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)
“The temperature of anything heated will increase until the rate of energy *loss* equals the rate of energy *gain*”
When energy input equals energy output, then the system is in equilibrium. In this state the system will not be hotter than the input. Of course, the input isn’t -18C, but is +49C, on the Earth, and, the Earth isn’t hotter than this. In the textbook example of trying to control the output radiatively, this only creates a blackbody spectrum inside the cavity which is created to do that. When you shine a flashlight at a mirror, into a mirror, or two flashlights at each other with a good seal between the, it doesn’t cause the flashlights to shine brighter. Equal temperatures can not heat each other.
REPLY: Joe, take a time out. This is becoming absurd with your thread bombing – Anthony
The position that Co2 causes heating at the Earth’s surface seems to be contradicted by millions of years of temperature records showing that temperature precedes Co2 increases, by about 800 years. The so-called “runaway greenhouse effect” would have happened millions of years ago when Co2 was ten times the level that it is today. So perhaps our greenhouse physics is missing something, like DATA.
Ok, have it be two black bodies of arbitrary material, large enough that the area we’re interested in is radiating towards the other body, one at 373 K and one at 273 K, radiating towards each other.
I’m confident that the radiation field between them can be described by the following equation:
P = εσA(Th⁴ – Tc⁴)
rather than:
P = εσA(Th⁴ + Tc⁴)
max@Funktastic:~$ calgebra
>>> (5.6703*10^-8)*(373^4 – 273^4)
782.63220248
>>> (5.6703*10^-8)*(373^4 + 273^4)
1412.55397668
Both of those can not be right, and if the colder black body raises the temperature of the warmer black body then the second one is correct, which would be roughly the same power as that emitted by a 297.28 K black body.
If the radiation from the colder body is added to that from the warmer body, that is akin to a block of ice raising the temperature of a pot of nearly boiling water by over 24 K!
Anthony I am not thread bombing, I am responding to comments, and on topic. I am being perfectly pleasant. Cheers.
Obviously we’re still having trouble with the concept of NET heat exchange despite Max’s efforts:
The surface radiates as described by the Stephan-Boltzmann law:
Surface radiation = εσ T^ 4
The atmosphere radiates as described by an empirically derived equation:
Down-welling atmospheric radiation = (1+ KC^2) x8.78 E – 13T^5.852 x RH^0.07195
Therefore the NET heat loss from radiation of the surface is:
NET Radiation = [εσ T^ 4] – [(1+ KC^2) x8.78 E – 13T^5.852 x RH^0.07195]
Therefore, as long as [(1+ KC^2) x8.78 E – 13T^5.852 x RH^0.07195] is greater than 0, the NET radiation MUST be LESS THAN the “gross” (or Stephan-Boltzmann calculated) radiation that would be the NET if there were no radiation from the atmosphere (i.e. no GHE). This is measurable, known, understood stuff; like the world is round(ish).
Please read these 5 pages for details:
http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut37%20Radiative%20Cooling.pdf
The best way to understand the role of greenhouse gases is to do a thought experiment as to the temperature structure without greenhouse gases including water. I such a case, ignoring airborne aerosols, cooling of the earth would be occur only by black or grey body radiation from the earth’s surface. So the energy balance equation would show a much colder earth’s surface and there would be no significant lapse rate structure to the atmosphere. On the other hand, a significant portion of outgoing energy is radiated to space from the top of the troposphere in an atmosphere with greenhouse gases and the temperature at the top of the troposphere is much lower than the surface temperature. So the greenhouse gas containing atmosphere is like an insulating wall in that a greenhouse wall radiates from the exterior surface of the wall whereas a non greenhouse wall would be akin to a thin membrane wall essentially radiating from the interior wall surface.
I have triple glazed windows in my house. The gas they put inside the windows is Nitrogen. Seems to me if CO2 was a great insulator, they’d be using that instead…
Sorry but I couldnt help it.
take house wall with a cavity down the middle, standard thermal calcs for houses says `and then ignore the thermal R value (U value in good old Blighty) of the outer wall` this is specifically due to the radiatiive value of the surface and the convective value of the air in the cavity once heated above ambient and the normal movement of air through the cavity due to the house `breathing`. This is true in both directions, bricks heated from the outside by the sun or from the house heated from inside. Just think of it as a plate heat exchanger. Reducing the radiative value (emmissivity) of the cavity surface (polish it) and preventing to a great degree simple convection/pressure driven air flow allows the walls (lets say normal heating from the inside) to change the temperature gradient across them, hence the cavity side of the ash block increase in temperature towards but never past the temperature inside the house, Thermal stabilisation will occur at some point with the cavity side of the inner wall always below the temperature inside the house. Convection is the biggest problem for double glased windows hence the normal limit of 19 to 22m between inner and outer pane after which thermal resistance goes down. Styrofoam beads approx 3 to 5mm diameter are very highly packed closed cell honeycombe nature and convection is very difficult to initiate within such a small volume CO2 filled eps would not noticeably change the insulating/resistance value. Adding insulation to your house allows you to maintain a specified and stable thermal gradient from any one side to the other with a lower thermal input. Incorrectly applied insulation works directly and absolutely measurably through the `placebo` effect.
Did I get the job ?
Just build 2 greenhouses of identical size. Enhance the CO2 in one to 1000ppm. Keep them at the same temperature over a year. Check if the enhanced CO2 greenhouse used less KWh over the year.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
April 24, 2013 at 2:07 pm
Just build 2 greenhouses of identical size. Enhance the CO2 in one to 1000ppm. Keep them at the same temperature over a year. Check if the enhanced CO2 greenhouse used less KWh over the year.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sure, that would provide measurable data. Of course to get measurable data large enough to actually measure with even very accurate instrumentation, you’d need to build the greenhouses several kilometers tall.
But the sun does emit infrared that does get blocked from reaching the surface by “greenhouse” gases. It works in both directions.
Just in case anyone is curious, with my cleaned up example above (two black bodies, 373 K and 273 K, respectively), the radiation field from the warmer to colder body is roughly the same as that emitted by a black body at 342.758 K, and while I can’t quite justify it as being certain, I would not be surprised if the two bodies reached equilibrium around that temperature, i.e. with the warmer body being cooled and the colder body being warmed.
Seems reasonable enough for the pot of nearly boiling water + block of ice as well, getting warm water wouldn’t seem odd, but getting hotter water than you started with by adding ice would be a very interesting result, wouldn’t it?
And it is true that per unit of mass, the sun produces very little heat. It’s about that produced by the average compost heap. It’s just a very big compost heap and so it produces a lot of total heat that takes a long time to get to the surface.
CodeTech says:
April 24, 2013 at 2:06 pm
I have triple glazed windows in my house. The gas they put inside the windows is Nitrogen. Seems to me if CO2 was a great insulator, they’d be using that instead…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Seems to me they’d put in whatever gas experimentation proved provided the best result. Probably argon btw, not nitrogen. What they used and why they used it says absolutely zero about co2 as an insulator other then they found something they think works better.
Gary Hladik mentions Roy Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment. I have a question about this that’s been been bugging me for some time. Perhaps someone can put me out of my misery. There appear to be two views about “back radiation”: that energy can radiate from a cooler material (atom I guess) to a warmer one or that it can’t. I’d always held the latter view, for no particular reason other than that’s how I thought things worked. But in either case, isn’t the net effect more or less the same? This is how I interpret things:
Case 1: Radiation flows between both warmer and cooler plates. The effect is the result of the net radiation flow, and so the warmer plate becomes warmer than it would have been if the cooler plate wasn’t there.
Case 2: Radiation only flows from the warmer plate to the cooler plate. But at some point, the atoms at the surface of the cooler plate reach the temperature of the warmer plate. The warmer plate can no longer radiate to the cooler plate until the cooler plate’s surface atoms cool again, presumably by a combination of conduction within the plate and radiation from the other side. Those times when the warmer plate can’t radiate lower the rate of heat loss from the warmer plate, and so the warmer plate becomes warmer than it would have been if the cooler plate wasn’t there.
Gently, please!
Max™ says (April 24, 2013 at 1:49 pm): “Ok, have it be two black bodies of arbitrary material, large enough that the area we’re interested in is radiating towards the other body, one at 373 K and one at 273 K, radiating towards each other.”
Max, what’s your take on the “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
“Spencer slays with sarcasm”
=======================================================
Sarcasm is indeed there, but there is also a problem with the scientific point.
First, the analogies with “cold keeps warm”, blankets, houses etc. a very misleading. A blanket would keep us cold, not warm, if the air temperature outside the blanket is higher, than our body temperature.
Second, even on the theoretical level the concept of “back radiation warming” is physically absurd and therefore impossible, because if the source has been kept initially at a constant temperature, then “back radiation warming” will inevitably lead to an endless mutual warming of the source of radiation and the thing that provides back radiation, without an additional input of energy, which is physically absurd. And everybody can make a simple experiment: just stand in front of the mirror and enjoy the “back radiation warming”. Must be 33C or more, if the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC exists. Please, not too close to the mirror, to avoid the effect of suppressed convection.
Coming back to the theoretical level, it goes like that. You have initially a body kept at a certain temperature by it’s internal source of energy. Now you put another colder body at the absolute zero temperature, let us say, in vacuum close to the warm body.
The warmer body will start warming the colder body immediately. Then, according to the “back radiation warming” concept, the back radiation from the colder body will increase the temperature of the warmer body. Actually, already on this stage we should start screaming and crying “how come?”, but let us proceed. So, the now even warmer warm body will warm the colder body even stronger, and the colder body will repay by sending even more back radiation to the warmer body, thus increasing it’s temperature even further. The warmer body will get warmer again. So will the colder body in turn. And so on.
This is the mutual endless warming without any additional input of energy I meant previously, and I hope it is easy to understand how physically absurd it is. This proves that the concept of “back radiation warming” is physically absurd. The “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC can not exist.
REPLY: No, it doesn’t. This argumentum ad infinitum that the slayers push about “cold can’t heat warm” is the absurd part, and nothing but a strawman argument. The greenhouse effect (a misnomer) isn’t so much about reheating the atmosphere with reradiated LWIR from top to below, it is about slowing the progress of LWIR to the top of the atmosphere. Without CO2 or other GHG’s the LWIR would proceed quickly to space, and the Earth would cool faster, and have a lower average temperature at night. The “backradiation” has a limited scope of effect, but it is there as part of the trasnfer process. GHG’s are not unidirectional, they are omnidirectional in the LWIR process.
GHG’s act as a LWIR transfer regulator from the surface to the top of the atmosphere where it is radiated into space. They slow the transfer. Without GHG’s nightitme temperature would drop quickly as LWIR is lost directly to space.
A simple proof of this has to do with the differences between nighttime temperatures between moist and dry climates at the same latitude/altitude where water vapor is the dominant GHG. See Knappenberger et al 1996 for example.
Dry desert climes cool faster at night and have a greater diurnal temperature variation than moist climes. Water vapor is the difference. CO2 has a smaller effect, but an effect nonetheless. – Anthony
Selgovae says:
April 24, 2013 at 2:29 pm
————–
Well, look at it this way. Radiation has no way of knowing the temperature of bodies out in existence someplace it may eventually encounter. The sun shines outwards in all directions equally (possibly some random variations, I’m not a solar expert, but darn close I think), regardless of whether or not there is a hotter surface out there someplace in space that some of its radiation may eventually encounter.
So yes, I’d expect radiation to propagate from a source through space with complete disregard for the temperature of the object it may eventually hit.
So there is a consensus on the greenhouse effect?
davidmhoffer says, April 24, 2013 at 2:21 pm:
“Seems to me they’d put in whatever gas experimentation proved provided the best result. Probably argon btw, not nitrogen. What they used and why they used it says absolutely zero about co2 as an insulator other then they found something they think works better.”
http://gaia.lbl.gov/btech/papers/29389.pdf
Interesting quotes:
“Low-emittance coatings are much more effective at reducing infrared radiation heat transfer than IR absorbing gasses. Gasses for gas-filling should be chosen for their low conductivity and high kinematic viscosity in order to effectively reduce conductive/convective heat transfer. The effective use of infrared absorbing gasses is thus limited to horizontal windows heated from above, or to thin gaps where low-emittance coatings cannot be used.”
“(…) even though the gas absorption/emission dampens the natural convection, the absorbing gasses being used as gas-fills have lower kinematic viscosities than air and some of the other low-conductivity gasses (argon, krypton) being used in windows (fig. 6). And, from Glaser’s results for vertical windows it can be seen that the convective transfer becomes significant at around 9 mm for SF6, while there is practically no convective transfer through an air-filled window at gapwidths up to 20 mm under these conditions. In fact, air outperforms SF6 at gapwidths greater than 9 mm in a vertical window and the benefits from infrared absorption by SF6 have been negated by the magnitude of the convection.”
“Fig. 3 shows that the effect of the infrared radiation properties of CO2 is unnoticable (…)”
“Max, what’s your take on the “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment?” ~Greg
The heated bar will raise the temperature of the unheated bar, adding another object to be warmed reduces the energy density, there is no way it can result in a higher temperature without creating energy.
150 Fahrenheit is 338.7 K and would emit 746.2~ W/m^2 as a black body
100 Fahrenheit is 310.9 K and would emit 529.7~ W/m^2 as a black body
max@Funktastic:~$ calgebra
>>> (5.6703*10^-8)*(338.7^4)
746.219894665
>>> (5.6703*10^-8)*(310.9^4)
529.771907497
>>> (5.6703*10^-8)*(338.7^4 – 310.9^4)
216.447987168
>>> (5.6703*10^-8)*(338.7^4 + 310.9^4)
1275.99180216
From the heated bar:
746.2 to shell, 216.4 to unheated bar
From the unheated bar:
529.7 to the shell, -216.4 to heated bar
If the power supply is constant then consider the case where the unpowered bar begins at the same temperature as the powered bar.
I see no reason why a body at given temperature should raise the temperature of another body at the same temperature, so accordingly I see no reason why a cooler body should raise the temperature of a warmer body.
“Roy Spencer says:
April 24, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Joe Postma, yes you probably CAN design a system for generating 5,000K temperatures using just a AAA battery. All you need to do is resistance heat a very small object with little heat capacity, and insulate it very well. The problem would be the insulation, because it, too,would heat up.”
=====
It’s called an incandescent flashlight.
“It’s called an incandescent flashlight.”
It wasn’t about a AAA battery lighting a flashlight filament to 5000K. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is about the resistor (lets use the filament) becoming even hotter still if you shine the flashlight at a mirror. This does not increase the brightness (temperature) of the filament. Trapping the radiation does not increase the temperature of the filament.
Selgovae says (April 24, 2013 at 2:29 pm): “This is how I interpret things: [snip]”
Mark covered the basic problem above (i.e. postulating clairvoyance by inanimate–or animate–objects), but here are a couple more thoughts on your case 2:
a) The temperature of the unheated plate (“plate 2”) never reaches that of the electrically heated plate (“plate 1”). Plate 2 is receiving energy from plate 1 on one side but radiating energy from two sides.
b) Plate 1’s radiation is based on its temperature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
so if its radiation decreases, its temp must have decreased. But as you know the temp doesn’t decrease, so your postulated decrease in radiation can’t happen.
Spencer “with sarcasm”, Ban Ki-Moon without satire!
25 April: Bloomberg: UN Says Clean Energy Funding Too Low to Halt Climate Harm
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the funds flowing to renewable power and efficiency aren’t sufficient to avert environmental calamities and that investors must move more quickly to back new energy technologies.
“Climate change is a threat to economies large and small and to the stability of the ***global financial system***,” Ban said today in a speech at a Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York. “The climate clock is ticking. The longer we delay the greater the cost. We only have one planet Earth. We have no plan B.”…
The UN has led an effort to bring more than 190 nations together to develop carbon-reduction policies, and Ban said he received a personal commitment from U.S. President Barack Obama two weeks ago to work toward a binding climate agreement in 2015.
“He’s assured me that the U.S. will lead by example,” Ban said…
He told bankers and fund managers gathered at the conference they must “lead by example” and that he’s doing the same.
“I have been dutifully, faithfully turning off lights in my hotel,” Ban said. “Sometimes it’s very difficult these days, all different hotels have a very different system of lighting. Normally I stay in a suite so there are many, many lights.”…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-24/un-says-clean-energy-funding-too-low-to-halt-climate-harm.html
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Kristian;
“Fig. 3 shows that the effect of the infrared radiation properties of CO2 is unnoticable (…)”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I wouldn’t expect it to be noticeable. Not at that gap width. The effect we’re talking about in terms of the atmosphere is from an air column 14 km high. Further, the article you quote refers to suppression of convection and conduction as being the primary factors for the application, and so they recommend materials that perform the best against those parameters.
Again, not using CO2 in a window has nothing to do with how it behaves in a 14 km high atmospheric air column and everything to do with what delivers the best result in a window. I could just as easily argue that they don’t build cargo ship hulls out of wood as proof that wood doesn’t float. It does float, there’s just other ways to float your boat that are more effective.