After the essays in May on mirrors and light bulbs, I’ve been regularly poked and prodded via email for not wanting to engage “the slayers” anymore, or to do that “third experiment” I mentioned in May. I long ago concluded by my experiences afterwards with “the slayers” that it is a waste of time and effort to try to explain anything to them. Curt Wilson, who did the second experiment and was planning to do the third, has come to the same conclusion, as have many others.
I have to give them credit though, they are entertaining. When I saw this profoundly ridiculous rebuttal (reflectional denial) at their headquarters while arguing over Willis’ Steel Greenhouse post, I just had to share it.
LOL! That’s the “slayers” in nutshell right there. No better example of the absurdity of their position exists in my opinion. Epic.
WUWT regular, Duke physicist Dr. Robert G. Brown has been trying to talk some sense into them over at Principia Scientific. I keep telling him he’s being sucked into a time and energy sink like gravity around a neutron star. Just as it is a good policy to steer clear of neutron stars, so it is with these folks who are incapable of assimilating the real world of physics, but live in an alternate reality of absurd second law constructs.
So, that’s why I’m not bothering anymore, when you have reflection denial statements like the one above, why engage in a pointless dialog with the hopelessly lost who don’t want to learn anything? Thank goodness for my spam filter.
For those that might care, keeping the filament of a lightbulb within its optimum temperature range increases its life, by limiting hotspots and thus tungsten evaporation. Putting an incandescent bulb into a reflector housing not designed for it will in fact increase the filament temperature, increasing tungsten evaporation and deposition on the inside bulb glass surface.
See: http://www.lightingassociates.org/i/u/2127806/f/tech_sheets/FAQs_Reflector_Design__Why_is_it_important_.pdf
Tungsten evaporation from hotspots is why standard incandescent bulbs eventually fail.
geran says:
July 20, 2013 at 1:04 pm
“The point is–the science is NOT settled. Allowing Slaxxers to comment here verifies your search for the truth.”
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Just to avoid misunderstanding, as far as I know, some people wrote a book “Slaxxxing the Sky Draxxxgon” and are called slaxxers since then, so, I am not one of the authors.
To call a slaxxer anyone who disagrees with the notion of “greenhouse effect” does not seem correct to me. I prefer the classification “warmists” and “non-warmists” in a purely technical sense. Consider me an independent non-warmist, if you like.
tjfolkerts says:
July 20, 2013 at 2:03 pm
‘All thermal radiation is “emissions which occur due to ambient temperature”’
Incorrect. Radiation occurs due to a change from a high vibrational energy state to a lower one. A CO2 molecule vibrational mode can be excited by photon absorption, or by resonant collision. The latter is a function of ambient temperature. The former is not necessarily. It is the former excitation of CO2 vibration states due to emissions of IR photons at the Earth’s surface with which we are concerned.
”
tjfolkerts says:
July 20, 2013 at 11:11 am
You are missing DirkH’s point. We don’t care about emissions which occur due to ambient temperature. Those would occur in any case, with or without additional CO2. We care specifically about emissions which occur as remission of emissions originating from the Earth’s surface, roughly half of which return to that surface.
”
big problem in comprehension here.
The lapse rate and emissions in the atmosphere are all about conservation of energy. It’s cooler higher up because there is a balance in power up there. There’s no such thing as emissions that are remissions of emissions. One has absorbed radiation, convection, and conduction to get energy into a parcel of atmosphere and the same things for outgoing. It is emission that depends on the T and the atmospheric composition. In a slab of atmosphere, there is radiation downward and radiation outward – like a shell with two surfaces. Since higher up there is radiation being absorbed from below but not from above and there is radiation being emitted downward and upward based on the temperature of the slab (and on the content of the gases when not using a solid surface as an example). obviously the slab T has to drop the higher up it is because there isn’t as much energy being absorbed.
”
tjfolkerts says:
July 20, 2013 at 2:03 pm
‘All thermal radiation is “emissions which occur due to ambient temperature”’
Incorrect. Radiation occurs due to a change from a high vibrational energy state to a lower one. A CO2 molecule vibrational mode can be excited by photon absorption, or by resonant collision. The latter is a function of ambient temperature. The former is not necessarily. It is the former excitation of CO2 vibration states due to emissions of IR photons at the Earth’s surface with which we are concerned.
”
An excited state can be entered due either to the collison or a photon absorption. Also, an excited state can be left due either to a collision or to a photon emission. Higher energy photons from a warmer BB continuum are still absorbed by the molecules in a rather T independent fashion but the emissions of the energy associated with those are not “re-emitted” at those higher energy but rather according to the BB continuum for the temperature of the atmosphere there and upon the spectral characteristics of the molecule. In other words, this absorbed radiation becomes thermalized and helps define the local temperature.
If the parcel of atmosphere were able to stay at the same temperature as Earth’s surface outgoing radiation, there would be no absorption lines present. If the parcel were hotter than the Earth’s surface, the parcel would be emitting spectral lines rather than absorbing them.
Greg House says:
July 20, 2013 at 5:14 pm
Marc says:
July 20, 2013 at 1:18 pm
“We can solve this whole problem if we stop calling it “warming” and instead call it “slower cooling”.”
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No, you can not save the “greenhouse effect” this way. “Slowing cooling by back radiation” the
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wow, Greg, don’t be obtuse.
It is very simple. I too hate the term greenhouse effect and I am not trying to save the term and the actual phenomenon will save itself by existing immutably. But cut it with the wordplay baloney.
The atmosphere slows the rate at which the sun heats the surface by blocking some of the energy coming in. Then it also slows the surface from cooling by blocking the rate at which the energy can leave.
Please! If I heat a pan of soup and pour some into the thermos and leave some in the pan, and I take the average temperature over several hours, the average temperature of the soup in the thermos will be higher than the average temperature of the soup left in the pan (at room temperature with the burner off). That is simply because the properties of the thermos slowed the rate of the soup cooling, not because the thermos imparted heat to the soup.
The properties of the atmosphere slow the rate of surface cooling — there is no question about that, and I don’t care what you call it. The physics are explainable too, but denying the basic way it functions is dishonest.
Do youdeny that the atmosphere slows the rate at which the surface cools when the sun is no longer heating the surface? If so, then please leave. If not, then this discussion is finished.
And yes, CO2 is one of the chemicals that has a property that slows the cooling, along with water vapor and many other things. If you deny all that, gee wilikers!
What we are all unsure abut is what other adjustments happen when we get a very slight warming from a modest increase in the ability of the atmosphere to slow cooling with more CO2 because it is such a vast, dynamic and complicated system with a lot more going on than soup in a thermos. Convection, conduction, radiation plus albedo changes and a million other things make it hard to say we can isolate the effect of CO2, and I suspect that the CO2 has a de minimis effect in such a wild and wooly system, but I am not sure. The main evidence points to the effect being small considering all.
If you think I am wrong about the atmosphere slowing warming and cooling then check out the day and night temperatures of rock celestial bodies without atmospheres, like the moon, cooky. Can we move on to something that moves the ball forward while you repeat a grade?
Greg House says:
July 20, 2013 at 5:05 pm
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
July 20, 2013 at 2:39 pm
“All what the 2nd Law says is that in average more radiation energy is transferred from a warmer to a colder object than reverse.”
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This is not true, the 2nd Law says nothing about “average”, exactly like it says nothing about “net”.
Again, the assumption “cold warms hot” leads to an absurd result and is therefore false, see my demonstration above.
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*sigh* No. tjfolkerts already addressed all of your points but you failed to grasp what he wrote. Let me try (because I’m bored). The second law of thermodynamics as expressed mathematically IS NET heat transfer. It’s called the Clausius inequality and is expressed as the closed integral of dQ/T <= 0. Think a little bit about the mathematical properties of an integral. Think about how you evaluate an integral.
Or here's another try. Take your plate. Let's insulate it on one side so we only have to worry about radiation from a single side just to make the problem a bit simpler. Then let's put another plate in place of the reflector but hook it up to a constant temperature sink that maintains its temperature at 100K. Let's say that our original plate is in equilibrium in this system at a temperature of 200K at some level of internal power production that is held constant. We all agree that (net) heat will flow from the hot plate to the cold plate at a rate of sigma*(Thot^4 – Tcold^4). Now let's increase the temp of the cold plate to 150K. The rate of heat loss from the hot plate just went down noticeably even though the object is still colder. By your understanding of the second law NO heat (not no net heat) can move from the cold plate to the hot plate, so how does nature know to reduce the heat transfer? Have we resurrected Maxwell’s Demon and given him a radar gun and ticket writing authority? No, what we’ve done is we’ve raised the amount of radiation from the cold plate that radiates back onto the hot plate. The hot plate now has to get rid of this extra heat and in order to be in equilibrium it has to raise its temperature.
Now let’s move on to your original reflector/plate problem. The system starts with the plate emitting a total of 800W, 400W to space and 400W to the perfect reflector. The reflector sends 400W back, so the net outflow from the plate is only 400W right at the instant the first reflected photons make it back to the plate. The next time step is where you start making your mistakes. You make the assumption that a new equilibrium is instantaneously reached with the extra 400W now meaning that the plate is emitting a total of 1200W, 600 to each side. In reality the thermal mass of the plate will play a roll in establishing the equilibrium, but let’s assume it’s so small that the plate heats instantaneously. So 600W out, 600W to reflector and 600W back to plate. OK, so that means that the next go around the plate has to emit 1800W which is 900W on either side and more than the original energy production! OMG, you HAVE falsified it!
Wait, no, you haven’t. You argument is that the plate is hotter and thus emitting 1200W when the additional 600W comes in, but that can’t be. See, I let you use instantaneous heating of the plate on the original 400W cycle, which means you have to let me use instantaneous cooling. The plate emits 600W to space and that’s gone. It emits 600W towards the reflector but due to the speed of light that emission has not made it back to the plate. The plate has radiated away the excess 400J (it’s in flight) so the temperature now reverts to that generated by the 800W of internal power. The plate is in instantaneous thermal equilibrium so that when the 600W comes back from the reflector the plate now has to deal with the 800W being internally generated and the 600W that just came in for a total of 1400W. And as tsfolkerts showed the next step is 700/700/1500, 775/775/1575, 793.75/793.75/1587.5,…
I admit I had to spend some time figuring out the exact flaw in your argument. Your error is in your numerical integration and your time steps. If you want more detail on the nature of the error I’d suggest picking up a good reference on numerical integration to learn of all of the pitfalls that must be avoided when using that technique to solve a problem (not that it’s invalid, just potentially tricky).
Bart,
The time that a CO2 molecule might spend in the excited state before emitting a photon is much longer than the mean time between collisions in the atmosphere. Most often, the energy from an absorbed photon will be shared with other molecules before another photons is emitted. In other words, the energy is thermalized. An emitted photon would only rarely be “the same energy” as a photon that was absorbed earlier. It is much more likely to be energy due to a collision with another molecule.
So being concerned with those rare photons that are indeed “re-emitted” is the wrong place to focus.
(Looking back before posting, it looks like cba is saying about the same thing about thermalization.)
SkepticGoneWild says (July 20, 2013 at 7:27 am): “Those equations are simple heat transfer equations which you will find in any thermo or physics textbook. They do not invalidate the 2nd Law”
Of course they don’t. The only thing “invalidated” by Willis’s & SoD’s textbook references is the imaginary version of the 2nd Law.
“I challenged Mr. Dumb to find me a textbook problem example which indicates a cooler body warming up a warmer body. Not just an equation, but a worked up problem with real numbers. He could not provide one. There are none.”
Actually there are–I found a fully worked out problem involving a radiation-shielded thermocouple–but they’re not easy to find in free internet references. Note that I also found several other relevant problems but without computed answers, making them useless for the purpose. 🙁
But hey, let’s forget the textbooks for now and (finally) get to experiment.
In these “cool thing warms a warmer thing” discussions, I always bring up Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment, because it’s a simple illustration of the problem and if actually performed should settle the question definitively. Of course I never expected it to be done for real because Dr. Spencer has no incentive–he already knows the answer–and the Pink Unicorn Brigade dare not do it because they’d be proven wrong.
It turns out, however, that the “Yes, Virginia” experiment–or rather a close variant–has been done and reported in the literature. Hat tip to “chris y” who cited this article all the way back in 2009 in the comment thread to the classic “Steel Greenhouse” article.
The paper proposes a method to calculate the efficacy of one or more radiation shields in a vacuum furnace. Their apparatus is a water-jacketed vacuum chamber with cylindrical radiation shield(s) surrounding a long coaxial heating element. It actually resembles the “steel greenhouse”–hence the “chris y” comment–but differs in no significant way from the “Yes, Virginia” setup. They discuss radiation shield theory and then compare experiment with prediction.
Rather than vary the heater temp, they maintain temp at 1300 °C and measure the decrease in power required to maintain constant temp with various shields in place. Using stainless steel, for example, the required power is only 52%, 37%, or 27% with one, two, or three shields, respectively, compared to no shield. Spencer 1, Pink Unicorn Brigade 0.
The most amusing aspect of this paper is the authors’ casual attitude as their–in the eyes of the horrified Pink Unicorn Brigade–black magic “overthrows” the holy Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the introduction they write, “In constructing the high temperature vacuum furnace, the heat efficiency must be good. Radiation shields are, as is well known, used for this purpose…” Perhaps not so well known in the more ignorant corners of the internet… 🙂
Of course I don’t expect this to change anyone’s mind, except perhaps Big Don’s. The Pink Unicorn Brigade has repeatedly demonstrated invulnerability to both logic and facts. But the tap dancing around this one should be amusing. 🙂
Rosco says (July 20, 2013 at 2:12 am): “Did anyone even bother to check that the example worked through is exactly the “steel Greenhouse” proposal and can be found in the textbook – – page 24 number 1026 – :-”
The 1990 edition can be downloaded here.
“””””……
My simple observation is that since the LED is made from semicondor material then in this case its resistance will go down.
This cannot be squared with your statement above.
Read the following article or any similar source on the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity……””””””
So some “””””…..similar source on the topic…..”””””
Well not really similar; an actual factual source on the topic.
Ro whit Silicon Semiconductor Data; as in SEMICONDUCTOR DATA.
By Helmut F. Wolf Pergamon Press.
I prefer my source to yours, since the entire SEMICONDUCTOR industry is built on MY Source; not on Wikipedia.
On page 48…. Resistivity of Silicon vs. Impurity Concentration and Temperature.
For n-type, Cb = 1E15 cm^-1 at 25 deg C rho = 5.5 Ohm cm
……………………………………………at 125 deg C rho = 17.0 Ohm cm. That’s a 3.1x INCREASE!
For n-type. Cb = 1E17 cm^-1 at 25 deg C rho = 0.1 Ohm cm
…………………………………………….at 125 deg C rho = 0.2 Ohm cm That’s a 2.0x INCREASE!
Well I could cite more of this SEMICONDUCTOR data, for both n-type, and p-type.
Sorry it is always positive Temperature coefficient for Silicon.
Should I dig out the data for Germanium or Gallium Arsenide as well, or would you prefer to look that up for yourself. But look it up in a real source; the kind that engineers and scientists who do work in the field use; their products are actually expected to work.
And yes, it is still positive for LED…… SEMICONDUCTOR MATERIAL
And maybe you should take a course in Semiconductor Physics, so you can learn the difference between RESISTANCE and ……. LEAKAGE CURRENTS.
“””””…..This cannot be squared with your statement above…….”””””
Correction Bryan; YOU cannot square “this” with my statement above !
I was lucky enough to take MY Semiconductor Physics studies from Andrew Grove, who wrote the definitive text on the subject. That was 45 years ago at Fairchild Semiconductor, where Si valley really started. Andy was later the President and CEO of Intel. Sadly he is now severely hampered, by Parkinson’s or some similar malady. Not something I would wish on anybody, of such stature.
Typo:
“””””…..Ro whit Silicon Semiconductor Data; as in SEMICONDUCTOR DATA……”””””
To whit…..”Silicon Semiconductor Data” ; as in SEMICONDUCTOR DATA…..
Greg House says (July 20, 2013 at 5:05 pm): ‘Again, the assumption “cold warms hot” leads to an absurd result and is therefore false, see my demonstration above.’
“Demonstration?” You mean your “reductio ad absurdum“ thought experiment? The one that tjfolkerts showed was bullus excrementum? Short memory, Greg? 🙂
“””””…..cba says:
July 20, 2013 at 8:40 pm
”
tjfolkerts says:
July 20, 2013 at 2:03 pm
‘All thermal radiation is “emissions which occur due to ambient temperature”’
Incorrect. Radiation occurs due to a change from a high vibrational energy state to a lower one……”””””
Well Tim is quite correct here.
The operative words are THERMAL RADIATION .
Thermal radiation >> IS << EM radiation whose entire cause is due to having a Temperature greater than zero Kelvins. So-called "Black Body" radiation is a fictional ideal type of THERMAL RADIATION
BB radiation is entirely independent of ANY actual material or material properties, including electronic structures, or quantum numbers or anything else real.
The vibrational/rotational or other oscillation modes of GHGs that are the crux of the so-called GHG effects are RESONANCE MODES of actual real physical materials each of which has its own characteristic modes and frequencies of oscillation, and are calculable with quantum mechanics; which relates to real physical materials.
It is getting totally tiresome coming to WUWT regularly, and finding there are still people who don't know the difference between atomic and molecular resonances, and thermal continuum effects, which are entirely a consequence of the energetic mechanical collisions between molecules/atoms, in a VERY LARGE ASSEMBLAGE of same. Temperature is a macro property of large assemblages of "particles"
RESONANCE RADIATIONS/ ABSORPTIONS are a property OF SINGLE MOLECULES/ATOMS……not of large assemblages.
The solar energy spectrum, is a continuum thermal spectrum due to the (surface) Temperature of the sun.
The Fraunhofer SPECTRAL LINES are a consequence of resonance emission/absorption by individual atoms/ions in the solar atmosphere (roughly). These spectral resonance lines are largely independent of Temperature; well there are Doppler and other line broadening effects, but the individual atoms don't know anything about Temperature (it's a macro property)
Leif can sanitize this if I got it all rong.
There is one simple thing that is often forgot. Earth surface only gets warmer if it gets more energy from the source (sun). How much earth surface transfers energy from the surface depends how warm the air is in the surface just above the surface. That just above is exactly what is enviroment temperature. Wind is very good at increase energy transfer from surface if it is colder than the surface. Earth surface radiate only the amount of energy what is temperature difference between surface and air, according to SB-law and Newtons cooling law. If temperature difference is 5K between surface and air that makes some few W/m2, not the measured 200-300 W/m2 which is its temperature what is calculated against 0K. Radiated energy depends of the temperature difference, earths surface cannot emit energy more than calculated energy change based on temperature change in surface material. Let’s say that that few W/m2 is 5 W/m2 all energy (5Wh/m2) transfers from the surface. Most of that is conduction when air is in contact with surface, there is very little energy left for radiation energy that warms air, simply because gases are very very poor absorbers or emitters in these temperatures.You cannot get more energy from the source ( now warmer surface is energy source to colder air) when it cools than what is its temperature chance. Radiation energy is only a very tiny part how energy transfers in system sun, earth, air, space and which energy transfer method works in different parts of that system. To calculate earths energy balance according to radiated energy misleads many false assumpitions ie. greenhouse effect. When you forget some vital energy transfers methods you must add to calculation more radiation energy to get that balance work. That is for sure wrong way to handle it and leads wrong theories and false physics as we have seen.
george e. smith, you appear to be saying that if semiconductor material is heated its resistance goes up.
I hope you agree with me that all commonly freely available sources (such as wikipedia) say exactly the opposite.
For example what is this person up to;
http://www.isb.ac.th/hs/jos/vol4iss1/Papers/1LEDTemp.pdf
Is he inventing data for an experiment that never happened?
Yet you claim that a highly specialised textbook supports your statements.
Further you appear to have worked in the semiconductor industry.
Why there should be such a disconnect between specialised and general literature is not obvious.
The facts about semiconductor materials have nothing to do with any controversy such as the extent of AGW.
Most posters above do not seem to fully understand the 2nd law. Whilst energy can flow from cold to hot the temperature of the hot body will not increase as a result. It is easier to understand when looking from the point of view of quantum mechanics.
The 2nd law can be reduced to three words:- ”entropy must increase”. Any increase in temperature that occurred from the cold to hot energy transfer would mean a reduction of entropy. This would mean that it would be possible to have a process working above 100% efficiency. This is clearly impossible as Anthony knew/knows when he refused to take up my challenge above to design and build such an engine working on the GHE principle.
He still refuses to answer the question regarding desert and rainforest surface temperatures.
Marc says July 20, 2013 at 8:41 pm:
“The atmosphere slows the rate at which the sun heats the surface by blocking some of the energy coming in. Then it also slows the surface from cooling by blocking the rate at which the energy can leave. … Do youdeny that the atmosphere slows the rate at which the surface cools when the sun is no longer heating the surface? … That is simply because the properties of the thermos slowed the rate of the soup cooling, not because the thermos imparted heat to the soup.”
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No, the atmosphere generally can not slow the surface cooling, except for the case, where warmer air moves from a warmer region to a colder one.
What the air does is cooling the surface by conduction/convection additionally to it’s radiative cooling, so it makes the cooling faster than it would be without air.
Note that the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC is about the radiation returned to the surface by the “greenhouse gases” warming the surface additionally. As I demonstrated earlier on this thread, such an effect is physically impossible.
To your thermos example, it simply prevents the (usually) colder air outside it from cooling the soup by conduction/convection. If the outside air was warmer than the soup in the thermos, the effect would the opposite: preventing the outside air from warming the soup. So, the thermos as such has neither cooling nor warming properties, it only separates the content and the outside air.
Greg House says:
July 21, 2013 at 7:43 am
Only one question to know your position: if a photon emitted by an object at 273 K hits another object at 303 K and is absorbed by the latter (assuming both objects are ideal blackbodies), is the energy of the photon absorbed by the “warmer” body or not?
Tsk Tsk says:
July 20, 2013 at 8:45 pm
“See, I let you use instantaneous heating of the plate on the original 400W cycle, which means you have to let me use instantaneous cooling.”
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The “greenhouse effect” is claimed to produce warming, not cooling, hence your derivation is not about the “greenhouse effect” any longer.
To see the absurd result of the assumption of the “greenhouse effect” you need to strictly stick to this assumption, not to jump from this assumption to the reality back and forth or even invent other absurd things.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
July 21, 2013 at 9:05 am
“Only one question to know your position …”
=======================================================
My position is that whatever some people imagine about what might happen to the radiation, back radiation of any kind can not warm the source, because the assumption of the opposite leads to absurd results, see the explanation above.
Of course, I am not going to speculate what exactly happens to the electromagnetic waves that have some properties that caused the introduction of the notion of photon. I am only interested in the question, if the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC exists or not. It doesn’t.
cba says:
July 20, 2013 at 8:40 pm
Blackbody radiation is unforced, random radiation. We are specifically speaking here of radiation forcing from the surface, being absorbed by the CO2 above, and half of which is, yes, re-emitted back to the surface. You’ve got to provide a pathway for energy flow back to the surface. Otherwise, quite simply, the surface doesn’t heat up.
Even if what you and TJ were saying were true, and it isn’t, the CO2 at lower altitude does not magically disappear when the new CO2 forces its center of mass upward. In fact, the base gets broader, so you’ve still got it radiating at low altitude, if anything at greater quantity than before.
Temperature-based radiation is not the radiation we are looking for vis a vis the Greenhouse Effect.
tjfolkerts says:
July 20, 2013 at 9:37 pm
“The time that a CO2 molecule might spend in the excited state before emitting a photon is much longer than the mean time between collisions in the atmosphere.”
Moot question. A CO2 molecule is as likely to gain energy in a collision as lose it, so it has little net effect.
johnmarshall says (July 21, 2013 at 3:43 am): “Most posters above do not seem to fully understand the 2nd law.”
The irony, it burns! 🙂
“Whilst energy can flow from cold to hot the temperature of the hot body will not increase as a result.”
How do you explain a radiation shield increasing the temperature of a vacuum furnace heating element?
“This is clearly impossible as Anthony knew/knows when he refused to take up my challenge above to design and build such an engine working on the GHE principle.”
I’m curious. If you, johnmarshall, assume for a moment that the so-called GHE really exists, how would you design such an engine?
Boiler Designer says (July 21, 2013 at 12:32 am): “Radiation energy is only a very tiny part how energy transfers in system sun, earth, air, space and which energy transfer method works in different parts of that system. To calculate earths energy balance according to radiated energy misleads many false assumpitions ie. greenhouse effect.”
Not sure what you’re trying to say here. Radiation is the only significant way the Earth gains energy from the sun, and the only significant way the Earth loses energy to space. “Radiated energy” is the only way to calculate Earth’s energy balance.
Sorry for bad, of course suns energy is only radiation energy to earth, but after that it is a very tiny part of heat transfer inside the system. Only in the upper atmosphere happens last radiation energy transfer to space. What happens inside the when sun energy is coming to earth and what happens between earth and atmosphere. Onlu molecules which can transfer heat to space are in practice O3 and CO2, if they increases the more earth radiates to space. Earth has incredibly fine temperature control system, more energy from sun, more CO2 from oceans, more radiation to space. CO2 acts as a cooler not as a warmer inside atmosphere. What happens to tempertaure if we take CO2 away from the atmosphere, atmosphere becomes much more hotter than with CO2, less heat radiation to space.
Greg says: “My position is that whatever some people imagine … ”
It is amazing (or maybe not so amazing) that whenever specific examples are brought up, whenever someone shows specifically where you are wrong, you always revert to your “soundbite science” and your own personal interpretation of the 2nd Law .
One more very simple example …
A block of copper has a heat reservoir on one side at 400 K and a heat reservoir on the other side at 200 K (the other sides are insulated). The average temperature of the block will be 300 K. Now slowly raise the temperature of the cold reservoir to 250 K. No heat can flow from the 250 K to the 300 K block — we all agree on that. But the copper block will warm up to an average of 325 K. The only external change was the cold reservoir. The only result was warming of the copper block. Whatever words you want to use, the temperature of the colder object is directly related to the temperature of the copper block.
Whatever words you want to use, the temperature of the cool atmosphere affects the temperature of the warmer planet.