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
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.
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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?