Environmentalist Air Pollution

From the text “All else being equal, a doubling of CO2 levels will increase average temperatures by less than 1⁰C, and most likely less than 0.5⁰C. Climate models overestimate warming because they wrongly assume that clouds, on net, cause positive feedback.”
We know that global temperatures haved been rising ever since the LIA. We have reasonable global temperatures since around 1850. The trend of temperatures has not changed over the time that we have reasonable records, and no-one has detected any CO2 signal in any temperature/time graph. Therefore the empirical data gives a strong indication that the total climate sensitivity for CO2 is indistinguishable from zero. See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/plot/gistemp/compress:12/detrend:0.1/offset:-0.075/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.35/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.0001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.9/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.0001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.64/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:-2

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

I enjoyed this – ’nuff said !

Reblogged this on sainsfilteknologi and commented:
Environmentalist Air Polution

from subtropical south-east queensland, australia… & thereabouts today….brrrrr!
12 Oct: Courier Mail: Ricki-Lee Arnold: Dig out the jumpers across the southeast as windy conditions expected to bring a chill this weekend
STANTHORPE residents woke Friday morning to discover a white wonderland in their backyards.
Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Matt Bass said Stanthorpe recorded a minimum temperature of 3.5 degrees at 5am and had heard reports from the area that cool temperatures coming from New South Wales had resulted in sleet…
Residents of Stanthorpe however are claiming they’ve been hit by snow as opposed to sleet.
Stella Drake told the Granite Belt Wine Country that she had experienced three flurries of snow on Friday morning in Eukey, just south of Stanthorpe…
Mr Bass said there had also been confirmed reports of October snow from the Snowy Mountains and Northern Tablelands in New South Wales.
Guyra was one of the worst hit areas in the Northern Tablelands, recording 15cm of snow.
Weather watchers across the border took to Facebook this morning to post pictures of falling snow and snowmen…
At 6.45am Friday, Brisbane was experiencing temperatures of 13 degrees, with the apparent temperature at six degrees.
Ipswich registered an apparent temperature of five degrees, while Toowoomba and Applethorpe, southwest of Brisbane, were dealing with the worst of it – recording an apparent temperature of -2 degrees.
Senior forecaster Brett Harrison from the Bureau of Meteorology said Thursday’s rainfall, which occurred across the state, has cleared off shore but had been followed by “very cold” west to south-westerly winds.
“The rainfall is bringing very cold air from southern Australia and we’re seeing low temperatures and high wind chill factor, which does make it feel colder,” he said…
“We do expect the windiest conditions to be during this morning but there will still be some wind around into the afternoon so it will still feel cool all day and the temperatures are going to be below average right around the state.
“We do expect it for everywhere apart from the Far Northern tropics.”
The cool conditions are expected to last into early next week but Mr Harrison said it will be accompanied by fine, sunny days…
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/dig-out-the-jumpers-across-the-southeast-as-windy-conditions-expected-to-bring-a-chill-this-weekend/story-e6freon6-1226494186786

Just copied and pasted this to Weatherzone – now waiting for the resident Skeptical Science trolls to start trying to tear it apart. 😀

“The Truth: All else being equal, a doubling of CO2 levels will increase average temperatures by less than 1⁰C, and most likely less than 0.5⁰C.”
The Real Truth: There is no evidence that CO2 has or will cause warming. All evidence suggests that CO2 increases are a result of warming, NOT a cause.

Chris,
Let’s imagine a fable, set in the days before chemotherapy was recognized as a sometimes useful tool in the treatment of cancer.
Let’s imagine that there are some medical scientists who get the idea that ingesting a poison might in some specialized cases actually be a good idea.
For people with invasive cancer, even though the poison would harm their body, it would harm the cancer cells even more. While the idea of self-administering poison is repugnant, there are cases where consuming poison reduces overall harm.
Now, let’s imagine that some nutters get hold of this information, and reason “well, if this poison has such positive benefits that it can tame aggressive cancers, maybe we should start consuming a little poison now, and prevent bad things from happening.” They become “poison advocates”. Some of these poison advocates think we should put some poison, like fluoride, in our drinking water now so that everyone can get this benefit as soon as possible. (The medical scientists were not sophisticated in the arts of public relations, so they called their idea “poison therapy”.)
Then, a reporter from the Guardian calls one of the scientists working on “poison therapy”. The scientist tells the reporter, “I am researching whether there are certain circumstances in which ingesting poison can reduce overall harm. But, one thing that commonly happens is that people try to represent us as ‘poison advocates’ when we are really working scientists trying to investigate something that might in some special circumstances be able to reduce harm (and potentially save lives). Please make sure you distinguish clearly between poison advocates and scientists researching poison therapy. Oh, and by the way, here are links to two interviews in which I have made my positions clear.”
Let’s furthermore imagine that it is early days and the government is not yet funding research into chemotherapy. So, a philanthropist steps in and says “I will contribute to studying this and other innovative ways to address threats posed by cancer, until the government can get its act together and start supporting this research.”
Then, the Guardian reporter, in order to increase the titillation factor of what he fears might be a rather mundane story, decides to blur the distinction between advocating poisoning our water supply and researching chemotherapy, and decides to publish an expose about how a billionaire tycoon and his mad scientists are poison advocates, giving the impression if not out-rightly saying that they seek to profit off of putting poison in your drinking water.
I think the above allegory reflects how I see the Guardian as handling this matter. The Guardian, it seems, has chosen to titillate rather than to inform.
And in so doing, the Guardian does me and my colleagues personal harm. I get phone calls or emails nearly every day from nutters who think that I am spraying something in the sky. They have published my home address on the web, much the way doctors who perform abortions here in the US have had their home addresses posted on the web. The Guardian is inciting a bunch of nuts who think the doctors studying chemotherapy need to be stopped before they can poison us all. There is an issue of personal safety here.
As I have said many times before, I don’t know if this climate chemotherapy can really reduce harm, but the stakes are high enough that we would be remiss if we did not examine this possibility.
It is completely irresponsible of the Guardian to conflate working research scientists with the nutters advocating spraying aerosols in the stratosphere. I would appreciate it if the Guardian could manage to be more responsible in their reporting in the future.
Best,
Ken
_______________
Ken Caldeira
Carnegie Institution Dept of Global Ecology
260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA

Great article Ira! It would make a great online test with true/false answer, that way lots of people could learn your facts and fallacies.
I was clicking around on the TV this evening and I thought I saw Paul Ryan being interviewed by some lady I’m not familiar with. There was this white monkey in a suit jumping around in the background, making a variety of contorted faces. Eh, maybe I just imagined it.

Excellent, I was thinking about the same chain of flaws. No wonder the propaganda has been so relentless to distort the truth. You made the case much better than I could.

I see no reason to concede ANY effect of human activity on climate. Any such effect can be shown to be so small as to be utterly statistically irrelevant. I wouldn’t concede to even an increase of 1/10^303) (that’s one centillionth) of a degree in global temperatures due to human activity. Ain’t happenin’, bro.
A more telling point about environmentalist-caused pollution: Diverting such huge amounts of capital to chasing the CO2 bogeyman will leave just that much less available to clean up pollution and develop cleaner fuels. Therefore, the AGW-enviro[word deleted, see Godwin’s Law – Ira] agenda will mean more, not less, pollution.
Of course AGW isn’t about the environment – it’s about regulatory oppression and tax rapacity. The environment is only the guilt trip and fearmongering used by the AGW crowd to manipulate uninformed people into going along with their reactionary agenda of returning to the bad old days of tyranny and slavery.
[Chad, it is true that the magnitude of the effect of human activities on climate has been way overstated (for political power), but I cannot go along with your refusal to “concede ANY effect”. The Atmospheric “Greenhouse Effect” is real. See my WUWT series Visualizing the “Greenhouse Effect” [Physical Analogy, Atmospheric Windows, Emission Spectra, Molecules/Photons and Light/Heat]. – Ira]

There needs to be a climate science version of USADA to catch climate cheats. Compile all the evidence against them then humiliate them in public, like how serial cheater lance Armstrong is getting humiliated now. Will make them think twice before swinging their hockey sticks around.
Michael Mann = Lance Armstrong of climate science.
Mann just using a hockey stick instead of a bicycle. Unfortunately, the amount of taxpayer money involved is exponentially larger in Mann’s case.
Does Mann think he is an “untouchable” like Lance Armstrong thought he was? Can’t wait for Mann to sue Mark Steyn.

Hypothesis!
You give theory a bad name

Nicely argued post, although I don’t entirely agree with every point made – Dr Burns, for example, states my beliefs about the unimportance of CO2 quite well above, and others have mentioned nuclear. Unfortunately, though, as has been pointed out before, consideration of the scientific and logical validity of the AGW “argument”, among many others, is entirely irrelevant.
The Real Truth: The HITwit “technocrats” comprising the UN, EU, the three letter agencies, your, our and most other governments have agreed among themselves that there are too many of us, and that we have come to believe, inconveniently, that we have some kind of right to self determination. (Which we do, absolutely.) Accordingly, they have set in motion a process to reverse this and concentrate all power and wealth in their own “highly intelligent” ranks.
They use the sort of plausible “arguments” you demolish in this post to make those of “lesser” intelligence believe that there is a range of hugely important issues – AGW, overpopulation, “sustainability”, you name it – which will destroy the human race and/or the planet unless their poisonous “solutions”, always involving depopulation and the concentration of power in unelected hands, are implemented. By controlling theoretically “democratic” processes, primarily through their control of the media which feed us “information”, they make people believe that they are actually choosing these “solutions” to the invented “problems” themselves. And so the program is implemented, step by bloody step: advanced economies are being closed down, their people dispossessed and increasingly controlled; whole countries in the Middle East are being contaminated with DU or whatever to reduce the number of viable births; meanwhile “authoritative” agencies with absolute power are seen all to agree on the “necessity” of every action. No matter the distress of the honest worker whose job and home have disappeared. No matter the heartbreaking despair of the mothers in the Middle East as they give birth to their grotesquely deformed babies. All this is “necessary”, the “experts” agree. The blood-soaked history of the last century, and particularly the last few decades, bears eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the process.
Think on that when you vote in November – or, if you’re British, in two and a half years’ time, or wherever whenever. It makes absolutely no difference whether you vote for Punch or for Judy, because the “technocrats” you don’t see – or, more importantly, vote for or have any control over – have their dirty hands firmly inserted in the nether regions of both. Their “superior intelligence” will continue to decide how the show proceeds, destroying us all, until the booth is ripped down and the bewitched ordinary person sees what is really going on. Whether that results in more enlightened rule by the “limited-intelligence wise” or Hobbes’ “war of all against all” remains to be seen, but nothing whatever will change until it happens. Power pollution, not air pollution, is the real problem.
[Steve C, THANKS for picking up on my use of “HITwit” as a shortened version of “High-Intellect Twit”, namely a person who is smart in some usually academic domain but who is also so foolish that he or she thinks they know everything about everything else. Based on a Google search, I may be the first person to use “HITwit” in that sense, and I have nominated the Sheldon character in the hilarious The Big Bang Theory as the prime example HITwit. Sheldon is portrayed as a brilliant cutting edge theoretical physicist with an eidetic (photographic) memory loaded with true but useless knowledge and a foolish belief that, since physics is the basis of all science, he knows or can figure out everything about everything else. Perhaps we should add James Hansen, another PhD physicist and Twit to the list of prime examples? I considered adding Al Gore, but while he is a classic Twit, he fails in the High-Intellect department :^). Another prime example is our current President who is smart in the academic sense and a brilliant speaker but IMHO has adopted foolish policies he really believes in because has no experience in business or practical political matters. – Ira]

@Dave
The Mauna Loa measurements are have a collection protocol that works to remove the effects of volcanic emissions.
It is interesting to note that the end result is little different from the raw data.

Dave says:
October 12, 2012 at 1:27 am
May be slightly OT, but why are all CO2 measures I have seen quoted from Mauna Loa? Surely atmospheric CO2 will be affected by local volcanic sources / activity levels. Just asking (go easy on me!)
————————————————————–
That is a good question but apparently Mauna Loa is an ideal place to make these measurements. The best explanation is contained in a previous post on WUWT by Willis Eschenbach
“CO2 measurements are taken only at night. Thus, they are measuring descending air that is coming from thousands of feet aloft. This air has travelled across half of the Pacific Ocean, so it is far from any man-made CO2 sources. And as a result, it is very representative of the global background CO2 levels. That’s why Keeling chose the site.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/04/under-the-volcano-over-the-volcano/

“It is becoming clear the main cause is natural cycles, such as Solar activity that modulates cosmic rays [6]”
Better not let Leif hear you say that 🙂

MikeB says
“And as a result, it is very representative of the global background CO2 levels. That’s why Keeling chose the site.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/04/under-the-volcano-over-the-volcano/
Much clearer now! – Thanks for the link.
Dave

Well-done

Dave Dodd says: October 11, 2012 at 10:21 pm: Oh, COME ON! How does one get three decimal output accuracy, when the input is INTEGER values! My poor old High School physics teacher gives you an F-!!!! His red pen would be BLEEDING by now!! “The Truth: The Earth has warmed a bit since 1880, but no more than 0.4⁰C.” How could we possibly know there has been ANY warming (or for that matter cooling) since 1880? We don’t know! The error band is larger than the supposed warming! ARRRGGHH!
Well Dave, first of all the number 0.4 is one not threedecimal places of accuracy.
Secondly, we know something about the data, namely that it contains a ‘noise’ component which causes it to jitter up and down from year to year. Even climate alarmists don’t claim those jitters are anything other than natural. But on a long enough timescale thse jitters tend to even out, leaving just the long term trend, up or down. Thet long term trend since 1850 has been a rise of 0.4degC per century. It is perfectly clearly defined above the noise. (see, for example, the blue line in the chart at http://www.thetruthaboutclimatechange.org/tempsworld.html )
Of course the number is only as good as the temperature data on which it is based. But it is certainly not statistically insignificant. Moreover, it demonstrates very clearly that the temperature rise (even if the data is perfectly correct) has been most un-alarming.

Dr. Glickstein’s argument for the falsity of FALSEHOOD #3 fails, for it assumes the existence of the equilibrium climate sensitivity as a scientific concept but this concept does not exist. The non-existence follows from the lack of observability of the equilibrium temperature.
Nonetheless, successful refutations of FALSEHOOD #3 are readily at hand. I’ll supply details if these would be of interest.

I prefer to see the theory as a jigsaw puzzle, If one piece is missplaced you cannot say that you have solved the puzzle. And right now there are so many pieces that do not fit to each other.

Richard Courtney, you write “No. The climate sensitivity has been measured by a variety of methods (which have been linked in this thread by me and wayne). A measured value is an observation and, thus, demonstrates that your claim of “non-observability” is untrue. ”
I take issue with this statement. It is theoretically possible to measure total climate sensitivity. You observe how much CO2 levels rise in the atmosphere, and you observe how much temperature rises as a result of this increase in CO2 concentration. This would give a measure of total climate sensitivity. No-one has actually made such measurements. My own look at this way of measuring CS has led me to conclude that CS is indistinguishable from zero.
‘
Other than this, all the numbers associated with CS have only been estimated; mostly by highly dubious physics. There is empirical data to support the idea of an increase in radiative forcing as more CO2 is added to the atmopshere. But there is no empirical data whatsoever that has been used as a basis for any claimed numeric value of CS.

Richard, you write “but I fail to understand the point you are making so I cannot answer it.”
Maybe I am being supersensitive, but I am appalled by the lack of the use of empirical data by the proponents of CAGW. They rely on hypothetical data, and the output of non-validated models. So the point I am trying to make is that none of the numbers that are routinely claimed to be values for CS are based on any empirical data; any actual measurements. So when I see you claim that some of the numbers are based on measured data, I bristle.
The point is that, because we do not understand what causes natural variations, it is impossible to claim that any particular observed change in temperature was actually caused by increasing levels of CO2. So, it is impossible to use empirical data to measure CS. I rely on negative data, which cannot prove anything. There is no sign that CO2 has affected the trend of global temperatures. Now, tomorrow, next week, next year, or some time in the future, a strong CO2 signal could emerge, and I would be proven wrong. But until that happens there is no sign that CO2 affects global tempertratures, and hence there is a strong indication that the CS of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero.

Ira Glickstein says, October 15, 2012 at 8:48 am: Earth to John Marshall ! ! ! :^) You say: “…GHG theory … has yet to be confirmed and it is certainly not needed for the extra temperature required to increase the surface temperature from that calculated using Black Body formula.”… the average surface temperature of the Earth is higher than it would be by SB calculations. It is about 33⁰C (58⁰F) warmer.
Earth to Ira: duh!
(1) An atmosphere-less earth would not be 33degC colder. It would be more like 90degC colder. This has been demonstrated both theoretically and empirically. The conventional black body calculation has been shown to be wrong because it first averages the incident radiation across the earth’s surface and then uses the S-B formula to calculate the corresponding average temperature. This violates Holder’s Inequality theorem which says that “averaging a function’s set of input values (in this case flux densities) and applying the result to the function does not produce the same output as applying each of the input values separately to the function and averaging the corresponding set of outputs (at least not if the function is non-linear as is very much the case with S-B).
So if you first use the S-B function repeatedly to calculate the temperature at each point on the earth and then average those temperature values, you get the correct theoretical result which is a 134degC lower temperature than ambient. Doing it the other way round, as is conventionally done, gives you the 33degC value which is simply wrong. This error has now been confirmed empirically: the moon’s average surface temperature has been determined to be about 90degC below earth ambient. (The difference between the moon’s 90degC and the theoretical 134degC black body value is due to the heat retention properties of the moon’s regolith). Nevertheless the moon’s mean temperature is nearly 3 times further below ambient than the conventional 33degC result.
You say: You appear to attribute that 33⁰C (58⁰F) to “adiabatic compressive heating by gravity”. OK, say it is 20⁰F outside and you have no heater in your house. So, you seal it up real tight and pump air in until the pressure goes up by 14 psi. I agree that will TEMPORARILY increase inside temperatures a bit (but most likely not by 58⁰F). But then, unless your house is perfectly insulated, which is impossible, the inside pressure will remain high, BUT your home will eventually cool to the ambient temperature outside of 20⁰F.
Earth to Ira: duh!
(2) This is the hoary old ‘bicycle tyre pumping’ story – except you have decided to pump up a whole house instead. The earth’s surface atmospheric temperature is not due to it being ‘pumped up adiabatically’ (billions of years ago, presumably). That would indeed have been a transient experience! Instead it is due to the steady state flow of energy arriving from the sun, passing up through the atmosphere, and back out to space. That continuous energy flow maintains a fixed surface air temperature because the only other variable, the surface air pressure, is itself fixed (1 bar) being itself a consequence of the (fixed) weight of atmosphere above the surface. So, sorry, there’s no room for any temperature variation due to CO2 or any other GHG.
Here too, there is empirical evidence to back up this theory. The Venus atmosphere has almost 100% CO2 whereas earth has almost 0% CO2 – the perfect laboratory experiment. Yet, as Harry Dale Huffman discovered, the Venus atmosphere temperature at any chosen pressure (that lies within the pressure range of the earth’s troposphere) is almost exactly the same as the earth’s temperature at that same given pressure (after adjusting for the two planets’ relative distances from the sun).
End of story.

David Socrates, Ira asks you “So what is the Atmospheric warming mechanism?” meaning related to pressure. Ira, would like your thoughts too but if I remember right you didn’t quite get my drift long ago, maybe this time.
Ask any qualified astronomer or radio astronomer, it is from mass extinction and its units are the mass extinction coefficient. All molecules or atoms are disturbed by all frequencies evenly and this all-spectrum absorption is pressure dependent. You can see its effect magnified to its limit measuring light radiance coming from stars just above the horizon, and guess what, that light is reduced 34 times less than when the same star is directly zenith. So just where exactly does that 33/34th of the energy disappears to?
David, I read your comment and agree with what you are saying. That is why I was surprised that Ira had finally considered that the ECS even be lower then 0.5. I take that very literally, could even be zero for not only co2 but all GHGs. I am beginning to think we have been fed a load of dung much deeper than most of the posts here at wuwt portrays, I think its flaws are in the way radiation is being handled completely by the climatologists.
All light (e/m) is attenuated by all matter, yes even gases of any type. The influence is not of rovibration absorption lines but in the interaction of the electric field with the electrons about the matter’s atoms. Think of translational levels which are not quantitized. The effect is very small compared to rotation or vibration events but these events happen to all frequencies of the e/m waves and to interaction with each and every atom or molecules depending on the exact proximity (density), polarization plane, instantaneous electron configuration and frequency.
Have you ever wondered how the air gets warm and so fast early in the morning? Put a thermometer on the ground’s surface… it isn’t from conduction, that’s for sure. The grounds cooler than the air! The ground or ocean water only absorbs more that the air by mass extinction when the coefficient gets smaller as the sun rises higher and the ground absorption reaches a maximum and air a minimum at zenith. Yes Ira, GHGs specific lines are also absorbing and radiating but their first absorption is high in the atmosphere when the sun is low… extinction is a continuous process, the more mass traversed the weak the light (speaking of any e/m here).
I am not trying so say that GHGs vibration lines have no hand for their interaction is very strong and line specific and especially water molecules are bound to have a hand in it. But this is a bit getting back into Ira’s bouncing photon description which is by far too simplistic. Rotation and vibration absorption and emission is really no more than long reaching and very fast line specific conduction as far a energy transfers in an atmosphere is concerned. Think along those lines when explaining why absorption and warming depends on pressure (and really it the density, not the pressure but in an atmosphere they always closely track each other – see optical thickness and mass absorption or mass extinction (meaning this only depend on the shear mass of the gas transversed)).
I don’t have the complete answers yet, still searching, but this topic brings back some deeper reading on radiation some forty years ago when I was an assistance to the astronomy professor and had an entire university library at my hands. Now the closest is some forty miles away or I might have already found the real answer I’m looking for. So far I have found but one thing, if it’s somewhere on the web it sure hides itself well! Maybe you or someone else can investigate that realm a bit.
Started to re-write this for better flow but I’m out of time so please just befuddle through my hobbled together thoughts above.

Ira, thanks in turn for your speedy reply.
Let’s first try and establish some principles on which I hope we can agree:
PRINCIPLE 1: Yes, we both agree that “adiabatic compressive heating by gravity” is NOT the mechanism that could possibly keep the earth’s atmosphere at its current surface temperature. That is and always has been a ridiculous argument with no scientific merit.
PRINCIPLE 2: Yes, I agree that for the sake of focus it is best to set aside the discussion about whether in the absence of an atmosphere the earth’s mean surface temperature would be 33deg C or ~90degC cooler (important though I believe that discussion is, for very fundamental reasons that can be discussed another time).
PRINCIPLE 3: Radiation is energy flow, not heat flow. So no laws of thermodynamics are violated by a cooler body radiating towards a warmer body (how would it know anyway?!). If two isolated bodies at different temperatures radiate towards one another, the cooler body will get warmer and the warmer body will get cooler. This is simply because the net energy flow is greater in one direction than in the other. So the warmer body is losing net energy and the cooler body is gaining net energy. Anybody who argues otherwise is guilty of perpetrating another ridiculous argument of no scientific merit.
PRINCIPLE 4: All matter absorbs and re-emits radiation all the time, including ALL atmospheric gases. GHGs absorb particularly strongly at atmospheric temperatures. The direction of emission of each individual emitted photon is random. Consequently, a significant proportion of photons are bound to travel from matter that is at a lower temperature towards matter that is at a higher temperature.
PRINCIPLE 5: The term ‘back radiation’ is needlessly divisive because it implies something special about a photon that happens to be traveling towards the earth’s surface. There is nothing special about it at all. So why annoy professional scientists unnecessarily by using the term?
OK, if you agree to the above this leaves us clear room to debate the real issue of what causes the ‘atmospheric warming effect’.
You say it is GHGs, principally H20 and CO2. I say it is the effect of a constant flow of energy passing through the air on its way back out to space. We have both already presented evidence, theoretical and empirical:
Your theoretical argument is that GHGs are strong absorbers of (a certain fraction of) the radiation flowing through the atmosphere. When they re-radiate, a proportion will be travelling downwards towards the earth’s surface and some will reach it. According to PRINCIPLE 3, this will slow down the rate of cooling of the earth’s surface so the surface will be warmer with the GHGs in the atmosphere than it would be if they were absent.
Your empirical evidence in support of the above theory is the satellite-derived spectra of ToA radiation showing significant absorption notches in what would otherwise be the expected smooth black body curve to which the earth’s emissions would otherwise approximate.
My theoretical argument is that a cubic metre of air at ground level has (by definition) a fixed volume and also a fixed pressure, the latter being in turn fixed by the weight of the mass of air above, all the way up the ‘atmospheric column’ to space. In those circumstances, the Universal Gas Law requires that, for a steady rate of energy flow through that cubic metre of air from the ground upwards, its temperature will be fixed. This leaves no room for ANY change in temperature unless the energy flow varies for any reason – e.g. a long term change in the sun’s output or a long term change in cloud cover. This means that that the temperature cannot be affected materially by the presence or absence of atmospheric CO2, because if it were, that would violate the Universal Gas Law. (I keep the discussion focussed on CO2 because it is the increase in this gas that is widely accused of causing global warming but of couse it is true for all the GHGs including H2O.)
I have two empirical arguments in support of the above theory. Firstly, in the last 161 years of the relatively reliable instrumental temperature record, there has been no sign of an increase in global temperature above that which could reasonably be considered to be natural variability. Using the HadCRUT3 offical data set, the long term linear regression slope is 0.41degC per century. See http://www.thetruthaboutclimatechange.org/tempsworld.html
My second empirical argument is based on Harry Dale Huffman’s amazing discovery about the pressure profile within the section of the Venus atmosphere that corresponds to the pressure profile of the earth’s troposphere. He has shown that, pressure-for-pressure, the temperatures are almost identical (after correcting for the relative distances of Venus and earth from the sun), just as you would expect from the Universal Gas Law. It is an especially important finding because the atmosphere of Venus is almost all CO2 (96.5%) whereas the earth’s atmosphere is almost entirely devoid of CO2 (0.04%) thus dramatically refuting the idea that CO2 has any special kind of warming effect over and above any other gas. This is a truly remarkable finding which in my view has never been successfully challenged. (There have been some pathetic attempts, like putting it down to ‘coincidence’!) I think it stands as the only really important empirical discovery so far in the troubled history of climate science.
Like you, I am an engineer not a theoretical physicist. I strongly believe that empirical evidence always trounces theory. I argue therefore that my empirical evidence strongly and unambiguously supports the ‘Gas Law’ warming theory and that at the same time it flatly contradicts your theoretical argument. Therefore I respectfully submit that there must be a flaw in your theory, despite the apparent empirical support you have provided.

John Marshall says, October 17, 2012 at 6:49 am: DS above in his 1st principle claims that adiabatic compressive heating cannot work in an atmosphere. Fair enough but how do you explain the extra heat radiated by the gas giants.
John, I don’t have to. I haven’t the faintest idea. It is not at all pertinent to this thread which relates to rocky planets and the question of why their atmospheres are warmer than their surfaces would be without an atmosphere. Ira says CO2. I say the Gas Law.
Perhaps, having graciously accepted your ludicrous error about “adibatic compressive heating” being the cause of atmospheric warming, you would kindly address yourself to the issue under discussion, namely my statement in my last post to the effect that theory and empirical evidence both support the position that there is no room for CO2 (or any other so-called greenhouse gas) to provide any measurable contribution to the atmospheric temperature enhancement because it is ALL accounted for by the Gas Law, as I have carefuly explained.
Ira seems to be hiding under a table somewhere after my last onslaught and it’s clearly down to you now to carry the can. So, do you agree with me? Or do you agree with Ira?
[David, I was not “hiding under a table” but rather, out of respect for your ideas and theory, I was composing a rather long, somewhat detailed, and completely convincing response. See my Comment immediately below. Enjoy! – Ira]

DS’s Principle 3, Radiation is energy flow not heat flow. Heat is but part of the energy spectrum and is radiated like all other forms of energy. (As far as the atmosphere is concerned most heat lost is by convection, to the tropopause then radiation.)
The 2nd law must apply to all forms of energy since heat is energy. If the 2nd law did not apply then a PPM would be possible. It is not.
A vacuum flask is used to delay cooling by re-radiating the escaping heat back into the substance in the flask. But the temperature still falls.
Ira. Why call the Fohne (the spelling in my book) effect phoney. It is the application of saturated and dry adiabatic lapse rates and certainly exists, see the Chinook Wind. Reasonable explained on Wikipedia.

Ira: My goodness your jokes are coming thick and fast. perhaps this whole debate is Fohne? 🙂
John Marshall: You say DS Principle 3… The 2nd law must apply to all forms of energy since heat is energy.
That is wrong in logic and wrong in reality. The 2nd Law only applies to heat. That is, kinetic energy of molecular motion. Radiation is a form of energy that can go in any direction anywhere without violating anything.

Ira: Looking through your “Visualising the Greenhouse Effect” article (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra/_) I came upon this gem in the blog response trail:
Arno Arrak says, March 10, 2011 at 10:11 am:
You have gone to great lengths to explain the spectral absorption features of the greenhouse gases. These gases are in the atmosphere and that is what they do. But it is unhelpful to know what the gases that are sitting there do when the atmosphere is in a stationary state. What is important to know is how does the addition of more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere change this picture. We are told that if you do that the atmospheric absorption will simply increase at the wavelengths that the added gas absorbs and in proportion to the amount added. But is this really true? There are no direct instrumental measurements of this and we simply have to believe theory about it. But what if there was a way to actually observe how the total atmospheric absorption changes as we increase the amount of CO2 we add to the atmosphere? It turns out that there is as Ferenc Miskolczi has pointed out. NOAA has been keeping a database of weather balloon observations since 1948 and these can be used to determine the relevant atmospheric absorption parameters. Miskolczi used this database to calculate how the global annual infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere varied throughout these years. And he found that the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared where carbon dioxide absorbs remained constant for 61 years, with a value of 1.87. This tells us that the transparency of the atmosphere in the infrared did not change for 61 years despite constant addition of CO2 to the atmosphere through all this long stretch of time. Hence, the greenhouse absorption signature of the added carbon dioxide which we are told about simply isn’t there. This is an empirical finding, not something derived from theory, and it overrides any calculations from theory that do not agree with it. Theories that disagree must either be modified or discarded. I want to point out also that his work came out in 2009 and no one so far has attempted to present any peer-reviewed arguments against it. Miskolczi concludes: “It will be inferred that CO2 does not affect the climate through the greenhouse effect.”
Now there you have some direct empirical proof that refutes the GHG theory. As an angineer, surely you value experimental data observations over theory? What more do I need to do to persuade you?