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)
There is no evidence that CO2 in the atmosphere acts like insulation
in a house.
Fiberglass insulation in a house reduces the heat lost from convection.
What fiberglass does prevent the movement of gas molecules- which
inhibits convection of heat. If you inhibit to loss of heat from convection all
gases [including CO2] make good insulator of heat. Fiberglass
also inhibts warmth from entering the house. So insulated house
is easier to be cooler during warmer weather.
Insulation doesn’t make something warmer, it prevent the loss
or transference of heat. A thermos does not make coffee warmer than
the temperature of the coffee which was poured into the thermos.
So the thermos preventing a transfer of heat, so coffee stays warm
for a longer period of time.
To make an analogy of CO2 to insulation is correct in sense
that there is also no way for CO2 to cause the surface or air
at the surface to become hotter. Or an asphalt road in sunlight will
not become hotter because of CO2, What affect the temperature
of this road is the intensity of the sunlight and the loss of heat
from convection of air. If the air is already warm, there will less
heat loss from convection of air. Warmed air and intense sunlight
[sun near zenith and clear skies] will cause it reach it’s max
temperature.
And we have not seen any increases in max surface temperature
from an increase in global CO2 content, nor should this be
expected.
What is expected by some is that CO2 will cause there to less
loss of heat. So generally since it doesn’t cause the day to be
warmer, it could cause the nights to become less cold.
But there is no evidence which clearly indicate that CO2 does
cause less cooling- e.g. there no clear evidence that nights are warmer
due to CO2.
Whether CO2 cause such warming and thereby causes an increase
in average global temperature has not be proven.
But what should rather obvious is that increasing levels of CO2 or
other greenhouse gas are not going make earth unbearable hot
[unless a person presently already thinks it’s unbearable hot].
Or there no reason to assume that greenhouse gases could cause
CAGW like conditions as is commonly described by it’s faithful- or no
reason to assume that Earth could become in anyway similar to
Venus due to greenhouse gases.
No reason to believe greenhouse gases will cause massive widespread
droughts, or numerous other “predicted” drastic changes in climate.
To say the danger from CO2 has been over hyped is an understatement.
Instead it has been series of fabricated stories delivered by mass media
which as had the intention to scare the public. Which has caused many people
a lot of unnecessary stress and concern.
The public has already been conned out hundreds of billions of tax dollars
and has already had numerous coercive and oppression laws designed to
solve a scary problem which is totally fictional.
@max
Then you haven’t looked very hard because the atmosphere and sun form a natural form of a optical pump which is the key component of a laser.
You only need 3 requirements an energy source we call it the sun, for a man made laser we use RF, microwaves, electric discharge anything will generally do its an efficiency issue.
You need an quantum active medium something like CO2, N20 or water vapor will generally will generally do.
Then all you need is a partial mirror which means a different input and output characteristics something like what the atmosphere does and we measure.
All pretty basic and not hard to understand .. see your problem it is that basic.
A question to Roy: Why we can see the Sun? Why it radiates? Its atmosphere certainly does not contain any greenhouse gases, being almost pure hydrogen with a small traces of helium. What we see is blackbody radiation at 6000 C, and every gas emits according Plank formulae even when its temperature is near 0 K. So it sounds weird that without greenhouse gases Earth atmosphere would not emit anything into space.
“Now snatch away the “insulating” shell, real sudden-like. The system is suddenly cooling twice as fast, as per problem 1023, but its power input is unchanged! Oh no! What happens to the temperature of the inner (now alone) sphere? Increase? Decrease? Remain the same?” ~Gary
FIrst off, 1023 isn’t about the cooling rate.
To see what would happen though, consider the case where the shell is in contact with the sphere. If the gap was filled with the same material as sphere and shell are made of, then the volume of material goes up while the energy supply remains the same as it was originally, right?
Two spheres with the same power input/composition which only differ in size won’t reach the same temperature, will they?
So now you remove a section from the larger sphere, such that it is the same size as the other sphere, what happens?
Now remove the same amount of material from the larger sphere, except for a thin shell at the original surface, such that the inner sphere is the same size as the smaller sphere, what happens?
“Let the system come to equilibrium, sphere at temp T2. Now add the shell back. Let the system come to equilibrium. Inner sphere is now at temp T3. What’s the relationship of T1, T2, and T3?
a) T1 = T2 = T3
b) T1 = T3 > T2
c) something else (specify)” ~Gary
Interestingly, that is almost the set up for problem 1024, fancy that.
If T_sphere = T_background =T_shell at some point, shouldn’t it remain that way?
If T_sphere > T_background, adding the shell would give:
T_sphere > T_shell > T_background
Joseph E Postma says:
April 24, 2013 at 8:07 pm
I did not ever say that the Earth was at +49C. I said this is the equivalent temperature value of the average input. This too is reality. This is very different from the usual assumption of a -18C or 240 W/m2 input.
AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect attributes this -18°C to the temperature of the Earth without its variation of “greenhouse gases”, that is, without “longwave infrared imbibing gases”, i.e. “radiated heat imbibing gases mainly water vapour and carbon dioxide”, but, it is crucial to understand this point in order to see the AGW sleight of hand in play, that -18°C figure comes from traditional real world physics and is the temperature of the Earth without any atmosphere at all, that is, also without the bulk of the atmosphere which is nitrogen and oxygen. The comparison in traditional real world physics is with the Moon, which has no atmosphere.
The equivalent temperature of the Moon corresponding to the Earth without any atmosphere at all, is around -23°C.
In other words, it is the bulk of our atmosphere of around 98% nitrogen and oxygen which is primarily the real world greenhouse gases without which the Earth would be -18°C – the comparison is with the Moon which has no atmosphere.
AGWSF has by sleight of hand science fraud misappropriated this figure and claims it is the temperature of the Earth only without its version of “greenhouse gases, but with the rest of the atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen in place”.
From this AGWSF claims that “its greenhouse gases bring up the Earth’s temperature 33°C to 15°C. This is an illusion.
Firstly because they have based this on their science fraud of misattribution of the -18°C figure, but also because there is no mechanism they can show for “their greenhouse gases” having the power to raise global temperature 33°C from -18°C to 15°C.
And thirdly, because they have excised the Water Cycle to create their AGWSF Greenhouse Effect Illusion.
Here’s how. In real world traditional science the temperature of the Earth with the atmosphere in place, but without water, think deserts, the temperature of the Earth is given as 67°C.
In other words, in real world traditional physics, it is the bulk atmosphere of mainly voluminous and heavy under gravity nitrogen and oxygen which makes the real thermal blanket around the Earth.
The bulk atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen which with the inherent properties and process of real gases keeps the Earth from the extreme temperature differences of the Moon, because these real gases not only trap heat through gravity keeping them in place, but also cool the Earth through convection, because in the real world in real physics hot air rises and cold air sinks.
Any meteorologist who doesn’t understand this doesn’t know how we get our winds and weather. Winds are convection currents in our heavy fluid gas atmosphere created by differential heating of volumes (sometimes called packets) of the real gas air. As volumes of heated air rise taking away heat from the Earth, volumes of colder air sink, flowing beneath. Winds are volumes of air on the move. Hot air rises because real gases expand when heated and so become less dense and so lighter than air; these are areas of low pressure, because less dense they weigh less under gravity. Colder heavier more dense air will spontaneously sink flowing down into the low pressure area of less dense hotter air.
Winds blow from high to low. Winds blow from high pressure to low pressure. From denser heavier to less dense lighter. Condensed heavier colder masses of real gas sink, expanded lighter hotter masses of real gas rise. Just as currents are created in the ocean, as volumes of heated ligher water rise and colder heavy volumes sink.
So, with our heavy ocean of real gas atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen in place, but without water, the extremes of the atmosphere less Moon are avoided and we get a temperature of 67°C.
Putting back water which comprises some 7/10ths of the surface, this 67°C is brought down to 15°C. This is called the Water Cycle.
AGWSF has excised the Water Cycle to create the illusion of “33°C warming by its greenhouse gases”.
The AGWSF Greenhouse Effect is an illusion.
It makes a big difference in what the input can and can not do. The total energy is conserved, the input is equal to the output in terms of total energy, but not in terms of power, not in terms of what the input and output power flux can do. The input can do a lot more work than the output. The input can generate very high temperatures on the surface. The atmosphere is then heated by the surface conductively/convectively and radiatively. That’s all that needs to happen because the input is so hot. Hot heats cold. You can go outside and feel the hot input on a sunny day. Latent heat carries a lot of this input around the planet via water vapor and liquid water.
Water has a very high heat capacity, as heated water becomes even less dense and so even more lighter than air it evaporates more quickly, this fluid gas water vapour taking the heat into the colder heights as it rises where it releases it and condenses back to liquid water or ice, and colder returns to the surface as rain.
The Water Cycle cools the Earth from 52°C from the 67°C temperature the Earth would be without it, but with the bulk of the heavy real gas atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen still in place.
It is the properties and process of real gases with volume, weight, attraction, which create the lapse rates in conjuction with gravity acting on the real mass; gravity stronger nearer the surface pulling the molecules of gas together, condensing them so they are heavier, allowing them to expand as gravity is weaker away from the surface so they become less dense and so lighter.
AGWSF’s the Greenhouse Effect Illusion is created out of the imaginary “ideal gas”, without mass and therefore nothing for gravity to act on. That’s why they don’t have gravity in their world and don’t understand real world physics. They have no weather at all because their ideal gases with no volume weight attraction cannot expand and condense to create weather. They are climate scientists of a non-existant climate.
All they have is an imaginary world where their ‘atmosphere’ “is empty space with ideal gases zipping through it at great speeds under their own molecular momentum bouncing off each other in elastic collisions and so spontaneously diffusing to mix thoroughly so they can’t be unmixed”. Their massless, weightless “ideal gas molecules” not subject to gravity can only create pressure by bouncing off some imaginary invisible wall of a “container”.
The AGWSF Greenhouse Effect world does not have an atmosphere, they go straight from the surface to empty space. So their “radiation only” world.
Without heat transfer by conduction and convection.
They have nothing to convect.
There is no internal consistency, how could there be, in their fake fisics – how can their “ideal gas carbon dioxide molecules accumulate in the atmosphere for hundreds of years”, when they have no atmosphere and there is no, unknown to real world physics, “invisible container” around the Earth keeping them in? Whatever atmosphere they might have had has long gone into outer space, and so all their gases and weather.
Their “ideal gases travel at great speeds miles apart from each other through empty space under their own molecular momentum” because they don’t have real gases with volume and weight containing them. They have no sound in their world – without gravity acting on real gases with volume they have no medium through which sound can travel.
The only hot air they have is their irrational arguments which they can’t hear because they have empty space around them in their impossible world.
There is no “33°C warming by the AGW greenhouse gases”.
It is an illusion created by science fraud and fake fisics in all its parts.
Gary Hladik says, April 25, 2013 at 3:03 am:
“Now snatch away the “insulating” shell, real sudden-like. The system is suddenly cooling twice as fast, as per problem 1023, but its power input is unchanged! Oh no! What happens to the temperature of the inner (now alone) sphere? Increase? Decrease? Remain the same?”
The system is radiating out power to its surroundings twice as fast as soon as the surrounding shell is removed, Gary. The sphere isn’t. Q (or J if you like) remains unchanged. The central sphere has been putting out the same power density flux all along, because that is what its emission temperature dictates, the emission temperature in turn being dictated by the heat supplied to the surface of the sphere from its heat source, and only that.
Read my comment
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/24/spencer-slays-with-sarcasm/#comment-1286834
The flux leaving the surface of the sphere into the vacuum between it and the surrounding shell (Q) will be the same as long as its internal heat source is active and constant. This flux is simply intersected by the shell, making use of some of it (heating the shell and after equilibration, maintaining its temperature) and letting the rest through to the surroundings. In other words, half goes to the shell, half goes to space. The flux from the sphere is the same all along, but the heat transfer between the sphere and the shell (Q’) is only 1/2Q, as is the heat transfer between the shell and space (Q”). Together they make up Q: Q = Q’ + Q” (Q = (Q – Q”) + Q”). The only thing you need to remember is that the entire energy/heat flux ultimately comes from the sphere, the shell simply ‘splits’ it upon absorption, a sort of intermediate reservoir.
How many angels were there on the head of that pin? My brain hurts. This is my simplistic layman approach to it and I know people will jump all over it, but so what.
Is CO2 increasing?
Year in year out.
Is temperature increasing in tandem?
It seems to be getting colder.
Does it get hot when the sun comes out?
Always seems to.
Does it get colder when the sun is blocked by cloud cover?
Always seems to
Did it get colder in the 60’s and 70’s when CO2 was also increasing.
It really did. I was around then.
Was it warmer than now in the MWP, the Climatic Optimum and the Roman Warm Period?
I wasn’t around then but a lot of credible people say so.
Was CO2 higher then than today?
Apparently it was a lot lower.
Did the LIA happen?
There’s a lot of historical evidence it did.
Were those temperatures normal?
Hope not.
Is it warmer now?
Thankfully
Has there ever been less ice in the Arctic than there is now?
History says yes
Did polar bears die out
History says no.
Did the Industrial Revolution start in 1850-1880?
Ask Sir Clement Clerke and others from 1678, using coal furnaces known as cupolas, or Abraham Darby, who was using coke to fuel his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale in 1709.
So is CO2 from human emissions warming the planet out of control?
Well, at the end of the day and not to put too fine a point on it, I find it very difficult with the evidence of my own subjective observations, to actually believe that it is.
gbaikie says:
The notion that CO2 can’t cause the days to become hotter is nonsense.
There is “cooling” going on even during the daytime in the sense that the Earth is always radiating heat. It is just that the warming due to the sun is larger than the cooling due to the Earth radiating. If you increase GHGs, you can change that balance and cause it to become warmer during the day too. There are reasons why nighttime temperatures are expected to warm more than daytime temperatures under rising GHGs, but both are expected to rise (and have been rising).
Kristian says: “What Problem 1026 is telling us is specifically that if R ~ r, the Q = Q’ + Q”.”
More specifically, Problem 1026 is telling us Q’ = Q” = 1/2 Q for R ~ r. In other words, the inner sphere originally emits thermal IR at a rate Q. After adding the heat shield, the inner sphere emits Q/2 IR to the shell. The shell in turn also emits Q/2 to space. So with the aptly named ‘heat shield’, we have reduced the heat loss to 1/2 of what it was, so only 1/2 as much power needs to be supplied to the the sphere to maintain the postulated steady temperature T.
“This is the exact equivalent to the Carnot cycle:”
No, not really. There is no work being done in Problem 1026, and no cycle. Other than that fact that Problem 1026 and the Carnot cycle both have something warm and something cool, there is really not much else that the two have in common.
Even “Q” itself means quite different things. The “Q” for a Carnot Cycle is the total heat transfer. The “Q” in Problem 1026 is the RATE of heat transfer.
“At any point in time, the heat flux leaving the surface of the sphere (Q) corresponds directly to (depends on) its specific emission temperature … “
The heat, ie the net transfer of thermal energy depends both on the temperature of the surface and the temperature of the surroundings. . You are ignoring the “J1” = J/2 that is clearly shown coming back to the inner sphere from the shell due to the temperature of the shell..
The NET loss from the planet is J/2
The NET loss from the shell is J/2.
The power required from a heater to maintain this situation is J/2.
“A star is pretty constantly heated, isn’t it?”
One would think so. But clearly this textbook problem assumes something else — that the TEMPERATURE is constant and the power adjusts to maintain that temperature. They could have instead assumed that the power input was constant, in which case the temperature of the star would have gone up after adding the heat shield.
richard verney says:
April 24, 2013 at 5:10 pm
“I can remember an old design of 3kw electric fire.
So the question is why did the middle element not get noticably hotter and take on a much brighter appearance?”
Richard, come on that is the real world, not the Climatological world.
It should have been about 50% hotter than the 2 outside ones, as they only received half the Radiation (from the other elements) as the middle one.
So all you Physicists please explain, as I notice you didn’t try to when Richard posted it.
Tim, you’re mixing two problems, I’ve pointed this out several times now.
1026, regarding the effect adding a shell has on the rate of cooling
1023, regarding the effect a shell has on the power radiated to the surroundings
1023 is the one described as analogous to a star in a dust cloud, with the implication that it has a constant input.
1026 is the one describing a body cooling with a shell added, with the implication that it does not have a constant input.
A number of posts advocating the greenhouse theory include the idea of a source of constant power.
That is that backradiation plus constant power force the source to a higher temperature.
Now electrical engineers are aware of electrical constant power sources.
But these are specially designed circuits and are not perfect.
I am not aware of any naturally occurring spontaneous constant power sources.
An increase in temperature of the source would imply it was capable of spontaneously increasing the energy QUALITY of its output
If a theory depends on such a violation of the Second Law then it must be false.
There’s no link to the thing you were ridiculing either here or on Spencer’s article. That makes it harder to share in the joke. I guess there would be a lot less to talk about on WattsUpWithThat if the greenhouse effect wasn’t true. And there would be a lot less books for Roy Spencer to sell.
In any case, the Tyndall experiment does not prove the existence of an atmospheric greenhouse effect as Monckton claims, merely that a cold gas target will absorb heat from a hot source. In the atmosphere CO2 molecules (and H2O etc) emit as much as they absorb, so there is no greenhouse effect. (My own post on it here.)
Regarding the desert at night, it is kept warmer because the water vapour changes the adiabatic lapse rate, not because of IR trapping. Also, humidity makes it feel warmer to a human.
IR trapping cannot make the source warmer than it otherwise was, unless you create energy in violation of the first law of thermodynamics.
Likewise, backradiation cannot make an object warmer than it otherwise was, unless heat moves spontaneously from a cooler to a warmer pool in violation of the second law. Another way of phrasing the second law is: EMR from a cooler object cannot be made to warm a warmer object further still.
Mosher writes “Earth radiates to space from the ERL.”
Agreed.
And then writes “When you add GHGs you raise the ERL.”
Maybe.
And then writes “When you raise the ERL the earth radiates to space more slowly.”
Why? Those slides state the following
“Surface and lower atmosphere cool by infrared radiation to space from upper troposphere (ERL= effective radiating level, such that total CO2 above is fixed)”
and
“Infrared radiation leaves earth for space from upper troposphere (ERL). Amount increases with temperature at ERL (immediate). Height of ERL is such that total CO2 above it is constant.”
And the fundamental assumption is that “total CO2 above it is constant” meaning the amount of energy leaving is dependent on opacity. The problem I have with that is that if say the CO2 levels double, then the total number of molecules at the ERL that have sufficient energy to radiate remains the same but the number of CO2 molecules that have sufficient energy to radiate doubles.
Therefore the amount of radiation heading upwards has doubled. So whilst the opacity has increased, so has the number of packets of energy trying to get past so the assumption that “total CO2 above is constant” is intuitively wrong for me.
A C Osborn says:
April 25, 2013 at 4:49 am…..
My approx. back-of-the-envelope calculations:
(1 cm diameter elements spaced at 5cm)
Assume elements are long enough to disregard effects at ends.
Each element receives ~ 3% of its neighbours radiation. (diameter / 2 * pi * spacing)
Centre element receives ~ 3% more energy input (power) than outer elements or 1.03 times.
Assuming no convection/conduction, using 4th root, centre element is 1.007 times as hot (in Kelvin).
If element temperature is several hundred degrees C, then difference is a few degrees,
This is probably too small to be noticeable by eye.
Max says: “Tim, you’re mixing two problems … “
BOTH problems have a “star” at a fixed temperature, and then add a “heat shield”. BOTH calculate how much less power is required after adding the shield. The only real difference is that 1023 assumes the shell is “nearby” so the R ≈ r, while 1026 allows the outer shell to be any radius. 1023 is a limiting case of 1026, and both say the total power required is 1/2 as much when the shell is added nearby.
@Sergey
You are sort of getting it and instead of answering your question I will pose two questions which answer you question but with you doing the thinking.
If I looked at the earth in only the infrared section what do I see. Here is a hint shot from Galileo spacecraft at a distance of 1.32 million miles (http://space.about.com/od/pictures/ig/Earth-Pictures-Gallery/Global-View-of-Earth-in-the-Ne.htm) Earth in the far infrared it would be even brighter … why????? You might want to look in contrast at the ultraviolet shot of earth from space shot from rosetta spacecraft (http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1809886/revealing_earths_ultraviolet_fingerprint/)
So your question why is the infrared image so much brighter than the ultraviolet image when viewed from a distance of space even though the sun emits predominately ultraviolet or visible spectrum.
Second question for you to work on since you are concerned by the suns blackbody temperature. The temperature of the corona of the sun is several million degrees not 6000K so the black body emission temperature discrepancy is actually far far worse than what your poor attempt to portrait the problem does. So how do we resolve a temperature of several million degrees on the corona to a black body temperature of 6000 degree and why isn’t a problem for science.
steveta_uk says (April 25, 2013 at 3:19 am): “For a simple example of how you are wrong, why are you assuming that the back radiation is from a colder source?”
============================================================
Very simple: per definition. Radiation from a warmer source is not back radiation per definition. You can call it “direct radiation”, if you wish, but a new term is not necessary, because there has been no confusion about it. Well, with the exception of your comment.
It’s bad enough to deal w/warmers that inflate known GHG effects to absurd levels. Now add to that slayers that don’t even understand that much (but think they do).
Noelene says:
Actually, the fact that one gets so much argument over something that is such basic physics should totally refute the argument that there is no consensus about AGW because you can find lots of arguments on the web about it.
The mistaken arguments of Monckton and others revered by those at WUWT are a little less silly than the Slayer’s arguments…but not that much.
TimTheToolMan says:
No…You don’t get it. If the total number of CO2 molecules doubles, the atmosphere becomes more opaque and the ERL moves up to a new level where the number of CO2 molecules is less (so the total opaqueness above it is still the same). What you are not understanding is how things work in a gas where you have both absorption and radiation.
Look at plots of the Earth’s emission as observed from space and you will see that the CO2 absorption lines result in suppression of emission at these wavelengths, exactly as theory and models predict. The whole field of remote sensing is based on us having a correct understanding of how this works. So, if you are confused about it, accept that fact that you are confused and need to learn more rather than continuing to believe you are right in the face of overwhelming evidence that you are not.
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
——————————————————————————————————————-
Are your sure it isn’t just the H2O being present that changes the dynamic of temperature flow from desert to “moist” areas? Check out the properties of H2O. It is an amazing element. Raise 1 pound of water 1 degree. 1 BTU. Raise that same pound the last degree to steam. 900 BTUs. Free water from it’s solid state… about 140 btu’s..
Of differently. It takes a tremendous amount of energy for the earth to have a temperature different than that of liquid water for a given pressure. The land cools till condensation, Dew/frost. It heats till evaporation caused clouds… This affect has nothing to do with the IR capability of h2o vapor.
Greg, the “definition” of “back radiation” deals only with direction, not temperature. “Back radiation” is simple radiation directed back toward earth’s surface. By extension we could use your term “direct radiation” or “emitted radiation” or “forward radiation” for the thermal IR leaving any surface. Then “back radiation” or “absorbed radiation” would be the IR absorbed by the surface.
It would be very odd to my thinking to reserve “back radiation” for radiation from a cooler object toward a warmer object. If there is both a warmer and a cooler object around, then a surface would simultaneously be emitting “back radiation” and “direct radiation” from the same atoms. Why use two different names for exactly the same process producing exactly the same spectrum of photons?
@ur momisugly Dr. Spencer
” ANYTHING that reduces heat loss from a heated object can increase its temperature.”
This is categorically wrong. It cannot heat anything unless it is at a higher temp than the “heated object”. If there is some insulating object (ie any matter) or gas it REDUCES the RATE of cooling from the “heated object”, under no circumstance can a cooler object HEAT a a HEATED OBJECT.
I don’t think that Dr. Spencer meant his statement exactly the way he stated it though.
Perhaps it can be re-stated in a more thorough fashion Dr. Spencer?
If anyone already addressed this comment, I apologize, I am running out the door and had to post without reading everything in here. Great discussion though and I hope Dr. Spencer and Mr. Watts will try to invite Dr. Pierre Latour to come in and write a response article on this matter. His writings on this subject are articulate, principled and clear.
Joel Shore says:
“No…You don’t get it.”
What Joel Shore doesn’t get is the plain fact that the planet is not responding to the rise in CO2 in the way that every climate alarmist was predicting [until the planet showed that it was not cooperating with the endless, incessant, and wrong predictions of runaway global warming].
Who should we believe? Joel Shore? Or Planet Earth?
Because they cannot both be right.