New WUWT-TV segment: Slaying the 'slayers' with Watts

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.

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?

Ron House says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:12 pm
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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.

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? 🙂 🙂
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What happened to your story?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No matter WHAT anyone else is – slayer, eco-wacko, me.
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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.
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Science, is making predictions: then checking those predictions against real-world experiment; preferably with a control, but one’s not always needed.
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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!”
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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.
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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.
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*You shall not correctly isolate, a heating signal accurately out of all that cooling. PARTICULARLY related to CO2 /and/or/ infrared back radiation distribution*
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The water and nitrogen and oxygen,
are just too big.
And just too cold.
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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.
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As I showed you – without need for cracking a book.
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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.

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.

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.

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…

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.
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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 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.

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?
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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.
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