I’ve still not received any reply from Nature Climate Change editor Rory Howlett to my query about why he allowed the term “deniers” in scientific literature (Bain et al), and neither has Bishop Hill to my knowledge. Lord Leach however, has weighed in, and has sent me his letter for publication here with permission. – Anthony
=========================================================
Dear Dr Howlett,
The use of the term “denier” does your journal a disservice, both for its vagueness and for its insulting overtone.
What does a “denier” deny? Certainly not Climate Change: nor global warming since records began in the late 19th century: nor the likelihood of human influence on temperatures. What, then?
A “denier” denies certainty on a complex and still young scientific subject. A “denier” questions assumptions about the near irrelevance of solar, oceanic and other non-anthropogenic influences on temperature. A “denier” prefers evidence to model projections. A “denier” tests alarming predictions against actual observations. In short, a “denier” exhibits the symptoms of a genuine seeker after scientific truth.
I wish the same could be said of “consensus” writers – or that they showed the same restraint and courtesy towards different opinions shown by sceptics such as Watts Up With That
Yours sincerely
Rodney Leach
==========================================================
I was surprised to see WUWT mentioned. I thank Lord Leach for the hat tip.
If you haven’t written a letter, you still can. See the details here:
Nature’s ugly decision: ‘Deniers’ enters the scientific literature
Some letters to the editor in the UK might also be helpful.
UPDATE: Jo Nova has an excellent letter also:
Dear Dr Phil Bain,
Right now, it’s almost my life’s work to communicate the empirical evidence on anthropogenic climate change.
I can help you with your research on deniers. I have studied the mental condition of denial most carefully. There is a simple key to converting the convictions of people in this debate, and I have seen it work hundreds of times. Indeed, my own convictions that lasted 17 years were turned around in a few days. I can help you. It would be much simpler than you think.
Firstly, to save time and money we must analyze the leaders of the denial movement. I have emailed or spoken to virtually all of them.
They are happy to accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and causes warming, that humans produce CO2, that CO2 levels are rising, and that the earth has warmed in the last century. According to Hansen et al 19841, Bony et al 20062, and the IPCC AR4 report3, the direct effect of doubling the level of CO2 amounts to 1.2°C (i.e. before feedbacks).
All they need are is the paper with the evidence showing that the 1.2°C direct warming is amplified to 3 or 4 degrees as projected by the models. Key leaders in the denial movement have been asking for this data for years. Unfortunately the IPCC assessment reports do not contain any direct observations of the amplification, either by water vapor (the key positive feedback4) or the totality of feedbacks. The IPCC only quotes results from climate simulations.
Since science is based on observations and measurements of the real world, it follows that a denier of science (rather than a denier of propaganda) must be denying real world data. I’d be most grateful if you could explain what “deniers” deny. Deniers repeatedly ask for empirical evidence, yet must be failing badly at communicating that this is the crucial point because none of the esteemed lead authors of IPCC working Group I seem to have realized that this paltry point is all that is needed. All this mess could be cleared up with an email.
The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is overwhelming, so the observations they deny must be written up many times in the peer review literature, right? After five years of study I am still not sure which instrument has made these key observations. Do deniers deny weather balloon results, or satellite data, or ice cores?
When you find this paper and the measurements, it will convince many of the key denier leaders. (But being the exacting personality type that they are, deniers will also expect to see the raw data. So you’ll need to also make sure that the authors of said paper have made all the records and methods available, but of course, all good scientists do that already don’t they?)
As a diligent researcher, I’m sure you would not have described a group with such a unequivocally strong label unless you were certain it applied. It would be disastrous for an esteemed publication like Nature to mistakenly insult Nobel prize winning physicists, NASA astronauts, and thousands of scientists who have asked for empirical evidence, only to find that the Nature authors themselves were unable to name papers (or instruments) with empirical evidence that their subject group called “deniers” denied.
If those papers (God forbid) do not exist, then the true deniers would turn out to be the researchers who denied that empirical evidence is key to scientific confidence in a theory. The true deniers would not be the skeptics who asked for evidence, but the name-calling researchers who did not test their own assumptions.
The fate of the planet rests on your shoulders. If you can find the observations that the IPCC can’t, you could change the path of international action. Should you find the evidence, I will be delighted to redouble my efforts to communicate the empirical evidence related to climate change.
Awaiting your reply keenly,
Joanne Nova
—————–
REFERENCES
1 Hansen J., A. Lacis, D. Rind, G. Russell, P. Stone, I. Fung, R. Ruedy and J. Lerner, (1984) Climate sensitivity: Analysis of feedback mechanisms. In Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity, AGU Geophysical Monograph 29, Maurice Ewing Vol. 5. J.E. Hansen and T. Takahashi, Eds. American Geophysical Union, pp. 130-163 [Abstract]
2 Bony, S., et al., 2006: How well do we understand and evaluate climate change feedback processes? J. Clim., 19, 3445–3482.
3 IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8.6.2.3. p630 [PDF].
4 IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. Fig 8.14, p631 [PDF] see also Page 632.
The global warming argument has nothing to do with science. It’s an ideological movement. The co-called Deniers have already won the science debate. Global warming caused by C02 is a scam. But we’ve failed to address the political debate. As long as the Climate Liars continue to win the politicians hearts and minds through propaganda and lies, the ecofascists will continue to implement their leftist, human-hating agenda and destroy the freedoms and liberties won over thousands of years of battle with tyrants and dictators. Until I see prominent politicians stand up and call the Climate Liars what they are LIARS, we’ve won nothing. And, as long as editors of science magazines such as those at Nature can get away with publishing such anti-science drivel as they recently published, REAL science is in deep peril of disappearing forever under a cloud of pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo, politically correct, cultiish hogwash. The editors of Nature are nothing but propagandists and should be fired.
davidmhoffer says:
June 20, 2012 at 6:19 pm
Greg House;
You’re proposed experiment is akin to counting penguins to prove…
====================================================
From your highly scientific answer I allow me to conclude that you probably do not like the results of my proposed experiment.
No problem. Just give us a link to an experiment that proves that back radiation warms something -18 degrees cold by 33 degrees.
Greg House;
No problem. Just give us a link to an experiment that proves that back radiation warms something -18 degrees cold by 33 degrees>>>>
Under what conditions? What inputs and at what frequencies? Over what period of time? With what heat sinks in place? Sinking by what mechanisms? Is there a water cycle present in the system? You cannot just wave your arms and shout. The experiment you propose has many, many, many variables, you have to define each and every one of them before proceeding. If you haven’t identified all the variables that could impact your results, then you’re results aren’t meaningful.
In your “open the freezer and put a sheet of glass over it, the following questions immediately come to mind:
1. The lid already blocked IR. So what difference should it make if you block IR with the lid or with the glass?
2. Is unplugging the freezer part of the experiment? If no, it will stay at the same temperature it was before provided that it has enough cooling capacity to overcome the lower insulation value of the glass versus the lid. If it doesn’t have enough cooling capacity to overcome the reduced insulation of the glass versus the lid, the temperature will reach a new equilibrium point dependant upon the temperature in the room, the new insulation value, the limits of the cooling capacity, and exposure to any air currents. If you do unplug the freezer, it will simply warm up to room temperature.
3. How do you justify 10 minutes? All heat transport mechanisms have a time lag. The way to determine this is to measure the temperature and plot it on log paper to determine what the time constant is. Then you can project to 5 time constants as the time it will take to reach a new equilibrium temperature. Unless you’ve done that calculation, you don’t know if the effect of the glass is going to take 10 seconds, 10 minutes, 10 hours, or 10 years. You’ve picked an abritrary number with no way to justify it. I may as well claim that if I don’t see a polar bear in the next 10 minutes it proves there aren’t any.
I could go on much longer, hopefully you see the point by now.
davidmhoffer says:
June 20, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Greg House;
No problem. Just give us a link to an experiment that proves that back radiation warms something -18 degrees cold by 33 degrees>>>>
Under what conditions? What inputs and at what frequencies?
=================================================
What is here so difficult to understand? Just give us a link to an experiment that proves that back radiation warms something -18 degrees cold by 33 degrees. Any experiment proving that.
I guess there exists none, right? And I know why: because this notion was debunked in 1909 by a scientist. http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html
Greg House
Your link is to a paper about greenhouses. The author asserts that greenhouses warm up primarily by blocking convection. He is absolutely correct. The “greenhouse effect” in the context of climate has NOTHING to do with greenhouses. It is a poor term to use, because of the confusion it causes on this very issue.
That said, the experiment you are looking for is called the Earth. Do some reading on Stefan-Boltzmann Law. This is an equation arrived at by two physicists over the course of much time and many many experiments that results in an equation that defines the equilibrium temperature of an ideal black body given a constant energy source (or, conversely, the amount of energy that an ideal black body will radiate at a given temperature). The equation is:
P=5.67*10^-8*T^4
Where P is in watts per square meter and T is in degrees Kelvin. To be fair, the Earth is not an ideal black body, but for the purposes of this discussion, it is so close as to not matter. Once you have read enough about SB Law to understand it, look up insolation values for Earth. What you will find is that the Sun outputs about 1366 w/m2. Adjusted for day/night, and also adjusted for curvature of earth surface which results in most of that 1366 w/m2 hitting at an angle, you wind up with an average of 1366/4= 341 w/m2.
So, plug 341 w/m2 into SB Law and you will get about 255K which is about -18C.
Other sources of heat besides the sun? Look ’em up. Tides release energy, but it is miniscule by comparison, so is the amount of heat that leaks from the earth’s core to the surface, and same for radioactive materials decaying in the earth’s crust. There simply is no significant heat source for Earth other than the Sun.
So there is your experiment. There is only enough heat from the Sun to keep the surface of the earth at an “average” of -18C, yet earth surface is an “average” of about 15C. If you propose the backradiation doesn’t exist, then please provide a credible alternate explanation for the difference in temperatures. If you decide you want to debunk SB Law instead, good luck with that, the SB Law equation is used by thousands of engineers every single day to design all manner of equipment that works as designed.
If there is an argument to be made, it is that averaging temperatures that do not have a linear relationship to energy flux results in a meaningless number. I would agree with that. 3.7 w/m2 at -40C raises the temperature about 1.6 degrees, but 3.7 w/m2 at +40 raises it only 0.55 degrees. So of what value is it to average temperatures that have completely different meanings in terms of energy balance?
Sadly, if you agree with me on that point, and arrive at an estimate the proper way, which is to raise all temps to the power of four, average them, and then take the 4th root to arrive at an “average” temperature, what you will find is that the actual average temperature of the earth via SB Law is over 100 degrees lower than the actual surface temperature.
I’m a raging skeptic by the way. I’m not arguing the warmist point of view which I believe to be utter garbage. But there are the way things work in reality, and reality is that the energy from the Sun cannot maintain the earth’s surface temperature anywhere near as warm as it actually is.
And there’s your experiment.
Greg House
In my haste, I neglected to adjust for albedo, which is the amount of energy that gets reflected rather than absorbed by earth. Subtract another 30% from my 341 w/m2. Sorry, my bad.
davidmhoffer says:
June 20, 2012 at 8:28 pm
Greg House
Your link is to a paper about greenhouses.
=================================================
Yeah, I knew this would come. Many warmists say that.
Now, the Wood’s experiment is about back radiation. The result demonstrates, that the back radiation either does not warm at all or warms only to no significant degree. And note, there was very much back radiation in the experiment.
This proves, that your theoretical calculation about 33 degrees warming through (less) back radiation is false. It is very funny also that you call your calculation “experiment”.
davidmhoffer says:
June 20, 2012 at 8:28 pm
and reality is that the energy from the Sun cannot maintain the earth’s surface temperature anywhere near as warm as it actually is.
======================================================
Yeah, this is also a little bit funny. Even the radical warmists do not maintain, that the “greenhouse gases” are an additional source of energy, but some moderates warmists actually do. I remember Lord Monckton explaining to me, that the “greenhouse gases” work like a radiator.
Greg House;
It is very funny also that you call your calculation “experiment”.>>>>
Call it what you will, the physics are what the physics are. The surface temperature of the planet cannot be achieved by insolation. You are free to propose another explanation.
If you insist on an experiment (and the earth is an on going experiment, despite you’re denigration of the calculations to arrive at what the surface temp would be based on insolation alone) then try this one. Leave a sweater in a cold room until it reaches the same temperature as the room. Then you go into the room and stay there until you get cold too. Then put the sweater on. After a short time, you will feel colder, warmer, or the same temperature. In the event that you feel warmer, please explain where the extra warmth is coming from since the sweater was as cold as the room in the first place.
None of which BTW changes your original assertion that putting a sheet of glass on a freezer in place of the lid for 10 minutes proves anything. You clearly have a very weak grasp of physics, and are repeating what you’ve heard in the belief that it is correct. If you want to learn, go look up the work of Stefan Boltzmann as I suggested. Learn some calculus and apply it to determine what the average incident insolation on earth surface is. Find out what a time constant is, and why it is important. If you spew facts from a foundation of ignorance you bring no value to the debate at all.
davidmhoffer says:
June 20, 2012 at 9:24 pm
Greg House;
It is very funny also that you call your calculation “experiment”.>>>>
Call it what you will, the physics are what the physics are. The surface temperature of the planet cannot be achieved by insolation. You are free to propose another explanation.
====================================================
Now just try and think logically.
Your theoretical calculation about back radiation warming has been proven wrong by the Wood’s experiment. You are free to look for errors in your calculation and I do not care at all if you find any or fail. What I care about is that the CO2 has an alibi as a result of the Wood’s experiment. So the “A” in your AGW concept has no basis in real science.
Phil C says:
June 20, 2012 at 11:14 am
Chuck Nolan —
Interesting response. You’ve written that you’ve read the “Climategate emails” but make no mention of having read the IPCC technical reports. Let me start here: have you read WG I?
————–
You’re kidding, right?
How do you ignore climategate, the harry read me file and the UN actions since it began.
I think they all have their reasons for pushing CAGW.
The UN and it’s IPCC have their reasons.
World governments have their reasons.
WWF, Greenpeace and other NGOs have their reasons.
Universities have their reasons.
GE and other manufacturers have their reasons.
Scientists have their reasons.
Jim Hansen and Peter Gleick have their reasons.
Me, I have no reason to believe any of them.
They all gain from the CAGW scare and the truth may be the biggest casualty.
I don’t believe they know so much and I don’t believe they’re chasing the truth.
People getting fired for denying this religion of CAGW is wrong.
Al Gore and Hollywood jetting around telling people to shut down power plants is wrong.
There’s too much money being passed around but, only if you support CAGW.
There is nothing in my make up that will allow me to stand on their side.
You think I should trust something from the IPCC? You’re kidding, right?
davidmhoffer says:
June 20, 2012 at 9:24 pm
Leave a sweater in a cold room until it reaches the same temperature as the room. Then you go into the room and stay there until you get cold too. Then put the sweater on. After a short time, you will feel colder, warmer, or the same temperature. In the event that you feel warmer, please explain where the extra warmth is coming from since the sweater was as cold as the room in the first place.
=======================================================
This example is first irrelevant to the matter of back radiation and second so blatantly misleading. I am not going to distract the readers from the main issue by going into details now. Unfortunately, it comes not only from the radicals, but also from some moderate warmists, this is sad.
Greg House;
So the “A” in your AGW concept has no basis in real science.>>>
Which part of “I am a raging skeptic” did you not understand?
Not everything the warmists say is wrong, and not everything the skeptics say is right. If you don’t understand how insanely wrong your glass sheet on a freezer notion is, and you refuse to educate yourself on the physics involved, then your opinion of what the Wood’s experiment means is equally useless.
davidmhoffer says:
June 20, 2012 at 10:03 pm
Which part of “I am a raging skeptic” did you not understand?
Not everything the warmists say is wrong, and not everything the skeptics say is right. If you don’t understand how insanely wrong your glass sheet on a freezer notion is, and you refuse to educate yourself on the physics involved, then your opinion of what the Wood’s experiment means is equally useless.
=====================================================
I do not care about how you call yourself. Second, I really like how you connected my proposal about freezer experiment with the Wood’s experiment having proven the back radiation warming hypothesis to be false.
One more time Greg. Put the sweater on.
Such strange argument. Your body (Sun) is burning fuel and giving off heat, and the sweater (atmosphere) is being warmed and delays loss of heat to the surrounding colder void. The Sun heats the Earth, then the Earth radiates heat to the atmosphere during the night. A greenhouse prevents mixing of Sun heated air inside with the colder atmosphere. None of these simple physical processes requires a trace gas to capture and radiate back energy from the colder gaseous element to the warmer solid. As I walk my dog Buddy to the beach during the day, then to his favorite piddle place at night just before bedtime, these phenomena are easily observed. I can confirm the greenhouse effect by measuring temperature in various areas of our sunroom and comparing them to the outdoors. When it gets too hot in the sunroom, I open windows, and close them to warm it up. These are simple, understandable experiments. And when my body stops warming my sweater, or my blankets at night, I won’t care anymore.
Quote of the Week candidate, surely:
All this mess could be cleared up with an email.
majormike1;
And when my body stops warming my sweater, or my blankets at night, I won’t care anymore.>>>
When your body warms the sweater or blankets which in turn keep you warm, you are experiencing back radiation. When you walk your dog at night, you might notice that cloudy nights are in general warmer than clear nights. Backradiation again. When an engineer designs a blast furnace or a smelter, she relies on backradiation to increase the temperature. You can buy instrumentation that accurately measures downwelling IR and actually measure it. Snow piled up against the side of a house will help keep the house warmer inside. Backradiation again.
The question to be asked is not if backradiation exists. It does, and it can be measured directly. Does the bulk of it come from CO2? No. Most of it comes from other gases in the atmosphere plus dust particles, ice crystals and so on. Does increasing CO2 increase the amount of backradiation? If it intercepts and re-radiates at frequencies that would otherwise have escaped directly to space, then yes it does, and experiments show this. Does this raise the temperature of the earth? NO! But it does change the height in the atmosphere at which the effective blackbody temperature of earth occurs, and due to the lapse rate and other factors, this impacts surgace temperatures. By a large anount? NO! It would take another 200 years minimum burning fossil fuels at peak consumption to increase temps by 1 degree over what they are now.
Where is the hole in the warmist position then? They postulate an increase in water vapour which is also a “greenhouse gas” that would double, triple, or even quadruple the effects of CO2 increases. This is the fallacy that can be proven wrong. As temps increase, the amount of water vapour that the atmosphere can hold also increases. But the problem with this theory is twofold.
First, water vapour levels haven’t ever maxed out for the temperatures we already have. There are other processes that keep them from doing this. Further, if the theory was correct, there have been cases in the geological record where precisely the conditions for such a turbo charged temperature increase have existed, and nothing happned. In brief, just because temps increase, we have no reason to believe that water vapour will increase by the maximum amount possible.
Secondly, there are many other processes besides water vapour, and the preponderance of the evidence is beginning to show that there are negative feedbacks that have been ignored and which mitigate water vapour and may be so strong as to completely cancel water vapour and provide a negative feedback to CO2 backradiation.
Your back radiation sounds a lot like insulation. My sweater is not warming me, it is just slowing my loss of body heat. I warm the sweater, but it never is as warm as my body, and being colder cannot warm me. If it is trapping too much heat, I unzip it, and cooling is rapid. The floor and walls of the sunroom exposed directly to sunshine are much warmer than the air inside warmed by radiation from the Sun-heated surfaces. The trapped air does not warm the solids, it just slows the heat loss, which I speed up by opening the windows.
Correct if i am wrong but with regards to the 90% question should’nt Phil C ask Ben Santer
Was not he ….. who alone change the final draft of a WG paper??
Ken Harvey says:
June 20, 2012 at 2:45 pm
To carry out an audit I need to be shown the numbers, with detailed explanations of any that have been moderated. No satisfactory explanations, then the audit fails.
It failed the audit – http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/files/WarmAudit31.pdf
GLOBAL WARMING: FORECASTS BY SCIENTISTS
VERSUS SCIENTIFIC FORECASTS
by
Kesten C. Green and J. Scott Armstrong
“We found
enough information to make judgments on 89 out of a total of 140 forecasting
principles. The forecasting procedures that were described violated 72 principles.
Many of the violations were, by themselves, critical.
The forecasts in the Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In
effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and
obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts’
predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainly and complexity. We
have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming.”
Of course, all this has a beginning – when the IPCC report was doctored by the powers that be behind it and their puppet Santer.
Short telling here: http://larouchepac.com/node/12823 IPCC’s Santer Admits Fraud
Longer telling here: http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Social/IPCC-Santer.htm
Having arrived at an average I am told that a computer programme is needed to take account of the feedbacks, negative and positive, the latter arising from greenhouse gasses. predominantly water vapour and carbon dioxide. These feedbacks go largely unquestioned by the skeptics and no physical experiment is produced to demonstrate that these exist in an open system. As a boy of six or seven I could have told you that the feedback from water vapour in the atmosphere is negative – a simple matter of personal observation. I repeat – water vapour – humidity – not cloud cover, which has an even greater negative impact. As to carbon dioxide there is no empirical evidence that this has any impact whatever on temperature in an open system. Working my way through screeds of physics reading, I have to go back more than a hundred years to find anyone of any account in the field of physics who even theorises that CO2 can have such an effect.
Exactly, the Water Cycle.. Missing from AGWScienceFiction energy budget because it shows the “33°C greenhouse gas warming from -18°C to 15°C”, is a sleight of hand.
The Water Cycle cools the Earth 52°C from the 67°C it would be without water as water vapour with its very very high heat capacity, and lighter than air anyway, rises taking away the heat from the Earth’s surface where it gives it up in the higher colder atmosphere and condenses back into water or ice, and, this pure clean rain is itself carbonic acid as carbon dioxide is irresistably attracted to water and so is swept up in the water cycle and so the cooling cycle of Earth.
They also don’t have the Water Cycle, because their atmosphere is empty space with ideal gas molecules zipping around at great speed bouncing off each other in elastic collisions, their molecules without weight and volume and attraction. They actually have no way for their clouds to form… And they can’t hear any of this because no sound is possible in their ideal gas world.
I am left believing that skeptics, perhaps re-actively to bad mannered warmers, are too polite, too politically correct, altogether too gentle, to laugh the warmers out of court.
Hmm, walking on a knife edge.. I find the level of ‘scientific’ understanding of basics by warmers is most likely from simply taking deliberately created fake fisics memes for granted – it ends up colouring all their perceptions and analyses without them being aware of it, but also, or perhaps rather from this, simple physics basics become difficult to grasp for them.
For example, so convinced are they that light not heat from the Sun is the power that heats land and oceans that it is practically impossible to get them to see how nonsensical this is – because a whole story has been created to give this ‘scientific credibility’. It’s been very cleverly done by tweaking real world physics and it’s well established now in the education system. They have been taught that “shortwave in longwave out” is the way the world works, that no direct heat from the Sun, thermal infrared, plays any part in heating land and oceans. They can’t understand the difference between light and heat because they’re taught that all electromagnetic energy is the same and all creates heat on being absorbed. It’s really very sad.
majormike1 says:
June 21, 2012 at 12:08 am
Your back radiation sounds a lot like insulation.>>>
bingo.
davidmhoffer says:
June 20, 2012 at 11:29 pm
When your body warms the sweater or blankets which in turn keep you warm, you are experiencing back radiation.
=======================================================
What you are experiencing under a blanket is a warmer air. The air under the blanket is warmed by your body through conduction and this warm air can not escape through convection because the blanket blocks the convection essentially. The same blocked convection goes for greenhouses, houses, cars and any other enclosed space. These are basics.
Now, the back radiation hypothesis is very (160 years) old. Some scientists in the 19th century did not bother to check it experimentally and committed a logical fallacy like that: there is back radiation and there is warming (or reduced cooling, whatever), so therefore it is the back radiation that causes this warming. This is not only a false conclusion from the purely logical standpoint, but it has also been proven false experimentally by professor Wood’s experiment in 1909.
What we have been experiencing now is that moderate warmists commit the same old fallacy forgetting that what sometimes appears to be true should be first proven true in the real science, and they repeat the same thing proven false long ago.
Greg House;
Your body heats the air space via conduction. It heats the blanket, if it is in contact with your body, also by conduction. In addition, your body radiates energy according to SB Law. The blanket absorbs some of that radiation. The higher temperature of the blanket results in it radiating at a higher temperature than it would otherwise, also according to SB Law. Since the blanket radiates some energy away from you and some toward you, the amount radiated toward you increases. It is not all a consequence of conductivity, nor is it all a consequence of of radiated energy, it is a combination of both. In the case of materials such as air and cloth, they are very poor conductors. The predominant factor in this example is radiance, not conductance. Try coverying yourself with a sheet of highly conductive material and you will get a completely different result. Two thin blankets together will keep you warmer than one thick blanket, because the gap between the two blankets breaks disrupts the conductive path. You can measure downwelling IR at night when there is no cloud cover directly if you have the proper instrumentation. Where is it coming from?
If you take my advice and learn the basics, you’ll be far better off. You are quoting the Wood’s experiment and shouting your beliefs because it is what you want to believe. A few hours with a physics text book to the point that you understand the formulas and can apply them directly yourelf will set you on the right path. These are formulas that millions of engineers apply every single day all around the world to design everything from power blants to engines to ovens, and they get it right over and over and over again.
There are gaping holes in the warmist meme. Learn what they are, and attack the actual problems with their theory. IF you aren’t willing to do the homework to understand the basic physics at play, then I can’t help you.
davidmhoffer says:
June 21, 2012 at 8:43 am
…In addition, your body radiates energy according to SB Law. The blanket absorbs some of that radiation. The higher temperature of the blanket results in it radiating at a higher temperature than it would otherwise, also according to SB Law. Since the blanket radiates some energy away from you and some toward you, the amount radiated toward you increases. It is not all a consequence of conductivity, nor is it all a consequence of of radiated energy, it is a combination of both. In the case of materials such as air and cloth, they are very poor conductors. The predominant factor in this example is radiance, not conductance.
======================================================
What you have said is a hypothesis. Your description does not prove the crucial point about “radiance, not conductance is the predominant factor”. It is exactly what I said in my previous comment: you conclude on a factor being predominant without providing any proof. This is a fantasy, not a scientific way of thinking.
The Wood’s experiment proves the opposite, namely that the BACK radiation even under most favourable conditions can not influence the temperature either at all or to any significant extent.
You narrative has been debunked, this is the reality.
Greg House;
You narrative has been debunked, this is the reality.>>>
Congratulations on that remarkable achievement.
Messers Hoffer and House, you make no mention of the human body perspiring water vapour. The blanket stops this escaping so quickly so the humidity close to your body increases and slows evaporation so you lose less heat as latent heat and you feel warmer.