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

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.
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 (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.
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.
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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

much like experiments on mice that they think will be reflected in humans.

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…
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 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).
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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.

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…
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early morning, “find a way of finding ” .. who wrote that !? doh

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.”

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.

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!