'Correcting' Trenberth et al.

Curt said:
“The question is so nonsensical that it is impossible to answer. Potential energy does not radiate, substances radiate.”
So you agree with me ?
“And substances radiate as a function of their temperature and their emissivity at that temperature. Period. Earth’s atmosphere has radiatively active gases that do radiate significantly in all directions at their temperatures.”
Lifting a gaseous substance to height via an internal circulation requires work to be done as does moving it back down again. The energy required for that adiabatic process takes the form of gravitational potential energy and as I explained to Joel it cannot participate in the radiative exchange whilst in potential form.
K&T and the rest of the objectors here have worked the calculations on the basis that potential energy can participate in the radiative exchange.
You have admitted that it cannot by confirming that “Potential energy does not radiate, substances radiate.”
How does the K&T diagram deal with the fund of non radiative gravitational potential energy within the atmosphere?
It shows it as sending down 102 W m2 as extra DWIR magically produced from nowhere.
Checkmate ?
Eric Barnes gets it and by now I imagine that lots of other non contributors do as well.

Curt says:
April 10, 2014 at 6:26 pm
“coherent discussion”
……or peering into the darkness your adopted postures so permit more like……might one opine.
….and, as interesting as it might be poking around in that other World, what K-T et al is using to spin the Warmist Tale just gets chivvied around instead of being soundly challenged as a total load of Established Law-breaking tosh.
The bootlace-free twin-Sun postulation somewhere not far above surely debunks the candle and flame etc. fancifications and with it much of K-T interchanges of radiative energy which may well excite their brethren, including water vapour, until enough of it has found its way to Space to maintain the balance but not terra firma where it has warmer potential (or, perhaps, equal as with the twin Suns).
Otherwise I would surely expect to see clouds as diffusers (H.S?) of sunlight and not simple reflectors as they can be seen from below and can only but guess the Tren`s 67 represents the Solar IR absorbed thereby whilst the other ~half of it either bounces off the oceans surface or cuts through to warm the Core as 168 doesn`t seem enough to drive the climate to me.
But The World does need its boffins at levels below the eclectic as well and so the shakers and makers do have to see that they don`t go bumping into things that might hurt too bad as they burrow deep into the relevant Sciences and be ever ready to do a Rule of Thumb over their product before making any bid or spending money.- because, like lawyers, they seldom agree on exactly what is right.

david(swuk) says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:38 am
Curt says:
April 10, 2014 at 6:26 pm
“coherent discussion”
Oh – and I think I made it clear that I too was of the opinion that the Thermal issues resulted in carrying HEAT (not just wafty energy) to the higher atmosphere from where it can be self ejected into Space….it seems to me too that near Solar IR needs better attention.

Frank says, April 11, 2014 at 11:24 am:
“When water evaporates from the surface and later condenses in the atmosphere, the heat of evaporation has been lost from the surface and gained by the atmosphere. The energy gained by the atmosphere makes it warmer. It doesn’t return only by adiabatic descent.”
What Stephen doesn’t seem to understand is the route the solar heat takes through the earth system (well, the devout believers in the ‘atmospheric radiative greenhouse effect’ doesn’t seem to get it either).
It is first (mostly) absorbed by the surface, warming it. From there it is released into the atmosphere (mostly) through convective processes (conduction/convection/evaporation), brought up towards the tropopause, warming the troposphere on its way. On the way (and mostly from the cloud/convection top) it is then released back out to space through radiation. It is trivial to follow this route in the available observational data from the real world: First surface temps change, then tropospheric temps, then OLR from ToA.
NO heat is globally radiated or convected/conducted back to the surface! It is simply IN and OUT. From hot to cold all the way. The atmosphere CANNOT make the surface (its heat source) warmer than what the sun makes it by transferring back (recycling) energy already emitted from it as thermal loss! This would violate both the 1st and the 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics.
How people don’t see this is a mystery to me …

Stephen, you say: “So you agree with me ?”
Absolutely not! You don’t even understand the arguments or even the terminology. No one is claiming that “potential energy radiates”, whatever that nonsense would possibly mean. That strawman is a product of your profound confusion.
I repeat what I said before: “Substances radiate as a function of their temperature and their emissivity at that temperature. Period. Earth’s atmosphere has radiatively active gases that do radiate significantly in all directions at their temperatures.”
Now, as gases rise, their temperature gets lower, and that affects how much they radiate, but how much they radiate is a function of the resultant temperature at any point and the emissivity of that temperature. It is simply not true that “K&T and the rest of the objectors here have worked the calculations on the basis that potential energy can participate in the radiative exchange.”
You also say, “Lifting a gaseous substance to height via an internal circulation requires work to be done as does moving it back down again. The energy required for that adiabatic process takes the form of gravitational potential energy and as I explained to Joel it cannot participate in the radiative exchange whilst in potential form.”
Now in this nonsensical statement, what I think you may be trying to say is that as the gas rises, some of the kinetic energy of the molecules is converted to gravitational potential energy, and therefore its temperature decreases, and that as the temperature decreases, it radiates less. No one is arguing otherwise (and certainly no one is arguing that “potential energy radiates” – that is a figment of your fevered imagination). But what you are missing is that the higher the gas is, the more of the energy is radiated to space, where it is lost to the cycle, instead of the nearby atmosphere, where it is not.
You continue to call the process adiabatic, no matter how many times people point out to you that it is not. Do you even understand what “adiabatic” means?
You ask, “How does the K&T diagram deal with the fund of non radiative gravitational potential energy within the atmosphere? It shows it as sending down 102 W m2 as extra DWIR magically produced from nowhere.”
The “fund” of gravitational potential energy in the atmosphere is fundamentally constant. Some parcels of air move up, some move down, but it all has to balance out. By the 102 W/m2 that you are asserting is “magically produced”, I believe you are referring to the net (78+42) upward of thermals and evapo-transpiration in the diagram, that you believe is unbalanced. But as has been explained to you multiple times, because of the radiatively active gases, energy is lost on the way up (past what is converted to gravitational potential energy), so that on the return down, it does not transfer as much energy back to the surface, so there is a net upward transfer from surface to atmosphere due to these mechanisms.
You ask, “Checkmate ?” Only in the sense that Charlie Sheen yells “Winner!”

Kristian: Individual molecules and photons appear “violate” the 2LoT all of the time through collisions, absorption and emission. Individual molecules and photons have kinetic energy (or E = hv), but they don’t have a temperature – a mean kinetic energy. Temperature is a concept that applies to large groups of frequently-colliding molecules. Statistical mechanics has shown that heat will always flow from the hotter group to the colder group even though some slower-moving molecules collide and transfer kinetic energy to faster-moving molecules. Warmer gases emit more photons that cooler gases, but some photons go from cold to hot. Only the NET flux is from hot to cold.

Frank says, April 11, 2014 at 3:27 pm:
But Frank, this is not the issue. The whole ‘heating by back radiation’ concept rests upon HEAT moving ALSO from cold to hot. Only HEAT (and work) can directly raise the temperature of (increase the internal energy of) a system. It is by ADDING ‘extra’ energy (energy that was previously emitted from hot to cold as thermal loss) that earth’s surface temperature allegedly rises, NOT by obstructing energy from leaving (being emitted from) the surface. This is per definition direct heating, whatever you choose to CALL it.

Frank 3:16pm: “Trick, the physics you cite isn’t adequate for describing all of the interactions between radiation and matter, including gases.”
Concur, I will expand little more w/o try teaching or editor (per Curt); a whole text book can be written on the interactions of radiation & matter. Nice work though Frank, fun talking some actual text book physics for once – usually if go in too deep lose many readers like Stephen who won’t consult a text just consults his imagination. Thanks for not using the word “heat” in confusion like Kristian does.
Emission is the birth of a photon, absorption is photon death and reflection/scattering is the life of a photon. Scattering is not a transformation of radiant energy into other forms but rather into different directions; radiant energy is always conserved as it is absorbed into the L&O earth surface from whatever indistinguishable source (atm., sun, bird, cabbage).
Here is a short list of what Stephen misses in these processes per Bohren 2006:
“What once was, and perhaps still is, the standard treatise on atomic spectra, by Condon and Shortley, fills 432 pages of text. Herzberg’s treatises fill 581 pages for diatomic molecules, 538 pages for polyatomic molecules, and 670 pages for the electronic spectra of polyatomic molecules. Townes and Schawlow devote 648 pages to microwave spectroscopy. And the physical strain of just lifting these nearly 3000 pages is as nothing compared to the mental strain of absorbing them”… as Stephen often writes he hasn’t read a one since the early ’60s.
Think it was R.Feynman said something like “Nobody understands all that”.
Real matter continuously emits & absorbs radiation. All wavelengths, all the time, at all temperatures as entropy can not remain constant in nature. I often see around here that bodies are “heated” – about “heat” radiation (no such thing) or “heat rises”, just drop “heat” as a noun (as Frank does) and reduce confusion. Maxwell would have been more clear with the “Theory of Energy” and Planck with “Theory of Radiation”. Cold bodies radiate too, even when bodies are cooled they radiate. Blackbody radiation existence does not hinge on the existence of a blackbody. Real bodies (large compared with the wavelength) are characterized by (dimensionless) absorptivities less than or equal to 1.
“In general, the absorptivity (and hence emissivity) of a body depends on the direction and state of polarization of the incident radiation as well as its frequency, caveats often omitted. We would not have to worry about this if all bodies were always illuminated by blackbody radiation (unpolarized and isotropic). But alas, this is not true, and real bodies when removed from cavities are illuminated by radiation that usually is not the same in all directions and may be partially polarized.”
“Just like gases, solids and liquids are transparent at wavelengths they don’t absorb.”
Here Frank in part confuses real objects with ideal black or ideal transparent bodies:
No real object is transparent (absorptivity=0.0) at any wavelength at any time at any temperature – only ideal objects can be transparent in theory (entropy constant) since all real processes increase entropy, again: “All matter – gaseous, liquid, or solid – at all temperatures emits radiation of all frequencies at all times, although in varying amounts, possibly so small at some frequencies, for some materials, and at some temperatures as to be undetectable with today’s instruments (tomorrow’s, who knows?).” Bohren 2006 p. 4 right up front.
”…Planck’s Law and the S-B law are special cases that can be derived from the Schwarzschild eqn.”
No. Planck’s distribution function is fundamental, it is contained IN the Schwarzschild eqn. for the transmission of radiation of a particular frequency through an absorbing medium.
”…we usually assess the radiation they absorb by measuring the radiation they reflect/scatter.”
A mirror illuminated by an incident beam gives rise to a reflected beam. Is this reflected beam redirected incident photons? Alas, we cannot do an experiment to answer this question. To determine if reflected photons are measured the same as incident photons would require us to be able to identify them. But photons are indistinguishable. We cannot tell one from another. We cannot tag a photon with GPS and follow its life line progress like a bird.
Thus if you want to believe that you measure reflected photons being the same as incident photons, you may do so. No one can prove you wrong. But you cannot prove you are right. When faced with an un-decidable proposition, you may believe whatever you wish just like Stephen top post & Kristian 4:45pm: “The whole ‘heating by back radiation’ concept rests upon HEAT moving…” No. How can anyone identify a heat photon was over there to know the photon moved over here? Can’t. So Kristian can believe what he wishes.
Note that in the wave language we would not likely even ask if the reflected wave is the same as the incident wave. Kristian should learn to write his thoughts w/o using the “heat” word to reduce & in some cases eliminate confusion as Frank does.

joeldshore says, April 11, 2014 at 5:50 pm:
“No, it doesn’t. It rests on the concept that the steady-state temperature of an object is determined by the balance between what it absorbs and what it emits, something that is only controversial among the scientifically-ignorant.”
No, Joel. The steady-state temperature of a real-world object is determined by how much energy has been accumulated at/below its surface upon balance between incoming and outgoing energy. The instantaneous fluxes themselves do not set the steady-state temperature. The steady-state internal energy of the object does.
Atmospheric IR is not incoming energy for the surface. It is not an extra input of energy. An input of energy to a system (like the surface) would come from its heat reservoir (like the sun), not its cold sink (like the atmosphere). The atmospheric energy came from the surface in the first place (an input), warming the atmosphere. It has only one way to go from there: towards colder, ultimately to space.
If you want to return (recycle) this previously thermally ejected energy to the surface ejecting it, the heat source of the atmosphere, to raise its temperature a second time, then you are relying on a concept where HEAT is also going separately/independently from cold to hot, an impossible situation in nature. I know you would never admit to this, because you know it violates all thermodynamic laws. But that is what you’re in fact doing.

As Kristian has well demonstrated, if you just rewrite the laws of physics to suit your prejudices, then you can believe anything you want to and remain safely behind your own self-imposed veil of ignorance.

Trick says, April 12, 2014 at 6:52 am:
“In your view, what happens (in basic science terms) to the incoming energy at the incoming terrestrial photon’s death upon being annihilated at the surface?”
What ‘incoming’ energy? The incoming energy comes from the sun. This energy then goes OUT from the surface to the atmosphere as thermal loss, because of the former (hot reservoir) being warmer than the latter (cold reservoir). As described by the radiative heat transfer equation. There is no extra energy input from the cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface. You’re double counting the energy.

Kristian says:
April 12, 2014 at 9:34 am
“There is no extra energy input from the cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface.”
This is such an elementary mischaracterization which causes so much unwarrented confusion. It is not your fault, but the fault of those who use such sloppy language.
The atmosphere does not produce “energy”. Energy is an absolute quantity which can be neither created nor destroyed, merely converted from one form to another. What we are talking about here is flows of energy per unit of time, which is power.
The GHGs in the atmosphere do not heat the surface. The Sun does that. Every second it shines upon the Earth, it is heating it. How hot the Earth’s surface gets depends on how efficiently it can rid itself of one batch of solar powered heat before the next batch of solar radiation comes in.
The GHGs impede the outward transport of that heat through radiation. Enough that, all things being equal, the surface temperature would rise until it reached a level to overcome the impedance of the GHGs.
It is analogous to putting a dam across a stream. The dam does not create water. It simply impedes the flow so that the water pools up behind it until it can flow over the top. Increase the height of the dam, and the depth of the water behind it increases, until it can spill over the top again.
At least, that would be the case if there were no other means of transferring heat to the GHGs than radiation.
But, that is not the case. Atmospheric convection also transfers heat to the GHGs, so that it can be radiated away into space. It is like having a spillway beside the dam which prevents the water from overflowing the top of the dam in the first place. You can build the dam higher, but the spillway is still going to keep the flow going just as it was before, and the extra height of the dam has no effect.
That is the point I have made in preceding comments on this page. I believe it is why we currently observe essentially no surface temperature to CO2 concentration sensitivity at all.