As readers may know, Dr. Roy Spencer and I have had a long running disagreement with the group known as “Principia Scientific International” aka the Sky Dragon Slayers after the title of their book. While I think these people mean well, they tend to ignore real world measurements in favor of self-deduced science. They claim on their web page that “the Greenhouse gas effect is bogus” and thus ignore many measurements of IR absorptivity in the atmosphere which show that it is indeed a real effect. Rational climate skeptics acknowledge that the greenhouse effect exists and functions in Earth’s atmosphere, but that an accelerated greenhouse effect due to increased CO2 emissions doesn’t rise to the level of alarm being portrayed. Yes, there’s an effect, but as recent climate sensitivity studies show, it isn’t as problematic as it is made out to be.
I don’t plan to get into that issue in this thread, as this is an hands-on experiment showing one of the thermal premises of the “slayers” in action to prove or disprove it. Most of what that group does is to spin sciencey sounding theories and pal reviewed papers by a mysterious members-only peer review system, and I have yet to any one of them try to do anything at an experimental/empirical measurement level to back up the sort of claims they make.
What started the recent row was an essay by Dr. Spencer titled Time for the Slayers to Put Up or Shut Up, which I followed on with: The Spencer Challenge to Slayers/Principia.
In their response to Dr. Spencer, they made this essay…
…and in that response was this curious graphic from Dr. Alan Siddons:
To be honest, I laughed when I saw this, because for all their claims to be “experts” on thermodynamics while telling the world that “back radiation” has no effect, this is a clear-cut case of them not knowing what they are talking about when it comes to heat -vs- visible light. Clearly, you can indeed reflect/re-emit a portion of the visible and infrared energy back to the light bulb, energy which would have been lost to the dark surroundings. There is no “extra” energy per se, just a spatial redistribution of energy (a greenhouse atmosphere has higher temperatures near the surface, but lower temperatures at high altitudes). They also seem to fail to understand how a mirror actually works, bold mine:
“Does shining a flashlight at a mirror so that all the radiation comes back to the flashlight make the flashlight shine brighter?”
While the emissivity of a glass mirror is high, no mirror reflects 100%, and mirrors of course are not lossless, so it will also absorb some Visible and IR in addition to reflecting/re-emitting some of it back. You can see this loss of energy in the FLIR camera in the video just before the mirror is removed at about 16:30.
I put their claim of “a light bulb facing a mirror does not heat up” to the experimental test.
I did several spot experiments at home over the last couple of weeks to investigate the issue empirically (since talk is cheap), and to make sure it was repeatable, while discussing the design and results with Dr. Spencer. The first two designs of the experiment had weaknesses that I was not happy with, and so it has take time to devise an experiment in a way that was fully comprehensive and uninterrupted from start to finish. For example, in my first iteration, the experiment was shot from the side (similar to the diagram), but required rotating the bulb mount assembly away from the mirror to get the temperature of the bulb surface. This wasn’t always repeatable to get the same spot on the bulb surface and it introduced variances. Another problem was that standard household bulbs had odd temperature gradients across their surface due to the way the filament is placed. The flood lamp was much more repeatable at its center. Repeatability is important, because I want others to be able to replicate this experiment without significant variances due to the equipment and how it is setup.
After ensuring the experiment works, and is repeatable/replicable, and that the control run without a mirror performed as expected, today in this WUWT-TV segment, I present the entire experiment uninterrupted as one long video. It is almost 21 minutes long, but I had no choice, because at least 16 minutes of it were required to be non interrupted to show the experiment in progress. I didn’t want anyone to be able make silly claims that the experiment was faked that there were video edits going on to change the results, such as Al Gore did in his Climate 101 video.
In my case, I did some graphic overlays to illustrate points and data, but there was no discontinuity edits of the video or audio from start to finish.
Here’s the experiment equipment list and procedure.
Equipment:
- FLIR BCAM portable infrared camera
- 65 watt incandescent flood lamp (used due to mostly flat center target surface)
- clamp on ceramic lamp base and metal electrical base/stand
- small glass wall mirror from K-Mart
- video camera to record the event
Procedure:
- Setup equipment in similar fashion to Alan Siddons figure 3 above, using stands and clamps to allow for correct height and continuous recording of FLIR camera image and a timer image.
- Focus FLIR on flat front surface of 65 watt bulb
- Start video camera to record experiment, simultaneously start digital timer
- Apply AC electrical power to 65 watt bulb
- Note FLIR temperature of bulb center surface at intervals, record that data.
- Run until equilibrium temperature is reached, which I defined would be when temperature no longer increases after a period of about 60 seconds, note that temperature, note how long that takes with timer. Record that data.
- Leaving all equipment in place and operating, place mirror perpendicular to 65 watt bulb surface, at about 3 inches away to fit scale of Alan Siddons Figure 3. This will obscure surface of bulb from FLIR camera but is required so that distance/position between bulb and FLIR is not changed, which could result in altered readings.
- Continue experiment.
- Show with video camera how equipment remains in place.
- Wait for the same amount of time as previous equilibrium temperature took to reach.
- Remove mirror, note on the FLIR camera what the surface temperature of the 65 watt light bulb is at that time.
Premise of the experiment:
If the temperature recorded by the FLIR camera is the same after the mirror has been left in place for the amount of time that it took to reach equilibrium temperature, then the Principia/Slayers claim is true.
If the temperature has risen, it falsifies their premise that “a light bulb facing a mirror does not heat up”.
Video of the experiment (with conclusion) :
Note that this is not a big budget production (it was done in the dining room of my home) so I apologize for less than perfect audio quality. BTW, the clothes iron I used as a prop was not turned on, which is plainly evident in the FLIR image. It just so happend that the tabletop ironing board and iron worked out well to position the mirror…. and I had no budget beyond a few dollars for light bulbs and lamp bases. Where’s that big oil check when we need it? /sarc
Plotted temperature data:
[Note: per a suggestion in comments, this graph was updated to show the data after the “mirror added” as dashed line, since only one datapoint (228F) was measured. – Anthony]
Supplemental information:
In a PDF file here: Slayers_lightbulb_experiment
- Temperature data recorded from the experiment to reach equilibrium temperature
- Graph of the data recorded from the experiment showing data including after removal of mirror.
- I also ran a separate control experiment for 2x of the tested equilibrium temperature time to see if bulb can reach same temperature without mirror. I’m satisfied that the experiment is properly functioning.
I have another experiment planned for part 2 that will test another claim that the Principia/Slayers routinely make. I’ll have that in a few days.
UPDATE: In the claim by Joe Postma at Principia where they stated a couple of days ago that we’d “cut and run” (obviously not, just taking our time to be careful) Alan Siddons makes this claim:
As PSI’s Alan Siddons laments:
“All of us on our side have researched and deeply pondered the actual principles of radiative heat transfer. On the other side, however, the “experts” we argue with, like Spencer, Lindzen, Monckton, Watts, just insist that a body’s radiant energy can be doubled by directing that energy back to it — even though the simplest of experiments will shows that this is false.
I’ve never made a doubling claim like that, nor am I aware that any of the others named have claimed a doubling, only that some energy will be returned, as I have just proven in the “simplest” mirror experiment postulated by Siddons.
I have to think these folks aren’t operating with a full understanding of what the physical basis is when I read things like this. This is an excerpt of this comment left in the thread below by Joe Olson where he confuses a microbolometer with doppler radar:
“Remote read IR thermometers are also used to ‘explain’ this back-radiation warming effect. These instruments work be sending out an IR signal and measuring the shift in the returned signal. ” (bold mine -A)
No, sorry, you are 100% wrong. it is a passive sensing device. No active signal is emitted.
FIGURE 1. One pixel in a microbolometer array. An infrared-absorbing surface is elevated above the substrate and thermally isolated from adjacent pixels. Low mass increases the temperature change from heat absorption. Read-out circuits typically are in the base layer, which may be coated with a reflective material to reflect transmitted IR and increase absorption of the pixel. http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/print/volume-48/issue-04/features/microbolometer-arrays-enable-uncooled-infrared-camera.html
Gosh, I didn’t think your misunderstanding of an IR bolometer was that distorted. No wonder you guys make the sort of way out claims you do.
A microbolometer is a specific type of bolometer used as a detector in a thermal camera. It is a grid of vanadium oxide or amorphous silicon heat sensors atop a corresponding grid of silicon. Infrared radiation from a specific range of wavelengths strikes the vanadium oxide and changes its electrical resistance. This resistance change is measured and processed into temperatures which can be represented graphically. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbolometer
You should really quit while you can Joe, you are making a fool of yourself when you make such claims that are so easily disproved. – Anthony
UPDATE3: The Principia/Slayers group has posted a hilarious rebuttal here:
http://principia-scientific.org/supportnews/latest-news/210-why-did-anthony-watts-pull-a-bait-and-switch.html
Per my suggestion, they have also enabled comments. You can go discuss it all there. – Anthony
I need some help here:
what is it called when observational data does not match one’s theory?
I’m sure there is a scientific word or phrase for this.
It’s unfortunate this is necessary. Bottom line IMO is not to waste too much effort, as it typically doesn’t change the dedicated slayers. Arguing w/fools, etc, etc.
Thanks Anthony I’ll have a look at this. Of course, this is beside the point of Spencer’s challenge and our answer to that challenge, in that in fact no GHE is actually observed in a time-dependent heat flow equation.
REPLY: Knock yourselves out. Someday we hope you’ll be fair and open up the Principia website to allow comments. Surely your science is “bulletproof” enough that you have no fear of debate.
For some entertainment, one of the principals of your organization, Doug Cotton, (who has become so obnoxious and devious with fake names and fake email addresses that he has been banned at several blogs) can defend your science in this video:
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8YbyfqUvfY ]
– Anthony
Nice Anthony.
John Who said
“I need some help here: What is it called when observational data does not match one’s theory?
I’m sure there is a scientific word or phrase for this.”
—- ——
The word is ‘wrong’
tonyb
OK well you didn’t actually do what you think you did, and so I’ll write an article for response instead of posting it here. Sorry, but the GHE is still dead…we already proved it with real world data anyway. Cheers. We’ll have a reply article for you later today or maybe one or two days.
REPLY: LOL! You might want to wait until the second experiment I’m doing is published, so you won’t have to retract your first rebuttal. How about opening up comments at Principia? You guys whine that we don’t debate your issues enough here and elsewhere, goose, gander, and all that. – Anthony
Wasn’t it the Dragon Slayers who first proposed strapping buttered toast to the back of a cat to get perpetual motion? No I’m joking, but they do remind me of that.
Well done Anthony, looking forward to reading their response.
Cool! :>)
Joseph E Postma says:
“no GHE is actually observed in a time-dependent heat flow equation.”
What?
http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut37%20Radiative%20Cooling.pdf
@Anthony
Good job! If attaboys were dollars you’d be rich.
Well it’s not a “rebuttal” I have for you Anthony, it is a few factual statements which render this experiment superfluous, because it didn’t do what you think it did or what it needed to do. It is completely independent of the results of your second experiment. Besides, as can be followed from the links in the response to Spencer’s challenge, we used actual data from the real world to look for the GHE, and found that it doesn’t exist. Anyway I’ll stay off here for now and will just come back to post a comment to link the response for you.
REPLY: the experiment was designed from the start to be repeatable/replicable, why not repeat it and show me exactly how it will “render this experiment superfluous”?
Empirically measured data talks, bullshit walks. Leave the realm of opinion and enter the realm of hands-on science, and then you’ll have something worth looking at.
And, why do you keep ducking that question about allowing comments on the Principia website? Surely you can’t be afraid of an open debate about your science claims? – Anthony
The ability to increase the heat source by 18F by simply adding a mirror to reflect the ‘Back Radiation’ must open up some good commercial opportunities given further development.
“They claim on their web page that “the Greenhouse gas effect is bogus” and thus ignore many measurements of IR absorptivity in the atmosphere which show that it is indeed a real effect.”
==============================================================
I think both statements are true. IR absorptivity in the atmosphere is real and the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC is non-existent.
The IPCC “greenhouse effect” goes beyond absorptivity and says that the “greenhouse gases” warm the Earth surface additionally via back radiation. Exactly such an effect is physically impossible, because under certain conditions it would lead to an absurd and impossible outcome.
Please, do not confuse IR absorptivity in the atmosphere with the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC.
REPLY: “physically impossible” um, no. Cue the “cold object can’t heat warm object” meme.
Back radiation from any gas is not only quite possible, but real. It’s called radiative cooling and it goes on every day. It is exactly what you guys get confused about with CO2 in the thermosphere. – did you even watch the video?
Sometimes I wonder if you guys have some sort of mental block on these simple physics basics, some have suggested that your claims are so absurd that your organization is a “plant” to make rational skeptics look ridiculous like Lewandowsky and company.
-A
AW: “Someday we hope you’ll be fair and open up the Principia website to allow comments.”
More misinformation and hypocrisy as usual from Anthony Watts. Contrary to his bogus claims anyone can post comments on the Principia Scientific International Forum – its freely available to to those who can be bothered to sign up for a free account.
So Mr Watts, when are you going to admit we do have a time-dependent energy model, contrary to the deceitful misinformation put about by you and Dr Spencer?
I don’t expect this comment to pass your censors as you have scrupulously deleted every single one of my comments for the past year.
REPLY: that’s because you’ve violated site policies like Mr. Cotton has. But I’ll allow this one.
Your reply is a strawman, I’m talking about the articles on your main web page, where you name Dr. Spencer and I, not some separate members-only forum where you have to sign up. We don’t make people sign up at WUWT to comment on articles. There are no comments allowed on those at PSI main page. If you want to claim openness, you should allow comments on articles where people are named so that they can reply directly below the articles, not someplace else.
Your model still doesn’t work. It’s as flawed as your claims of “CO2 cools the atmosphere” or a “cooler object can’t radiate to add heat to warmer object”
Dr. Spencer doesn’t see anything worthwhile yet, when/if he does, look for a statement from me.
In the meantime, do be careful and don’t take this one comment approval as a sign that you have commenting privileges again. Sock puppetry shouldn’t be necessary if your science was solid.
– Anthony
paulus says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:30 am
The ability to increase the heat source by 18F by simply adding a mirror to reflect the ‘Back Radiation’ must open up some good commercial opportunities given further development.
I have an old 1Kw electric fire with a reflector – does that count? 😉
Not sure that reflection == absorb and re-emit ??
But that is why such experiments are useful and why science uses them.
Anthony, I don’t need to repeat the experiment because the experiment is incorrect, and so I’m just going to state why it is so.
The comments on PSI don’t really concern me. I do have my own blog which is open to comments…we don’t have anyone that could moderate comments at PSI and leaving such comments “open” is not really a good thing to do due to abuse, spam, etc. The PSI site is for articles and research papers…not really an interactive site like yours here.
Again, in terms of your challenge to empiricism and measured data, in our reply to Spencer’s challenge we provide just that, from the actual real-world. Not a table-top experiment but actual outside data.
REPLY: LOL! Replicating hands-on a diagram of an an experiment you postulate and publish on your own website is “incorrect”? Do you hear yourself when you say these things?
There may be no hope for you. – Anthony
@Joseph E Potma As with Anthony, I too beieve that you et al are sincere in your intentions, but this experiment does not set out to prove/disprove GHE. It sets out to prove/disprove that a mirror placed in front of a lightbulb creates a positive energy feedback. The premise is elegantly proven.
With regard to a mirror making a light source grow brighter, them’s photons, and we all know the basics about light interferance patterns, and light scatter, don’t we?
Very good demonstration!
A minor point on your time vs. temperature graph. The line segment between mirror added and mirror removed might be shown as dashed to emphasize it is inferred from the endpoints.
REPLY: That is a valid point, I’ll make that change, thank you – Anthony
REPLY: “physically impossible” um, no. Cue the “cold object can’t heat warm object” meme.
Back radiation from any gas is not only quite possible, but real. It’s called radiative cooling and it goes on every day. … did you even watch the video?
==========================================================
Back radiation is real and the the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC is non-existent. There is no contradiction here. Because the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC is not just about existence of back radiation. The IPCC goes beyond that and claims that this back radiation has a warming effect on the surface. Exactly this warming effect (this includes slowind down cooling) is physically impossible.
No I have not watched the video yet. I certainly will do it a little bit later, when I have more time.
“Cue the “cold object can’t heat warm object” meme.”
Yep. Somehow the concept of NET heat transfer escapes them.
paulus: The ability to increase the heat source by 18F by simply adding a mirror to reflect the ‘Back Radiation’ must open up some good commercial opportunities given further development.
There’s this device that has a concave mirror and an incandescent bulb at its focal point. It conveniently has a battery inside of it and a switch.
Perhaps you’ve heard of it? I think it’s called a “flashlight”. >.<
[snip – this is getting too far off topic, the discussion is about the current experiment. If you want to make a new one, do it and submit it as a guest post with data – mod]
Anthony said: “Replicating a diagram of an an experiment you postulate and publish on your own website is “incorrect”? Do you hear yourself when you say these things?”
The problem is that you don’t understand the data, and what you’re actually supposed to measure, and what you’re measuring. It is not quite so crass as you are saying.
Bugs Man said: “With regard to a mirror making a light source grow brighter, them’s photons, and we all know the basics about light interference patterns, and light scatter, don’t we?”
Yes, exactly, and that’s basically why the GHE doesn’t exist.
Anyway, geepers, I’m trying to stay off here. A reply is coming, which will be an article at PSI, which I will link to here, or if comments are closed here then hopefully people find it anyway. 🙂
REPLY:
Postma writes: “you don’t understand the data, and what you’re actually supposed to measure, and what you’re measuring.”
Then do it yourself, do the ACTUAL EXPERIMENT you diagrammed on your website, and prove me wrong with the data you collect. Until then, all you have is noise. Now that you’ve made the claim, I’ll accept nothing less than replicating what I did and showing it to be wrong.
Theoretical essays won’t cut it, man up and do the experimental work. We’ll discuss it then. Don’t comment further here until you have that.- Anthony
Thank you Anthony for allowing discussion of this simple experiment. Turning on an electric light bulb causes internal heating of the filament, globe and base, followed with the rise in surrounding air temperature until a convective equilibrium is reached, at approximately 400 seconds in this experiment. Then adding the mirror, REDUCES convective currents until a new equilibrium is established. To properly conduct this experiment, one must do a blind convective restrictor, a non reflective surface of same size and placement as the mirror, OR induce a convective flow that is NOT disrupted by the mirror placement. This could be done with a small fan creating a draft normal to the mirror plane.
An outbound OLR photon moving at the speed of light impacts a three atom, free moving gas with a narrow absorption band and is in a billionth of a second ’emitted’ as a lower energy, longer wave length photon, that is incapable of reheating the warmer source of the OLR emission. This lower energy emission is required due to the KE transfer, but a three atom molecule cannot ‘redirect’ with the magnitude of a solid surface, or even a multi-molecule surface like water vapor. There is scattering by CO2, but nothing approaching 50% reflection from OLR-CO2 impacts.
Remote read IR thermometers are also used to ‘explain’ this back-radiation warming effect. These instruments work be sending out an IR signal and measuring the shift in the returned signal. All electromagnetic energy transmission is a function of the square of the distance, yet a remote read IR thermometer will give the same reading of a shot at your backyard barbie, regardless of the distance. Your body can ‘feel’ infrared energy, and you can easily feel this energy below, beside and above your barbie. You can also easily feel the difference in temperature at these three locations due to convective currents, and always flowing away from Earth.
If you take a tuning fork to a concert, it will vibrate to the natural frequency of the concert….but it does not amplify the sound of the concert. A thousand tuning forks would be equally ineffective. Hopefully showing half the experiment will inspire others to do the complete experiment. Hopefully discussion of the full spectrum of Earth forces will end the Carbon forced hysteria. Objective readers are encouraged to visit the PSI “Publication” tab for a wider discussion. PSI is a volunteer group with limited control over independent actions of some of our members. We only support that which is publicly posted. Alan Siddons is a radio chemist, but to my knowledge has not claimed to be a PhD.
REPLY: “Remote read IR thermometers are also used to ‘explain’ this back-radiation warming effect. These instruments work be sending out an IR signal and measuring the shift in the returned signal. ” (bold mine -A)
No, sorry, you are 100% wrong. it is a passive sensing device.
FIGURE 1. One pixel in a microbolometer array. An infrared-absorbing surface is elevated above the substrate and thermally isolated from adjacent pixels. Low mass increases the temperature change from heat absorption. Read-out circuits typically are in the base layer, which may be coated with a reflective material to reflect transmitted IR and increase absorption of the pixel.
Gosh, I didn’t think you misunderstanding of an IR bolometer was that distorted. No wonder you guys make the sort of way out claims you do.
A microbolometer is a specific type of bolometer used as a detector in a thermal camera. It is a grid of vanadium oxide or amorphous silicon heat sensors atop a corresponding grid of silicon. Infrared radiation from a specific range of wavelengths strikes the vanadium oxide and changes its electrical resistance. This resistance change is measured and processed into temperatures which can be represented graphically. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbolometer and also http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/print/volume-48/issue-04/features/microbolometer-arrays-enable-uncooled-infrared-camera.html
You should really quit while you can Joe, you are making a fool of yourself when you make such claims that are so easily disproven. – Anthony
[snip we are talking about the experiment on this thread, this is way off topic – mod]
Bugs Man says (May 27, 2013 at 8:49 am): “…this experiment does not set out to prove/disprove GHE. It sets out to prove/disprove that a mirror placed in front of a lightbulb creates a positive energy feedback. The premise is elegantly proven.”
=============================================================
Right, a mirror or a reflector would create “a positive energy feedback”, as you put it, but it can not have a warming effect on the source. So, it can have a warming effect on something else, this is obvious, but not on the source. Therefore the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC is impossible.
REPLY: “a mirror or a reflector would create “a positive energy feedback”, as you put it, but it can not have a warming effect on the source. ” Like Postma, do you listen to yourself when you say these things? Watch the video, I’ll give you a 30 minute time out to do just that – Anthony]
I wonder why flashlight manufacturers put a mirrored surface behind the bulb?
A WUWT-TV movie without Benji?
REPLY: Kenji was in the room, observing while maintaining a look of “why are you wasting your time doing this when we could be chasing balls?”. Given responses from Slayers so far, he knows better than I – Anthony
Anthony, interesting experiment. I see you too are part of the 97% of the real consensus (as opposed to the SkS manufactured consensus). 😉
I think there’s a potential confound here though between what you’re visualizing and what may be happening.
Here’s my take:
An IR bulb produces most of its radiation in the infrared. Mirrors are not very reflective very far into the infrared, so most of that infrared is getting absorbed and is heating up the mirror, which in turn is radiating infrared, part of which is heating up the bulb.
You can test for the importance of this effect by putting a second bulb (not plugged in) an equal distance from the backside of the mirror. It’d be interesting to see what happens if you replace the mirror with a black surface.
Both mechanisms (scattering and reemission) play a role in the inappropriately named GHG effect, so the function is still served in terms of refuting slayer quackery.
Nice experiment, Anthony. I noticed the FLIR instantly returned to room temp when the mirror was placed in front of the bulb, and it briefly hit the high 80’s while your arm was in front of it.
I can’t personally testify that there were no camera tricks, however. I skipped over both equilibration segments. Sorry. 🙁
REPLY: No tricks, this experiment is fully replicable as you see it – Anthony
What if, that mirror reflects back to, that is, it reflects the energy from the source back at the source?
What of several mirrors? Each one reflecting energy back at the source? Thinking now of, say a Tungsten filament in a bulb, in a vacuum, with a fixed amount of energy per unit of time (Watts) applied via a current through said filament.
Oh, never mind,. I see. It *will* make it cooler. I see the error in my thinking … /s
.
By putting the mirror in relatively close proximity to the heat source you would be restricting the air circulating around it.This would increase the temperature of the source. Nothing to do with ‘Back radiation’
REPLY: LOL! Complain to the slayers then, they designed the experiment and published it first as a diagram. I simply followed their example premise, bulb was ~3 inches away, like in their diasgram. Heated air rises, no constriction. – Anthony
Chico still has a K-Mart?
How does it stay in business with its nuclear weapon components aisle empty?
OK, consider this: Your experiment is measuring the temperature of WHAT? The only significant temperature here is that of the actual resistance wire heater in the IR lamp, usually around 1,100 F. Did the wire get warmer when the mirror was put in place? I guarantee it did not. To determine this you would need a Fluke, measure current and voltage, see if the IsquaredR changed.
My original post was not off-topic, as the physics of the Greenhouse Effect are in question here, and most on this site have profound misunderstanding of the basics.
REPLY: And yet, in the diagram proposed in the essay by Postma, such fine details were not mentioned nor required. Demanding them now post facto doesn’t fly – Anthony
Isn’t using an incandescent lamp bad for the climate?
Why have you snipped the comment by Michael Moon above? He was perfectly on topic discussing the theoretical aspect of the experiment. In addition what he (correctly) said can be calculated relatively easily. Censorship is very bad.
[it is getting too far off topic, he’s welcome to resubmit being more on-point about the experiment itself -mod]
Carrick says:
May 27, 2013 at 9:30 am
…
Here’s my take:
An IR bulb produces most of its radiation in the infrared. Mirrors are not very reflective very far into the infrared, so most of that infrared is getting absorbed and is heating up the mirror, which in turn is radiating infrared, part of which is heating up the bulb.
—————-
Interesting point, but doesn’t this also refute the slayer position? Reflection or back radiation, I thought their position was that cooler objects could not cause warmer objects to become warmer still.
Michael Moon says:
May 27, 2013 at 9:16 am
Heat transfer is always from warm to cool, proven by centuries of experience with steam in utility boilers.
Michael, that is incorrect. Heat is transferred in all directions. Sure, net transference is always from the warmer to the cooler, i.e. as shown in Anthony’s experiment where we know there is of course more energy moving from the bulb to the mirror than vice versa. But there is still some energy being radiated back from the mirror to cause the bulb to be even hotter.
Or did you miss that part of the video? Skip to the end if time is short, and watch.
Ha! One of those little Kill-A-Watt meters appliance power ‘meters’ (they measure apparent and true/RMS quantities as well) should indicate this …
I suggest a slight variation to the experiment. Continue the experiment past 1000 seconds at the removal of the mirror. The temperature as measured by the FLIR ought to decline towards the 210 degree level when the mirror was put in place.
REPLY: Yes, you can see the beginning of that after the mirror was removed. And I comment on it in the video – Anthony
[REPLY: then do that experiment and report back, we are discussing this one – Anthony]
Oh well, the slayers are becoming a distraction, they did bring up some good points though. What remains is that the Earth’s surface is predominantly cooled non-radiatively (evaporation and convection) and most of the energy is transferred to the atmosphere, not the space. The atmosphere of course can lose this gained energy only by LWIR to space. The bottleneck is this atmospheric radiation, not the very efficient surface cooling. On the face of it, even a net CO2 cooling effect cannot be ruled out. But the Null Hypothesis is NO effect of the trace CO2.
Bravo Mr. Watts! When I looked at the light bulb mirror claim Figure 3, I thought that no one could be so foolish as to set themselves up with so asinine a claim. I don’t see how they can recover from such a blunder. The best that can be done is to admit error on at least this point and maybe blame it on an unpaid summer intern. It also confirms an observation that I have made over the years which is that few people understand radiant heat. There is an area where I work that has a long hallway banked on one side with very large windows facing roughly north. In the winter this area is very cold. Clearly the architect did not understand radiant heat loss nor does any administration since. I tell them to cover the windows with aluminum foil (a cheap solution) but I only get blank stares. This works in summer as well for south facing windows and I used this in an apartment I lived in years ago. It’s like magic! A more direct example of the light bulb figure is the tin reflectors placed in front of open hearth ovens to aid in roasting a section of beef. This is technology going back to, at least, the middle ages. The PSI is well and truly cooked.
Joseph E Postma says: “Anthony, I don’t need to repeat the experiment because the experiment is incorrect, and so I’m just going to state why it is so.”
So where is your stated “why it is”? All I see in your comment here is a bunch of yapping. Absolutely nothing to back up your statement that Watt’s experiment is incorrect.
Have not been able to watch the whole video yet. Agree with your approach. One real experiment is worth any number of thought experiments.
Your results are different to the result I achieved with a different but similar experiment, I did not get any additional increase in temperature when I used a reflector around the sides of an insulated tin which was exposed to the sun at the end. Therefore I will try your experiment.
I think your experiment would be better if you were measuring the temperature of the filament, not the glass surface of he bulb. You are not trying to control convective or conductive heat loss in any way, and the mirror might have an effect on that, since it party blocks air flow around the bulb
Peter Champness
Anthony,
Wouldn’t a proper control for this experiment be a non reflective surfaced board of some sort in place of the mirror? Maybe just tape black paper over the face of the mirror. If the experiment was done again with the “control” board in place of the mirror we could see if there was still an incread in temperature, and if there was if the increase in temperature was due to the reflective nature of the mirror, or just due to to its obstructive nature. Is it really the mirror that raises the temperature?
I had some friends, years ago, that got a busy little business going selling what were essentially tin foil liners to people for their attics on the basis that these would act as insulating agents summer and winter. They had a cute little doll house that they used to demonstrate the thing by shining a light on the house and observing a thermometer in the living room. When they introduced the tinfoil the temp went down behind the tin foil (for a while) – that was the trick that was eventually discovered and undid their little enterprise. So they moved on to some other scam. I think it was health food related.
The experiment is basically correct. However, the source size is so small compared to the spacing, that the effect would be difficult to accurately measure, and also due to the fact that the source is not a constant input power device (voltage is fixed, but resistance changes slightly at higher temperature). Blocking some of the convection is also a source of the possible errors. The heating of the bulb also enters in the balance, complicating the experiment. You need a cleaner experiment.
However, anyone that understands radiation physics knows the effect you are striving to demonstrate is valid. The absorbed back radiation results in reduced direct radiation in the direction of the blockage, and thus slows energy loss (from a constant input power source) driving the source goes to a higher temperature. It is analogous to covering part of the radiating area with a layer of thermal insulation, which would produce exactly the same effect. i.e., the temperature would go up slightly, but the radiating effective area would go down slightly, and TOTAL power out would remain constant.
People commenting on lack of conservation of energy are just showing lack of understanding.
Joseph E Postma says: “The problem is that you don’t understand the data, and what you’re actually supposed to measure, and what you’re measuring.”
If all you have to say is We be right and You be wrong and We understand the data and You don’t; then you have zero credibility. I have looked at PSI/Slayer site and find it to be severely lacking in facts and science, being vague on PSI/Slayer reasoning, and requiring faith to accept PSI/Slayer position. Now where have we seen this before? Hmmm…
There does seem to be theoretical & even some experimental support for the hypothesis that increasing CO2 will measurably warm the lower atmosphere, all other factors being held equal, if only by a trivial amount (by slowing the rate of reflected radiation out to space). But all other factors cannot be held equal. An issue is therefore is whether net feedback effects be positive or negative. Under some conditions in some areas of the globe, the net effect of increasing CO2 could be cooling rather than warming, even if the effect globally might be to warm.
As for the man-made contribution, humans also add cooling agents to the air, so it’s possible that the net effect of peoples’ activities may at times be to cool the planet, IMO.
In any case, Antarctic glaciation commenced with CO2 concentration possibly as high as 1500 ppm, & most likely no lower than 750, at a time when solar radiation was practically as strong as now. So if humans decide we don’t want the present major ice sheets (Greenland & Antarctica) to start melting before the next glacial phase begins (when North American, European & Siberian ice sheets spread again & glaciers advance in the SH), the “safe” level of carbon dioxide isn’t 350 ppm but perhaps 700.
As I’ve noted before, 1000 ppm, as in real greenhouses, can give some people headaches, but IMO even burning all accessible fossil fuels over the next few hundred years wouldn’t by itself achieve that level. Humans, with our high oxygen need, would suffocate at Cambrian & Ordovician levels of 7-8000 ppm. As you know, there was a glacial Ice House phase in the Ordovician, with CO2 possibly 20 times higher than now, & the sun only some four percent weaker.
I’m part way through the experiment–why is the left side of the mirror consistently hotter than the right side?
REPLY: Perhaps the iron (used as a prop for the mirror) wasn’t exactly flush with the surface. Look at the IR pattern on the FLIR after the iron is removed, I’ve added it here:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/post_iron-removal_capture.jpg
– Anthony
@Anthony: you can see the beginning of [temp decline] after the mirror was removed. And I comment on it in the video – Anthony
Indeed you do: Another nail in the coffin.
Mirror removed at 16:35 –
228 at 16:35
226 at 16:43 (8 sec)
224 at 16:52 (9 sec)
222 at 17:04 (12 sec)
220 at 17:15 (11 sec) last frame.
At this point, I would just add a note under the chart:
“After mirror removed, temperature dropped 8 degrees in 40 seconds at end of video.”
Correction–it is the left side of the iron.
David_UK:
I’d say “heat energy is transmitted in all directions”.
Unfortunately thermodynamics still has language that harkens back to the caloric theory of heat.. and people still talking about heat flowing, as if it were a fluid. Even the wikipedia entry on heat does this “The second law of thermodynamics states the principle that heat cannot flow directly from cold to hot systems.”
Anyway, “heat” as used in thermodynamics is a technical term which refers to the net heat energy transferred from body A to body B during one complete thermodynamic cycle. Understood in this technical sense, the wiki entry is basically right, because “heat” by itself implies a “net quantity”.
This is a really awful terminology, and there’ s a bit of a movement to try and shift the language away from vestigial 19th century concepts, but it’s too entrenched yet for that to succeed.
Note also the oddity that people talk about dynamics processes using quantities like “energy” that don’t have an explicit time dependence. That’s because the early formulations didn’t have a mechanism for computing non-equilbrium quantities (that had to wait until statistical mechanics was developed).
@ Lance: Obviously a Leftwing conspiracy.
Mark Bofill:
I agree. That’s why I said “Both mechanisms (scattering and reemission) play a role in the inappropriately named GHG effect, so the function is still served in terms of refuting slayer quackery.” Though perhaps it could use more explanation:
The mirror absorbing infrared radiation from the light bulb then radiating it as heat energy in all directions is an example of reemission, and this is the mechanism that most closely matches the “backradiation” that the slayers claim is physically impossible.
Regardless of the mechanism (reflection or absorption followed by reemission) the mirror prevents some of the radiated power from escaping as efficiently. As long as you are continuously supplying current to the heat energy source, this will always result in the temperature “interior” to this barrier to increase from what it would have been without the barrier.
That’s “just physics”.
Breaking down Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change Alarmism (CACCA):
1. Climate change: Yes. Happens constantly, in cycles long & short. Earth has been warming naturally since the depths of the Little Ice Age, on the scale of centuries. On the millennial scale, our planet is still cooling, coming off the highs of the Holocene Climatic Optimum (~5000 years ago) or later Minoan Warm Period (~3.3 Ka). The previous interglacial, the Eemian, was a lot hotter than our current phase. Earth is also cooling on the scale of millions, tens of millions & hundreds of millions of years. It is however warmer than it was during the Snowball Earth events ~600 to 800 Ma.
2. Anthropogenic: Not much effect from human actions, & we might actually be contributing to global cooling. At best negligible either way so far, & probably not statistically significant.
3. Catastrophic: Unlikely. No convincing evidence supports the hypothesis that humans risk igniting runaway global warming or death & destruction through extreme weather through our activities. Earth is homeostatic, & we are almost clueless as to GHG sinks. The planet didn’t suffer runaway global warming when CO2 concentrations were five, ten & twenty times higher than now.
4. Alarmism: Not justified, IMO. Even should human effects prove potentially problematic, there is plenty of time to consider remedial measures. So far more CO2 gain & warming, from whatever cause, have been beneficial to our species.
Moms can keep the cyanide out of the reach of their kids.
Anthony’s real experiment resembles Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment, except Dr. Spencer’s “cooler object” isn’t necessarily very reflective.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
You seem to be implying that if you have two balloons in your living room, one filled with CO2 and one with air [with a source of heat], the one filled with CO2 will become warmer than its’ surroundings and break the universal law of thermodynamics!
CO2 is a strong absorber and EMITTER of infrared.
All atoms are constantly shedding heat and trying to reach absolute zero [-273C]. The ice in your freezer at -25C is constantly shedding heat! The only reason it doesn’t cool is that it is [usually] receiving about the same amount of heat as it transmits. The temperature will always move towards equilibrium where the heat transmitted and received is the same.
The ability to increase the heat source by 18F by simply adding a mirror to reflect the ‘Back Radiation’ must open up some good commercial opportunities given further development.
You’re right! For example, we could invent foil insulation for spacecraft — oops, that’s been done. We could use a reflective backing that could double as a moisture barrier on household insulation. Aw, darn. We could invent metallic reflectors for space heaters. Mmmm, too late. We could invent a nifty thing called a “space blanket”… rats! How about low-E glass with an IR reflective film? No? Gosh darn it, it looks like this isn’t even exotic physics, this is engineering to everybody but the Slayers.
But just how old is the concept? Well, they sell this stuff in grocery stores called “aluminum foil”. Those of us who know physics AND like to cook use it to loosely tent turkeys both to hold in moist hot air that helps the turkey inside cook without drying out and to reflect the radiant (IR) heat from the walls of the oven that would otherwise both dry out the surface of the turkey and cause the turkey to prematurely brown. We tend to remove it only at the very end of cooking, to permit that good old IR to make it to the turkey surface and brown it off nicely, all juicy and moist.
Those of us who are turkeys claim that a cold mirror can never make a heated source increase its temperature. Joe Postma, for example, has made this claim repeatedly. He and I have spent a megabyte’s worth or more of ascii character data debating this general issue. It is trivial to prove using absolutely ordinary physics that in fact one can easily make a heated object in radiative equilibrium hotter by reflecting its own thermal or nonthermal radiation back to it. The basis of the proof are things like “Maxwell’s Equations” (for the power carried by electromagnetic radiation) and “The First Law of Thermodynamics”, and they are truly first year physics stuff. The usual claim that is made to counter this is that if it happened it would make perpetual motion machines possible or other nonsense, claims that persist without proof in spite of direct, first year undergraduate computations that show that the second law of thermodynamics is perfectly happy with the heat flow involved.
Anthony’s nice, simple demonstration was long overdue as a direct refutation of their nonsense. However, it won’t work. They will claim that the heat rise was due to the interruption of convective flow in front of the mirror when it was placed nearby. They will claim that the iron was turned on so that the mirror was really hotter than 230 F. They will claim anything and everything not to be so very publicly proven wrong in an experiment, because as a general rule they pay lip service to the idea that grand claims need to be experimentally verifiable.
Obviously, this one isn’t.
And Joe, in case you are ready to continue to make claims otherwise, consider this one. One can take a COMPLETELY ordinary 100 watt light bulb and fasten a thermistor to its surface with a temperature tolerant glue. One can then repeat Anthony’s experiment, but instead of using a mirror, one can wrap the bulb tightly in aluminum foil in a completely distinct run. The tightly wrapped foil is going to have almost identical thermal contact with the surrounding air — it is an excellent thermal conductor (much better than glass!) and so it will be difficult to claim that there will be any significant insulation of the bulb by the thin aluminum layer per se.
What are you willing to bet that the temperature increase in the (now) completely opaque light bulb will not increase dramatically? Bear in mind that the bulb has to lose 100 watts in steady state between radiation and convection, and you’ve just blocked the visible radiation so that all of the power that WAS escaping the light bulb through the visible light channel is now being retained within the bulb. Bear in mind that we can probably find somebody with a vacuum chamber handy so that we can eliminate convection altogether from the equation (if the bulb can stand the pressure difference), so that the foil surrounding the lightbulb will have to heat to the point where it alone can radiate away most of 100 watts in steady state. Bear in mind that as the light bulb heats up, the argon/nitrogen gas inside (usually at around 0.7 atm) will increase its pressure. If one manages to double the operating temperature in K, one will double this to around 1.4 to 1.5 atmospheres, and risk actually making the bulb explode (especially if one operates it in a vacuum).
Personally, I think it is a no-brainer. Of course it will heat up. As Anthony’s experiment is already perfectly adequate to demonstrate. As countless other experiments with reflecting light energy from conducting surfaces and a perfectly consistent and intelligible theory of electrodynamics predicts.
rgb
It was more fun watching the Nenana Ice Classic ice out. There was some uncertainty associated with that!
I got into an exchange with one of the slayers and didn’t realize it for a few posts. I came away rather amazed that they could cling to this that warm objects can’t absorb heat from colder objects. For that to be true the warm object would need some mechanism to reflect photons with a wavelength longer than what the warm object is emitting. This negates the entire understanding of emissivity and absorption of photons.
My take on the matter is that a cold object emits photons, fewer and longer wavelength than a warm object. If those photons hit the warm object, it gains heat, but thankes to the warm object having a higher flux, the warm object doesn’t warm up, it continues to cool – just at a lower rate.
In this case, the bulb’s hot filament is adding heat, so I’d expect a colder object to have a net effect of raising the equlibrium temperature.
I have two critiques, those come next.
Again, thanks for this dialogue. The remote read IR thermometers that i mentioned above DO operate as described, these are the same $60 instruments that Dr Roy, Chris Monckton, Fred Singer, Judith Curry and others AGREED was proof of GHE in a lengthy CC thread in Feb 2011 involving 25 scientists. The Laser Focus World bolometer is a different system. An expensive, well calibrated thermal imaging camera with a 2% accuracy range may beat a $60 IR toy, but the results are the same. You can take a tuning fork to a concert and it will vibrate to the sounds of the concert. You can measure this ‘vibration’ with an optical motion detector, but your are NOT measuring amplification. A thousand tuning forks in a concert hall will not amplify the concert sound level. A thousand CO2 tuning forks in the sky will not amplify the Earth’s temperature.
I have been involved in 50 hr per week study of this most complex problem, every week for five years now. Early on i made statements, which were factual correct, based on the IMPLIED properties of CO2. I used the climatology short hand of ‘radiation = warming’, therefore back-radiation = warming. I stated in early articles “there was no back radiation”….there is undeniable scattering, but cooler does not make warmer, warmer still. Every object in our Universe has radiant energy, as even the Cosmic Background Radiation is 2.7K. The CO2 molecules in the atmosphere resonate as the OLR photons flow past, but lack the mass and structure to reflect energy back to Earth. Water vapor does have the mass and structure to redirect energy, but this energy cannot warm the source of the OLR. There are convective currents around the light bulb that were not controlled in this first run of the experiment. WIth proper convective conditions, the mirror/bulb experiment will show reflected light does not warm the surface that created the light.
REPLY: Oh please, those $60 units have a laser so that you can AIM THEM because there is no view screen, the laser is not an active part of the sensing system. They are passive sensors just like the more expensive models like the FLIR I have. Go to Harbor Freight, buy one, point it with the laser at a hot cup of coffee, turn off the laser, you’ll get the same reading. I have one of these cheap units, and I have coffee, need I prove this failure of your understanding too?
As for your convective complaint, YOU set the parameters for the experiment with Siddons diagram, with no mention of convection. I followed it as diagrammed. To claim I did it wrong after the fact is simply disingenuous. – Anthony
lots of conflict today, as I am not a scientist what the hell do I know though I always like to keep an open mind and the following in mind, funny how things come back and bite you on the arse.
hmmm RIDICULE.
Guess it works both ways.
(Reuters) – An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.
This test measures the temp of the bulb surface. It does not establish that reflecting radiation back to the source (the filament) increases the power output of the source. The ghg theory claims that downwelling IR causes the source of the IR, the earth’s surface, to emit more power – this is what siddons is taking issue with.
Fascinating. The skydragon folk appear to not like empirical science. Their response when challenged to an actual real world science experiment appears to be. “It’s wrong because we say it is wrong.” Then they neither explain how it fails nor do they ever demonstrate it is wrong. They just wave their hands and declare it is wrong.
That is so antiscience I am amazed. I shouldn’t be the entire AGW group does the exact same thing but still.
I think the experiment could be easily replicated with different materials. For that matter painting a board or sheet of metal with a light colored heat reflective paint versus a dark heat absorbing paint would be interesting to compare to the mirror. Oh and why do we have heat reflective and absorbative materials if such can’t exist or work?
@richard Smith. If you believe that then demonstrate that is the problem and remember that it was the skydragon folk on their own web page who used that as an example. So if your defending their point you need to demonstrate with experimental data how it is wrong. Just stating theory on why it might be wrong won’t disprove an actual physical experiment.
You can’t handwave away experimental data. You have to do experiments of your own to disprove experimental data. This is why data collection and retention matter in science.
Anthony, you have demonstrated much, much more here (for not the first time). That back radiation heats, yes, but also that you don’t suffer the extreme stuff, even where it is opposed to the CAGW meme. The honesty and gentlemanly behaviour you’ve demonstrated is a comparatively rare commodity in these ‘let-the-devil-take-the-hindmost’ days (honesty seem to be concentrated in the WUWT community as well) – witness the silence of most of climate scientists and even other types who know better in the face of egregious scientific and personal misconduct, misrepresentation, and fraudulent science. They happily number Cook at sks as a partisan, even though they know he’s full of sawdust. The APS, ACS, Royal Society, IPCC… don’t hold back on the D-folk but will be silent if a totally out to lunch partisan puts something forward that supports the CAGW meme. Your work and the precious few others scattered about the world will never receive the Nobel Prize for saving the whole world from The Plan.
I admire Judith Curry for her patience with some theorists who will use any thread to tout their own pet theories, like the iron sun theory. It might not be accepted science by a long shot, but it does no harm.
Also there is a parallel here to how skeptics are treated at f.ex Realclimate – Watts Up should not be a place with a “borehole”. So “put up or shut up” is not the way it should be.
Let people have a say – and if they have nothing of substance, then most times they will be arrested by the community. Nothing wrong with that.
It is open debate – something skeptics have always been better at then alarmist.
A tradition we should be proud of.
Anthony
i am not a slayer, but wish to make 2 points:
First, whilst I have not seen your video (I have internet access capped at 2gb per month so I cannot watch video), I am not sure that your experiment captures the pertinent issue. You will recall how the bottles filled with CO2 captures a different issue, not CO2 induced warming. As I understand the GHG issue, it is whether 255K photons can warm a surface, or the atmosphere immediately above the surdace, which are at a temperature of about 288K. Now I do not know the temperature of the light filament but I prsume it to be around 2700K to 4500K. If that is so, then whether say 3000K photons can warm the glass bulb which glass is at atemperature of about 480K is not really dealing with the central issue.
Second, I consider that you need to give careful consideration as to how you deal with the slayers. I am very well aware of the politics behind all of this, but it may well be the case that whilst the slayers are not correct on all or most of there assertions, there may be merit in some of the issues that they raise. As climate sensitivity tends towards zero, the more likely it becomes that the slayers are correct on some of their assertions. There is of course no first order correlation between CO2 and temperature in any data set (ie., the thermometer data set going back to the 1800s or CET going back to the 1500s, the satellite data set as from 1979, or the paleo record). There are of course periods of some similarities where temperature and CO2 go up or down in unison, but there are periods of no correlation and even periods of anti correlation. To the extent that temperature and CO2 act in unison, it appears that CO2 lags temperature, and that it is temperature that is driving CO2, not the other way around. All of this suggests that there may be some merit in some of the points raised by the slayers. I would not be surprised to see in 20 or 30 years time a re-evaluation of the climate radiation model as proposed by K&T and I would not be surprised to see revisions to that model. It would be unfortunate if WUWT which has probably done more than any other site to promote good science in the climate science field, was behind the curve by censoring slayer related material, or for that matter whooly and completely ridiculing them.
I know that for you it is a difficult balance to strike, but I am sure that there is a balance. I applaud the reporting of this experiment. I only wish that I had been able to view the video of the experiment.
REPLY:
1. The CO2 in a bottle experiment is flawed, it demonstrates the better heat conductance of air than CO2 gas, something you can get from an engineering table on heat transfer.
See this: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/gas_heat_transfer_table.png
Note the values for Air and for CO2 that I highlighted in the 300K column. 300K is 80.3°F.
More here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/
2. I can’t compromise on facts. If they claim the greenhouse effect is “bogus” there’s really no course of action except to refute them – Anthony
Critique 1:
I’m a bit uncomfortable with how close the mirror is to the bulb. I think it interferes with convective cooling around the bulb. The temperature pattern on the bulb’s face shows convection is occurring. However, my sense is that the interference is minor and might only change the result by a couple of degrees.
Critique 2:
This is more important, and may actually be a big part of how your demonstration works. Note – where I say “you” I’m referring to both you, the experiment’s designer, Dr. Siddons, and the experiment design.
The design states that the mirror supplies visible photons back to the flashlight. This is thinking too small, especially for something as low powered as a typical flashlight.
Before the mirror was added the wall behind the camera (and table and ceiling) were all sending photons to the surface of the bulb. In fact, the CO2 and water vapor in the air were doing that too. When you added the mirror, then depending on the emissivity of the mirror at long and short wavelengths, the bulb was being irradiated by photons coming from objects reflected by the mirror and by the mirror itself.
While the mirror was in place, it warmed up due to:
1) it’s imperfect emissivity leading to absorbing photons from the bulb
2) convective and conductive heat transfer by air heated by the bulb.
The net result is that while the bulb was getting some heat from its own photons being reflected back (and those visible light photons being much “hotter” than the surface of the bulb), the bulb also was getting more longwave photons from the elevated temperature of the mirror. These were photons “cooler” than the surface of the bulb.
All in all, I’m unimpressed by Dr. Siddons’ design. I thought about what would be nice to do in my old discussion, but it quickly expanded to copper slabs with tubing braised on them and water pumps moving water heated to well controlled temperatures or accurately measure temperatures. I’d get one stable at some warm temperature, stop the heating, and then use the other at various stable temperatures and then see the temperature curve on the first.
According to the slayers, only when the second slab was warmer than the first would it affect temperature change.
At any rate, I think you’ve fairly reproduced Dr. Siddons’ design. I think any criticism from the Slayers will also have to criticize his design. Well played, but I doubt the “put up or shut up” goal will be met. 🙂
richard smith says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:08 am
So why did Dr. Siddons suggest such a poorly designed experiment? And can you explain why there has to be a visible light emitting filament? Besides the 2% of electrical energy being converted to visible light, why couldn’t it be something with greater surface area than a filament but releasing the same 65W of heat?
Nice experiment, Anthony!
Re the Slayers, they tried to recruit me a year or so ago. I declined after reading some of their book. I gave up arguing with them in emails when it became clear that no amount of factual, real-world evidence and sound logic would dissuade them.
It is well-known in engineering circles that colder objects radiate heat back onto hotter objects. We design fired furnaces with that concept. Examples include gas-fired hot water heaters, power plant boilers, and industrial furnaces. There are many millions of these fired furnaces operating around the world.
If the Slayers were right, the fired furnaces don’t work.
I’m enjoying reading the comments on this post.
For any readers who insist that CO2 cannot absorb IR and re-emit, please go to a technical library, find a Perry’s Chemical Engineering Handbook, 5th Edition, and have a look at page 10-57. That page discusses the emissivity of CO2.
If you repeat the experiment using a blackboard instead of a mirror, would you also get an increase in temperature, possibly a bigger increase?
Greg House says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:53 am
Back radiation is real and the the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC is non-existent. There is no contradiction here. Because the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC is not just about existence of back radiation. The IPCC goes beyond that and claims that this back radiation has a warming effect on the surface. Exactly this warming effect (this includes slowind down cooling) is physically impossible.
————————————————————————————————————–
So, if back radiation (of energy) is possible, please explain exactly what happens to that energy when it reaches the surface? Seems to me your position requires it to vanish without trace which, I humbly suggest, is a far greater violation of physical laws than having it reduce the cooling of the surface!
Please explain clearly why it ain’t so (in other words, what does happen to all that back-radiated energy)?
Further to my last comment.
I understand that the experiment that Anthony conducted is the slayer’s own experiment. one issue is whether the experiment is a good experiment and well designed to test the pertinent issue raised.
Gary Pearse says (May 27, 2013 at 11:19 am) “Anthony, you have demonstrated much, much more here (for not the first time). That back radiation heats, yes…” i would have thought that there were very few who doubt that radiation (whether back radiation or not) is capable of heating. The issue is whether it can heat the source, or whether cooler photons can heat a warmer object even warmer. That is why I have issues with the experiment. I do not consider that it is dealing what some people consider to be the nub of the problem.
i agree with what bathes says ( May 27, 2013 at 11:29 am). That iis what I was trying to say in my second point. As sceptics we should not have closed minds (I am equally sceptical of every argument that counters AGW just as I am sceptical of every argument that supports AGW), and we should at least consider new ideas and we should always be open to debate. Most of us can come to a reasoned opinion as to what is crap, what is of dubious merit, what is of some merit, what is of interest, what has particular merit etc.
Anyone living in the South or other hot areas of the Country that have installed e-glass windows can do this experiment without any ado. I have installed e-glass windows in my south Florida home. These windows have a Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) of .21. “Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) represents the fraction of the solar energy that is transferred through the glass of a window. SHGC values range from 0 to 1. The lower a window’s SHGC value, the less solar heat is transmitted through the window. ” This very low .21 SHGC is excellent at blocking solar radiation from passing through the window.
One day while standing outside near my front, west facing windows in the late afternoon, I noticed I was feeling heat from those windows, reflected solar energy that could not pass through the e-glass. The air was warmer up to about 4 feet from the windows.
Now I cannot and do not claim to know what this all means however, the question is can these air molecules that have been warmed by the reflected solar energy have an additional heating effect back on the windows themselves. If they do, this would be a GH effect would it not.
Joseph A Olson says: “A thousand tuning forks in a concert hall will not amplify the concert sound level. A thousand CO2 tuning forks in the sky will not amplify the Earth’s temperature.”
One does not equate to the other and you are using fact mixed with non-sense in attempt to make your claim.
What is becoming obvious is PSI/Dragons attempt to sway people with slickly-devised convoluted arguments.
johnosullivan says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:39 am
“So Mr Watts, when are you going to admit we do have a time-dependent energy model, contrary to the deceitful misinformation put about by you and Dr Spencer?….”
============
Disagreement is one thing.
Accusations of “deceitful misinformation” is another.
Get ready, cus here it comes!
Jospeh A Olson: “These instruments work be sending out an IR signal and measuring the shift in the returned signal.”
Oh boy…
Oh good grief.
In http://principia-scientific.org/supportnews/latest-news/202-roy-spencer-and-wuwt-cut-and-run-on-own-greenhouse-gas-challenge.html they say
I don’t recall hearing that there was a revolt going on except maybe over that silly discussion about lunar temperatures and NASA getting it wrong back in Apollo days. Nope, that link goes to letter from 50 NASA folk last March that IIRC was more about NASA GISS procedures and policies than the existence of the Greenhouse effect.
I don’t think there’s anything in that latter that could ever be called an endorsement of the Slayer’s stand on the matter.
“richard smith says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:08 am
This test measures the temp of the bulb surface. It does not establish that reflecting radiation back to the source (the filament) increases the power output of the source. The ghg theory claims that downwelling IR causes the source of the IR, the earth’s surface, to emit more power – this is what siddons is taking issue with.”
No, the theory makes no such claim.
The earth as a system ( planet plus atmoshpere) cools by one mechanism: via radiation to space.
This happens at the ERL– the effective radiating level. When you increase GHGs you raise the ERL. Since the earth system has a negative lapse rate, this means the earth will be radiating from a higher and hence cooler region. Cooler bodies radiate less rapidly than warmer bodies so by raising the ERL to a higher cooler region the rate at which energy is lost to space is decreased.
The planet isnt warmed by back radiation. Back radiation is the effect of more GHGs in the system. The planet cools less radpidly than it would otherwise, mch the same way your coffee in a thermos is “kept warm” by the silver lining.
This happens at the ERL– the effective radiating level. When you increase GHGs you raise the ERL.
what about the desert at night.
there again the desert in the day with more moisture would make it cooler and at night warmer.
There is more than enough hard science to disprove the alarmists’ arguments and contentions, but this does mean that skeptics should stick to the hard science. Of course there is a greenhouse effect, and it varies by substance – surely nitrogen and oxygen and argon have some greenhouse effect, even if it is tiny relative to, say, water vapor. The Earth is definitely warmer, by about 15 degrees C, than it would be without its atmosphere. False or manifestly incorrect rationalizations by skeptics for rejecting AGW will only provide grist for the alarmist mill.
This debate does express a healthy willingness on the part of skeptics to mull over and argue about details, in contrast to the religious, delusional, see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil dogmatism and stonewalling torpor of the alarmists, and this objectivity and skepticism among skeptics is crucial to differentiating honest science from alarmist charlatanism.
However, my concern in this debate is first and foremost that, regardless of different opinions amongst us on details, the skeptic community must be united in its general position that there is no discernible incremental effect on temperatures of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that such effect as could ever be identified will be either nugatory or actually beneficial. At no time should we back away from this position.
The Oregon Petition statement offers a solid basis for skeptic activism, with its unequivocal declaration that there is no significant or attributable human effect on climate.
To those who think that placing the mirror on one side has any significant effect on the convective losses from the bulb really have no sense as to how convection works. The bulb heats the air directly around it by conduction, and that air rises as a result. The resulting lower pressure around the bulb can be replaced by air from virtually any direction except straight up. As long as there is not a constriction in the other directions that is so great that it actually causes a measurable pressure drop and air velocity through the constriction, there will be no noticeable effect. With over half of the potential angles for the “draw” of air to replace the rising heated air still open, there is no detectable effect in this case. (It’s easy enough to demonstrate experimentally, anyway.)
I say this as someone who regularly works with the design of cooling systems for electronics, and has to decide, for example, whether forced (fan-driven) cooling is required or not.
False or manifestly incorrect rationalizations by skeptics for rejecting AGW will only provide grist for the alarmist mill.
true,
Stomach ulcers , this has been thrown around a lot but illustrates a point beautifully ,
99% of doctors were 100% wrong about stomach ulcers , lots of scientists have been ridiculed. Thought this site was to question , not sneer.
but guess we have to stick to the greenhouse story for the moment.
I have done experiments to show willis’s steel green house effect:
http://climateandstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-copper-greenhouse-new-test.html
and others.
I have done a preliminary experiment to prove that a cool object can heat a warmer object:
http://climateandstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/a-cool-object-reduces-energy-loss-from.html
I am working on improving the cool adding energy to hot. But have a bit of a problem maintaining ambient to within a few 10ths of deg C. When I succeed I will put the results up. Unless the effect of ambient can be removed the slayers will find problems.
Actually, my rather expensive, 1995 first generation “Night Owl Infrared Rifle Scope” was vastly superior to a $60 IR toy, but was returned for full refund when it could not amplify ambient IR to any useable level without an additional IR light source. That light source was limited by wattage to close range. The downside is that a night feeding bunny might not see your IR source light, but anyone with a night vision scope could easily see you….from a LONG way away. The military uses IR projections on their very expensive weapon systems as well. There was no noticeable difference in my 1st generation scope based on phase of the moon or cloud cover, as ambient IR levels were not high enough. The IR thermal image systems used by law enforcement and the military far exceed the $60 IR toys, which do send a IR signal, measure the reflection and hold that value in memory until re-fired. The IR energy of your backyard barbie is NOT constant over distance, the remote reader “temperature” would be target dependent constant. However, this temperature does not indicate radiation at the REMOTE reader. Hence the resonating CO2/tuning fork analogy, CO2 molecules, resonating as photons fly, by does not constitute an additional source of energy.
http://infrared-cameras.org/thermal/rifle-scope/
This site mentions “hog hunting”, but “man-bear-pig” hunting might apply as well.
Quite the argument! Dr. Suess would have loved to be alive today. Imagine a story about buttered bread but from a global warming perspective (or in this case, the debate here). Unfortunately he was quite the liberal so I would guess he would have written a children’s book about the perils of global warming (or in this case, the debate here). For those of you not familiar with his pen, his book was about a war that started between people of different opinions on either side of a line that eventually become a tall barrier regarding which side of the bread should be buttered. Then each side decided to outbuild the other’s weapon. Alas, for Dr. Suess naivete was his lover and so he argued from a pet belief, not cold hard facts. If you want to win a debate, study that children’s book.
Anthony
Thank you for your response to my comment at 11:31am (which is appreciated). I wish to make it clear that I am not in any way criticising you. I am a firm supporter of your blog, and the valiant efforts you have made with the surface temperature station audit, and your work with respect to UHI. Your blog has won many awards, rightly deserved. I am fairly convinced that our children and grandchildren, will be indebted to you and your site.
As I said, I am not a slayer. I am a regular commentator, and have been so for many years, and I cannot recall having once made a comment in support of the slayers.
We both agree that the CO2 in the bottle experiment is flawed. The point I make that although the experiment that you conducted was thought up by the slayers, I consider that that experiment is flawed, if one is hoping to test whether cooler photons can warm a warmer object.
I may mis-understand the slayers, but my understanding is that one of their issues is that cooler photons cannot warm warmer objects. Whether they can slow down the cooling of warmer objects is a different issue (and would require different experiments). I consider (and this is no criticism of you) that their experiment is flawed, since it does not deal with the issue that they consider to be relevant. That was simply the thrust of my observation in my first point. Of course, it is up to the slayers to properly design an experiment that deals with the issues that they consider to be relevant. That is not up to you, you have more than fulfilled matters by conducting their experiment and revealing the results that you have obtained. The implications of the results is open to interpretation as others have suggested with convection issues and what would happen if the mirror was replaced with some other object etc 9or what would happen if the mirror was to be moved back in increments of a few inches at a time until it was say many feet away from the light bulb). But those issues are not a shortcoming on anything that you have done.
Of course, we all want to know to what extent the greenhouse effect is real and precisely what it can do and what its bounds are. That of course raises so many issues, not least whether the effect is already saturated, or whether it is predominantly controlled by water in its various phases and that CO2 is nothing more than a bit player (or of course, a predominant player). But it is for those that claim that the greenhouse effect is real to establish that. I consider that Trenbeth is wrong when he suggests a contraian positon on the burden.
This principle of passive reflection back to a warmer radiating body to increase the temperature of that radiating body has been exploited commercially for many years now. Many halogen incandescent light bulbs have a “dichroic” filter on the inside of the glass enclosure. This material reflects back most of the (near) infrared radiation from the filament back to the filament, while letting the visible radiation through.
The reflected radiation increases the temperature of the filament, which has two useful effects. The higher the temperature, the more of the electrical power is dissipated radiatively (since this increases roughly as T^4) and the less is dissipated conductively (since this increases roughly as T^1). Second, the higher temperature shifts the radiative spectrum more into the visible light band. Combined, these make the lamp brighter.
It is essential to realize that this temperature increase does not increase the power consumed by the bulb. In fact, it actually decreases the power use, because the resistance of the tungsten metal filament increases with temperature, decreasing the current through it (I = V / R) and the power dissipated in it (P = V^2 / R).
The Slayers claim on their websites that the producers of these bulbs are committing commericial fraud in advertising the advantages of this scheme, and that they have bamboozled the US Patent Office into granting invalid patents for “perpetual motion machines.”
we all have to be careful,
a little story this week, sea level rise, so the story goes, the last time co2 levels were 400ppm , many eons ago, the sea level was how many feet higher? but according to the new research it seems that the land they were using to measure this by was actually much lower, it has risen over the millions of years giving a false impression.
Uh, a couple questions.
1. Is the glass of the bulb itself the source of the light or is it the filament?
2. Is the filament temperature being monitored?
3. Why is this an attempt to refute a claim which isn’t made? I thought the slayers were saying the bulb won’t become brighter, not that it wouldn’t be warmer if you collected the light it emits and redirect it back onto the bulb?
I’m just not sure how measuring the temperature of the glass on a light bulb when you reflect the light back onto it is supposed to be proof or disproof of any of the points they make.
richard smith says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:08 am
This test measures the temp of the bulb surface. It does not establish that reflecting radiation back to the source (the filament) increases the power output of the source. The ghg theory claims that downwelling IR causes the source of the IR, the earth’s surface, to emit more power – this is what siddons is taking issue with.
Richard: (Sticking solely to this physical experiment and for a moment forgetting about GHGs.) You claim that on the one hand the glass of the bulb is indeed able to gain energy back from the mirror, but at the same time you seem to believe (unless I misunderstand you) that the filament is not able to gain some energy back from the glass of the bulb. Your position seems to be that that the back radiation stops with the glass bulb and that the filament remains at the same temperature with or without the presence of the mirror?
@richard:
Three million years ago, the land that was to bear ice sheets, like Greenland still & Europe, North America & Asia once & future, had not yet been so burdened.
Just goes to show that higher CO2 has little to no effect.
The Antarctic Ice Sheets formed when that continent was cut off from the others by the Southern Ocean. The northern ice sheets formed when the Americas were connected by an isthmus. In interglacials, as now, all we have left of them is mainly Greenland, but the other, bigger ones will grow larger once more, no matter how much life-, food- & fiber-giving carbon dioxide we add to the air.
Anthony,
The message is absoletely clear. However I struggle a bit with quantities. I had the opportunity once to play with an infrared thermometer used by cooks. It was a clear sky evening in winter with some cloud patches. When I aimed it at clouds it would return temperatures of say 0C to -10C, When I aimed it on the clear sky it would peg at it’s minimum of -18C,
So although I am a believer of GHG effect I could not verify it myself. No with that fabulous piece of equipment, that FLIR, you could aim it at the clear night sky, get an actual radiation temperature and convert that to the energy in W/m2. Would that be anywhere in the ballpark of raising the alleged blackbody temperatue of -18C to the global average of about 15C?
Anthony,
I was trying to be polite, pointing out the error without rubbing anyone’s nose in it. Once again, what happened to the wire? The air temperature is trivial. Why does hot air rise? Because it is less dense than colder air. How did it get less dense? It expanded. In what direction does expansion happen? All of them. Did your mirror block this movement? To some extent yes.
With all the money our society spends on heat, and electricity, the idea that we could generate all these terawatts with a simple reflector to increase the temperature, but somehow no one ever noticed this or thought to try it, well it seems a little arrogant. If this method worked it would have been adopted by your namesake James Watt, the originator of the steam engine.
Another writer mentions the net heat transfer. He seems to think that heat is also transferred from the colder object to the warmer one. The definition of “Heat” says, if an object is Heated, it gets Warmer!!! When heat is transferred the object to which heat was transferred warms. Your heater wire did not warm. At all.
This is not to say that the Greenhouse Effect does not exist. When 15-micron IR hits a CO2 molecule it is absorbed. In the denser lower atmosphere, before it could re-emit this photon, the molecule will collide with several thousand other molecules, thermalizing the energy from the photon, heating the atmosphere to the extent that 400 ppm is able. Higher in the atmosphere re-emission becomes more possible, and indeed 50% of these re-emitted photons go up, cooling the atmosphere.
Heat, it’s not just for breakfast anymore…
richard verney says:
May 27, 2013 at 1:11 pm
I may mis-understand the slayers, but my understanding is that one of their issues is that cooler photons cannot warm warmer objects. Whether they can slow down the cooling of warmer objects is a different issue…
Actually it isn’t a different issue. It’s the same thing. Anything that is capable of slowing down cooling is equally capable of causing additional warming (given an energy source, of course, for example a light bulb or the Sun).
Mods: OT (sorry) but how come my comments always end up “awaiting moderation”? Am I in someone’s bad books?!
Well, my last comment makes me look a bit silly – ignore me, sorry!
“So although I am a believer of GHG effect I could not verify it myself:
like believing in GOD.
rgbatduke says:
May 27, 2013 at 10:59 am
One can then repeat Anthony’s experiment, but instead of using a mirror, one can wrap the bulb tightly in aluminum foil in a completely distinct run.
I did do that experiment in response to a previous claim of one of the Slayers that this couldn’t increase the temperature of the filament in the bulb.
First problem was to find an incandescent bulb here (not sold anymore, except halogen types, but these have no full vacuum). But at last I did find one.
First measured the glass temperature of the front of the bulb (fitted horizontally) when the light was on after a few minutes with an infrared thermometer.
Wrapped it in aluminum foil to just outside the copper base. Made a thin opening in the foil at the front to measure the glass temperature.
Without foil: glass around 80°C
With foil: glass between 110-120°C
The intention was to let the light on until the filament burned out (normally 2000 hours), but I had to stop the experiment because the paint of the fitting started to smell, I didn’t like to burn down our house…
Next time I’ll follow the suggestion to measure the resistance of the filament with a ampère or power meter with and without foil…
@ Ferdinand.
I have just gotten word from the VP of an electronics company lab that they are doing this experiment as you and RGB describe, including measuring resistance.
I’ll have a detailed writeup later this week. We don’t need anyone to burn their house down to refute the slayer silliness.
Anthony
“It is essential to realize that this temperature increase does not increase the power consumed by the bulb”
sounds like more efficient teknology , much like petrol or diesel engines get more MPG than 30 years ago.
This test measures the temp of the bulb surface. It does not establish that reflecting radiation back to the source (the filament) increases the power output of the source. The ghg theory claims that downwelling IR causes the source of the IR, the earth’s surface, to emit more power – this is what siddons is taking issue with.
(the power delivered to the bulb from the electrical power supply) plus the power it absorbs from its environment (all sources and channels) plus</bL the power it absorbs that it previously emitted but that was reflected back to it by the mirror. It must then radiate away strictly more power than it did when there was no mirror. In order to do so, it has to get hotter, because the rate at which it loses energy in all channels — radiation, convection, and conduction — varies monotonically with bulb temperature. In the conduction channel, for example, the relevant “averaged” equation is called Fourier’s Law. In the radiation channel, it is called the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. In the convection channel, it would be the Navier-Stokes equation, although the latter is really general enough to allow for all three in the one. In NO CASE does the heat flow away from the bulb increase without an increase in the difference between the (average) temperature of the bulb and the (average) temperature of the surrounding environment, and given more or less fixed environmental temperatures, the bulb has to get hotter to lose both the power it receives through the wire and the power reflected back to it from the mirror.
Not so. I’ve been involved with a very long exchange with Siddons, and you misstate the GHG theory as well. Permit me to clarify.
1) Nobody has asserted that the power output of the source has increased, because it does not increase. Power is being delivered to the bulb in question by Joule heating, and is more or less independent of the bulb’s temperature. It is quite trivial to control for this and use a power supply that fixes the power delivered to the bulb and control for even the second order variation that arises from the modulation of the bulb’s resistance with temperature.
2) In equilibrium, the total power into the bulb equals the total power out of the bulb so that the net power delivered to the bulb is zero. By definition. However, the net power into the bulb when the mirror is present is
All of this is the simple application of the First Law of Thermodynamics — a.k.a. the Law of Conservation of Energy — plus simple definitions of things like specific heat and the relevant equations for the dynamical transport of heat. In all cases the heat flow itself is from hotter to colder and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is also satisfied.
All the GHG theory states is that GHGs in the atmosphere absorb IR emitted from the Earth’s surface in a way that is directly connected to their quantum structure and spectroscopy. These gases then re-emit the radiation in all directions. Some of the re-emitted radiation (after one or more absorptions) is returned to the ground, which is heated by many mechanisms, but primarily by sunlight. The returned radiation becomes part of the total average power received by the surface of the Earth. Since this power is strictly greater than the average power it would have received without the GHG present — e.g. the average power received by the moon (which is directly measurable and long since measured) — the surface temperature in equilibrium is strictly greater than what it would have been without the GHGs present or what the Moon’s average temperature — measurable and long since measured — actually is.
All of this is such simple logic that it truly is amazing that so many people seem incapable of following it. You make an income. You are taxed according to your net wealth. Your net wealth increases until your taxes on it equal your income. This is a simple linear model for equilibrium that one hopes anybody competent to live in the real world can understand.
Now, suppose that somebody stands between you and the tax man and gives you a rebate (even a small one) on your taxes, but passes the rest on to the tax man. Your net wealth then increases until the tax rate including the rebate is exactly equal to — your income.
Let’s make it concrete. Suppose you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, and are taxed at 10% of your net worth. Your net worth will increase to a million dollars. Now somebody gives you a 5% rebate, so your NET tax rate is 5%. Your net worth will increase to two million. In equilibrium, you will continue to lose your actual income to the tax man, but when you get a rebate your “income” is the sum of your actual income and the rebate. When you have two million dollars, you are charged 10% of it ($200,000). Then you get back a rebate of half of that ($100,000). You make $100,000 of external income. $200,000 in equals $200,000 out, and the $100,000 you actual make precisely matches what the tax man ultimately gets so your net worth remains constant.
But the constant value of your net worth is considerably higher when you get a rebate than when you don’t. And temperature is proportional to net worth in this metaphor — the enthalpy content of the Earth’s surface. Or, the enthalpy content of the light bulb.
3) FWIW, part of the confusion is to just what source you, or Siddons, are referring to as the “power output of the source”. Do you mean the power output of Niagra Falls, or more likely Pacific Gas and Electric that is actually providing the electrical power to the light bulb? That doesn’t change. Do you mean the net power received by the light bulb from the combination of PG&E and the surrounding environment? That does change when you insert the nearby mirror. Do you mean the rate at which the light bulb loses power to its entire surrounding environment? Note well: That does not change. At the end of the day, that has to equal the rate of external power input — the power provided by PG&E. Just as (in the case of the Earth) that has to equal the power delivered by the Sun.
4) The GHE is indeed misnamed. It is also not simple, not as simple as any of the simple models used by the Slayers to claim that it doesn’t exist. It is better named the “Atmospheric Radiative Effect” to cleanly divorce it from the mixture of channel modulations that actually cause greenhouses to get warmer. The ARE has both heating and cooling components. There is absolutely no question that the heating exceeds the cooling, on average, for the Earth, because the mean surface temperature of the Earth is very definitely warmer than the mean surface temperature of the Moon, in spite of the fact that they both receive more or less identical TOA insolation. The actual final temperature distribution of the Earth is complex and depends on albedo, absorptivity, and both heating AND cooling contributions from the particular absorptive spectra of the many gases that make up the atmosphere, plus an enormous heating and cooling modulation due to the wild card in the mix, water.
Accepting that the GHE or ARE is real and is responsible for elevating the Earth’s mean surface temperature to the point where the Earth isn’t a permanently frozen snowball does not mean conceding the point that the climate sensitivity (defined as the increase in temperature per doubling of CO_2) is positive, negative, or any particular value. The ARE is enormously complex and nonlinear and the Earth has proven to be remarkable STABLE in its climate on the warm side of things. But denying that it exists at all is just plain stupid, especially when the arguments for its existence are things as moronic and demonstrably, experimentally false as “a light will not heat up if its own light is reflected back onto it by a cooler mirror”.
Of course it will. And the logic associated with the event is no more “taxing” than the metaphor above indicates.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
May 27, 2013 at 10:59 am
Bear in mind that as the light bulb heats up, the argon/nitrogen gas inside (usually at around 0.7 atm) will increase its pressure.
Didn’t know that, thought that incandescent bulbs were full vacuum and halogen bulbs has some halogen vapour to enhance the light yield without burning the filament… So I was lucky that the foiled bulb didn’t explode…
Anthony, with respect, you don’t really understand what is happening in your experiment. I will try to explain the flaws in your reasoning. But first I would just like to state that I am one of the persons responsible for calibrating the focal plane arrays currently orbiting over our heads in the commercial earth imaging satellites. This process starts with NIST traceable calibrated lamps and uses state of the art equipment so I feel more than qualified to address this issue.
To state it simply;
The addition of the mirror changes the operating environment for the lamp
The reflected energy does heat/warm the lamp filament
The warmer filament has a higher resistance
Since you are operating with a constant voltage source (120 VAC), the current flowing through the lamp drops
The lamp efficiency (optical watts out/electrical watts in) goes up
Your Power supply (the inverter on your solar panel system, or the utility company) IS THE SOURCE OF YOUR WARMER LAMP
The mirror IS NOT THE SOURCE OF YOUR WARMER LAMP
The proper analogy between your experiment and the Sun/Earth/Atmosphere/Universe system is simply that;
A (very very very) tiny amount of the light that is reflected from the Earth’s surface makes its way back to the surface of the Sun and warms the Sun.
The surface of the Earth IS NOT AN ENERGY SOURCE LIKE THE SURFACE OF THE SUN. It is simply a re-radiator of energy.
When considering energy flows, The surface of the Earth is NOT LIKE A LIGHT BULB.
The “GHE” only acts as a hybrid optical/thermal delay line. By causing the energy to makes several passes through the system at the speed of light the ”GHE” delays the energy by a few tens of milliseconds.
The funny thing about an optical delay line like this is that you cannot observe the delay effect when a constant input (sunlight/light bulb) is present. You can only observe the delay when a pulse of light travels through the system.
You have all been chasing a chimera for decades now, you should just stop and think; Jeeeze I make all these measurements and models and predictions and “energy budgets” and ITS STILL NOT WARMING, MAYBE THE GHE THEORY IS WRONG ?
Nah, couldn’t be that, those “deniers” must be stupid.
PS, in precision radiometry testing we NEVER use constant voltage supplies, it creates too
many experimental errors.
Have a nice holiday everyone.
Cheers, Kevin
“One can then repeat Anthony’s experiment, but instead of using a mirror, one can wrap the bulb tightly in aluminum foil in a completely distinct run. Made a thin opening in the foil at the front to measure the glass temperature”
when i hear the word wrapped in aluminum foil , in a glass bottle , in a lab, experiment in doors, I immediately smell a smelly rat.
much like experiments on mice that they think will be reflected in humans.
Joe Bastardi, proudly listed as a member of the rightly debunked PSI organization [http://principia-scientific.org/about/why-psi-is-a-private-assoc.html], is quoting as saying this on Fox News [http://jobs.cybervillage.com/Job-Search/joe-bastardi/]: “CO2 cannot cause global warming. I’ll tell you why. It doesn’t mix well with the atmosphere, for one. For two, its specific gravity is 1 1/2 times that of the rest of the atmosphere. It heats and cools much quicker. Its radiative processes are much different. So it cannot — it literally cannot cause global warming.”
OK, after this now total debunking of the PSI group by Anthony and Dr. Spencer, who can still claim they fully support either PSI or one of its proud members, Mr. Bastardi, regarding any of their climate change opinions now?
The intention was to let the light on until the filament burned out (normally 2000 hours), but I had to stop the experiment because the paint of the fitting started to smell, I didn’t like to burn down our house…
times, absolute. Still, from (say) 400K to almost 500K is a fair bit, assuming that the change is at all proportionate (not necessarily true for clear glass bulbs where at least the visible light comes straight out of the filament through the glass).
Next time I’ll follow the suggestion to measure the resistance of the filament with a ampère or power meter with and without foil…
And you can be sure that when you are done, Siddons and Postma and Sullivan and Olson will just pretend that it never happened, or argue that the temperature increase was due to something else, or assert that this means that the second law can be violated and hence must be wrong.
The biggest risk of your experiment is that the bulb will (rather quickly) get so hot that it melts the insulation on the supply lines, causing them to short out, before the filament actually breaks or the bulb heats enough to pop from surplus pressure of the confined gas. If you plug the bulb into a ground fault protected circuit you can ensure that the arcing short of the supply line will not start a fire, and by wearing eyeglasses you can ensure that you won’t be badly injured by an exploding bulb. I’m guessing that lower power bulbs are also less likely to fail catastrophically — I’d think that a 200W incandescent would be very dangerous to play with in this way as that’s a rather lot of power to dissipate from the surface area of the light bulb, although T^4 in the SB equation means that you only need to boost temperatures by
rgb
Didn’t know that, thought that incandescent bulbs were full vacuum and halogen bulbs has some halogen vapour to enhance the light yield without burning the filament… So I was lucky that the foiled bulb didn’t explode…
I learned it when using a light bulb as a “plasma globe” on top of a Tesla coil (100-200 kV high frequency AC). Apparently it is a good thing that they do have a gas, as if they didn’t the electrons would strike the glass after accelerating off of the filament and create soft x-rays. Indeed, an x-ray tube is little more than a cathode at high voltage and a collector plate at ground — the electrons accelerate enough crossing the gap to knock loose inner shell electrons which they cause the emission of x-rays when the level refills from e.g. the valence bands.
Wouldn’t do to contract cataracts or get radiation burns playing with Tesla coils, after all. They are plenty dangerous as it is (although SO COOL that it almost doesn’t matter:-).
rgb
Anthony,
The mirror you are using is probably not a front surface mirror and the IR must go through the glass before being reflected back through the glass again. If the glass is not perfectly transparent to the IR, it absorbs some of the energy and consequently heats. A better mirror would be a polished sheet or plate of copper as such a mirror should cause an even greater temperature rise when used in your experiment. What would really be interesting is to repeat your experiment with a front surface mirror that is kept cool or even cold. Although it could not be below the dew point of the air in your home or the mirror will fog up. Your results should be nearly independent of the mirror’s temperature.
now let me see, I have a fridge, I close the door. I have to use electricity to take the heat from the fridge to the outside to cool it. Now if green house gases are transferring heat downwards, there is surely a cooling going on somewhere, or if co2 can cause warming then we are missing a trick in using it for thermal insulation of some kind.
I may mis-understand the slayers, but my understanding is that one of their issues is that cooler photons cannot warm warmer objects. Whether they can slow down the cooling of warmer objects is a different issue…
Actually it isn’t a different issue. It’s the same thing. Anything that is capable of slowing down cooling is equally capable of causing additional warming (given an energy source, of course, for example a light bulb or the Sun).
Note well the additional problem — photons have no temperature! It is quite literally impossible even in principle to determine the temperature of a source that emitted any given photon, let alone the temperature of the photon itself.
This is only one of the many, many idiocies promoted by slayers — that somehow the photons reflected by colder glass or absorbed and re-emitted by a colder gas are “different” from photons absorbed or emitted by a warmer gas, as if they individually come labeled with their source’s temperature.
Not so. Seriously. A kiss is just a kiss, and photon is just a photon. Is the number 7 random?
I have heard Postma and/or Siddons claiming, with a presumably straight face, that photons from a colder source are resonantly reflected from warmer objects without every being absorbed. The warmer materials “just know”, I guess, what the temperature was of the thermal emitter for each and every photon…
rgb
Did someone say the mirror heats up ?
That would explain why the system temperature went up. You are changing the heat transfer characteristics of the whole system, by having a solid warmer mass close to the bulb.
If you can find a way of finding a reflector that doesn’t heat up, (or loses heat very quickly) you would get a different result.
Maybe try the same experiment with a thin film of aluminium foil as the reflector. and find some way of keeping it at room temperature, blow a fan on the back or something.
early morning, “find a way of finding ” .. who wrote that !? doh
I actually performed a set of experiments and I sent it to your email on 23 May 2013.
I have replicated my results in a variation of my experiment. I will send it to your email – it inckudes a timeline and photographs.
I heated the bulb of a thermometer using one spotlight to 303 K, I then heated the same thermometer with a second spotlight to 309 K.
I then turned both on together and recorded the temperature.
After more than 2 hours the maximum I recorded was 319 K – it took 15 minutes to reach 318 K.
I think this demonstrates one fundamental claim may be wrong.
It does not appear that adding 2 discrete radiation sources produces the same result as increasing the power of one source of radiation to the same arithmetic sum.
I can’t prove the Stefan-Boltzmann law – I simply accept it
Like you I show an increase in temperature occurs – I simply say that it does not equate to doubling the power.
Consider posting this document I am sending today – it will add to discussion and is easy to replicate for anyone to try. The accuracy of my results are not what is important it is the principle.
I quote:
‘They claim on their web page that “the Greenhouse gas effect is bogus” and thus ignore many measurements of IR absorptivity in the atmosphere which show that it is indeed a real effect.’
Those measurements are quoted out of context. It certainly looks like the greenhouse gas effect really is bogus. Global temperature has not increased for the last 15 years as even Pachauri of the IPCC reluctantly admits. At the same time atmospheric carbon dioxide level is highest in recorded history but it is having no effect on global temperature. According to what has been pounded into our heads, greenhouse warming is caused by carbon dioxide absorbing the outgoing long-wave radiation, converting this radiation to heat, and thereby warming the atmosphere. A very fine theory but it simply does not work in practice. It is based on the claims of Svante Arrhenius who showed that carbon dioxide absorbs radiation and therefore must heat the atmosphere. What is missing in this picture is the fact that there are two greenhouse gases that count, carbon dioxide and water vapor. They interact. IPCC tells us that their interaction consists of a positive feedback, one in which water vapor will increase the original warming that absorption by carbon dioxide creates, doubling or even tripling it. But it obviously is not doing anything like that now and has not been doing it for years (fifteen years to be precise). Why? The answer is very simple. That positive water vapor feedback peddled by the IPCC is an ad hoc addition to theory that is just plain wrong. When the full physics is analyzed, as Ferenc Miekolczi did, it turns out that water vapor feedback is negative, not positive as IPCC claims. As a result, presence of water vapor in the atmosphere actually blocks the effect of warming created by the absorption of OLR by carbon dioxide. That is why the presence of high amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not caused any warming at all for the last 15 years. And it is very likely that it never has caused any warming at all. All the past warming that is described to us as greenhouse warming is not caused by the greenhouse effect but has natural causes. If you have access to temperature records you can apply simple laws of physics and easily prove that no warming we have a record of within the last 100 years can be called greenhouse warming. High school physics is sufficient to do this exercise and I will leave the details for the reader to work out. And if you wonder why high-faluting climate scientists don’t know this the following quote from Jim Watson’s “Double Helix” seems to hit the nail on the head: “One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
Did someone say the mirror heats up ?
That would explain why the system temperature went up. You are changing the heat transfer characteristics of the whole system, by having a solid warmer mass close to the bulb.
If you can find a way of finding a reflector that doesn’t heat up, (or loses heat very quickly) you would get a different result.
In this case, this doesn’t explain why the bulb temperature went up, but in any event yes, if the bulb were surrounded by a vacuum followed by a shell of almost anything, the shell would warm up and then so would the bulb. Note well I said vacuum — no conduction or convection. This is precisely the thing that the slayers claim is impossible, because the surrounding shell will not heat up as much as the bulb — you still have a cooler thing “warming” a hotter thing.
Putting almost anything in between the earth/bulb and the 3 absolute “black body absorber” of the night sky will cause the earth/bulb to get hotter, because it does indeed change the heat transfer characteristics of the entire system. The Slayers simply want to “deny” that CO_2 is capable of changing the heat transfer characteristics of the Earth’s climate system in spite of direct spectrographic evidence that it does. Greater idiocy than this the Earth doth not provide…
rgb
Ok, try this, put the mirror the reverse way around, mirror side away from the bulb. I bet you get the same result as mirror side in. Its the mass of the mirror holding the heat in the system, and I bet the mirror many many times heavier than the filament and bulb.
I’m not saying anything about slayers or what ever, just that its a stupid experiment that doesn’t prove anything except that mass retains heat.
David, UK says:
May 27, 2013 at 1:39 pm
I think the word “slayers” is kicking comments into the must-be-approved bin.
My one line reply to you at 2:41 is hung up in moderation….
That positive water vapor feedback peddled by the IPCC is an ad hoc addition to theory that is just plain wrong. When the full physics is analyzed, as Ferenc Miekolczi did, it turns out that water vapor feedback is negative, not positive as IPCC claims. As a result, presence of water vapor in the atmosphere actually blocks the effect of warming created by the absorption of OLR by carbon dioxide. That is why the presence of high amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not caused any warming at all for the last 15 years.
All of which might well be true. But that has nothing to do with whether or not the GHE is real or exists, or whether it is responsible for any of the observed difference between the Earth’s temperature and the moon’s, or the theoretical greybody temperature. Ask Miekolczi whether or not the GHE is real. Ask Lindzen. Ask me. Ask Tim Ball. As any competent physicist (and yes, they do need to be competent).
It is one thing to claim that climate sensitivity and computation of feedbacks in climate models is incorrect. It is another to claim that CO_2 in our atmosphere has no effect whatsoever on temperature, independent of its concentration. It is especially silly to claim the latter when one has clear evidence in the form of TOA and BOA spectrographs that the atmosphere absorbs and blocks radiation in the outgoing direction and re-emits it back towards the surface of the earth in the other direction. On the surface of the Earth, there is always heat being radiated downward from the atmosphere, even on a clear, cold night. On the surface of the moon, that heat is not there. That is the difference between the Earth and the moon, and that difference is the Atmospheric Radiative Effect or Greenhouse Effect.
Is it complex? Sure. Difficult to compute? Absolutely. Is it real?
As real as the nose on your face. Look at the IR spectrographs in e.g. Perry, or published on WUWT. If you understand spectroscopy at all, you really need no more evidence.
rgb
bobl says:
May 24, 2013 at 5:30 pm
Thank you Richard, that’s exactly what I was trying to say, I was thinking about how energy lost from the surface, by convection is radiated to space, and whether CO2 partial pressure plays into the efficiency of that process.
1. CO2 molecule takes up energy through collision with non radiating gas
2. C02 molecule emits photon
——————————————————————————————
I see all of this as a function of the residence time of the energy involved. So a GHG DECREASES the residence time of energy received via collision from a non GHG, but can, 50% of the time, INCREASE the residence time of outgoing energy received from LWIR from the surface, by directing said energy back towards the surface.
Clearly, if the GHG cools the portion of energy in the upper atmosphere which contains convective and conducted heat, relative to a non GHG molecule, then conduction from below, as well as convection accelerates to higher elevation. Also, clearly a portion of the atmosphere which intercepts outgoing radiative energy, and keeps a portion of that energy within the atmosphere, causes warming with regard to radiating energy, decreasing convection and conduction from below.
An interesting thought experiment is what would happen in an atmosphere with zero GHG. According to radiation theory the atmosphere would be far cooler (some say 30 degrees) then the surface. However, then the hotter surface would CONTIUALLY NET CONDUCT to the atmosphere just above the surface, the atmosphere just above the surface would then cool by conducting energy to ever higher, and cooler, elevations within the atmosphere, and the lower atmosphere would then continually receive ever more energy via conduction from the surface. Eventually, as energy is never lost, the atmosphere would establish an equilibrium with the surface, the lapse rate would be set via the molecules per sq M with the T established, not by different vibration rates of each molecule, as they would equalize, but by the number of molecules hitting the measuring instrument. (the more mass per m2, the higher the specific heat per m2)
EVENTUALLY, in this non GHG world, you would not have back radiation to the surface, but “back conduction” to the surface, thereby increasing the specific heat above the S-B equation. In a non radiating, equalized with the surface convecting atmosphere, this would occur about 50 percent of the time. Night time cooling would be different in this non GHG world, as the atmosphere would be required to cool via back conduction to the surface, the surface then radiating the heat past the atmosphere to space. Changing the balance of GHG molecules, vs. non GHG molecules likely has a greater affect on WHEN and WHERE (lapse rate) the energy is, then the total energy.
Currrently CO2 molecules may , or may not?, receive more radiatiated energy then convected conducted energy, however this ratio of conducted energy vs radiated energy changes according to the ratio of GHG molecules. A non GHG atmosphere of equall density has almost exclusively conducted convective energy, making up for some or all of the radiative energy. On balance does adding a GHG increase or decrease the residence time of energy verses an atmosphere that must back conduct to the surface in order to cool? I certainly do not know the answer to this.
Please note the word eventually and consider that not all heat sinks fill at the same rate. A GHG atmosphere may heat more rapidly then a non GHG atmosphere, ( where the upwelling LWIR bypasses the atmosphere) yet OVER TIME, conduction and convection work effectively to establish an equilibrium with the surface T.
So this is my assertion, based on David’s Law of physics which reads, “Only two things can effect the energy content of any system in a radiative balance. Either a change in the input, or a change in the “residence time” of some aspect of those energies within the system.”
Comments welcome!
The mirror you are using is probably not a front surface mirror and the IR must go through the glass before being reflected back through the glass again. If the glass is not perfectly transparent to the IR, it absorbs some of the energy and consequently heats. A better mirror would be a polished sheet or plate of copper as such a mirror should cause an even greater temperature rise when used in your experiment. What would really be interesting is to repeat your experiment with a front surface mirror that is kept cool or even cold. Although it could not be below the dew point of the air in your home or the mirror will fog up. Your results should be nearly independent of the mirror’s temperature.
There are lots of ways to make the experiment better, but even as is it is good enough to be utterly convincing. After all, even if the foil warms it is never as warm as the bulb, and the Slayers have openly claimed that cooler objects can never radiatively warm warmer ones. Anthony’s experiment refutes this. Besides, it should be perfectly obvious to anyone but a religious fanatic on the issue that the observed effect has nothing to do with the temperature of the mirror.
Personally I think that the best way to conduct the experiment is to just put a small light bulb inside an over the counter thermos and screw down the lid. Small for a reason — the interior of the thermos will get very hot with any sort of light bulb. Use as a control an ordinary mason jar of roughly the same volume. Convection in both cases is then equally suppressed, and air is a lousy conductor (although vacuum would of course be better:-).
This experiment will work even better with a compact fluorescent bulb, since they emit more of the energy they consume in the visible band and heat less. So preventing the loss of visible light energy by reflecting it back onto the source will have a much more dramatic effect.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
May 27, 2013 at 1:57 pm
Great analogy!
The mirror is simply acting as an insulator, though inefficient and at a distance from the heat source.
Clamp a piece of rock-wool over the transparent face of the lamp and it will heat up and eventually explode.
The problem with the GREENHOUSE theory is the use of the word GREENHOUSE.
As is so often the case the emotive power of words are often used by activists to scare people.
Anyone who has ever walked out of the cool day into a hot greenhouse knows the feeling of stifling, un-natural heat and that is exactly what the Warmists want to convey.
Let’s all try to find another, more apposite term for the complex system of: insulation, absorption, reflection, conduction, convection, condensation, flow, freeze and thaw… which comprise the Earth’s amazing temperature regulation system.
On a more prosaic note I would like to repeat a challenge which someone posted into a Warmist comments stream. (I paraphrase)
“If CO2 at concentrations of 400ppm can trap/amplify sufficient infra-red energy to heat the entire atmosphere of the earth by .8 C, why do engineers not use pure CO2 in solar panel type arrays to capture and amplify infra red heat in sunny locations? This heat could then be used to drive steam turbines or other generating processes.”
@Arno Arrak –
The problem is that while the claimed feedback loop that results in excessive heating is so much junk. The skydragon folk are rejecting the GHG effect entirely. Simply because the AGW folk misused the theory and use a broken add on to it. By demonstrating that the feedback loop doesn’t function the way the AGW folk claim the skydragon crowd then claim that the entire theory is no good. The problem is that this is just as bad as the AGW folk embracing Greenhouse Gas and then using a failed model of feedback loops to do their predicting. Climate is a very complex system and you can not rip parts of it out and do a good job of figuring out what is going on. Just look at the mess that the AGW people are in now that they have spent 20+ years chasing down a wrong path and suppressing any other thought. The skydragon crowd are very much in danger of doing the exact same thing.
On the skydragon’s folks, [Note: I use skydragon because I don’t want to keep looking up Principia all the time to spell it. 😛 ], website they essentially challenge Anthony and Dr. Spencer by proposing this experiment. So if this experiment is so bad why in the world did they propose it and set it up this way.
The only correct way to counter experimental research is with experimental research. Pure theory is just that and pretty much pure fantasy until you have real world research backing it up. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for pure theory but if the theory doesn’t match what we can find there might just be a problem with the theory.
Anthony said: “I have just gotten word from the VP of an electronics company lab that they are doing this experiment as you and RGB describe, including measuring resistance.
I’ll have a detailed writeup later this week. We don’t need anyone to burn their house down to refute the slayer silliness.”
I have a feeling no matter what the results are, the slackers will likely say you did not understand, did it wrong again, something to move the goalposts again…
@ Charles. “Let’s all try to find another, more apposite term for the complex system of: insulation, absorption, reflection, conduction, convection, condensation, flow, freeze and thaw… which comprise the Earth’s amazing temperature regulation system.”
I’ll second and third and … as “n” tends to a very large number.
The words Greenhouse, and blanket do not belong in any rational discussion of the atmosphere.
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
May 27, 2013 at 3:01 pm
The radiation physics of CO2 are so that you need a column of 70 km of air with the double concentration from 280 to 560 ppmv to increase the temperature at the surface with ~1°C.
Most solar panels are not that thick, and even pure CO2 would loss its heat to the environment faster that what is extra captured…
There is only one atmospheric constituent that effectively changes the mass of any particular part of the atmosphere. ! dihydrogen monoxide.
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
May 27, 2013 at 3:01 pm
The mirror is simply acting as an insulator, though inefficient and at a distance from the heat source.
In the case of wrapping the bulb in aluminum foil, aluminum is a better conductor for heat than glass, thus hardly act as an insulator. Still the bulb gets much hotter…
the word greenhouse itself is offensive,
Greenhouse- warm air trapped in a glass house, hotter at the top than the bottom.
earth’s atmosphere. Do i need to continue.
Help wanted & needed.
Consider two volumes of air each containing 10,000 molecules at, let’s say, 1000 m above msl on a NH equinox, ignoring lesser trace gases & rounded to nearest whole molecule:
A) a cold, smaller, denser, drier volume in the arctic with 7803 molecules of N2, 2100 of O2, 93 of Argon, three of CO2 & one of water vapor, and
B) a warm, larger, less dense, wetter volume in the tropics with 7494 molecules of N2, 2016 of O2, 87 of Argon, three of CO2 & 400 of water vapor.
Now leave all conditions, eg insolation, albedo, pressure and initial temperature, the same, but double the concentration of CO2, making each volume a little more massive:
Aa) 7801 molecules of N2, 2099 of O2, 93 of Argon, six of CO2 & one of water vapor, and
Bb) 7492 molecules of N2, 2015 of O2, 87 of Argon, six of CO2 & 400 of water vapor.
I say that the extra CO2 & its feedback effects will cause the arctic volume to warm slightly & the tropic volume to cool, if not remain the same within measurement margin of error. IMO, the tropic level of water vapor swamps out, for want of a better term, any effect from the extra CO2 molecules absorbing IR. In the arctic case, the excited CO2 molecule will jostle its neighbors, as they all huddle together to stay warm. As it were.
At the new equilibrium state, an extra H2O molecule might join the arctic mix, humidifying the chilly scene, with its own feedback effects.
What have I failed to consider?
Please state if I am right, wrong or nuts. Thanks.
The experiment is well done, except that I don’t like the introduction of an un-powered heating device (iron). I would think PSI could make a claim about convection at this point also, although it would be very weak and would only result in an improvement in setup.
In my opinion, PSI needed to be rebutted because of they defocus the true climate discussion. Their existence detracts from the seriousness of the main-stream and well considered climate disagreement. The boys at RC are likely celebrating the distraction (because of their own version of advocacy) but the net will be to those of us who point out the problems on both ends of the activist spectrum and report the reasoned result of science which seems to point toward the middle of the road rather than planet-ending doom.
… but where are the mirrors in the sky? The clouds? Yes, it’s warmer on a cloudy night in winter. On a clear night, there is obviously no mirror because it gets bitterly cold. But then, is the GHE about clouds or is it more about a few CO2 molecules acting like the Earth’s thermostat, and a few more causing disaster?
The experiment proves the point at hand, but I also think Richard Verney and Bathes made some good points upthread. People are getting a bit too upset about all this, I suspect. Think I’ll have a Cognac and a sigar, while the warmists chew their popcorn.
Very nice and simple experiment to do Anthony. And while it isn’t perfect, I don’t wish to quibble with the imperfections since it is good enough to show the effect in a valid manner.
But I do want to take issue with the word “emissivity” as used in this sentence.
“While the emissivity of a glass mirror is high . . .”
Here you used the wrong word. The correct word would be “reflectivity”. In fact a mirror surface (particularly a highly reflective wideband reflecting surface) has a very LOW value of emissivity. And it MUST have a low value of emissivity in order to be an effective reflector.
On another note towards improving the experiment for others who wish to expend effort in this area I would recommend the following minor improvements:
1. Do not use a glass (second surface) reflector. Use a highly polished first surface metallic reflector or deposited metal film reflector. This will have a bandwidth that is not reduced by the characteristics of the glass. Most glass is quite poor in the thermal infrared region (8 to 14 microns). Good low loss material for windows and lenses in the thermal IR region is typically Germanium and quite expensive.
2. If possible use a surface shaped to scatter as little of the light bulb’s energy away from the bulb as possible. This could be something like a spun aluminum reflector for photographic lighting. And it would allow you to see the bulb’s surface through a central hole in the reflecting surface while the mirror was in place. An array of small flat mirrors could be used to do the same thing but it would be a lot of effort to support them.
3. Run the experiment twice starting from the bulb surface temperature at equilibrium at room temperature and running through Time=5 times the equilibrium time to elevated temperature. Once with the mirror and once without it. This would give two nice curves that could be plotted against each other.
and mass, the mirror must be as near massless as possible.
Question for my fellow posters here: is it possible that Joe Bastardi is right, or partly right – or right for the wrong reasons? I’m asking because I don’t know.
I do find the Oregon Petition statement about the nugatory effects of CO2 most compelling, however, as previously noted, and I haven’t read anything here that changes my mind on that.
I have watched the video and my conclusions are: a) the experiment does not prove the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC (back radiation warming effect) and b) it does not refute the statement “a light bulb facing a mirror does not heat up or shine brighter from its own radiation coming back“.
To prove the points requires not only demonstrating that the temperature changes, but also that the reason for the change is back radiation and not anything else. The experiment failed to demonstrate the latter.
The explanation is very simple. A mirror put so close to an object much hotter then the air in the room reduces convective cooling of the object by air. As a result, if there is no internal source of energy, the object will be cooled by the air at a lower rate. If there is an internal source of energy, the reduced cooling by the air will lead to a higher temperature. This is what reduced convection does.
Since reduced convection has a warming effect, and there was reduced convection in the experiment, the warming effect in the experiment can not be attributed to back radiation just like that. Of course, the alleged back radiation warming effect is not refuted by this experiment either, so the experiment simply failed to demonstrate what was intended to be demonstrated.
Going to those extremes shouldn’t be necessary. There’s data available showing that CO2 was many higher in the past with:
1. no runaway greenhouse
2. deep ice ages
Isn’t that enough? You appear to be on the side of proper science but you’re splitting hairs about smoke and mirrors. It’s pointless and churlish.
rgbatduke says: “They will claim that the iron was turned on so that the mirror was really hotter than 230 F.”
Jeff Condon says: “The experiment is well done, except that I don’t like the introduction of an un-powered heating device (iron).”
I concur, they can claim you pre-heated the iron. They an also claim you changed the ambient room temperature. You should of included a room temperature thermometer.
Robert Brown,
I like the way that you summarize many of your complicated and often subtle analyses as straight forward or even trivial. Are you by any chance related to Laplace? That said your analogies are quite ingenuous, and your reasoning is impeccable, but maybe only to another Physicist.
Also, you should of let the bulb fall back down to 208 before ending the video as they will claim it was actually heating up some of that temperature rise the rest of the time on it’ own.
johnsullivan says (May 27, 2013 at 8:39 am): “… anyone can post comments on the Principia Scientific International Forum – its freely available to to those who can be bothered to sign up for a free account.”
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John, your forum requires registration just to read. This is not OK. And it does not replaces comments below the articles. I think it is time you make comments possible.
When one wants to survive in a snow storm, does one sometimes not form a small cave like chamber in order to keep warm? Have not the Inuit people used igloos in the same manner for millenia?
How’s that work anyway?
Greg House says: May 27, 2013 at 3:56 pm
To prove the points requires not only demonstrating that the temperature changes, but also that the reason for the change is back radiation and not anything else. The experiment failed to demonstrate the latter.
——–
Perhaps you would like to comment on a setup I have developed to measure cool providing energy to hot object so hot with same power input gets hotter?
meant to give a link to current proposed setup for measuring “back radiation”
http://climateandstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/proposed-back-radiation-test-setup.html
When I was in engineering school, we called this stuff “Kitchen Physics”. The experiment was simple, and was designed to specifically test a suggested effect. Apparently, somebody’s hypothesis was falsified, and they are not happy. Now, the ball is in their court (Slayer’s) to execute an experiment that includes all their after-the-fact points, and prove their case with empirical evidence.
By the way, when has anyone suggested that the GHE in and of itself generates energy?
SImple test to see if energy is bounced by a mirror or not – take a Crookes Radiometer , shine a light on it, record the RPM with an appropriate gauge (electronic RPM gauge tools are readily available), then add a mirror so the light bounces back through the radiometer directly at the light source.
Does the radiometer speed up? I’m assuming it will, but this is an easy and quite visible test of the claim:
“Does shining a flashlight at a mirror so that all the radiation comes back to the flashlight make the flashlight shine brighter?”
Even simple CCD-based cameras are sensitive to near (shortwave) IR; I have a black and white camera CCD camera that is most sensitive to near (or shortwave) IR as emitted by LED IR emitters (iluminators.)
Perhaps some do, but these are NOT thermal imagers in the FLIR class utilizing cooled image plane sensors or linear arrays and a suitable back and forth scanning mirror system (in lieu of an X by Y thermal image plane sensor).
Of course not.
You had a simple ‘toy’ camera and display ‘system’ that ‘saw’ near (shortwave) IR as output by an illuminator, utilizing wavelengths that were just outside the normal range of human and animal sight, IOW, our eyeballs do not respond to those wavelengths. Also, objects close in temperature as normal room temperature do not emit much IR at the short wavelengths your toy operated at, so it saw NOTHING.
No.
They DO NOT ‘send a[n] IR signal, measure the reflection’. No!
That’s NOT how they operate.
They operate using exotic optics and ‘thermal’ sensors at the end of those optics to sense the LWIR emitted BY OBJECTS and THEIR FEATURES which they are aimed at.
No
That’s NOT how they operate.
Word salad; makes no reference to Electro-Magnetic wave ‘capture’ (or EM wave interaction with CO2’s moving/vibrating dipole-moment ‘charges’) which is the mechanism at play with CO2 and various wavelengths to which CO2 is responsive (‘resonant’) in its various vibratory or ‘resonant’ modes.
That looks to be an actual LW (longwave) thermal IR ‘camera’ probably using a cooled thermal “image plane” (or imager) to detect LW IR emergy as emitted by objects which are at ‘room temperature’ (and vicinity).
.
Joseph A Olson says: “Actually, my rather expensive, 1995 first generation “Night Owl Infrared Rifle Scope” was vastly superior to a $60 IR toy, but was returned for full refund when it could not amplify ambient IR to any useable level …”
They are two different devices. Your “Night Owl Infrared Rifle Scope” wasn’t a Infrared (IR / thermal) scope but a Night Vision scope. Night Owl products are night vision imagers; which are meant to intensify visible (and near-visible) light reflected off an object. From Night Owl manual: “Light (like moonlight or starlight) coming into the device from the direction of the object is gathered by the objective lens and focused onto the Image Intensifier Tube. The front of the Image Intensifier Tube contains a photocathode which converts light into electrons.”
What a IR (thermal) Scope does from FLIR’s web page: “FLIRs make pictures from heat, not visible light. Heat (also called infrared, or thermal, energy) and light are both parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a camera that can detect visible light won’t see thermal energy, and vice versa. Thermal cameras detect more than just heat though; they detect tiny differences in heat – as small as 0.01°C – and display them as shades of grey in black and white TV video.”
To clarify this: A Night Vision scope needs some weak visible light source to see a human. A FLIR scope can detect that human without any light source. For example: A FLIR scope can show a human’s foot prints (albeit rough pattern) after a human has walked through a carpeted area if done within a few seconds (longer with high-end models). A Night Vision scope simply can not.
Thus – No surprise you had to return Night Owl scope, you were trying to use it to do something it was not capable of doing. If you think your Night Owl scope was “rather expensive” at $250-$500, then you are in for sticker shock if you try to purchase a IR (thermal) scope, being their basic starting prices are $8,500.
Picture showing difference between Night Vision vs. Tthermal (FLIR) scope: http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/rAvnMYqj2c0/hqdefault.jpg
rgbatduke says:
May 27, 2013 at 2:54 p
“Personally I think that the best way to conduct the experiment is to just put a small light bulb inside an over the counter thermos and screw down the lid.”
__________________________________________________________________________
You are right of course, but my suggestion was intended as a very minor change to the exact set-up Anthony was using. But your idea of the best-set up brought to mind a similar set-up used for an entirely different experiment. A little off topic but the following may be of interest to some here who enjoy such things.
V. A. Kishkintsev, a Russian scientist, used a similar set-up to rgb’s “best way” to demonstrate the Eotvos Effect – the dependence of the weight of a mass of gas on its temperature and latitude. He used a light bulb to heat the gas inside a sealed dewar placed inside another container on a sensitive balance to monitor the weight. As the gas heats, the gravitational attraction for the mass of the contained gas changes in the order of 1 part in 100,000 per degree.
This tiny change in weight is due to the rotation of the earth as the change in centrifugal force on east bound gas molecules does not compensate perfectly for the force change on west bound ones, as that force is a function of velocity squared rather than linear. The dewar was needed to minimize and slow the temperature change on the outer surface of the container resulting in dimensional changes, affecting the container’s buoyancy in air which also affects the weight measurement.
F. Ross says (May 27, 2013 at 4:27 pm ): “When one wants to survive in a snow storm, does one sometimes not form a small cave like chamber in order to keep warm? Have not the Inuit people used igloos in the same manner for millenia? How’s that work anyway?
=========================================================
It works as a barrier between you and the air warmed by you inside and the colder air outside. The colder air outside can not reach you and cool you by conduction and convection.
25 W and lower bulbs are generally ‘vacuum’ filled … that used to be the norm anyway.
.
@F. Ross:
As you surely know, like most thermal shelters, a snow house or cave acts to insulate its occupants, keeping heat in & cold out. That is, it interrupts convection. The snow is at 32 F while the air temperature outside, especially with wind chill, could be much colder.
Please excuse my Alaskan chauvinism however to point out that the Inupiat people of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas also build igloos. While the Inuit of Canada & Greenland speak mutually intelligible dialects, Greenlanders can’t understand Inupiaq, although the languages are closely related. I don’t know, & maybe no one does, which group invented the igloo in its advanced form.
The other group of Alaskan (& Siberian) Eskimos, the Yupik of the Bering Sea, however don’t often use igloos & speak a less closely related language.
Is this the ‘house’ comedy act scheduled for 7:00 hour (locally; it’ll be 7 PM here shortly)?
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“The experiment was simple, and was designed to specifically test a suggested effect.”
Very badly designed, by someone with little understanding of the effects of thermal mass.
It has not falsified any hypothesis, nor has it proven it. Its a NON-experiment for its purpose.
Joseph A Olson says: ” The IR thermal image systems used by law enforcement and the military far exceed the $60 IR toys, which do send a IR signal,”
“$60 IR toys” do not send an IR signal and Law Enforcement / Military IR (thermal) do not send an IR signal. As Anthony correctly stated both are passive devices.
With regard to “$60 IR toys”, from WiKi – “An infrared thermometer is a thermometer which infers temperature from a portion of the thermal radiation sometimes called blackbody radiation emitted by the object being measured. They are sometimes called laser thermometers if a laser is used to help aim the thermometer, or non-contact thermometers or temperature guns, to describe the device’s ability to measure temperature from a distance.”
@ Olaf Koenders
What is “churlish” ~ a) rude, boorish, miserly, vulgar, b) Medieval peasant
….is the Medieval premise that a single human caused parameter has a linear effect on a vast, dynamic and chaotic system that is never in equilibrium. To foist this vulgar fable requires a population with a miserly understanding of reality. Replying to some of the above, Joe Bastardi is correct, CO2 has a Specific Gravity of 1.5, more than standard air at 1.0 [assigned] and a Specific Heat of 0.8, less than standard air at 1.0 [assigned]. The en.wikipedia.org/wiki/infrared page has a greenhouse gas schematic showing 168 w/m^2 solar, 324 w/m^2 from GHE, so some folks, at one time believed in this magic doubling, and some still do. On the availability of ambient IR, first generation night scopes had x1,000 power, second x20,000 and third x50,000 power, yet all still required supplemental IR light, even using the full 700 nm to 1mm IR range, not just the narrow CO2 band. You point a remote read IR meter at the sky, eventually it his dust, or returns weak/no signal, so you get the lowest display range temp, -18C. Point an remote IR meter at a cloud in the sky you get a reflected signal, warmer than-18C, but still lower than the temperature of the Earth below, unless during a rare inversion. The cloud mass delays cooling, but delayed cooling is not warming. That an errant branch of science evolved on a false premise, designed to promote Carbon commodity markets is Medieval misdirection by Wall Street and our easily misled government, lap dog media and toe licking education system. We have a full spectrum of forcings yet to discover, along with amplifications and bufferings. Hopefully we will have a open and free internet for these much needed discussions.
Humble Science Monk
Anthony – Very intriguing experiment – Thank you for performing it and sharing the results! If you’re game, I’d be very interested in seeing the same experiment run, but with a thermal absorber, rather than a reflector. I would suggest a piece of aluminum sheet (highly thermally conductive) painted on both sides with high-temperature flat black paint. I think this would more closely resemble the mechanism that CO2 exhibits in the atmosphere. Cloud cover would act like a mirror, but CO2 would be a black body for the 15 micron stuff.
For your next act, how are you going to get out of the “wrapping-a-light-bulb-in-aluminum-foil” gambit?
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Jeff Condon says: ‘In my opinion, PSI needed to be rebutted because of they defocus the true climate discussion. Their existence detracts from the seriousness of the main-stream and well considered climate disagreement.”
You bring up an aspect of PSI that is bothersome. Is PSI a covert attempt by ManBearPig types to discredit those who have rejected man-made CO2 Global Warming? Attempt to get those who disagree with AGW to go along with a premise that proponents of AGW will eventually soundly refute, then via pro-AGW media publicize the heck out of.
Sounds tin-foil hat, until you consider a past attempt to discredit “Skeptics” (NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science by Stephan Lewandowsky) as discussed here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/01/paging-dr-stephan-lewandowsky-show-your-invitation-list/
Poptech says (May 27, 2013 at 4:01 pm): “I concur, they can claim you pre-heated the iron. They an also claim you changed the ambient room temperature. You should of included a room temperature thermometer.”
The FLIR would have detected a heated iron (it did detect Anthony’s arm). Also, the hot spot on the back of the mirror would have been iron-shaped.
If increased room temp raised the lamp temperature, then Anthony must have blown a lot of cold air at the lamp the instant he took the mirror away. 🙂
Nice experiment Anthony.
A much simpler experiment to show that radiant energy from a cool object can increase the temperature of a warm object is something almost every kid has tried.
On a warm and sunny day ( say 25C ) you take a magnifying glass and a piece of paper. Both of which are at ambient temperature. Now focus the Sun’s rays onto the paper to the smallest dot you can. You will, as we all know, quickly see the paper begin to smolder. It has raised the temperature of the paper to ( at least ) over 200C. Despite the fact that the magnifying glass is still at 25C. An object at the same temperature as the paper has dramatically raised the temperature of the paper.
Now, replace the magnifying glass with a focusing mirror such as those used in telescopes. You keep the mirror covered until you start the experiment so that is does not heat up above ambient temperature. You have of course already set the paper at the correct focal length.
The moment you uncover the mirror, you will have smoking paper from a mirror that is at 25C.
As, I think rgb said, photons don’t know anything about temperature. Whether they are radiated by a CO2 or water molecule and hit the Earth or are concentrated by a lens or mirror, they all heat the surface they hit.
/ikh
Anthony, there’s something these fools fail to acknowledge:
Paramedics often wrap cold/shock patients in aluminised mylar. If the IR reflective properties of that aluminium were zero, they’d use clear plastic instead because it would be cheaper.
We find it is also warmer on a clear but *humid* night (in comparison to a dry one) … as we all recall, CO2 is not the only GHG …
The “sla yers” fail in a really big way when it comes to arguing against this effect.
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Greg House says (May 27, 2013 at 3:56 pm): “The explanation is very simple. A mirror put so close to an object much hotter then the air in the room reduces convective cooling of the object by air.”
So if the experiment is done in a vacuum chamber, and the lamp temp still increases in the presence of the mirror, then this would demonstrate that so-called “back radiation” is responsible? Or do you have some other objections that you haven’t shared with us yet?
I love experiments. I would request some intermediate hold/elevator music during the quiet times however 😉
Kinda trying to do that old BASF thing >
Your model still doesn’t work. It’s as flawed as your claims of “CO2 cools the atmosphere” or a “cooler object can’t radiate to add heat to warmer object”
==========
Anthony I enjoyed your experiment. That is how science is supposed to be conducted. Galileo’s Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment didn’t require a supercomputer, yet it stood the science of nearly 2000 years on its head.
One quibble. CO2 does cool the atmosphere. Some of the energy removed in cooling the atmosphere is then radiated back to the surface where it heats the surface. Otherwise, if CO2 didn’t cools that atmosphere it would need to generate energy out of nothing to warm the surface.
Consider this, when you placed the mirror in front of the light, everything behind the mirror started to cool.
You are measuring the attainment of steady state, and the level of the steady state with and without mirror. This is actually a quite sophisticated experiment.
At steady state, influx and efflux are equal, and we love to be able to switch one or the other off to be able to measure both.
What I would have also done is allow the system to come to steady state, and then switch off the power, measuring the initial cooling rate. This is a measure of efflux. Repeat with mirror in place and you would have observed a slower rate of cooling. This difference in the two rates is your back-radiation.
AndyG55 says:
May 27, 2013 at 4:56 pm
Very badly designed, by someone with little understanding of the effects of thermal mass.
Anthony assembled the components and ran the experiment precisely the way it was defined to him. Heat was added to the light bulb by back-radiation. Most people would say that the hypothesis of back-radiation not causing the light bulb to take on additional heat was falsified. This may or may not have anything to do with the greenhouse effect in your opinion, but you are free to conduct your own physical experiments along those lines.
Darren Potter says:
Or, is it a covert attempt by skeptics to make themselves look good by making it seem that they are not occupying some extreme end of the scientific spectrum but only a middle ground between extremes on both sides, as expressed in posts like this…
Jeff Condon says:
As I said.
I suggest Anthony re-do the experiment in 2 ways.
1. with the mirror facing away.
2. use a very low mass mirror, eg alfoil or similar, and blow a fan on the back of the alfoil to keep it at room temperature.
@ Anthony
“Sometimes I wonder if you guys have some sort of mental block on these simple physics basics, some have suggested that your claims are so absurd that your organization is a “plant” to make rational skeptics look ridiculous like Lewandowsky and company.” -A
Anthony,
I firmly hold this view and have yet to find any solid information to contradict it. I believe the appropriate term is “Assault Clown”. The anonymity of the Internet has allowed the Alinsky Method to be modified such that “Change Agents” can now be supplemented with “Anti-change Agents”
“Snowstormers” and “Sleepers” are also used on other blogs and forums.
A microbolometer is able to measure infra-red radiation coming from a body that is cooler than itself. In other words the LWIR from a cold body is arriving at the warmer microbolometer sensor and being measured. This, on its own, is enough to disprove the idea that radiation from a cooler body cannot affect a warmer one. These guys really are totally clueless!!!
Its kind of cute for this piece to begin with “we’re not going to argue with the Slayers BUT … here’s all the reasons why they are wrong…”. The slayers are probably going to turn out to be right. WUWT needs to decide how deep a hole they feel like digging for themselves. The political ploy of going along with AGW backradiation theory in order to seem moderate is a Faustian contract that scientifically will get no-one anywhere except further into the wilderness and fiasco of the AGW error. You cant just sweep the second law of thermodynamics under the carpet with some snarky comments and think that puts the issue to rest. Prigogine’s nonlinear thermodynamics of dissipative structures also supports the Slayer’s thesis. Predjudice on this or any other scientific question is not going to change anything.
paulus says:
Why do I get the impression you intend that to be read ironically? I.e. that you are either claiming that no such GCOs exist, or that their obvious nonexistence indicates some kind of mistake in the experiment?
In fact cavemen knew that this effect is real, and they used it: Light a wood fire and try keeping it alight without setting pieces of wood against each other to create a cavern in which the temperature can build. Yes, this combines both air trapment and heat reflection, but it works even when the air flow is fierce, so the heat reflection is significant.
Or consider how much brighter a car headlamp is compared to if it didn’t have a parabolic reflector behind it.
In fact I would go as far as to say that this effect is almost a logical necessity simply by considering the geometry of the case.
In his update, Anthony writes, “I’ve never made a doubling claim like that, nor am I aware that any of the others named have claimed a doubling, only that some energy will be returned, as I have just proven in the “simplest” mirror experiment postulated by Siddons.”
In Willis Eschenbach’s “Steel Greenhouse” articles, assuming black body emitters and a spherical shell insignificantly larger than the actively heated sphere it encloses, the sphere radiates twice as much power with the shell as it does without. This is the optimum case, of course, as the effect of the shell diminishes with distance from the sphere, just as the effect of Anthony’s mirror would decrease with increasing distance from the lamp.
phlogiston says (May 27, 2013 at 7:00 pm): “Predjudice on this or any other scientific question is not going to change anything.”
Exactly. So why haven’t the so-called “slayers” done the definitive experiment that would prove them right and disprove the entire basis of the so-called “greenhouse effect”? They write endlessly, but do nothing. Pretty suspicious, no?
Bob says (May 27, 2013 at 6:31 pm): “Heat was added to the light bulb by back-radiation.”
=======================================================
This conclusion is not supported by the experiment, because reduced convection led to the change in temperature. Whether there was some alleged effect of back radiation too or not can not be concluded, see my comment above.
joeldshore says:
May 27, 2013 at 6:33 pm
…
Or, is it a covert attempt by skeptics to make themselves look good by making it seem that they are not occupying some extreme end of the scientific spectrum but only a middle ground between extremes on both sides, as expressed in posts like this…
——————
Welcome to the wild wild world of nefarious conspiracy ideation Joel! Isn’t it just plain neat?!? 🙂
Careful though. The Great Eye (of Lew) is ever watchful… You might get miscategorized you keep up that sort of thing.
Hey BTW, while you often irritate me beyond all reason when I don’t agree with you (you know, all of those cases where I’m totally right and you’re totally wrong :p ) you did good work over at Roy Spencers in the comments, thanks and kudos.
If the filament became hotter it would shine brighter – it didn’t because heat travels from hot to cold! Redirecting heat to cooler surroundings and measuring this is irrelevant.
There is a fortune to be made if I am wrong. How about an IR receiver that on its bottom side absorbs the 390 W/m2 radiated from the surface of the Earth, and on its top side absorbs the 330 W/m2 (approx) from the atmosphere. That’s 720 W for a one sq m receiver – could run my whole house on a 2 -3 sq meter array (night and day)…….
Greg House says May 27, 2013 at 7:26 pm
Light bulb covered in foil, Greg – what will be ‘your out’ on that (what conditions, what effects will you choose to attempt to void that experiment) ?
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Con spir acy theory much? When it comes to ‘some things’ Joel, there isn’t enough money to make someone (a stooge shall we say) look foolish beyond reason, but Joel D. Shore THINKS he has found that someone: The Slayers. Paid-off by those receiving those Big Oil paychecks to adopt a position BEYOND reason. No, Joel, that kind of darkness requires total commitment on behalf of the ‘oddball’ proponents and adherents, in the face of all manner of logic and ‘demonstration’ (using that word in the ‘old’ sense: a presentation open for examination by all.)
BTW Joel, are you allowed into their site to (“Are you now, or have you ever been a member of … ?“), um, to debate, discuss or dissuade them in their ‘pursuit of total madness’ as you would seem to be attempting to do here almost daily?
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Conditions indeed. One has to careful about the conductivity of the “foil”. I knew a college frat that thought that if he put aluminum foil between his butt and a bottle rocket he would be spared the object lesson. I am sure that he has moved up and on to PSI and their advanced physics program.
Ferdinand Engelbeen May 27, 2013 at 1:51 pm:
rgbatduke May 27, 2013 at 2:14 pm,
It is. The filament is at a really high temperature, like 3000C. So, for the outside of the bulb to go from 80C to 120 C is not a big change. The fact that the glass is only 80C shows how well air convection removes heat from it.
Air will touch every part of the bulb evenly, whereas the foil touches the globe in parts, and would have air pockets in other parts. Yes aluminium is a better physical conductor than glass, but the actual heat conduction may vary depending on how well you put the foil on, how smooth the foil is, etc.
It could also be due to a change in emissivity of the foil compared to the components of the bulb.
Greg,
I don’t think convection is the issue. What has happened is that you have introduced a large (relatively) heat sink/source into the system. Now a light buld has a heat balance between its filament and the local temperature, so if the local temperature is changed by the addition of a very large object, that is absorbing and radiating the lights heat, then the temperature gradient is changed and the filament must raise itself to a higher balanced temperature.
I suspect that you could have a piece of anything of the same thermal mass, and the temperature change would be similar. That is why I suggest reversing the mirror.
Thing is CO2 in the atmosphere DOES NOT add any thermal mass, only one atmospheric substance does that. H2O.
Jim, by wrapping a light buld in foil, you are massively changing its cooling characteristics by interupting radiative, convective and conductive cooling. Why to you think they wrap chill patients in foil, to reduce temperature loos, and let the body build up heat.
Greg House says: “This conclusion is not supported by the experiment, because reduced convection led to the change in temperature.”
Anthony has provided sufficient information for you to duplicate his experiment. Thus feel free to repeat experiment whereby you attempt prove your claim that “reduced convection led to the change in temperature” instead of reflectivity of the mirror.
1) Repeat experiment as defined to closely duplicate Anthony’s results and set a baseline.
2) Repeat experiment using non-reflective (IR thermal transparent) barrier which blocks air movement (reduces convection) in place of mirror.
3) Repeat experiment as defined, except suspend mirror, instead of setting mirror on ironing board so that air can flow past the mirror (convection of air from below mirror, past mirror’s sides, to above mirror).
4) Repeat experiment as described in #3, except use same non-reflective barrier used in #2.
Then report back on results.
Are you Greg House, or has he appointed you power of attorney?
Are you answering for all Dragon Sla yers? You are sounding unusually reasonable (for a change) … but how long is this going to last? How long before Greg comes back in here unsupervised making wild claims again?
We can’t wait …
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richard smith says: May 27, 2013 at 11:08 am
>This test measures the temp of the bulb surface. It does not
>establish that reflecting radiation back to the source (the filament)
>increases the power output of the source. The ghg theory claims
>that downwelling IR causes the source of the IR, the earth’s surface,
>to emit more power – this is what siddons is taking issue with.
I would like to add:
Adding a mirror to a light bulb increases its temperature, not its
*net* power output. (Output of what gets past the mirror.) The mirror
causes the lightbulb to get hotter and produce more heat production
(mostly radiant). Physically-required lack of increase of heat
production is limited to the universe, which includes the shadow of
the mirror.
Something else I want to add: The thermodynamics law requiring
radiative heat transfer from hotter to cooler only applies to *net*
heat flow. When 2 objects thermally radiatively transfer photons
to each other, “the law” only requires *net* heat flow being from
hotter to colder.
When a photon is emitted, its emitter typically does not know the
temperature of what the photon was emitted towards.
When an object absorbs a photon and converts the photon’s
energy to usually heat, the absorbing object usually does not
know the temperature of the photon source.
Radiative heat transfer between 2 objects is a 2-way street. The
famous physics law only requires *net traffic flow* to be from hotter
to colder.
Adding a tollgate to the radiative roadway from Earth’s surface
to outer space *does* make Earth warmer. The thermodynamics
laws only require Earth to be cooler than the sun and warmer than
the face of the edge of the universe. And that my hypothesized
atmospheric tollgate has to be warmer than the edge of the
universe, and cooler than Earth’s surface.
Surely, no laws of physics including thermodynamics say that
you can’t make yourself warmer with blankets or clothes that
are cooler than your body. “The Laws” only require direction
of *net heat flow*. The fundamental laws of thermodynamics
say nothing about speed of heat flow, or “thermal resistance”.
BTW, your answer was not very clear.
Remember, it’s the Slay ers denying (like yourself? I don’t know which camp you’re claiming as ‘home’ ATTM) the effect raised humidity has on a clear night in allowing nighttime temperatures to ‘fall’ more or less depending on that humidity level … you ever take a meteo course? Probably not … a lot of folk ought to avail themselves of a basic course or two and cover these subject before propounding ‘so many things that just aren’t so’ on a regular basis …
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phlogiston says:
May 27, 2013 at 7:00 pm
======
So, we’ve got:
Cute, holes, Faustian contract’s, wilderness and fiasco.
Leading into the big hit, wait for it…..
“Prigogine’s nonlinear thermodynamics of dissipative structures ”
—-
If you have something to say, just say it.
All this dancing around, only distracts.
AndyG55 says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:30 pm
“Thing is CO2 in the atmosphere DOES NOT add any thermal mass…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_mass
(If you have a better definition, please feel free.)
What does that even mean? In the next fragment you say, “…only one atmospheric substance does that. H2O.”. You do understand the vibrational behavior of CO2 and H2O are not that dis-similar? Yes, the concentrations of CO2 vs. H20 (atmospheric) are very different, but you are saying no to one and yes to another when these molecular structures are mostly same regardless if it is the oxygens or hydrogens twitching. These “twitchings” are a great importance to even the oil and gas industry with micro-Raman analysis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy
Donald L. Klipstein says (May 27, 2013 at 8:48 pm): “*net* heat flow. … “the law” only requires *net* heat flow being from hotter to colder … emitter typically does not know the temperature of what the photon was emitted towards … Radiative heat transfer between 2 objects is a 2-way street.”
======================================================
“The law” as it has been known historically, does not contain any reference to any “net” thing or “2-way street” or anything like that between a colder and a warmer bodies.
Even on the theoretical level the idea “cold has a warming effect on warm too” leads under certain conditions to an absurd outcome, namely to endless mutual warming without any additional input of energy, and is therefore absurd itself.
Donald L. Klipstein says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Adding a tollgate to the radiative roadway from Earth’s surface to outer space *does* make Earth warmer.
========
You could argue that it makes the earth’s surface warmer. In doing so it must make something else cooler. Otherwise energy has been created out of thin air.
Since the incoming at outgoing energy must be constant at equilibrium, the warming of the surface can only occur if the atmosphere is made cooler.
In the absence of GHG, the atmosphere must be the same temperature as the surface. With GHG that atmosphere must be cooler than the surface, and this cooling of the atmosphere provides additional energy to warm the surface.
Having said this, there is still something fundamentally wrong with the GHG theory, because it predicts that there will be a net warming of the atmosphere – which simply cannot be – because it would require energy to be manufactured from nothing.
This is the reason there is no tropical hotspot, because adding GHG warms the surface by cooling the atmosphere, but gravity limits this cooling because air can only fall so fast, no matter how much it cools.
Thus, no matter how much GHG you add to the atmosphere, once GHG exceeds a critical point, gravity prevents more energy from being extracted from the atmosphere to heat the surface than can be provided by the force of gravity acting on the mass of the atmosphere.
The dry air lapse rate proves that the atmosphere is already at the point where adding more GHG cannot increase the warming of the surface. No matter how much GHG you add, the dry air lapse rate will not increase further.
Sound like MORE nonsense Joseph; from all that you’ve written about you’re mixing ‘night scopes’ and FLIR together in the mind-blender and rendering a near continuous stream of gibberish and misinformation.
Say, you’re not into that ‘free energy’ from magnets and the like are you? You don’t think Maxwell and Roentgen got it all wrong – do you? Maybe best to avoid that topical field in the future, and cut out viewing those YouTube vids on that subject as well …
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richard says: May 27, 2013 at 12:33 pm
>> This happens at the ERL– the effective radiating level. When you
>> increase GHGs you raise the ERL.
>what about the desert at night
Beware of being in a desert at night, especially in a location more
rural than Las Vegas, and especially when the soil is sandy.
The temperature at night in many deserts drops almost like a bomb.
H2O is the biggest greenhouse gas on Earth, and I hope there is
open and honest debate as to how much its presence and effect
changes, in response to increase of CO2.
“Only two things can effect the energy content of any system in a radiative balance. Either a change in the input, or a change in the “residence time” of some aspect of those energies within the system.”
I see all of this as a function of the residence time of the energy involved. So a GHG DECREASES the residence time of energy received via collision from a non GHG, but can, 50% of the time, INCREASE the residence time of outgoing energy received from LWIR from the surface, by directing said energy back towards the surface. So to solve such a riddle we need to know how much of the energy GHGs encounter is conducted / convected, and how much is radiated from the surface. We need to know how much ADDITIONAL conducted energy would exisit in a non GHG world, to make up for the backradiating GHGs. (a lot) And of course the rest of te feedbacks are very complicates, IE how much of the back radiation is converted to evaporation, cloud cover, reflectivit, an accelerated water cycle, greater convection, causing greater amounts of convected molecules to tranfer conducted non GHG enegy to GHG molecules, (cooling) etc.
Clearly, if the GHG cools the portion of energy in the upper atmosphere which contains convective and conducted heat, relative to a non GHG molecule, then conduction from below, as well as convection accelerates to higher elevation. Also, clearly a portion of the atmosphere which intercepts outgoing radiative energy, and keeps a portion of that energy within the atmosphere, causes warming with regard to radiating energy, decreasing convection and conduction from below.
An interesting thought experiment is what would happen in an atmosphere with zero GHG. According to radiation theory the atmosphere would be far cooler (some say 30 degrees) then the surface. However, then the hotter surface would CONTIUALLY NET CONDUCT to the atmosphere just above the surface, the atmosphere just above the surface would then cool by conducting energy to ever higher, and cooler, elevations within the atmosphere, and the lower atmosphere would then continually receive ever more energy via conduction from the surface. Eventually, as energy is never lost, the atmosphere would establish an equilibrium with the surface, the lapse rate would be set via the molecules per sq M with the T established, not by different vibration rates of each molecule, as they would equalize, but by the number of molecules hitting the measuring instrument. (the more mass per m2, the higher the specific heat per m2)
EVENTUALLY, in this non GHG world, you would not have back radiation to the surface, but “back conduction” to the surface, thereby increasing the specific heat above the S-B equation. In a non radiating, equalized with the surface convecting atmosphere, this would occur about 50 percent of the time. Night time cooling would be different in this non GHG world, as the atmosphere would be required to cool via back conduction to the surface, the surface then radiating the heat past the atmosphere to space. Changing the balance of GHG molecules, vs. non GHG molecules likely has a greater affect on WHEN and WHERE (lapse rate) the energy is, then the total energy.
Currrently CO2 molecules may , or may not?, receive more radiatiated energy then convected conducted energy, however this ratio of conducted energy vs radiated energy changes according to the ratio of GHG molecules. A non GHG atmosphere of equall density has almost exclusively conducted convective energy, making up for some or all of the radiative energy. On balance does adding a GHG increase or decrease the residence time of energy verses an atmosphere that must back conduct to the surface in order to cool? I certainly do not know the answer to this.
Please note the word eventually and consider that not all heat sinks fill at the same rate. A GHG atmosphere may heat more rapidly then a non GHG atmosphere, ( where the upwelling LWIR bypasses the atmosphere) yet OVER TIME, conduction and convection work effectively to establish an equilibrium with the surface T.
So this is my assertion, based on David’s Law of physics which reads, “Only two things can effect the energy content of any system in a radiative balance. Either a change in the input, or a change in the “residence time” of some aspect of those energies within the system.”
Greg not understanding the existence (let alone the intricacies) of EM (Electro-Magnetic) energy in the radiative transfer of what we would term ‘thermal’ (LWIR) energy would explain his continued behavior; his neighbor’s dog doesn’t have any grasp of the EM domain either … sort of a ‘cargo cult’ attitude must exist, one turns a knob, the TV comes on, and a picture appears on the screen – one need not understand the underlying applied science(s) or one IOTA of ElectroMagnetics to buy, operate and enjoy a TV (or radio) set, but it would help a bit if -and when- arguing the finer points of radiative energy transfer …
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David says (May 27, 2013 at 9:16 pm): “An interesting thought experiment is what would happen in an atmosphere with zero GHG.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/12/what-if-there-was-no-greenhouse-effect/
How does frost form, Morris, when air temperatures might still be hovering around 35 deg F.?
How come that same frost doesn’t form when clouds form (or move in) overhead? Bear in mind the temperature ‘up there’ (in the clouds) can be well below freezing too.
Not saying you’re wrong, just that there is more to consider overall (like radiative energy transfer which occurs in the EM or ElectroMagnetic domain at various wavelengths versus simply ‘vibrating molecules’ -as in a solid- ‘bumping’ into each other at a more or less rapid rate as the temperature changes.)
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[snip – take your ad hom claims of amateurish elsewhere, like over to Principia, where the experiment was designed – mod]
I see lots of insult flying around – don’t think that contributes much to anything.
How about this.
209 degrees F is more than 98 degrees C or 371 Kelvin. The flux emitting from the glass is of the order of 1080 Watts per square metre.
At the end the temperature was 228 degrees F or about 109 degrees C or 382 K. The flux emitting from the glass is of the order of 1208 Watts per square metre.
With the mirror so close to the glass of the bulb the reflection back has to be far in excess of 50%.
If 1079 W/square metre plus say 50% or more can induce a mere 10 K increase in temperature I’d say that goes a long way to proving that it is invalid to sum 2 distinct radiation fluxes and use that sum to calculate a valid temperature.
1079 plus say 50% gives a sum of ~1619 Watts per square metre which should induce a temperature of ~411 K – or ~280 degrees F – almost 30 K or 62 degrees F lower than recorded.
If an object at 209 degrees F, 98 degrees C or 371 Kelvincan only produce 10 K increase what chance … – well I’ll leave that unfinished.
Sorry “lower” should be “higher”.
Joseph A Olson says: “On the availability of ambient IR, first generation night scopes had x1,000 power, second x20,000 and third x50,000 power, yet all still required supplemental IR light, even using the full 700 nm to 1mm IR range, ”
Why do you insist a Night Vision scope requires supplement IR light when Night Vision scope functions primarily in visible light range (aka starlight moonlight).
Why do you keep mixing Night Vision scopes with IR Thermal (FLIR) scopes?
Do you not understand Night Vision and FLIR scopes are functionally different, have different purposes, and provide user with different information?
Gary Hladik says:
May 27, 2013 at 7:26 pm
Exactly. So why haven’t the so-called “slayers” done the definitive experiment that would prove them right and disprove the entire basis of the so-called “greenhouse effect”? They write endlessly, but do nothing. Pretty suspicious, no?
===
They did.
They waited 20 years, and with CO2 levels raging upward, contrary to ALL your predictions,
it cooled.
That is i.m.p.o.s.s.i.b.l.e. with GHE hypothesis.
The bulb was a whole 3 inches from the mirror, so there’s no loss in convection at all. In fact, the surface temp of the bulb is only lowered by the convection that touches the bulb surface.
Further, any reduced space around a curved surface creates a venturi, increasing airspeed and therefore convection.
[snip – take it to the slayers for designing a flawed experiment then – mod]
Rosco says (May 27, 2013 at 10:00 pm): “With the mirror so close to the glass of the bulb the reflection back has to be far in excess of 50%.”
Look at the video again. Before the mirror is added, say at about 6:00, we see the light illuminating part of the desk. This is of course only part of a hemisphere of illumination that won’t be reflected back to the lamp by the flat mirror.
At about 12:30, with the mirror in place, Anthony moves the camera, and at several angles we see light coming directly from the lamp to the camera, and reflected off the mirror to the camera; none of this is reflected to the lamp. Note also that reflected light from the mirror is illuminating the wall behind the apparatus, not the lamp. Moreover, as revealed by the hot spot behind the mirror, much of the lamp’s radiation heats the mirror, which then loses heat by convection and by radiation both toward and away from the lamp.
So it’s not at all obvious that “far in excess of 50%” of the lamp’s radiation is reflected back to itself. If anything, the experiment shows that only a small fraction of the lamp’s radiated energy is returned by the mirror.
To measure the power actually reflected to the lamp, presumably the experimenter could reduce power to the lamp until its temperature with mirror matches its temperature without. The difference should approximate the effective reflected power.
Donald L. Klipstein says
Compared to moist places, the desert’s lack of water vapor maximizes the adiabatic lapse rate. Heat from the surface is lost to space at an increased rate due to the increased vertical temperature gradient of the air, which in turn increases vertical convection, etc. A second possible reason is that the dry desert air feels cooler to a human. Greenhouse effect not required.
Steven R Vada says (May 27, 2013 at 10:20 pm): “They waited 20 years, and with CO2 levels raging upward, contrary to ALL your predictions,
it cooled.
That is i.m.p.o.s.s.i.b.l.e. with GHE hypothesis.”
Wow! What a great laboratory experiment!
So what happened on their control Earth? 🙂 🙂
[snip – Mr. Watts has made no claims of being an expert in radiometery as you assert, he’s simply replicated an experiment to show how it is problematic. If you don’t like the premise of the experiment, complain to the slayers as it is their design, but don’t make false claims about Mr. Watts because you have issues with claims he has not made. – mod]
H2O adds thermal mass because of condensation to a liquid.
CO2 does not alter the mass of any part of the atmosphere.
Gary Hladik says:
May 27, 2013 at 9:21 pm
David says (May 27, 2013 at 9:16 pm): “An interesting thought experiment is what would happen in an atmosphere with zero GHG.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/12/what-if-there-was-no-greenhouse-effect/
———————————————————————————————————————-
Gary,
Now that Anthony has effectively trashed the arguments of the PSI Assault Clowns, perhaps it is possible to discuss the real critical flaws in the failed radiative GHE hypothesis.
Dr. Spencer has got it wrong. Most of what he writes in the linked post is correct. In particular the critical role of radiative gases in tropospheric convective circulation. Dr. Spencer is also correct in saying that other than a near surface layer with substantial temperature variation, most of a non radiative atmosphere would trend to isothermal. However Dr. Spencer has made two critical mistakes, which combined invalidate the whole hypothesis.
The first mistake is assuming that the earth’s surface would have a substantially lower Tav under a non radiative atmosphere. As Anthony has shown by empirical experiment, reflected LWIR can slow the cooling rate of materials. My empirical experiments several years back at the Talkshop showed the same. However, my empirical experiments also showed that incident LWIR has no significant effect on the cooling rate of water that is free to evaporatively cool. This means that DWLWIR has no significant effect on the cooling rate of 71% of the earth’s surface. Surface Tav would be lower under a non radiative atmosphere, but not 33C lower.
Dr. Spencer’s most critical mistake is in claiming that other than the near surface layer in a non radiative atmosphere that – “The rest of the atmosphere would be at approximately the same temperature as the average surface temperature.” This is wrong, Wrong, WRONG! Simple empirical experiment shows that for a non radiative atmosphere, the temperature of the isothermal portion of the atmosphere would be set by surface Tmax NOT surface Tav. And that is not some general Tmax either. That would be spot Tmax such as desert surfaces and exposed liquid magma.
Dr. Spencer correctly points out that tropospheric convective circulation would stall without radiative gases. However, after the non radiative atmosphere, without strong vertical circulation, has gone isothermal, super-heating would then occur. Gases unable to return from altitude would be still adsorbing small amounts of UV, SW and IR. Because N2 and O2 are poor radiators, this would lead to super-heating just as in the thermosphere. Without radiative gases, our atmosphere would start to boil off into space. There are no planets or moons in our solar system that have managed to retain an atmosphere without radiative gases.
Radiative gases do slow the cooling rate of the land surface and absorb surface IR and heat gases in the lower atmosphere. However the cooling effects of IR radiation to space from the upper atmosphere and convective circulation cooling the day surface are far greater. The net effect of radiative gases in our MOVING atmosphere is cooling at all concentrations above 0.0ppm.
This thread was about an empirical experiment that others can replicate. Here are five other simple empirical experiments you can build and run yourself –
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/05/a-comparison-of-the-earths-climate-sensitivity-to-changes-in-the-nature-of-the-initial-forcing/#comment-1267231
-Experiment 1 shows that liquid water that is free to evaporativly cool does not respond to LWIR as other materials do, so the surface Tav under a non radiative atmosphere would not be 33C cooler.
– Experiments 2 & 3 are for those who do not understand the role of radiative gases in atmospheric cooling and convective circulation.
– Experiments 4 & 5 demonstrate that Dr. Spencer is wrong in claiming that the isothermal portion of a non radiative atmosphere would have its temperature set by surface Tav.
KevinK says: “The addition of the mirror changes the operating environment for the lamp The reflected energy does heat/warm the lamp filament The warmer filament has a higher resistance
Since you are operating with a constant voltage source (120 VAC), the current flowing through the lamp drops ”
With a drop in current flow, the watts being used has to drop too given constant voltage source.
Drop in watts being consumed by (or supplied too) bulb would cause a drop in bulb’s temperature. As in a 25 watt bulb won’t produce as much heat (85.3 BTUs) as 65 watt bulb (221 BTUs). The temperature didn’t drop with the mirror present, temperature instead went up.
Thus, try again on your claim that addition of mirror increased filament’s resistance.
{ I = W/V or 0.5416A = 65w/120v and R = V/I or 221ohm = 120v/0.5416A}
richard verney says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:54 am
I think I see here the cause of much of the misunderstanding in this thread. NB: photons do not have a temperature. One can talk loosely about the typical temperature at which a certain photon might be radiated (e.g. where the maximum of the black bode emission spectrum is for a particular temperature) but any photon can certainly be emitted by any black body that is higher than that typical temperature. The hotter a body is, the more it radiates at all frequencies even though the peak frequency shifts upwards as temperature increases.
The second important physical principle here is that the laws of radiation are symmetric (as indeed almost every physical law is). That is, whatever can be emitted can be absorbed. So a hot black body object can absorb at all frequencies that can be emitted by a black body of the same or lower temperature. These are the rock solid physical laws that underpin our ability to make radios, lasers, indeed any technology that can emit or receive any kind of radiation.
This means that to doubt about whether a body can absorb a ‘cooler’ photon (meaning one typically but not necessarily emitted by a body at a lower temperature) is to doubt whether our current basic understanding of physics is correct. Now by all means feel free to doubt all that, but recognise that this would be an extraordinary thing if everything we thought we knew since Maxwell were so badly wrong. It is utterly extraordinary, and there would need to be some serious discrepancies in the evidence to entertain it. For that reason, since I have never heard of the slightest scrap of such evidence, as soon as I read what Anthony’s experiment did, I knew what he would find, and indeed he did find exactly that.
We have here a really strange phenomenon: a truly fantastic claim (that our understanding of radiation is dramatically wrong) is being put forward, without any evidence, as the reason why our understanding of something derivative (namely the greenhouse effect) is mistaken. Surely it is obvious why that is so very perverse a process? It differs in no substantive way from, for example, claiming that powered flight is impossible because invisible pink unicorns block the takeoff of aircraft.
I should add here that I am not taking issue with Richard whom I have quoted, although I started out clarifying what seems to be a mistake in his physics, rather I am trying to show why this (apparently common) mistake logically leads to bizarre conclusions. The only reason I can think of why this weird idea is gaining currency is that it seems to be associated with careless, but plausible-sounding, statements of the second law of thermodynamics.
Is not the reason that manufacturers of open top light shades indicate a limit on the wattage of incandescant bulbs because back radiation from the shade causes the bulb to overheat and explode?
Greg House says:
May 27, 2013 at 9:04 pm
Of course it does! Thermodynamics is by its very nature about the behaviour of extended bodies, which makes it at its fundamental level a statistical law. An individual photon can go anywhere it is permitted to travel by the laws of optics and the quantum laws of interaction with atoms etc., so photons can certainly travel from an atom in a cold body to an atom in a warm body; but it is less likely and so the majority flow establishes a heat flow from warmer to colder. The probability of its being violated in a particular case is nonzero, but so small as to never occur to a body of even the size of a pea anywhere in the universe in its entire lifetime. Look up statistical thermodynamics if you want to learn more.
Well, after all that unnecessary word-salad almost completely unrelated to my original post, I’d like to say “boorish” thanks.
Any chance of repeating the experiment with the mirror at 6″ and 12″ etc.?
[waaaaaaayyyy off topic rant. This thread is about the experiment, not communications, not refrigeration, not storms – mod]
Gary Hladik says: that only a small part of the radiation is returned to the mirror.
I say he has no idea how much is returned neither does anyone really but with the mirror so close – 3 inches – a significant proportion is being returned.
At 3 feet there would be almost no temperature increase – inverse square law
And note at 209 degrees F and the mirror 3 inches away the increase is 11 K.
I say again – if 50% is reflected back standard calculations say the temperature should be ~411 Kelvin and not 382 Kelvin – if more than 50% it is even a bigger disparity – and that speaks volumes for what sort of effect one would expect at ambient temperatures and a reflecting distance of even 30 feet – so close to zero as to be unrecordable.
Konrad says (May 27, 2013 at 11:00 pm): “However, my empirical experiments also showed that incident LWIR has no significant effect on the cooling rate of water that is free to evaporatively cool.”
An Earth without the so-called “greenhouse effect” would necessarily be an Earth without water, or with all the water somehow locked away from the atmosphere. You’d also have to do without ozone, either by removing the oxygen, or by destroying ozone (chemically?) as fast as it forms.
General comments on PSI;
First of all Principia Scientific International (PSI) is a poor name for a scientific organization as the abbreviation ‘PSI’ is associated with the paranormal and telepathic. This immediately gets it associated with cranks.
Second the website layout is poor and if it is supposed to be a journal you could never tell by how it is layed out. Five minutes copying any open access journal online’s style would have been a good place to start, if they were looking for openness as even the reviews on these are free and open. You can see an example here,
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/9/issue1.html
Having the forums hidden without logging in is a sure way to get no one to find or read them as the link is also buried under the “PSI Member” tab but is only visible AFTER you create an account.
Gary Hladik says:
May 28, 2013 at 12:01 am
//////////////////////////////////////////
it is a mistake to compare the temperature of the Earth with that of the Moon. They are fundamentally different objects, not least in the speed of rotation and the fact that Earth has an atmosphere (irrespective of its composition).
There is so much solar energy being received by the equatorial region of the Earth that the tropical ocean would not be frozen irrespective of any so called GHE. That being the case, the tropical ocean would always be acting as a heat storage device smoothing the changes between day and night (which is only 12 hours and very different to that of the moon) and in any event part of the tropical ocean is always in sunlight. The tropical oceans (via currents) would distribute some of its heat polewards thus keeping areas outside the tropics warm.
It may be that the Earth would be cooler without the GHE, but it is likely that the GHE has been over-hyped by a failure to understand the fundamental differences between the Earth and the Moon (one is lifeless with a slow rate of rotation, the other is geologically active, has a relatively fast speed of rotation and is a water world).
richard verney says (May 28, 2013 at 12:26 am): “it is a mistake to compare the temperature of the Earth with that of the Moon.”
Who wrote anything about the Moon?
That’s a good experiment Anthony, it got lots of feedback – some ridiculous, others valuable.
While it cannot quantify a greenhouse effect with any great accuracy (not that it was meant to), it provides evidence that, although no cooler object can actually “heat” a warmer one, back-radiation can reduce the radiative efficiency of the source. Instead of losing that radiation to space, the mirror reflects some of it back, reducing the speed of that loss causing the source to retain greater temperature.
I would expect to see similar, but not as powerful results using a sheet of tin sprayed flat black and backed with styrofoam instead of the mirror. The energy returned will be more pure IR than visible photons, but the concept and results should be the same. Using a bulb sprayed flat black will also allow the experiment to be done in pure IR.
Ron House says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:12 pm
//////////////////////////////////
Ron
I should correct you.
I am making no comment on the physics.
I am merely pointing out that at the heart of the issue is the contention made by some as to the effect of back radiation and to what extent it can perform real and effective work in the environs in which it finds itself. Put simply, some claim that photons originating from the source cannot warm the source, and/or that ‘cooler’ photons cannot warm a ‘warmer” object. No doubt, you must have seen that claim numerous times.
What I was pointing out is that if that is the contention, then the experiment is flawed (in its design, not in the manner it was carried out) since it does not test the contention.
i have made no real comment on the results of the experiment since unfortunately I have not seen it (my internet has a data cap of 2gb per month and I cannot therefore watch videos). I did suggest it would be interesting to see the effect with the mirror at different distances, but nothing beyond that. Since, I have not viewed the experiment, I have left it to others to comment upon the interpretation of the results.
Rosco says (May 27, 2013 at 11:56 pm): “I say he has no idea how much is returned neither does anyone really…”
Exactly. So there’s really no point in doing calculations based on baseless assumptions, right?
“…but with the mirror so close – 3 inches – a significant proportion is being returned.”
Define “significant” and then show (geometrically, taking into account mirror conductivity, reflectivity, etc.) that the experiment matches the “significance” criterion. If you want to calculate view factors, you can start here
http://webserver.dmt.upm.es/~isidoro/tc3/Radiation%20View%20factors.pdf
bearing in mind that you’re dealing with two view factors (lamp to mirror, then mirror back to lamp) and must correct for the fraction of the radiation received by the mirror that’s actually reflected back to the lamp, plus correction for IR absorbed by the glass and heat radiated/convected from the mirror. Good luck.
“I say again – if 50% is reflected back…”
Rosco, you can say whatever you want, but until you know how much reflected radiation is actually received by the lamp, your “calculations” are about as useful as the Drake equation.
If you really want to calculate actual vs theoretical heating via so-called “back radiation”, why not pick a simpler geometry, e.g. a heated sphere inside an enclosing shell, the “Concentric Spheres” case in the reference above?
Gary Hladik says:
May 28, 2013 at 12:01 am
————————————————————————————–
Gary,
You linked to Dr Spencer’s thread and I provided empirical evidence of the critical errors in Dr. Spencer’s post. Now you raise side issues that are not addressed in Dr. Spencer’s 2009 thread? What?? No, don’t explain, I expect I understand….
I believe you misunderstand Experiment 1. This experiment alone does not invalidate the radiative GHE hypothesis. It simply shows that the assumed value for surface Tav under a non radiative atmosphere is incorrect.
There is an atmospheric greenhouse effect on earth. However there is not a RADIATIVE greenhouse effect on earth. The greenhouse effect is created by the poor ability of N2 and O2 to radiate energy they have acquired from surface conduction and the release of latent heat, added to be the ineffectiveness of the surface in conductively cooling the atmosphere. This is moderated by radiative gases. Strongly radiative gases, water vapour in particular, are the “broken panes” in the greenhouse. Without these gases our atmosphere would super-heat and be lost to space. The net effect of radiative gases in our atmosphere is cooling at all concentrations above 0.0ppm.
If you care to actually challenge my empirical experiments, perhaps you could give me your direct YES or NO answers to the following questions –
– Does DWLWIR have the same effect on the cooling rate of oceans as it does for land?
– Are radiative gases critical to strong vertical tropospheric circulation?*
– Is conductive flux between the surface and atmosphere biased by gravity?
*Nick Stokes (promoter), Joel Shore (promoter) , Davidmhoffer (sleeper?), Tim Folkerts (believer) and Doug Cotton (slayer) have all answered “NO” to this question.
What would the difference be, if instead of a mirror, you used glass or anything transparent
Gary Hladik says:
May 27, 2013 at 7:26 pm
Exactly. So why haven’t the so-called “slayers” done the definitive experiment that would prove them right and disprove the entire basis of the so-called “greenhouse effect”?
THEN Gary Hladik says:
May 27, 2013 at 10:46 pm
Wow! What a great laboratory experiment! So what happened on their control Earth? 🙂 🙂
===
What happened to your story?
===
It changed.
Mine hasn’t; and it isn’t going to.
I need, the experiment done, with YOUR prediction. 24 years in a row now I’ve watched GHE BELIEVERS’ predictive power.
You need,
ANY prediction, that ANY amount more, CO2
means more heating of the globe, in ANY format
giving you repeated,
predictive power.
===
If you’re right, then you MIGHT be right, about WHY.
When you show you can REPEATEDLY be right,
you’ve got a theory.
Till then it’s a hypothetical.
===
But if you’re wrong, as you are; and not one instrument type on earth can be designed, that can correlate any given temperature, to any given quantity of CO2, then you’re just w.r.o.n.g.
Proven wrong, the first time you were given a globe, to dose with CO2, and check your predictive powers, for 24 years, using your CO2 back radiation solution. Dead-in-the-water,
wrong.
===
No matter WHAT anyone else is – slayer, eco-wacko, me.
===
But then if I’M wrong, I’M WRONG. For GOOD.
I said “you shall not do that.”
If I’m right and you DON’T: as you obviously can’t,
we all know you guys give us stitches in our sides laughing, as you try to claim you have a glimmer of just what it is, you’ve boldly LoL claimed –
well, then, I MIGHT be right about WHY. I MIGHT NOT.
===
Science, is making predictions: then checking those predictions against real-world experiment; preferably with a control, but one’s not always needed.
===
For instance when I say,
“The frigid nitrogen/oxygen bath, with the water-driven, integrated phase-change refrigeration system,
is a giant, infrared-light, heat-lamp on in the sky – that’s heating the earth! And the REFRIGERANT WATER, is the main HEATING ELEMENT for that LIGHT.
CO2 is a heater in the sky, too.
You can CHECK it!”
===
And indeed we know, I can.
I go see if indeed, there’s a frigid nitrogen/oxygen bath.
Check.
Then I go see if indeed, there’s a water-driven, integrated, phase-change refrigeration system installed, and functioning.
Check.
Then I just go watch YOU check your OWN prediction that when we add more CO2, it’s going to get warmer.
I ‘ve been watching for 24 years, since Hansen lied on TV.
and you’re wrong.
===
And we both saw me prove that I’m right, whereas you’re wrong;
but not why I’m right. I might have just lucked out.
I can’t prove why I’m right, but I can tell ya.
Since the globe’s covered in high-energy blue & white light reflective , liquid refrigerant,
you’re already in a bind, because I have the main greenhouse gas just in liquid form
lying there, cooling far, FAR more than any clouds ever could warm: in conductive contact not as a gas but a liquid: with 55% of the earth’s surface.
And indeed the vast oceanic blue basins are f.r.i.g.i.d.
That’s conductive cooling in the liquid form as I say: it’s like pouring ice water
into a warm stone pitcher.
Particularly when that same water, operating as a gas, helped block 25% of sun energy in.
Before it got kicked out before touching the substrate, by the frigid ocean in direct, conductive contact with the planet: sucking temps down, like that ice water in a stone pitcher.
Before it got kicked out by the snow on top and bottom of the globe where sunlight was already weaker but still, it’s covering substrate all across antarctica, that ice/snow mix.
Extremely reflective.
All those mountain range peaks around the world, at higher latitudes covered in white, reflective snow.
===
*You shall not correctly isolate, a heating signal accurately out of all that cooling. PARTICULARLY related to CO2 /and/or/ infrared back radiation distribution*
===
The water and nitrogen and oxygen,
are just too big.
And just too cold.
===
So there will not EVER be, a back radiation dependent, algorithm
predicting earth’s temperature, correctly and repeatedly. Not ever.
You will not do it because that cooling signal is GINORMOUS.
===
As I showed you – without need for cracking a book.
===
It’s so large
it is like fleas and freight trains,
—–
and the nitrogen, oxygen, water-cooling freight train,
aren’t saying s.q.u.a.t.
—–
to that CO2 flea,
—–
when they blow by, spitting out ice, dumping energy up toward space.
I know my posts are long. I really didn’t come to hijack, just make a point without the need to really, much crack a book.
My resolve isn’t even sweating. I’m literally laughing at how easy it is to see whether you might ever in the next say, 400 or 500 years be right.
Nope. You will not be. Not relying on that back radiation story you insist on having as part of your global temperature belief system solution.
Sorry for the off topic conversation just ditch the last one there; my bad.
Seriously, sorry about that, mod, I don’t believe the Slayers thought about the experiment they put up and I don’t think they thought about some of the other ones, either. I think they were erroneous representations that will get them some grief, but like I said:
Phlogiston has it called exactly: this is obviously about a miles deep frigid fluid gas bath, with an integrated water-based refrigeration cycle. There’s not going to be a CO2/Water back radiation signal that can be correlated to global temperature, not ever.
Not tomorrow not a hundred years from now.
The massive nitrogen/oxygen/water cooling freight train,
are just way too big, and way too cold, to even glance at that flea CO2 when they go by.
Thank you rgb@duke for the clear and unpatronising reponse to my comment about siddons’ claim. It had seemed to me that ghg theory was equivalent to pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, but your patient explanation shows that to be a misunderstanding.
Greenhouse gasses cause global cooling as do all gasses in the planets atmosphere. They remove heat from the surface by conduction convection and (in the case of water) by removing the latent heat of evaporation. The net loss to the Earth’s surface is radiated into space. There is of course a huge amount of back radiation involved in this process with about half of all energy removed this way being radiated back to the Earth’s surface with the other half being radiated into space (and being equal to the net surface loss). The atmosphere is therefore a powerful but inefficient radiator. Note that the Greenhouse (back radiation) effect does exist but forms a very small component part of all back radiation and which is saturation limited. Greenhouse gasses also have a “double-back” radiation effect by preventing some of the back radiation getting back to the Earth’s surface.
Interesting question: How much additional cooling of the Earth’s surface results from increasing CO2 levels from say 280ppm to 400ppm? Note that energy is picked up from the Earth’s surface by conduction/convection and with more molecules more energy is removed from the surface in this way. Note also that 100% of energy absorbed in this way -> is absorbed in this way! Note also that if we neglect double-back radiation half of this energy will be re-radiated back to the surface. Back radiation from energy removed from the Earth’s surface through thermal means is far more powerful that that absorbed and re-emitted through radiation (C02 GE effect).
Strangely the global warmists have missed this gross obviousness and the fact that this alternate source of back radiation due to increasing CO2 levels is about fifty times more powerful than the radiative GE effect itself and is not saturation limited!
Note that cooling doesn’t always equate to temperature reductions.
I don’t believe this experiment affected the bulbs element , only the cooling affect on the bulbs surface .
Paul Clark says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:26 pm
Yes aluminium is a better physical conductor than glass, but the actual heat conduction may vary depending on how well you put the foil on, how smooth the foil is, etc.
One can overcome these problems by chemically applying a thin film of silver to the outside of the bulb, the same way as done for mirrors. With only on clear spot left at the top of the bulb for temperature measurements. Then only radiation is blocked and convection and conduction are virtually unchanged…
Gary Hladik
Rosco, you can say whatever you want, but until you know how much reflected radiation is actually received by the lamp, your “calculations” are about as useful as the Drake equation.
This question will never be resolved But if you don’t believe there is a large amount of light reflected straight back you are ignoring the geometry of the setup.
If you want to see another experiment where values are identifiable send me an email – roscomac at dodo.com.au and I’ll send you something else to look at.
What have you got to lose.
Everyone loses over the relentless round of insults. As Fleetwood Mac say in the 1969 song – Oh Well
“Can’t help about the shape I’m in, I can’t sing, I ain’t pretty and my legs are thin
But don’t ask me what I think about you I might not give the answer that you want me to”
Oh Well
“Now when I talk to God I know he understands he says sit by me and I’ll be your guiding hand
But don’t ask me what I think about you I might not give the answer that you want me to”
Good philosophy – a little humility goes a long way.
How to control for convective changes is simple enough. Just run the experiment three times with the following modifications:
1. A sheet of glass which remains in place near the light bulb.
2. Get three sheets of material to place against the glass, on the other side from the bulb: another sheet of glass, a sheet of black glass, and a mirror all with the same mass and density, differing only in their transmittance, reflectance, and absorptivity.
3. Run the experiment as you did, placing the clear/black/mirrored material after temperatures stabilized, leave it until temperatures stabilize again, then for a final bit of interesting data, turn off the bulb and plot the rate at which it cools.
___________________________________
I would expect the glass/glass run will remain unchanged (for the most part) as the only radiation passing through towards the bulb would be from the wall or experimenter. When you add the black or mirrored material, you’re reducing the ability of the glass bulb to shed heat, and note for all past and future posts I make, the following statement holds under all conditions and in any context: radiation is not heat, heat is the transfer of energy from a warm body to a cold one, which includes thermal emission of radiation.
The real question I have is if you have some plan to test for whether the bulb became brighter, rather than the glass becoming hotter, as you did originally, Anthony.
I confess I know nothing of physics and am unable to participate in the matter of whether the planetary greenhouse effect exists or not. Here is my take on this experiment, however. The experiment is supposed to be about radiation, is it not? But would not the convection effect also increase the bulb’s temperature? A REAL greenhouse works through the reduction of heat loss by convection which raises the interior temperature. The placing of the mirror close to the light bulb also reduces heat loss via convection round the light bulb to a certain extent, does it not, contributing to raising its surface temperature?
In fact, is it not the case the you could place ANYTHING in front of the light bulb and the resultant diminution in convection would raise the light bulb’s temperature? How would your experiment work out if a sheet of plywood or glass were placed in front of the bulb for 8 minutes rather than a mirror?
Forgive me for venturing into this discussion. I realise I may have wholly missed the point of this experiment so feel free to correct my “common sense” understanding of what is being tested or demonstrated.
“I would expect the glass/glass run will remain unchanged (for the most part) as the only radiation passing through towards the bulb would be from the wall or experimenter. When you add the black or mirrored material, you’re reducing the ability of the glass bulb to shed heat, and note for all past and future posts I make, the following statement holds under all conditions and in any context: radiation is not heat, heat is the transfer of energy from a warm body to a cold one, which includes thermal emission of radiation.
The real question I have is if you have some plan to test for whether the bulb became brighter, rather than the glass becoming hotter, as you did originally, Anthony.”
I would expect a clear pane not to get as warm as the mirrored glass, therefore the clear pane
will not warm the air as much and therefore not cause the bulb to get as hot. But perhaps half the difference. A flat black surface should become hotter than clear pane or mirrored glass, and so should make the bulb be as hot or hotter than mirrored pane.
On a more prosaic note I would like to repeat a challenge which someone posted into a Warmist comments stream. (I paraphrase)
“If CO2 at concentrations of 400ppm can trap/amplify sufficient infra-red energy to heat the entire atmosphere of the earth by .8 C, why do engineers not use pure CO2 in solar panel type arrays to capture and amplify infra red heat in sunny locations? This heat could then be used to drive steam turbines or other generating processes.”
Because your description of CO_2 as being “just an insulator” is wrong? Because 400 ppm x 10 km per 1 C (which isn’t, IIRC, the correct number) doesn’t, actually, translate to much heating from 10 cm of the pure gas? Because even in the atmosphere, the effect is saturated so that the gain is logarithmic in the concentration, not linear, so that 10 cm of the pure gas isn’t going to give a whole lot more heating than 1 cm?
In other words, because the physics of the gas both predicts the spectroscopically observed Atmospheric Radiation Effect (ARE) and predicts that this proposal is nonsense at the same time?
To a very small scale, to very little advantage, something like this would probably even work. But even pure CO_2 can at best block the CO_2 bands out of the LWIR, and of course it doesn’t amplify anything, so you are still stuck slightly modulating an existing solar heat budget.
Personally, I’d work on adding the reflectors that this article is all about. Or capping Fresnel lenses. Even though they are cooler than the coils they heat, they are perfectly happy reflecting sunlight and really concentrating it. As in gain factors of 10, not 0.01…
rgb
I don’t believe this experiment affected the bulbs element , only the cooling affect on the bulbs surface .
Ah, but this is just like saying “I don’t believe in the laws of thermal physics”, isn’t it, which isn’t terribly surprising given that you almost certainly don’t know them?
If you raise the outside surface temperature of a closed object that contains something producing heat on the inside, you raise the temperature of the thing producing heat. Or, if you prefer, the bulb contains a gas. The gas conducts heat from the filament to the glass. If you raise the temperature of the glass, you decrease the temperature gradient between glass and bulb and make it more difficult for the filament to lose heat. Consequently its temperature goes up to restore the gradient to the point of precise dynamic equilibrium. The WHOLE SYSTEM, in other words, heats up as the outer surface heats up.
You know, is it that crazy to suggest that before you post a learned opinion on something you don’t understand, you crack a few books and spend a year or two learning what a second year undergrad physics major already knows? And this isn’t just a comment for you, it applies to all the “dragonslayer defenders” participating and the slayers themselves, although they are beyond hope or help AFAICT. The math and physics for this isn’t terribly difficult. All you need to know to understand it is:
a) Energy is conserved. Really. I mean, if you propose some process that violates energy conservation, it is wrong. If you think otherwise, please go buy lottery tickets expecting to get rich or reply to the many Nigerian scam letters offering you a free lunch. This is known as the first law of thermodynamics.
b) Net heat flows from a hotter reservoir to a colder one, at a rate that depends monotonically on the DIFFERENCE in temperature of reservoirs. This is a process that can best be understood statistically — if you have a container of red and green sugar that starts out perfectly separated with red on top and green on the bottom and shake it, the red and green will probably mix. If you start with a mixed container and shake it, you could shake it for the rest of the lifetime of the Universe and a few powers of ten factorial MORE Universes and never, ever, shake it so that it separated out neatly into red on top and green on the bottom.
Heat flowing from hot to cold is obeying this simple principle — it has nothing to do with the silly “resonances” the Slayers sometimes invoke to explain why photons from a cold piece of matter can’t be absorbed by a hotter one (of course they can! they don’t come with labels!) it is just more probable that energy will diffusively flow from where it is more dense (per available degree of freedom) to where it is less dense. By the time you sort out the probability for net macroscopic transport the other way, it is a finite number so close to zero that they are neighbors, their kids go to the same schools, you’d never really notice the difference between them if you saw them in line at a supermarket checkout.
Of course physicists have to go and make all this formal and mathematical, and write this rule as saying that the “entropy” (which is the log of the missing information, in case you care or want to start your studies with something) of the Universe associated with the NET heat transfer must increase. Note well, of the Universe. One can easily transfer heat from a hotter reservoir to a colder one, and my beer is grateful for this. It just creates more entropy at the point where the refrigerator coils dump the heat into the room than it removes from the beer.
This one is called “the second law of thermodynamics” and it too prevents free lunches. If one proposes a theory or statement that violates it, one must hang one’s head in shame, because, well, you are probably wrong. In fact you are 99.9999…..999993% certain to be wrong, where I could type in 9’s for the rest of the day in place of those missing dots.
Two rules. Is that too much to ask?
So, reflecting energy back to the bulb from the mirror. This definitely happens. First law, that energy has to go someplace. Some fraction goes back into the bulb. The bulb thus gets hotter. You can WATCH THIS HAPPEN in the video above. Heat flows from the hot filament out into the room BECAUSE OF THE SECOND LAW. When you raise the temperature of any part of the room, you make it a bit less probable for heat to flow in that direction and this slows the rate of flow. Since we are adding heat to the filament at a constant rate (first law again), this increases the net energy content of the filament until the rates balance. The mirror, in fact, has precisely the same effect as putting a second bulb at the same distance behind the mirror as the first bulb is in front! Now we have two light bulbs shining straight at each other, each heating the other! Of course they warm up. One one of the bulbs isn’t real, it is the reflected image of the real bulb.
Come on, this is even conceptually simple. Why is it so difficult to just accept it? Because you don’t want to acknowledge even the possibility that CO_2 might regulate temperature? What if you are just wrong about that? After all, you DON’T know any physics. Would it be so surprising that you are wrong about it? Sure, you might have to accept at least the possibility that the ARE is, in fact, dangerous. But only a crazy person wouldn’t accept that possibility anyway, especially in a case of risk assessment. Even if the gun cylinder has 100 chambers and only one live round, who wants to give the cylinder a spin and fire it pointing it at the head of somebody they love?
rgb
Paul Clark says:
May 27, 2013 at 10:38 pm
Donald L. Klipstein says
Another is that the low dewpoint means that dew doesn’t form. That releases a lot of latent heat, especially at high dew points, and shows up as a slowing of the rate of cooling overnight.
The treeless landscape allows for radiation from soil easy access to space.
The dry, porous soil is a poor heat conductor, so the soil surface cools quickly.
Is not the reason that manufacturers of open top light shades indicate a limit on the wattage of incandescant bulbs because back radiation from the shade causes the bulb to overheat and explode?
Not necessarily explode, but overheat absolutely. And overheating anything in an electrical circuit is a bad idea. That’s why this whole discussion is in some sense idiotic. If the slayers were in charge of the National Electrical Code, how many people would have to die before they came to believe in back radiation increasing the temperature of an active source such as a light bulb? If they were in charge of NASA, how much money would be wasted as they strip off reflective insulation and replace it with something their “overheated” imaginations say would work, since reflection can never increase the temperature of a heat source it is wrapped around? If they were in charge of physics teaching, what exactly would they do about the chapters in Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics where skin depth, absorption, and reflection are treated in some detail, where the Poynting vector is developed. What would they do about Stefan-Boltzmann, the laws of thermodynamics that they casually violate?
The amazing thing is that they cost everybody so much time when they are basically ignorant crackpots with a political agenda who thrive on the attention being paid to them. Their physics is so bad that a real paranoid conspiracy theorist would suspect that they are being paid off by the same folks that profit from the CACC/CAGW “settled science” to ensure that nobody will take counterarguments seriously because they are in some sense on the same “side” as the “slayers”!
There’s an old Heinlein recipe for how to best use your vote in an election you don’t have time to research. Find the stupidest, most biased person you know. Ask them how they will vote. Vote the other way. Could it be that the entire PS operation is a vast conspiracy to exploit the Heinlein effect? Because deliberate or not, that’s the way it works to a vast array of scientists who don’t have time to go into depth on the issue but who know enough physics and thermodynamics to know bullshit when they read it. I mean, read Olson’s work. Is there any crackpot theory left uncovered? Fusion inside the Earth’s core? Really? Try talking to Postma about mirrors and light bulbs. Anthony MAKES A MOVIE proving him wrong, does he accept it and move on? Oh no. He CAN’T be wrong.
rgb
Good question, I can’t remember the last time I took the shade off a lamp to clean it, placed it back on, and the light bulb exploded… you’d think that would stick out in the midst of normal day to day events huh?
Max™ says:
May 28, 2013 at 3:28 am
I like that modification of the experiment.
Here’s an experiment from a Heat Transfer textbook, which everybody can perform:
“Open the freezer door to your refrigerator. Put your face near it, but stay far enough away to avoid the downwash of cooled air. This way you cannot be cooled by convection and, because the air between you and the freezer is a fine insulator, you cannot be cooled by conduction. Still, your face will feel cooler. The reason is that you radiate heat directly into cold region and it radiates very little heat to you. Consequently, your face cools perceptibly.”
Now, close the freezer door and put your face near a wall or something, which is still colder than your face. Consequently your face will warm.
We have here a really strange phenomenon: a truly fantastic claim (that our understanding of radiation is dramatically wrong) is being put forward, without any evidence, as the reason why our understanding of something derivative (namely the greenhouse effect) is mistaken. Surely it is obvious why that is so very perverse a process? It differs in no substantive way from, for example, claiming that powered flight is impossible because invisible pink unicorns block the takeoff of aircraft.
I only wish that I’d said this first. The bit about pink unicorns, I mean. The rest of it I and many others have said many times, and will say again, but I’ll go out on a limb here and make a non-physics prediction:
Nothing anyone says will make the slightest bit of difference to the Slayers of PSI because if you put them all together and pooled their knowledge of physics, it still doesn’t match the knowledge of a second year undergrad physics major.
And that is sad. One might as well put the lunatics in charge of the asylum as accept the claims of the Slayers. Or ask my 17 year old son what he thinks (a half-year of physics, no thermo).
rgb
This whole premise is rather silly. So-called “back-radiation” is just radiation. There isn’t anything special about it. If you put another light bulb in front of the first light bulb at an equal distance as the mirror, you’d get approximately the same effect, I predict.
The experiment using a light bulb, although nice and convenient, is a flawed one. But it does tell a certain tale, and that is: if you bounce radiation back at its source, its source gains some of the energy of that radiation back, with the result that its temperature is elevated. There’s just no telling how much it simply reflects back at the mirror, though, only to be eventually scattered back away from both the mirror and the bulb.
In short, I think your experiment simply understates how much the bulb would heat up. Imagine that same bulb in a vacuum, and surrounded by a spherical mirror.
I think it has more to do with the lampshade catching fire, actually.
Todays post by Chris Monckton shows the 163 year HadCRUt4 data with a 0.47C/century rise. As Dr Singer has noted repeatedly, a portion of this is natural rise from the Little Ice Age. As Anthony Watts has noted repeatedly, a portion of this is sampling error due to Urban Heat Island effect at monitoring sites, leaving very little for human Carbon gases to effect. In an above comment there is mention of a boiling off of the TOA, which does in fact exist. The entire idea of “Radiative Equilibrium” is defective for two reasons. First there is no equilibrium condition in a constantly changing system, about the time Earth “equalizes” it’s temperature, the Sun rises and the cycle of change repeats. Second, the “equilibrium” that DOES exist is Energy Equilibrium, which would include not just radiative loss, but mass loss as well. The TOA is constantly losing matter with mass, at escape velocity….which is ENERGY, not counted in radiative only analysis. This is quantified in “Empirical Model of the Thermosphere” at Springer.com. Mass x velocity^2 = energy….which should be added to radiative loss to balance the energy equation.
Wiki/Night_Vision_Device, gives detailed history of night vision optics, and first generation, 1,000x power devices DO benefit from auxiliary IR lighting and so do 50,000x power third generation devices, all of which operate on wider IR band than just the CO2 absorption band. The point being, there is scant IR energy available, even with massive magnification. In the conclusion to today’s Monckton post he makes the claim that the 1998 Great el Nino and two previous large el Ninos are volcanic in origin. This hypothesis, caused by variable Earth fission, was first made in “Motive Force for All Climate Change”, May 2009. We all have imperfect knowledge, recall, and even imperfect “facts”, but the Watts College is where we separate the wheat from the chaff. We can all agree that AGW is chaff….we are yet to agree on what is wheat. My thanks to my fellow students….remember, in a three sided argument….two sides are wrong.
Gary Hladik says:
May 27, 2013 at 9:21 pm
David says (May 27, 2013 at 9:16 pm): “An interesting thought experiment is what would happen in an atmosphere with zero GHG.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/12/what-if-there-was-no-greenhouse-effect/
———————————————————————————————
Gary, thank you. I read Dr Spencer’s article. I admire Dr Spencer, and consider that he knows far more about climate science then I will ever know. As such I was pleased to read some very similar ideas expressed in our thought experiment. However, in order to better separate the GHG effect on earth I think we should leave the earths atmosphere the same as today, just , as a thought experiment, remove ONLY the GHG property of them.
The assertions I wish to dispute made by the good Dr Spencer are as follows… “there would be no weather on Earth without the greenhouse effect”
And this…“The global-average temperature at which this occurs would depend a lot on how reflective the Earth’s surface is to sunlight in our thought experiment. ..it could be anywhere from well below 0 deg F for a partially reflective Earth to about 45 deg. F for a totally black Earth”
(I am not openly disputing the ladder, however I am questioning the numbers.) For instance, on earth with GHG properties consider W/V alone. Per a solar spectrum chart which shows that about 98% of TSI energy lies between about 250 nm in the UV and 4.0 microns; with the remaining as 1% left over at each end. Such graphs often have superimposed on them the actual ground level (air Mass once) spectrum; that shows the amounts of that energy taken out by primarily O2, O3, and H2O, in the case of H2O which absorbs in the visible and near IR perhaps 20% of the total solar energy is capture by water VAPOR (clear sky) clouds are an additional loss over and above that.
So removing the GHG affect of W/V instantly allows about 20% more insolation to reach the surface. Throughout the tropics this is 20 percent of a far higher number then shown in the Trenbeth diagram. At the tropics in the afternoon this incoming solar insolation is closer to 960 joules/m2/second at the height of the day almost three times the 342 Wm/2 shown in the charts, then the TSI affected by water vapor alone (clear sky) could be about 200 Wm/2 during the day, and the estimated 78 Wm/2 given for evaporative latent heat transfer would also be far higher. Evaporation conduction of latent heat may vary far more then realized and set a limit on further tropical temperature increases. (Newell & Dopplick’s (1979) calculations that tropical temperatures cannot rise any further.)
Now back radiation has a lot stated above to make up for. That additional surface energy now goes into an atmosphere where it cannot escape the atmosphere by radiation, but must conduct about indefinitely, until it reaches a cooler surface and back conducts to the surface where it can radiate.
Also please consider that a far higher percentage of LWIR back radiation goes into the latent heat of evaporation, then SWR, which penetrates the ocean and incurs a far longer residence time. (Again, the GHG affect increases the residence time of radiation, but to effectively evaluate it this must be compared against the residence time of conducted energy, and the greater amount of conducted energy within an earth where the GHG affect of gases is removed.)
“It is the long-term balance of these flows across the ocean surface that determines the oceanic (and therefore the atmospheric) temperature. As a result, small sustained imbalances can cause gradual temperature shifts of the entire system Each input into the earth’s system (Land, ocean, & atmosphere) encounters different properties, based on the materials that energy contacts. A certain wave length of SW energy is reflected back to space by clouds, the equivalent energy, in a different vibrational frequency, can penetrate up to 800′ into the ocean, and remain within the earth’s system for centuries.
Every change in input into the earths energy system causing a net change in the earth’s energy balance, must be evaluated according to the energy change involved, RELATIVE TO THE RESIDENCE TIME OF SAID ENERGY of the radiations involved. Different vibrational wave lengths, travel different roads, each one having a different RESIDENCE TIME depending on the materials said energy encounters. This appears to me to be incontrovertibly true. So the W/M2 is not by any means the only factor, or the most important factor. The idea of all W/M2 forcing being equal and linear is ignoring the residence time of the forcing considered. If my very simple residence time hypothesis is correct, a reduction in SWR penetrating the ocean has (depending on the persistence of said reduction, a potentially far greater impact on the earths heat content do to the mean residence time of SWR in the system being FAR longer then LWR.
Concerning Dr Spencer’s assertion that there would be no weather I am surprised he would make this statement. We still have day and night, a heating revolving convicting conducting world with clouds rain, ocean currents, cold poles, hot equator, etc etc. (All we removed was the aspect of those atmospheric gases intercepting incoming and out going LWIR spectrum of energy.) We would certainly have weather, and more energy initially striking the surface, just less radiative energy redirected back to the surface, but more conducted energy throughout the atmosphere, with no way to cool except via back conduction to the surface.
Interesting video. I am impressed by the thermal imager’s ability to detect Anthony’s presence reflected in the lightbulb before the bulb was switched on.
Could the experiment be repeated without the view of the bulb being obstructed? The mirror could be to one side rather than in front, or perhaps two mirrors one on each side with a gap between them so the bulb is visible at all times.
The suggestions in various comments to use foil sound good to me – trying it with clear glass and then again with the same glass but with foil stuck to the rear of it would largely eliminate convection and physical mass variables that could be present in the original test.
If the sky dragons didn’t exist, skeptics would have had to invent them to distinguish themselves from the “deniers” that AGW enthusiasts love to label them with. At least this way the skeptics can point to the sky dragons and say “I think you mean those guys, we just think you dont understand the level of attribution”
Half the time I think the dragon slayers are a bunch of rabid warmists deliberately spamming nonsense on sceptical forums to make us look like idiots. The other half of the time I think they are just people with an unfortunate conceptual block who don’t understand the distinction between heat and temperature. They seem to be operating off some vague notion of temperature itself passing from hot objects to cold ones like water flows downhill.
Rejecting the kooks and the ignorant from the ranks of the sceptics may give us the high ground. But in a democracy can we win an argument by only appealing to intelligent well informed people. There are a frightening number of ignorant people with kooky ideas out there and their votes are every bit as powerful as mine. I note that the other side has a lot of support from all sorts of astonishingly ignorant people, like the ones who see nothing wrong with advertisements for “carbon free sugar” and those who think it would be a good thing to purge their bodies of carbon.
Morris Minor says:
May 27, 2013 at 7:37 pm
If the filament became hotter it would shine brighter – it didn’t because heat travels from hot to cold! Redirecting heat to cooler surroundings and measuring this is irrelevant.
There is a fortune to be made if I am wrong.
You mean like the patented light bulbs that are more efficient because they reflect emitted IR back to the filament and heat it up increasing its emission and shifting the wavelength towards the visible so more visible light is emitted per watt of electrical energy.
For example from GE:
“Standard incandescent and halogen lamps lose approximately 76% of the input energy by radiating heat, and convert only 8% into useful light. The Precise™ IR halogen capsule has multiple layers of very durable, thin, interference film which redirects heat, which would otherwise be wasted, back onto the lamp filament. This increases the filament temperature and allows it to give off more visible light for the same input power.
The increased burning efficiency provides the same light performance with a significantly reduced power input, alternatively allows a longer lamp operating life or a combination of both.”
Page 2 of
http://www.gelighting.com/LightingWeb/emea/images/Halogen_MR16_IR_Lamps_Data_sheet_EN_tcm181-12732.pdf
For those criticizing the experiment — do one yourselves (and write up a post) if you don’t like it. Anthony set one up that was simple, cheap, fast & demonstrates the basics. His time is limited.
RGB,
I love your comments, but I would suggest a couple refinements
Individual photons — like individual molecules in the atmosphere — do not have a temperature.
Collections of photons — like collections of molecules– do have a temperature.
It is quite possible to tell the temperature from the spectrum of the photons. (This will help to ward off a couple counterarguments from Joe Postma).
*************************************************
For the “light bulb in a mason jar experiment”, I would suggest changing the experiment to a pair of mason jars, one wrapped with AL foil. This would make the control and the experiment more similar.
For completeness, a few other experiments could be done, like wrapping the jar in sarah wrap, or spray painting the outside of the jar and/or Al foil. The jars could also be immersed in water (of varying temperatures even) to reduce the warming of the glass itself and to change the “back IR” from the glass.
Joseph A Olson says:
May 28, 2013 at 6:07 am
The TOA is constantly losing matter with mass, at escape velocity…
AFAIK, the only elements escaping from earth are the lightest ones: hydrogen and helium, which velocity is high enough and mass is low enough to escape from earth’s gravity. Good for us, hydrogen is largely bound with oxygen which is heavy enough and helium is constantly made by radioactive decay. The rest of the gaseous elements still are in earth’s atmosphere. If these could escape, there wouldn’t be an atmosphere left, as is the case for the moon.
See:
http://physics.ucsc.edu/~josh/6A/book/gravity/node12.html
I like to see some calculations of how much energy is lost by escaping hydrogen and helium…
u.k.(us) says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:56 pm
phlogiston says:
May 27, 2013 at 7:00 pm
======
So, we’ve got:
Cute, holes, Faustian contract’s, wilderness and fiasco.
Leading into the big hit, wait for it…..
“Prigogine’s nonlinear thermodynamics of dissipative structures ”
—-
If you have something to say, just say it.
All this dancing around, only distracts.
The radiation and backradiation question is really the “holy of holies” of AGW science, and it is science, of a kind, no need to be needlessly derogatory. An internal narrative has been laboriously constructed, with billions of tax payer research dollars, into an extremely sophisticated edifice of equations and theory. So anyone arguing against AGW on the radiation-back-radiation question would have to find another inhabited planet somewhere and use its entire GDP to fund a corresponding research effort to construct an alternate body of theory. (If such a planet had not roasted to death already from alienothrogenic GW – perhaps the absence of such planets is evidence of AGW after all! – OMG we’re going to diiiiiieeee!!). Thus anyone arguing against AGW on radiation-backradiation theory is cruising for a bruising – the murderous lynching of Ferenc Miskolczi is evidence enough of that. The “Slayers” have rushed in where angels fear to tread and the inevitable has happened. But I dont think that this has all that much meaning regarding the central question of whether now – for the first time in the earth’s 4 billion year history, CO2 (still at historically low levels) should start doing something it has never done before, i.e. heat the planet.
Many arguments and taunts here take the form “but experimental data shows that back-radiation CAGW does exist – where is the slayers’ data?” But is this fair? It requires a large number of assumptions to claim that any experimental setup relates to the radiation budget of the planet. The size and chaotic complexity of the atmosphere and radiative and convective processes means that the only experimental model that will replicate the planets behaviour is the planet itself.
Many of the arguments may boil down to questions of definition and meaning. I dont think it is true that the slayers’ position is that a cold object cannot transfer radiative heat to a hotter object in the mechanistic quantum sense. This would contradict one of their own other arguments that a true black body can never exist. So everything except an object at absoute zero emits photons. Will a photon emitted from a cold object suddenly annihilate or change direction just because it is headed toward a warmer object where it will deposit hv amount of heat? No. I think the actual argument is more about the net balance of heat transfer when all processes of radiation and convection are considered together.
The more substantive argument of the slayers (and where they would be wiser to concentrate their energies, avoiding the back-radiation question) is that of the hydrological amplification that CAGW requires. CAGW science acknowledges that CO2 back-radiation warming declines logarithmically with increasing CO2 levels and is small anyway. But their get-out clause is amplification by water vapour – the hydrological cycle is accelerated by small CO2 warming and has the effect of adding further warming, multiplying the overall warming to reach alarming levels necessary for political efficacy of the narrative. This is where the thermodynamic arguments come in. It is also where nonlinear thermodymanics are relevant (a discipline started by Ilya Prigogine) – the cloud and weather systems energised by supposed CO2 warming would constitute “dissipative structures” which – as their name implies – must necessarily dissipate heat. The entropy budget – the issue of the 2nd law of thermodynamics – also demands that emergent structures from an accelerating hydrological cycle imply a decrease in entropy, so it must be balanced by increasing entropy elsewhere, most likely in a planet surrounded by vaccuum by export of heat. Looked at another way – it is an outrageous claim by AGW that a planet-warming hydrological accelleration can somehow decrease cloud (even they acknowledge that clouds increase albedo – except at the south pole – and thus cool the planet). The opposite is much more likely – increased hydrological cycle energy including thunderstorms will increase cloud cover and act as a negative, not positive feedback, and cool the planet. (Its a bit more complex than that – high cirrus cloud, which unlike lower cloud has a warming effect, was shown by Spencer himself and Christy to decrease in response to atmospheric warming excursions pointing to another cloud-based negative feedback.) This is precisely what Willis Essenbach (who is noticeably silent on this thread BTW) has argued in his very plausible thunderstorm and cloud “thermostat” theory. In nonlinear dynamics of an open, dissipative non-equilibrium system it is fundamental that emergent structures export entropy.
It is thus nonlinear dissipative thermodynamics that pose more of a threat to AGW than the backradiation question, which it is probably better to tactically ignore and side-step, General MacCarthy-style.
Phil. says (May 28, 2013 at 6:52 am): “For example from GE: “Standard incandescent and halogen lamps lose approximately 76% of the input energy by radiating heat, and convert only 8% into useful light. The Precise™ IR halogen capsule has multiple layers of very durable, thin, interference film which redirects heat, which would otherwise be wasted, back onto the lamp filament. This increases the filament temperature and allows it to give off more visible light for the same input power.””
=======================================================
The manufacturer has written this indeed, but it has apparently no basis in science. It is a pure fiction. Redirecting of light is still possible, of course, so you can get a brighter spot at the expense of the area around it.
Maybe we can call it “a fallacy of attribution”. A real effect wrongly or without evidence attributed to a certain cause.
Gosh. So much reading. Can I ask a question? If 99.9% of the Earth’s atmosphere, the nitrogen, oxygen and argon, cannot radiate or absorb IR at temperatures encountered, how do they cool once they have warmed?
I have made similar kind of experiments.
1) with 60W light bulb
using
a) Polyethylene(PE)-sheet, doubled. (transparent to IR and light).
b) Alu-foil-plastic-sheet( in fact cookie packet wrap, similar as space blanket, reflects IR and light)
close under the bulb.
Both stop convections but only b reflects really back.
In case a) Light bulb warmed from +78 °C to +83 °C in one minute and +87 °C in two minutes.
In case b) Light bulb warmed from +78 °C to +91 °C in one minute and +100,5 °C in two minutes.
I used IR608 Meterman microbolometer for temperature measurements.
2) with warm TV-screen (LCD)
using a and b. (beside, vertical, separated 1 inch from screen, areas 4 dm^2)
In case a) TV-screen warmed from approx +35,8 °C to +37,8 °C in 35 minutes
In case b) TV-screen warmed from approx +35,8 °C to +41,8 °C in 25 minutes and to +40,9 °C in 30 minutes.
In both case only back reflection explains the greater warming using b instead of a.
Even though a) was doubled sheet (!).
There is another entirely different way to address the back-radiation idea. Measuring the temperature of a really hot gas is notoriously difficult, yet it is done all the time using equipment very much like the experiment above, though much more like a planet’s surface and atmosphere and back-radiating gas. This should settle the matter for the minions of Mr Postma.
The measurement of temperature with a thermocouple requires that the metal tip come up to the same temperature as the gas such as a flame. When the tip gets hot from conduction and radiation, it radiates more and more heat away at a rate that increases with temperature reducing the reported temperature value, and never reaches equilibrium with the passing gases. This is a well known phenomenon and the problem has been resolved. In order to get the ‘real’ temperature the tip is shielded in a silvered tube with a high reflectivity. A pump draws a small amount of gas through the tube so it is able to sense the flame temperature as it passes.
The outgoing IR from the hot tip is reflected from the inside of the tube back to the radiating tip and is re-absorbed by the tip, which results in an increase in temperature reading. The direct cause is a net return of IR by back radiation. Against many protestations above, IR back radiation heats the tip further until the convective temperature of the gases passing through the mirrored tube is matched by the tip temperature. The tube tends to be several times longer than the diameter. This method is routinely used in industry and is the only way to get an accurate temperature measurement from a hot gas stream. An unshielded thermocouple always reads low because it loses heat by IR emission.
This is very much like the surface of the earth and the atmosphere above it containing at least some IR absorbing gases. There is nothing special about ‘back radiation’ it is just the relabeling some of the re-radiation because it happens to be downwards. Re-radiation happens with nearly every material in the universe that is above absolute zero. It was correctly stated earlier that the net energy exchange is the key to understanding this.
The key error is to think that the concept of heat ‘flowing’ from a hot object to a colder object – which is perfectly true for heat conduction – applies to energy radiation. It is obvious from the argument from Mr Postma that the group thinks of radiation as if it is conduction, which it is not.
There are three types of heat transfer: convection, conduction and radiation. It is not possible to heat a hotter object by a colder one by conduction. Convective heat transfer will only pass heat from a hotter object to a colder one because it is a form of conduction known as ‘mass transfer’. Radiation not a form of conduction and the Hot => Cold rule does not apply. Radiation is continuous in all directions and such energy is absorbed by whatever it strikes, or is reflected away. It is not true that radiated energy from a (relative) cold object is not absorbed by a hot object. Of course it is! The colder object did not know where it will strike when it emitted the photon! The direct result is a re-radiation by the now hotter object at a higher frequency. That is why objects start to glow in the visible range if they are heated enough, eventually glowing yellow.
Long wave (low energy) IR radiated from the surface of the moon strikes the sun and (slightly) elevates its temperature. That would happen whether the sun were burning and 6000 or dead and -160 degrees. It strikes the sun. End of short story. IR is absorbed, adding energy, raising the enthalpy, resulting in a higher temperature.
No energy is conducted to the sun from the moon because there is no mechanical connection between them. Radiation from the sun hits the moon, is re-radiated to the sun, elevating the temperature of the sun very slightly – just like CO2 and the surface of the earth.
The movement of heat from the surface of the earth is largely by convection to high elevations where it is lost to the dark, nearly infinite absorber of the Rest Of The Universe – by radiation of course. That CO2 warms the surface is, as Lindzen says, trivially true and numerically insignificant.
Swallow it. It’s good for you.
Greg House says:
May 28, 2013 at 8:05 am
Phil. says (May 28, 2013 at 6:52 am): “For example from GE: “Standard incandescent and halogen lamps lose approximately 76% of the input energy by radiating heat, and convert only 8% into useful light. The Precise™ IR halogen capsule has multiple layers of very durable, thin, interference film which redirects heat, which would otherwise be wasted, back onto the lamp filament. This increases the filament temperature and allows it to give off more visible light for the same input power.””
=======================================================
The manufacturer has written this indeed, but it has apparently no basis in science. It is a pure fiction. Redirecting of light is still possible, of course, so you can get a brighter spot at the expense of the area around it.
Maybe we can call it “a fallacy of attribution”. A real effect wrongly or without evidence attributed to a certain cause.
No it’s real science as opposed to House’s non-science!
It has nothing to do with “redirecting light into a brighter spot”.
Measurements of the light emitted from the capsule of the bulb show that the IR is not emitted in the presence of the dichroic coating and that the visible emissions increase exactly as would be expected from basic optics. The change in the measured current in the presence of the dichroic indicates that the resistance of the tungsten wire has increased in response to the increase in wire temperature caused by the feedback of the IR. Alternatively the same light output as the standard bulb can be achieved at lower voltage because of this feedback (a selling point of this product).
@phlogiston says:
>…No. I think the actual argument is more about the net balance of heat transfer when all processes of radiation and convection are considered together.
Unfortunately a close reading of their premises shows they believe that radiation is the same as conduction, ruling out in principle a transfer of heat from a cold to a hot object. It is a very simple error made very early on. The rest is wordy defenses of the misunderstanding.
It is not even interesting.
***
joeldshore says:
May 27, 2013 at 6:33 pm
Or, is it a covert attempt by skeptics to make themselves look good by making it seem that they are not occupying some extreme end of the scientific spectrum but only a middle ground between extremes on both sides, as expressed in posts like this…
***
Unless you forgot a sarc tag, only you could turn a perfectly reasonable comment by J Condon into a “covert attempt by skeptics to make themselves look good”. Pathetic & smacks of paranoia.
In theory. If, on the other hand, the emissivity of whatever is doing the emitting varies widely over the spectrum, not so much in fact. In the particular case of light bulb glass, I don’t know. I would think it’s a given that even if the setup doesn’t measure temperature accurately, the fact that there is a significant observed change in instrumented temperature means that it’s getting hotter rather than colder or staying constant.
There’s where I think the value of this experiment is: not that this is a radiometrically accurate setup from which we can compute how much energy is going back into the light bulb, but that (instead) we can deduce that substantial energy IS going back into it.
RGB said:
“The returned radiation becomes part of the total average power received by the surface of the Earth. Since this power is strictly greater than the average power it would have received without the GHG present — e.g. the average power received by the moon”
Peak daytime surface temperatures are lower with more atmospheric water vapour present due to absorption of solar NIR. Surely DWIR from the WV overnight won’t make up the daytime losses to the surface with ~half of the WV LWIR radiating to space?
The TOA is constantly losing matter with mass, at escape velocity….which is ENERGY, not counted in radiative only analysis. This is quantified in “Empirical Model of the Thermosphere” at Springer.com. Mass x velocity^2 = energy….which should be added to radiative loss to balance the energy equation.
OMG! An equation! Good job. Now, your next job is to compute the actual magnitude of this “evaporative cooling” of the Earth. The equations you will want to use are: The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of velocities at typical very-upper-atmosphere temperatures. The mass density at typical very-upper-atmosphere pressures. Escape velocity (that would be 11.2 km/second). Oooo, damn, not within orders of magnitude of being relevant. Damn, foiled again by that pesky arithmetic!
Now, let’s return to a discussion of the actual mechanisms that contribute to the Earth’s cooling and heating that are large enough to pay attention to. That would be insolation — ignore tidal forces, the stupendous rate of thermonuclear fusion in the Earth’s mantel (that would be what, zero?), exaggerated claims of the rate of fission (or any other internal) energy being conducted out of the Earth’s core, etc etc, and radiative loss, ignoring evaporative cooling through TOA loss of atmospheric mass.
We ignore these things because they are orders (plural) of magnitude less than insolation (incoming radiation) and radiative heat loss (outgoing radiation). So I guess that in the end, all we have to do is balance outgoing radiation integrated over the entire solid angle of the Earth and all frequencies and incoming radiation integrated over the entire solid angle of the Earth and all frequencies, because the Earth is sitting there in a gravitationally bound vacuum so conduction is nonexistent, convection is nonexistent, and evaporative loss (from molecules at the tail of the MB distribution that happen to have escape energy) is completely, utterly, negligible on any timescale of interest.
But still, an equation! Good job! Now if you would just invest in a calculator (and learn a few more equations)…
rgb
Peak daytime surface temperatures are lower with more atmospheric water vapour present due to absorption of solar NIR. Surely DWIR from the WV overnight won’t make up the daytime losses to the surface with ~half of the WV LWIR radiating to space?
It isn’t half. The downwelling radiation comes mostly from water vapor and CO_2 at air temperatures close to surface temperatures. The actual rate of radiative loss comes from photons emitted in the right direction at the height where (for each GHG and emission line thereof) the photon has a reasonable chance of actually escaping. This is the height where the atmosphere actually cools, and collectively establishes the tropopause. The temperature there is considerably lower than surface temperatures — even on an absolute scale — and the outgoing radiation rate goes as T^4 so the rate is (much) further suppressed.
But again, why not just look at TOA and BOA spectra. There are measurements — so screw theory. BIG hole in the outgoing TOA emission spectrum in LWIR. BIG peak in downwelling radiation that almost precisely mirrors the TOA emission, upside down.
The point is that without any atmosphere the problem is simple. The daytime lunar surface heats to where the SBE, albedo, emissivity, the specific heat of the surface, and insolation say it should heat so that with a small temporal lag incoming power equals outgoing power (the lag means that it is always chasing but not quite reaching equilibrium). The nighttime lunar surface cools to where the SBE, emissivity etc says it should with no input worth mentioning from starlight and/or Earthlight. Daytime surface temperatures are hotter than the Earth’s comparable surface temperatures, but not insanely hotter. Nighttime surface temperatures are cold. Very cold indeed. Cold cold cold. The temperature change is far from symmetric, hence the Moon with no ARE has a mean temperature computed any way you like that is considerably (roughly 10%) less than the Earth.
So I guess that is an empirical fact that the combination of atmosphere and ocean causes the Earth to end up much warmer on average, and the atmosphere ALONE provides enough of the required oomph that a snowball Earth is not a stable attractor, or we would have long since fallen through to it.
Beyond that, I agree, water vapor and clouds are complicated, and water vapor and clouds can in the vicinity of the Earth’s current climate state be net warming or net cooling, provide positive feedback to CO_2 driven warming or negative feedback. I rather like the possibility of negative feedback, as this would explain a lot of the observed very long timescale stability and lack of a third “very warm phase” attractor on the hot side. Right now we are in the warm interglacial of a prolonged and deep glacial period, geologically speaking. There is no evidence in well over millions to tens of millions of years of a still-warmer stable phase, and over most of the last three million the warm phase has been remarkable stable — and comparatively brief — compared to the glacial phase.
rgb
Rosco says (May 28, 2013 at 3:13 am): “This question will never be resolved…”
My point exactly.
“But if you don’t believe there is a large amount of light reflected straight back you are ignoring the geometry of the setup.”
*sigh* Define “large”. Then express “the geometry of the setup” mathematically, calculate the view factors, correct for the portion of the radiation reaching the mirror that isn’t reflected to the lamp, correct for heating of the mirror and its convective/radiative heat losses, etc.
As I pointed out before, you might as well be solving the Drake Equation. Good luck. 🙂
BTW, Part 2 of this article is now up on WUWT, and the geometry is somewhat simpler. You may want to take a stab at analyzing that one.
No it’s real science as opposed to House’s non-science!
It has nothing to do with “redirecting light into a brighter spot”.
Measurements of the light emitted from the capsule of the bulb show that the IR is not emitted in the presence of the dichroic coating and that the visible emissions increase exactly as would be expected from basic optics. The change in the measured current in the presence of the dichroic indicates that the resistance of the tungsten wire has increased in response to the increase in wire temperature caused by the feedback of the IR. Alternatively the same light output as the standard bulb can be achieved at lower voltage because of this feedback (a selling point of this product).
Ooo, ouch.
But don’t worry, the slayers don’t believe in halogen dichroic bulbs. To them they are pink unicorns that stop airplanes. If they happen to turn on a light containing such a bulb, they feign blindness.
rgb
Steven R Vada says (May 28, 2013 at 1:32 am): “What happened to your story?”
What story? I don’t recall writing a story. Link?
“I need, the experiment done, with YOUR prediction. 24 years in a row now I’ve watched GHE BELIEVERS’ predictive power.”
OMG, you’re serious. You really think the Earth is a laboratory experiment. Even though there’s no, zero, nada, zilch control. My, what a…unique view of the experimental method.
I was referring to a real laboratory experiment that would (in the Slayers’ view) prove them right and destroy the basic premise of the so-called “greenhouse effect” (SCGE), i.e. Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” experiment, or one very much like it. Yet they haven’t done it, which IMHO is very suspicious.
Back to the Earth: If you think that X years of the so-called “average temperature of the Earth” (SCATE) not following the IPCC’s model “ensemble” falsifies the so-called “greenhouse effect”, would you say that X years of the SCATE agreeing with the models proves the SCGE?
(hint: I would say “no” to both)
It is thus nonlinear dissipative thermodynamics that pose more of a threat to AGW than the backradiation question, which it is probably better to tactically ignore and side-step, General MacCarthy-style.
Sure, but this leaves a significant enemy to the rear. No, not the warmists or scientists who relatively uncritically accept the argument of the catastrophists. The Slayers. When they make statements that violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics, statements that aren’t just “wrong” (like Greg House’s utterly unfounded claim and empirically refuted claim that radiation reflected back on the filament of a light bulb doesn’t increase its temperature and hence alter its radiation spectrum favorably towards the visible) — they aren’t even controversial. In this particular case, they are simple engineering.
PSI makes a shambles of the real scientific case against CAGW or CACC. In so doing it makes it very difficult for legitimate scientists who doubt it and are (quite correctly) trying to falsify the theory with a mix of careful algebraic work and measurement to get a hearing.
It is a logical fallacy of sorts to disbelieve a conclusion just because the person stating it is obviously incompetent to argue the issue at all, so wrong that the wrongness actually hurts, but it is human nature to do so. The same phenomena occurs in medicine and physicians have to be careful about it — crazy personality disordered narcissistic hypochondriacs get sick too, so much as you’d LIKE to write off their complaint of upper right quadrant pain and general fatigue as attention seeking, even if they complain of a whole raft of symptoms they obviously looked up in a book to make their complaint more plausible, you have to work them up, time after time, for something that is almost certainly nothing. General scientists don’t have the time or energy for this (and no liability for being mistaken) so they follow the simple, human path of rejecting the badly made arguments AND the well-made arguments of others that lead to a somewhat similar conclusion. So sure, the real question is how to solve problems in highly nonlinear nonequilibrium thermodynamics in open systems containing multiple coupled Navier-Stokes fluids interacting with a non-uniform stratum on a rotating tilted eccentrically orbiting differentially heated and cooled ball and not get complete nonsense for answers. The entire community is distracted from this search and legitimate challenges to the existing set of “settled science” answers so far proposed by the Slayers’ nonsense.
It is truly time to put an end to it. Sadly, the only way to do so is to post direct, easily reproducible experiments that refute their nonsense arguments online so they can be instantly referenced when they try to bring them up in their inane arguments in all sorts of forums. And we (skeptics) have to do the policing ourselves, because many of those arguing on the other side of the issue are perfectly happy to lump Spencer, Watts, Ball, Curry, and others in with the PSI. Ball in particular, since he (I think inadvertently) gave their early “results” a certain amount of credibility by joining their “organization”, back before it became clear that it was a vehicle for cracked pottery.
I expect the next week or so to be very entertaining. Roy and Anthony have, I think, decided to make the real push to put and end to this here and now. I’ve been working on it myself in separate threads and other venues, but look forward to participating in it here as it unfolds. There appear to be a group of volunteers who will do the experiments that refute the oft-repeated arguments of the Slayers, one at a time, in easily reproducible, videotaped ways.
This will not convince the Slayers themselves, of course. To admit that they are not only wrong, but badly wrong, should-have-known-better wrong is to accept two things. One is a blow to their personal egos that they cannot endure the thought of, one that will drive them into a state of cognitive dissonance that will literally prevent them from being able to face their refutation. The second is that they really have lost all right to be taken seriously on matters of climate science, by anybody, ever again, and that they really need to find a new hobby, ideally one that doesn’t require any knowledge of physics, calculus, or general science.
rgb
Konrad says (May 28, 2013 at 1:26 am): “If you care to actually challenge my empirical experiments, perhaps you could give me your direct YES or NO answers to the following questions -”
I don’t challenge your controlled laboratory experiments. I’m sure they behaved exactly as you described.
While you’re at it, why not repeat the R. W. Wood experiment?
Greg House says (May 28, 2013 at 8:05 am): “The manufacturer has written this indeed, but it has apparently no basis in science.”
Wrong again:
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/5269770/5269770.pdf
“It is a pure fiction.”
Right. Fictional patents, no complaints from government regulators, and–get this–no complaints from their competitors that they’re lying. Greg is confronted with real, commercially available products using a physical principle he claims doesn’t exist, and…he sees nothing. Greg, are you related to this guy?
Greg House, the Sgt. Schultz of WUWT. 🙂
Collections of photons — like collections of molecules– do have a temperature.
It is quite possible to tell the temperature from the spectrum of the photons. (This will help to ward off a couple counterarguments from Joe Postma).
A minor quibble. It is possible to infer the POSSIBLE temperature of a source of photons IF that source is thermal and at something like a uniform temperature. That is, if the source happens to be an actual blackbody or behaves like a blackbody as far as radiative emission is concerned, sure.
For the “light bulb in a mason jar experiment”, I would suggest changing the experiment to a pair of mason jars, one wrapped with AL foil. This would make the control and the experiment more similar.
For completeness, a few other experiments could be done, like wrapping the jar in sarah wrap, or spray painting the outside of the jar and/or Al foil. The jars could also be immersed in water (of varying temperatures even) to reduce the warming of the glass itself and to change the “back IR” from the glass.
Sure, that would work. Although lots of things will work, because their assertion here is very wrong so nearly anything that reflects a reasonable chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum back to a heated source will measurably raise its equilibrium temperature. Who would be surprised if two spotlights facing each other so that 100% of the emission of one was absorbed by the other got hotter? Yet it is oft-quoted holy writ to Postma that if we replace the actual second spotlight with a perfectly reflective (but cooler!) mirror that the image of the second bulb will not heat the first bulb. Indeed, I’m not certain Joe accepts that the two bulbs facing each other would get hotter than one bulb alone, or would accept it if he were sitting there watching a thermometer attached to one of them go up when he turned on the second one. You can actually feel your face warm from a piece of aluminum foil held in front of it. People market the space blanket and radiative thermal insulation for space craft. As far as light bulb filaments are concerned, it’s just engineering:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp#Halogen_infrared_reflective_.28HIR.29
Clearly, no Slayer nor Greg House would ever buy a Halogen IR reflector bulb, because they deny the simple, measured fact that the IR reflector increases the filament temperature and shifts the peak of the emission spectrum towards the visible at constant filament power. This is a very compact version of the GHE in practical engineering and it makes Anthony’s demonstration moot.
This is bizarre beyond measure. The light reflected from a mirror is just — light. It carries energy. The light energy can be and will be absorbed, photon by photon by any high-emissivity, low albedo surface. The real question is: Given this rather devastating mini-experiment and the other facts elicited on this thread, will Postma openly concede that he has been wrong in his repeated assertions that reflection from a mirror can never cause an increase in the temperature of a heated source such as a light bulb filament, in spite of the fact that he can head on down to Wal Mart and buy a bulb whose simple engineering refutes him!
My guess is — based on extensive communication on this issue with him in the past — no. In fact, I’d bet a beer on it. If you bought him a such a bulb, if you directed him straight to the engineers who designed, patented, built the bulb, he’d simply deny that the bulb exists, or works like they say it does, in spite of his own ability to (if he wishes) directly measure the fact that he is wrong.
Cognitive dissonance too great to be borne. Sorry, Joe.
rgb
I have read hundreds of replies and opinions on one simple experiment, yet AGW crowd expects us to believe with regards to that the vast chaotic experiment called climate, there is no need to discuss it anymore, it is settled.
rgbatduke says:
“There are measurements — so screw theory.”
Exactly my sentiments on seeing that peak daytime surface temperatures are higher where there is less water vapour present locally. WV also absorbs a small band of visible solar EMR, and scatters an amount too (Raman?). Even if the OLR is less than half, I still don’t see how it adds up to a radiative advantage overall, as any losses will result in less than unity on average.
“Daytime surface temperatures are hotter than the Earth’s comparable surface temperatures, but not insanely hotter.”
Peak equatorial Lunar temp’ is about 30C hotter than something like fresh asphalt can reach on our equator.
“So I guess that is an empirical fact that the combination of atmosphere and ocean causes the Earth to end up much warmer on average, and the atmosphere ALONE provides enough of the required oomph..”
With the average ocean temp’ being ~9C warmer than the average land temp’, it would seem sensible that the oceanic thermal reservoir is maintaining the land and the atmosphere at a higher temperature.
beng says:
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment inspired by Darren Potter’s conspiracy theory. In all seriousness though, after reading the Slayers nonsense rejecting basic physics, merely the rejection of the significant weight of the evidence rather than outright rejection of basic physics does look good by comparison.
REPLY: you mean like David Karoly just did, by lowering the six degrees of screaming the sky is falling to now about 2 degrees? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/28/australian-scientists-take-6-degrees-of-global-warming-off-the-table-say-it-is-closer-to-2/
Based on Nuccitelli’s irrational ideas and steamnets about Dr. Richard Tol, Karoly must now be be a denier for “encouraging” skeptics.
– Anthony
Does he realize that a linear extrapolation of that trend, for which Warmistas are famous, will soon have the earth cooling in an unprecedented manner?
(There’s always time for Karoly to jump to another conclusion, which I’m sure he will.)
So many seem to conveniently or purposely forget some basic physic concepts in each and every statement, making an unreal story-line with these pieces pasted together, never looking at it all at one sitting.
All radiating gases do so in a isotropic manner. If you are just looking in an upward and downward axis then you can say half is upward and half is downward. This may not be an exact split, there may be a slight directionality upward but I have seen no evidence to support this view.
On a line by line basis, Kirchhoff’s law holds, there is an equal amount absorbed and radiated at one given frequency. One commenter used the description of ‘ringing’ molecules and that is pretty close to the actual.
It is moot whether radiation going back to the energy source is actually absorbed (thermalized) or not. The math ends up right either way. I like to parallel this concept to the same principle used to cancel sound waves. If you can produce the same sound frequencies in the opposite direction and anti-phased then the sound ceases to exist at all. So how does nature do this? Isn’t nature breaking it’s own conservation of energy law? Shouldn’t waves just pass right through each other, even electric and magnetic waves? There is energy producing each set of waves so how does this energy just disappear when diametrically opposed? Doesn’t that violate conservation of energy? No. Energy transfer is a vector quantity and in a way nature knows the end result as it occurs and by the least action principle cancelling does occur, there is such a thing as waves cancelling each other.
Taking this concept to Anthony’s experiment or the “slayers” concept they are the same, opposing radiation power, the ability to radiate, does cause an energy source to not be able to shed energy as it would if it was not opposed and this is what is so misnamed as the greenhouse effect.
If you carry these same concepts to Venus’s atmosphere you can reproduce both Earth’s and Venus’s atmosphere entire temperature profile (well, to within a few degrees from at least the surface to the top of the atmosphere, they both miss a little in the middle of the atmosphere using just this set of concepts) and both have adequate ghg’s to make each pressure band have the same energy transfer ratios through such bands. But you have to perform these calculations using spherical geometry, plane-parallel will not do. Spherically radiation inward has a given amount of self-radiating, self-opposition, that you will not find with the plane-parallel model. See my last notes on tallbloke’s site. But you have to do so in equal pressure bands, not equal altitude bands, for equal pressure bands all have the same mass so the number of molecules within each band are equal. that is saying in radiation’s case density does matter when computing energy transfers.
If the ‘slayers’ are saying that water vapor and carbon dioxide (really any ghg) being strongly radiators at certain frequencies have no effect at all on the surfaces ability to shed heat radiatively, but I think they are not saying ‘that’ exactly… well, then I completely disagree with them.
Gary Hladik says:
May 28, 2013 at 11:07 am
“While you’re at it, why not repeat the R. W. Wood experiment?”
——————————————————————————
Because all the wood experiment shows is that the primary warming mechanism of a physical greenhouse is through the restriction of convective cooling. My experiments demonstrate why adding radiative gases to a moving atmosphere increase convective cooling. Very simply really.
Gary,
Do you you have any serious challenge to my claim that AGW is a physical impossibility?
Joseph A Olson says: “Wiki/Night_Vision_Device, gives detailed history of night vision optics, and first generation, 1,000x power devices DO benefit from auxiliary IR lighting and so do 50,000x power third generation devices, all of which operate on wider IR band than just the CO2 absorption band. The point being, there is scant IR energy available, even with massive magnification. ”
Your “point being” is invalid.
Wiki Night Vision discusses use of auxiliary light (Active Illumination) being of NIR (Near Infrared), not IR (Infrared). For 4th point time – Night Vision scopes are not designed to work with “IR lighting”, whether they are 1st gen, 2nd gen, or 3rd gen. Even with 3rd gen’s 50,000x amplification Night Vision scope is not going to make them usable with “IR light”.
You end up jumping to invalid conclusion based on flawed understanding of Night Vision scope’s capability and what you were seeking Not to find. If you want to detect IR (thermal) get a FLIR imager (thermal sensing device). A FLIR device being designed to detect differences in IR of objects and surrounding areas, and display those differences in a visual format your eye can see. Your “point being” is like you claimed to go deer hunting, took a fishing pole, came back without venison, then stated there can’t be any deer because you didn’t hook any Bambis.
Konrad says (May 28, 2013 at 5:47 pm): “Gary,
Do you you have any serious challenge to my claim that AGW is a physical impossibility?”
Do you have any “serious” evidence that it is?
Anthony it is so heartening to see you and Roy taking on the ridiculous claims of the slayers who are as crazy as the far lunatics of the pro AGW camp and heat doomsdays. I live in hope that the pro AGW camp will likewise take on their lunatics and hopefully then we can resume normal science rather than the crazy garbage that climate science has become.
Radiation is one of the three methods of heat transmission. Radioactivity is different phenomenon. Your expt. does not prove what you claim. Heat is always transmitted from body with higher temperature to the body of lower temperature, like water from higher to lower height to level up the height.
Re Gary Hladik says:
————————————
Gary I responded to your post about Dr Spencer’s article here…
David says:
May 28, 2013 at 6:13 am
I am looking forward to your thoughts, and please understand my assertions, (questions really) are not cogent to rejecting backradiation, which I do not do.
RGB, if you would like to respond to my post also I would appreciate the opportunity to learn. I think my assertions and questions are reasonable.
Gary Hladik says:
May 28, 2013 at 7:38 pm
Gary,
I asked you if you have any serious challenge to my claim that AGW is a physical impossibility. Your response –
“Do you have any “serious” evidence that it is?”
I have already given you a link to photographs and instructions for five simple empirical experiments that together disprove the radiative GHE hypothesis. What more do you need?
Dr. Spencer has correctly claimed that strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation would cease without radiative gases. Dr. Spencer has also correctly claimed that most of such an atmosphere would go isothermal. The empirical experiments I gave you show that such an isothermal atmosphere would be far hotter than our present atmosphere.
Experiment 4 shows that the temperature of a non radiative atmosphere without full vertical circulation would have its temperature set by surface Tmax, not surface Tav as Dr. Spencer claims.
Experiment 5 shows that even though land surface Tmin would be lower under a non radiative atmosphere, this is largely irrelevant to atmospheric temperatures as the surface is far less effective at conductively cooling the atmosphere than it is a conductively heating it.
If an atmosphere without radiative gases would be far hotter than an atmosphere with radiative gases, then the net effect of radiative gases in the atmosphere must be cooling not warming. This disproves the radiative GHE hypothesis.
Do you have any serious challenge to my claim that AGW is a physical impossibility?
I still wonder when someone is going to address whether the bulb became brighter.
I noted the interesting point that adding a mirror is similar to adding a lightbulb the same distance behind the mirror as the original, except for the region in the shadow of the mirror, of course.
Adding objects around or over or on the bulb is functionally the same as applying paint with different emissivities to the bulb, same input, lower emissivity, means you need a higher temperature to dissipate the same amount of heat as an output.
There isn’t extra heat being produced here, is there?
The room the bulb is in doesn’t become warmer as a result of placing the mirror beside the bulb, does it?
Howdy Richard111. Clear gases obviously aren’t very capable of absorbing radiated heat, therefore they need the 2 other ways of doing it – conduction (direct contact) and convection (stirring).
During a sunny day, the ground warms up. The air molecules in direct contact with the surface heat up through conduction and rise away from the surface, being replaced by cooler molecules which are in turn heated.
This swirling around of air molecules creates a stirring effect and mixes warm air molecules with colder ones through convection. Warmer air molecules can also share their heat through direct contact with colder air molecules. This continues as long as there’s enough energy available to distribute and the air heats up. The air and ground constantly radiate any heat from their molecules outward and ultimately into space.
On cooling, everything happens largely in reverse. Radiated heat from ground and atmosphere continues to be lost to space except the heat source is now gone. The rocks cool, air molecules through conduction also lose heat to the ground which, through radiation and convection continue to lose it to space.
Notice how a cloudy night is usually warmer and that on such nights, frost is impossible. This is due to the water vapour clouds reflecting a lot of that radiated heat back to the ground. During the day, they obviously play the role of shade, reflecting much of that heat to space.
This is just a simple explanation. If someone wants to express it more eloquently, be my guest.
Konrad says (May 28, 2013 at 9:44 pm): “I have already given you a link to photographs and instructions for five simple empirical experiments that together disprove the radiative GHE hypothesis.”
Whoa. Arrogant much? What you have are a few toy models of a very large and very complex system plus a lot of verbiage (“Look, Mom, I’ve discovered CONVECTION!!!”), and all this “disproves” conventional atmospheric physics? Not “calls into question”, not “raises some doubts”, not even “needs more work”, but absolutely “disproves”? Sorry, that kind of claim just pegs my “built-in doubter”.
http://www.strbrasil.com.br/English/Res/fact.htm
You sound, in fact, a lot like Al “the science is settled” Gore (OK, sorry) and the Pink Unicorn Brigade (OK, sorrier) that Anthony, Dr. Spencer, and Curt have at long last bitch-slapped into temporary silence. Maybe I’m just burned out on people who know “THE TRUUUUUTH”, but I woudn’t be much of a skeptic if I suddenly turned gullible now.
So yeah, I have a serious challege to your claim: You lack humility in the face of a problem that has consumed the entire careers of people smarter than (I believe) both of us. You cite no publications, derive truth from models one step above R W Wood’s, and overturn decades of work from your kitchen. Sorry, I need more.
I wish you well in your quest for the next plate tectonics theory, ulcer bacteria, or germ theory of disease, and I hope you take my criticism constructively, but if you want to dismiss my response as “unserious”, be my guest. In the so-called Information Age I’m deluged with so much PUS (pink unicorn s**t) I don’t have time to worry about being overly skeptical. /rant
Next?
“Mr. Hladik? Hi, I’m Barack Obama, and I have the answer to your health care problem, your tax problem, your terrorism problem, your climate change problem–”
Oh, &*%^*$
Hi Max. It’s all a question of redirection. There’s no extra energy such as visible or IR, we’re just bouncing back what would have been lost through the space blocked by the mirror.
The bulb gets warmer only because that normally lost energy is reflected back, reducing the speed at which that loss occurs. The room as a whole can’t get warmer, but more light and heat is directed by the mirror to the side of the room it faces. This is why torches shine predominantly forward, the parabolic curved reflector being the mirror.
Adding the mirror reflects the light back to the side of the room the mirror is pointing at, so that side of the room is brighter, which is almost the same as using 2 bulbs, but the mirror blocks the light that would normally be lost. It’s all simply redirecting the light and IR.
It’s possible the bulb would appear brighter, however sensitive Lumens measuring equipment might be needed to differentiate that from the glare our eyes normally see.
Gary Hladik says:
May 29, 2013 at 12:26 am
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That’s it? That’s the best you’ve got?
I would say you just lost Gary. Badly.
Ok, well, I have to say that if I thought the slayer position was the one being presented here, I wouldn’t have any time for it either… but I didn’t notice things like the Siddon image having the comment about heat rather than just brightness.
I’m thinking the slayer position is what I mentioned above, from the position of the light bulb adding a mirror resembles the effect of adding another bulb behind the mirror position, if we ignore things like reflections off the roof and walls of course…
That doesn’t mean it is actually the same as adding another light bulb, because part of the room is now darker due to the mirror, as the light that would have traveled that way was redirected.
As a whole I would be rather surprised if this could actually increase the total brightness of the room, and similarly I would be surprised if this actually made the bulb brighter, rather than hotter.
_______________
Actually, I would REALLY like to see what the profile from the side–perpendicular to the mirror placement–would be.
One side of the bulb should be warmer than the other side, shouldn’t it?
Max, I believe that the reflected side of the bulb would generally be hotter, because it’s also receiving the extra energy. The total brightness of the room wouldn’t increase, just the wall that’s receiving the reflected light from the mirror. I feel that looking from a certain angle,the bulb might appear brighter, but not by a useful amount.
I’d like to see an IR map of the entire bulb. That would show exactly where the extra heat is concentrated. Light, however would be more difficult to map.
Your experiment did not do what you claim. The argument was ”shining a lighted bulb to a mirror does not increase the brightness of the bulb”. This did not happen. Therefore Joe Postma is correct. You had a small increase of temperature because the mirror acts as an insulator preventing the temperature equilibrium being maintained so you ended up with a small temperature increase. This does not prove that the GHE is fact only that insulation works, which we all know.
PLEASE use SI units of temperature.
Since several people have complained about the lack of access to the PSI forum.I sent an e-mail to John O’Sullivan about 1 1/2 days ago suggesting that they make a forum section visible to the public and volunteered to help them moderate it.I was a moderator of an older forum but left after having to clean up the spamming on a daily basis which is not possible to prevent due to the low quality of the Kunena forum software.I tried hard to convince them to use a good forum software such as myBB and gave them links to the Joomla merger software to bridge myBB and Joomla together and it was rejected in favor of the gutter quality Kunena software from Joomla.
There have been no response to the e-mail and that is why I am commenting about it here.I am a member of that private forum but unable to go there anymore because I never joined the PSI group thus making me an outcast.Have not seen the forum for months and no longer care to because of this absurdly level of privacy.
I am pissed about it.
REPLY: I don’t blame you. It’s like the SkS kidz club at the opposite end of the spectrum. -Anthony
Konrad says (May 29, 2013 at 2:33 am): “That’s it? That’s the best you’ve got?
I would say you just lost Gary. Badly.”
Whatever you say, Barack. Good luck storming the castle.
OK, what @#%$^& is next on the agenda?
I love real-world scientific experiments. This is what Nye and Beakman were SUPPOSED to do for kids, but they quickly switched to advocacy and lost their shine.
Keep this up!
This should handily disqualify your point of view, unless you’d like to revisit your use of the word “insulator” as used to describe a material that is an excellent conductor of heat.
Anthony,
I have been told that anyone can now post comments at the PSI blog.
Gary Hladik says:
May 29, 2013 at 7:24 am
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I am not sure I understand your reference to “Now is the Moment” Obamcaclese, teleprompter reader in chief, architect of the sub-prime loan crisis and former president of the Joyce Foundation. But no matter..
“Assault the castle”?
Let us not go to Camelot, it is a silly place. There is no need to assault the castle, it can be pushed over with a finger. The walls are made of cardboard and those 2500 knights guarding the ramparts are scarecrows stitched from whole cloth and stuffed with grey literature. The whole point of the PSI thing was to shame any sceptic from questioning the radiative GHE hypothesis and finding this out.
The castle will self destruct in due course. There is a man on the inside. One of your own. Ray Pierrehumbert, high priest of AGW and writer of the sacred texts. He worked out the critical errors I am highlighting with the radiative GHE hypothesis. He knew before 1995. He tried to write some industrial strength bafflegab to cover it up. Essentially trying to get away with this –
“initially adding radiative gasses to the atmosphere causes cooling, but after a “certain point” than strangely coincides with current political conditions, it causes warming.”
It wasn’t going to work, so it was buried under the castle. It is still ticking.
So Gary, good luck with the AGW thing.
What’s next on the Agenda? All the AGW fellow travellers tearing each other to pieces in a maelstrom of blame, rage and despair. Popcorn time for sceptics.
Konrad says (May 29, 2013 at 5:13 pm): ‘I am not sure I understand your reference to “Now is the Moment” Obamcaclese…’
Because, like yours, his sales pitch is that he has THE ANSWER. Well, so does the Pink Unicorn Brigade, so does the IPCC, and so does the deodorant commercial on TV. My built-in doubter says they (and you) probably don’t.
‘“Assault the castle”?’
Actually it was “Good luck storming the castle.” from “The Princess Bride”: Three guys (one crippled) against a castle. A metaphor for overturning the conventional science that so-called “greenhouse gases” provide a net warming of the atmosphere.
“There is no need to assault the castle, it can be pushed over with a finger.”
And yet it still stands. Funny, that. Finger out of order? 🙂
“The walls are made of cardboard and those 2500 knights guarding the ramparts are scarecrows…”
Those “knights” come from BOTH sides of the CAGW debate, i.e. both supporters and critics of the IPCC. You’re not part of the Pink Unicorn Brigade, but your “army” is apparently about as small as theirs. Small “armies” have “stormed the castle” before (e.g. plate tectonics), but the vast majority just melt away.
“So Gary, good luck with the AGW thing.”
Thanks. Good luck with the castle. In all sincerity, you’ll need a bigger battering ram than your kitchen experiments. (And only here do I realize that I should have gone with the “Jaws” metaphor instead, so I could tell you to get a bigger boat. *sigh* Story of my life…)
“What’s next on the Agenda? All the AGW fellow travellers tearing each other to pieces in a maelstrom of blame, rage and despair. Popcorn time for sceptics.”
While that vision is certainly appealing, my built-in doubter says the CAGW scam will slowly fade away, only to be replaced by even more destructive stupidities.
Sorry to implode your bubble here, but if IR was reflected by the mirror and the bulb reduced thermal loss because of this, as you admit, then it’s obvious other wavelengths of photons were reflected, such as visible light. In the glare of the bulb, our own eyes may not be able to perceive much change in brightness. This is difficult to measure without accurate Lumens measuring equipment.
But it still stands to reason that any reflected photons will affect the bulb’s brightness, whether in UV, IR or visible light wavelengths. The experiment is, for all intents and purposes, proven.
Addendum to my above:
Any photonic wavelength that can be reflected by the bulb surface, or even filament (which it can because it’s visible even when switched off), will make the bulb appear brighter, however the argument was not about the filament – just the bulb. in any case, Joe Postma is incorrect and his hypothesis duly falsified.
joeldshore says: “It was a tongue-in-cheek comment inspired by Darren Potter’s conspiracy theory. In all seriousness though, after reading the Slayers nonsense rejecting basic ”
> beng says: ” Unless you forgot a sarc tag, only you could turn a perfectly reasonable comment by J Condon”
>> Potter says: “Is PSI a covert attempt by ManBearPig types to discredit ”
Call it what you will, but PSI is doing a good job of trashing web sites which have rejected AGW (claim of man made CO2 inducing climate change). Try reading through some of threads where PSI / Slayers have posted numerous comments. It is hard to tell who is skeptic of AGW and who is Slayer rejecting GHG — unless you already know the players.
Now imagine reading through the same sites and threads as an average person who is starting to doubt ManBearPig’s AGW. An outsider that has come here looking for information and facts on GW. With said average person having education of one or two high school science classes, works in non-science field, and up until now has gotten their AGW (cough) science from newspapers and television. Realizing, an average person is not deeply interested in science of climate change, and most likely has limited amount of time to spend digging out fact from fiction.
I tried reading through a few such threads wearing hat of an average person, and quickly grew weary of all the conflicting comments / trashing. I never made it to point of who was right or wrong, let alone whether AGW was science or nonsense.
Regardless of whether PSI / Slayers are ManBearPig / AGW operatives; PSI / Slayers are having a negative impact on those of us who have rejected ManBearPig’s Global Warming SCAM, and are attempting to help others understand why AGW is not science fact. ( IMO it is a mistake to underestimate how far ManBearPig is willing to go to win AGW: http://climaterealityproject.org )
Gary Hladik says:
May 29, 2013 at 6:28 pm
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“Kitchen experiments”? Gary, the instructions for the experiments posted have been designed specifically so other readers can build and replicate them for themselves. I cannot ask others to use Q-Cell and Mylar insulation, dry nitrogen or peltier chips. The basic physics demonstrated in the experiments remains valid and AGW remains a physical impossibility.
You have attempted to defend the radiative GHE hypothesis. In your responses you have attempted to ridicule me by association or comparison to others. You have made call to authority arguments regarding “conventional science”. You have attempted to ridicule the simplicity of the experiments shown without addressing their results. (I note that you do not attack Anthony’s experiment in the same way). You have nowhere addressed the science. Why is that?
I don’t need a army Gary, one is enough. All that is needed is the Internet and time. After all, some AGW promoters already knew for years why the hypothesis fails, yet continued to push it anyway. The evidence of this cannot be erased. Pierrehumberts clumsy patch up. The “high altitude ice clouds cause warming” papers being ditched. The attack on the Makarevia 2010 discussion paper. It’s all there on the Internet forever. There will be no “slow fade away”, no “soft landing”. The hoax got too big for that. The public will demand the names and they will get them.
Darren Potter says:
May 29, 2013 at 7:24 pm
“it is a mistake to underestimate how far ManBearPig is willing to go to win AGW”
—————————————————————————————————–
Indeed,
look at the money from Soros through Fenton Communications to set up the pro AGW sites including RC. Then further money to Google to keep RC further up in the search listings than their traffic alone would justify.
The weight of circumstantial evidence would indicate that PSI, Greg House and Myrrh are AGW Assault Clowns. Always jumping on any thread discussing problems with the radiative GHE. Never seen to comment on proxy studies, surface station data or numerous other issues. Their apparent mission – make any sceptic thinking of challenging the radiative GHE hypothesis afraid to be associated with them.
Part 2 of this thread is quite entertaining. AGW Promoters and AGW Sleepers arguing with AGW Assault Clowns. Anthony has “taken out the trash” yet they are still trying to keep the game alive 😉
That’s one thing that could be said for climate blogs. They do attract a better class of troll 😉
Konrad says (May 29, 2013 at 7:57 pm): “Gary, the instructions for the experiments posted have been designed specifically so other readers can build and replicate them for themselves”
While I appreciate the attention, you have to realize that I and other laymen here at WUWT are not your target demographic. If you want to revolutionize atmospheric science, you ‘ll have to target atmospheric scientists. If you have more sophisticated experiments, submit them for publication. If you have a better GCM, show that it explains climate parameters better than existing GCMs and submit for publication.
“In your responses you have attempted to ridicule me by association or comparison to others.”
You reject the prevailing scientific paradigm, therefore your claims are extraordinary, but you present no extraordinary evidence. You claim unique truth, much like the Pink Unicorn Brigade, so I hold you to the same standards.
“You have made call to authority arguments regarding ‘conventional science’.”
Sorry, have I misrepresented “conventional science”?
“I note that you do not attack Anthony’s experiment in the same way”.
Come on, Konrad, you don’t seriously think the complexity of the issues is even comparable, do you? I mean, light bulb + mirror ~ planetary climate system? Seriously?
Besides, Anthony’s results are in line with “conventional science”. 🙂 I know, because I’ve even seen this stuff in textbooks (which, BTW, disagree with you on so-called GHGs causing net cooling). You can bet, though, that I’d have a bone to pick with him if his results weren’t “conventional”. Extraordinary claims, right?
“You have nowhere addressed the science. Why is that?”
Au contraire. I explicitly accepted all your experimental results. Convection! Evaporation! Refrigeration! They’re real!
My quarrel is with extending these results to an entire climate system.
“I don’t need a army Gary, one is enough. All that is needed is the Internet and time.”
“I admire your notion of fair odds, mister.” — “The Magnificent Seven”, 1960
“The public will demand the names and they will get them.”
My built-in doubter says otherwise, but I hope I’m wrong.
I can see how 50 or 60 incandescent lights throughout the house could add to the warmth of the home.
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/image_galleries/bulbs.html
The IR light is more pleasant as well even though you can’t see it.
Slartybartfast–
Have you seen or used a ”Space Blanket”? These are very thin polymer sheets covered with a mirrored finish, probably aluminium, that reflects EM radiation. It is used to cover very cold survivors to keep them warm, or even help to warm them up. It insulates very well but does not prove the GHE.
Gary Hladik says:
May 29, 2013 at 10:30 pm
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Gary,
Still no scientific rebuttal of my primary claims? No? Why am I not surprised…
I have no interest in “revolutionising” non established atmospheric science. I will leave it to Dr. Spencer to return atmospheric science to reality when he wakes up. Remember, the AGW hypothesis has no founding in empirical science. The radiative GHE hypothesis has no supporting empirical evidence. It will fail. All that is require is the Internet and time.
I suspect you misunderstand my motivation and entertainment. I know the radiative GHE is pseudo science. I know that some of those promoting the radiative GHE also know that it is pseudo science. Sceptics are not part of a “well funded denialist machine”. Herding sceptics would be like herding cats. Pointless. You are dealing with the worlds first genuine “grass roots movement”. None of the old techniques will work. Sceptics are self motivated. They observe each other and choose an area in which they can contribute. I do not waste energy on debating PSI Assault Clowns. Identifying and outing “Sleepers” is so much more fun 😉