In comments on Dr. Roy’s Facebook page about him turning comments off on his blog because he’s simply tired of dealing with sockpuppeting troll Douglas J. Cotton, there was this quote that I thought was very, very succinct and appropriate. It also applies to the climate debate in general.
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” :- Alberto Brandolini
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/11485742.Alberto_Brandolini
Spencer replied:
That quote is a great description of what has been happening. Person #1 can put together a meaningless string of technical jargon. Person #2 can say, “that makes no sense at all!” Person #1 then says, “sorry you don’t know enough to understand it.” It just goes downhill from there..
Indeed, and the amount of energy expended by me and others is great. We walk a very fine line here, trying to balance giving a legitimate forum to open and honest people, while ferreting out and limiting people who simply want to disrupt the conversation via sockpuppetry. It is a lot of work. If I didn’t have volunteer moderators for WUWT, I probably would have gone the way of Spencer long ago. Since we routinely process a thousand or more comments a day here, many of which are from sockpuppeters and posers (you know who you are with special attention to K-man) It would certainly give me more time to research and write articles. It’s certainly less effort.
So, I thought it was time to ask the question:
Doug, don’t even try to comment here again.
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“This ”gravity” that is discussed above is what gives the atmosphere it’s density. Gravity drives how hard the atmosphere is pulled down onto it, and is thus responsible ultimately for the temperature of the planet at the surface.”
I’m sorry – this is not true.
Gravity does not maintain a temperature at the surface.
You are confusing the work required to compress a gas (as in pumping up a bike tyre) into a continuous process.
It is a one-shot process. Once an atmosphere has been compressed under gravity the work is done. Yes, a temp rise will take place in the atmos …. but it will then dissipate to space, never to reappear.
Obviously this is not observable as a planet’s atmosphere forms in a slow process under the influence of gravity.
Think about it.
Does your bike tyre remain hot forever after being pressurised by your hand-pump?
Despite cooling to it’s surrounding – as the atmosphere does to space.
No.
The air in the tube is pressurised (work applied and heat created by compression). The once.
Otherwise you have created a perpetuation heat engine.
Gravity is responsible for the lapse rate in an atmosphere consequent to it’s Cp (specific heat) of it’s atmosphere, merely because of it’s overturning motions (an inherent function of an irradiated rotating sphere).
Vis convection, turbulent motion and density temp/differentials between equator and pole with Coriolis causing convergence.
The atmosphere is a heat pump with a LR formed as such and modified by saturated air releasing LH aloft.
IOW: motion causes the LR which is fixed at the surface by the GHE at a global ave 15C. Without GHG’s the surface would be -18C (which is that now at an altitude of ~7km).
Nope . Gravity is the force and thus the “source” of the necessary trade off of potential to kinetic energy to statically balance the requirements for total energy dictated by the Divergence Theorem .
In a strong sense I’m going out on a limb here , not yet having time to work thru , eg , http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-gravity-continuously-does-work-on.html , but I see no other answer to the demands of the Divergence Theorem for total energy balance . And the computations appear to work very well .
On the other hand , there simply are no quantitative equations offered by the GHG proponents .
“Gravity does not maintain a temperature at the surface.”
False! What you miss in your comparison with the bicycle tire is the fact that, unlike the tire pump, gravity works upon all of the surrounding atmosphere. It is a ubiquitous and permanent force. Thus, for a given stream of energy, we get permanent adiabatic warming proportional to density.
We are moving way off topic
can we stick to comments about comments
Just another thought, if one had to buy a subscription to comment and a troll paid the fee how could you then snip any of his/her/its comments just because they contained crackpot ideas or were thread bombing? If a troll wants to troll, they are going to find a way to troll.
By collecting a fee, would you then have to establish a for profit business, obtain a business license, perhaps file for a fictitious name and then account for income and pay taxes? You certainly don’t want the government to send in the IRS dogs because they disagree with your blog.
Like many others above, I would say that I have learned a lot from the comments.
Anthony, I’d suggest you might do as the Real Climate blog used to do. They dumped any comment they disagreed with into a thread they called the Borehole. In this case you possible automatically send sockpuppet comments into a similar blind thread. That way the moderators would only have to keep tabs on honest commenters and be on the lookout for new psuedonyms.
I will make this one comment on this tangent, as it’s OT.
Goddard was finally beginning to understand things in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/08/venus-envy/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/06/hyperventilating-on-venus/#comment-386054 is the best comment on his previous, more confused post. Goddard has trouble explaining things clearly.
Harry Huffmann’s article is http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html
Some of his other pages are pretty weird. While he says there’s no greenhouse effect, I read that as other processes (mainly atmospheric convection) are much more important. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, almost by definition.
This ”gravity” that is discussed above is what gives the atmosphere it’s density
I’d prefer to say it’s a combination of the air pressure (essentially the weight of the air column above a unit area) and the ideal gas law. I.e. there’s more than gravity involved. Toneb went into additional detail.
It’s not OT from the standpoint that the comments that Dr. Spencer claims to have caused collateral damage relates to an ongoing and unsettled debate on the Gravito-Thermal Effect:
Ric links to an excellent comment which outlines why the Gravito-Thermal Effect determines the temperature gradient in the troposphere and not the presence of IR-active gases: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/06/hyperventilating-on-venus/#comment-386054
That being said, I am a huge fan of Dr. Spencer and am sad to lose the comments from his site. I expect to continue to learn from his future posts.
Chic,
Tricky. One should be able to drive a heat engine with such a temperature gradient, various schemes for doing it in the oceans have been discussed.
The point of contention as I understand it is envisaging how temperature gradient in the atmosphere treated as a whole would evolve in a totally closed system. The argument goes that in such a system, convection wouldn’t even be able to power itself because it could never be 100% efficient, much less power anything else. Tendency toward an isothermal atmosphere in this thought experiment is my prediction.
The 2010 WUWT comment you link to doesn’t argue that scenario, e.g.:
The cyclic heat input from the sun (over day and night; seasonal variations at different latitudes, etc.) provides the driving forces behind the continuously circulating atmosphere and its vertical transport of heat from the surface of the earth to higher altitudes, where heat balance can be established by long-wave radiation towards space.
With which I don’t have an issue. As ever, the sticking point is the very next sentence:
Well proven, basic physics considerations (radiation balance and adiabatic compression) therefore directly explain the observed temperature of Earth’s atmosphere, without the need to revert to obscure and unverified greenhouse effects from greenhouse gases.
For one thing, radiative transfer and Beer-Lambert law are no more obscure or “unverified” principles of textbook physics than Boyle’s Law is. You might know the rest of this speech better than I do: predicting change in temperature as a function of pressure says nothing about absolute temperature. The various states of any part of a heat engine derive from the net of ALL fluxes into, through and out of it.
Tossing out allegedly “obscure” energy transfers without so much as testing for them sounds to me like a recipe for wrong answers. Any cosmic-ray fans reading that last would agree with me at least in principle, I’m sure.
I’ve never noticed Doug Cotton or whatever he posts . I’ll accept that he is a troll . But Roy Spencer went beyond that in essentially banning all discussion challenging the ruling paradigm in which both sides of this trillion dollar debate conduct their battles .
I don’t know the complete history of the rise of GHG theory to paradigm status , but surely when James Hansen’s claim that Venus’s extreme surface temperature , 225% of , 400K hotter than , that of a gray body in its orbit , an energy density at it’s surface 25.6 times that of the space next to it , was due to a spectral GHG phenomenon ( see http://cosy.com/Science/Hansen.avi ) without any challenge to show us the equations was a marker that the paradigm had uncritically been accepted by all sides of the “climate science” establishment .
As a APL programmer for whom to claim to understand something quantitative is to implement it , and with a fair understanding of spectra from a background in visual psychophysics , I sought in vain for the essential enabling equations .
They are nowhere to be found .
I could not even find the equations for the equilibrium mean energy density and corresponding temperature of a radiantly heated colored ball . Surely this has to be in some half century old heat transfer textbook somewhere .
Finally , I just went ahead and figured out and implemented the generalization of the calculation which produces the endlessly parroted 255K meme , I’ve posted this simple expression in terms of the ratio of dot products of object and source spectra a number of times here , and it the main point of my http://cosy.com/Science/HeartlandBasicBasics.html talk and is derived in detail in a number of different ways on http://CoSy.com . It is a generalization of the computation which produces the endlessly parroted 255K meme and a similar derivation by Martin Hertzberg , It is experimentally testable .
Yet I have never been able to elicit either confirmation ( or correction ) of it here or anywhere . And if you can’t settle the calculation of the mean temperature of a radiantly heated uniformly colored ball , how can you possibly claim to understand the mean surface temperature of a planet to the 4th or 5th decimal place variation this entire historical hysteria is about ?
So , simply calculating the energy density in our orbit from the surface temperature of the Sun and its diameter and our distance from it explains 97% of our estimated surface temperature . Our absorption=emission spectrum with respect to the Sun’s power spectrum is the next parameter to incorporate and rather than parroting the unconscionably crude 255K approximation awaits calculation in terms of our actual observed absorption=emission spectrum as seen from the outside .
But , and this is where the GHG proponents have never presented their quantitative equations , just endlessly word-wave , is how they get around the Divergence Theorem , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergence_theorem , that mean total energy density on the interior of a passively heated ball must match that of its surface .
Electromagnetic phenomena , being bi-polar , can’t .
Unipolar asymmetric gravity can and must and by calculations by apparently several people accurately does quantitatively explain the difference between Top of Atmosphere and surface temperatures — and indeed the phenomenon continues on into the solid planet itself . Just the simple observation that gravity computes as a negative force instantly implies the equations which must hold for the constant total energy balance demanded by the Divergence Theorem .
While various people dismiss the necessity of including gravity as an essential parameter , and the remarkable correlation with observation it provides , they offer no computable testable equations for their GHG hypothesis .
But , beyond all this , the gravitational blueshift , ie : increase in energy , as radiation descends in a gravitational field is a settled fact . ( just google it . ) Even radiant energy itself gets “hotter” to maintain the total energy balance with gravitational potential energy .
So , the GHG believers have to contend that the total energy balance equations which radiant energy adheres to do not apply to matter — altho atmospheres exhibit exactly the temperature gradients one calculates on the basis that they do .
To me , that’s QED .
Particularly since the GHG crowd has never presented testable quantitative equations for the phenomenon they claim produces a 400K rise in temperature over a distance of a few 10s of kilometers .
Brandon,
Thought experiments will not solve this argument. There is theory which predicts a temperature gradient and anecdotal centrifuge evidence from a comment earlier by Ed Bo claiming it doesn’t happen. I replied with a reference to a Dr. Graeff, who has experimental evidence supporting the theory. Convection is ruled out by the condition of dQ=0.
Let’s call that 2010 WUWT comment from Sense and Science = SAS2010. He/she doesn’t toss out radiative transfer equations and well-established gas laws or call them obscure. SAS2010 was referring to the “it that should not be named” effect which claims that elevated surface temperatures are due to IR-active gases.
Yes, I don’t see how a temperature gradient alone determines a surface temperature. Solar input, albedo, and knowledge of the concentration of IR-active gases seem to be crucial facts to know.
Chic,
I have finally gotten around to reading Graeff’s work, specifically Measuring the Temperature Distribution in Columns of Liquids (2006).
His main finding appears to be:
Vertical temperature gradients:
The most important result is the temperature gradient value 1 of the inner axis of the glass tube 1, filled with water and glass powder, as shown as the lowest blue curve in GRAPH 2. It is quite stable around a value of about -0.034 K/meter, the minus sign indicating a lower temperature at the top than on the bottom. This value is close to the theoretical value of -.04 K/m as discussed below.
I’ll skip over the derivation and discussion to give the final form:
He doesn’t give units, so I assume them: g is acceleration due to gravity in m/s^2, H is vertical distance (height) in m, c is specific heat in m^2 s^-2 K^-1 and n is number of degrees of freedom (unitless), which for water he gives as 18. He gives the theoretical answer for water as -0.04 K m^-1, so plugging in values and solving for g we get:
-0.04 K/m = -g m s-2 / 4186 m2 s-2 K-1 * 18 g m s-2 = 0.04 K/m * 4186 m2 s-2 K-1 / 18 = 9.3 m s-2Eh? He’s saying the experimental rate under centrifugal acceleration (which he does not specify) is the same as the rate under (roughly) Earth standard gravity? Did I miss something?
For some real-world perspective, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is between 10,898 and 10,916 m deep. I’ll average the range as 10,907 m. Thus:
One of us has goofed somewhere.
Now the fuss on this thread has died down, I’d like to remind Anthony, the mods and everyone else here of what the commenters at WUWT can do:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/25/judith-i-love-ya-but-youre-way-wrong/
Maybe the reaction here wasn’t the only reason Judith Curry decided to return to proper science. But I suspect it contributed. And I was part of that.
So, for me, to stop or even to restrict comments on a blog like WUWT is to surrender truth to politics. I feel for Roy Spencer, and wonder whether he has done this against his will in response to pressure. Perhaps, pressure from his paymasters?
An increase in the moderation team at WUWT seems the only sane option.
I’d like to help, but – and I suspect I’m not alone here – I can’t usually tell until a day or so before whether or not I will have time on a particular day to go troll-hunting. Being 8 hours ahead of California time doesn’t help either.
I would suggest keeping the comments as a net positive contribution. In a more narrow context, I’ve noticed some sub-optimal story submissions on renewable energy, particularly on solar. Comments are my way of clarifying and updating industry facts and rapid changes in an industry for now on WUWT in lieu of submitting my own stories on solar energy. I’m held back for now with the problem of how to explain my points without access to some key proprietary data.
Bob,
Do you have a reference for the Hockey Schtick computations here or elsewhere?
Sad to hear Clive Best is getting assaulted.
Sorry , have no time , but follow the links at the top of http://CoSy.com front page .
His main finding is a temperature gradient due to gravity alone. There seems to be some question about the theoretical value of 0.04 K/m. I calculated 0.0025 K/m and Graeff multiplies that by 18 degrees of freedom. Hmmm. Why?
Extrapolating to the deep ocean probably violates assumptions used in deriving the theoretical gradient equation from the hydrostatic equation. Plus if the sign is negative, the deep ocean should have boiled away by now!
The answer is not to suppress or censor comments, but to try and understand both what’s right and what’s wrong instead of focusing only on what’s wrong which intrinsically deprecates anything that might be correct, which only serves to infuriate the commenter.
For example, the flaw in Cotton’s argument is that while gravity establishes the lapse rate, the temperature profile of the atmosphere is a function of both the temperature of the energy source heating it (the surface) and the lapse rate. The Sun heats the surface whose temperature is clearly affected by the GHG effect and the surface heats the atmosphere. Solar energy absorbed by clouds is thermally connected to the surface via the hydrological cycle and can be equivalently considered to heat the surface.
Venus is different, where the 100% cloud coverage, not the surface, is in direct equilibrium with the Sun are these clouds are not thermodynamically coupled to the surface (bismuth/tin rain not withstanding). In this case, the temperature profile becomes a function of the equilibrium cloud temperature and the PVT profile of its dense CO2 atmosphere, in effect, a reverse lapse rate, which makes the temperature profile of the Venusian atmosphere far more dependent on gravity than it is on the GHG effect (except as GHG’s establish cloud temperatures). The surface temperature is what it is because the surface is heated by the atmosphere, rather than by the Sun which is also true of the Earth’s solid surface beneath its oceans whose temperature is similarly diurnally and seasonally constant and dependent on the gravitational separation of water by its temperature. The temperature profile of a gas giant is universally considered to be far more dependent on gravity than any other factor and the Venusian atmosphere is far closer to that of a gas giant than it is to that of the Earth.
Few on either side understand control theory well enough to apply it to the climate system. Otherwise, it would be obvious that runaway GHG feedback is a physical impossibility as is the impossibly large positive feedback required to support the absurdly high sensitivity claimed by the IPCC. Blindly accepting that the Venusian surface temperature is the result of runaway GHG feedback and not runaway clouds is a large part of the problem as it masks the underlying flaws in the feedback modelling which literally must create energy out of thin air in violation of COE. A complete rejection of Cotton’s argument precludes runaway clouds heating the atmosphere from above and an atmosphere, rather than the Sun, heating the surface, which infers that the only reasonable explanation for Venus is otherwise impossible runaway GHG feedback whose presumed possibility is counter productive towards arriving at an accurate quantification of climate system feedback and how it affects the sensitivity.