Note: This will be the top post for a day or two, new posts will appear below this one.
Readers may recall my original post, Nature’s ugly decision: ‘Deniers’ enters the scientific literature. followed by Dr. Paul Bain Responds to Critics of Use of “Denier” Term (with thanks to Jo Nova, be sure to bookmark and visit her site) Dr. Robert G. Brown of Duke University, commenting as rgbatduke, made a response that was commented on by several here in that thread. As commenter REP put it in the update: It is eloquent, insightful and worthy of consideration. I would say, it is likely the best response I’ve ever seen on the use of the “denier” term, not to mention the CAGW issue in general. Thus, I’ve elevated it a full post. Please share the link to this post widely. – Anthony
Dr. Robert G. Brown writes:
The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype (denier) is that it reveals that you really think of people in terms of its projected meaning. In particular, even in your response you seem to equate the term “skeptic” with “denier of AGW”.
This is silly. On WUWT most of the skeptics do not “deny” AGW, certainly not the scientists or professional weather people (I myself am a physicist) and honestly, most of the non-scientist skeptics have learned better than that. What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2. They challenge this on rather solid empirical grounds and with physical arguments and data analysis that is every bit as scientifically valid as that used to support larger estimates, often obtaining numbers that are in better agreement with observation. For this honest doubt and skepticism that the highly complex global climate models are correct you have the temerity to socially stigmatize them in a scientific journal with a catch-all term that implies that they are as morally reprehensible as those that “deny” that the Nazi Holocaust of genocide against the Jews?
For shame.
Seriously, for shame. You should openly apologize for the use of the term, in Nature, and explain why it was wrong. But you won’t, will you… although I will try to explain why you should.
By your use of this term, you directly imply that I am a “denier”, as I am highly skeptical of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (not just “anthropogenic global warming”, which is plausible if not measurable, although there are honest grounds to doubt even this associated with the details of the Carbon Cycle that remain unresolved by model or experiment). Since I am a theoretical physicist, I find this enormously offensive. I might as well label you an idiot for using it, when you’ve never met me, have no idea of my competence or the strength of my arguments for or against any aspect of climate dynamics (because on this list I argue both points of view as the science demands and am just as vigorous in smacking down bullshit physics used to challenge some aspect of CAGW as I am to question the physics or statistical analysis or modelling used to “prove” it). But honestly, you probably aren’t an idiot (are you?) and no useful purpose is served by ad hominem or emotionally loaded human descriptors in a rational discussion of an objective scientific question, is there.
Please understand that by creating a catch-all label like this, you quite literally are moving the entire discussion outside of the realm of science, where evidence and arguments are considered and weighed independent of the humans that advance them, where our desire to see one or another result proven are (or should be) irrelevant, where people weigh the difficulty of the problem being addressed as an important contributor (in a Bayesian sense) to how much we should believe any answer proposed — so far, into the realm where people do not think at all! They simply use a dismissive label such as “denier” and hence avoid any direct confrontation with the issues being challenged.
The issue of difficulty is key. Let me tell you in a few short words why I am a skeptic. First of all, if one examines the complete geological record of global temperature variation on planet Earth (as best as we can reconstruct it) not just over the last 200 years but over the last 25 million years, over the last billion years — one learns that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about today’s temperatures! Seriously. Not one human being on the planet would look at that complete record — or even the complete record of temperatures during the Holocene, or the Pliestocene — and stab down their finger at the present and go “Oh no!”. Quite the contrary. It isn’t the warmest. It isn’t close to the warmest. It isn’t the warmest in the last 2 or 3 thousand years. It isn’t warming the fastest. It isn’t doing anything that can be resolved from the natural statistical variation of the data. Indeed, now that Mann’s utterly fallacious hockey stick reconstruction has been re-reconstructed with the LIA and MWP restored, it isn’t even remarkable in the last thousand years!
Furthermore, examination of this record over the last 5 million years reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.
There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase that might be associated with a “tipping point” and hence “catastrophe” (in the specific mathematical sense of catastrophe, a first order phase transition to a new stable phase). It has been far warmer in the past without tipping into this phase. If anything, we are geologically approaching the point where the Earth is likely to tip the other way, into the phase that we know is there — the cold phase. A cold phase transition, which the historical record indicates can occur quite rapidly with large secular temperature changes on a decadal time scale, would truly be a catastrophe. Even if “catastrophic” AGW is correct and we do warm another 3 C over the next century, if it stabilized the Earth in warm phase and prevented or delayed the Earth’s transition into cold phase it would be worth it because the cold phase transition would kill billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the temperate breadbasket of the world.
Now let us try to analyze the modern era bearing in mind the evidence of an utterly unremarkable present. To begin with, we need a model that predicts the swings of glaciation and interglacials. Lacking this, we cannot predict the temperature that we should have outside for any given baseline concentration of CO_2, nor can we resolve variations in this baseline due to things other than CO_2 from that due to CO_2. We don’t have any such thing. We don’t have anything close to this. We cannot predict, or explain after the fact, the huge (by comparison with the present) secular variations in temperature observed over the last 20,000 years, let alone the last 5 million or 25 million or billion. We do not understand the forces that set the baseline “thermostat” for the Earth before any modulation due to anthropogenic CO_2, and hence we have no idea if those forces are naturally warming or cooling the Earth as a trend that has to be accounted for before assigning the “anthropogenic” component of any warming.
This is a hard problem. Not settled science, not well understood, not understood. There are theories and models (and as a theorist, I just love to tell stories) but there aren’t any particularly successful theories or models and there is a lot of competition between the stories (none of which agree with or predict the empirical data particularly well, at best agreeing with some gross features but not others). One part of the difficulty is that the Earth is a highly multivariate and chaotic driven/open system with complex nonlinear coupling between all of its many drivers, and with anything but a regular surface. If one tried to actually write “the” partial differential equation for the global climate system, it would be a set of coupled Navier-Stokes equations with unbelievably nasty nonlinear coupling terms — if one can actually include the physics of the water and carbon cycles in the N-S equations at all. It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand! Global Climate Models are children’s toys in comparison to the actual underlying complexity, especially when (as noted) the major drivers setting the baseline behavior are not well understood or quantitatively available.
The truth of this is revealed in the lack of skill in the GCMs. They utterly failed to predict the last 13 or 14 years of flat to descending global temperatures, for example, although naturally one can go back and tweak parameters and make them fit it now, after the fact. And every year that passes without significant warming should be rigorously lowering the climate sensitivity and projected AGW, making the probability of the “C” increasinginly remote.
These are all (in my opinion) good reasons to be skeptical of the often egregious claims of CAGW. Another reason is the exact opposite of the reason you used “denier” in your article. The actual scientific question has long since been co-opted by the social and political one. The real reason you used the term is revealed even in your response — we all “should” be doing this and that whether or not there is a real risk of “catastrophe”. In particular, we “should” be using less fossil fuel, working to preserve the environment, and so on.
The problem with this “end justifies the means” argument — where the means involved is the abhorrent use of a pejorative descriptor to devalue the arguers of alternative points of view rather than their arguments at the political and social level — is that it is as close to absolute evil in social and public discourse as it is possible to get. I strongly suggest that you read Feynman’s rather famous “Cargo Cult” talk:
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
In particular, I quote:
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a
friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing–and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether
drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it
would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a
result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re
being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.
Time for a bit of soul-searching, Dr. Bain. Have you come even close to living up to the standards laid out by Richard Feynman? Is this sort of honesty apparent anywhere in the global climate debate? Did the “Hockey Team” embrace this sort of honesty in the infamous Climategate emails? Do the IPCC reports ever seem to present the counter arguments, or do they carefully avoid showing pictures of the 20,000 year thermal record, preferring instead Mann’s hockey stick because it increases the alarmism (and hence political impact of the report)? Does the term “denier” have any place in any scientific paper ever published given Feynman’s rather simple criterion for scientific honesty?
And finally, how dare you presume to make choices for me, for my relatives, for my friends, for all of the people of the world, but concealing information from them so that they make a choice to allocate resources the way you think they should be allocated, just like the dishonest astronomer of his example. Yes, the price of honesty might be that people don’t choose to support your work. Tough. It is their money, and their choice!
Sadly, it is all too likely that this is precisely what is at stake in climate research. If there is no threat of catastrophe — and as I said, prior to the hockey stick nobody had the slightest bit of luck convincing anyone that the sky was falling because global climate today is geologically unremarkable in every single way except that we happen to be living in it instead of analyzing it in a geological record — then there is little incentive to fund the enormous amount of work being done on climate science. There is even less incentive to spend trillions of dollars of other people’s money (and some of our own) to ameliorate a “threat” that might well be pure moonshine, quite possibly ignoring an even greater threat of movement in the exact opposite direction to the one the IPCC anticipates.
Why am I a skeptic? Because I recognize the true degree of our ignorance in addressing this supremely difficult problem, while at the same time as a mere citizen I weigh civilization and its benefits against draconian energy austerity on the basis of no actual evidence that global climate is in any way behaving unusually on a geological time scale.
For shame.
David L. Hagen says:
June 23, 2012 at 6:59 am
Robert Brown
Complements on your clearly addressing the “denier” ad hominem attacks and objectively addressing the actual climatic evidence.
To endorse your point on climate variability, conventional conventional classical climate statistics understate the natural variations by a factor of two,
Curiously, that’s almost exactly what I guestimated when comparing Hansen’s 1981 Science paper to the actual UAH data in the reply above (but way below your original reply, sorry, I started from the bottom up until it became clear that half of the Continental United States had posted a comment or series of comments in the six or seven hours it took me to get back to Beaufort, move in, and eat dinner. It looks like even ignoring the clear H-K jump in 1998, the fluctuation range on either side of the jump is clearly easily twice what Hansen puts on the same scale.
And of course Hansen seems somehow to be ignoring “natural variability” of longer scale fluctuations, ones that take centuries to accomplish. That’s really at the heart and soul of the problem, and yes, I metaphorically sit at Koutsoyannis feet and gaze in wonder. The guy has some serious, genius-level talent. It’s about time somebody in this game had some.
OK all, I’m getting very tired, it being 3:30 a.m. after a long day, and I’m really, really hoping to go fishing tomorrow and catch a boatful of blues and spanish mackerel, so I may or may not post on this thread for a while. I apologize if I left any comment or argument unacknowledged or unanswered, and I will check back in to see if there are any comments on the uah-and-hansen81.jpg I made and to determine if anyone is screaming “Jihad!” and driving peasants and pitchforks towards my door, but even I must sleep and play for a bit.
rgb
Dr. Brown – you developed an analogy involving fog lamps to illustrate absorption and reradiation.
This is easy to understand. As your response to my question merely reiterates assertions and suggests, essentially, a course in climatology and radiation physics rather than giving a direct answer and whereas you say you don’t understand what I mean by H20 hole, I will attempt to improve my question.
If I understand that you mean, by CO2 hole, a notch in the spectrum indicating rather complete absorption of the IR radiation in a narrow range of frequencies attributable to CO2, and that you consider this to be proof that CO2 must be absorbing energy and dissipating heat, then why is there no such notch of absorption in the range of frequencies attributable to IR absorption by H2O vapor and liquid.
Is there such a notch that is occulted by some means?
If there is not, then how is it that such a notch attributable to CO2 can be considered proof that CO2 is warming the atmosphere but absense of a notch of a considerably much more prevalent IR absorbing gas and liquid has no equal and opposite significance?
Thank you for any sincere attempt to reconcile this apparent inconsistency. I’m not prepared to take a course on radiation physics of the atmosphere, as you may be unsurprised to know.
If I can improve my question such that you are able to understand it without difficulty, I will certainly try.
“””””…..mydogsgotnonose says:
June 24, 2012 at 1:45 am
……………..
Sorry George E Smith, there are engineers like me who can easily show why electromagnetic radiation cannot transfer energy to a warmer body contrary to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics……”””””
Well your dog don’t hunt either.
If you were a Physicist, instead of an Engineer, then you would know that the Second Law of Thermodynamics, doesn’t have anything to do with the transfer of ENERGY.
It specifically relates ONLY to “heat” or more strictly to “heating”.
And if you knew the Clausius form of the second Law, you would know it applies only to CYCLIC machines, and it is inherent in such a cyclic machine, that “heat” propagates in both directions.
“Heat” requires a physical medium of interracting (colliding) particles; without such particle collisions, there is no transport of “heat”, and just coincidently there is no TEMPERATURE either.
A single particle in free flight (single atom or molecule) has no Temperature, which is defined in terms of the statistical distribution of the collision energies of a large assemblage of colliding particles.
There is no continuous path of frequently colliding particles between the sun, and the earth, which is why we get NO “heat” from the sun. We get plenty of good clean Electromagnetic Radiation energy, and if we collected it all on suitably designed solar cells, and converted all of it into electricity, and charged batteries with it, to store all the good energy; then we would all freeze to death, because there would be no heat to keep us warm.
Fortunately for us, we don’t have enough solar cells to convert the solar energy to electricity so most of the energy falls into the deep oceans where it gets simply wasted; thereby creating all the heat we need right here on earth.
Electro-magnetic Radiation can be described pretty much completely by Maxwell’s equations for the electro-magnetic field. Absolutely nowhere in the theory of Maxwell’s equations of the EM field, does the word Temperature ever appear, and there is nowhere in any of his equations to put Temperature if you wanted to, so Temperature, has nothing whatsoever to do with electromagnetic radiation energy; and if you were a Physicist, you would have known that already.
And notice mydog, that I’m not ashamed to put my own name to what I write; but you alone know what your stuff is worth !
As for the Planck Radiation law for the spectrum of the blackbody radiation and the Stefan-Boltzman result of integrating the Planck law; a “Black Body” is a completely fictitious and fictional object, which exists nowhere in the universe. Also the Planck derivation (highly accurate) for the spectrum of a black body, makes no reference whatsoever for the “material nature” of the fictional object; it is simply a large assemblage of “particles” not comprised of any one of the 92 naturally known elements, or any of the unnatural ones either, so it is quite independent of any atomic electron configurations or structure, and is a product of classical physics only; not quantum mechanics. Yes it does require emitted radiation energy to be in “packets” of discrete size; but that energy packet, can have ANY ENERGY VALUE WHATOEVER. It can also have ANY FREQUENCY or WAVELENGTH whatsoever, so there are NO SPECTRAL LINES in the spectrum of blackbody radiation, the frequency range for any BB emitter at any Temperature ranges from zero to infinite frequency, although the bulk of the energy is contained in a 16:1 range of frequencies or wavelengths (98% of it).
But as I said, no such thing exists, so it doesn’t matter if it is made of no material known to us.
It is however one of the most useful non-existing things ever devised
George E. Smith; says:
It may be that your answer does not relate appropriately to the proposition of Gary Hladik for it is true that in a vacuum, a focussed IR laser can easily make a bit of carbon glow in the visible spectrum, Boltzman’s law notwithstanding.
George E. Smith you make a number of interesting points in your post.
Would you mind answering this question.
The KT97 diagram
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/TFK_bams09.pdf
relies on the following assumption
That the 1364W/m2 solar radiation reaching Earth is thermodynamically equivalent to four times a value of 341W/2 (as shown in their diagram).
It seems to me that this may be true for the first LoT but most unlikely to be true for the second LoT.
Simple existence proof mydog, If you put one end of the poker into the fire, so it gets hot, the molecules in the poker will bounce all over the place colliding with each other. At a particular point at some particular temperature, a given molecule can be travelling in a direction away from the hot end, and towards the cold end, where it soon will collide with a “colder” molecule and transfer energy to it. On the rebound the same molecule can now travel in the direction away from the cold end, where it will eventually collide with a suitable molecule that is towards the hotter end, and transfer energy to that molecule.
So the mechanical enery of collsions and particle velocities, can transfer from one molecule to any other molecule in any direction, whether hotter or colder. True the net heat energy propagation will be from hot to cold, but there is “heat” going in both directions, just as Clausius required. And a molecule right at the cold end can send energy through collisions, that can ultimately reach the hot end. That won’t happen as often as energy coming the other way.
George E. Smith; says (June 24, 2012 at 11:46 pm): “The answer to that question is NO; well more scientifically acurate; hell no.”
Heh. Most of the explanation went over my head, but intuitively it seems reasonable that an image of the sun can’t be brighter than the sun. I was wondering what happens if multiple “suns” are applied to a target, but I found an answer of sorts here:
http://www.psa.es/webeng/instalaciones/horno.php
where it mentions an upper limit of about 10,000 suns for solar furnaces, which is roughly equivalent to a black body temp around 3,645 degrees K:
http://www.endmemo.com/physics/radenergy.php
What happens if we build our 10,000-sun plant on the planet Mercury, where solar flux is over 9,000 watts per square meter? Do we get the calculated temp of over 6,300 degrees K, or does the larger apparent size of the sun screw up the geometry?
Apparently large pinnipeds are also in the business of denying Social/Societal results
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/antarctic_ice_not_melting/
These things are generally no respecter of persons, and the males will basically copulate with anything that moves. Resulted in some uncharecteristic rapid retreat from some of my Royal Marine friends whose exercise involved sneaking up a Falklands Island beach in ghillie suits. Apparently the phrase “Endex Endex” can be voiced in a manner conveying emotion and stress…..
Greg House says:
June 24, 2012 at 10:21 am
Robert Brown says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:07 am
mydogsgotnonose says:
June 24, 2012 at 1:45 am
“Sorry George E Smith, there are engineers like me who can easily show why electromagnetic radiation cannot transfer energy to a warmer body contrary to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
There is a glaring hole in the understanding of most physicists.”
Robert Brown says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:07 am
“Look, don’t think of it as transferring energy to a warmer body. That’s where everybody gets mentally screwed up. Think of it as slowing down the cooling of a warmer body.”
===========================================================
Yeah, just rename it and everything will be just fine.
============
Looks like deviant doctrine to me..
I do wish they’d give themselves a name so we could tell them apart immediately from the official AGW doctrine holders like Spencer who claim that colder can heat hotter.
And where’s the expiment to prove that lagging my attic with CO2 will keep my home insulated? Why isn’t this on the market yet?
davidmhoffer says:
June 24, 2012 at 6:34 pm
Here’s an actual experiment:
http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm
Note that at the top of the article there is a downloadable zip file with some credible criticisms of the experiment suggesting his extrapolation to a number for the atmosphere as a whole is too low. It matters not if you accept or reject those criticisms, not one of them suggests that his direct results are wrong.
And they were not zero.
I’m betting that I will STILL hear someone standing with their fingers in their ears screaming “lalalalala…”
Nope, it’s you doing that. Why not try reading all of it for comprehension?
Like all the AGW ‘science’ claims, the figures used in the first place are just pulled out of the air. You don’t have any experimental evidence.
======
Robert Brown says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:24 am
Sorry, Robert, I do not regard it as proven that an increase in CO2 causes warming,
And that is your right and privilege as a free citizen of the world.
But you are wrong. And if you actually give up your religion and study the experimental evidence that conclusively proves that it does you might change your mind.
But I doubt that you will.
=====
Enough of this! How many times do you have to be asked? Where is the experimental evidence? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?
Show it
Firstly:
Show the damn experiment which proves that greenhouse gases raise the temperature of the Earth 33°C which is the AGW claim. Show it.
Slow handclap.
Show it.
Has anybody seen or heard from Dr. Paul Bain?
Seems that he has a few little questions to answer.
Judging from the content and quality of the commentatori on this thread, I think I can safely say that having genuine scientific discussions appears to be the ultimate troll repellant…
Dr. Brown:
Having had some time to discuss my question with a friend and think about it some more, it seems that the basic gas laws may answer my question. Please feel free to correct any errors.
Firstly, if the spectrographic analysis shows an absorption notch, that indicates not only that absorption is taking place but that reradiation is not. Therefore, the conclusion is that the CO2 is transferring the absorbed energy to neighboring molecules kinetically. Therefore the space blanket analogy is flawed, i.e., it is neither reflecting nor radiating nor ‘back-radiating’.
Secondly, if water shows no absorption notch, then it must be a net radiator in the direction of the satellite viewing the TOA, i.e., it is radiating energy to outer space, therefore it is cooling the atmosphere.
Corollary implications exist as well, but that assumes no error in this amateur analysis.
Thank you Dr Brown for a really crisp statement. Also for the consequence that you have put several houes labour into excellent follow-up.
“A suggestion for the site might be to have a few top level articles that very clearly explain things like the GHE so that this silly debate stops being a major time-waster. This is also a major factor in the use of the ‘denier’ label — which I do not agree with or approve of — it enables a world full of logical fallacies that sadly are often highly persuasive on the part of those that support the CAGW ’cause’.”
Excellent idea – and you are absolutely right: some sceptics are dangerous attached to physical notions which are just plain wrong, and their heated defence is fuel to the RealClimate types who lump all sceptics together as “deniers”. As Franklin said: “He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.”
I too am a Feynman fan. asmith (above) suggested that Feynman missed a few points on non-scientific value, but in fact his Lecture 2 in “The Meaning of It All” is devoted precisely to values of all kinds, including the ethical and aesthetic. But, of course, he was especially concerned with value in science: “The scientist tries to find… exceptions… He does not try to avoid showing that the rules [in his theory] are wrong; there is progress and excitement in the exact opposite. He tries to prove himself wrong as quickly as possible.” He also put it more succinctly: “Doubt is clearly a value in the sciences.” It was another hero of mine – Julian Jaynes – who defined a “scientism” as a scientific theory which had adopted a quasi-religious intolerance of doubt (combined with an ability to wriggle to adapt to or retrospectively “predict” inconvenient results). The climate theory of the inner core of the faithful – Hansen, Mann, Jones, Briffa and the rest – has attained that dubious status. Scientifically literate scepticism is science in a real sense. Calling sceptics “deniers”, even without the holocaust-etc baggage, is a shabby way to decline to adress (Feynman would say embrace!) real doubt.
Knocked it out of the park, rgb.
Greg House says:
June 24, 2012 at 10:37 pm
Think of it this way; suppose you have a garden hose that has water flowing through it at x gallons per hour at some pressure. If you restrict the flow by placing your thumb over the end of the hose, the pressure inside the hose will increase and the flow will decrease (this can be measured). This is analagous to what Dr. Spencer wrote of in his ‘Yes, Virginia’ thought experiment. Please remember that in Dr. Spencer’s explanation the heated plate had not changed in any way (same mass, same energy input, same flow of IR) from.the initial starting condition. All that changed in the second scenario was that the second plate (unheated) had been introduced into the chamber. The addition of the second plate modifies the rate at which the IR flows from the source thereby causing an increase in the temperature of the first plate (just like putting your thumb over the end of the garden hose).
Babsy says
The addition of the second plate modifies the rate at which the IR flows from the source thereby causing an increase in the temperature of the first plate (just like putting your thumb over the end of the garden hose).
Henry says
also@Garcad
All good and well, but still you have to start thinking OUT of the box,
and not in terms of IR spectra line-analysis
but in terms of how much cooling and how much warming is caused by each of the GHG,
in other words: a balance sheet in the correct dimensions,
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Note that O2/O3 and H2O and CO2 all absorb in the 14-15 region, \
which makes it all very,very complicated…..
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
Or try this experiment yourself. Fill a vacuum flask with freshly percolated coffee. Cap it. After a couple of hours measure the temp of the water. Read the ambient temp off your thermostat. Drink the coffee. Refill with freshly perked coffee, recap and stick it in the fridge for the same couple of hours. Read the temperature from your fridge’s thermostat (or its spec – probably c 5 degrees). Remove, measure temp, drink coffee. According to Newton’s Law of Cooling you won’t enjoy the second batch as much as the first, which contains extra heat from its environment.
HenryP says:
June 25, 2012 at 7:58 am
Yep! Very complicated indeed!
George E Smith (and others) who keep trying to show certain individuals why the principle of GHG’s is not in violation of thermodynamic laws, please save your energy.
Take a pause and ask yourselves, do you honestly and truthfully expect these individuals to be persuaded by any amount of logical argument, no matter how carefully constructed? Honestly? I have been down this route before and you can never win such arguments. There is a whole army of similar individuals. A lot of them can be found hosting blogs declaring that “Einstein was wrong”. They tend to perpetuate pithy logical conundrums such as “If 4 dimensional space-time existed, then motion would be impossible” which is presented as “proof” that such and such cannot exist.
Please spare your sanity, and have no more part in this – it is a mugs game.
RGB:
“It presumes that we have an accurate knowledge of e.g. the water cycle, global circulation and how it is tied to everything else, thermohaline circulation, tropical albedo, solar state and how it feeds back through mechanisms known and unknown (where IMO it is perfectly OK to profess ignorance of the unknown and factor this into the Bayesian weight we give a complex explanation) and more”
I would say it also presumes we can accurately model all that in a computer.
Very nicely written, Dr. Brown, I for one enjoyed the read, and I think it accurately matches my thought process, and stated better than I ever could.
Gary Hladik says:
June 25, 2012 at 12:02 am
Greg House says (June 24, 2012 at 10:37 pm): “Come on, Gary, let us stick to the truth: there is no experiment or any link to an experiment in Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” article.”
As I have pointed out repeatedly, Dr. Spencer describes a thought experiment that voodoo physicists could perform in real life to prove their claims and revolutionize physics.
========================================================
No. Gary, it is obvious, that 99.99% of the readers can not perform his “thought” experiment, because they do not access to appropriate facilities and equipment.
His “thought” experiment can only have been designed to convince people that things work that way without providing a real scientific proof.
So I am asking you and other warmists for the 5th time to present a link to a real genuine experiment that proves that cooling of a warmer body can be slowed down by transferring energy (in our case it is infrared radiation) to this warmer body from a colder body without external work.
There are other AGW basics without any basis in real science, but let us start with this one.
Greg House says
So I am asking you and other warmists for the 5th time
Henry says
but I did give you a clear example that proves the GH effect,
a simple minima experiment on a clouded night in winter and on a cloudless night,
here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#comment-1017528
Eh, I would have gone with “blueprints for a small screw that holds together children’s toys in comparison.” The system is just that complex.
“””””…..Gary Hladik says:
June 25, 2012 at 2:02 am
George E. Smith; says (June 24, 2012 at 11:46 pm): “The answer to that question is NO; well more scientifically acurate; hell no.”
Heh. Most of the explanation went over my head, but intuitively it seems reasonable that an image of the sun can’t be brighter than the sun. I was wondering what happens if multiple “suns” are applied to a target, but I found an answer of sorts here:
http://www.psa.es/webeng/instalaciones/horno.php
where it mentions an upper limit of about 10,000 suns for solar furnaces, which is roughly equivalent to a black body temp around 3,645 degrees K:…..”””””
Gary, As seen from earth, the sun on average subtends an angle of about 1/2 degree; well the main disk of the sun does, so as a source, it subtends an angular radius of 0.25 degrees. If you looked at the sun through your 7 x 35 binoculars (another hell no; don’t do it), then the final apparent angular size of the solar disk would be 7 x 0.25 or 1.75 deg radius or 3.5 deg angular diameter. That’s what the 7 means in the bino specs; it’s an ANGULAR magnification. Well the areal magnification, will be the square of 7 or 49; roughly 50 times, and if you put your eye there it would get fried by “50 suns”.
Well if you increased the magnification of your binos, or other optical system, further, the number of “suns” would go up. Now you can only increase the angular magnification to 360 before the angular radius of the image would be 90 degrees filling the whole hemisphere, which would be the maxcimum. 360 squared is 129,600.
Now there is NO optical system that can do that. Super fast lenses stop well short of that and besides such lenses are severely aberrated so eventually the energy density stops increasing.
Solar furnaces, are particularly inept, in that they emulate a parabolic mirror. For starters, a parabolic mirror has astronomical amounts of quite incurable coma, so it isn’t even vaguely Aplanatic.
As you arrange the furnace individual mirrors about the boiler, each focussing the sun on the boiler, you eventually run out of space, and the mirrors have to be placed further and further away from the boiler, so their individual focal lengths get longer and longer, and the sun image they form gets bigger and bigger, instead of smaller and hotter. That’s roughly what coma means, each radial zone of the “lens” or mirror, produces a different magnification so the image doesn’t keep getting smaller.
It turns out that imaging optics, which is what solar furnaces are are simply crappy as solar energy collectors.
Only non-imaging optics, can come close to reaching the theoretical maximum solar concentration. Well there are some theoretical weird imaging optics, such as the “Luneberg Lens” which reach the ideal; they just aren’t physically realizable at solar energy wavelengths (works well at microwaves).
So non-imaging optics theory tells us how much we can concentrate; and moreover exactly how to do it.
The answer is that a source with angular radius (a) = 0.25 deg for the sun, can be converted into a full 90 degree half angle 2pi image with an areal concentration of 1 / sin^2 (a), in air.
So 1/sin^2 (0.25) is 52,525. which is the theoretical maximum solar concentration you can get in air. Solar furnaces don’t come close to maximum, and therefore can’t reach the solar 5,800 K roughly.
One of the best two dimensional non-imaging (trough) concentrators is the CPC, compound parabolic concentrator, which can reach a maximum one axis concentration of 1 / sin(a) or 229.
Unfortunately it is not ideal in three dimensions, so it doesn’t reach the 52,525 limit in three dimensions. There are other hyperbolic forms of three dimensional concentrators; (circular hyperboloids of one sheet) which are in fact ideal in three dimensions and can reach the 52, 525 maximum concentration, BUT; they too have a gotcha. Most of the radiation only makes it down to the bottom of the trumpet like funnel, after bouncing multiple times off the walls of the funnel, an infinite number of times by the time you get to 90 degrees at the receiver end; so reflection losses eat your lunch and you don’t get the maximum energy buildup you wanted..
Winston and Welford did their number by taking advantage of a high refractive index YAG crystal which gives an n^2 increase in the concentration inside the crystal, so they used the CPC form, which is less than the ideal, but it gains more than it loses with the n^2 enhancement; and in addition the wall reflections are all total internal reflections, so there is no mirror coating to lose energy in reflectance losses.
I’m thinking that Roland achieved 56,000 suns with that gizmo (inside the crystal).
And if you do the full analysis, you find, even though the image is brighter than the surface of the sun, you still can’t get the Temperature pumped up above the solar surface Temperature. Mother Gaia, is damn persnickety about allowing that.
George