experiments performed July 10th 2024
by Dale Cloudman
Abstract
It is experimentally shown that the thermal radiation from a transparent, colder solid has the capacity to influence a solid warmer than it to become even warmer, under the right circumstances. This dispels the critique of the greenhouse effect that, as heat only flows from hot to cold, the effect is thermodynamically impossible. Even so, significant portions of the theory of the greenhouse effect remain experimentally unproven, signaling caution rather than uncritical acceptance of the theory.
Introduction
A long-running debate about the physical reality of the greenhouse effect centers around whether the thermal radiation from the colder atmosphere can possibly have a warming effect on the warmer Earth’s surface. The argument goes as follows: as heat only flows from hot to cold, the radiation emitted by a colder object cannot possibly cause a warmer object to become warmer. It might have a reduced cooling effect, but under no circumstances can it result in a warming effect.
The most salient features of such debates are that neither side provides experimental evidence in their defense, and that the debates frequently devolve into heated arguments, which is generally an indicator that solid arguments are lacking. As genuine scientific knowledge is acquired via experimentation performed in physical reality, and not theory or “experiments” (sic!) consisting of computer simulations, I sought to settle the debate once and for all with a properly-performed experiment.
I constructed a de Saussure-style hotbox, above which I placed a clear glass plate separated by a good amount of space. I pointed it towards the Sun, and, left to its own devices, the bottom of the box got to around 100ºC, with the glass plate getting to around 30ºC. I then swapped the glass plate with an identical one that was pre-heated to 60-70ºC, and the result was unmistakable: the already much hotter bottom of the box got even hotter as a result. I ruled out any possible conductive or convective effects, concluding it was due to increased thermal radiation coming from the +30-40ºC warmer glass plate. Although this neatly dispels this particular critique of the greenhouse effect, significant obstacles remain before being able to accept that the greenhouse effect behaves as-described.
The Demonstration
The apparatus (Figure 1, Figure 2) consists of a hotbox made of styrofoam, with the inside floor being cardboard and the inside walls and floors spray-painted black. Two layers of thin plastic polyethylene film suppress convection with the outside air. Surrounding these is another piece of styrofoam to further prevent heat loss through the sides. Cotton padding between the styrofoam pieces provides further insulation.
On top of the hotbox are two styrofoam walls that support an extra-clear glass plate on top. This is the glass that is swapped with an identical, hotter version during the experiment. A middle mount point allows the optional mounting of another plate in the middle.
Temperatures are measured with Type K thermocouples, labeled and color-coded for ease of reference. Styrofoam pieces immediately above yet not touching them serve as radiation shields. The solar insolation is measured with an Apogee SP-510-SS pyranometer, and the net infrared gain or loss is measured with an Apogee SL-510-SS pyrgeometer.
I pointed the apparatus at the sun and let it heat up on its own. In the meantime, I set aside an identical extra-clear glass plate, on top of which I placed an aluminum plate with a pot of water on top. An immersion heater kept the water temperature at a constant 80-90ºC, which heat diffused downwards to heat the glass plate.
Once the bottom plate exceeded 100ºC, I swapped the cool glass with the hot glass, first by hovering the hot glass above it, then removing the cool glass and placing the hot glass in the same position. This swapping technique provides a dip in measured solar insolation due to both glasses absorbing the sunlight rather than just one. This clearly delineates the swaps, and ensures there is no extra heating effect due to slightly higher insolation that would happen if we first removed one glass and then replaced it with the other glass.
I performed five swaps as above, with Tcoolglass measuring 30-38ºC and Thotglass measuring between 67-75ºC at the start of the swaps. The result was clear and unambiguous in every case: Tbottom shot up rapidly in response. The following two runs are representative (Figure 3):
As is evident, before the first swap on the graph, Tbottom was increasing at a certain steady pace. After the swap to the hot glass (delineated by the purple vertical line), the rate of increase rapidly shot up. Once swapped back to the cool glass (delineated by the gray vertical line), Tbottom stabilized around 108ºC. It remained there for ~5 minutes, after which another swap caused it to increase rapidly again.
It is notable that at the exact moment of the swaps, the net infrared radiation Net IR picked up by the pyrgeometer remains negative yet increases. That is, the bottom’s radiative cooling is measurably lessened as a result of this swap.
To rule out differences between the two glass plates, such as the possibility of slightly more solar insolation which could cause a temperature change, I did two swaps with both glass plates at around the same temperature. With these swaps, no difference was observed in the evolution of Tbottom or in the Net IR.
Confirming the Radiative Nature of the Effect
It is important to rule out any convective effects as having caused the increase. The hotter glass will, of course, heat the air around it as well. How do we know that Tbottom didn’t get hotter because the hotter glass heated the air in-between, which then heated the thin plastic films, which then reduced the convective loss of the bottom and caused its temperature to increase?
The evidence is three-fold. First, we can observe that Tlowair did not noticeably increase as a result of the swap. Indeed, it was warmer before the swap than after (Figure 4):
Second, by including Tthin1 and Tthin2 in the graph, we can see that Tbottom increased first, and only nearly half a minute later did Tthin1 start to increase, soon after which Tthin2 increased as well (Figure 5). Thus the temperature increase started from bottom to top, not from top to bottom, meaning the observed increase could not be due to the air being heated from the top.
Third, I repeated the experiments, but with a thin borosilicate plate mounted in the middle of the apparatus (Figure 6). Borosilicate is highly absorbent of infrared radiation. If the effect is radiative, we would expect the borosilicate to absorb any extra thermal radiation from the hotter glass, preventing Tbottom from increasing. This is precisely what happened. During these runs, the Net IR did not change when the hotter glass was swapped in, nor did Tbottom respond to the swaps.
Thus we have to conclude that the increased thermal radiation from the hotter glass is what caused the bottom to increase in temperature, even though the hotter glass itself was much cooler than the bottom.
Analysis
How does this not violate the laws of thermodynamics, wherein heat only flows from hot to cold? The answer is that one must consider all the heat flows in the system. When Tbottom is at a steady temperature around 108ºC, it is because the amount of heat it is gaining from all sources is equal to the amount of heat it is losing to all sinks. At that temperature, the only heat it is gaining is from the sunlight, which is actually the thermal radiation emanating from our nearby star with its surface temperature of 5900K. It is at the same time losing heat conductively with the bottom of the hotbox and the walls, convectively with the air in the box, and radiatively with the plastic wrap layers, the glass, and the sky above. The hotbox itself is also losing heat convectively with the outside air.
When the hotter glass is swapped in, effectively the only change is that now the bottom is losing less heat radiatively to the glass. With all else being equal, it is thus now gaining more heat from the sunlight than it is losing to all other sources, and the result is an increase in temperature. Notably, without the much hotter sun as a heat source, the increase in temperature would not be observed; only a reduced cooling effect would occur.
Conclusion
There are several key differences between the experiment performed here and the theorized radiative greenhouse effect, such that this experiment does not serve as verification of the latter.
- The hotbox is heavily insulated and enclosed to suppress convective heat loss. By contrast, the majority of the heat loss by the Earth’s surface is due to convective loss to the air.
- The temperature ranges are different, with the Earth’s surface being around 15ºC and the air ranging from 15ºC to -55ºC with increasing altitude, contrasted with 100ºC for the black bottom and 30-70ºC for the glass.
- The colder object is a solid plate of glass as opposed to a column of atmospheric air, i.e. a large volume of gas.
- The warmer object is a uniform pitch-black plate, as distinct from the Earth’s surface with its varied terrain, soil, plant, foliage, ice, snow, water, etc.
- The greenhouse effect is due to the air becoming more absorbent of and emissive of thermal radiation at the same temperature, while the experimental result was due to the colder object retaining the same emissive properties yet becoming hotter.
- The observed time duration was minimal and no conclusions can be drawn about the total magnitude of the effect or what effects it may have in the long run.
Indeed, the greenhouse effect theory has a large gap when it comes to the empirical demonstration of the greenhouse effect’s total effect on surface temperatures. It largely relies on a simplified calculation that shows the Earth’s average temperature would be -18ºC without any atmosphere. This calculation even includes the albedo effect of clouds, which would not be present without an atmosphere. Further it ignores all the distinctions listed above, and doesn’t account for the adiabatic lapse rate, which is the main reason why the bottom of the grand canyon is +50ºC warmer on average than the peak of Mount Everest. Such a lapse rate occurs entirely due to non-radiative effects, and therefore would have some effect even if the air were fully transparent to infrared radiation. - The observed temperature increase here was due to swapping in a hotter glass plate that was externally heated by another heat source (i.e. neither the sun nor the black bottom). This is in contrast with the greenhouse effect, where the atmosphere’s thermal radiation that is theorized to result in a much warmer surface temperature, is initially warmed by the surface itself. This gives the appearance that it presents a situation where an object is able to heat itself up with its own heat – first the atmosphere at the same temperature emits thermal radiation according to its own temperature, which then results in a warmer surface, that then in turn heats the atmosphere further, etc., in a (diminishing) feedback loop.
Although the experiment performed here indicates that the presence of the sun ought to make this possible, and Infrared Halogens appear to exploit an analogous mechanism to reduce energy consumption, an experiment should be done to confirm this is the case. It is notable that past experiments have failed to definitively show a powerful effect: R W Wood’s 1909 experiment showed “scarcely a difference of one degree” between two hotboxes, one with a radiatively-absorbent glass lid and one with a radiatively-transparent rock salt lid, where we would expect the radiatively-absorbent lid to result in a much hotter temperature due its higher radiative emissions as well. More recently, a re-do of Wood’s experiment “performed more carefully” by Pratt actually replicated the result, despite being heavily critical of Wood: a difference of 1.1ºC between the floor of a hotbox with a glass lid vs one with a rock salt lid. Pratt further showed that the glass lid was actually 6.2ºC hotter than the rock salt lid. This further complicates the analysis as convective heat transfer is proportional to temperature difference and indicates the +1.1ºC result is at least in part due to reduction of convective heat loss. - Finally, even if the basic greenhouse effect were to be conclusively demonstrated, it is well-known that the current levels of CO2 are already saturated with regards to higher concentrations causing higher thermal emissions. The enhanced greenhouse effect is said to occur due to the much colder higher-altitude layers of the atmosphere absorbing and emitting more thermal radiation, thus having a cascading effect on the air immediately below it, which in turn has an effect on the air below, and so on up to the surface. In other words, the hotter absorbing element in the enhanced greenhouse effect is also atmospheric air, and not a solid object. This provides further complications as atmospheric air can freely travel vertically up and down, and hot air tends to expand and rise.
In conclusion, although the thermodynamic possibility of colder objects causing warmer objects to increase in temperature has finally been conclusively demonstrated, a lack of experimental verification of other facets of the greenhouse effect theory warrants caution before accepting its conclusions.
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A long-running debate about the physical reality of the greenhouse effect centers around whether the thermal radiation from the colder atmosphere can possibly have a warming effect on the warmer Earth’s surface.
2 thank you for this, however, people still dont get thats its impossible to prove things or disprove things experimentally.
“theres [sic] no debate.”
You mean the fact that you can’t average intensive properties like temperature and color?
As usual, Mr. Mosher never responds to his drive-by comments.
Exactly! My parka in winter is definitely colder than my body temperature, but it definitely keeps me warm and wouldn’t want to leave home without it, in spite of all the armchair physists saying it’s impossible for a colder object to heat a warmer one!
(Not to Mosher) Leave heat transfer physics to the experts, or at least try to use some common sense!
“Greenhouse effect” is a thing, and the debate should be how tiny our effect is on it and the climate.
Your parka transfers energy from the cold environment to your body?
No. Your parka changes the thermal resistance between your body and the exterior environment. Inside the parka warms due to energy produced by your metabolism until thermal equilibrium is achieved.
The presence of IR-absorbent gases in the atmosphere changes (increases) the thermal resistance between the earth’s surface and the exterior environment. Inside the atmosphere warms due to energy produced by absorption of solar radiation until thermal equilibrium is achieved.
Same thing.
CO2 does not change the thermal resistance.
Atmospheric energy transfer is controlled by the gas laws.. CO2 has ZERO effect.
bnice,
You don’t think that a gas that absorbs radiation instead of allowing it to pass through doesn’t reduce the heat transfer (i.e. increase the resistance)? Seriously?
IR is not thermal energy.
We are talking IR, right? We need to see things in context so have to consider other molecules and their vibrational modes. Coupled w that we are also looking at frequency bands.Plus, we are talking about thermal heat.
What most physicists will say looking at the mechanism of the molecule interaction at a basic level close to the surface is that, due to both the proportionality of H2o to Co2 (15 to 1) and the vibrational modes (3 to 1) we cannot conclude that Co2 has any significant influence on the atmosphere close to the surface. That comes first. Coupled with that is the way H2o acts in various forms in the troposphere both in heating and cooling. Now, we already know that Co2 cannot provide heat at a basic level when H2o is the driving factor. It certainly cannot FORCE anything. So, we then have to look at what Co2 can do at higher altitudes where water vapour influence is no longer a factor. Leaving aside the whole argument of whether a cold object can transfer heat to a hot one you first have to look at a more basic level namely temperature and altitude. The colder the temperature the less interaction of molecules. Remembering that Co2 is a trace gas it seems to me rather a jump to assume any significant back radiation in regards to heat and forcing the system to change. Even if you consider transmission photon energy in all directions in regards to Co2 you cannot lose sight of the low numbers of those molecules. Plus, if it is supposed to get to the surface it again has to deal w H2o on the way down. To use a visual mechanism: this Co2 mouse at ground level has to struggle w the elephant H2o who gives it no chance to move. Then the mouse travels up through the troposphere so much so that the elephant is left behind. But its getting cold and he cant do jack shit. So he decides to go back down again to force the elephant to give up being…an elephant.
Alright, maybe ive painted a simplistic model here. Could somebody please correct me?🙂
Per Wijngaarden and Happer (and many others), the doubling of CO2 will have only a minor impact on the transmittance of heat from the Earth’s surface to space. However, La Chatelier’s Principal, and the obvious fact that ‘we’re’ all still here after much larger changes in CO2 concentration during the Phanerozoic, suggest that the effect of human CO2 emissions on climate probably can’t be distinguished from ongoing natural climate variability.
The Wijngaarden and Happer analysis completely accepts the idea that the presence of IR-absorbing (“greenhouse” ) gases in the atmosphere reduce the radiative heat transfer to space, resulting in higher surface temperatures.
They just don’t think that the kind of changes we can introduce will increase this resistance by very much. And they get a slightly smaller estimate than the “establishment” calculations.
Yeah. If I recall H&W estimate 3 W.m-2 for 2xCO2. This compares to Myhre et al. 1998’s estimate of 3.7 W.m-2 or the RRTM of 4 W.m-2.
What I find most interesting with the H&W argument is their use of the world “saturated”. People have taken that to mean the effect is 0 W.m-2 (eg. here). Yet their “saturated” effect isn’t that different from the “establishment”.
“resulting in higher surface temperatures.”
Be specific! What higher surface temps are you talking about? Daytime temps? Max temps? Nighttime temps? Nighttime minimums?
You are welcome to produce empirical scientific evidence that atmospheric CO2 causes warming
Or you could fail just like everyone else.
bnice,
The earth’s surface is hot enough to output about 500 W/m2 of power, averaged over area, EMPIRICALLY measured. The earth and its atmosphere absorb about 240 W/m2 of power from the sun, averaged over area, EMPIRICALLY measured.
Yet not even the worst alarmist thinks that the earth is more than 1 or 2 W/m2 out of balance, again averaged over area. So the 1st Law of Thermodynamics says we have a gap of 250+ W/m2 to close.
The downwelling IR radiation from IR-active gases (i.e. “greenhouse gases”), including H2O and CO2, EMPIRICALLY measured, closes this gap.
No other explanation can even come close. You are welcome to produce empirical scientific evidence of another cause.
You have not produced ANY empirical measurement of warming by atmospheric CO2.
Want to try again. ?
I said, “The downwelling IR radiation from IR-active gases (i.e. “greenhouse gases”), including H2O and CO2, EMPIRICALLY measured, closes this gap.”
In particular, the downwelling radiation in the 14-16um band, EMPIRICALLY measured (by warming the sensor at the surface), which can only come from atmospheric CO2, produces warming.
Except you seem clueless how surface sensors measure.
But I’m sure you can ignore your ignorance.
Your posts produce no evidence of an IQ over 100
Your posts barely reach double figure IQ.
“500 W/m2 of power, averaged over area, “
Except you can’t to that because 70% of the surface is water.
240 W/m2 of power from the sun, averaged over area”
Except you can’t averaged over area, because the angle of incidence changes.
Not a good start.
“Except you can’t to that because 70% of the surface is water.”
The water is the easy part, because of its uniform radiative properties (gray body with 97% emissivity).
“Except you can’t averaged over area, because the angle of incidence changes.”
The 240 W/m2 figure takes into account the angle of incidence changes. Some places have more than average (high angle of incidence), some have less than average (low angle of incidence, night). These average out — funny thing about averages!
How did you do the average? Since the angle of incidence is a sine/cosine you can’t just assume everything cancels and averages out.
Integrate over the hemispheric surface (you can integrate sinusoidal functions), and divide by the hemispheric area. Then divide by two to include the night-time hemisphere. Very straightforward.
There’s also a much easier shortcut…
What do you think you will get from that integration?
Is all radiation straight up?
Wrong. Below the surface, water or land, is a very large heat sink. It warms during the day and cools during the night.
Black body calculations are strictly based on energy equilibrium at the surface. Rarely are they used correctly.
Whatever is calculated as black body emissions must account for energy flowing from the surface to colder mass below the surface plus conduction/convection/advection/evaporation, etc.
The other thing is energy is not W/m^2. Energy is in joules.
Empirically? A collection of locations does not define the planet.
Your alleged violation of the 1st Law of Thermodynamics says we have to account for whatever gaps there are, not that our puny efforts to calculated something as dynamic and chaotic as the biosphere have proven anything.
Averaged over area. T^4 is fun. 25 km grids are fun. CERES is fun, especially given it’s measurements are bandwidth limited and measurement accuracy is 0.5% to 1% and the sensor, which is a few cm in size can measure a 25 km x 25 km surface area when the emissions are spherical?
SN4,
The types of issues you raise, such as finite sampling resolution, can lead to a few percent error in the resulting values. But these possible errors do not even come anywhere near to closing the 2-to-1 gap between solar input and earth surface output.
You object to my use of power flux density, in W/m2. If you integrate local power flux density over the area of the earth, you get total power flux, in W. Or, if you have already averaged the density values, you just multiply by the surface area of the earth (~5.15 x 10^14 m2) to get the total power flux. But the flux density is a very useful shorthand for discussing these matters, especially since the fundamental radiative equations produce values in W/m2.
If you want to talk about energy, not power, you simply integrate the power flux over time to get the resulting energy transfer over that time period. However, it is perfectly valid, and often more useful to talk about power, rather than energy.
Ed,
“The earth’s surface is hot enough to output about 500 W/m2 of power, averaged over area, EMPIRICALLY measured”
Where did you get that measurement from?
“The downwelling IR radiation from IR-active gases (i.e. “greenhouse gases”), including H2O and CO2, EMPIRICALLY measured,”
No it wasn’t.
Infra-red radiation is electro-magnetic energy.
Heat is the flow of thermal energy from a higher temperature to a lower temperature.
IR and heat are not the same. Just ask Eunice Foote.
Have you ever taken a heat transfer course? Or even cracked open a heat transfer textbook? It seems apparent that you have not!
In radiative heat transfer, electromagnetic radiation is the mechanism by which there is a “flow of thermal energy from a higher temperature to a lower temperature”.
And it is vital to realize that the EMR goes both from the higher temperature body to the lower temperature body, and from the lower temperature body to the higher temperature body. There is just a greater flow from higher to lower.
The difference in these EMR flows is what we call the “heat transfer”.
I suggest you spend some time studying a real heat transfer textbook. Here is a good free one online, used at MIT. Chapter 10 covers radiative heat transfer.
https://ahtt.mit.edu/
Engineers make some simplifying assumptions, Ed, and do not necessarily pay much attention to the correctness of the underlying theory. (They simply don’t care, and don’t need to.) There is no “energy flow” from a colder object to a warmer one, and hence no “heat transfer” in that direction either. You can invent fictional flows if it makes the math easier (it actually doesn’t), but don’t pretend that this is “real”. No one has ever measured it.
That’s just patently false. There absolutely is an energy flow from a colder object to a warmer object. This is easily proven with a noncontact IR thermometer pointing at something colder like the inside of a refrigerator.
It is real. The 1LOT is unequivocal in this regard. ΔU = Q – W or in a more contemporary and applicable form ΔE = Ein – Eout. It is a statement that the change in internal energy of a system is equal to the amount flowing in minus the amount flowing out; the law of conservation of energy.
CO2 is *NOT* a source. It is a reflective body.
If the earth sends out two photons and CO2 sends back one does the earth cool? Did the earth heat back to its original temp? Did it get hotter than when it started?
Scenario 1: Sun sends 2 photons, Earth sends out 2 photons and they escape to space.
Scenario 2: Sun sends 2 photons, Earth sends out 2 photons and CO2 sends one back.
Is the Earth warmer in Scenario 2 than Scenario 1?
“This is easily proven with a noncontact IR thermometer pointing at something colder like the inside of a refrigerator.”
WRONG. It get’s its reading by subtracting what is missing from a reference value.
Ignorance of how they function is not a good excuse..
FAIL !!
“There absolutely is an energy flow from a colder object to a warmer object.”
No there isn’t. The 2nd Law forbids it.
“This is easily proven with a noncontact IR thermometer pointing at something colder like the inside of a refrigerator”
Maybe you should study how IR thermometers work, because you clearly have no clue. They don’t violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, for starters.
Patently False. The 2LOT does NOT in any way forbid a cooler body from radiating energy toward a warmer body.
I know. I’ve been trying to explain that to contrarians for years.
BTW…what the 2LOT says is that heat (the net transfer of energy) moves from a warmer body to a cooler body when the system is evolving by its own means. It does not say that energy (the ability to do work) cannot flow from cooler to warmer.
BTW #2…the 2LOT does not even prohibit heat (the net transfer of energy) moving from a cooler body to a warmer body in all circumstances. It only prohibits this for systems acting spontaneously or evolving by their own means. This is the isolation clause of the 2LOT which is often ignored by contrarian bloggers.
“BTW #2…the 2LOT does not even prohibit heat (the net transfer of energy) moving from a cooler body to a warmer body in all circumstances. It only prohibits this for systems acting spontaneously or evolving by their own means. This is the isolation clause of the 2LOT which is often ignored by contrarian bloggers.”
You *have* to consider *all* bodies involved in a thermodynamic system.
You keep talking about a system where you have at least THREE bodies, a source, a receiver, and an energy source providing work. If you only consider the source and the receiver then it is *IS* a violation of the 2LOT to say that heat can move from a colder body to a warmer body. It is *not* a violation of the 2LOT if the third body is providing the work needed to move the heat from the cold source to the warm receiver.
STOP CHERRY PICKING! It’s what you do best no matter what you are discussing. You can’t just cherry pick two bodies out of a three body system and say that the 2LOT allows heat movement from cold to hot.
Playing games with the system boundaries is all he has.
N.B.: “contrarian” in this context is anyone who dares to contradict the nonsense that bgw posts.
And he still doesn’t understand heat flow.
“a cooler body from radiating energy toward a warmer body”
Correct. But that’s not what you said earlier. You said “an energy flow from a colder object to a warmer object”. That’s not the same thing as “radiating energy”, now, is it?
A very apt understatement.
In another thread, I just cited for you direct quotes from physicists Clausius and Planck acknowledging the reality of energy flows from cold to hot. Were they not “pay[ing] much attention to the correctness of the underlying theory”?
I see that, Ed, but they were using very old terminology that is more than 100 years out of date. The rest of the field has moved on since then. Are you planning to?
I see you object to the terminology and not the substance of those arguments. And since you object to using any quantum analysis, such as photons, in evaluating radiation, it seems that it is YOU whom must move on.
What exactly is the “substance” of Planck’s description of “heat rays”, Ed, in modern terms, given that physicists no longer use phrases like “heat ray”? (Or “caloric”, either, for that matter, in case you missed that memo too)
And no, you are not ready to think about photons until you have grasped the fundamentals of classical thermodynamics, which appears to be a long way to go for you yet. You will know you are there when you can explain why a phrase like “net heat” is nonsensical, or at least, precisely identical to plain old “heat”, and therefore overly verbose and redundant. What do you think “heat” means (in modern terms, such as the ones in common use as of at least the second half of the last century), Ed?
Still desperate to keep quantum physics out of the discussion! It’s plainly obvious why — if you go down to the molecular level to consider how we know that thermal radiation is generated, it absolutely demolishes your arguments.
The now well understood mechanism by which a molecule emits a photon as a function of its temperature, even if that photon is emitted towards a hotter object. That photon carries energy in the direction of its motion, and it does this even if this direction is opposite to a flux of photons with a higher power flux.
So, if you understand what is going on at the molecular level, there truly are multi-directional radiative power fluxes. What we call “heat transfer” (a process, remember, not a physical entity) is the NET of these fluxes.
Now, each of these photons creates an EM field, and it is possible to compute a resulting overall EM field, and from this (net) field, you can compute your precious Poynting vector. But this is just a different way of computing a net value.
Why are you stuck in the 19th Century? Can’t you at least enter the 20th Century?
Too general an approach and you HAVE to include proportionality. You need to be specific and quantify your downwelling energy and couple it to heat transfer. And NEVER forget that Co2 is a trace gas. People often amplify the hell out of this molecule and give it magic properties.
Like getting into a cold bed and snuggling under the covers, it’s only the capture & containment of your own exuded body heat that makes you warm.
The opposite effect happens when you wake up too hot under the covers, and you shuck them off – your exuded body heat escapes into the larger airspace of the surrounding room, and you cool down.
And if one blanket isn’t enough, you pile on another.
The problem with all the blanket analogies is that they refer to suppressing convection, by physically preventing hot air from escaping. The mechanism demonstrated here with thermal radiation is very different.
In other words, it is an analogy that only works if you already agree with its conclusion. The mechanism is different enough that it warrants its own demonstration.
I agree. I’ve had many (not all) people over the years eventually concede that the “blanketing” effect can indeed cause a warm body to warm further, but then reject the idea that it would do so if radiation were the mechanism in play instead. Your experiment is yet another that demonstrates that the principals of thermodynamics work the same regardless of whether the mechanism is convection, conduction, or radiation so in that regard it is different and useful.
WRONG..
There is no blanket that COOLS the person when the surface gets too warm.
The blanket analogy is for mindless children.
The experiment shows the reduction in net radiative flux due to a change in the temperature of one plate… nothing more..
And it is not analogous to Earth’s atmosphere.
Also, the hotter plate injects energy into the enclosure, adding to the energy input.
Is there actually a single blanket analogy that has anything to do with convection? An insulator in close contact with a heat source, or more or less enclosing a heat source, prevents the energy from getting beyond the insulator (to the extent of its insulation ability). It is only after the energy get beyond the insulator that it is possible for convection to come into operation.
That is to say, the transfer of heat from the source to the insulator can only be occurring through conduction or radiation unless possibly there is a large air space between the heat source and the insulator where convection is possible. Then transfer from the insulator to the outside air can only be occurring through conduction or radiation. Convection can only enter the picture once the air has the energy. Some energy, perhaps most, may leave the insulator purely through radiation.
Conduction and convection are often used interchangeably when talking about gasses, and sometimes liquids.
When boiling water on your stove, the swirling is called convection current.
From way back, conduction is the flow of thermal energy through homogeneous matter. Convection is the flow of thermal energy across the interface between two different kinds of matter.
In science exact definitions are critical. In the days before physics, understanding of gasses and electromagnetics, etc., the expressions were “sensible heat” and “heat radiation.” We know better now. IR and all other frequencies of the electro-magnetic spectrum are not heat or thermal energy.
Define thermal radiation as you are using it.
If you stay outside long enough you will find that you will still get cold. The parka is not a heat source. That’s why fire is so important as a heat source. I’ve been out camping with a tent and a sleeping bag in sub-zero (F) temps. No matter how much clothing you put on when you get in that tent and in your sleeping bag, by morning you *will* be cold and ready to get out of the tent and stoke the fire.
I disagree.
I have camped in winter in total wilderness, sleeping in tents on snow, including in the mountains. It is comfortably warm at night inside the tent. One does not get cold inside sleeping bag.
It has no bearing on this the relative quality of the camping gear?
OMG. You’ve never been out with Boy Scouts in sub-freezing weather where they have the same sleeping bag they use on summer campouts.
A mosh drive-by, how quaint.
Ha ha!
He lingered a bit though. With periods and big letterz.
a traditional mosh drive-by would be:
wrong
wrong wrong rong
wrong wrong!
(squealing tires)
Au contraire, the way science works is that falsifiable predictions are made, which experiments can then disprove. If a theory is not falsifiable, it is not scientific (see: Karl Popper).
In this experiment, I definitively falsify the theory that a colder object’s thermal radiation cannot possibly have a warming effect on an object warmer than it. Prior to this I have only seen theoretical arguments, which, although compelling, can never amount to actual, factual proof.
What you seem to have done is create a perpetual motion machine. If your experiment and conclusions are correct the universe will never suffer a heat death, entropy will never go to zero, and in fact, the universe will end in a blooming fire as colder bodies drive hotter bodies to ever higher temps.
“The evidence is three-fold. First, we can observe that Tlowair did not noticeably increase as a result of the swap.”
Think about this one for a minute. How did you stabilize the air inside the experiment when you removed the top glass in order to substitute the other piece of glass?
Why didn’t you just put the hot glass on top of the piece already there? If the only impact was “radiative” then it would have worked exactly the same.
I haven’t had a chance to examine your experiment in detail. I suspect there are any number of problems with it.
“I suspect there are any number of problems with it.”
I suspect you are right. You say “Why didn’t you just put the hot glass on top of the piece already there?” Precisely.
Most people do not understand why RW Wood did exactly that (although he left his glass to be warmed by the sun), to eliminate one likely source of error and criticism for being a sloppy experimenter.
None of Dale Cloudman’s somewhat amateurish attempts to break known physical laws seem persuasive. He is obviously enthusiastic, but possibly naive.
Tim, perhaps you don’t understand the experiment yet. The stabilized air is under two layers of clear plastic in the lower box. it is not opened and the air inside is undisturbed by external convection. Only the glass plate held well above the lower box has air that can freely convect around it. Placing the hot glass on top of the cool glass would be an interesting addition to the experimental design. We could then test your hypothesis. However, the point of this experiment was to test a clear pane of glass that was emitting more IR since it was hotter. Placing it on top of the other pane of glass now allows conduction and convection between the two. This complicates the experiment. This is actually a pretty well-designed experiment.
Just totally irrelevant to the atmosphere.
Thanks for the feedback!
The obvious problem with putting the hot glass on top of the colder one is two-fold:
1 – glass absorbs IR so the colder glass will absorb the hotter glass’s IR and there will be no effect (as shown with the borosilicate control)
2 – glass absorbs some amount of sunlight, so there will be less sunlight reaching the black bottom. This adds an obvious confounding factor. The more controlled version is as it was performed, swapping the glass so the solar input is the same.
Your problem is that you are trying to add a second heat source instead of a reflective one. Two heat sources *will* cause the temp to go up, just as the earth’s temperature would go up if you could put a second sun in the sky.
CO2 is a *reflective* substance, not a heat source.
IR is not heat.
I understand the experiment quite well, thank you. This experiment does *NOT* model the biosphere at all.
The second glass pane represents an additional heat source, just like putting a second sun in the sky. Put two suns in the sky and the earth’s temperature will go up.
To properly model the biosphere what would be needed is a “one-way mirror” that lets sunlight through in one direction but reflects EM waves in the other direction – just like CO2 is supposed to do. CO2 is a “reflective” body and not a heat source.
As a reflective body CO2 can’t “warm” the earth. It can only impede radiation from leaving. If the earth sends forth two photons of energy then at best CO2 will only return one (the other one being radiated out of the container). Two out, one back –> cooling.
The issue here is what would you use for a “one-way mirror” for IR? It would have to be an imperfect mirror which would let a certain percentage pass while reflecting a percentage.
The author is a dingbat and proved nothing
Does heat move from cooler objects to warmer objects?
Heat Transfer: The movement of heat from a warmer object to a colder one – when two substances at different temperatures are mixed together, heat flows from the warmer body to the cooler body until they reach the same temperature (Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics – Thermal Equilibrium).
Temperature can be thought of as the average kinetic energy of the molecules in a volume. Heating is the transfer of this energy by conduction, convection, or radiation. Electromagnetic radiation is one type of energy transfer process. All things above absolute zero emit electromagnetic radiation called blackbody radiation.
Heat is just the name of energy being transferred in thermodynamics. It can take the form of kinetic energy transfer between atoms (conduction), actual movement of collections of atoms with different kinetic energies (convection), or emission of electromagnetic waves (radiation).
Heating is a process, synonymous with energy transfer driven by a temperature difference. EM radiation is one such type of energy transfer, along with conduction, convection, and latent heat, for instance.
Electromagnetic radiation is a form of energy transfer, which can transfer heat energy from one object into another. Net heat energy always flows from the warmer object to the cooler object.
Yes, the experiment confirmed that this is the case, and yet a colder object can in conjunction with an external heat source (ie the sun) result in a warmer object becoming warmer. No laws of physics violated.
It is critical that the segregation between thermal energy and electromagnetic energy was no made in the experiment.
You added a second sun. CO2 is not a heat source like a second sun. It is a reflective body.
In essence you added a second burner into your oven.
Just a clarification. electromagnetic waves (radiation) are not heat. Energy yes. There is a conversion process from thermal energy to EM energy. yes.
The elephant in the room is if and how all of these discussions are affected by systems being open or closed. The Second Law, for example, is formulated for a closed system. The only true closed system is the Universe itself.
You have not analyzed the experiment.
“there are a few wrong people making noises on the internet”
Look in the mirror, Mosh. That is you… every time.
Have I got that right? I’d hate to get in a nonexistent useless debate with you over it.
Lol
Wow, occasional capitalization, even some punctuation. Of course, still unfamiliar with the apostrophe. Dazzled by his prose, imagine how valuable are his scientific opinions.
Steven – “thank you for this, however, people still dont get thats its impossible to prove things or disprove things experimentally.”
Einstein – “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experimentcan prove me wrong.”
Richard Feynman – “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
Sorry, I choose Einstein and Feynman rather than Mosher.
The “debate” was created by folks who have not grasped the fact that anything warmer than absolute zero will radiate along with not understanding the difference between total radiative flux between two objects of different temperature and net radiative flux between the two objects.
The flip side of the “debate” are people who don’t understand that in the troposphere the effects of CO2 are saturated and the warming from increased CO2 comes more from an increase in the altitude of the effective radiative surface.
Then you have to quantify in exact terms how this warming occurs in regards to Co2 and altitude, not just present a general concept.
To add, what do you call a ‘radiative surface’? Be precise please. Id rather see ‘vibrational modes’ because ‘surface’ implies volume. And Co2 has only one mode namely the bending one ( as opposed to H2o w 3)..
I see what you did there…
A greenhouse has a roof. The Earth doesn’t. Yet climate scientists act as if it does indeed have a glass ceiling.
The Milky Way doesn’t get a look in
This seems to be the biggest hole to me, currently, plus the fact that the absorption at ground level is already saturated. The only way more CO2 can have a warming effect is if the air far up in the troposphere becomes warmer due to the air even further above it absorbing more CO2, and this warming effect cascades down towards the ground. But with air being able to freely convect up and down, much unlike a solid, fixed roof, plus all the other atmospheric phenomena, this seems very questionable.
It boils down to essentially the only evidence provided being computer models, but the models are programmed to give the desired output. It is mathematically impossible for them to actually simulate the atmosphere with enough accuracy, as it is a non-linear chaotic system, which can be described with for example the Navier-Stokes equations, which do not have exact-form solutions. Being chaotic, no amount of fine-grained simulation is sufficient to yield a correct output. In other words, there’s tremendous amount of fudging going on.
This is one of those arguments that is easy to understand when you have all the facts. The statement as given is in fact true. The problem is this is not a complete picture.
What you are unknowingly assuming is the radiation flux is staying constant. This is assumed because the Earth is getting a fixed amount of energy from the sun. However, all that energy is absorbed within a few meters of the surface. That is not the radiation flux.
So what is the radiation flux? As far as CO2 is concerned it is radiation near the 15µm bands. When you increase CO2 you increase the radiation flux in these bands. This is due to Kirchhoff’s Law. Hence, upward radiation flux increases.
This means there are two effects. More radiation and more absorption. They balance out and net flow remains the same. The claims that the enhanced greenhouse effect produces warming is pseudo-science. It leaves out half of the story.
Only if CO2 saturation is not a factor. If CO2 has reached the point where all radiation has been collected by the current concentration, then more CO2 will have little effect
This has little to do with saturation. It is discussing the effect within the atmosphere of increases in CO2. In the atmosphere CO2 is constantly being energized by other molecules through collisions.
This is one big mistake climate science is making. They treat the energy absorbed by CO2 separately. Once energy becomes part of the atmosphere there is no distinction for how it got there. It gets moved around freely between all the molecules.
This means that the energy radiated to space anywhere in the atmosphere by CO2 could have entered the atmosphere from conduction, water vapor condensation, absorption by water vapor, etc. That’s why CO2 saturation is irrelevant at this point.
Of course it will – because the level at which most energy is leaving to space will rise as CO2 concentration does, and therefore emit less efficiently at a lower temperature per SB.
Nope, cannot happen. The process pushed by climate pseudo-science violates Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation.
Definition of Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation:
“Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824–1887) stated in 1860 that “at thermal equilibrium, the power radiated by an object must be equal to the power absorbed.” This leads to the observation that if an object absorbs 100 percent of the radiation incident upon it, it must reradiate 100 percent.
The atmosphere has a lapse rate such that upwelling IR has come from a warmer GHG below.
(radiative) thermal equilibrium is never obtained in the atmosphere as upwelling IR always (very nearly) comes from a warmer layer.
The effective emission layer is simply that layer where most emission heads for space, and is still not in thermal equilibrium.
If KLT did apply then the 2 LoT would not and we know that is not the case.
From space the Earth’s temperature is measured as 255K
and not 288K.
255k being the thermal energy of absorbed solar radiation.
NOT in thermal equilibrium.
There is no such layer. Emissions head to space from every part of the atmosphere.
Have you ever been on a mountain? Gets pretty cold. In fact, we know it gets colder as you rise through the troposphere. So, where did all the energy go that is radiating upward? Why aren’t the higher layers warmer?
Easy answer …. it was radiated to space.
While every layer is never in exact equilibrium, they are always trying. And, when you average it out over time they come pretty close. That means you can’t have those layers absorbing more energy than they are radiating. And that is exactly what you are claiming.
“if it does indeed have a glass ceiling.”
What has gender got to do with it ? 😉
Not gender, sex.
Gender is a social classification system repurposed from language, such as Latin.
Is this a wind up? This starts off with an obviously false presumption at the most basic level of Earth’s energy balance in space, and the measured science anyone who studies the subject knows.
The idea that the greenhouse effect warms the atmosphere which warms the surface and causes global warming has been said by no serious scientist, ever. Nobody who studies the subject seriously thinks that, because it isn’t what we measure to happen and the physics doesn’t work that way.
So the whole exercise is based on a fraudulent presumption. As anybody with a basic familiarity with the MODTRAN spectrum and the science of radiative cooling knows, the greenhouse effect reduces the amount of radiation lost to space at the greenhouse gas frequencies. The consequence of more greenhouse gas is that the resulting excess energy imbalance in the atmospheric system causes the surface to warm to increase the overall radiative loss to space, at all frequencies, and hence rebalance the energy in and out at a new higher surface temperature.
Asn Will Happer recently explained, again.
No sentient person of any scientific competence suggests the greenhouse effect heats the atmosphere. I suggest the moderator reads and understands the basics of the greenhouse effect on the Earth’s energy balance and explains to the person involved before publishing such embarrassing nonsense. If interested in real science, there is a good online course on this by David Archer at University of Chicago.
PS While the atmosphere absorbs roughly 1/3 of the total solar insolation aborbed by the surface and atmosphere, 77W/m^2 per NASA , that is higher within the atmospheric layer, so colder, and not heating the ocean. EMR energy absorbed from the Sun leaving the surface as LWIR must end up in space, by whatever transport and route, because the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics applis, Sun does not stop delivering energy and the same amount must leave Earth as arrives to maintain the radiative energy balance in space that is the true control of earth’s climate.
Overall the atmosphere’s significant effect on the thermal energy flux from the oceans to space is to increase it by the effect of the higher surface temperature arising from the ideal gas lapse rate and reduce it by the increased resistance created by the scattering of the greenhouse effect.
The atmosphere is not warmed by the greenhouse effect.
It is primarily a transport medium for LWIR heat energy passing from the warm oceans to the absolute cold of space, the most by evaporation that becomes radiation in the Tropopause as the vapour condenses, and increases in effect at 7% per deg K. 6W/m^2 K of negative feedback.
Good effort on craft though. NO connection to science. A future as a stand in for Bill Nye? BRLC
The main greenhouse gas is water, and CO2 is a trace greenhouse gas. During the day, water
and CO2 absorb incoming IR light from the sun. This results in warming of the air. After sunlight
is absorbed by the surface, it is converted to heat, a portion of which radiates up into the air as IR light. Water and CO2 absorb some of this IR light emanating from the surface. This absorption of the IR light and the heating of the air is the classical greenhouse effect.
At 70 deg. F and 70% RH, the concentration of water vapor is 17,780 ppm. This is 14.3 grams of
water per cubic meter. Presently at MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 is 427 ppm by volume.
This is only 0.839 grams of CO2 per cubic meter for air at STP. For these weather conditions, the
amount of CO2 is 0.780 grams per cubic meter of air, and water is 97.8% of the greenhouse effect.
Based on the above data and analysis, I have concluded that he claim by the IPCC that CO2 is the “cause” of the recent slight “global warming” is a lie.
The biggest absorber on the suns energy is the oceans which can hold heat for 100+ years.
I think you present the GHE differently. The interaction of molecules absorbing and transmitting energy/heat either directly from the sun or via IR absorbtion/radiation from Earth’s surface is, as far as i understand, not the GHE. I gather it is only when some kind of delay factor or ‘blanket’ hypothesis (leaving the flawed back radiation hypothesis out) is involved which is supposed to have an effect..i hope people will clarify this because i see them mixed up quite often..
I simply see all of this as a set of hypotheses. The theory bit is quite slippery, let alone proof. You can make calculations but they still rely on underlying assumptions. The difficulty and uncertainty increases with complexity. Actually, the latter is the ultimate and only proof that things can a priori never be called settled in matters concerning Earth’s temperature, let alone climate which is even more speculative.
The alarmists NEVER get that.
I will refer you to Dr. Pierrehumbert, lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC:
And this educational web-page presented by Berkeley:
During personal correspondence with various CO2 coalition members, they also explained the greenhouse effect as actually warming the air.
—
You leave out several in-between steps here. How does more absorption “up there” allegedly lead to higher temperature “down there”?
One way would be that by absorbing more “up there”, the “up there” heats more. This would be heating the atmosphere first.
Another way would be that by absorbing more, and simultaneously emitting more, the extra downward emission would warm the surface. But it cannot do that at current concentrations, because the bands down at the surface are already saturated (the bands are broader due to pressure broadening the spectral bands). Any increased absorption “up there” will happen at a band that is already saturated in the air in-between. Thus this extra downward emission of IR does not reach the surface, it is absorbed by the air below it.
This would have no direct impact on the surface. The only impact would be if the air heats up more first.
Note this is referring to the enhanced greenhouse effect, not the basic greenhouse effect.
Continuing my comment from above. This statement is right.
This statement is wrong. As I said above, Pierrehumbert is assuming the upward energy flux is unchanged. That is wrong and violates Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation. There’s also more energy flowing up when you have more CO2 molecules. The reduction seen by more absorption is simply countering the additional upward flux. The amount of energy is unchanged.
Hence, there is no increase in the effective emission height to colder layers. Nothing changes.
“adding more greenhouse gas molecules”
“Those are colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well”
So I double the number of molecules which then radiate half as well. What happens to the total amount of radiation to space?
Spot on.
First of all, light is not thermal energy emanating from the sun. Conflating electro-magnetic energy with thermal energy is not science.
There is thermal conductance from the bottom through the air to the glass lid. The air has a thermal resistance. Energy flow at equilibrium it (T1 – T0) / Rt where T1 is hot, T0 is cool, Rt is thermal resistance.
When the cooler glass was replaced with the warmer glass, equilibrium was disturbed. In order to achieve equilibrium of thermal energy, the bottom temperature elevates due to the energy absorbed from the electro-magnetic energy, until the thermal conductance again achieves equilibrium.
There is also a minor effect not accounted for. Light passing through glass has some energy that warms the glass. If the glass is hotter than equilibrium given a fixed quantity of EM energy, that hotter glass passes more light than the cooler, which in turn warms the base.
An interesting experiment, but it needs improvements. The specific pyranometer was not identified. In general, pyranometers have a bandwidth limitation much narrower than solar irradiance.
So, no, you did not demonstrate that a colder temperature can warm a hotter temperature.
In essence you demonstrated how a thermal blanket works.
From the article:
At ~$500, these are lower cost instruments (compared with Kipp & Zonen for example); the pyranometer has an acrylic diffuser instead of the conventional double quartz or fused silica domes. They claim 390-2200nm for the transmittance — usually the domes transmit out to about 4 microns.
The experiment says he used borosilicate glass, but the IR transmittance cutoff of glasses varies a lot, it can be anywhere from 2 to 4 microns. Without an actual transmittance curve, there is no way to evaluate what might be happening.
Additionally, glasses don’t have 100% transmittance in the passband, up to 10% absorption should be expected, and there is inevitably at least a few percent reflection from the surfaces. The reflection increases with nonnormal incidence angles.
The transmittance is indeed not 100% for sunlight, but it doesn’t particularly matter does it? The key is that the two glasses are nearly identical, the only difference being the temperature between them. The nearly identical is shown to be sufficient by the fact that swapping them out without heating one of them, doesn’t affect the bottom plate’s temperature.
The pyrgeometer’s spectral range is 5 to 30 μm, the fact that it registers a change when the hotter glass is swapped in, and that it doesn’t when the same maneuver is performed but the borosilicate is in-between, shows that the borosilicate is absorbing at the relevant spectral ranges, i.e. between 5 to 30 μm.
Sunlight is indeed the sun’s thermal radiation, which is well into the visible light due to its temperature. Compare the ideal blackbody curve of a ~5700K object, with the spectral curve of actual sunlight, and you will see what I mean.
The disturbance can’t be due to the change in the thermal conductance through the air from the bottom to the glass, because the bottom temperature increased *first*, immediately upon swapping, without the intervening plastic-wrap layers increasing in temperature. How would the bottom “know” that the top got hotter without any of the air in-between getting hotter first?
Thus the disturbance must be due to the additional thermal radiation coming from the marginally hotter glass.
This is accounted for by the pyranometer’s measurement of the actual incoming sunlight, which changed only negligibly if at all. The spectral response of the pyranometer is available on the specification sheet which you can find at the link from the paper.
Amazing. Heat passing through space.
Nice work. There must be a fairly straight forward thermodynamic derivation possible. Also one could design a tea kettle boiling apparatus, or cooker (say) assisted with a concave mirror to direct more concentrated insolation where it’s wanted- a bit of a Rube Goldberg device.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
Just today I mentioned that colder bodies can indeed cause warmer bodies to warm further and mentioned the simple experiment with a kitchen oven in which closing the cooler door causes the warmer inside to warm further. The usual suspects said it was nonsense without even trying the simple experiment which quite frankly is such an intuitive result that it defies credulity to think that someone would even think otherwise and even need to be convinced by the experiment.
But yeah, the critique you see here and elsewhere are based on a gross misrepresentation of the 2LOT. Many people are quick to ignore what is arguably the most important part of the 2LOT…the isolation clause. If a system isn’t isolated then colder bodies within it can and do cause warmer bodies within it to warm further (eg. heat pumps).
And you still don’t understand heat transfer. Opening and closing the oven door changes the thermal resistance, duh.
You reckon it’s the oven door that causes the oven to get hotter?
Well bugger me, I’m gonna do that every time I cook a roast from now on.
I won’t even have to turn the oven on at the switch.
Save me heaps in electricity bills.
One question if I may –
will my roast take any longer to cook to medium-rare?
Absolutely. It’s the only thing that changes in the experiment.
The oven has to be on. And this is the salient point. When the oven is on it is no longer an isolated system meaning that it is no longer evolving by its own means.
Sez Foz E. Bear the scientist — “wacka wacka!”
It is absolutely NOTHING to do with the door being cold.
With the door closed, you are trapping the all the produced heat inside, stopping air movement out of the system.
That cold door will rapidly heat up to the same as the oven.
You really are displaying an incredible amount of basic ignorance.
Its like saying the fridge door makes the fridge get colder. DUMB beyond words.
I’m sorry, but you cannot trap heat. You can prevent the escape of heat and cause the internal energy of the oven to increase. Trapping heat is nonsense.
So, you are saying the heat inside the oven doesn’t get released when the oven door is opened…
Oh.. Ok !
How is preventing something from escaping, any different from trapping it. ??
There is no “heat” inside the oven. Heat is the transfer of energy across a system boundary. A bucket of hot water contains no “heat.”
“There is no “heat” inside the oven”
Ok, perfectly safe to put your heat in just after opening the door. !
Perfectly safe to put your hand on the inside of the door as well.
Referring to radiation, Maxwell writes: “In Radiation, the hotter body loses heat, and the colder body receives heat……. “
If something can “lose heat” that implies it contains heat to start with.
Good enough for Maxwell…
You are also saying there is no such thing as “heat transfer”..
.. since, according to you, “heat” is already a form of transfer.
Can’t have heat transfer transfer can we…. Tautology ?
heat transfer – Search (bing.com)
Seems if you block convection, conduction and radiation.. there is no “heat transfer”…
… so the heat is not transferred.. ie .. it is trapped.
Work has a similar definition as heat, Work is a boundary property. You can do work, but it’s not because your body contains work.
“It’s the only thing that changes in the experiment.”
That is the thing you get TOTALLY WRONG.
You actually change the volume of air being heated by the oven, as well as the methods of heat transfer out of the oven
But being TOTALLY WRONG from the very start is very much an AGW-cultist thing, isn’t it.
I know this fact comes as a shock to a lot of people. I’ve seen several people over the years baffled by this simple experiment and struggle to reconcile their deeply held position that cold bodies cannot be the cause of warm bodies warming further. Many of them eventually concede that this effect works but only in the case of convection or conduction and not for radiation. Many people remain unconvinced though. I had one guy once tell me that my oven was “magic” and that his wouldn’t behave that way. When I asked if he had done the experiment his response was equivalent to “because I already know what the result is going to be”. Other’s dismiss it without thought and just reflexively call it nonsense. Anyway, Dale Cloudman’s experiment is an example where the effect is demonstrated with radiation as well. Dr. Spencer has similar experiments here and here.
Because it is nonsense — you STILL don’t understand thermal resistance. And it isn’t worth the time that would be needed to educate you, past experience has aptly demonstrated the impossibility of this ever happening.;
If colder bodies can warm hotter bodies then a bag of ice instead of a warm piece of glass would cause the temp to go up as well.
There are three kinds of heat transfer, conduction/convection/radiation. There doesn’t see to be a complete analysis of what is happening with this experiment but I’m guessing that conduction and convection are being ignored.
If you kept the glass at -50ºC, and then swapped it with a 0ºC glass, then you would observe a temp increase as well. You have to consider both the sun->bottom plate heat flow simultaneously with the bottom plate->glass heat flow.
bzx is talking about his kooky oven explanation, not your experiment.
They are related in that they both demonstrate that cool bodies can be the cause of warm bodies getting warmer. It’s a fact that you called nonsense. And you can see by the discussion’s here that a lot of people agree with you. The difference between Dale’s experiment and the oven experiment is the heat transfer mechanism in play. For the oven it is primarily convection. For Dale’s experiment it is primarily radiation. I mention the oven experiment because I’ve been using it for years and is usually simple and intuitive enough that most people concede that cool bodies can indeed be the cause of warm bodies getting warmer which goes a long way in convincing someone that this holds true for radiation as well.
The multitude of verbiage here does not alter the fact that it is nonsense.
Do you also build perpetual motion machines?
I sent you a picture a year or so ago showing you this oven idea from a thermodynamics book. All you are doing is modifying the boundary of where the system is and the surroundings. The door if left open does not cause the bigger room to warm so it adds nothing.
Exactly, he is playing games by redefining the system.
Nope. The boundaries of the system remain unchanged. The only thing that changes is whether there is a physical barrier 5 sides or 6 sides of cube that defines the boundary. It’s still the same 6 side cube either way.
Yes it does. If it didn’t that would be a violation of the 1LOT. Now what may happen is that the bigger room is so vast that the warming in it would be imperceptible. But make no mistake…it will warm even if only a little bit. The 1LOT is unequivocal on this point.
Put a big block of dry ice in that hot oven. Then come back and tell us if the temp in the oven went up or down!
You are talking about adding a second heat source, not a reflective body like CO2 is.
Yep.
This experiment is *not* that simple. What would happen if the second piece of glass was taken out of a refrigerator at 32F. Would it *still* cause the temp at the bottom to increase?
If colder bodies can warm hotter bodies then putting a bag of ice on top of the first piece of glass *should* cause the bottom temp to go up as well.
Planck must be rolling over in his grave.
No, replacing the 30ºC glass with a 0ºC glass would not cause the bottom temp to increase, it would cause it to decrease.
But swapping the 30ºC to a 60ºC one did cause the 100ºC bottom temp to increase, when both 30ºC and 60ºC are much less than 100ºC. Whatever your understanding of the world is, you have to adjust it to accommodate this fact.
Change in net radiative flux.,
Also change in air conductivity rate because of deceased energy difference,
… and a change in the rate of convective cooling.
CO2 has none of these effects in the atmosphere.
Exactly. This is what the experiment shows, that change in net radiative flux can cause a warmer object to become warmer, even when the change involves objects colder than the warmer object.
The debate going on in this thread indicates this was a worthwhile thing to show.
The experiment rules these out. The glass plate is quite a bit apart from the lower apparatus. The temperature change was instantaneous with the swap, faster than the change propagated through the air.
Your second glass *added* to the net flux. CO2 does not *add* anything. It is an imperfect reflective body, not a heat source. It won’t change the net flux at all.
If the earth sends out two photons into the atmosphere then it is two photons cooler. If CO2 then sends one back the earth will *still* be cooler by one photon.
Only by the heat capacity of the glass.
If the second glass is warmer than the equilibrium temp then you are adding another heat source, just like adding a second sun in the sky.
If the second body is colder than the equilibrium then why would the bottom temp decrease? It won’t be because of radiation. It could only be from conduction or convection.
The colder second body will *still* be exchanging radiation with the original body. Why would this cause a *decrease* in its temperature?
OMG what an idiot.
It is not the colder door that is causing the heat increase. It is the fact that you are now trapping the produced heat inside, preventing air movement and convection.
You really are a complete scientific cretin with zero comprehension of the real world.
He’s tried to pump this nonsense into WUWT before. The negative reinforcement he gets only tells him how “right” he must be.
The inside of the “cold door” rapidly becomes a hot surface.
Let’s see if beeswax thinks the air is not being physically trapped, and the door doesn’t become hot quickly.
Here’s a little experiment for beeswax.
Close the oven “cold” door and heat it up to 250C, now put your face just above where the oven door opening is and open the “cold” door.
Then quickly put your hand against the inner surface of the “cold” door.
See if anything “instructive” happens. 😉
Only a complete scientific clown thinks that an oven heating is because of the “colder” door.
As in just a few seconds.
Nah, doesn’t take that long.
And I’ve got the burn scars to prove it 🙁
Yeah, I was being generous.
I bet you bdgwx is not going to respond. He’s something else for sure. I don’t know what his deal is.
What is there to respond to?
BTW…I stand by what I said. If you place the cooler door into service it will cause the warmer inside to warm further. That is unequivocal and indisputable. bnice2000’s (and others) challenge of this fact does not make it any less true. And I encourage you to do the experiment and prove it for yourself.
Your ignorance continues to flow. You now have ZERO credibility.
Putting ANYTHING that blocks the flow of heat from the front of the oven will cause the oven to warm up.
It is absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the door.
It is absolutely NOTHING to do with cold warming hot.
I have outlined an experiment for you to try.
But you won’t.
For the lurkers…this is an example of what I discussed above. That is completely rejection of the fact that the placement of a cooler body (the door in this case) between a cold body (the outside in this case) and warm body (the inside in this case) had any influence on the warm body getting warmer.
You really are a moronic twit , aren’t you.
It wouldn’t matter if the door was hot or cold, the oven would still warm up once you close the door.
You are changing the system from an open system where the produced energy easily escapes, and warms up the kitchen, to an small enclosed space that traps the heat inside.
The fact that you think it is the cold door causing the heating is totally anti-science to the point of DELIBERATE IDIOCY !!
Thermal resistance is totally beyond his ability to comprehend.
It is nonsense to say that heat is trapped!
So you can’t release it by opening the door. ??
Oh… Ok !
Every part of the insulation of the oven, including the double glass door, is designed to stop heat energy escaping by radiation, conduction and convection.
If your aim is to stop something escaping by any means… isn’t that a trap ??
Heat is the transfer of energy across a system boundary. Heat cannot be contained.
And all the heat transfer is blocked.. or that is the aim.
This makes the inside of the oven Hot !!
We have stopped the thermal transfer, trapped it.
heat
[hiːt]
noun
the quality of being hot; high temperature:
Please use the thermodynamic definition of heat in discussions like this.
Heat is a type of energy that is only recognized as it crosses a boundary. Work can also cross a boundary. Sometimes called energy in transit.
”Heat is defined as the form of energy that is transferred between two systems (or system and its surroundings) by virtue of a temperature difference.” Quote from a thermodynamics book.
The word itself originated from changing heat into motion.
So there can be no such thing as “heat transfer”..
… since, according to you, “heat” is already a transfer.
heat transfer – Search (bing.com)
According to you, Convection, Conduction and Radiation are just “heat”, not forms of “heat transfer” …
Correct. Except for pure vacuum (an oxymoron), there are no perfect insulators.
Except it doesn’t. It limits the rate of energy flow, but not to zero.
Is your radiation electromagnetic or thermal?
EM can not be trapped. Shielding is not perfect.
You are correct.
Contained would have been a better word choice.
Go easy or change yr title benice..🙂
So are you in agreement now? Do you accept that body A can be the cause of a warmer body B getting warmer even if body A is cooler than body B?
Did you do you the experiment? Is that what convinced you?
If you throw a bag of ice into the oven will it get warmer or colder?
It is NOT the door that is causing the warming.
It is the fact that you now have an enclosed system.
When you you get back to the reality plain..
… instead of your wacky-wacky idiot plain. !!
Did you know that if you close the warmer fridge door, the inside of the fridge becomes COLDER !!
This is proof that warmth causes cooling.
Nah, I reckon all it confirms is that if you leave the fridge door open any more than a minute, your Mom or Dad will give you a clip around the ear and say something like –
“you must think electricity grows on trees”
A classic example of “the lurkers support me in email!”
PS — sentence #2 is a meaningless word salad blob would be proud of.
Again, trapping heat is nonsense.
So there is no heat build-up inside the oven. Odd concept.
It it isn’t trapped, then you can’t let the heat energy escape by opening the door.
Do you as least acknowledge that the whole idea of an oven is to stop heat energy escaping ??
There is heat contained in the oven walls, and also in the air inside. The door prevents room air from mixing with the oven air, so yes, heat is trapped.
Look up the definition of heat. You are stating nonsense.
heat
[hiːt]
noun
Referring to radiation, Maxwell writes: “In Radiation, the hotter body loses heat, and the colder body receives heat.”…..
This implies that the hotter body contains heat.. otherwise it couldn’t lose it.
Again, the definition of heat is the transfer of energy across a system boundary due to a temperature difference. You can lose heat; you can gain heat; but you can’t contain heat. Work is also a system boundary process. You can gain work; you can lose work; but you can’t contain work. It’s the First Law of Thermodynamics.
A bucket of hot water does not contain heat. Usually it will lose heat to cooler surroundings as its internal energy decreases.
Trapping heat is a old expression used before physics was available.
You are correct. Heat, by definition, is the flow of thermal energy. By definition if it is “trapped” is it not flowing and therefore not heat.
I have yet to see a construct or an experiment that absolutely trapped energy. Storage is not trapping.
The definition most people use is when something is allowed to enter but not allowed to exit. If you allow energy to enter a system, but you don’t allow it to exit then it is reasonable to say that the energy was “trapped”.
I’m curious…if you don’t think it is reasonable to define “trapped” as “being allowed to enter but not allowed to exit” or some substantially equivalent verbiage then how exactly are you defining “trapped”?
You can trap energy. but you can’t trap heat. Once heat crosses a boundary, it ceases to exist. In other words, it changes into some other form of energy. The correct term is internal energy. If you add heat to a system, it will increase the system’s internal energy–assuming the system doesn’t also lose the energy by some other method.
I’m on your side on that one Jim. Though I do have to admit that I am sometimes too loosey goosey when I use the term “heat”. That comes from my interest in the history thermodynamics in which “heat” was often used interchangeably with “energy”. The evolution of the vernacular was laise faire for a long time. Remember, the now defunct caloric theory even posited that “heat” was a substance (or imponderable fluid) that could be stored as well as moved from one body to another. I do think we have to allow a little grace and not be overly pedantic. But yeah, if you ever see me use “heat” when I should have used “energy” then I absolutely want you to call me on it.
“. . . then I absolutely want you to call me on it.”
And when I do, I get many negative votes. Work is also a boundary property. You can do work on a system and/or the system can do work, but the system doesn’t contain work. That would be nonsense.
re: “that colder bodies can indeed cause warmer bodies to warm further”
The case of a concave mirror (or multiple flat, plane mirrors) focusing sunlight (EM radiation) onto a object in front of the mirror comes to mind … the temperature of the mirror, the back and the glass remain near, maybe a little elevated above ambient … EM (i.e.sunlight) is reflected by the mirror’s reflective surface.
Yeah, there are many examples. Another interesting one is that of the JWST solar shield in which the cooler mirror side layers caused the warmer Sun side layers to warm further. The JWST also happens to be a real world example of the Green Plate Effect which is related to Dale Cloudman’s experiment here.
Which have absolutely NOTHING to do with the atmosphere.
No green plates, or blue plates or any other colour plates for that matter, in the atmosphere.
No multi level aluminium/polymer shield, either.
Again, just altering the net radiative transfer and blocking other energy flows.
Now… empirical evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2.
We can keep waiting. !
“Now… empirical evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2.
We can keep waiting. !”
Red thumbs are NOT evidence. !
Perhaps the red-thumb twit could also provide pictures of the green and blue plates in the atmosphere ?
I’ll take that as a big NO !
“I’ll take that as a big NO !”
Red thumb confirms my theory.. Thanks. 🙂
Knows I am correct, just doesn’t like it… diddums. !
The point of doing this is to have something that absorbs solar radiation and which then heats up. How is this anything like a convection oven?
No. Colder bodies can indeed cause warmer bodies to lose heat more slowly. (this IS NOT an admission of AGW btw)
If you change the temperature difference, net radiative, conductive and convective fluxes will change.
Basic Physics.
But changes in atmospheric CO2 do not change atmospheric temperature differences.
They are controlled by the gas laws in the atmosphere. (proven by analysis of balloon data.)
Did you do the experiment?
Did you wake up to the fact that you changing the oven to and enclosed system.
Or are you too dumb to realise the difference.
Or are you still in your fantasy la-la-land.
Nice experiment. The outcome is not a surprise of course. Any other outcome would imply that radiation knows the temperature of its destination and refuses to take flight if that destination is warmer. For example if there was a half moon overhead, the Earth’s surface could radiate only toward the dark half (colder) and not toward the sunlight side (warmer). That would be even weirder than quantum mechanics I think.
What is presumably impossible thanks to Conservation of Energy is a net flow of energy by radiation from a colder body to a warmer one. Were that possible, one could presumably build a perpetual motion machine to harness the flow then tell their power company to take a hike.
It’s no surprise to some of us. Unfortunately I’ve had these discussions with countless people over the years and what is surprising is just how many people vehemently reject the concept and result described by Dale Cloudman.
Understanding basic physics seems beyond you.
All that is happening is the net radiative flux is being altered.
This experiment has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the atmosphere.
Correct.
Of course the source and receiver communicate. It is called electro-magnetic radiation for a reason. Radiation is simply the interchange of electric and magnetic energy advancing at the speed of light. It exists in the electro-magnetic field meaning there is an electric potential from source to receiver. The field equilibrates at the peed of light. Same speed as gravity communicates.
The receiver effects the source in a similar way as two masses “feel” each other in the gravity field. . The sum is influenced by the Earth’s mass and its influence on the electric-magnetic field. Temperature is a broad spectrum measure of electro-magnetic potential.
These are well known concepts. EMR from the sun “sees” the vacuum of space as having an impedance of 376ohms.
https://byjus.com/physics/impedance-of-free-space/
But any matter encountered will have a different characteristic impedance and alter the output of the sun toward that object after the sun “sees” the object. It takes 16 minutes for the sun to see earth both gravitationally and electro-magnetically.
Figure 3 : the 3 cycles (without glas, whith glass, with glass) are the same with respect to IR thus the glass does not modify the IR radiative energy transfer.
The sun flux is also the same : so the total radiative energy transfer from Sun + Air + Glass to the Bottom is the same as the radiative energy transfer from Sun + Air towards Bottom.
The bottom temperature evolution is then only an artifact caused by the glass switches, air turbulence created while doing so, etc.
Figure 4 : it is said that the air is not affected while it was sharply decreasing before the switch and then stopped its decline which invalidates the claim.
Figure 5 : the thin foils warmed after and one even cooled : since there is no radiative evolution with or without glass, it must be again a convective/conductive artifact.
Conclusion : the null hypothesis prevails.
Figure 3: I’m not sure how you are able to say the cycles are “the same with respect to IR” when there is a clear increase in net IR corresponding directly with the swaps.
The apparatus as a whole is evolving as well, with net IR gradually declining the entire time (due to the pyrgeometer getting warmer), but there are clear sharp increases where the hotter glass is swapped in.
Figure 4: The air temp fluctuates throughout the experiment. It is effectively a function of how much the outside wind is blowing. When it blows less, the air becomes warmer. This variable unfortunately could not be controlled for. However, it is evident that if convection were causing the bottom to be warmer, that would be because it is a period of prolonged stillness, which it clearly wasn’t as when the air was warmer (before the swap), the bottom plate was cooler. So, the bottom plate warming up right when the swap happened, cannot be attributed to this.
Figure 5: There are convective effects which is why Tthin2 decreases, but that should lead to Tbottom decreasing as well, not increasing, which is what was observed.
Conclusion: the experimental result holds
The 3 cycles are exactly the same : intial point and trend so it’s not the glass that causes the up initial point but a flawed experiment somewhere. BTW, if it wasn’t by a convection artifact, the bottom temperature should have evolved accordingly to those 3 IR cycles : it hasn’t.
The same conclusion holds.
It is nice to get this experimental verification, but was it really necessary?
The Stefan-Boltzmann law of radiation states that a body will emit radiation power in proportion to the fourth power of its absolute temperature and its total radiating surface area: P = ε*σ*A* T^4, where ε is the object’s effective surface emissivity, σ is the Stephan-Boltzmann constant, A is surface area radiating to space, and T is the object’s absolute temperature. Note that this law does not have any dependence on the presence of a second (or more) bodies intercepting part of that radiation.
The law of conservation of energy requires that any body intercepting and absorbing radiation power from an external source (based on there being no such thing as a perfect reflector of radiation) must increase in temperature at least momentarily as a result of absorbing that extra power as long a radiation is the only means that body has to lose energy.
The Stefan-Boltzmann law of radiation and the law of conservation of energy are very well established in physics . . . what the above-described experiment serves to clarify is that the term “heat” is just poorly/improperly understood by most people, as in the phrase “heat always flows from hot to cold”.
Simple “gedanken experiment” (much less complex than the experiment described above): when ice at 0 °C sitting in water at 0 °C melts which way does “heat” flow? OK, now when water sitting at 100 °C turns to steam at 100 °C, which way does the “heat” flow? Hmmm . . . no “hot versus cold” to talk about yet energy is exchanged.
In each of your examples, you are confusing (latent) heat with temperature. BTW, latent heat is not involved in the experiement.
You need to look up “Enthalpy of Fusion” (about 6kJ/mol for H2O)
And “Enthalpy of Vaporisation” (about 41 kJ/mol for H2O)
Enthalpy is not involved in the experiment.
I was actually replying to TYS’s last paragraph, Sorry. 🙂
No. I do know the difference between heat (energy, static or flowing) and temperature. A hint for you: they are expressed in different physical units so they are not equivalent.
Also, I never said or implied that latent heat was involved in the experiment described in the above article.
Sorry for my first crude and misleading statement, the point was not to heat the debate so I will elaborate :
1) If the ice is at 0°C as is the water surrounding it too, there will be no heat transfer between the ice (which will remain ice) and the water, so in your thought experiment the ice can’t melt :
2) If the water vapor is at 0°C as the boiling water below there will be also no heat transfer between the two, while there is actually a heat transfer (enthalpy) from the boiling water to the ambiant air.
I hope I clarified my point.
2) if the water vapor is at 100°C (not 0°C !)
Consider that concentration gradients (under non-equilibrium conditions) can drive phase changes in a single chemical system without requiring simultaneous temperature gradients. That is, ice-liquid water and liquid water-vapor phase changes. A phase change ALWAYS involves the transfer of energy between molecules (i.e., a change in enthalpy between the phases).
I think so. A number of people I had long debates with, came around to seeing that reality works as the experiment shows, as a result of the experiment. Debating can only get you so far. I would also posit that you cannot really know until you see the experimental result. A theory can be very clever, but if experiment contradicts it, the theory is wrong.
I’m left wondering if you’ve got any experience with (a) an incorrectly designed experiment, or (b) experimental errors, or (c) a theory not amenable to experimental testing, such as the Big Bang Theory or the Multiverse Theory.
My take is: it is up to the proponents of a theory to validate it with experiment. If they don’t, then the theory has not been proven. If they say it cannot be done, then the theory is unfalsifiable and thus not scientific.
The problem with climate alarmism is that it has become unfalsifiable. The effects of increased CO2 levels on surface temperatures have only been quantified by computer models, and adjusted past temperature trends (that can never prove causation anyway). And the proponents say you can’t test it in a lab because you can’t get a 10km-tall lab or a spare planet Earth. Further, if it becomes hotter it is proof that they are right, and if it becomes colder, well they predict that it gets colder also so it is also proof they are right. And if it stays the same, well these things take time to change so it is not disproof.
Thus they have constructed an unfalsifiable theory, which shouldn’t be taken so seriously.
I get your general point, but I have to disagree with your statement
Science-based paleoclimatology proxies for Earth’s past “global” temperatures and past atmospheric CO2 levels have clearly falsified the hypothesis that atmospheric CO2 concentration levels drive Earth’s “global” temperature. You see, nature has already run the most-representative “experiment” for us under the proper boundary conditions and at the proper scale.
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, if it doesn’t agree with observation, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
— Richard Feynman
Dale, as you wrote A theory can be very clever, but if experiment contradicts it, the theory is wrong.
I’m not sure what theory you are attempting to prove wrong. There is certainly no “greenhouse theory”. Even Raymond Pierrehumbert said “Carbon dioxide is just planetary insulation”. Pretty crappy insulation at that – temperatures drop to below the freezing point of CO2 in the Antarctic.
So what “clever theory” are you trying to contradict?
The ‘clever theory’ contradicted here is that a colder object’s thermal radiation can’t have any warming influence whatsoever on an object warmer than it. I have shown in this limited circumstance that it can. Proponents of this theory must abandon it and alter their understanding of the world.
If the colder body is a heat source then it will obviously add to the net flux being received. If the additional body is a reflective body (i.e. like CO2) then it doesn’t add to the net flux being received.
The misconception here is that “back radiation” from CO2 is a heat source. It isn’t. It is reflected flux that was originally generated when a body cooled. Reflected radiation can’t warm the originating body to a point higher then it began.
That would ONLY be true if the additional body was a perfect reflector, which doesn’t exist in the real world, even for CO2.
If CO2 is not a reflective body from the viewpoint of the earth then what heat is it generating as a source of additional heat, again from the viewpoint of the earth?
The experiment falsifies two hypothesis.
1) Cool bodies cannot be a cause of warm bodies getting warmer.
and the more specific
2) Cool bodies acting only by radiation cannot be a cause of warm bodies getting warmer.
It’s trivial to falsify #1 and I can usually get most (though not all) people to concede that the hypothesis is false.
It’s harder to construct an experiment for #2 so you don’t see a lot of them. One of my favorite experiments here is the JWST sunshield which not only falsifies #2 as well, but falsifies other contrarian hypothesis related to radiation and demonstrates the green plate effect.
So it proves absolutely nothing about anything happening in the atmosphere.
You still haven’t shown us where the green plate and metal foils screen is in the atmosphere.
Please go away. You don’t know what you are talking about.
And bozo-x does know what he is talking about?
Experimentation can be very difficult to achieve correctly and flawed experiments “showing” that correct theories are invalid are legion even when carried out at the highest scientific level (I remember that a research team found that some muons where measured to be faster than the speed of light in the vacuum …)
Did you account for changes in permissivity of the top glass due to temperature?
I didn’t consider this variable, but the pyranometer measuring the solar insolation shows there was only negligible changes to the incoming sunlight, so I think it can be safely ruled out.
Thought I would toss this in –
“DIY Radiative Sky Cooling Fibers Successfully Made!”
Here is where the testing starts: The result (claimed) is that the fibers can achieve a temperature *in sunlight* below that of the ambient temperature –
https://youtu.be/G8YBV7GoF_s?t=4980
What startling crackpot science. Has reason completely fled from our society?
:
Nature’s Second Law of Thermodynamics is ironclad. .Did you forget?
“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with
Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” – Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944)
This is really sad coming from Cloudman, who I thought disproved the greenhouse effect many ways on his X account. He apparently never seriously read my even more unanswerable disproofs or he would quit wasting his time and just spread my message. Too bad, so few who read this blog do either.
The Earth climate system is all about Planck black bodies. The surfaces of the Sun and Earth are black bodies, but the atmosphere can never be, thus can only have a cooling effect if any. That ends the possibility of a greenhouse effect without further consideration being necessary if you have a deep understanding. Too bad, the greenhouse effect is scientifically dead but it keeps running along like the headless chicken.
Debate? If you touch and hold two black bodies together that have different temperatures, they eventually equalize and achieve equilibrium. This proves that heat only flows from hotter to colder. Separating them by a short vacuum has the same effect via black body radiation. End of debate.
The ultimate disproof of the greenhouse effect is to understand entropy as a measure of energy dispersal. At the beginning of the Big Bang, all energy was super-hot and concentrated, and ever since it has been cooling and dispersing, meaning slowly losing its ability to generate heat or do work. Energy, in short, has a quality factor that decreases with each heat transfer. I struggle to wrap my mind around the inevitable Heat Death of the Universe.
To believe that Earth’s atmosphere can raise the temperature of the surface higher than the Sun alone is like believing that eating the crap from eating a juicy steak will give you more energy, and can be done repeatedly with even better results. See the film “The Human Centipede” for the disgusting result.
Each day the Earth surface absorbs high quality visual wavelength solar radiation and heats up, reaches a peak, and resets at night. Meanwhile it continually tries to cool via its own low quality IR wavelength radiation. Recycling this waste heat can’t reheat the surface because it’s no match for the high quality solar energy. So much for the greenhouse effect, a relic of 19th cent. Victorian steampunk science that the global Marxists gave new life to with lying physics. Sorry, Frankenstein wasn’t history, it was fiction.
This is a war raging whether you like it or not. Climate science has long been hijacked by global Marxists as a weapon against their archenemy Big Oil, and they’ll push any hoax that helps make them some useful idiots. Currently their scam program is winning walking away.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want global Marxists dumping crap in my face and telling me to eat it.
This U.N. IPCC octopus that’s the main instigator is gigantic, and the blog’s owners I suspect are compromised by the way they refuse to cut to the chase like I do, and aim their big guns at global Marxism itself They have an opportunity now to prove they aren’t by prominently promoting my ultimate killer disproof of the greenhouse effect as pure, you guessed it, starts with c.
Here’s the link:
http://www.historyscoper.com/isthegreenhouseeffectreal.html
Of course not. And yet, the experiment showed that a colder solid’s thermal radiation, caused an object warmer than it, to become even warmer.
The experiment is not a theory, it is something that happened in reality. So, you will have to explain how it was able to happen *without* violating the 2LOT. It clearly doesn’t, as it happened.
I refer you back to the experiment.
The answer is simple, of course. The warming effect would not be observed if the Sun were not shining on the apparatus the whole time. Heat is indeed flowing from hot to cold – from the sun, to the black plate, to the glass. But when heat flows less from the black plate to the glass, the result is the black plate gets warmer. That is all there is to it. The experiment is irrefutable, so, you will have to adjust your theories accordingly.
I was careful to be precise and point out the experiment only shows it works with solids. To show the effect works for gases would require… an experiment with gases.
Well, as gases **do** emit thermal radiation as well, it would be odd if it worked for solids and not for gases. The possibility is properly maintained or ended with an experiment, not a theory.
I do think the burden is on the climate alarmists to prove their theory, which they haven’t. I also point out the numbered critiques at the end of my paper to show what is missing for their theory to be shown to be viable.
You mistake the paper as saying the greenhouse effect is real… it doesn’t. It just says this particular critique is not valid. It does not address other critiques, since the experiment does not speak to those.
we are talking about how a gas affects a solid not how one solid affects another. Your experiment is close to meaningless.
Big groan. I guess you didn’t hear a thing I said. You’ve totally stunk yourself up by joining the myriad of crackpot scientists with perpetual motion machines et al. Eddington is rolling over in his grave.
You didn’t say the greenhouse effect is real?. You are saying you could prove it with another crackpot experiment and be the judge – I can hardly wait. No sign that you studied my final disproof using pure logic that makes lab experiments a waste. If I made a mistake in that where’s your scientific refutation, or are you going to do another lab experiment?
Meanwhile you’ll never stop chasing their wild goose and start fighting global Marxism head-on, guaranteeing its victory. Marxist brain-caging is incredible.
(1037) TL Winslow’s answer to Are you surprised by the temperature rise in recent decades being in line with what climate scientists projected would happen if humans kept burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate? – Quora
The ball remains in your court to explain how the experimental results do not violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. We know they don’t, because they happened in reality. Or, if they do, where the mistake is.
Diverting the discussion to some other arguments is nothing but that, a diversion.
You added a second sun to the biosphere, even if it was colder than the surface. CO2 is not a heat source like a second sun would be. The second sun *would* warm the earth to a higher temp. CO2, as a reflective body and not a heat source, simply can’t do that.
The earth sends out two photons and CO2 sends one back. Did the earth cool or did it reach a higher temp than before it emitted the two photons?
That is a fair point which I addressed in the paper. I specifically noted that distinction! So you have accepted a colder object can cause a warmer object to be warmer, if the colder object is warmed by a heat source other than that initial object. I have an experiment in mind to test this but it will take some months to acquire the materials.
Scenario 1: Sun sends 2 photons, Earth sends out 2 photons and they escape to space.
Scenario 2: Sun sends 2 photons, Earth sends out 2 photons and CO2 sends one back.
Is the Earth warmer in Scenario 2 than Scenario 1?
The earth certainly doesn’t get HOTTER than when it started which is what your experiment did!
All your experiment really showed was that if you add a second heat source you can make something hotter. That has nothing to do with how the Earth’s biosphere works with CO2. CO2 is not a second heat source. It proves nothing about the “greenhouse effect”.
Climate science doesn’t claim CO2 slows nighttime cooling, it claims it makes the Earth “hotter”. Thus the claims that CO2 is going to turn the Earth into a blazing desert.
Even the claims about higher “equilibrium” temps are so bogus. Freeman Dyson’s main criticism of the climate models was that they are not holistic at all. The earth is never in equilibrium. As something goes up something else goes down. If you can’t identify all of those things the you can’t have a good model – and climate science is FAR from identifying all of those things.
Sorry, I had to stop reading right then and there.
I agree. They are obviously not. But let’s call them grey. Reading on he makes a few good points which includes thinking about the GHE which i agree with. My suggestion: always read on. Amongst the wrong might lurk some rights..
Did your brain get bruised on your brain cage? 🙂
No. 😊
That’s the best you got? 😳
The “greenhouse effect” is fantasy. And not for the reasons you presumed.
Earth’s energy uptake is regulated by thermostatic limit on ocean surface temperature of 30C. Open ocean surface cannot sustain more than 30C. The regulating process is very powerful and regulates the top of atmosphere radiation fluxes to limit the surface temperature to 30C. The process is visible somewhere across the globe at any time of the year; commonly recognised as monsoon.
This chart of latitudinal reflected short wave and outgoing long wave radiation shows how the process has worked this century as the precession cycle shifts the peak solar intensity northward:
?ssl=1
More surface area just north of the Equator is reaching the 30C limit so the cloud is increasing in that region. Note how the OLR and SWR are reversed. This is for all latitudes. If you look at the warm pools regiulating at 30C you find the feedback factor is 2. Meaning the SWR increases twice as fast as the OLR reduces.
👍🏻
OKAY – anybody else tried the experiment of ‘reading the sky’ with a hand-held IR thermometer?
I think the one I’ve got reads around 14 um wavelength if I’m not mistaken. Notable is on high-humidity days (w/clear sky, no cloud) the sky ‘reading’ may be -10 deg C or warmer, while on ‘dry’ days the temp reading ‘bottoms out’ below the limit of -54 deg C.
Most handhelds have 8-14 um filters in front of the thermopile. But yes, I get higher readings when precipitable water values are higher. I also get higher readings when pointed at a low cloud.
They DON’T use thermopiles, the response time would be way too slow and the signal tiny.
You get a higher reading when pointing at a cloud because it is receiving radiation reflected from the clouds in the “atmospheric window” band of the IR spectrum. That band is used so that there is no attenuation from the IR active gases, primarily water vapor and CO2.
The temperature reading is not actual “temperature” of the sky.
Are you saying it is all to do with H2O… and not CO2 ! 😉
CO2 doesn’t vary that much between dry and humid days.
I have always struggled with the fact that people believe the atmosphere is heating the earth. I can’t see why we even refer to the atmosphere. Why aren’t we only referring to the troposphere? Considering that the top of the troposphere is -55 Celsius and the top of the troposphere is only eleven miles high at most and as little as four miles at the poles how on earth can the CO2 in the cold troposphere warm the warm earth. It doesn’t make sense.
If you really wanted to duplicate our biosphere, instead of putting a piece of warm glass on the setup a bag of ice should be been put on the original piece of glass in order to see if a colder atmosphere would warm the bottom of the experiment.
The first step in understanding what is happening in general is understanding that the specific hypothesis that gets thrown around a lot “cold bodies cannot be a cause of warm bodies getting warmer” is false. Based on conversations I’ve had over the years I believe the hypothesis originated due to a misrepresentation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Many people seems to think that the 2LOT prohibits heat moving from cold bodies to hot bodies under all circumstances. But that’s not what the 2LOT says. It only prohibits heat moving from cold bodies to hot bodies when the system is isolated. There have many different phrasings of this isolation clause over the years. Other phrasings you might see are “when the system is evolving by its own means”, “when the system is self-acting”, “spontaneously”, “without other compensation”, etc. An example of a system in which heat moves from cold to hot that few challenge is a heat pump. The reason why a heat pump does not violate the 2LOT is because the heat pump system is not isolated or evolving by its own means. Similarly the climate system is not isolated or evolving by its own means so a model of the climate system showing heat flowing from cold to hot does not violate the 2LOT.
Still nonsense.
You think you can get to The Promised Land by redefining what you call the “system”.
Occam is not laughing with you.
He thinks he’s invented the ideal perpetual motion machine. Like all charlatans he ignores the fact that an *external* source is required in order to do the work of moving the heat from a colder body to a warmer body. Entropy will not be denied. Thre is no such thing as a cooler body warming a hotter body in an isolated system. If you have an external source doing work to move the heat then you no longer have an isolated system.
Exactly. His heat pump needs an external compressor with an energy input to move heat into the target.
CO2 is an IMPERFECT REFLECTIVE BODY. It is *NOT* a heat source.
If the earth sends out two photons then it cools by that amount of energy. If CO2 reflects one back then the earth is *STILL* cooler by one photon.
“Similarly the climate system is not isolated or evolving by its own means so a model of the climate system showing heat flowing from cold to hot does not violate the 2LOT.”
Do some more studying. The heat gets moved from the colder body to the warmer body by WORK being done. That work comes from an external source. If the external source was not needed then you would have the ideal perpetual motion machine.
A pointless experiment….the greenhouse effect does not increase the radiation temperature to the ground….it just slightly extends the time of the diurnal warm maximum. It is not correct to say the GH effect warms the ground…it merely slows down the cooling of the ground within the 24 hour cycle.
“it merely slows down the cooling of the ground within the 24 hour cycle.”
Actually, there is no evidence it does that. Don’t get sucked in by AGW anti-science.
Thermalisation to the bulk of the atmosphere is fractions of a second, then the gas laws take over.
Right, but just let’s assume it does slow down the cooling. What does THAT actually mean for its effect? Does slow down means A: temperature stays the same or B: temperature goes up?
In a cycling system where the heat source comes and goes, e.g. the earth and the sun, then slowing down the cooling when the heat source is missing will cause the bottom of cycle to have a higher temp. It won’t affect the top temp of the cycle since that will be controlled by the heat source.
Too many in climate science ignore two things. First, the earth radiates away heat even during the day, the sun just provides *more* heat than the earth can radiate away so the earth’s temp goes up. Second, the cooling off starts *before* the sun goes behind the horizon. That cooling is an exponential decay meaning that the earth radiates at a much higher rate early in the cooling cycle than it does later on. Thus the impact on the ultimate asymptote of the cooling is not nearly as high as one would think. Yes, pre-dawn temps may be higher and this will cause longer growing seasons, etc. But how much higher? I’ve never seen this actually studied by climate science. Certainly enough to impact the mid-range temp, (tmax + tmin)/2, but the impact of that higher pre-dawn temp is *NOT* what the scaremongers whine about. They want you to believe that maximum temps are going up enough to melt all the ice on the planet, cause people to die, and create mass food shortages. That is *NOT* what the impact of a small increase in pre-dawn temps will cause.
Well….. what you would expect to see is night time temperatures rising faster than day time temps…and the Arctic warming in the NH winter and not in the summer…..which is exactly what you are seeing.
We are not actually experiencing extra heat coming into the atmospheric system….we are experiencing less cooling.
The evidence would be the 2nd law I would say….Even though the atmospheric GH absorptions and emissions are at the speed of light, the radiation inertia from the blackbody is not….it is that inertia that slows the cooling, and the downward emissions of the GHG that replenishes that radiation which forms a feedback loop. The more GHG available, the longer that feedback loop lasts….
Thankyou.
Now if you can only turn one of the plates into a gas. Lol
You hit the nail on the head. The gas would be a *reflective* mirror, not a second heat source.
No – you may conclude this but it simply shows you do not understand the nature of the electrico-magnetic field that exists throughout the universe we inhabit.
All matter communicates with all other matter at the speed of light in both the gravity field and electro-magnetic field. Placing a warm piece of glass just above your solar absorber would equilibrate the E-M fielding in an instant thereby reducing the rate of heat loss from the solar absorber to cooler matter in its view above the warm glass plate.
All IR responsive gasses and solids in the atmosphere absorb long wave radiation from the surface and warm up. Accordingly they reduce the rate of heat loss from the surface into space but by reduced transmission not back radiation. There is no back and forth radiation. Energy only goes from hot to cold and it is rare for the atmosphere to be warmer than the land below.
When someone points an IR temperature gauge at a cloud, they are not measuring radiation coming back from the cloud but reduced radiation from the instrument to the cloud, which was calibrated using the Stefan-Boltzman relationship. Many cannot grasp this basic concept of EMR.
Heat energy spreads out…dissipates…it never accumulates. A hot object can be slowed in cooling by a nearby cooler object. Ultimately the hotter and cooler objects will attain the same temperature but the rate of cooling of the hot object was slowed by the cooler object……and the cooling of the cooler object was of course slowed by the warmer object…..due to the IR between the objects. The global warmists claim that the IR frequencies between the incoming daytime and the outgoing night time are not exactly the same frequencies and the night frequencies are more affected by CO2 than the daytime……hence it acts a little like a one way valve.
Many people seem to be under the impression that IR thermometers react to “cold rays”, which are apparently emitted by “cold bodies” (whatever they are).
Pictet and others believed that “frigorific rays” could be reflected and concentrated – they just didn’t understand what was occurring. Like Willis Eschenbach refusing to believe than gases like neon, argon etc. emit IR when above absolute zero.
“Once the bottom plate exceeded 100ºC, I swapped the cool glass with the hot glass . . . “
I may have misunderstood. Are you claiming that you can heat a surface to more than the boiling point of water just by putting it in sunlight with a piece of glass over it? Your bottom plate seems to be a black painted piece of cardboard on a piece of styrofoam, but maybe I missed something.
in any case, if you are suggesting that a piece of black painted cardboard under a sheet of glass can reach a temperature in excess of 100° C due to unconcentrated sunlight, you should be able to boil water with it – even droplets on your black painted cardboard, if you like.
I’m sorry, but I think you might need to look at your temperature sensor, if you think that water can be boiled by leaving it in the Sun.
Thanks.
Water evaporates in the sun.
Water evaporates off my skin in winter.
Yep that is indeed what happened. I actually got temperatures of 148ºC (Celsius, not Fahrenheit) with the box, putting 5 borosilicate glass plates above it.
The styrofoam insides greatly melted away when it reached these temperatures. It definitely got that hot, the sensors are calibrated correctly. See video evidence here: https://x.com/DaleCloudyman/status/1817179365882401067 .
Greenhouse ideas involve radiative emission from a higher average altitude, with the ad hoc lapse rate applied.
As the radiative windows are shuttered ever more, the surface radiative cooling to space diminishes. Subsequently, more radiative emission to space occurs from up in the atmosphere. This raises the average emission altitude to a colder temperature, and colder temperatures radiate less effectively.
That’s about all there is to it. Radiative emission to space occurs at a colder average temperature than the surface. In the process, an assumption is made that the lapse rate is fixed.
It doesn’t really matter how the energy is transported up into the atmosphere to be emitted. All that matters is that as the windows are shuttered, less radiative emission occurs from the surface and more from up in the cold atmosphere.
However! over the past several decades, the increased shuttering of the windows has been accompanied by a decreasing cloud mask. The decreasing cloud mask increases the surface portion of outgoing radiation by revealing more of the clear sky, and the radiative cooling temperature is compensated. In the process, however, more solar is absorbed.
There is no historical data for the height of the where this “radiative emission” occurs so we have no factual information on it.
The idea is that the average height is simply reflected in the average emission temperature of outgoing radiation, assuming fixed lapse rate. However, in observation this temperature is not decreasing – in fact, outgoing radiation intensity increases at a linear rate with surface temperature change.
This suggests an unknown constraint on greenhouse effect intensity. Greenhouse effect intensity is a consequence of a yet unidentified physical constraint. Additionally, greenhouse effect, by including emission from cloud, necessarily is not independent from planetary albedo. Greenhouse effect in the LW is coupled to planetary albedo in the SW in a fundamental way.
Greenhouse effect as it’s understood exists, while it also appears to be stable. The global warming forcing mechanism will not be found by looking at changes to LW flux intensity in any direction whatsoever, because greenhouse intensity is not changing.
So you agree with me. We have no historical data.
“As the radiative windows are shuttered ever more,”
I.e. more CO2, right?
“This raises the average emission altitude to a colder temperature, and colder temperatures radiate less effectively.’
More CO2 radiating less effectively does what to the total radiation?
can’t really parse the total radiation thing. The idea is the Earth glows less brightly in space when surface transmittance is diminished. Meanwhile. solar continues to pour in.
This is merely a semantic debate. “Heating” means something gets hotter, which means energy was transferred to it. “Cooling more slowly” means the insulation, which retards cooling, was improved. What exactly got hotter here?
Nuffin
All I know is there’s more missing heat-
Australia warned to prepare for another freezing weekend (msn.com)
OK when sitting on the front (north-facing) veranda in the sun, when the clouds aren’t there.
But that breeze is like….. brrrrrr !!
It is positive to read this section..
Indeed, the greenhouse effect theory has a large gap when it comes to the empirical demonstration of the greenhouse effect’s total effect on surface temperatures. It largely relies on a simplified calculation that shows the Earth’s average temperature would be -18ºC without any atmosphere. This calculation even includes the albedo effect of clouds, which would not be present without an atmosphere. Further it ignores all the distinctions listed above, and doesn’t account for the adiabatic lapse rate, which is the main reason why the bottom of the grand canyon is +50ºC warmer on average than the peak of Mount Everest. Such a lapse rate occurs entirely due to non-radiative effects, and therefore would have some effect even if the air were fully transparent to infrared radiation.
Yes indeed, the tropospheric lapse rate is unrelated to GHGs, unlike certain people claim. But it is also essential to the GHE, something one can not reproduce in a “hot box”.
“The cold that heats the warm” is actually this lapse rate, which again is not radiative thing.
The tropospheric lapse rate is affected by H2O, there are nice little formulas enabling the calculation of the wet lapse rate from humidity and other things..
CO2 on the other hand, has absolutely zero measurable or calculatable effect on the lapse rate.
True, but that is because it is a condensating GHG, with the emphasis on condensating. Its GHG property however is far less significant.
About 12 years ago I did some experiments. I don’t remember all the details but I used calibrated thermocouples and text various temperature measurements using mostly two half inch thick metal discs with the faces painted flat black. In the photo the disc on the right was heated to I think 200 F. The disc on the left was heated to somewhere around 100°. The room was climate controlled if I recall to 70° f. As I recall placing the thermocouples on the face of the discs and at the center of each disc did not show any increase of temperature on any of the surfaces of the discs. The only way I could get the temperature to rise was to heat up a 3-in steel ball to a certain temperature and wrap a thin layer of thermal wrap which caused the temperature to rise rapidly. Other experiments were done but unfortunately I lost all the pictures and data because I’ve since retired. I was a Sr. Metrologist.
I realize you may no longer have the details, but can you at least state the hypothesis being tested here? At a cursory glance it looks like your experiment may have elements of the so called green plate effect.