From the department of “I told you so and I have an experiment that precedes this to prove it” comes a paper that proves Bill Nye’s faked ‘greenhouse effect’ experiment is also based on the wrong ‘basic physics’. Remember when I ripped Bill and Al a new one, exposing not only their video fakery, but the fact that experiment fails and could never work? Well, somebody wrote a paper on it and took these two clowns to task.
The Hockey Schtick writes:
Oh dear, the incompetent & faked attempt by Bill Nye to demonstrate the greenhouse effect for Al Gore’s Climate “Reality” Project has also been shown by a peer-reviewed paper to be based upon the wrong “basic physics” as well. According to the authors, Nye’s experiment and other similar classroom demonstrations allegedly of the greenhouse effect:
“All involve comparing the temperature rise in a container filled with air with that of the same or a similar container filled with carbon dioxide when exposed to radiation from the Sun or a heat lamp. Typically, a larger temperature rise is observed with carbon dioxide and the difference is attributed, explicitly or implicitly, to the physical phenomena responsible for the climate change. We argue here that great care is required in interpreting these demonstrations and, in particular, that for the case of the demonstration described by Lueddecke et al., the results arise primarily from processes related to convective heat transport that plays no role in climate change.”
Bill Nye the propaganda guy experiment for the Climate Un-Reality Project
According to the paper, Nye’s experiment
“demonstrates an entirely different phenomenon: The greater density of carbon dioxide compared to air reduces heat transfer by suppressing convective mixing with the ambient air. Other related experiments are subject to similar concerns. Argon, which has a density close to that of carbon dioxide but no infrared absorption, provides a valuable experimental control for separating radiative from convective effects.“
Not only did the authors find that addition of the non-greenhouse gas Argon had similar heating effects to CO2, the Argon control actually heated up slightly more than in the greenhouse gas CO2 experiment, definitively proving that such experiments assume the wrong “basic physics” of radiation were responsible for the heating observed, instead of the limitation of convection due to CO2 having a greater density compared to air.
Nye’s experiment not only limits convection by addition of denser CO2, it completely eliminates convection by enclosing the CO2 in a bottle with the top on.
According to the authors,
“It has been known for more than a century that the warming of air in a real greenhouse results primarily from entirely different physics—mainly that the glass prevents mixing between the warm air inside and the cooler air outside, and therefore suppresses convective heat transfer between the interior and the exterior; the infrared absorption of the glass plays a much smaller role. We show here, via experimental data and a simple theoretical model, that the effects observed in the demonstration described in Ref. 1 arise from a similar restriction of convection rather than from radiative effects. In this case, it is the density difference between carbon dioxide and air, rather than the presence of a solid barrier, that suppresses mixing of the gases. Although the details differ, similar considerations apply to other demonstrations that have been reported.”[including Nye’s ‘greenhouse effect’ enclosed in a glass bottle]
Thus, Nye’s experiment, in addition to the video fakery and incompetence, is not even wrong on the “basic physics” of the greenhouse effect.
As the authors point out in the conclusion,
“Although not an accurate demonstration of the physics of climate change, the experiment we have considered and related ones are valuable examples of the dangers of unintentional bias in science, the value of at least a rough quantitative prediction of the expected effect, the importance of considering alternative explanations, and the need for carefully designed experimental controls.”
The paper in the American Journal of Physics:
Climate change in a shoebox: Right result, wrong physics
Paul Wagoner , Chunhua Liu and R. G. Tobin
Classroom experiments that purport to demonstrate the role of carbon dioxide’s far-infrared absorption in global climate change are more subtle than is commonly appreciated. We show, using both experimental results and theoretical analysis, that one such experiment demonstrates an entirely different phenomenon: The greater density of carbon dioxide compared to air reduces heat transfer by suppressing convective mixing with the ambient air. Other related experiments are subject to similar concerns. Argon, which has a density close to that of carbon dioxide but no infrared absorption, provides a valuable experimental control for separating radiative from convective effects. A simple analytical model for estimating the magnitude of the radiative greenhouse effect is presented, and the effect is shown to be very small for most tabletop experiments.
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tonyM says:
August 11, 2014 at 8:53 am
SMS says:
August 11, 2014 at 7:38 am
If I were to take two bell jars and fill one with air and the other with CO2 and then proceed to add heat at the same rate to each; I would see the CO2 warm faster due to it’s having a specific heat of about .8.
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Argon’s mass heat capacity is about 0.5. The experiment used Ar as a comparison so it would make it even more confusing as both behaved similarly.
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This all reminds me of the magic trick I used to do as a child balancing a pencil and by gently blowing on the pencil I could get it to move and point any direction i wanted it to.
richardscourtney said on August 11, 2014 at 2:16 am:
Get the NoScript plugin and just don’t give permission for this site to run scripts. Then there’s a different symbol, might be a flame, that doesn’t… Strange, they didn’t register a “like” for me before. But now that I did a test “like” with the script it now works without, maybe it set an identifying cookie.
And if you block wp-dot-com then it doesn’t show the identities of the “likers” in the hover-thing.
Good News, Richard! You can click on the star and “un-like” your previous “like”, it’s reversible.
You can also “like” your own comments. Would you feel comfortable voting for yourself if you were running for public office?
And now when I checked before posting, it shows you did test that feature on that comment. You do believe in democracy!
This “experiment” is just bizarre. First off, Nye says the bottles are “sealed.” Then he unseals one and puts in a hose through which is flowing CO2 from a pressurized bottle. The CO2 will be cool due to the throttle effect, adiabatic pressure drop. The CO2 flow appears to be directed at the thermometer’s empty end. The “heat lamps” put out visible and near-infrared light, with a negligible amount of far-infrared 15-micron IR. The lamps heat the thermometers directly! This completely negates any CO2 active absorption/thermalization of 15-micron IR. Why one heats faster than the other is anyone’s guess but has nothing to do with the gases, as both air and CO2 are completely transparent to visible/near-infrared light. Most likely the bulb of one thermometer was directly above a dark-blue section of the little globes, and the bulb of the other thermometer was directly above a lighter-colored section of the globe. The dark-blue section of the globe would heat slightly faster from the heat lamps.
Stokes, your thoughts please? Oh, wait, you are a computer programmer and never studied thermo, transport of heat, chemistry, physics, any of that…
bushbunny says:
August 10, 2014 at 10:38 pm
They are nuts, CO2 is a small part of our atmosphere, how can they justify their experiment?
The justification is simple and completely unrelated to CO2 in the real atmosphere. They are not examining the affects of CO2 in the real world; they are looking at the assumptions made by Nye in designing his experiment and in interpreting its results. What they say in metaphor is that Mr. Nye wandered onto the cricket pitch and attempted to explain the players behaviour using the rules of golf.
The purpose of experimentation is to isolate a “known” – like CO2 – in a controlled environment with known properties – like a bottle – and subject it to a known force – like a heat lamp – or process and measure changes. Importantly, you use controls that cover variables – like mass – in order to isolate the distinct response of the material being studied. This something that computers and mathematical models are poor at. Nye failed to 1) properly estimate what the results should be using the appropriate physics, assuming his “hypothesis” was correct, 2) he failed to consider the behaviour of the experimental microenvironment and ITS effect upon the outcome. The only “right” outcome was that he (Nye) correctly predicted that exposing a bottle of gas to a heat lamp will warm the contents. But while he correctly “predicted” that CO2 would warm more than a normal air mix, he failed to account for the additional mass of CO2, which is considerably heavier than air. By using Argon as a control the new work demonstrated that mass and convection, facts known for over a century, but ignored by Nye, are critical in explaining the experimental outcome.
It is worth remembering that Arrhenius – the “father” of the “Greenhouse Effect” – and Tyndal(?) upon whose work he relied were BOTH using “bad” phsyics to begin with. Tyndal had an excuse, but Arrhenius continued to be an advocate of the “lumniferous aether” into the 20th century, well after Michelson and Morley, who published in 1887. It was well known before WWI that Arrhenius phyics was wrong about how the greenhouse effect worked.
In an earlier post I said faking experimental results was acceptable in climate science. That’s not true, I apologize, the majority of climate scientists are intelligent, hard working, honest and genuinely want to advance the science. It’s only a few bad apples that ruin it for everyone and this is an example of a couple of bad apples.
The experiment does seem silly; if the same quantity of heat Q is transferred to air and CO2 of course the temperature rise will be different because both mass m and cp are different,
Q=m*Cp*dT
I have seen no evidence of that assertion, while I have seen much evidence of the reverse of that. I truly believe that an honest climatologist is a rare bird indeed. (I do not know if most are willfully dishonest or if they are just deluded by the whole myth)
The thermometers have to be shaded from the direct electro-magnetic (infra-red) radiation. It is not possible to just hold a thermometer in the sunshine and measure the temperature of the air – you need a “shade” temperature – that’s why a “Stevensons screen” is used to shield against heat radiation from outside of the shelter corrupting the measurement.
The headline is very confusing. Makes it sound as if the critique of the Nye experiment validates that experiment. Is it “not right” or “not wrong”?
I told you all
– and that feels like a million years ago-
that you cannot assess the nett effect of more CO2 in the air with a closed box experiment.
Arrhenius and Tyndall and all those like this guy [e.g AL GORE] are only looking at half the story…
…….
look here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-aug-2011/
IOW
you have to look at the whole spectrum of a gas to understand this,
as the argon experiment clearly shows.
Pamela Gray says:
August 11, 2014 at 7:06 am
++++++++++++++++++++++++
It’s worse than you thought. At 6:55 they show the earth spinning in the wrong direction. Either that, or they shot it upside down with the south pole at the top. An Aussie production perhaps? 😉
BTW
to prove that water absorbs (“mirrors”) in the visible area of the spectrum, see this beautiful presentation,
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=e20b9df6c8&view=att&th=147c48955c731a02&attid=0.1&disp=safe&realattid=d8941274a3c5862b_0.1&zw
it confirms exactly what I have been saying all along:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-aug-2011/
does it not?
Question: why is nobody teaching this?
At the fan rep, the big globe is going the right way in case we get comments.
Dr. Strangelove says: “But how do you put it in the cylinder in the first place? By pumping it. That heats it. When released it will cool. But cooler than ambient air? No. Because you’re putting it in another container. It has to force air out of that container.”
Among other things, I’m a SCUBA diver. Air pumped into the tank heats it. I suppose if you were to immediately let it back out, yes it would return to ambient temperature. But that’s not what happens. WHILE the air is pressurized and hot, the tank is cooled in a water bath as otherwise it will get so hot as to weaken it (and then maybe explode). This removes heat energy.
Releasing the pressure once the tank is cooled produces very cold air because the same amount of heat that occupies is now being spread out over a larger volume producing lower temperature.
This is true also of carbon dioxide fire extinguishers, a trick is to blast your beer can with CO2 and it will chill it very cold very quickly. Needless to say keep your body parts away from the blast and any metal parts near the nozzle because you are shooting dry ice at about -110 F even when the steel bottle is at ambient temperature.
This phenomenon also exists for propane tanks at ambient temperature. While operation, they get very cold at the valve and eventually can chill the tank itself, on a cold day already it can chill itself to the point where it just stops working.
Your comment pertained to going from one container to another. Here’s a description of filling a paintball gun cylinder from a larger CO2 cylinder. Going from higher pressure to lower pressure chills the CO2 even though the lower pressure is still higher than ambient.
“When the frost (ice) disappears from the cylinder, close the tank valve. This usually takes about ten seconds for the system to equilibrate.”
http://coaching.nra.org/documents/pdf/education/airgun_safetyguide-5.pdf
SMS “If I were to take two bell jars and fill one with air and the other with CO2 and then proceed to add heat at the same rate to each; I would see the CO2 warm faster due to it’s having a specific heat of about .8″
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chemengrls says:
August 11, 2014 at 10:01 am
The experiment does seem silly; if the same quantity of heat Q is transferred to air and CO2 of course the temperature rise will be different because both mass m and cp are different,
Q=m*Cp*dT
========
SMS and others should pay attention to chemengrls. I and others have pointed this out before CO2 mass is 44.01 grams per mole but air is 28.9 grams per mole. Due to the mass of CO2 it cannot get as high a temperature as air give the same volume and Q (heat input).
Any real physicist would have winced when they watched that childish “experiment” – then bit their tongues. “Useful idiots” after all. The real tragedy is not the idiocy of Messrs Nye and Gore, it’s the silent complicity of corrupted or fearful scientists.
“The real tragedy is not the idiocy of Messrs Nye and Gore, it’s the silent complicity of corrupted or fearful scientists.” ~ brains356
Good point. That point is the salient one. The entire corruption of science by the “climatologists” should be horribly apparent to the honest scientists in other disciplines, and yet few are willing to stand up and yell “bull crap on that!”
For another perspective, see the 1909 Robert F. Wood experiment on physics of greenhouse
http://www.biocab.org/Wood_Experiment_Repeated.html
The casual blogger should remember that shortwave IR such as solar, and “longwave” IR emitted from “terrestrial” objects have very different real world properties.
http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/angstrom1900/index.html
BTW, modern greenhouses use polycarbonate panels or polyethylene sheets. The IR transparency is not an issue, only thermal insulating properties. Greenhouse operators know that daily temperature swings must be regulated. Modern technology is crafting plastics with controlled IR properties. http://www.modernplastics.com/may05/wdgesolarsheet19.html
george e. smith says:
August 10, 2014 at 10:30 pm
Well this expose is also gobbledegook.
No, it is not. The work is not about “climate” or determining anything remotely related to climate. Their methodology, rational and conclusions say nothing about climate. The work is an experimental critique of Nye and his experimental methods and physical interpretation. The only value the authors find in Nye’s work is as an example of bad experimenbtal design. Not everything is about climate. Nye’s work is replicated and found not just inadequate but wrong by the authors.
Nick Stokes:
Known since Tyndall? Tyndall speculated that CO2 caused warming in the atmosphere. Arrhenius hypothesized based on his faulty experimentation. Experimental evidence since has shown that both were wrong.
The difference between speculation, hypothesis and experimental fact appears to escape you completely in favour of “the inerrancy of certain scientists”.
It is a fallacy, of course.
Duster says: August 11, 2014 at 9:44 am
“But while he correctly “predicted” that CO2 would warm more than a normal air mix, he failed to account for the additional mass of CO2, which is considerably heavier than air. By using Argon as a control the new work demonstrated that mass and convection, facts known for over a century, but ignored by Nye, are critical in explaining the experimental outcome.”
It isn’t new work. But you’ve misunderstood it. The mass of gas only affects the heating time, whereas these experiments seem to have settled down to steady state. Wagoner et al attribute their effect to a density stratification, which allows a temperature gradient (and differential) which would otherwise dissipate with convection.
But that is a pretty special circumstance. It requires that the thermometer be at the bottom. It requires that both air and CO2 (or Ar) be present; if it’s all CO2, there is no gradient. And it would require that the CO2 be introduced carefully, without mixing.
John A says: August 11, 2014 at 11:53 am
“Known since Tyndall? Tyndall speculated that CO2 caused warming in the atmosphere.”
No, he didn’t. Nowhere. He simply measured the IR absorption characteristics of CO2 and other gases. And those measurements of physical properties have held up very well.
Shouldn’t the CO2-rich mix take longer exposure to IR heat to warm up and take longer to cool down?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/
Not to mention the obvious fact that it doesn’t really matter in the face of diurnal effects, starting temperature, pressure, etc. seen in the real world.
Michael Moon says: August 11, 2014 at 9:35 am
“Stokes, your thoughts please? Oh, wait, you are a computer programmer and never studied thermo, transport of heat, chemistry, physics, any of that…”
Not true.
I haven’t read all the comments but I think that I might have had a hand in this. I have been very active on the internets pointing out the existence of the 2010 paper whenever someone brings up the CO2 in a bottle experiment.
I believe that Dr. Spencer has also chimed in on these worthless experiments pointing out that CO2’s radiative properties are both a function of concentration and distance. At such short distances it is simply impossible to measure the greenhouse gas effect of CO2 with a thermometer. Even in major controlled laboratory experiments using long distances it takes extremely accurate instrumentation to measure the actual GHG effect of CO2.