Jonathan Abbot writes in comments on 2013/07/23 at 12:59 pm
My 10 year old daughter just read an article in National Geographic Kids about global warming. ‘The world is getting warmer, daddy! See?’ She wouldn’t believe me when I said it wasn’t.
I told her that data is more important than written words, and showed her this page as an explanation.
We discussed how temperatures had increased but were now flat, and so when the article made the usual claims about the hottest temperatures being all in the last 10 years, we agreed it could be true but it still didn’t mean the world was still getting warmer.
She had no idea she could go online to see the actual numbers for herself, they don’t mention that sort of thing at school.
I don’t know if you ever find time to read these comments Anthony, but thank you and all at WUWT for being there and doing the work you do. It changes people.
Thanks Jonathan, that made my day, as well as lifting the spirits of those who have contributed to the many reference pages that WUWT offers.
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@Ox AO July 24, 2013 at 1:20 am
The case is worse than you can imagine. Last night a barman offered me some dihydrogen monoxide to put into my whisky – IN GLASGOW…!!!
‘No!” I cried. ‘It’s made with the stuff!’
Mr. Watts,
I cannot express how much I am in your debt for all that you have done to counter the forces of ignorance and hysteria that came horrifyingly close to stampeding the U.S. into ill-considered, harmful actions. If I may say so, the country owes you a hearty THANK YOU!
Truth is truth, data is data, no matter how many times the blindly loyal believers in man made warming scream, “ALL THE SCIENTISTS AGREE!!!” I say, so what? The data itself doesn’t and if they want to deny the actual data, then they are the deniers. Not me!
All the scientists have been wrong before on some issues and they will be again on others. The raw data clearly shows that this current century has NOT warmed at all. Last century did, a bit and within the error bars of measurement and within natural variations as have happened in the distant past.
I am yet to see any proof, outside of an incomplete computer model, of global warming being exclusively of human cause. I do not deny climate change, nor do I deny that the earth has warmed a little less than 1 degree since the end of the Little Ice Age. I do not deny that there may be some human cause in the uncertain amount of warming, but I have not seen proof of the alarmist’s claim of human induced global warming in the data in the public domain.
Neither is there certainty that the earth will continue to warm faster and faster. Nor even certainty that it will continue to warm at all. The future could be colder or warmer, for me? The jury is out on that one.
Models based on all variants of the warmist theory of CO2 driven warming have been scientifically falsified, if not politically.
Outside of those, there is no proof of man made catastrophic warming because the data says otherwise.
I’m sure you gave equal weight to the views of most climate scientists on the matter, yes? Certainly you told her that most of them tell us that warming continues within predicted rates, just not at a significant rate in one section of the biosphere for a short period of time. Wouldn’t want to lie to your own kids, right?
Amen, John Garrett. I couldn’t say it better myself. Anthony Watts is Nobel worthy except accepting a Nobel ( as it’s presently awarded) would be stooping for a penny.
Deserved particularly from those of us who rarely comment when it isn’t a criticism: thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you, Mr. Watts.
And another thank you for the above reminder of your data pages.
What never fails to amaze me is that the True Believers in the Cult of AGW somehow seem to think that warming since 1850 is somehow BAD!
Seriously??? As I recall, 1850 was still the tail end of the Little Ice Age. I suspect we would all be quite miserable with disease, famine, and all sorts of other problems if the world had NOT WARMED since then.
So, warmistas, please explain to me why warming, compared to a Little Ice Age, is supposedly a BAD THING, because I simply don’t get it.
Also, as an aside, something I have always wondered about (and yes, this question probably belongs on the tips and notes page, but what the heck, I am already typing here!) The question goes as follows:
1. The Mauna Loa “official” CO2 site is located geographically very close to Kilauea.
2. Kilauea has been erupting pretty much non-stop since 1986.
3. I assume that the continuous eruption of Kilauea produces large amounts of CO2 (among other things).
So finally the question:
Does the continuous eruption of Kilauea for the past 27 years “contaminate” the Mauna Loa CO2 data, and if so, how is this accounted for and corrected?
I have never seen an actual answer to this question, but it seems to me when you have a highly localized, continuous source of CO2 emissions geographically VERY close to the “world standard” CO2 monitoring station, there had better be significant (downward) correction of the data being done. Has anyone even studied this?
I also assume that there are other CO2 monitors around the world which give similar readings to Mauna Loa, and therefore Mauna Loa is still assumed to be correct, but I haven’t seen corroborative data from other stations, so I don’t know that either.
Jimbo,
If temperatures start cooling the same people will have the same reactions. I remember some old “earth crisis” movie in which global warming shut down the gulf stream sending Europe into an ice age (I believe it was overnight). The radical environmentalists will take the view that any negative event is necessarily caused by human action. Never mind the scarcity of people dying from floods or hurricanes, if there was a hurricane it was necessarily the fault of polluters – and we are all polluters. Planet warmer? It is bad and it is our fault. Planet cooler? It is bad and it is our fault. More rain (i.e. flooding)? It is bad and is our fault. Less rain (drought)? It is bad and our fault. More wild fires? It is bad and is our fault. The piney bush preserve advances into a stable full growth forest due to fire suppression? It is bad and is our fault.
“Why can’t we live in balance with the world like traditional hunters and gatherers?”
Response – you first. You start weaving your own cloth for clothes using what you can find around you. Good luck if you poke yourself with a needle and get an infection – better go down to the river to wash it and hope the water is clean. If I cut myself with a cheap knife made in Brazil while cutting tomatoes grown in Mexico on my countertop produced in China and mounted on cabinets using wood cut in Canada I will use my purified tap water to clean it out. Bam, 10 seconds and I don’t have to amputate my hand and cauterize the wound.
Dear Ryan the Facetious,
“Wouldn’t want to lie to your own kids, right?”
The whole point I was making was to encourage her to look at data herself and try to make her own mind up. If she now chooses to go off and find out more, and comes back and tells me she’s a committed CAGW alarmist, I’ll politely listen to her explanation about why, and look forward to some interesting discussions on the topic. Maybe she’ll find something I missed and convince me. Maybe I’ll talk her round based on what I have learnt. Who knows where such an intellectual journey could take us?
Obviously I have no idea if you already have kids, or may have them one day, or help in the upbringing of other peoples kids. If you do, would you say the same about a belief you hold dear? I hope so, but based on your snide reply, very much doubt it.
Ryan the Facetious,
Perfect screen name, by the way. My own personal answer to your question is:
“I would rather lie to my own kids than have someone else do it for me!” That way, at least I know that the lies my kids are hearing are the ones I WANT THEM TO HEAR and not something else that I would rather they not hear!
However, the most important skills we can teach our children are independent thought and critical thinking. I went to one of the most Liberal of Liberal Arts schools in the world, but I was very lucky in that they highly valued independent thought, critical thinking, and honest debate and disagreement, and thought that these were an absolutely critical part of the learning process, and as such were taught to us and were highly encouraged. I could completely, utterly, and totally disagree with a Political Science professor, and as long as I could back up my points properly, I would still be awarded an “A” on a paper.
Far too many places now will simply give a bad grade to a paper which disagrees with “orthodoxy” even if the disagreement is backed up cogently, logically, and concisely, and that is a tragedy.
Again for Ryan,
“I’m sure you gave equal weight to the views of most climate scientists on the matter, yes?”
First of all, I would have to explain to my child that under the actual definition of “science”, so-called climate science ISN’T ACTUALLY A SCIENCE since it fails to follow the scientific method the vast majority of the time. Then, I would have to explain why it isn’t necessary to give equal weight to something which isn’t actually valid.
Most adults don’t understand the scientific method enough to recognize that is isn’t being properly applied in a particular scientific discipline, so most adults default to the position of “trusting the opinion of the experts”. Hopefully we can educate our children well enough to understand and properly apply such things, so that at least THEY can learn to recognize when the “experts” are full of #@^$#.
John Garret, may I expand your statement to include the (English-speaking?) world owing the WUWT volunteers a debt of gratitude for aggregating so much data and resources. From Anthony to RGBatDuke, Ric Werme to Willis, Bob Tisdale to Roy S., Leif S. to Vukovick(sp?). Even Mosher, if he’ll take the time to explain his thoughts (same for Leif).
I was reading a book a friend loaned me, which had a section discussing what convinces people. You can make emotional appeals, or use data and reason, or both. Emotional appeals convince most people most often, and using both is barely more effective than using data alone. Chances are that even after you’ve explained it to her and showed her the data, the graphs, the images…, the warmists will change her mind again and again.
Persistence is victory. And, as the ancient said: God is great, beer is good, people are crazy.
This crap about global warming is part of the “common core” propaganda now being “taught” (i.e., indoctrinated) in US schools as part of the “sustainability” meme, which additionally tells kids they will have to give up their civil liberties so that the world can be made safe.
The people purveying this obscenity ought to all be locked up for abusing kids by scaring them with lies.
mib8 says:
“Persistence is victory.”
That is why many of us probably bore some folks to tears with constant posting of charts and graphs. But they tell the true story, and the general public needs to hear/see a fact several times before it begins to sink in. But with emotional scares, once is often enough to make up the public’s minds. One of the great benefits of science is to overcome emotion.
So: tell ’em what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell ’em what you told them. Eventually it sinks in: there is nothing unusual or unprecedenbted happening with the climate. Nothing. Everything we observe now has happened before, and to much greater extremes.
Why are people so concerned about the latest hurricane or drought? Those things always happen, naturally. There is no need to open your wallets to the government, or forfeit your freedom as a result. And the media is just a mindless organism that only cares about selling newspapers and TV ads. The truth is not important to them. If a false alarm sells more ads, then that is what is important. It is our job to look for the opinions of those who do not repeat the prevailing ‘wisdom’.
Convincing folks requires telling people,, more than once, that we are fortunate to have been living in an unusually benign global climate over the past century. A total fluctuation of only 0.7ºC is almost unheard of! If we measured temperatures in degrees instead of tenths and hudredths of a degree, global temperatures would appear completely flat.
The entire global warming scare is nothing but a massive head-fake. Absolutely nothing unusual is happening. But when the government / media / education triumvirate can label every local weather event as “climate change”, then thank God for the internet. It is the only place where the truth can be found. But you still have to look for it.
Brian D Finch
Thanks
Dihydrogen Monoxide is a perfect example on a small scale of what the CAGW cult is doing.
When I was looking up Dihydrogen Monoxide I found a couple of radio announcers John and Scott Fish were suspended this year and face felony charges for advertising the Dihydrogen Monoxide prank against the uneducated.
In other words you can get felony charge slapped against you for making a prank solely directed at our uneducated society. CAGW cult is much worse. They are in it for a profit and doing a very good job at it.
The question that remains is whether or not you tell/ask your daughter to keep her scientific mind to herself at school. In US government schools, AGW is religion, not to be questioned, and those who do question it are labelled, marginalized, and in some cases humiliated. Tough decision.
We home-school, for exactly these reasons (not religious).
Totally. Like telling people that some guy a long time ago, without any corroborating evidence, walked on water, turned loaves into fishes, water into wine, and cured the sick just by touching them.
Jonathan Abbott says: July 24, 2013 at 7:26 am
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
The whole point I was making was to encourage her to look at data herself and try to make her own mind up.
Yes, once someone looks at the data and makes up their own mind, no amount of Warmist rhetoric and propaganda can make them forget the facts. The Warmists don’t like the facts because it is easier to trick the uninformed.
—
Cross-posted on the WUWT Global Temperature Page:
“Thank you for your comment, it makes me think that it might be beneficial to craft some of our reference pages and articles to be more accessible to younger and less knowledgeable audiences. Any suggestions on how we might do so? ”
—
It is going to be really hard to compete with the EPA’s cool “Calculate Your Emissions” app…:)
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="564"]
It is insanity to call carbon dioxide pollution, it is the building block of all Carbon Life.
We are Carbon Life forms, comprising 20% carbon and the rest mostly water, and we get our carbon from plants and from the critters which eat those plants.
Without carbon dioxide there would be no life on Earth as we know it.
Carbon dioxide is a trace gas which is practically all hole in the atmosphere. It is physically incapable of raising the temperature of the Earth. There is no sense of scale or understanding of heat energy and heat capacity in the AGW Greenhouse Effect.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect is an illusion, there is no “33°C warming by greenhouse gases without which the temperature would be minus 18°C”.
Traditional science contradicts this and comparison shows the AGW GHE to be exactly what it is, built on sleights of hand manipulation of real physics changing properties and processes and producing a nonsense through the looking glass with Al world, where any number of impossible things can be thought before breakfast..
From traditional physics:
Temperature of the Earth with atmosphere, mainly nitrogen and oxygen, 15°C
Temperature of the Earth without any atmosphere at all, minus 18°C
Compare with the Moon without atmosphere, minus 23°C
Temperature of the Earth with atmosphere, but without water, 67°C
That is the temperature of the Earth without the main “greenhouse gas” water – 67°C – think deserts.
Where is the AGW Greenhouse Effect claim of minus 18°C without its “greenhouse gases”?
It does not exist. That 33°C “warming by greenhouse gases” is a science fraud.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect has excised the Water Cycle, and it has no rain in its Carbon Cycle. The residence time of water in the atmosphere is 8-10days, carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle.
The real thermal blanket is the heavy volume under gravity of the real gases nitrogen and oxygen.
These also help regulate temperature from the extremes of cold and heat of the Moon.
In heat transfer by convection as their individual volumes expand when heated and so less dense and lighter than air they rise taking away heat from the surface, where they cool and condense and now heavier than air sink back to the surface flowing into the less dense hotter low pressure area, in convection currents, winds.
Hot air rises, cold air sinks & Winds flow from high to low. Basic real world meteorology.
Then the fake fisics of the AGW Greenhouse Effect gets even more absurd in the claim that we get no direct radiant heat energy, longwave infrared, from the Sun.
Claiming thermal infrared is either stopped by some invisible unknown to traditional science barrier “like the glass of a greenhouse at Top of Atmosphere (TOA)” and/or, “the Sun gives off insignificant amounts of longwave infrared and we get insignificant of insignificant”.
The last from the claimed temperature for the Sun of 6000°C, calculated by some planckian sleight of hand on the thin 300 mile wide atmosphere of visible light around the millions of degrees hot surface of the real Sun.
Absurdity piled on absurdities. In place of the direct radiant heat we actually physically feel from the Sun, which is longwave infrared, aka thermal infrared which in traditional physics is simply called Heat to differentiate from Light from the Sun, AGW Greenhouse Effect fake fisics claims shortwave, mainly visible light, heats the Earth’s surface of land and water. This is a physical impossibility in real physics.
Visible light from the Sun is not a thermal energy, it impacts matter on the much smaller electronic transition level which does not heat matter.
The electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen bounce visible light around the atmosphere, for example, hence our blue sky, and, water is a transparent medium for visible light, it does not get absorbed at all, not even on the electron level but is transmitted through unchanged.
We would have no life if the ocean was heated by visible light from the Sun.
It takes the bigger energy of longwave infrared heat to move whole molecules of matter into vibration, which is heat.
How is it that so many “climate scientists” have not seen the absurdity of these claims? How come they are all, apparently, ignorant of the basics of real gases with mass therefore weight under gravity, and volume and attraction? How can so many calling themselves scientists claim our great, blazing millions of degrees hot Star which we call the Sun, is a cold 6000°C, – roughly the temperature of the Earth’s innards?
Whatever they are, these people claiming to be climate scientists while pushing these fake fisics basics, are not scientists.
Who created the fake fisics for the KT97 and ilk to claim we get no direct radiant longwave heat from our millions of degrees hot Sun and so attribute real world measurements of this to “backradiation by greenhouse gases downwelling from the atmosphere under TOA?
The Solar Constant is the real world physics measurement of how much heat energy, longwave infrared, heats the Earth at the surface.
AGWScienceFiction fisics in its comic cartoon energy budget has attributed this to shortwave from the Sun at TOA. This is science fraud.
Why has the AGW Greenhouse Effect claimed this? Because, it is a scam. I repeat, AGWScienceFiction uses real world physics measurements of the direct longwave infrared heat we get from the Sun to claim this comes from “backradiation by greenhouse gases downwelling from the atmosphere under TOA”.
Look at these comic cartoon energy budgets – notice how KT have more heat radiation upwelling from the Earth then they have shortwave entering at the surface..
How many examples of the science frauds in the AGW Greenhouse Effect do you require to see the con for what it is?
What you have is the creation of a ridiculous fantasy world of a fictional Earth and its cold 6000°C star with no heavy voluminous real fluid gas atmosphere, but instead, empty space populated by the imaginary ‘hard dots of massless not subject to gravity ideal gas travelling at great speeds under their own molecular momentum miles apart from each other bouncing off each other and the sides of an invisible container to thoroughly mix’.
And yet another imaginary “invisible container” around this pretend Earth. Maybe its the same invisible one preventing the heat from the real Sun entering, this time to keep these fictional ideal gas molecules from diffusing at great speeds to the ends of the universe.. This imaginary “well known radiation physics” from AGW GHE goes straight from the Earth’s surface to empty space.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect has excised the whole of our heavy ocean of real gas atmosphere around the Earth.
And apparently, none of those calling themselves climate scientists have noticed they do not have sound in their world – can you hear this?
You have been had.
If that does not make you angry as scientists then you are not scientists.
TheRealCarbonDioxide: It takes the bigger energy of longwave infrared heat to move whole molecules of matter into vibration, which is heat.
The formula for the energy of a photon is E=hv. Or energy equals planks constant times the frequency of the photon. This mean that a high frequency photon, like X-ray or UV has much more energy than low frequency longwave radiation.
Tilo Reber says:
“The formula for the energy of a photon is E=hv. Or energy equals planks constant times the frequency of the photon. This mean that a high frequency photon, like X-ray or UV has much more energy than low frequency longwave radiation.”
What does this E=hv really mean, what is it saying? To the majority of the people reading such blogs these formulae are meaningless, they convey no pictures to the mind about what is happening physically.
Can you explain this simply?:
http://www.expertsmind.com/course-help/?p=heat-transfer-laws-assignment-help-98734287858
“Planck’s law Planck assumed that electromagnetic radiations are not emitted or absorbed continuously but in energy associated with each photon is
E = hv
Where h is Planck’s constant (= 6.625 x 10-34 j – s). On the basis of quantum theory Planck showed that
ER(λ) = 2πhc2 / λ5 /1 [ehc / λKT – 1] ”
“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” Einstein http://www.phnet.fi/public/mamaa1/einstein.htm
Imagine I am your grandmother..
So your: “This mean that a high frequency photon, like X-ray or UV has much more energy than low frequency longwave radiation”
What do you mean by “more energy”?
Heat and light are distinct categories in traditional physics, heat is not light and light is not heat. They are different wavelengths, they impact on matter in different ways.
Light from the Sun impacts matter on the electronic transition level, heat impacts matter on the whole molecular vibrational level.
Why when all the different wavelengths are travelling at the same speed, heat and light from our millions of degrees hot Sun reaches us at the same time, in around 8 minutes?
Because there is a great difference in size. Visible light from the Sun is not big enough to impact on the whole molecular vibrational level, it does not have the power to move the whole molecule into vibration which is what it takes to heat up matter.
Rub your hands together, that is mechnical energy moving the molecules of your skin into vibration, heating them up, you can feel the heat. Heat is invisible.
Stand in front of a fire, the invisible heat you feel radiating out from the fire is longwave infrared, called thermal infrared because it is the wavelength of heat. Near infrared, shortwave infrared is not called thermal, it is classed in with light.
There is a huge difference in size between the wavelengths of gamma and radio waves, for example, radio wave can be as big as a house and several football fields long. The smaller visible light wavelength impacts matter on the smaller electron level. It is much tinier than the wavelength of heat because it is moving more rapidly within the same linear speed. So what does “more energy” mean? Are are rapid series of microscopic pin pricks to your skin carrying more energy than one impact by a dagger?
All these references to “more energy” and complicated, meaningless to most people mathematical formulae are for one reason only, to confuse the difference between the bigger heat waves and the much, much tinier light waves.
The difference in size between the invisible thermal infrared, longwave infrared which is heat energy, and the invisible shortwave infrared is great – heat energy is around the size of a pin head and bigger, if it was not invisible it would be big enough to see, near infrared is microscopic, even if it was not invisible it would be too small to see.
Visible light is even smaller than near infrared.
So what does more energy mean between these?
This meme from the AGW version of ‘physics’ is to make you think that visible light from the Sun is powerful enough to heat matter, because it has taken out the real heat energy direct from the Sun and claims shortwave light heats matter so that you do not notice the real heat energy is missing.
This is in order to pretend that there is such a thing as “backradiation heat from greenhouse gases downwelling from the atmosphere under TOA”, it uses real world measurements of the direct longwave infrared downwelling from the Sun to pretend these are from “greenhouse gases backradiating longwave infrared heat which is upwelling from the heated Earth’s surface of land and water”.
Visible light from the Sun cannot heat land and water, because it is much tinier it impacts matter on the electronic transition level, the level of tiny electrons of the bigger whole molecule.
Because AGW claims “shortwave in longwave out” it does not explain what impact visible light from the Sun actually has on meeting matter, as it makes the false claim that it heat matter in its meme “all energy is the same and all heats matter on being absorbed”.
In the atmosphere which is mainly the real gases nitrogen and oxygen, visible light is reflected/scattered by the electrons of these molecules. The electrons absorb visible light and are briefly energised by this and move in their orbit, always wanting to return to ground state they do and emit the same energy they absorbed, blue being more energetic than the longer wavelengths of light, tinier moving more quickly than the bigger slower wavelengths of visible, gets reflected/scattered more – think more nervy pin ball – so we get our blue sky as blue light has more encounters with the electrons. This does not convert to heat energy, it is non-heat energy in and non-heat energy out.
In sight visible light converts to electrical energy, in nerve impulses, this again is not converting to heat energy. In photosynthesis in which plants create carbon matter out of sunlight, water and the building block food of all carbon life forms, carbon dioxide, visible light in mainly blue and red is converted to chemical energy, in the creation of sugars. Again, this is not converting matter to heat energy. Our eyes and photosynthesis are using visible energy for quite distinctly different processes to that required to heat matter.
The AGW meme “all electromagnetic energy from the Sun is the same and all create heat on being absorbed” is clearly seen to be a science fraud. Visible light does not heat matter, it cannot because that electronic transition level is too small to impact on the the bigger whole molecule. It takes bigger energy to move whole molecules into vibration. Vibration, internal kinetic energy, which is movement of the whole molecule, is heat.
Further, AGW claims that “visible light from the Sun heats the ocean”, but here from traditional physics which has already understood the way visible light impacts matter, it classes water as a transparent medium for visible light. Which means it is not absorbed at all by the electrons and is therefore transmitted through unchanged.
If visible light from the Sun heated the water in the ocean, if its energy was being used to heat up the water, there would not be any photosynthesis.., there would not be carbon life as we know it.
The AGW Greenhouse Effect and its energy budget is trickery.
If you can see why they have needed to take out the real direct wavelength of heat energy from the Sun and so needed to put in its place the physically impossible claim that visible light heats matter on being absorbed, for its fake “backradiation by greenhouses gases downwelling from the atmosphere under TOA”, then you will be able to see the other sleights of hand they use for this – like attributing the Solar Constant to shortwave at TOA, when it is actually the measurement of how much direct thermal infrared heats matter at the surface, how much the Sun’s great thermal energy transferred by longwave infrared radiation actually is, by how much it heats the surface matter.
C.O.D. physics n. Science dealing with properties and interactions of matter and energy.
An x-ray is not the same as a radio wave, they are distinctly different. Light from the Sun is distincly different from Heat from the Sun.
Visible light from the Sun is benign, it is non-ionising which means it does not move the electrons which absorb it out of their orbit, it is too weak to do this – uv is in both sets, some is ionising and some not. Bear in mind the difference in scale.. Ionising uv scoring a direct hit on an electron will send it out of its orbit, this is destructive to the molecule.., which is why our bodies produce melanin to absorb it, to stop it destroying our skin molecules, which is how we get our tans. Uv is also non-ionising, our outer layer of skin uses it much like plants use visible light, but to convert to vitamin D, essential for our good health.
This science fraud of the AGW Greenhouse Effect effectively hides the wonders of our natural world of which we are fully part. The real physics is now very well known, we have come a long way since Herschel’s first amazing discovery that the great heat from the Sun was invisible…, and is still taught traditionally. Alhough now you will have to got to the different science disciplines to discover what these different energies are like, their different properties like size and so on, and what happens when they impact matter. And no doubt we still have more to discover.. If you want to learn about radiant heat, longwave infrared, go to Thermodynamics not Optics or, as we have now advanced in knowledge even further, Biology.
And note, AGW tries to hide there is a difference in the actual wavelengths by their meme “all electromagnetic energy is the same and all create heat on being absorbed” is further bolstered by the “meme” that “thermal means the source, the Sun”. Deliberately lying to hide that in real traditional physics thermal, meaning of heat, is a description of the actual wavelength. So shortwave infrared is not called thermal. See the NASA traditional physics which used to taught through general education because the difference between invisible heat and visible light was expected to understood at primary/ young secondary level: http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/infrared.html
“Far infrared waves are thermal. In other words, we experience this type of infrared radiation every day in the form of heat! The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is infrared. The temperature-sensitive nerve endings in our skin can detect the difference between inside body temperature and outside skin temperature
“Shorter, near infrared waves are not hot at all – in fact you cannot even feel them. These shorter wavelengths are the ones used by your TV’s remote control.”
Note the difference in size.. Remember this, this is traditional physics teaching and still taught to some and importantly – it directly contradicts the claim from AGW’s Greenhouse Effect that “there is an invisible barrier like the glass of a greenhouse at TOA preventing the direct longwave infrared heat from the Sun entering the Earth’s atmosphere”. Such an “invisible barrier” is not known in traditional physics.
NASA’s traditional physics is saying here that the Heat we feel from the Sun which reaches us at the surface is the invisible longwave infrared, which is why it is caleed thermal, and that it is different from shortwave infrared which is not thermal, which we cannot feel as heat (because it is too small to impact us on the whole molecular vibrational level) – you decide which makes logical, physical sense.
The memes of “formulae” and “more energy” are simply magicians’ distractions to stop us seeing the trick.