Heh. In response to a ridiculous claim making the rounds (I get comment bombed at WUWT daily with that nonsense) which I debunked here: A misinterpreted claim about a NASA press release, CO2, solar flares, and the thermosphere is making the rounds
Dr. Roy Spencer employs some power visual satire, that has truth in it. He writes:
How Can Home Insulation Keep Your House Warmer, When It Cools Your House?!
<sarc> There is an obvious conspiracy from the HVAC and home repair industry, who for years have been telling us to add more insulation to our homes to keep them warmer in winter.
But we all know, from basic thermodynamics, that since insulation conducts heat from the warm interior to the cold outside, it actually COOLS the house.
Go read his entire essay here. <Sarc> on, Roy!
UPDATE: Even Monckton thinks these ideas promoted by slayers/principia/O’Sullivan are ridiculous:
Reply to John O’Sullivan:
One John O’Sullivan has written me a confused and scientifically illiterate “open letter” in which he describes me as a “greenhouse gas promoter”. I do not promote greenhouse gases.
He says I have “carefully styled [my]self ‘science adviser’ to Margaret Thatcher. Others, not I, have used that term. For four years I advised the Prime Minister on various policy matters, including science.
He says I was wrong to say in 1986 that added CO2 in the air would cause some warming. Since 1986 there has been some warming. Some of it may have been caused by CO2.
He says a paper by me admits the “tell-tale greenhouse-effect ‘hot spot’ in the atmosphere isn’t there”. The “hot spot”, which I named, ought to be there whatever the cause of the warming. The IPCC was wrong to assert that it would only arise from greenhouse warming. Its absence indicates either that there has been no warming (confirming the past two decades’ temperature records) or that tropical surface temperatures are inadequately measured.
He misrepresents Professor Richard Lindzen and Dr. Roy Spencer by a series of crude over-simplifications. If he has concerns about their results, he should address his concerns to them, not to me.
He invites me to “throw out” my “shredded blanket effect” of greenhouse gases that “traps” heat. It is Al Gore, not I, who talks of a “blanket” that “traps” heat. Interaction of greenhouse gases with photons at certain absorption wavelengths induces a quantum resonance in the gas molecules, emitting heat directly. It is more like turning on a tiny radiator than trapping heat with a blanket. Therefore, he is wrong to describe CO2 as a “coolant” with respect to global temperature.
He invites me to explain why Al Gore faked a televised experiment. That is a question for Mr. Gore.
He says I am wrong to assert that blackbodies have albedo. Here, he confuses two distinct methods of radiative transfer at a surface: absorption/emission (in which the Earth is a near-blackbody, displacing incoming radiance to the near-infrared in accordance with Wien’s law), and reflection (by which clouds and ice reflect the Sun’s radiance without displacing its incoming wavelengths).
He implicitly attributes Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 speech to the Royal Society about global warming to me. I had ceased to work with her in 1986.
He says that if I checked my history I should discover that it was not until 1981 that scientists were seriously considering CO2’s impact on climate. However, Joseph Fourier had posited the greenhouse effect some 200 years previously; Tyndale had measured the greenhouse effect of various gases at the Royal Institution in London in 1859; Arrhenius had predicted in 1896 that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 4-8 K warming, and had revised this estimate to 1.6 K in 1906; Callender had sounded a strong note of alarm in 1938; and numerous scientists, including Manabe&Wetherald (1976) had attempted to determine climate sensitivity before Hansen’s 1981 paper.
He says, with characteristic snide offensiveness, that I “crassly” attribute the “heat-trapping properties of latent heat to a trace gas that is a perfect energy emitter”. On the contrary: in its absorption bands, CO2 absorbs the energy of a photon and emits heat by quantum resonance.
He says the American Meteorological Society found in 1951 that all the long-wave radiation that might otherwise have been absorbed by CO2 was “already absorbed by water vapor”. It is now known that, though that is largely true for the lower troposphere, it is often false for the upper.
The series of elementary errors he here perpetrates, delivered with an unbecoming, cranky arrogance, indicates the need for considerable elementary education on his part. I refer him to Dr. Spencer’s excellent plain-English account of how we know there is a greenhouse effect.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (April 18, 2013)
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Konrad says:
Sounds great until one realizes the consequences of what you are saying, which is that the high altitude would have to heat up, reducing the lapse rate…However, we already know that convection can only drive the temperature down to the lapse rate and no further. This is the sort of science one gets if one says lots of nice words but never works out the mathematical consequences of those words.
Sorry…The IR gases also absorb. And, we know the net result from both satellite measurements from space and radiative transfer calculations that agree excellently with these satellite measurement. And, that result is that the radiation to space at the wavelengths absorbed by the IR gases is lower than at the wavelengths where they don’t absorb. At the end of the day, the IR gases are reducing the emission of radiation to space, forcing the surface temperature (and the temperature throughout the troposphere) to rise.
Another conjecture shot to h*ll by empirical data.
Joe Postma says:
Neat trick, Joe. If the 3rd object is at the same temperature as the 2nd object, how are you going to get heat to flow from the 2nd object to the 3rd object (which it must do to escape back out into space)? If the 3rd object is at a lower temperature, how are you going to get it to radiate enough to get back out into space the same amount of energy as was received by the system?
It’s no wonder we have never seen a simple mathematical model (like the shell model) from you on this point: You can’t create one that satisfies the basic laws of physics that constrain us.
Joe, Sorry…You can’t just ignore the sun. Did you take an introductory physics course? Have you ever seen the equation (Net Intensity emitted) = sigma*epsilon*(T^4-T_0^4) ? Do you understand that the second term is generally understood as being radiation from the cooler surroundings that are absorbed by the object? If you don’t like that interpretation, you don’t have to believe it: It won’t affect the fact that the rate of heat flow from an object depends on the temperature of the surroundings, which is all you need (along with conservation of energy) to prove that your claims here are nonsense.
They are not conflicting theories. They are different levels of detail. The purely radiative picture ignores the fact that there is also convection. In the presence of convection, the lapse rate is driven down to the adiabatic lapse rate, which will tend to reduce the temperature difference between the surface and the mean radiating level. To say the cause of the rise in surface temperature above that possible in the absence of an IR-absorbing atmosphere is due to adiabatic heating is not correct and I haven’t seen anyone claim that. The point is that convection is reducing the greenhouse effect from what it would be with a steeper lapse rate in the absence of convection, but because the atmosphere is only unstable to convection for lapse rates steeper than the adiabatic lapse rate, convection can only reduce the greenhouse effect so far.
Unfortunately, if you repeat pseudoscientific nonsense often enough, it doesn’t become science. There is not a maximum temperature associated with a certain input. You are making the assumption that you are radiating back out to space at 0 K, i.e., you are ignoring the T_0 part of the equation (Net Intensity emitted) = sigma*epsilon*(T^4-T_0^4) that you can find in any intro physics textbook in order to calculate T.
You are changing the subject. It is a conduction problem, not a radiation problem. I understand why you want to change the subject since it shows that the Postma statement of the 2nd Law is utter nonsense. Of course the temperature on the left end of the rod depends on the colder temperature on the right end: The constant heat input on the left end will enforce a certain temperature gradient through the rod. For the numbers that I gave, the difference in temperature between the ends works out to somewhere around 40 C…I don’t have the paper on which I worked it out in front of me now to give a more precise value.
As I explained, everybody who can do basic math to enforce energy conservation, can see that this is exactly what you are in effect saying. Of course, as I noted, you never actually say it because people would immediately see that your claims are nonsense. But, there is no way for you mathematically to get the results you are claiming without making that assumption. That’s why the Sl*yer arguments are most appealing to people who have no ability to check the math.
I said: “However, we already know that convection can only drive the temperature down to the lapse rate and no further.”
That should read: “However, we already know that convection can only drive the temperature down to the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate and no further.”
Konrad,
I really like your approach — doing experiments yourself and then also looking at other papers that have dealt with some of the some issues. My main concern is that you may not be incorporating enough details some times.
1) Your experiments seem to be using fairly small boxes (but I don’t have a good description handy, so it is tough to comment too exactly). This could do many things —
* eliminate the importance of the lapse rate;
* introduce boundaries that create friction and turbulence;
* introduce boundaries that are about the same thermal conductivity as the air;
* change the various “time constants” for the system to reach steady-state by many orders of magnitudes;
* eliminate “day” and “night”.
Any one of these creates what could be significant differences between your “model” and the real atmosphere.
2) The diagram of Rayleigh-Bénard convection you linked to comes from this paper:http://www.crss.ucsb.edu/music/LEVEL0/ConferencesOpen/Conferences.2004/ICAPP4241.pdf
* they use a thin layer of liquid, not a thick layer of gas.
* they use huge heat inputs (44,000 w/m^2) and small time-scales (~ 10 seconds)
* they start with an isothermal sample, and then suddenly start to heat it.
Again, any of these could make it very difficult to draw analogies between this system and the earth’s atmosphere. What I see is that the heat input at the bottom does indeed warm the fluid, but convection LIMITS how much the fluid at the bottom warms, which is pretty much in line with most interpretations I have seen for the effect of earth’s atmosphere’s convection.
joeldshore says:
May 8, 2013 at 5:47 am
——————————————————————–
“Sounds great until one realises the consequences of what you are saying, which is that the high altitude would have to heat up, reducing the lapse rate”
– No. Radiative gases allow energy loss at altitude, cooling the upper atmosphere, increasing buoyancy imbalance and increasing the speed of tropospheric convective circulation. Remember that the speed of tropospheric convective circulation is 0.0 m/s in the absence of radiative gases. Pierrehumbert’s magical point at which these gases stop cooling and start warming does not exist.
Further to the issue of lapse rate, the lapse rate below the troposphere is a product of convective circulation. If this circulation were not occurring the troposphere would be isothermal (prior to super heating and being lost to space). Convective circulation in the troposphere depends on radiative gases. Here is a simple experiment which will demonstrate the role of vertical circulation in generating the tropospheric lapse rate. PSI Assault Clown Doug tried not to understand, but you should be able to see why it works –
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/how-can-home-insulation-keep-your-house-warmer-when-it-cools-your-house/#comment-76518
“At the end of the day, the IR gases are reducing the emission of radiation to space, forcing the surface temperature (and the temperature throughout the troposphere) to rise.”
– Only for the land surface, not the atmosphere. Without radiative gases the atmosphere loses it’s primary cooling mechanism. Further to this my empirical experiments show why the surface is effective at conductively heating the atmosphere, but ineffective at cooling it. Radiative gases increase the emission of energy to space from the atmosphere, drive convective circulation and cool the surface during the day.
As to surface temperatures, radiative gases raise land surface Tmin. They have no significant direct radiative effect on surface Tmax. However these gases have an indirect effect reducing surface Tmax by driving convective circulation. While land surface Tmin may be higher under a radiative atmosphere, land surface Tav is lower as is tropospheric Tav. Radiative gases cool our atmosphere at all concentrations above 0.0ppm.
Joel, there is nothing wrong with radiative physics. The AGW hypothesis fails because the role of radiative gases in the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere was not properly considered. This has been compounded by the mistake of assuming that Tav for a moving non-radiative atmosphere would be set by surface Tav.
At some point you need to acknowledge that tropospheric convective circulation depends on radiative gases.
tjfolkerts says:
May 8, 2013 at 9:34 am
“What I see is that the heat input at the bottom does indeed warm the fluid, but convection LIMITS how much the fluid at the bottom warms, which is pretty much in line with most interpretations I have seen for the effect of earth’s atmosphere’s convection.”
——————————————————————————————————————
Tim,
Your interpretation is essentially correct. The problem for the AGW hypothesis is that convective circulation below the tropopause is dependant on radiative gases. The lower atmosphere is being heated by surface conduction, intercepted surface IR and release of latent heat. All this energy, not just intercepted surface IR, is being radiated from the upper atmosphere by radiative gases. This drives convective circulation.
Surface Tav and Tmax* is reduced by convective circulation. There would be no tropospheric convective circulation without radiative gases. The benefits of radiative gases in the atmosphere are three fold –
A- Plants can breathe and grow.
B- Surface temperatures are liveable. (increased Tmin, reduced Tmax)
C- Most of our atmosphere does not boil off into space, so no ones breathing privileges need be revoked. (look at molecular temps in the mesosphere, that’s what happens without radiative gases)
I acknowledge the limitations of small scale experiments. Experiments 4 & 5 do suffer from scale effects due to the speed of gas conduction, hence my advice to build them a large as possible. Surface friction is however required for experiment 4 if built small, you will notice surface friction controls added in the photo of the version I built only 250mm tall (not needed in 1m version). However the basic physics being demonstrated in experiments 1 to 5 are sound. The instructions given are for others to replicate with easily available resources. I have access to materials others may not have such as vacuum metallised Mylar filled with q-cell insulation as opposed to EPS foam. I do not expect other bloggers to have access to such materials or high torr vac pumps etc**. The instructions I post are modified accordingly, and yes I have tested each of the modified set-ups.
*Land surface Tmin is increased by radiative gases.
** You need a very good vac pump to do the two shell experiment (hint – don’t use spheres, use plates and heat the primary plates with sw radiation from the back, not with a resistor.). -950 mb will not do it. You can get close with a delrin piston roughing pump and a carbon rotary vane secondary. What is really needed is a secondary turbomolecular. Out of my price range but I wish I had this –
http://www.creare.com/services/fluid/minivac.html. If only I had “Climate Science” money, imaginary “Big Oil” dollars don’t cut it 😉