Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Abstract: Using the CERES satellite data, it is shown that over the last ~ quarter century, the increase in greenhouse gases has had no detectable effect on the global average surface temperature. On the contrary, the overall increase in available solar energy after albedo reflections is shown to be sufficient to explain the warming. In support of this, variations in available solar energy are shown to agree quite well with the variations in the observed temperature. Go figure.
I got to thinking again about how to measure the efficiency of the very poorly-named “greenhouse effect”, which has absolutely nothing to do with actual greenhouses like the one shown above. Here’s an overview of some of the major energy flows of the climate system.
Figure 1. Monthly surface upwelling longwave (thermal) radiation, along with solar radiation at different altitudes. Equivalent temperatures are calculated using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Seasonal variations removed.
The red line shows the 24/7/365 global average solar radiation that strikes the planet, 340 watts per square meter (W/m2) of planetary surface area. However, part of that radiation is reflected back out to space.
The orange line shows the 241 W/m2 of solar radiation remaining after clouds, aerosols, and the surface reflect some of the sunlight back to space. Other than a tiny contribution from the geothermal heat, this is the total energy entering the climate system. It’s all we’ve got.
Then aerosols, water vapor, and clouds absorb some of the remaining solar radiation before it hits the ground. The yellow line shows how much of the solar radiation is actually absorbed by the surface itself. At only 164 W/m2, it’s less than half of the solar radiation striking the top of the atmosphere.
Before moving on to further questions, please take a moment to look at Figure 1 and contemplate the surprising stability of the overall system. The clouds, ice, plants, and snow that determine the albedo are constantly changing on an hourly, daily, and monthly basis. Despite that, Figure 1 shows that the amount of energy entering the system (orange line) and the amount reaching the surface (yellow line) barely change from year to year.
Coincidence? You be the judge. But I digress …
Here’s the perplexitude. All solids and most gases are constantly absorbing and emitting longwave radiation. The amount of radiation emitted depends on the temperature, so this is sometimes called “thermal radiation”. And on average, because of its temperature, the surface of the earth is emitting almost 400 W/m2 of upwelling longwave thermal radiation. See the blue line at the top in Figure 1.
That’s the puzzle. Less than half of the 400 W/m2 energy flux that the surface is emitting comes from the sun. Where is the rest coming from?
The answer is that some of the upwelling longwave energy from the surface is absorbed in the atmosphere by clouds, aerosols, water vapor, and what are called “greenhouse gases” or “GHGs”.
At the same time, these clouds, aerosols, water vapor, and greenhouse gases are constantly radiating the energy flux they are absorbing from both the downwelling solar radiation and the upwelling longwave (thermal) radiation. Of course, it’s emitted in the form of longwave (thermal) radiation.
Since the atmospheric thermal radiation is emitted in all directions, about half of it proceeds to space and the other part goes downwards and is absorbed by the surface. And that downwelling thermal radiation is the source of the extra energy that allows the surface to radiate more than just what it gets from the sun. For further information on this question of the so-called “greenhouse effect”, let me recommend my post below.
Looking at Figure 1 reveals that we can measure the overall efficiency of this “greenhouse” system by calculating how much radiation the surface emits for each W/m2 it receives from the sun. Overall, the system receives about 240 W/m2 of energy flux from the sun, and just under 400 W/m2 is emitted by the surface. So the general answer is that the surface emits about 1.65 times the total energy flux that the planetary climate system receives from the sun (solar radiation after albedo reflections).
What I have just calculated, the amount of surface energy flux emitted per 1 W/m2 of incoming solar energy flux, is a measure of the overall efficiency of the greenhouse system. It measures how well the so-called “greenhouse effect” is able to convert solar energy into surface warming. I’ll return to this discussion of greenhouse efficiency in a moment.
Now, the blue line in Figure 1 above shows that over the period of record, the surface upwelling thermal radiation has increased slightly, by about 0.9%. That is because the surface temperature has increased. Here’s a closeup of the change starting in 2000.
Figure 2. A closeup of the surface upwelling longwave radiation shown in Figure 1 above (blue line in Figure 1). As in Figure 1, temperatures are calculated using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Seasonal variations removed.
The obvious question is whether this increase in the surface temperature is the result of increasing “greenhouse gases”, which are CO2, methane, water vapor, nitrous oxide, halogenated gases, and other minor greenhouse gases. According to the IPCC and the canonical theory, the increasing greenhouse gases are indeed what is causing the surface warming shown in Figure 2 above.
Now, if the increase in those GHGs is what has been driving the increase in surface temperature (and surface thermal radiation), that would show up as an increase in the efficiency of the greenhouse system. More greenhouse gases would absorb more upwelling thermal energy flux from the surface, leading to more downwelling energy flux. This would make the surface warmer for the same amount of incoming solar energy flux. That change would be reflected as an increase in the greenhouse efficiency as calculated above.
But as Figure 3 below shows, there’s been no observable change in greenhouse efficiency in the last quarter century.
Figure 3. Greenhouse efficiency, a dimensionless number calculated as the thermal energy flux emitted by the surface (in W/m2) divided by the solar energy flux entering the system (solar radiation minus albedo reflections). This measures how efficient the system is at converting incoming solar energy into increased surface temperature.
I must confess, I was surprised by this graph. I’d expected the efficiency to have risen somewhat due to the increase in greenhouse gases. But there’s no significant trend.
This is an important finding. Despite increasing GHGs, there has been no corresponding increase in greenhouse efficiency since the turn of the century. This means that whatever is driving the temperature increase shown in Fig. 2, it’s not increasing GHGs.
Note that I’m not saying that the GHGs don’t increase the downwelling longwave radiation. They do. They absorb more upwelling radiation and thus perforce, they increase the downwelling radiation. I’m saying that the increase in downwelling radiation is NOT showing up as an increase in surface temperature. If it were, we’d see it in the efficiency calculations shown above.
My next question was, is it possible that this greenhouse efficiency measurement is too crude to detect the expected change in efficiency from increased GHGs? To determine if this is the case, I looked at the change in efficiency that we’d expect to see from the increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases over the period. Figure 4 below shows the trend of the expected change in efficiency from increased GHGs (orange line).
Figure 4. As in Figure 3, but with the addition of the trend of the increased efficiency expected from the increase in the well-mixed greenhouse gases (orange line). Per the IPCC, the total effect of all greenhouse gases (GHGs) combined is about twice the effect of the CO2 alone. So in Fig. 4, the increase in total GHG radiation is calculated as twice the increase in CO2 radiation. See the end notes for the full calculations.
If the increase in surface radiation were the result of increased greenhouse efficiency from the increased well-mixed GHGs, it would show up in Figure 4 above as the efficiency increasing with a trend as shown by the orange trend line. So the greenhouse efficiency measurement is quite sensitive enough to detect the theoretical increase due to increased GHGs.
But in the event, since the year 2000 there’s been no such increase in greenhouse efficiency. There’s no such trend.
So … what’s going on here? That’s really two related questions.
The first question is, where is the extra energy for the known surface warming coming from? Clearly, it’s not coming from the increased GHGs, or we’d have seen an increase in greenhouse efficiency.
The second question is, what has happened to the increased downwelling thermal radiation from the atmosphere? We know that the increased GHGs are causing increased downwelling radiative flux because we can measure it from satellites … but it’s not causing increased surface temperature. We know that energy can’t be created or destroyed … so what’s happening to it?
Regarding the first question, the extra energy must be coming from the sun. Aside from the GHGs, it’s the only other game in town. To demonstrate that the sun is totally sufficient to explain the rise in the planet’s surface temperature/thermal radiation, Figure 5 below is a graph comparing the surface upwelling thermal radiation to the solar input radiation times the average greenhouse efficiency (~1.652).
Figure 5. Surface upwelling longwave (thermal) radiation in red. Black and black/white lines show the solar input radiation (TOA solar minus albedo reflection) times the average greenhouse efficiency (1.652).
Note how closely the variations in the output (surface radiation) correspond to the variations in the input (the amount of solar energy flux entering the system). Both show the same rise-level-rise-level-rise pattern, in the same amounts and at the same times. This shows that the changes in surface temperature are exactly what we’d expect from the change in solar input, given the average efficiency of the system as a whole.
In other words, a greenhouse gas explanation is not needed and is indeed superfluous over this period—given the known greenhouse efficiency, the surface temperature is responding to the change in solar input exactly as expected … while in the background, Occam quietly hones his razor …
Regarding the second question, which was … hang on, what was it? … oh, ok, it was, what has happened to the increased downwelling thermal radiation from the atmosphere, since we know it’s not warming the surface?
Let me refer folks to my post below entitled “The Details Are In The Devil”. It discusses the problem of relating changes in downwelling radiation to changes in temperature in an actively governed system, which is a large part of the answer to the second question.
Another part of the answer to the second question is in the following post:
There are more answers to the second question. There’s advection. There’s sensible heat loss from the surface. There’s Nino/Nina-driven transport of warm water to the poles to speed up energy loss to space. Then there are the giant natural refrigerators we call “thunderstorms” cooling the surface in a myriad of ways …
… but that’s enough for now. Further affiant sayeth naught.
Here, after a foggy week, it’s a bluebird day. I can see the sunlight on the ocean six miles (ten km) from my house, my grandkids are laughing in the next room, what’s not to like?
Best of life to all,
w.
The Usual: When you comment please quote the exact words you are discussing. I can defend my words. I can’t defend your interpretation of my words.
The Math: First, the required trigger warning.
Then, the data. It’s a small (20 kb) .csv file in my public dropbox here.
Next, the math.
The variables are:
coshort—the monthly atmospheric CO2 levels for the period analyzed
surf_lw_up_all_mon—monthly surface longwave up, all-sky conditions (not just clear skies)
toa_avail_all_mon—monthly available solar radiation after albedo reflections
themult—monthly efficiency factor as calculated in Fig. 3, surface thermal radiation divided by available solar radiation
coforce—monthly total GHG forcing in W/m2
theco—GHG forcing expressed as a change in greenhouse efficiency
The functions are:
log2—logarithm base 2
first—first value of a series
mean—average value
getfitted—returns the linear fit (regression line or trend line) of a variable as a series of values
Comments are whatever follows the hashmark “#” on a line.
The calculations in R computer language are:
> coforce = log2(coshort / first(coshort)) * 3.7 * 2 # monthly total GHG forcing over the period> theco = (coforce + mean(surf_lw_up_all_mon)) / mean(toa_avail_all_mon) # monthly GHG forcing expressed as a change in greenhouse efficiency> theco = theco - first(theco) + first(getfitted(themult)) # adjust it to start at the start of the red fitted linear regression line in Fig. 4.Discover more from Watts Up With That?
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I’m always grateful to see the excellent work you do and share.
However, in the real world we have Ed Flywheel Miliband…
To paraphrase the Ultravox song: It means nothing to him.
474 comments – a record. Lots of science discussion but the Net Zero is about political and economic power so is wasted on Miliband and all the ecozealots
The so called greenhouse effect is entirely due to large scale convective overturning of the entire mass of the atmosphere.
Heat (KE) at the surface is converted to PE (not heat) within uplift and back again in descent.
The delay in emission to space caused by that process adds to overall system energy content to raise the temperature at any given level of solar input.
Changing anything within the atmosphere just results in changes to the speed of overturning so that any thermal effects are neutralised.
That is entirely consistent with observations and with Willis’s thunderstorm hypothesis.
The recent warming is therefore down to solar induced cloudiness changes.
Not via any changes in aerosols but via changes in the general pattern of circulation.
The sun appears to have changing effects on the distribution of energy in the stratosphere which drives top down changes in tropospheric weather patterns and thus overall cloudiness.
Gravity creates kinetic energy..
The closer the surface, the more the kinetic energy… hence the more radiative energy.
Gravity is a large, always there, forcing !!
Stupid, but not a violation.
Denying that gravity is a downwards force .. ?
Gravity works on objects to change potential energy, at height, to kinetic energy as it gets closer to the surface.
That potential energy exist because of gravity.. PE = mgh
As gravity does its thing, that potential energy changes to Kinetic energy and the gravity term disappears. KE= ½mv²
This will increase the temperature, hence the radiation increases.
This is very basic physics.
Not what you said.
Gravity leads to compression of planet Earth and a little heat which then rises to the surface. It is estimated at less than 1 watt/m2. It is not the cause of surface temperatures being warmer than solar forcing would create. It isn’t CO2 either, but when you push pseudoscience, you won’t convince any real scientists.
But the gravity based thermal gradient is the reason there is more kinetic energy at the bottom of the atmosphere than say 1km altitude.
It allows the near surface atmosphere to retain more energy.
Exactly, but it doesn’t add any new energy. It simply distributes the solar energy unevenly.
Yes, with far more KE towards the surface.. 🙂
Hence the temperature gradient.
That’s right, but it’s not what you said above. You implied that gravity created more kinetic energy. It doesn’t. The energy comes from the sun.
Gravity just causes more molecules to be located close to the surface. When these are energized by solar energy the sum of their kinetic energy leads to what we refer to as temperature.
Solar energy is passed through the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. They are needed and with more of them close to the surface, it is warmer. However, there is a maximum warming level reached when saturation occurs. That’s why we don’t see in additional warming from adding more greenhouse gases.
If engineers ignored the effect of gravity, EVERYTHING would collapse… literally. !
But ignoring the effect of gravity in the atmosphere.. seems to be “the thing to do”
JFC.
I’m standing on the surface right now. How much kinetic energy do I have? I have a mass of 100 Kg if you need that for your calculation.
So, you are pushing down on the surface with a force of about 980N.
So the ground must be exerting an equal and opposite force on you… where does that force come from?
If you stood on a table.. where does the force stopping you falling, come from?
Tell me… If you take a 10kg weight and hold it stationary in front of you with a crooked arm… does that take any energy ?
But we are talking kinetic energy in the atmosphere… are you saying there isn’t any ?
The question was, I am standing on the surface right now, can’t get much closer than that, how much kinetic energy do I have? You didn’t answer the question. You started babbling about force instead.
As the moderator said. JFC.
If you were dropped from a height, the potential energy would convert to KE.. and you would realise that when you hit the ground.
When you are standing on the ground it must be exerting an equal and opposite force on you… where does that force come from?
Answer please… and the other questions.
Do you deny that the air near the ground has more kinetic energy that at higher altitudes?
Not following this but it’s vaguely reminding me of the paper not a single skeptic organization would publish with a main working premise that a change in gas concentration was governed by F=MA.
I recently was given the idea to have a section where we publish bad stuff we would reject. That paper was a doozy.
Willis’s entire article is a doozy, Charles… along with everything he thinks he knows about physics… are you going to reject this too?
The “kinetic energy” of the air is reflected in its temperature (Stefan Boltzmann’s law). Gravity’s effect on the atmosphere is the decrease of air pressure with height. Same thing with water pressure for the oceans. Since “gravity” hasn’t changed with time, it can hardly be used to explain climate change effects.
While the gravitational constant has not changed with time, planetary gravitational forces do.
The earth does not orbit the sun, but rather the center of gravity of the solar system. Take that and consider the moon. We can see the gravitational influence by watching the tides. To a lesser extent, the planetary alignments also affect gravity. Due to the sun, gravity is higher at night than during the day. Not much, but not zero.
I realize this is just a nit, but science needs to be precise and there are no absolutes wrt changes versus time.
“You started babbling about force instead.”
Do you deny that gravity acting on a mass, creates a force ?
I’m struggling to imagine how many intelligent users you chase off.
How is you babbling about a force when asked a question about kinetic energy equate to me denying gravity?
Don’t answer. You are pissing the moderator off and he’s probably pissed at me too for continuing to engage with you. Though leaving some of your boneheaded statements unchallenged isn’t good for the site either.
“a force when asked a question about kinetic energy”
Truthfully, I am not sure what you think !
The fact that you don’t seem to see the relationship between gravity, potential energy and kinetic energy in the atmosphere….. is a bit of a problem , though.
You aren’t a gas obeying the Ideal Gas Law, nor are you moving as a molecule from the atmosphere should be. If you were moving as fast as an atmospheric molecule, you would have measurable kinetic energy.
You also forget that you are moving through the universe at a pretty high speed, although that is immaterial in a closed system.
Kinetic energy requires movement. If something is standing still, it has potential energy.
Further.
Suppose you were standing on the middle of a long plank.
Where does the force to hold you up, come from ?
The last time I looked, Force wasn’t energy.
And with regard to WORK, (energy expended), the Force must act over a DISTANCE. If distance = zero, then work = zero. If you did no work, then you expended no energy.
And with regard to one of your earlier comments, if you hold a weight above your head you will get fatigued, yet you are doing NO WORK. The fatigue is in response to you holding your muscles in tension, (as tension members on both sides of your arm bones). Muscles consume energy when you are holding a force, but that energy is not the same as potential, nor kinetic energy.
And if you are standing on a plank, (like walking the plank), the force to restrain the plank is apparent in a bending moment within the plank. BUT, just like before, it is a pair of balanced forces. No work is being done.
Any more points need clarification.
That force coming from the bending moment in the plank is called strain energy..
Its units are Joules.
For mechanics calculations, it is often desirable to calculate work and energy in terms of stress and strain rather than force and displacement.
There is a direct relationship between strain energy and “work” (also in Joules) called the Work-Strain relationship.
I should also note, that a large proportion of structural engineering calculation and software relies on the Work/Strain relationship.
It is used to build “things”!!
In statics and dynamics we called it tension and compression. Work is done when a deflection is accomplished on a structural component.
This whole conversation is getting away from what happens. Force is primarily taught using Newtonian physics that work is forcexdistance. That is a basic definition. However, force does require the generation of energy which is a whole different thing. Look up the SI units for all this and work through how energy (Newtons) and distance (meters) are related to all this.
I can push a mountain with my bulldozer and expend a great amount of energy doing so, but I have done no work. One has to consider how units of measure are defined and how they should be used.
A book on a table must have opposite forces working on it, but no work is accomplished. Yet energy is expended.
Don’t get lost in the forest.
E = mv
F = mA
KE = mA = 1/2 mv^2
E = energy
F = force
KE = kinetic energy.
Work, you got right.
Take a zero mas bar and rest it on a zero point fulcrum at the midpoint. To each end suspend a mass, each equidistant from the fulcrum and each with identical mass.
The force of gravity pulls on the masses and the fulcrum provides an equal but opposite force to suspend the system. No motion, no work, as the forces counteract each other and no energy is expended. All of the energy in the system is potential.
Gravity applies to air molecules. In this case accelerating the molecules until they impact the surface. The molecules rebound but there is an exchange of energy. The surface gains and the molecules lose. Some.
Sorry but this is a misapplication of an example used in 1st year Physics to try to explain the idea of ‘work’ requiring a change in height.
To an observer EXTERNALLY it APPEARS you are doing ‘no work’ but as you clearly understand a person holding a plank ‘gets fatigued’ and its not just that your muscles are ‘in tension’. Its because your heart is pumping blood through your veins against the force of gravity (and since blood is viscuous, against friction in your veins etc.). So you ARE doing work, its just harder to calculate it in that its not just the simple application of E=F*d!
Again, do not misapply simplified ideas introduced in 1st year Physics to teach a ‘concept’ to real world activity. If the world was as simple as taught in 1st year Physics there’d be no need for Engineers.
I mean…you’re not wrong. But some might consider that a level of pedantism that misses the spirit of his point.
You keep on yammering away at the same thing. I asked you a question about kinetic energy, and you claim from that that I don’t understand or am somehow denying the existence gravity. Your leaps in logic are stupendous.
The answer to your idiot question is the plank holds me up. If I stand on a ladder, the ladder holds me up. If I stand on a bridge, the bridge holds me up. Are you quite done with kindergarten statements that have nothing to do with the discussion?
All of which has nothing to do with the question I asked you. Your kindergarten responses demonstrate that you don’t understand the question, so there’s no point returning to this thread to see what boneheaded response you come up with next.
“is the plank holds me up”
Where does the plank get the force to counter the force of 980N you are exerting?
“If I stand on a ladder, the ladder holds me up.”
Where does the ladder get the force from to hold you up ?
Suppose it was a balsa wood ladder…. would that hold you up ?
You seem to think that forces just appear from nowhere ! 🙂
If you get off the plank or ladder does it suddenly jump up into the sky? Well then it’s not applying a force to you.
The mass is just getting in the way of the Earth pulling you to the core.
Speaking of gravity, it is pulling on the atmosphere and concentrating the molecules closer to the surface which then leads to concentrating the heat closer to the surface – but it’s in equilibrium so it’s not the same as doing work to compress air in a pump. In the pump all the air has the same temperature and as soon as you let go the handle jumps back – gravity can’t stop pulling on the air.
Text chat is a highly difficult means of communication.
Nope. Solar is stll down until 2037. According to Gleissberg.
I am sure it is due to volcanic activities underseas, especially the Arctic, the Mediterranean, the Black sea and Antarctica. In fact, there is growing evidence El Nino is caused by more volcanic action in the SE pacific. You must remember that 70 % of all volcanoes are under water. …
Henry Pool:
“You must remember that 70% of all volcanic eruptions are under water”
Apart from Hunga Tonga, the only volcanic eruptions that have any climatic effect are VEI4 or higher eruptions that inject dimming sulfurous gasses into the stratosphere.
ALL El Ninos are caused by decreases in the amount of SO2 aerosol pollution in our atmosphere ,NOT underwater volcanic eruptions.
See “The Definitive cause of La Nina and El Nino events”
https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.17.1.0124
“the only volcanic eruptions that have any climatic effect are VEI4 or higher eruptions that inject dimming sulfurous gasses into the stratosphere.”
But what if there were thousands of black smokers quietly doing the same thing cumulatively?
Isn’t there a way that the dissolved sulphur in the sea water is carried into the atmosphere with the evaporating water?
I am busy looking in detail at same subject. Thx for the link.
Looks to me like both El Nino en la Nina originate from the same source in the SE Pacific. Amazing.
Burl
Pity. Link does not work. I was looking forward to reading it. Can you check for me?
Henry, here’s the link:
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2023-0124.pdf
Tread with care. Burl thinks that changes in airborne SO2 are the “definitive” cause of El Nino / La Nina events, but his paper contains heaps of special pleading.
w.
Willis.Many thanks! I was thinking that a major volcanic source in the SE Pacific at the same spot could produce water vapor and CO2 causing El Nino whilst when it changes and spews acids and Sulphur it could start a La Nina…..it is exactly what I see happening.But let me keep quiet until I have gathered more proofs.
Henry, you’ve claimed that ALL Ninos and Ninas are from volcanoes … sorry, that makes no sense.
You’ve also made the claim that all changes in global surface temperature are due to SO2 …
w.
Willis. I am still busy investigating. Some pictures of the warming and cooling from the sats are compellingly pointing to the same source of the warmth and the cold. But don’t confuse me Henry Pool with Burl Henry.
Why is this excellent and entirely correct post getting downvotes?
Stephen is definitely one of those who is “on the right track”.
Actually understands the conversion of Potential to/from Kinetic energy in the atmosphere. 🙂
Reduce longwave radiation down welling by banning hydrogen oxide emissions with mandated solidification convertors on emission sources (vehicles, aircraft, ships, trains, industrial facilities, etc.).
Come on you downvoters, That’s funny.
Climate activists are dumb enough not to get the joke.
I’m sure there are climate pseudoscientists preparing their barrage of stupidity to pounce on the hydrogen power bandwagon if it gets established. They won’t let society use even that super expensive fuel. They won’t be happy until we’re all dead.
Did you mean di-hydrogen oxide, perhaps?
Good work. Getting there. The one obvious thing that no one talks about is that for every photon that hits the earth’s surface from CO2, there are probably trillions of photons emitted by the earth itself. It’s called ‘Economy of scale’. You can’t measure it because it is several orders of magnitude below detection.
Every single thing on earth’s surface radiates photons constantly. That’s why infrared camera work.
The other obvious point is that no energy is ‘trapped’ in the atmosphere by radiative gases. That is because, if you could actually see a CO2 molecule radiate, it would look like a constantly on light bulb. They radiate constantly, in all directions. Like a flash bulb. They don’t ‘wait’ to absorb a photon, they are by definition radiating at all times as long as they are above 0K. If CO2 has ANY affect to the atmosphere, it would be to COOL it, not heat it. Atmospheric molecules are in constant motion, and in constant collisions. The collisions cause a transfer of energy. Because CO2 and other radiative gases are radiating, their energy declines. When they collide with a non-radiative molecule, energy is generally transferred TO the radiative gas, ‘cooling’ the non-radiative molecule. Understanding how microscopic atmospheric molecules work is key to understanding the atmosphere in total. CO2 is a good thing. Without it we would not be here.
“Getting there”??? Could you possibly be more unpleasantly arrogant?
w.
“Could you possibly be more unpleasantly arrogant?”
Ooooooh! Could you possibly be trying to defend the indefensible? Adding CO2 to the atmosphere does not make it hotter. Removing CO2 does not lower temperature.
Feel free to be as insufferably patronising as you wish.
Pass.
w.
Got me to thinking that both O2 and N2 have Raman absorption bands in the IR. These are very weak, but on the other hand, the concentrations of O2 and N2 are about 3 orders of magnitude greater than CO2’s.
What a load of rubbish!
Loeb says that GHGs are the cause of the increased ASR shown by CERES.
Sorry, bdgwx, but what is “ASR”, and who is “Loeb”?
A link here would be useful.
w.
I think that bdgwx is referring to the data in your figure 5:
Figure 5. Surface upwelling longwave (thermal) radiation in red. Black and black/white lines show the solar input radiation (TOA solar minus albedo reflection) times the average greenhouse efficiency (1.652).
TOA incoming sunlight does not show an increasing trend over the period, so the thing making solar change is albedo reflection – i.e. there is an increase in absorbed solar radiation, not an increase in TOA solar. Loeb, et al., 2021 show that this increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR) is indeed a response to changes in clouds and sea ice reflection. This change in albedo is a response to GHG driven warming (i.e. a positive feedback), it is not an independent change.
Also, a note about wording. This is in error:
Absence of a statistically significant trend does not mean the presence of a statistically significant non-trend – it simply means you can’t say if there is a trend or not given the variability in the data.
“Beware the tautology” applies also to this AJ quotation linked to the above: “This change in albedo is a response to GHG driven warming (i.e. a positive feedback), it is not an independent change.”
Everything Loeb claimed was based on guesses and models. It was laughable nonsense.
The TOA flux data Willis is citing comes from Loeb.
It comes from CERES satellites. Yes, Loeb is scientist responsible but that doesn’t make his papers valid. He has been obviously biased.
Guessing that this “Loeb” may refer to
https://terra.nasa.gov/people/dr-norman-g-loeb
Further, that “ASR” may mean (surface)-Absorbed Solar Radiation.
As to ‘The Cause’, this statement from Building-Wax (sorry bdgwx) only makes sense if the purported [‘Loeb says that GHGs’]-claim includes clouds-albedo / SW-reflections, isn’t that right?
Wasn’t that their story? — the danged clouds (reduction) got in the way, but don’t worry because that (the cloud reduction) could come somehow indirectly from the GHGs (increase).
Where there’s a will, one finds a way, that’s the motto [heavy sarcasm alert]
And by the way, don’t forget, Mr BridgeWax, to consider the ‘Bad Penny circulating’ (metaphor of Clauser or other spectroscopists?) in the CERES popular interpretations. Beware the tautology!
Absorbed Solar Radiation
Loeb is the principal developer, maintainer, and investigator of CERES.
[Loeb et al. 2018]
[Loeb et al. 2021]
[Foster et al. 2023]
[Blunden et al. 2023]
[Hansen et al. 2023]
[Hakuba et al. 2024]
[Minobe et al. 2024]
Note that Loeb was not the first to hypothesize the shortwave feedback induced by temperature changes. That was Manabe and Wetherald.
[Manabe & Wetherald 1967]
[Wetherald & Manabe 1988]
A brief high level summary of how it works is provided by Donohoe.
[Donohoe et al. 2014]
Next thing we’ll hear from Mr BDGWX’s bibliography report is how the atmosphere’s relative humidity remains constant (not!) as the sea-surface temperature increases: the fatal false-assumption from Manabe ’67 to Carney Report (late ’70s) ad infinitum ad nauseum
Are you employed as his agent? “While his contributions have been significant, Loeb feels like he still has more work to do. He hopes to one day see a multi-decadal climate data record of the Earth’s radiation budget to help improve our understanding of climate. When Loeb isn’t digging through satellite data, he enjoys playing squash, swimming, running and hiking.” — same source as cited previously
This is irrelevant and adds nothing to the discussion, and this and $2 won’t buy me a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but I have a really close friend who i’ve known since high school that works at LaRC and is a coauthor with Loeb on a couple of those papers.
Who is the coauthor?
It is shocking WE does not know ASR and Loeb !
ASR is Absorbed Solar Radiation, which was the subject of your article WE.
Dr, Normal Loeb, Ph.D., leads a large team dedicated to ensuring the success of CERES, from beginning to end. Loeb says working with and learning from this outstanding group of scientists and engineers has helped him grow professionally and personally. Loeb is a physical scientist at NASA La
It is important to mention that aerosols have the opposite effect. They decrease ASR. So if aerosols are reduced the ASR would be expected to increase as well.
Loeb mentions this as the cause of the increased ASR shown by CERES as well.
And here are the citations.
[Hodnebrog et al. 2024]
[Voosen 2024]
Ah. I see the difficulties. First, I was referring to the canonical claim that increased GHG forcing was the cause of the temperature increase. I found clear evidence that that claim is untrue.
However, I made no further claims. As you point out, Loeb says something and Manabe says something … but none of them are looking at greenhouse efficiency as measured by output divided by input and the implications of the fact that greenhouse efficiency does NOT show the expected trend from the known increases in GHGs.
So how about you stop trying to change the subject and you discuss my findings? Are you seeing any flaws in my logic or math? If so, now would be the time to bust them out.
w.
All these others resort to making stuff up to support their claims that our emissions are still the cause. Their jobs depended on it.
I’m just pointing out that Loeb says the CERES data is consistent with the prevailing hypothesis of GHG warming.
In regard to your specific analysis of the greenhouse efficiency I can’t say much yet because I am still unable to replicate your result in figure 3. When I compute UWIR / ASR from CERES I get a change in this efficiency of about 0.004 which looks pretty close to your orange line in figure 4. I don’t know why I’m getting a different result.
I’m using the following EBAF 4.2 Level 3b parameters and calculations.
UWIR: [Surface Flux | Longwave Flux Up}
ASR: [Solar Flux | Incoming Solar Flux] – [TOA Fluxes | Shortwave Flux]
GE = UWIR / ASR
There is a significant seasonal cycle in GE with a range of 1.576 to 1.744. Using a trivial 12 month moving average to remove the annual cycle I get a range of 1.649 to 1.659. The mean is 1.653.
BTW…this isn’t the first time there has been a discrepancy between our reporting and analysis of CERES data. It came up in the article here as well. Perhaps there is a difference in the way we are downloading the data.
Not sure why. Here’s my calcs. I’m using the same EBAF parameters and calculations.
I’m using 288 months (24 full years) of CERES data, Mar 2000 – Feb 2024. I first remove the seasonality by subtracting out the monthly average anomalies. The result is shown in my graph of Figs 3 & 4.
As you see above, the slope of the trend line is 3.6E-5 units/year (0.00004). This is far from the 0.004 you found. Not sure why.
Note also that the p-value is 0.275, and that’s without adjusting for autocorrelation. After adjusting for autocorrelation the p-value is 0.505. Either one shows the trend is meaningless.
Regards,
w.
Here is what I show.
Using a linear regression trend and an AR(1) model for uncertainty I get a change of +0.002 ± 0.007 over the period of record.
That’s like a 300% uncertainty. And we are supposed to believe your figures are meaningful with that kind of uncertainty?
Check your reading of the vertical-axis labels.
Eyeballing it roughly, it looks like 1.654 ± 0.002 [rms ‘uncertainty’] …
… which, is closer to 0.1% rsd ‘uncertainty’ better known as ‘deviation’, from 0.002 / 1.654 (x 100), correct?
Or, one may prefer to use ( 0.002 / 0.654 ), i.e. based on the 65.4% power gain, which would be ~ 0.3 % rsd.
NOT “300% uncertainty” per your comment.
“of +0.002 ± 0.007 ”
7/2*100 = 350%
The message says: “Using a linear regression trend and an AR(1) model for uncertainty I get a change of +0.002 ± 0.007 over the period of record.”
Perhaps you should read what you are replying to.
Much obliged.
And corrected: 0.002 as the rms deviation from the whole-period average of the ‘Greenhouse Efficiency’ measure.
And (coincidentally): 0.002 (± 0.007) as the change in same measure, over the whole period, i.e. per ~ quarter-century.
Willis, I spent some time going through a few different methods to estimate the expected change in greenhouse efficiency. I think +0.004 is pretty reasonable. Depending on method I got a range of 0.002 to 0.010 though. Either way the change of +0.002 ± 0.007 that I show is consistent with the expectation.
BTW…I should mention that I actually have more confidence in the higher end of the range of expectation values I computed than the lower end. So in the respect I think Willis’ orange line in figure 4 could be conservative.
Willis,
Is the orange line in Figure 4 just the direct effect (from CO2 + other GHGs) or does it also include the postulated indirect effects from CO2 on water vapor + other GHGs?
Direct effects only.
w.
Speaking of the findings, and sorry if someone already asked or answered this: if the world is receiving about 340W/m2 but radiating about 400, why isn’t the world cooling?
Is there about 60W coming up from the core of the Earth, or is the 400 right at the surface (like it actually says, now that I double-checked the wording in the graph…) so that some of it gets reabsorbed and emitted by the time the energy reaches the top of the atmosphere so things balance out at the hypothetical equilibrium temperature?
Btw, love your work on emergent phenomena – hope there is a Nobel in it for you. You found the world’s actual thermostat.
If I’m not mistaken, in the time of the Jurassic and Cretaceous, with 2500ppm CO2 and denser atmosphere, more active Sun, etc., still the average temperature was maxxed out only 10°C higher than now, probably due to the emergent phenomena you described, blocking the Sun’s energy from heating the Earth even more.
PC, the 400 W/m2 radiation is only from the surface. Part of that is absorbed by the atmosphere, and the result is that the total radiation from the earth is ~ 240 W/m2, the same amount that it absorbs from the sun.
w.
W,
“Part of that is absorbed by the atmosphere, . . . ” – and presumably vanishes, never to be seen again!
Whatever happened to the conservation of energy? You really don’t understand what you are talking about, do you?
Pass.
w,
Reduced albedo (and so increased ASR) has long been expected as a major feedback to GHG forcing. For example, Hansen 1984:
“There is substantial uncertainty in the quantitative value of these feedbacks. However, the most important feedback, due to water vapor, seems certain to be greater than one and is unlikely to be less than approximately 1.5. The ice/snow albedo feedback seems certain to be greater than one.”
Nick, like bgdwx you seem to be missing the point.
The greenhouse efficiency data clearly shows that increasing GHG forcing is NOT the cause of the post-2000 increase in surface temperature.
How about you stick to that question, thanks.
w.
Willis,
“clearly shows”
Not that clearly. There is actually a positive trend. How it compares to the trend you’d expect, I don’t know. Here is your plot with the level drawn:
,
As I said, no significant trend. In addition, it is FAR from what is expected.
w.
You big gotcha is level trend would be 1.652 but instead its 1.653. After 25 years GE has increased 0.001
FFS!
Climatistas like Stokes have never understood the concept of measurement uncertainty and significant figures, and never will.
What people here don’t understand is that saying something is not significantly different to zero doesn’t mean that it is zero. It just means that you don’t know much. It would be not significantly different to a whole range of positive values.
Yep. That’s why if you think something might be happening, you formulate the null hypothesis that there’s nothing happening.
Depending how close you are to being able to reject the null hypothesis, you can either call it a loss, go out and get more data, or go out and get better data.
What they cannot / will not understand is that your chosen “measure of the overall efficiency of the greenhouse system”* already incorporates all the observed optical effects of the atmosphere, whether from gases / vapors (including H2O & CO2 of course), from clouds, from ‘aerosols’ or whatever else may lie between the earth’s / ocean’s surfaces and the CERES satellite observatory.
Of course, they are all-too-aware that an infrared-absorbing gas (mainly CO2) has been added to the atmosphere, over the past quarter-century(+), in ever-greater quantities, such as can be calculated to perceptibly alter radiation fluxes (measured in space) or other thermometer readings (ground or atmosphere). All other things-atmospheric being equal. No need here to recount their disastrous choice to descend into the madness of infinite (+)-feedback loops not to say tipping points. (Even to build such parameters into gigantic GCM simulations that can barely manage to conserve energy / converge!)
So that now, when you have showed them how this observed ‘greenhouse system’ parameter-of-interest is imperceptibly changed, over precisely that quarter-century, they react as though you are trying to show them that the (assumed-positive) feedback is too small to detect. And so they want to tell you how you have neglected to consider the various atmospheric components that are part of their positive-feedback paradigm.
But, sadly for them, those components were already incorporated, as stated at the top.
Finally, if & when they grasp the main point and its logical implications, they will still say what a miraculous accident it must be — that the ‘negative feedbacks’ could so precisely cancel their beloved ‘positive feedbacks’ plus the entire primary effect itself.
Whereas it would’ve been far better, from the outset, to take seriously some form of ‘null hypothesis’, i.e. the possibility of internal control or self-regulation.
Best regards, — RLW
Are you saying increased humidity or increased cloud cover is predicted? It is well-known that the mid-troposphere humidity has not appeared. We also have reduced cloud cover over the last several years. I am not sure what your statement means or if it is correct. Please amplify.
Mr N Stokes may be stuck in a feedback loop and can’t get out of it.
Or, as in the most-famous quote of A.D. 2024,
“I don’t think that even he knows what he just said”
As we well know, CO2 causes any and all effects that are negative in the minds of climate alarmists. Willis just clearly demonstrated all of you were wrong.
Nick, But since 1948, specific humidity is up a we bit at the surface but down at altitude, quite a bit at 9 kilometers. See climat4you.com, climate+clouds button. Does this not suggest that the influence of water vapor is down a bit over the last 75 or so years?
And this is where the alarmism originated. My intuition has always been that the passive forcing of CO2 would be opposed by the other feedbacks (as a net effect) as per pretty much every single natural feedback mechanism on energy in nature hence ECS would end up being equal to or less than the forcing of CO2 alone.
Hansens alarmism was that special fearful alarmism that catapulted him to fame. He also thought earth could turn into another Venus. He was unbalanced to say the least.
But YMMV.
Loeb will say whatever he needs to to keep his funding. Hopefully, Trump will allow him to be honest.
If that is true then Willis’ analysis here is not valid.
I can see your mind is swirling now that Willis demonstrated AGW was nonsense.
I’m wondering if something isn’t clicking here. Loeb is the principal developer and maintainer of CERES. If he is saying whatever he needs to keep his funding then Willis’ analysis here is not valid because it depends on what Loeb says is happening with Earth’s UWIR and ASR.
What “isn’t clicking here” is that nothing real “depends on what Loeb [or anyone else] says is happening”. You’ve confused the results (observations, data) with the spokesmen (interpretation)!
Back in the real world, life goes on:
(i) the CERES-mission instruments on the various satellites are our unblinking eyes-in-the-sky, receiving signals and transmitting the readings …
(ii) the CERES teams are busy with never-ending (re)calibration checks of the instrument readings and organizing the output (datasets) for rapid publications …
and (iii) the CERES scientist-representatives are tasked, from time to time, with publishing reports that (after the usual sausage-making) may include various interpretive statements, relating precariously to whatever popular models & concepts that happen to be in vogue. And to “correcting past errors”* in those interpretations.
To think that this whole enterprise (i,ii), on which Eschenbach (as many others) have relied, may “depend on what Loeb says is happening with [the measured trends]” is just … what to say … out of touch.
—————————————
*For your convenience, repeated here is the quotation from May ’24:
It appears that the CERES team headed by Norman Loeb is correcting past errors. As pointed out by Howard Hayden … at the CERES Science Team Meeting, May 7-9, 2023, … Loeb presented graphics detailing the changing data… Despite substantial variations in ASR and OLR trends for ‘hiatus,’ ‘transition to El Niño,’ and ‘post-El Niño’ periods, NET trends are nearly identical in all 3 periods (within 0.1 Wm-2 dec-1). Implies rate of increase in planetary heat uptake is relatively insensitive to internal climate variability during CERES.” [Boldface added] In other words, during CERES the increasing greenhouse effect was insignificant even though according to NOAA data compiled at Mauna Loa show a CO2 concentration increased from 371 parts per million (ppm) in March 2000 to 418 ppm in March 2023.
I know who Loeb is. I’ve read his obviously biased papers. That is different than the data collected by satellites. Unless he starts adjusting the data, I will trust it.
He does adjust the data. He also interpolates and uses lots of modeling to produce the CERES dataset. [Loeb et al. 2018]
You are correct, bdgwx. That the warming is due to an increase in ASR (absorbed solar radiation, i.e. cloud reduction) is known and explained within the CO₂ theory and by models. Willis discovery is not such.
The problem is that the warming is attributed then to a feedback (cloud feedback) of the increase in GHG and not directly to an increase in GHG forcing. And feedbacks cannot be measured, so we cannot know if this attribution is correct or not.
This means that the hypothesis that the Earth is warming due to an increase in GHGs cannot be proven (nor disproven), and the alternative hypothesis that the Earth is warming due to a natural cloud reduction remains equally possible. Hardly the basis to impose climate policies on society.
Despite being generally accepted by most scientists, the enhanced CO₂-effect hypothesis of global warming has failed to provide solid evidence that it is correct. The failure to show an increase in the GHE, that Willis believes he has discovered since he doesn’t read the relevant bibliography, is a strong argument against the hypothesis. If the Earth was warming due to a reduction in OLR (outgoing long-wave radiation), we would know the hypothesis is correct. As it is warming due to an increase in ASR, other hypothesis are equally possible and we could be completely wrong about climate change.
Javier, like others you missed my point. It was not whether the absorbed solar was a contributor to the warming.
My discovery was that the efficiency data shows that there was no effect on the temperature from the increased CO2 forcing. As far as I know, no one has noticed this before.
Regards,
w.
You cannot possibly know that. Temperature is affected by multiple things. Not even multiple variable analysis can rule out an effect from one of them. Your “discovery” will not be accepted because you haven’t proved your point. The most you can say is that the energy emitted by the surface is proportional to its temperature which is proportional to the energy received from the Sun, its only source, all of which is trivial in nature. You have no information from this data on the magnitude of the feedbacks to the GHE increase, which from the definition of feedback, can modify the input to the system.
If it was so easy to disprove the CO₂ hypothesis it would have been disproven long ago.
There’s no convincing reason why Willis cannot do UWIR / ASR and call it greenhouse efficiency with an approximate value of 1.65. It does go up when the surface warms and albedo stays the same. Whether UWIR / ASR is the best metric to use may be debatable though.
For once I agree.
I also think Willis could add ocean influence to improve the graph even more. The affect of ENSO on his numbers jumps out. There also appears to be slight PDO influence. I suspect this is the result of warmer oceans adding a little more/less energy to the atmosphere.
Willis, I’ve been explaining why no increase in greenhouse warming is possible for a few years now (physics) and I have explained the warming was mainly due to cloud reductions.
You have provided data which verifies what I have been saying and that is probably even more important since most readers and WUWT appeared to ignore my descriptions.
‘The problem is that the warming is attributed then to a feedback (cloud feedback) of the increase in GHG and not directly to an increase in GHG forcing.’
The scramble from the original alarmist ‘canonical’ narrative of direct GHG forcing to the current model-inspired paradigm of indirect GHG forcing via cloud feedback has been going on for years. (My brief summary, below).
What’s should be obvious to any disinterested observer is that from the distant past to the present, i.e., from CENOGRID deep sea cores, ice cores and CERES measurements, there is absolutely no evidence that variations in atmospheric CO2 levels have had any impact on the Earth’s surface temperatures and climate.
I think we’re way overdue to take a critical look at some of our most closely held tenets, particularly the near universal belief that Schwarzschild’s radiative-centric model for energy transfer is applicable throughout the troposphere.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/01/16/cloud-reduction-global-warming-crgw-101-a-competitive-theory-to-co2-related-global-warming/#comment-4024342
Interesting. Thanks for posting this. I haven’t paid nearly as much attention as you have to this line of argumentation.
But in respect to models, I have no reason to trust any diagnostic claim about GCM representation of feedback or clouds. E.g., here is a 2018 paper from GFDL (Zhao et al 2018b) openly describing the tuning of cloud parameters – “We calibrate AM4.0 TOA radiative fluxes (OLR and SW absorption) toward the observed values primarily through tuning the parameters related to cloud processes.”
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017MS001209
I say this with respect for the GFDL co-authors for the transparency of the tuning work.
Thanks. And thank you for continuing to highlight the GOES data. Speaking of ‘tuning’, I forgot where I saw the reference, but apparently ‘they’ve’ updated their estimate of solar isolation at orbit by an amount that would equate to about 1.5 W/m^2 on ‘average’, which is way more than their estimate for TOA energy imbalance (EEI). Needless to say, there’s ‘nothing to see here, move along’ in their re-tuned models.
“average”
How do they calculate that “average”? Take nighttime. An exponential decay in temperature. That means nighttime radiation is also an exponential. You can’t just take (Tstart + Tend)/2 to find the average value – unless you are a climate scientist.
Low cloud cover is reduced during the warm phase of the AMO.
A warm AMO is driven by negative North Atlantic Oscillation conditions (i.e. due to weaker indirect solar forcing), while rising CO2 is expected to increase positive NAO conditions, which can only drive a colder AMO.
Wow, this is interesting, Willis. Thank you.
Amen, Brother.
P.S. So you are the same ‘David Dibbell’ who has had several rather technical articles (postings*) over the past decade, is that correct correct?
If I recall correctly, you expressed a serious concern about the capability of the CERES satellite detectors to represent adequately the reflected solar radiation aka ‘albedo’ effect. Something about the inability to measure directly the specular (keyword: ‘Specular‘, as opposed to ‘Diffuse‘ reflective component).
As I recall, other readers / commenters (not to be named here, but similar to the Loeb’s-Knows-All club active in these threads) rushed to the defense of the CERES operation, assuring us all that you were incorrect, that the CERES database took everything that is important into account.
Or, contrarily, that the ‘specular reflection’ doesn’t need to be measured directly (even for a quiescent sea surface!) because one can just calculate it from the index-of-refraction of pure water for any angle of incidence … therefore it’s a known-unknown / unchanging parameter of no interest.
Is that more-or-less correct & complete, or have I missed something that gave a more satisfactory resolution to your concern? Yes, I have tried to ‘look this up [my]self’ but couldn’t get a straight answer. And it’s highly annoying to read that the Official Definition of Albedo explicits in stating that only Diffuse Reflection / light scattering is considered, thus excluding the specular component of the reflected radiation!
*Such as this one:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/16/wuwt-contest-runner-up-professional-nasa-knew-better-nasa_knew/
Yes, I am the author of that 2022/05/16 post.
I have indeed posted comments at WUWT about the inability of the CERES data to independently establish a value for the claimed EEI (Earth’s Energy Imbalance), but I have not raised the specular vs. diffuse concern.
(See Loeb et al 2018, in the abstract about the uncertainties, and in section 3) “TOA Flux Adjustments” about the adjustment to produce the EBAF dataset and in connection with EEI. https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0208.1 )
I hope this helps.
Willis, where you say…
“Since the atmospheric thermal radiation is emitted in all directions, about half of it proceeds to space and the other part goes downwards and is absorbed by the surface. “
You are thinking single dimension.
In reality, about 68% of that radiation has more horizontal component than vertical component.
ie.. most radiation is horizontal.
If you look at the surface of the Earth, (in a model), and you assume flat, then the radiation that goes sideways is reabsorbed by the adjacent molecules and is subsequently emitted again, this time in a different direction, up or down. It’s not lost by flowing out the side of the model.
However, in the real world, the Earth has a near spherical surface. If the height of the CO2 molecule is zero, (on the surface), then the molecule has exactly a 50% chance of emitting downward as upward, with downward hitting the surface of the Earth.
But when you lift the elevation of the CO2 molecule, the surface of the Earth becomes less than 50% of the emission targets. Effectively, the Earth curves away as the relative sky percentage increases.
It would be expected that an emission from a molecule in the atmosphere becomes less Earth bound as the altitude increase. Is this included in the models or is it excluded?
As an example, at an altitude of 10km, the horizon is about 3 degrees below a flat plane. So the sky is 186 degrees, the land 174 degrees. Surely this elevation would increase the percentage going to space.
I have thought the same ever since I heard the GHG theory. Unless gravity is bending the trajectory of the emission.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/21lo0t/just_how_much_does_earths_gravity_bend_light/
This link shows some calculations for the amount of bending near the Earth. If the sums are correct, I think we can ignore that.
And based on my observations, I can’t disagree with the sums. If the bending was anywhere near the 3 degree, (as above for an altitude of 10km), then if flying in a plane, the world would look flat.
I’m not saying the Earth is flat. I’m sure you’re not either, let’s hope someone doesn’t pick up on this and claim that if gravity bent light more, we’d be living on a flat Earth.
/s as required for that last bit.
I wouldn’t want to give the FE’s any ammunition. 😉😂
Eng-Ian, I am also an engineer(RPEQ Chem) but one with very much experience in heat transfer. One of the things you have forgotten is the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I have had discussions with ChatGPT and with the AI recommended by WE ie perlexity.ai. They both have confirmed the the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies spontaneously at every point of heat transfer. Radiation will only occur from hot to cold. There can be no back radiation. Secondly, it is wrong that radiation occurs equally all directions. That can only happen if a source is completely isolated in a vacuum, and is spherical and composed completely of the same material with the same emissivity. The sun does not radiate to the Earth the same all the time because 1/ the distance changes, 2/ the surface temperature of the sun changes and 3/objects (eg the moon) may get in the way. I have experience with flames in furnaces. The flame radiates to the load (eg a glass furnace) and heat is lost to the exhaust. Very little or no heat is lost from the insulated furnace walls. Emissivity of the source and receiver are important factors in the rate and quantity of heat transfer by radiation. With a natural gas flame the emissivity can be changed by configuring the burner to crack the CH4 to give some carbon. I have worked with flames and gases in range of 70C to 3500C. I suggest that the vast number of scientists have no actual experience with any type of heat transfer. Climate Scientists do not understand (or lie) about the basics of heat transfer.
For EW I suggest that you ask perplexity.ai for proof that radiation occurs equally in all directions on our Earth surface or a small distance up in the atmosphere (where it is colder) above the surface.
Climate invokes a special kind of fisiics that can never be validated by actual measurements. WE has the surface radiating at 399W/m^2 because the surface temperature is at 289K.
The models have been adapted to produce the cloud response on average. What they cannot replicate is the actual spatial changes being observed. Cloud has reduced at all latitudes except a small region of Antarctica and a few degrees just north of the Equator:
?ssl=1
Fiddling climate model parameters to get the spatial data anything like what is occurring is a tiresome task.
As time goes by, and the models need constant adaption and retuning to approximate observations, they will eventually wake up to the fact that CO2 influence is immeasurably small.
Cementafriend, your understanding of radiative heat transfer is from century old textbooks before Planck’s law was determined to be a necessary addition to radiative heat transfer engineering. It works for simple heat problems of conduction and convection but not for doing radiative heat loss calcs. I’m sure a brief review of some engineering problems associated with heat transfer from electronics components in an enclosure will show you the importance of “back radiation” in the calculations. Radiation DOES occur from cold to hot, but NET radiation occurs from hot to cold, so the 2nd law is valid. Maybe for your purposes you can consider radiation to be electromagnetic waves…and they aren’t “heat” until absorbed by a surface. Helped me in my heat transfer masters level courses, now a half a century ago…
Thanks, DMac. You are 100% correct. Lots of folks misunderstand this issue. I discuss it at length in my post “Can A Cold Object Warm A Hot Object“.
Here’s a fun consequence: If you light a candle on a clear day, the sun gets warmer …
w.
My favorite demonstration of a cold object warming a hot object is the JWST sunshield. When they unfolded the shield the sun-side layer got warmer while the mirror-side layer got colder. It is a real world example of Eli Rabbit’s green plate effect just with 5 plates instead of 2.
A more practical demonstration is that of a kitchen oven. If you turn it on high so that it doesn’t cycle with the door open the inside temperature will eventually achieve steady-state. If you then close the colder door the warmer inside will warm further. It is a simple experiment that anyone can do in their own home.
Yeah, Eli’s thought experiment is horribly broken.
He claims adding a second plate behind the first increases the temperature of the first due to the first plate warming the second and then the second plate warming the first. He claims 18K increase in his example.
So move the second plate to be in contact with the first plate and suddenly the additional energy disappears.
Something is very broken with that argument.
And yet the JWST sunshield proved it correct.
That’s what was shown by the JWST. When the layers (plates) of the sunshield were in contact the temperature on both sides stabilized while the satellite lingered at L2. When operators then issued the command to begin separating the layers (plates) the sun-side layer (plate) began to warm while the mirror-side layer (plate) began to cool. This warming and cooling proceeded as the layers (plates) continued separating and until a new steady-state was achieved allowing the operators to proceed to the next step of commissioning.
This was the whole point of the sunshield and separating the layers.
And yet it is the only solution that remains consistent with the 0LOT, 1LOT and 2LOT. Any other solution can be shown to violate one or all of these laws.
Eric Swanson performed the experiment and described the results here.
Dale Cloudman performs an experiment with a similar theme and described the results here.
Regarding the Dale Cloudman experiment
Dale claims to be answering the debate
And then sets up his experiment and changes out the top (glass) plate with a warmer one and shows the bottom plate warms up
But what he doesn’t do is shade the sunlight at the time he changes the top plate.
So the sunlight is what is causing the temperature (ie energy) increase because the replaced “warmer” top plate is making the bottom plate cool more slowly and hence warm up more in the sunlight.
What you appear to be claiming, bdgwx, is that even in the absence of that sunlight, the bottom plate would warm up once the top plate was replaced with the warmer one.
This is incorrect because both plates are radiating energy and the bottom plate at 100C is radiating energy much more quickly than the top 60-70C plate can supply energy to replace it.
They’re both cooling down.
I haven’t read the thread and there are a lot of posts but I do wish I’d been part of it at the time.
The sunlight was not the cause of the bottom warming beyond 100 C. The sunlight could only get it to 100 C and no more. The cause of the bottom warming beyond 100 C was swapping the original glass plate which was at 30 C with one that was at 60-70 C. It was the glass plate swap that caused the bottom to warm beyond 100 C. It is clear…the placement of that 2nd glass plate, which was cooler than the bottom, was what warmed the bottom further.
Don’t hear what isn’t being said. Neither Dale nor I claimed that either glass plate was heating the bottom. They weren’t. This is because heat is the net flow of energy which was from the bottom up toward the glass plates. However, that in no way changes the fact that the 2nd glass plate caused the bottom to warm regardless.
Nope. I never said that. What I’m claiming in no uncertain terms is that a cool body can be the cause of a warm body getting warmer. And there are countless example of this happening all around us.
BTW…I specifically mentioned the sunshield sun-side layer so that no one could possibly (or so I thought) accuse me of forgetting the Sun. And as I’ve mentioned in explanations in other posts regarding this topic an input of energy into the system is essential for this effect to play out.
Its clear you dont understand what’s going on. The warmer top plate did enable the bottom plate to warm beyond its original equilibrium temperature but it didn’t warm it to that new temperature. The sun did that.
The warmer top plate only had the impact (by itself) of slowing the rate of cooling of the bottom plate. The warmer top plate did not have the capability (by itself) of warming the bottom plate.
You might think it amounts to the same thing but it most certainly does not and impacts one’s thinking on how thermodynamics works.
Here’s how the experiment would have gone if Dale had shaded the apparatus when he replaced the top plate with a warmer one…
The bottom plate would have started at 100C and slowly dropped.
Here’s how the experiment would have gone if Dale had shaded the apparatus but left the original plate in place…
The bottom plate would have started at 100C and more quickly dropped.
Without sun, the plate was never going to warm beyond its equilibrium temperature.
The cooler object could not warm the warmer object where “warm” means increase the temperature beyond where it started.
No it didn’t. The temperature was stuck at 100 C. The amount of sunlight didn’t change. The only thing that changed was swapping the glass plate. It was the swap that caused the warming beyond 100 C.
No. Cooling means ΔT < 0. The temperature of the bottom plate never decreased. There was no slowing of the cooling because there was no cooling to begin with. I think what you actually mean is that the swap of the top plate reduced the net flow of energy from the bottom plate to the top plate.
No one disputes that. That still doesn’t change the fact that a cooler body caused a warmer body to warmer further. There is no way to get around this fact.
This is where your thinking breaks down. The bottom plate is always cooling at a rate set by its emissivity and T^4. The sun is warming it at the same rate as its cooling. That’s it being in equilibrium and is 100C
When the warmer top plate is added, it radiates more energy towards the bottom plate than the previous cooler top plate did.
None of this we disagree on.
Our disagreement comes next where you claim the top plate warms the bottom plate above its previous temperature and I claim the top plate slows cooling of the bottom plate allowing the sun to warm it to a new higher equilibrium temperature.
My argument is that in absence of the sun the warmer top plate does not warm it to the new higher equilibrium temperature and so is not doing the warming. Only the sun is capable of warming the bottom plate beyond the previous equilibrium temperature. The top plate, being cooler than the bottom plate, can’t do that.
So in summary you can argue adding the warmer top plate is causal to the new bottom plate’s higher equilibrium temperature but you can’t argue it warmed it to that new temperature. There is a difference.
The Stefan-Boltzmann law says the radiant exitance of body is set by its emissivity and T^4. It says nothing about what T is doing.
The bottom plate is warming; not cooling in Cloudman’s experiment.
When the bottom is in a steady-state it means Ein = Eout. It is impossible for the warming rate to equal the cooling rate except when those rates are zero. Remember temperature cannot simultaneously change such ΔT < 0 and ΔT > 0.
What you actually mean is that the radiant flux F inward is matched by the radiant flux outward such that Fin = Fout such that ΔE = 0 and ΔT = 0.
No it wasn’t. Cloudman proved that wasn’t possible.
Yes it can. Cloudman proved that is was possible.
Of course I can argue that and be justified in doing so because Cloudman’s experiment proved it.
Don’t hear what isn’t being said. Neither I nor Cloudman said the top plate heats the bottom plate. And I’m always extremely careful with my words when describing this behavior because the term heat in thermodynamics has a very specific meaning. It means the net flow of energy. The net flow of energy is always from the Sun => Bottom => Top => Air.
He didn’t prove that. He didn’t do enough experiments to prove what was happening beyond proving a causal relationship between a warmer top plate and warmer bottom plate.
Good. Because that’s certainly one interpretation people can make from your arguments. And one interpretation that can be made from statements that suggest a cooler object can warm a warmer object….without also explicitly acknowledging the other warming source which is crucial to that claim.
Right. But its the most crucial thing to explain if you want to convince people the greenhouse effect is real. Putting a jumper on a dead body doesn’t warm it up but that’s the thrust of what you’re pushing and its not surprising people push back.
That doesn’t explain the greenhouse effect though because the effect is caused by the modulation of the Eout flow as opposed to the Ein flow of energy.
This discussion is related to the contrarian myth that the GHE is a violation of the 2LOT. Like is the case with the JWST sunshield or Cloudman’s apparatus the GHE does not violate the 2LOT. The flow of heat is still Sun => Surface => Atmosphere => Space consistent with the 2LOT.
People think it violates 2LOT because of your argument!
When the argument is properly made that the sun can warm the earth a bit more than it used to because the earth is cooling more slowly then there is no apparent breaking of the law.
When you argue the cooler atmosphere warms the surface then you are arguing a position that does break LOT2 on the face of it.
Do you think heat flow along the path Sun => Surface => Atmosphere => Space a violation of the 2LOT?
Do you think the 2LOT applies to systems that are not isolated like the surface and atmosphere only?
The Earth isn’t cooling. It can’t cool more slowly if it isn’t cooling at all. What you actually mean to say is that the Earth is shedding energy at a lower rate.
Regardless the the warming is caused not by a change in the input from solar radiation, but by a change in the output of terrestrial radiation impeded by GHGs. The Sun isn’t what changed in this case. It is the concentration of GHGs that change. Therefore GHGs are the cause of the change in the climate system.
No it doesn’t. The 2LOT says that heat flows from hot to cold in an isolated system evolving by its own means. Heat is not flowing from the cool atmosphere to the warm surface in the isolated Sun-Surface-Atmosphere-Space system. It is flowing from Sun => Surface => Atmosphere => Space. But even if you constrain the system to just Surface-Atmosphere it still wouldn’t violate the 2LOT because the Surface-Atmosphere system is not isolated evolving by its own means. Remember, the 2LOT only applies to isolated systems evolving by their own means.
An example of a familiar system where heat flows from cold to hot is the air conditioner in your home. This does not violate the 2LOT because your air conditioner is not an isolated system evolving by its own means.
The earth is always cooling. And the sun is always warming it. The difference is whether its net cooling or net warming.
Its most definitely cooling on the night side.
But if it makes more sense to you to use the terminology that the earth is radiating energy rather than cooling then sure.
Is correct from a causal point of view. But incorrect from a process point of view and impacts one’s thinking and leads to the idea that a cooler object can warm a warmer one.
You’ve said so yourself and people push back on it because its not true and does defy LOT2 in, and of, itself. The statement is only true when combined with warming from the sun.
Try this. Does the following statement break LOT2 or not?
— bdgwx
And the answer is yes, it breaks LOT2 in and of itself. And the reason it breaks the law is that the statement needs the part that states the warm object is continually being warmed by something else for that further warming to occur. Its not implicit.
However it is always correct to say the cool object can cause the warmer object to cool more slowly and this is irrespective of any other warming that may be happening.
I’ve posted this elsewhere but it bears repeating. Using “averages” to compare heat-in and heat-out is incorrect. It’s a common failing of climate science and statisticians. If temperature goes up because of more energy intake then the the “cooling” goes up as well since is an exponential decay. f(x) = a(1-r)^x. If “a” goes up then so does the integral of f(x), i.e. the heat-out. The heat-out isn’t based on the average value of the exponential decay but on the integral of f(x).
No. It most definitely does not violate the 2LOT. And it’s good that it doesn’t because then air conditioners, refrigerators, over doors, the JWST sunshield, and countless other examples would all violate it.
What the 2LOT says is that heat (net flow of energy) cannot flow from cold to hot in an isolated system.
Note that the isolation clause has historically be been described with various verbiage including “when the system is evolving by its own means”, “without some other change”, “spontaneously”, and others.
This means that the 2LOT doesn’t even preclude heat moving from cold to hot in all cases. That is only true for isolated systems.
The 2LOT is the most misstated and misrepresented physical law in blogs.
I think you’re still conflating the concept of cooling which means ΔT < 0 with the concept of energy loss Eout > 0. Those are two very different concepts.
You cannot slow the rate of cooling of a body if the body isn’t even cooling.
What you can do is slow the rate of energy loss. Slowing the rate of energy loss such that ΔEout < 0 is one way of making a body warm.
If body B (whether warmer or cooler) is the cause the decrease in the energy loss of the body A resulting in an increase of temperature then we say that body B was the cause of body A getting warmer.
All those instances involve additional energy.
An air conditioner works because work is done on the gas to compress it, same for a fridge. The “door” argument involves a heating element for an oven door and simply does not work for a room door in and of itself.
Close a door to an unheated, cold room and it doesn’t warm up above the temperature of the walls. But you can slow the cooling.
Its vital to the argument “a cold object warms a warm object” to add that the warm object is also being warmed by something else. Without it, the statement is false, breaks LOT2 and causes people who dont have that knowledge to believe in incorrect physics.
I’m not sure why you’re persisting with the jwst sunshield as an example. From what I can see it just not an example of the plate thought experiment at all.
You’re claiming things about it that didn’t happen like non conductive separation when you want there to be an increase in temperature due to the “plate effect”
Its not the plate experiment if there is conduction between the layers and there almost certainly was at the initial deployment. They started out touching and there was no process to separate them until later.
That increase in temperature you say is caused by the plate effect corresponds to the sunshield being exposed to the sun and then at actual separation, when it happened, there was a temperature drop which is opposite to what you wanted to show.
Yes. It is vital. Nobody is challenged that.
What gets challenged constantly by contrarians is that cold bodies cannot be the cause of warm bodies getting warmer.
That is what I’m addressing and I’m doing so by mentioning the common scenario of a kitchen oven and its door that everyone can experiment with. It should be intuitive and indisputable.
Your own preferred video showed the green plate effect.diagram.
It was already exposed to the Sun.
As I already said the temperature drop was expected. The tensioning increased the separation distance so that some of the radiation leaks out the edges. This will cool all layers.
And just to be clear I’m not saying the green plate effect explains all of the temperature changes. I’m just saying that the JWST sunshield is a real life example of it happening and the temperature changes are not inconsistent with it.
And clearly NASA designed the sunshield with this effect in mind because they have diagrams showing it.
Because “cause” has too many implications that are usually unstated so there is no wonder it gets pushed back on.
There are fewer implications when you say the colder body slows the cooling of the warmer body. That stands on its own and is less prone to misinterpretation and mistaken thinking around it too.
But I cant convince you so please continue to make the argument as you see fit.
The whole spacecraft was exposed to the sun. Boom extension is (afaik) when the sunshield was initially unfurled from whatever tight packaging it had during flight, and that started on new years eve according to the guy interviewed in the video.
So around 31st-1st one would expect the sunshield to become directly exposed to the sun and increase in temperature. That’s what your temperature graph showed.
It showed a diagram of layers directing radiation to the edges so that subsequent layers were being exposed to less radiation. That’s not the plate effect. The plate effect is that a subsequent layer facilitates warming of the front layer which is exposed to the sun.
If you’re saying this is an example of the plate experiment then you’d expect the temperature to increase, not decrease. That’s the whole point of the plate experiment.
Post hoc arguing decrease just undermines the argument.
NASA designed it for maximum cooling of the instruments behind the shield, not to have the front of the sunscreen increase in temperature as per the plate thought experiment.
The plate thought experiment is interesting but the jwst just isn’t a practical demonstration of it.
Except that it is patently false. Like I keep I saying you can’t slow cooling if it isn’t cooling at all.
You can convince me by showing that the 0LOT, 1LOT, and/or 2LOT are wrong.
You can convince me by showing that the isolation clause in the 2LOT was a mistake.
You can convince me by showing that air conditioners, refrigerators,
Yep.
Yep.
The sunshield surface area increased. Increasing surface area does not increase the radiant flux (in W.m-2) received from the Sun.
No you wouldn’t. In the green plate thought experiment the separation distance is irrelevant. Whether it is 1 mm or 1 m makes no difference.
Where the separation distance does matter is the edge leakage effect. The further apart the layers the more energy leaks out the sides. The expectation is for a drop in temperature and radiant exitance of all layers.
Yep. And to do that they have to decrease the energy flow on the mirror-side of the sunshield. Where do you think that energy is getting redirected?
So you really don’t think there is a steepening of the temperature and radiant exitance gradient between the layers?
Except it is cooling. And warming at the same time for net change of zero if its in equilibrium.
Why does it matter? Because the cooling energy is long wave energy and the warming energy is short wave energy and they have different properties.
When you consider it to not be cooling you miss this and consequently your understanding of what is happening with further processes, is going to be faulty.
One side of the craft was pointing at cold space. Do you know where the temperature sensor was located relative to that before the boom extension?
Albedo almost certainly changed with boom extension too.
Suggesting the temperature increase at the time of the boom extension was due to the plate effect is just wishful thinking. Many changes were happening that are (IMO) much, much more likely to result in the temperature increase that was measured.
The plate experiment has the front plate having a higher temperature when two separated plates are involved.
The front of the sunshield dropped in temperature when clear separation happened from your graph. That undermines your argument the jwst is an example of the plate experiment. Its not rocket science.
But being 0mm in places makes all the difference in the world.
And what has the insulative effect of the layers got to do with the plate experiment?
The data doesn’t demonstrate the plate experiment which is an increase in temperature of the front layer that is separated from layer(s) behind. The data actually suggests the opposite.
No it isn’t. Read Cloudman’s experiment. T of the bottom plate is increasing. It stopped increasing at around 100 C. Then he swapped the top plate and T starting increasing again.
I consider it not to be cooling because it isn’t cooling.
Why?
It’s due to the law of physics.
The idealized green plate thought experiment is with no edge leakage. The real JWST sunshield had the layers separated sufficiently to leak energy out the edges.
The edge leakage effect does not turn off the green plate effect.
Yes. Which I already mentioned. LIke I said this is the expected result. A lowering of the temperature on all layers is consistent with the edge leakage effect.
No it doesn’t. This the fallacy is so common it has a name. Affirming a Disjunct. Just because the JWST demonstrates the edge leakage effect does not preclude it from also demonstrating the green plate effect.
That is the green plate effect.
The consistent with this effect. Once initial separation occurred the temperature went up. Now it may have gone up for a combination of reasons, but the green plate effect is among them. The laws of thermodynamics so say.
We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this. But the disagreement is definitional. You believe cooling always means dropping in temperature, I believe cooling means radiating energy away.
So substitute “radiating energy away” if it makes you feel better.
Because the surface of the sunshield is as close to perfectly reflective as they could make it but the configuration of the pre-extended boom package was almost certainly less reflective than that.
No, but it undermines the argument that jwst is an example of the green plate effect. The green plate effect is a particular result that the jwst just doesn’t show.
But you’ve used the argument that jwst is an example of the plate effect and therefore supports the thought experiment that is the plate effect. But it clearly doesn’t from the data.
You dont get to just say:- Well it would have if it wasn’t for other factors.
It either supports the argument because it behaves as per the expected result which is a warmer front surface or it doesn’t. And it doesn’t
Lol. No it isn’t. The green plate effect isn’t that something shaded from the sun is cooler than if it was in the sun.
You keep telling yourself that.
It does. And this isn’t a case of unjustified pedantry. Cooling means a decrease in temperature. Nothing else.
It’s the same material. If there is any difference in albedo it would be lower when it is packaged and higher when it is unpacked. So if that was the dominating factor we would expect the temperature to drop when the sunshield was spread out.
But it does show it. The radiation transport between layers 1 and 2 is higher than between 4 and 5 where 1 is sun-side and 5 is mirror-side. This also creates a gradient of high temperature on 1 and low temperature on 5. The gradient would be less if there were 4 layers and higher if there were 6 layers.
You’re right. That effect happens with only 1 layers. As I said just above the green plate effect is what happens when there are multiple layers.
That’s what the data shows.
Here is the Wiki on that
Its not mandatory.
We have Newton’s law of cooling
No mention of temperature drop there, its about “heat loss”.
But if you’re confused by the idea an object can be cooling at the same rate its warming and hence be in thermal equilibrium, then please review everything that has been said in the light of this.
Or not, depending on the location of the sensor relative to the sun at the time. They also manoeuvred the whole thing around at that time to cool the deployment motors. All bets are off as to causes of temperature changes at the sensor at the time of deployment.
Here is the green plate effect straight from Eli’s website
The green plate effect as named by Eli is about the result “second plate raised the equilibrium temperature of the first by 18 K“
Since you’re hung up on definition rather than understanding, you may want to rethink your position on what it actually is.
It doesn’t. But again we’ll have to agree to disagree on this. IMO the inevitable conduction between the layers prior to separation invalidates any argument you have.
Well yes. A body can lose heat and still not cool if it is under going a phase change. But that is irrelevant because the bottom plate was not losing heat nor was it undergoing a phase change.
Yes I know. I’m the one who posted the link and the link to the follow article showing the math as you add more plates.
Yep. And the second plate is 24 K lower than what it would have been without the green plate effect.
In a 5 plate arrangement it would have been +23 K and -59 K respectively.
And this is a crucial point. The warming on the hot plate is less than the cooling on the cold plate. That is consistent with the data provided by NASA.
What do I need to rethink?
There is no need to disagree. I posted a graph of the temperatures.
The layers are 1/20th of a millimeter thick. 1/20th!!
When all the layers are compressed they are only 1/4th of a millimeter.
The layers were folded 12 times. That is a total thickness of only 3 mm at least if perfectly packed which probably isn’t the case.
Conduction will equilibrate the temperature through the bulk rapidly with both faces radiating equally. This is the configuration prior to the green plate effect.
After the sunshield is unfolded and extended with the initial separation of layers the green plate effect rebalancing occurs with the expectation that there is a higher radiant exitance and temperature on the sun-side and lower radiant exitance and temperature on the mirror-side.
After the sunshield is tensioned the exit angles on the edges increase significantly allowing energy from all layers to leak out the sides with the expectation that the radiant exitance and thus temperature of all layers will decrease.
The expectation is consistent with the data.
You posted a graph of temperatures during the boom extension, Separation happened days later.
Didn’t happen. You just made that up. The sunshield was unfolded with the boom extension but the layer separation happened 3 days later. Its well documented.
After boom extension, you’re assuming no conduction between the sun side layer and at least the next layer after that initial boom separation. There’s no evidence of that and no expectation either. It wasn’t part of the strategy that I’ve seen.
Conduction at places over the layers that were tightly packed together and are the size of a tennis court, is inevitable IMO.
I’m assuming that when the sunshield extends, its sun side sensor is exposed to the sun and heats up. Its the simplest explanation for the data and fits with the fact the temperature increase is nearly instantaneous but the extension took about 7 hours.
I genuinely dont understand why you keep claiming this. Actual separation happened 3 days later. Its documented. You’re claiming incidental separation with the boom extension results in the green plate effect. Its just not plausible.
I posted a graph covering the whole commissioning.
Remember the sunshield expansion also separates the layers. It’s certainly not a lot of separation like what happens when tensioning, but its separation nonetheless.
Can you show me the documentation that says the layers remained compressed?
How did they keep the layers compressed in a weightless environment?
No I’m not. I even talked about this specifically. I said that conduction is significantly reduced except where the layers are still sagging and in contact. I didn’t say there was no conduction at all. BTW…I struggled with the proper word to use there because sagging isn’t actually possible. The layers are all free floating at L2 so they wouldn’t actually sag, but I felt it would get the point across that some some contact area would inevitably remain. How much? I don’t know, but I do know it will no longer be 100% nor will it be 0%.
They are no longer tightly packed after the expansion. But like I said in my original post it is inevitable that some contact areas remain so that probably limited the temperature increase on the sun-side and limited the decrease on the mirror-side.
It was always exposed. You can see this in the data. You can also look at the sensor on the sun facing side of the equipment package.
The layers are free floating.
Why?
No it doesn’t. Separation and tensioning is a separate process. Show me where there is an expectation of initial separation. The layers only have to be touching in some places for conduction to happen and break the green plate effect and without separation that’s almost certainly going to be the case.
What you can see in the data is that the temperature increases almost instantly at the time of boom extension. You don’t know that the sun side sensor was exposed prior to boom extension. The whole craft was turned to cool the extension motors prior to it happening. That’s documented too.
It took 7+ hours to extend the sunscreen. How do you explain the near instantaneous jump in temperature?
But not separated so almost certainly touching before separation and tensioning.
Let me follow up this statement by asking a specific question.
If the green plate effect isn’t plausible with the JWST sunshield then why have 5 layers?
If the green plate effect isn’t plausible with the JWST sunshield then why is the mirror-side layer so much colder than the sun-side layer?
It not only is plausible, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the front surface would have been warmer than it would have been if there were no back surfaces.
But at the same time because of the design the jwst is not a practical demonstration of the effect because the design of the jwst has the cooling enhanced by the additional surfaces, not reduced.
With more efficient cooling, the whole thing’s temperature is reduced and so it’s just not an example of the green plate effect.
Oh and regarding the green plate effect from Eli…
No. Somewhat unsurprisingly you dont understand what Eli was trying to show. Or you’re just being obstinate which actually seems more likely.
Eli started off with this
And he was trying to show that the front plate would warm with the addition of the back plate.
He wasn’t trying to show the back plate would be cooler than the front plate, that’s an artefact of the experiment and crucial to the result, but its not what the green plate effect is.
He starts with what it is, and ends with it restated in terms of the thought experiment and calls it the green plate effect. And its the warmer front plate.
Yes. That is literally how the math works out. That is the hot plate gets warmer and the cold plate gets colder.
He is showing that a cool body can make a warm body warmer. It is the whole reason I mentioned it.
Exactly.
It’s two sides of the same coin. Or in this case two sides of the same multi-plate system…literally. You can’t have one result without the other. Anyway, my point was that the asymmetric temperature behavior arising as a result of the green plate effect is also manifest in the data NASA provided as well. It just so happens that the warm side of the system isn’t that important in the JWST example. It’s the cool side that is critical in that case. That in no way changes the fact that the green plate effect plays out in the JWST sunshield.
And a cooler back plate. Warm got warmer and cool got cooler.
How is the back plate cooler? That’s not part of the effect. If anything it gets warmer when the front plate warms.
The back plate is exactly the temperature set by the radiation from the back of the front plate. By definition.
It’s actually a good example of how the feedback is negative. Eli doesn’t go into it but when the front plate warms due to the effect, the back plate must also warm because its warmed by the radiation from the front plate and so the rate of cooling must increase for the system overall.
And the new equilibrium temperature at the front must be lowered to compensate.
It must radiate at 133 W.m-2 as opposed to 200 W.m-2 to bring the system back into energy balance.
No, it doesn’t. The math is clear on this matter.
When the front (blue) and back (green) plates are in contact the front-left side is radiating at 200 W.m-2 and receiving 400 W.m-2 while the back-right side is radiating at 200 W.m-2 and receiving 0 W.m-2. The plates are in thermal equilibrium (0LOT) and a steady state (1LOT ΔE = 0) with both plates at 244 K.
Then you separate the plates. Suddenly the back (green) left and rights sides are receiving 200 W.m-2 and 0 W.m-2 respectively but the plate itself is radiating 200 W.m-2 on both sides. The back (green) plate’s energy budget is no longer balanced. The amount of energy going out is higher than it is coming in so the plate has to cool.
If you disagree see if you can figure out a way to comply with the 0LOT, 1LOT, and 2LOT while keeping that back (green) plate at the same or higher temperature.
In a 2 plate system yes. In a 3 more plate system then no. Read the follow up post for the math that describes a multi-plate system.
No it doesn’t. The back plate (green) cools for the reason described above.
The temperature of the front plate (blue) must be raised to bring the system back into energy balance.
That’s not part of the effect, you’re just making it up as you go along to desperately try to not be wrong.
The plates were never in contact to begin with. The back plate doesn’t cool down to equilibrium as part of the experiment.
The plates are separated and come to equilibrium via radiation at the outset. That’s how its described and shown in the diagrams. Eli specifically says it heats up to be in equilibrium.
This is how Eli sets up the experiment
In my research lab I conducted experiments in a reaction vessel in an oven where I wanted to measure the temperature of the reacting gases. For this I used a fine wire thermocouple to get the necessary time response. The trouble was that the wire lost some energy to the surrounding cooler oven walls and so gave a lower temperature than the gas (basically T^4-Tw^4). In order to reduce the error I put a glass tube between the the TC wire and the oven wall, now the heat loss is reduced because the tube temperature was hotter and the ThC registered a higher temperature due to the reduced net heat transfer. In both cases there is radiational heat transfer from ‘the cooler to the hotter’.
That a great example of the effect in an industrial environment.
Its an interesting thought experiment. I’d say that once the sun gets warmer, it expands so that its rate of fusion decreases and reduces its output. My intuition tells me the overall warming would be less than the energy from the candle alone.
a couple of points
Whilst true, this isn’t the point. The point is that, at least in principle, energy from the candle makes it to the sun to warm it.
Also true but the sun is huge so the IR has plenty of opportunity to be absorbed by any elements the sun has created (beyond helium) that might momentarily be found as bonded compounds. The chances of the compounds existing only has to be miniscule for it to occur given the size of the sun…in principle.
Anyway, its only a thought experiment and is a useful exercise.
Willis,
Your appeal to your own authority states “there is a block of wood between you and a block of ice, if you remove the wood, you’ll get colder because you will be absorbing less radiation from the ice than you were from the wood. You no longer have the wood to shield you from the ice.”
Complete indefensible nonsense. Your living body will absorb precisely no radiation from anything colder than itself. You obviously believe in “cold rays”! Sorry, Willis, no such things exist – except in your fantasies.
What Willis believes is there is more radiation directed at you from a block of warmer wood than there is from colder ice. Hence you’re warmer with the block of wood between you and the ice.
Its the same effect you feel at night when there is a very clear sky and its cold vs when its cloudy and is warmer. The cloud is between you and the coldness of space.
Pass.
w.
W,
You wrote –
“If you light a candle on a clear day, the sun gets warmer …”
So if you have a big block of ice radiating the same total energy as the candle, also exposed to direct sunlight, the sun gets warmer? You say the darndest things, Willis.
Keep us all laughing.
Pass.
w.
‘I’m sure a brief review of some engineering problems associated with heat transfer from electronics components in an enclosure will show you the importance of “back radiation” in the calculations.’
Finned heat sinks and fans that enhance convective cooling are essential to preventing the enclosed electronics of your PC from failing. It’s also essential to read the instructions before installing canned lighting or bulbs in areas or enclosures that hinder convective cooling. A good thought experiment would be to inquire how well any of these devices would work in a radiative only media, i.e., a vacuum.
To your point, no good engineer doubts that all surfaces radiate, and that this mode of energy transfer needs to be taken into consideration. But I think there is a problem with loosely extrapolating the science of of measurable radiation from a surface to the modeled ‘back radiation’ from greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the troposphere for the simple reason that in the lower troposphere GHGs in an excited state are overwhelmingly thermalized by collisions with non-GHGs gases before they can spontaneous emit photons.
Electromagnetic radiation is not bound to the laws of thermodynamics. Thermal energy transfer (heat) is from hot to cold. Unfortunately so many words have become conflated and confused. Thermal radiation being one of those.
It is still bound to the laws of thermodynamics because according to Stefan-Boltzmann, a warmer object emits more energy than a colder one (in a T^4 relationship). Hence energy is net radiated/transferred from the warmer object towards the colder one.
But that doesn’t mean the warmer object cant receive energy from the colder one.
The important thing to understand is that the colder object radiating towards a warmer object cant “warm up” the warmer object, but it can effectively slow the rate of cooling of the warmer object.
This is what is happening to the earth. The sun warms half the surface and the whole of the earth radiates to cool. The greenhouse gasses slow down that cooling so that overall the earth retains more energy at the surface and is warmer.
And then feedbacks make it extremely complex.
A cool object can definitely cause a warm object to warm further.
This happened with the JWST sunshield when they unfolded the layers. The warm sun-side layer got warmer while the cool mirror-side layer got cooler.
An although not constrained to radiation like the JWST the door on your kitchen oven is another example of the more generalized concept. If you turn your oven on high so that it does not cycle the inside temperature will achieve a steady-state with the door open. If you then close the cooler door the warmer inside will warm further.
You still haven’t figured this out, have you? If the oven door is “cooler” than the oven it should *COOL* the oven when you close the door, not warm it!
And yet it warms it!
No, the oven heating element warms the oven.
Closing the door changes the system configuration. With the door open you have an open system where the oven can exchange mass and energy with the surroundings. With the door closed you have a closed system which can only exchange energy with the surroundings.
You have changed the convection, conduction, and radiation equation by closing the door. This will result in a changing temperature inside the system.
Your understanding of thermodynamics is at a elementary school level.
You don’t need to worry about explaining your rejection of the fact that closing the cooler door of a kitchen oven will cause the warmer inside to warm further. I already know that you reject this fact and can’t be bothered with doing the experiment yourself. I will say what is new this time is that you actually think that action will cause the inside to cool down.
“You don’t need to worry about explaining your rejection of the fact that closing the cooler door of a kitchen oven will cause the warmer inside to warm further.”
That’s not actually what you said and implied. You said: “A cool object can definitely cause a warm object to warm further.” implying that the cooler object (the door) warmed the thermodynamic system known as the oven.
It hasn’t got anything to do with the *door* warming the inside. It has to do with changing the system from an open thermodynamic system to a closed thermodynamic system. Thus the convective part of the system known as the oven is lost. The cooler door didn’t warm the inside, it merely changed the system configuration.
Keep squirming and trying to change what you actually said. It’s all recorded here on the internet. You are going to have a hard time convincing people you didn’t say what you actually said.
‘If you turn your oven on high so that it does not cycle the inside temperature will achieve a steady-state with the door open. If you then close the cooler door the warmer inside will warm further.’
I’m sure that’s true in the perfect vacuum of your kitchen. For those of us in the real world, closing the oven door will cause the oven to warm further because it is no longer cooling by convection into the cooler kitchen.
Yes, if the kitchen was in a vacuum and the oven was turned on with the door open the oven would have a certain temperature as measured say in its middle.
Close the door and the temperature will increase because there is no longer that path to radiate energy away directly.
Now the whole oven has to warm up until the energy it radiates from the top, bottom, sides and door equals the electrical energy warming it.
It works in the standard atmosphere too. The only difference being that instead of just radiation there is now convection in play as well. But the result is all the same. The closing of the cooler door is the cause of the warmer inside getting warmer. No violation of the laws of thermodynamics needed. In fact, it is precisely because of these laws that we know what the result will be before we even do the experiment.
No vacuum needed. I encourage you to do the experiment and prove this out for yourself.
Yes, our oven heats up / cools down whenever we close / open its door. My point was that you consistently downplay the heat transfer impact of convection. Instead of considering a very hot oven in excess of 500 F, consider opening a door or large window in a room at 70F on a very cold day – the room will cool very rapidly notwithstanding that every surface in the room is still radiating.
That is just patently false. I talk about convection all of the time. I even mentioned that the example of the oven door was not constrained to radiation like the JWST sunshield. Convection is definitely a huge component of the total Eout of the oven; maybe even the dominant component. But that’s irrelevant. Closing the cool door is the cause of the warm inside getting warmer regardless. That’s the point. Cold bodies can and do make hot bodies warmer. It happens all of the time.
It is astonishing how many people reject this simple and intuitive fact. We even have one of the Gorman’s above who thinks that closing that door to the oven will actually make it…wait for it…colder. That claim is so mind blowingly absurd it almost defies credulity that anyone nevermind someone who claims to have a BSEE would seriously consider that. But here we are…
“Closing the cool door is the cause of the warm inside getting warmer regardless.”
You keep talking about a “cool” door. It doesn’t matter what the temp of the door is. Just say “closing the oven door causes the oven to warm because it changes from an open system to a closed system”.
“Cold bodies can and do make hot bodies warmer. “
Again, it doesn’t matter what the temperature of the door is. It could be at 1000C when it is closed and it would still cause the oven to warm to the same temperature as a door starting at at 0C. It’s what the heater in the oven does in an open system vs a closed system that determines the temperature of the oven.
Turn the oven off and close the door. The oven will cool over time.
Nope. The sun warmed the sun side. And it cooled slower so got warmer relative to what it was. Without the sun, it wouldn’t have warmed up.
Nope. Its the electric energy from the oven doing the warming, not the door. The door slows the rate of cooling.
Put it this way, an oven that is turned off has the same temperature with or without the door closed.
Ok. I’ll just remember that you reject the fact that separating the cooler layers from the warmer layers of the JWST sunshield had nothing to do with the warmer layers getting warmer.
Ok. I’ll just remember for next time that you are one of the ones who doesn’t think closing the cooler door to your kitchen will cause the warmer inside to warm further.
I do have to ask…did you even bother doing the experiment?
The kitchen experiment is pointless as the energy transfers are clearly dominated by convection. Everyone has had that experience every time they open an oven.
The jwst sun shield is about insulation, not warming. The energy was to be directed outwards as per the NASA quote
So your argument hinges on the warming of the top layer increasing as the individual layers separated but I haven’t been able to find that data.
https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html?units=metric
Just gives a structure average. Do you have a reference?
Replying to myself, I think I have an explanation to the surface side warming – assuming that’s what happened.
The design of the multi layer sun shield is to keep the energy from getting through to the back where the instruments are and has the passive effect of directing the energy out the sides to help.
This a cooling effect and hence for the same sunlight incident on the front, there should be an increase in energy flowing through the shield which can only come from a front surface increase in temperature.
So bdgwx is going to have to do more work to convince me this is an example of the Eli plate thought experiment.
Irrelevant. The laws of thermodynamics do not discriminate between modes of energy transmission. Putting a cooler body (the door) into the system causes the warmer body (inside) to warm further all the same. Whether that happens by action of radiation, conduction, or convection is irrelevant to the fact that cool bodies can and do cause warm bodies to warm further and it can happen with any or a combination of those three energy transmission modes.
The big jump on the sun-side and drop on the mirror-side on 1/1/22 was caused by the separation of the layers. This forced the system to rebalance and achieve a new steady-state.
The slight decline on 1/4/22 was caused by the tensioning of the layers which allows more of the radiant exitance of the cooler layers to leak out to space without fully impinging on the sun-side layer.
Not according to the Wiki which says
2021 December 31, initial deployment of the telescoping booms to support and unfurl the sunshield.[34]
2022 January 3, initial tensioning and separating of the first three layers of the sunshield.[35]
Separation occurred on the 3rd not the 1st. Your claimed jump is when the thing was initially unfurled and unsurprisingly rapidly increased in temperature as it was exposed to the sun.
Here is a video of an actual test deployment (on earth) and you can see the final tensioning does indeed involve the layer separation. Its the very last step.
https://youtu.be/IBPNi7uGgWM?t=443
Do you have an actual reference (as opposed to a screenshot) to back up your claim?
But at the heart of this is your claim (and Eli’s claim) that a separated back plate enables the front plate to warm beyond its initial equilibrium temperature.
So what is it about the radiated energy that enables warming that conduction in the case where the plates are touching, does not enable the warming?
Or if both cases allow for warming then what is the mechanism in simple descriptive terms?
The boom extensions on 1/1/22 (or 12/31 EST) creates the initial layer separation. It’s not a lot and I’m sure there is significant sagging especially in the middle where they continue to touch, but they are separated at this point with very little edge leakage because the separation is small. The tensioning does separate them more, but that doesn’t increase the green plate effect except by maybe eliminating the remaining contact area where there was sag. The big impact of the increase in the separation distance is to provide the edge leakage effect. But you don’t need 5 layers to create that effect. All you need is 2. It would have been cheaper and less risky to only use 2 layers as opposed to 5.
It is important to recognize what the math says is happening when you increase the number of plates in a multi-plate system. The ratio of the radiant exitance of the hot plate to the input is given by n/(n+1) while the ratio for the cold plate is 1/(n+1) where n is the number of plates. That means for a 5 plate system the hot plate radiates 5/6 of the input while the cold plate radiates 1/6 of the input. As n increases the incremental change in radiate exitance declines thus you get diminishing return with each new plate. The Rabett Run blog describes how this ratio can be derived using the SB law and 1LOT here. Note that this is the only way to comply with the 0LOT, 1LOT, and 2LOT and have the system in a steady-state. Any other value for those radiant exitances would violate one or more of the laws of thermodynamics.
What is different with the JWST vs the idealized green plate scenario is that the JWST leaks (by design) radiation out the edges of the plates where as the idealized green plate scenario is assumed to have only an infinitesimally small separation and thus no leakage between plates. This significantly alters the radiation budget of the system. When I get time I’ll see if I can’t calculate how much radiation is lost given the number of plates, the separation distance, and the edge flare out distance.
And here is a screenshot of the YouTube video showing the green plate effect.
It is important to point out that the timelapse in this YouTube video is mainly showing the tensioning of the layers. It looks like the boom extension had already completed. And remember, this timelapse was done on the ground where gravity is compressing the layers. There’s no compression effect at L2 so once the boom extension completes the layers are free floating and separated.
You can see from the actual test video boom extension is not separation. Separation is a separate event where the layers are moved apart.
Even if I grant some incidental separate parts, before separation the sunshield is more like swiss cheese and is most likely touching in many places. With so much conduction, It’s just not an example of the plates.
The boom extensions is when the thing is exposed to the sun. Of course the temperature is going to climb sharply. You’re going to have to do a lot better than that to claim it’s any floppy, incidental separation that has anything to do with a temperature increase.
You’re making it up as you go along.
But let’s say you’re right and now effectively a solid with swiss cheese holes in it acts like the plates, where do you see any further increase when the proper separation happens?
It’s easy to see how the plate thing works from the diagrams and maths. But its not easy to see why the plate thing breaks when the plates touch and the energy flow becomes conductive.
Perhaps you could explain this to me.
Never mind, I’ll explain it so that the answer makes sense and isn’t some borderline law breaking description.
Consider the two plates to be a system that is warmed from the front.
When the two plates are touching, efficient conductive transfer of energy happens and cooling is maximised, particularly at the back side which is where the difference will come from.
When the two plates are apart, less efficient energy transfer takes place and cooling from the back of the back plate is reduced. It cools more slowly as a system.
Because it cools more slowly (as a system) it will have a higher equilibrium temperature and it will warm at the front.
I don’t think this is correct. This is the reasoning that says the Earth will turn into a burning cinder because of increased CO2 retaining more and more heat – i.e. CO2 “traps” heat. If CO2 trapped heat it would have turned into a cinder long, long ago.
Heat radiation coming in from the sun has to balance radiation out to space. If CO2 temperature goes up it radiates at a higher intensity. That is a negative feedback that drives temperature back down as the heat causing the increased temperature is radiated away. At best you might see a small oscillation around an equilibrium point because of the variable of “time” but measuring that oscillation probably can’t be done because of the coarseness of our instrumentation.
The balance equation is ΔT ∝ΔT^x. (I use x as the exponent because the earth is not a perfect black body)
This caps the maximum temperature the earth can reach. Since radiation-out goes up faster than Temperature, at some point you can’t raise the temperature any further – unless you increase the heat input to the system. CO2 is not a heat source, it can’t raise temperature by itself. And the sun’s contribution is pretty much constant, at least over small time periods.
Greenhouse gasses don’t “trap” heat in any way to make it bound, they absorb the IR energy from the surface and transfer it to the atmosphere near to the surface …and then absorb energy from the atmosphere to radiate to space higher up in the atmosphere.
That’s not a process whereby the energy is trapped, its one where the energy stays in the atmosphere longer. At least in principle before feedbacks.
“That’s not a process whereby the energy is trapped, its one where the energy stays in the atmosphere longer. At least in principle before feedbacks.”
Heat is energy. If the retention causes energy (heat) to remain in the atmosphere then that energy (heat) *is* trapped. Trapped heat will ultimately result in the earth being a cinder as more and more energy heat) gets trapped.
I think what you are trying to say is that the “slowed” heat is eventually lost to space, just at a later time. That makes the retention time basically meaningless as far as the earth’s temperature is concerned. If the sun causes the earth’s temperature to go up during the day then the decaying exponential nighttime heat loss starts at a higher temperature. That means that *more* heat is lost early in the decaying exponential – in essence the area under the temperature curve goes up.
The formula for a decaying exponential is f(x) = a (1-r)^x where a is the initial value and (1-r) is the decay factor. If “a” goes up then the area under the curve goes up as well.
This is part of the problem with climate science – it ignores the physical realities in order to be able to “simplify” the whole thing by using averages.
Averages don’t tell you that the nighttime temperature is a decaying exponential where the area under the curve (i.e. the total heat loss) goes up as the starting temperature goes up. It’s a negative feedback factor if you will.
Climate science also ignores the fact that the heat loss occurs even during the day! As the sun forces a sinusoidal temperature curve, the daytime heat loss remains a decaying exponential. Since the heat loss is an exponential it goes up faster than the sinusoidal temperature – a negative feedback. Using a mid-range temperature as an “average” value for daily temperature hides this physical reality.
Specifically I said
So yes, I said slowed.
Further to this, I think use of “trapped” when describing how green house gasses interact with IR is about how GHGs absorb the IR energy (ie the GHG traps it on the way past) rather than the energy being trapped in the atmosphere so it can’t escape.
Once the energy has been absorbed (ie trapped) by the GHG from the surface, it’s typically transferred to the O2 and N2 via collision.
There is no implication GHGs stop the energy from leaving the atmosphere, in fact they’re crucial for radiating out to space from the upper atmosphere.
“There is no implication GHGs stop the energy from leaving the atmosphere, in fact they’re crucial for radiating out to space from the upper atmosphere.”
If the heat is actually lost, even if by thermalization rather than radiation, then what drives the temperature at the surface to go up?
Thermalization and convection is a *negative* feedback, a cooling process, that drives the temperature down, not up.
No. My understanding is…Conduction will only occur from hot to cold. Radiation is energy that is emitted and absorbed irrespective of the states of the target and source. Radiation cant necessarily be absorbed by a target molecule that is already in an excited state at a molecular level but that’s ok, it will be absorbed by a different molecule that isn’t in an excited state.
Radiation definitely flows from cold to hot.
What doesn’t flow from cold to hot is heat or the net flow of energy.
Doesn’t radiation constitute a “net flow of energy”?
Not necessarily no. For example, the walls in my family room are emitting radiation at around 430 W.m-2. But since they are all emitting close to that value there is no net flow of energy.
Thanks. My comment was obviously incontextual, as I hadn’t trickled thru the thread.
Stay warm and be thankful you don’t have ice rink alleys out there.
Sounds like you’re down by the Gulf of America.
Nope, proud mid American.
Who cares? Another temporary, petty, gesture, right up there with pulling Milley’s pic from the hall with the line up of old Joint Chief’s of Staff. No one else on earth will call it that, and it will revert back, when we have our national Snap Out Of It in ’28.
Thanks, bnice. The effective radiation height for CO2 is about 5-6 km. Let’s take 6 km for calculations.
At that altitude, the dip of the horizon is 2.5°. So 92.5°/180° = 51.4% of the radiation is directed at space and 48.6% goes towards the earth.
Given the small difference, it’s usually ignored in overview analyses like this one. You’re free to include it, the conclusions don’t change.
Best regards,
w.
PS—51.4% is indeed about half, and it’s specifically why I said “about half of it proceeds to space” in the head post.
Except that the CO2 radiation frequency has a rather short path length until you get way up into the atmosphere.
when in hole, stop digging
You should go and discuss with those who work with CO2 lasers.
They will put you on the right track.
That Will Happer is such a crank! /sarc
The actual portion of the downward Earth portion v sky portion is : –
(1-sin(2.5°)) : (1+ sin(2.5°))
Or about 47.5% down and 52.5% up. A little bigger than you stated, probably due to the angle sweeping out an area. Rather than just being a linear interpretation of the included angle.
I see your point, Ian. I was 100% wrong.
However, I can’t duplicate your calculations. I get (1 + sin(2.5°)/2 = .521. So that’s 47.9% down and 52.1% up.
Onwards, and thanks for checking my numbers,
w.
The horizontal component is basically irrelevant in understanding energy balance. It cancels out. Only the upward and downward portions of every emission are interesting.
“ie.. most radiation is horizontal.”
On a single molecule, yes. What happens when that radiation finds another molecule and that emission finds another, etc What does not impact the surface ultimately leaves the earth system.
And the iterations begin again for the energy that impacts the surface.
Thanks for hitting two of my pet peeves: greenhouse science and less directly the “blanket effect” of GHGs. Downed in a single felling stroke, IMO.
Warning note: this may be approaching an explanation for miscalculation of “feedbacks.”
Nice work, WE. Greenhouse ‘efficiency’ is something I had not previously thought about. The only potential issue I see is the length of time, but it is all of Ceres you have to work with.
Thanks, Rud, always good to hear from you. True about the length of time. However, the CERES dataset is one year short of a quarter century. The stability and lack of trend of the efficiency over that length of time is impressive in itself.
w.
It’s also supported by solid physics which is not obvious without digging into some of the finer details.
dam complicated stuff!
I’m with you, Joseph.
Just when when we’re totally unsettled about the settled science, Willis keeps revealing more unsettling aspects of said settled science.
More and more, I’m becoming an adherent to the “wisdom” of Donald Rumsfeld –
That for me seems to wrap up most conclusions about what the IPCC (correctly) observes is a “coupled, non-linear, chaotic system”.
At this stage, the most honest position to take on how climates behave throughout their numerous observed cycles is –
we just don’t know
(and by the way, this field of research / study should certainly continue through the efforts of all who take an interest in the topic, but any purported necessary “action on climate change” does not have a place in this lane.
The “science” needs to actually be settled before any rational conclusions can be reached as to whether such “actions” are warranted or useful at all.)
We do know. It’s not CO2.
Whether we do or don’t know: There’s no justification for any policies at all wrt CO2 and climate. If any effect at all, it’s negligible. The problem is, the people in power cannot tax sunlight. CO2 is taxable (via energy and fossil fuels), and it can also be used to justify almost any policy in the name of “saving the planet” including a one-world government new world order. That’s why they want it, and they’ve created an extremely well funded religion-based economic ecosystem around it. I hope the new administration brings this nonsense to a full stop.
What seems evident to me, in figure 5, to which your words refer, it that from about 2004 to 2014 solar input was overall flat but that its ups and down are in direct opposition to upwelling longwave radiatioon. It is only after that (in time) that your statement is correct.
I’ll watch the comments.
According to the greenhouse effect hypothesis isn’t the tropical troposphere supposed to warm at a faster rate than the surface?
Did they ever find the hotspot?
https://climateaudit.org/2008/12/28/gavin-and-the-big-red-dog/
Good article btw.
John, the GHE per se says nothing about a tropical troposphere hotspot. That is an artifice of nearly all the climate models of the GHE. The sole exception is INM CM5 in CMIP6. So important that the Russians published a longish paper on it. Turns out they parameterized tropical ocean rainfall using actual ARGO data. More rain, less water vapor feedback, no tropical troposphere hotspot. And, that model’s ECS is 1.8, very close to observational EBM central estimates.
See link to climateaudit.
Or has the science changed since then?
GCMs are the climate models I refer to. Turns out the Russians proved the AR4 model explanation wrong. The bigger problem ignored is that the ‘explained’ modeled effect simply does NOT exist.
Yes I know what a gcm is. I’m asking if the ghe hypothesis is still used today compared to the past when tt temperatures disagreed with gcm’s. See here https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/06/uah-finds-a-warming-error-in-satellite-data-lowers-global-temperature-trend-constradicts-ipcc-models/
And don’t even bring up the stratosphere 😂
I love their language – “find” and “show”, which I reserve for actual data or a natural law versus a more appropriate verb “predict” which is better for unproven models.
Those claims are based on a false water vapor feedback mechanism which essentially works exactly the opposite to what they claim. Dr. William Gray pointed this out decades ago.
So is it just being swept under the rug? I mean that was a main tenet of the greenhouse effect “theory”.
Yup, there were some papers cherry picking ENSO variation and claiming it was evidence of a hot spot. Dr John Christy shot them down.
“All solids and most gases are constantly absorbing and emitting longwave radiation” … since some of the absorbed radiation energy is lost due to collisions that is misleading … most gas atoms are absorbing and only a lower percentage are emitting … that statement implies EVERY atom that absorbs must also emit … which cannot be true …
Every single atom in the universe emits photons, ie longwave radiation. It’s not possible that they don’t, unless they are at 0K, which is not possible (at least as far as we can observe).
What you’re trying to say, I believe, is that not all radiation absorbed by said gases is necessarily emitted as radiation. Certainly, some will be converted into kinetic energy and transferred to neighbouring molecules.
It is unfortunate that both kinetic energy of molecules (ie movement) and radiation are both described as heat. It makes things difficult to describe correctly.
Actually, your Lordship, Kirschoff’s Law says exactly that. Kirchhoff’s law of thermal radiation states that the emissivity of a body is equal to its absorptivity.
Regards
w.
PS—Atoms don’t absorb or emit thermal radiation. Only molecules do that.
Hmm. Show me an atom that doesn’t emit photons, please?
I think there is a misunderstanding here. All atoms and molecules will emit a photon when sufficient energy is added to the system. This is usually done when a high-energy photon hits the atom or molecule and gives an electron enough energy to jump up an energy level. Impact with a high-velocity particle will also do this. Thermal radiation is usually taken as infra-red light. It does not have enough energy to move an electron up to the next level. it can only add energy to a vibrational mode – the way the atoms in a molecule bounce around as if they are connected by springs. The same energy is emitted as another photon in the infra-red spectra with exactly the energy equal to the transition of the molecule from one vibrational state to a lower one. So both statements are correct – given sufficient energy, all atoms and molecules can emit a photon. However, only some molecules can emit photons in the infra-red. For example, diatomic molecules such as nitrogen and oxygen and monatomic molecules such as argon cannot emit infrared photons. Triatomic molecules can because there are many new vibrational energy levels opened up by the structure of the molecule.
I’m still dubious about the terminology. All atoms will emit IR photons, otherwise they would not have a ‘temperature’. I think the terminology herein is merely focusing on those photons ‘captured’ and ‘released’ by so-called greenhouse gases, while all molecules will potentially emit IR photons for different reasons.
No, the physics of atomic spectra and vibrational levels of energy is quite well established. Some atoms don’t radiate in the IR band. The temperature of an atom is more closely associated with its kinetic energy than if it is radiating photons. For an ideal gas, we can derive E = 3/2kT where E is the kinetic energy, k is Boltzmann’s constant and T is the absolute temperature.
Loren is correct, you have a flawed concept of temperature, an Argon atom at room temperature has translational kinetic energy but no rotational/vibrational energy and will not emit radiation.
ZZW, we’re talking about thermal radiation. NO atoms either emit or absorb thermal radiation. Only molecules can do that.
w.
I know…. Wikipedia….. I’m with ZZW on this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation
Me too.
Atoms do have quantum states that alter with absorption and emission of IR photons. Electrons jump up and down.
But the effect is less than molecules that vibrate and rotate as well.
Take an Argon atom, to excite it from the ground state to the first excited state will require the absorption of a photon with an wavenumber of 93143.7653 cm^-1. IR is between 4000 and 400cm-1, to excite an Argon atom requires UV light!
Willis, first off let me just say that I find this blog story and most of what you write very interesting, insightful and generally correct.
Unfortunately in this case unless you are using a definition of thermal radiation different than the established definition in thermodynamics this is incorrect.
Thermal radiation by established definition (not just words but as calculated…see below) is the radiation given off by a body (solid) or substance (liquid, gas, a plasma and yes at least ‘in theory’ even a single atom in motion) dependent on its ‘heat content’…most definitions would say ‘dependent on its Temperature’ but I personally hate that definition as Temperature is not an inherent quality of matter, its energy or ‘heat energy’ is. That is to say we ‘measure’ temperature of a substance by measuring its heat content, either by a physical measurement of its kinetic energy (e.g. a mercury thermometer, thermistor or similar) OR by measuring its thermal radiation.
In any case I’m not trying to be a jerk, and I’m responding to you as opposed to others who seem to be missing this most salient point as you are the author of the blog post and thus people reading this and other things you’ve written will (mostly correctly) take your input as valid on its face. And the concept of thermal radiation is so fundamental to science not just climate science that readers really do need to understand that yes, even the 02 and N2 in the atmosphere are emitting thermal radiation (probably in the infrared) simply by being in motion. What they do NOT do is absorb (excite an internal state) and thus take part in the slowing down and re-emitting of that thermal radiation given off by everything else.
youcantfixstupid Reply to
Willis Eschenbach
January 24, 2025 1:32 pm
ycfs, in the field of climate science, the term “thermal radiation” refers to the longwave radiation given off at earthlike temperatures by everything but monatomic gases. It’s also called “far infrared” radiation. A wavelength of something like 4 – 30 microns is generally taken to be the range of thermal longwave radiation.
Now, this thermal radiation is NOT the result of electrons changing levels. That’s a totally different kind of radiation.
Thermal radiation is the result of energy in the flexing of the molecular bonds being converted to electromagnetic radiation. And the reverse is true. Longwave thermal radiation transfers energy to molecules by flexing the bonds between them. Solids have lots of bonds, so they freely radiate and absorb thermal radiation.
With gases it’s a bit more complex. Gases with more bonds, like chlorofluorocarbons or methane, can flex in a variety of ways, and thus they are able to absorb/emit in a variety of frequencies.
Water vapor, O3 (ozone) and CO2 are also efficient absorbers/emitters. Here are the various types of molecular flexing they can undergo.
Diatomic gases like O2 and N2, only have one mode of flexing, and that one mode only comes into play when the molecule is colliding with another molecule. So their contribution to the absorption of upwelling surface radiation is generally ignored.
Finally, monatomic gases like argon, xenon, and neon have no bonds to flex. As a result, they are transparent to longwave thermal radiation.
My best regards to you,
w.
Hi Willis.
For future reference, not as an ‘argument from authority’, I have a Masters in Physics (Theorist). I ‘dropped out’ when I realized I wasn’t going to be an Einstein, yeah, came as a shock to my brain too! My apologies for not including that in my comment above but I try not to ‘advertise’ it as it sometimes comes off as an ‘argument from authority’ and I never do that.
Ultimately, I’m well aware of internal vibrational states of molecules, how they are different than electronic transitions etc.
To my original point than, I did give you an ‘out’ (e.g. ‘unless you are using a different definition’), since given how much of what I’ve read from you is accurate and attempting to ‘stick to the facts’, I couldn’t believe you’d make what I consider an ‘unforgivable sin’ in Physics.
But if ‘climate science’ defines ‘thermal radiation’ as you have indicated here, and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of your statement, than that just gives me another reason to hate ‘climate scientists’. They certainly are not Physicists and since the climate is fundamentally a Physics problem they simply can’t be doing science with the definition of thermal radiation you are describing.
And again, not trying purposely to be contrarian but I’ve lived with ‘my’ (taught to) definition of thermal radiation all my life. I can’t even imagine trying to limit it to only that radiation re: “Thermal radiation is the result of energy in the flexing of the molecular bonds being converted to electromagnetic radiation”
I wouldn’t even know how you could distinguish thermal radiation as you’ve defined it from the thermal radiation definition normally used in thermodynamics. Sure on absorption you can measure an absorption spectrum to see that certain molecules absorb IR at certain wavelengths, but when emitted you couldn’t distinguish that photon at a given wavelength from a photon emitted due to kinetic energy/motion of any random particle in a gas, monotonic or not. Its just a photon of a given wavelength, you have no idea where it came from.
I can imagine someone saying ‘Thermal radiation absorbed by…’, I might question “how do you know the radiation absorbed is from energy of motion?” but only in my own mind not as a bone to pick.
So not to belabor this more, I will certainly make every effort to respect the definition of thermal radiation as you (and perhaps others) are using it. Please understand though that I have to, simply due to what I ‘know’ use the standard definition from thermodynamics as I’m far too old to divorce my brain from the definition I’ve used for almost 40 years.
Sincerely
YCFS,
Perhaps a slight rephrasing will help:
For the range of earth ambient temperatures climate science deals with, radiation emitted by terrestrial substances as a function of their temperature is solely (or at least overwhelmingly) due to the flexibility of molecular bonds.
This is certainly NOT true in the more general case of a wider temperature range, particularly at higher temperatures.
You talk about “a photon emitted due to kinetic energy/motion of any random particle in a gas, monotonic or not.” But we understand in solid theory, confirmed by innumerable controlled and repeated laboratory experiments, that we do not get photons emitted this way at earth ambient temperatures.
For example, monotonic argon gas does not emit any photons at earth ambient temperatures, even though the atoms have kinetic energy and motion.
Actually no ‘rephrasing’ needed. I must apologize to Willis (and Phil below). I did more ‘noodling’ and reading because I still couldn’t imagine Willis (and others) getting something ‘fundamentally incorrect’…it wasn’t them, it was ME.
It starts with me ‘recognizing’ (remembering/waking up?) that S-B is only applicable to a ‘Black Body’ or ‘near like’ ones…the main point being it involves ‘absorption & emission’ by definition…its built IN to the equation….I won’t go in to my entire trip down ‘conversion road’ but I recognize that NOT all substances ’emit thermal radiation simply due to their kinetic energy’ or ‘equivalent’ to their kinetic energy and will NOT emit a ‘black body spectrum’ or ‘thermal radiation’ that can be converted to their temperature just because of their kinetic energy.
My apologies again, I was the idiot here.
Argon at room temperature for one.
Argon at room temperature will emit a radiation spectrum exactly equivalent to any other body or substance held at room temperature, the S-B equation says nothing about the ‘content’ or ‘makeup’ of a body or substance.
No, gases absorb/emit based on their available energy levels, Argon, being a monotonic molecule, has no rotational or vibrational energy levels. Therefore the only energy levels which can be excited are the electronic energy levels which require temperatures far in excess of room temperature to be excited. For a room temperature Argon molecule to emit it needs to absorb a UV photon of the appropriate frequency and then it will be able to emit one of the same frequency. Thermal radiation being the emission due to the temperature of the molecule, room temperature Argon emits zero, which would be expected in the IR range.
Hi Phil. Feel free to review my exchange with Willis above.
But I can guarantee that if you use an Infrared thermometer to detect infrared radiation emitted by the Argon gas and convert (“measure”) the temperature of the Argon gas it will properly register as room temperature. That is ‘thermal radiation emitted’ by the Argon gas that is being detected by the Infrared thermometer. Additionally see the Stefan-Boltzmann equation…this type of ‘thermally emitted radiation’ is exactly what it is meant to describe.
What you are referring to is an absorption & emission of radiation due to excitation and ‘decay’ of internal vibrational or electronic states. I’m well aware of this physical phenomena. That’s fine, it happens, but its not what I, nor standard thermodynamics refers to as ‘thermal radiation’.
Here’s a reference to a definition of thermal radiation in on-line Britannica. There are any number of such definitions from ‘respectable’ resources, almost equivalent, and some better than others, that you can reference. This one refers to a ‘surface’, others a ‘body’, yet others a ‘substance’. Fundamentally thermodynamics makes no distinctions between ‘body’, ‘substance’, ‘gas’, ‘plasma’ or even a single atom in motion. And many of them refer to ‘depends on the temperature’ or ‘governed by the temperature’ which is just sloppy as temperature is not an inherent property of matter, energy is. There is no detector that measures a property called ‘temperature’ directly, they measure (detect) the kinetic energy (mercury or even thermistor thermometer) or the emitted radiation e.g. ‘Infrared thermometer’ and ‘convert’ that to a temperature.
I’m not trying purposely to be contrarian, I’m just saying the definition of thermal radiation you are using is not the standard definition of thermodynamics.
It’s been a while since I read Planck but I seem to remember an assumption that the black body must be made up of a conglomeration of “units” (oscillators?) that are larger than an atom and that those “units” must all be in thermodynamic equilibrium, e.g. having the same kinetic energy. It’s a restriction that makes it difficult to identify gases as a black body, especially diffuse gases in an atmosphere. This being the case it’s questionable whether S-B can be directly applied to those diffuse gases as separate entities.
“But I can guarantee that if you use an Infrared thermometer to detect infrared radiation emitted by the Argon gas and convert (“measure”) the temperature of the Argon gas it will properly register as room temperature. That is ‘thermal radiation emitted’ by the Argon gas that is being detected by the Infrared thermometer.”
Your ‘guarantee’ isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, there will be no emitted IR from the Argon, you’re probably measuring the temperature of the container!
You are 100% correct, see my ‘conversion’ above & apology to Willis and I apologize here to Phil. I was the idiot here for equating Argon by itself to a ‘black body’…which of course its not.
Phil,
How are you measuring the temperature of the Argon? Are you really silly enough to claim that Argon emits no photons at wavelengths consistent with its temperature, and is thus at absolute zero?
Argon freezes at about -189 C. If it doesn’t absorb photons from its environment, how do you keep your Argon gaseous? You really have no clue. Feel free to demonstrate your attachment to reality.
It seems a bit tenuous to me.
Nonsense, the Argon molecules have translational energy due to collisions with neighboring molecules, they have no rotational/vibrational levels and consequently when at room temperature are unable to emit radiation unless excited by an appropriate UV photon.
“How are you measuring the temperature of the Argon?”
Well, you could stick the end of a mercury thermometer into the argon gas. The atoms collide with the mercury bulb, with their kinetic energy transfers, which increase with temperature, causing changes in the mercury in the bulb, causing the mercury column to expand or contract as a function of the argon gas temperature.
No radiation transfer is required at all.
And this “kinetic energy transfer” occurs how? Certainly sounds impressive, except you are probably going start waffling about atoms “colliding”, like little billiard balls – or something equally ridiculous.
You might not accept that all matter above absolute zero emits infrared radiation, but don’t blame me for your ignorance. As a matter of fact, if you allow argon to radiate sufficient energy, it will cool, and eventually liquefy.
Maybe you think gases can be cooled and liquefied by subjecting them to “cold rays”, for all I know. I won’t suggest you learn some basic physics – it doesn’t seem that you possess the required brainpower.
Michael,
Your ignorance is exceeded only by your obnoxiousness. I have not yet ruled out the idea that you are purposely posting nonsense to see how much time you can get people to waste. But still I will respond.
Of course, atoms of a gas collide – with each other, and with solids and liquids that are in contact with the gas! And these collisions transfer momentum and kinetic energy. This is the most basic, basic concept on the subject, and you don’t begin to understand it!
How do you think conduction occurs in a gas, if it is not from the energy of collisions? Why do you think every university in the world gets it wrong?
And it is simply NOT true that “all matter above absolute zero emits infrared radiation”. I cannot find a single source that states this.
Please cite the emission bands for argon in the infrared range. (Comparable to CO2’s 14-16um band.) None of the sources I see have any.
What is the change in the state of the argon atom for each IR photon emitted. Of course this state change much match the energy of the emitted photon.
I eagerly await your responses, but I am not holding my breath…
If you think this conversation is obnoxious wait until he starts trying to convince the WUWT community that the Moon is not rotating on its own axis like he did for years on Dr. Spencer’s blog. You will witness a level of absurdity that defies credulity.
It’s curious, Ed. I and most everyone else were told in high school or college science that all things above absolute zero radiate thermal longwave infrared radiation. Everything. No exceptions.
What we were not told is that there is a curious exception to this—monatomic gases like argon.
And we were also not told that the more complex the molecule, the more emission bands it would have. So CO2 and H2O and O3 are far better absorber-emitters of longwave radiation than say O2 or N2.
Now, I do my best to follow Keynes and Samuelson, viz:
However, some folks see holding on to a position as a noble act. Here’s Keynes again:
Anyhow, the rude truth is that monatomic gases are totally transparent to thermal longwave infrared radiation. The energy transformation occurs by flexing of the interatomic bonds … and monatomic gases have no interatomic bonds.
My best to you, and to all,
w.
Great than or equal, but for our atmosphere they are usually equal.
Seriously? You would expect a maximum of an additional 0.5% of greenhouse gases, and not even the most effective greenhouse gases, to cause a detectable trend?
I think you need to reassess your expectations, Willis.
Thanks, ZZW.
My Figure 5 above shows that the trend due to the GHG increases should absolutely be detectable, so my expectations were rational.
w.
You describe the efficiency thus:
I don’t believe that this figure should change with increasing upwelling radiation which is shown in figure 5. What am I missing?
Willis’ hypothesis isn’t unreasonable. As the surface warms UWIR increases so UWIR / ASR should increase as well at least assuming there is no shortwave feedback involved in whatever caused UWIR to increase. If there is a shortwave feedback then the increase in that ratio would be less.
But it does seem unlikely. As the surface warms the emitted radiation increases as T^4 (the Stefan-Boltzmann law) while the forcing due to CO2 only increase logarithmically and so you would expect the efficiency to drop dramatically as the world warms.
Willis defines Greenhouse Efficiency as UWIR / ASR. As the surface warms holding albedo and thus ASR constant this value increases.
Willis:
You have nicely proven that greenhouse gasses do not cause any warming, and instead say that surface temperatures respond exactly to changes in the incoming solar radiation.
But what is causing the changes in the incoming solar radiation?
Clouds?
Clouds driven by natural events and cycles.
Richard M.
See my reply to John W., above.
Here’s what I don’t understand. As far as I can tell weatherstations measure the temperature of the air. Then conclusions are drawn about the changes of the surface temperature.
Why not measure the surface temperature if that is what you’re interested in?
Willis, You might not be aware that N.Nicolov and K.Zeller have published on this relationship of declining albedo using CERES data correlating to temperature in 2022. They also have developed a novel and very interesting hypothesis that millennial climate change is due solely to atmospheric pressure and solar radiation intensity with no impact of greenhouse gases of any type. They have successfully predicted, using NASA data, temperatures of rocky solar system bodies and past high latitude earth temperatures caused by polar forcing. Lots of information at http://www.climate-veritas.com. As a starter though Tom Nelson’s recent podcast/YouTube with Ned Nicolov is good.
Tom, regarding N&Z, see my post A Matter Of Some Gravity.
w.
N/Z found an interesting correlation in planetary temperatures. Unfortunately, they tried to manufacture something to replace the greenhouse effect. They got that wrong. It is not gravitational compression. It is simply gravity’s effect on matter. With a higher density atmosphere near the surface, it is warmer.
GHGs are still necessary to move energy through the atmosphere and warm it up relative to its density. It has nothing to due with back radiation or emission height.
This is why there’s been no increase in the greenhouse efficiency. The physical atmosphere has changed very little.
On a very cold day in January, WE decides to join the WUWT Peanut Gallery. He has become a CO2 Does Nothing Nutter. Say hi to BeNasty, the Court Jester of the Peanut Gallery.
Never mind the work of 99.9% of scientists since 1896 with evidence that CO2 emissions will increase the greenhouse effect
Never mind the predictions from 1979 when the average climate model claimed CO2 x 2 would cause +3 degrees C. of warming … while the actual warming from 1975 was at a nearby +2.4 degrees C. per CO2 rate
Never mind the predictions that CO2 warming would mainly affect the higher latitudes, except Antarctica, mainly in the coldest months of the year and mainly at night. Exactly what happened for MOST of the warming since 1975. The rest of the warming could be explained by less manmade SO2 air pollution and a lower percentage of cloudiness causing more daytime absorbed solar radiation.
128 years of evidence and 50 years of actual global warming to study, but WE waltzes in and say climate science is all wrong.
There are 362 global weather and climate related satellites. WE cherry picks CERES instruments. \ CERES data intended mainly to determine the effect of clouds
The satellites that CERES instruments are on, the NASA Aqua and Terra platforms, started to drift in their orbits several years ago, and it’s not clear how (or if) they will contribute to the long-term records going forward. Fortunately, there are additional CERES instruments on Suomi-NPP (launched in 2011) and NOAA-20 (launched in 2017) that can be used.
CERES data begin in 1997. The current global warming trend began in 1975, 22 years earlier.
CERES data are considered accurate, with an absolute accuracy goal of 1% for shortwave measurements and 0.5% for longwave measurements.
CERES data primarily indicates an increasing greenhouse effect by showing a growing “Earth’s Energy Imbalance” (EEI), which means the planet is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating back into space, primarily due to the trapping of heat by rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to a warming trend on Earth; this data is derived from measuring the amount of incoming solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation from the planet, allowing scientists to monitor changes in the Earth’s energy balance over time.
According to available information, there are currently around 162 satellites actively used for climate studies, with various agencies across the globe operating them, including the US, Europe, China, India, and others.
According to current data, there are approximately 200 meteorological satellites currently in orbit used for weather studies, with most being classified as either polar-orbiting geostationary satellites, each serving different functions in weather forecasting.
WE wants us to believe he is a genius and CO2 Does Nothing. The alternative is CO2 Does Something and 99.9% of scientists have been right about that for the past 128 years.
NASA funds and owns CERES data. I do not find any indication they think CERES data contradict the greenhouse effect of rising CO2 levels based on THEIR CERES data.
There are 128 years of lab studies of the warming effects of CO2. For WE to be right that CO2 Does Nothing, all 128 years of lab spectroscopy must be wrong. A global scientist conspiracy of epic proportions? Or perhaps WE is not a genius and he is wrong. I say WE is wrong. 99.9% of scientists agree.
RG, you rather unpleasantly confound lab studies of GHE and real world observations concerning same.
As a more pointed example of this apparent confusion, take the GHE of methane. In the lab, it is a GHG because in the lab all measurements are in dry air. In the real world it isn’t because of the overwhelming impact of water vapor.
Exactly! At 98% of the greenhouse gases, it swamps everything else in the IR spectrum.
Now take the fact that the hydrological cycle (evaporation and condensation), and the convective cooling mechanism of the atmosphere completely swamps the IR cooling mechanisms, and CO2 is revealed as a nothing-burger of a nothing-burger!
Methane in a lab experiment with water vapor has very little warming effect. Probably too small to measure. MODTRANN and HITRAN both allow these calculations WITH water vapor. The climate liars will talk about methane with zero water vapor. There are no in situ measurements so lab infrared gas measurements are a good starting point.
If WE is right, then all the most popular skeptic scientists MUST be wrong. Richard Lindzen, Wiliam Happer, Roy Spencer, John Christy and Judith Curry. All science Ph.D.’s and all wrong? Every consensus scientist since 1896has been wrong? That is VERY hard to believe. That they are right, and WE is wrong, is VERY easy to believe.
Richard, I do not disagree in general with those scientists. I just see other things going on as well. Perhaps you missed this part of my post, viz:
“Note that I’m not saying that the GHGs don’t increase the downwelling longwave radiation. They do. They absorb more upwelling radiation and thus perforce, they increase the downwelling radiation.
I’m saying that the increase in downwelling radiation is NOT showing up as an increase in surface temperature. If it were, we’d see it in the efficiency calculations shown above.”
Best to you and yours,
w.
Particularly with CO2, whilst it absorbs upwelling IR I’m far from sure it all/any gets re-radiated; much/most of it gets thermalised. Water vapour has a much shorter relaxation time and so less energy gets thermalised.
[no taunting~ctm]
No, I said absolutely nothing.
Just drawing RG’s comments to your attention.
Ok,
Richard. stop it.
BeNasty and I will get together around a campfire and sing Kumbaya. Our truce will probably last as long as peace in the Mid-East.
But I enjoy BeNasty taunting and then returning fire. That is what the internet was invente for.
You have returned nothing but blanks. Everyone (almost) here acknowledges that co2 can absorb and emit radiation. But only you and a few others belong to the church of climate believers without a shred of concrete evidence that it is doing anything substantial.
Mike, sure there is evidence. CO2 is up and so is temperature. It’s a correlation. Then of course there is https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations, which displays many such correlations. Today’s feature is “Popularity of the first name Walker with Old Dominion’s Freight Line Stock Price.” The r2 is 0.985, even better than the CO2/Temperature correlation. So it must be true!
“But I enjoy BeNasty taunting “
…… and still he keeps going !
Please stop Richard. I can only be intentionally biased and unfair for so long.
Come on, ctm, RG deserves it here.
Stop Richard. Stop.
Hmmm. 99.9% of scientists agree.
Wasn’t it Einstein who answered the 100 scientists by saying that if he was wrong one would be enough?
So who is the one you wish to rely on to say that WE is wrong?
Richard, it seems you don’t understand the basics of scientific discussion. Please read the post below, up your game, and come back when you can actually show I’m wrong.
Regards,
w.
PS—99.9%???
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1765552712626975193.html
Ned Nicolov and Karl Zeller agree with you. See http://www.climate-vertas.com
It is your job to prove you are right.
To do that you must proven that almost everyone else is wrong. Everyone else includes Ph.D. scientists who work full time on climate and energy, NASA and the head of CERES.
If you are right, then almost all the skeptic scientists ON OUR SIDE must be wrong too. Please sen e-mails to Richard Lindzen, William Happer and Rot Spencer to tell them that they are fools.
Solar warming can NOT explain why most of the warming since 1975 has been at higher latitudes, except Antarctica, in the colder months of the year and TMIN when there is very little sunlight. Greenhouse warming has those characteristics.
Solar warming would be higher TMAX in the tropics during the day and during the warmer months of the year. That is NOT the main characteristic of post-1975 global warming.
For you to be right a huge number of scientists and lab spectroscopy must be wrong. Common sense — the Occam’s razor answer — is that they are right, and you are wrong.
As the global greenhouse gas emissions per decade gradually increased since 1974, the global warming rate per decade has increased too. With UAH data the decade from the 2014 to 2024 had the highest warming rate per decade in the 45 year UAH record. Just as expected with the greenhouse gas theory. Just a coincidence?
Get your paper peer reviewed and published in a science journal. If you win a Nobel Prize I will eat my hat.
It is my conservative opinion that 99.9% of scientists believe there is a greenhouse effect and manmade CO2 emissions increase it by some amount. That is based on my 28 years of reading almost 99% conservative climate articles and studies. Of course all consensus scientists believe in a greenhouse effect and CO2’s role as a greenhouse gas. I can only recall one conservative scientist, Canadian geographer Tim Ball, who denied the greenhouse effect. A 2013 study of peer reviewed climate papers found a 99.99% belief in the existence of AGW.
There are certainly very few scientists who say CO2 Does Nothing or Almost Nothing.
Then it’s up to the ”99.99%” to prove they are right.
Oh my god, put a sock in it, willya?
Richard Greene:
I challenged you to read my article “Scientific proof that CO2 does NOT cause global warming”
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0884.pdf
It uses a different approach to prove that CO2 has no warming effect than Willis used, but it does confirm that he is is actually right, and you are WRONG.
Oh yes! Didn’t you know? That figure is not just made up for dramatic effect -it’s real. Lol.
Given that we have added 0.5% of total greenhouse gases in 150 years, any signal would necessarily be impossible to determine at this level of accuracy.
Fortunately, it’s also completely irrelevant, so it’s all a nothing-burger.
“ I say WE is wrong. 99.9% of scientists agree”:
0.00000000000001% of engineers (me) disagree. Willis is correct in determining that the ‘greenhouse efficiency’ has a value of 1.652 across the near 24 year period of the CERES data and I am glad that he pointed it out, as I hadn’t seen it before. It’s not shown directly here, but just add the ‘absorbed by surface’ and ‘absorbed by atmosphere’ and divide into ’emitted by surface’:
(Full data is at https://cw50b.wordpress.com/cagw/ceres/)
That’s a gorgeous diagram, loaded with nutritious quantities.
I have posted a comment at the site (cw50b…), asking to confirm that the entry “RF” (+0.87 W/m^2 associated with “Greenhouse Gases”) is not implicated in any of the other reported quantities (measurements or calculations derived therefrom).
Best regards, — RLW
Hi Robert,
thank you for your comment. The “Radiative Forcing” comes from Table 2 @ur momisugly https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/aggi.html
To frame the range to be the same as the CERES data I took the value for 2000 (2.62) and 2023 (3.485) and subtracted to give 0.865, rounding to 0.87 for use in the graphic. This is a calculated value (although the ppmv values used in the calculation are measured) but I thought it worth including because someone may be able to use the CERES data to determine a measured value for comparison. The data is on the sheet ‘RF’ in the spreadsheet:
https://cw50b.github.io/CERES%20Data%20for%20Earths%20Energy%20Budget-published.xlsx
Thank you for your interest. Comments and critisisms are gladly accepted as I am doing this without any particular ‘Climate Science’ education, just an aged Engineer’s intuition.
Best regards, Boris.
I did not insert the @…….. Just after ‘Table 2’. I have no idea where it came from. Apologies, no offence meant.
Dear Boris / Cyan,
You’re most welcome. Could I get your permission to use it? (With full attribution to the author / artist, of course.)
— Robt Whetten
P.S. In my not-so-humble opinion, diagrams of that quality (completeness + artistry) are so critical to effective technical communication, and especially where it is most difficult — across disciplinary boundaries. As may be case for all who struggle to grasp ” Greenhouse Efficiency Insights “
Hi Robert,
you have my permission to use anything I have added to the diagram without the need for attribution but the original diagram is courtesy of NASA, which they use in a number of different guises, for instance here:
https://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/basic-page/earths-energy-budget
Given the NASA stance on AGW, they may get a little upset to see their artwork used in this way 🙁
The infamous flat earth model.
Lol.
Your inevitable back tracking when the the UAH shows a significant drop in ”GAT” is going to be delicious.
Actually, Willis just showed RG a very solid piece of science and all RG can do is spew denial and invectives.
Richard – your mean-spirited screed shows that you really haven’t understood what Willis did in this post. He looked at CERES data in a new and original way and came up with an interesting, unexpected and provocative conclusion. He never said “CO2 does nothing”, which is what you claim he said. From that assertion, you resort to inflating (without evidence) the old, shopworn “97% consensus” to no less than “99.9% of scientists”.
As we are often reminded at WUWT, Einstein pointed out that it only takes one observer to refute the “consensus”. That observer was Knut Ångström, who published his refutation of what we would now call “the CO2-induced global warming hypothesis” in 1900. He also never said “CO2 does nothing”, he merely concluded that its effect on global temperature was very small. He relied on his own experimental data and came up with the “saturation” and “it’s mostly water vapour” arguments familiar to readers of WUWT. And he’s been ignored by the “99.9%” for 124 years and counting, for reasons that have been debated endlessly at this website, and really don’t have much to do with science.
Next time, I suggest that you carefully read a post (twice, if you don’t get it first time) and do your best to comprehend it, before you attempt to critique it. And please don’t descend to insults, which have no place in a scientific debate. Just try and point out what you think is wrong with the author’s arguments (as Willis says, every time).
Good post, Smart Rock.
He also never said “CO2 does nothing”, he merely concluded that its effect on global temperature was very small. He relied on his own experimental data and came up with the “saturation” and “it’s mostly water vapour” arguments familiar to readers of WUWT.
I would add one tiny additional clarification to this bit.
Willis’ analysis of the CERES data suggests the RECENT increases in CO2 only have a very small effect on global temperature.
The global temperature increase due to increasing CO2 content could have been significant prior to us getting satellites launched and the ability to collect the CERES data.
I do not know exactly where we are on the asymptotic curve of CO2 versus temperature. As you pointed out, we may be nearing the saturation level.
Much of the vitriol in this thread seems to me to be based on the “deniers don’t believe CO2 does anything” premise. Whereas, Willis’ data analysis (and conclusions) merely suggest that the recent CO2 increases aren’t doing much.
Richard Greene:
Willis is correct.
You need to read my article “Scientific proof that CO2 does NOT cause global warming”
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0884.pdf
It took a little while to track this down (a plain-language summary* — with bibliography / links to primary sources — of the Loeb et al. ‘bad penny’ fiasco as presented prominently by Clauser):
————————
“It appears that the CERES team headed by Norman Loeb is correcting past errors. As pointed out by Howard Hayden in the May 11 TWTW, at the CERES Science Team Meeting, May 7-9, 2023, Loeb presented graphics detailing the changing data including regional trends in Top Of Atmosphere radiation and Sea Surface Temperature from March 2000 to March 2023…
In other words, during CERES the increasing greenhouse effect was insignificant even though according to NOAA data compiled at Mauna Loa show a CO2 concentration increased from 371 parts per million (ppm) in March 2000 to 418 ppm in March 2023. There is no climate crisis caused by carbon dioxide. There is a political crisis caused by the IPCC and its collaborators.”
————————
[bold highlights added]
None of this is to criticise the noble efforts of the CERES Science Team (Loeb & Co.) to maintain and organise the satellite-measured radiation fluxes. We all owe them (& taxpayer funded NASA support) a great debt / gratitude for bringing these astounding new results out in such a timely & public manner.
Interpretation is a whole ‘nother matter … the CERES EEI interpretative fiasco illustrates the peril, but also the continuing need for ideas to replace the failed paradigm.
*The Week That Was: 2024 05-25 (May 25, 2024) Brought to You …
https://sepp.org/twtwfiles/2024/TWTW%205-25-2024.pdf
128 years? Hmmm…
I would have put that at 210 years of spectroscopy. Joseph Fraunhofer, 1814.
Perhaps a trip down memory lane to Newton in 1666 would be “enlightening.”
Perhaps William Hyde in 1802 is a better choice as the father of spectroscopy.
Most of those early experiments you mentioned measured Cv.
Clearly he means infrared spectroscopy, in the mid-infrared (~ 3 to ~ 20 microns in wavelength) as infrared spectrometers (optics) of any quality came much later.
You have the sun at constant 340W/m^2. So you are actually making the case that it is due to lower albedo due to less cloud and surface ice cover.
To make a convincing argument, you would have to prove that CO2 is not able to reduce cloud cover or cause ice to melt.
I will also refer you to a paper:and this text from the paper:
Even more fundamentally, the local instantaneous Poynting vector S(r,t) is a monodirectional vector. This means that even if one assumes that S(r,t) describes the direction and rate of local electromagnetic energy flow, then at any moment this flow occurs in only one direction. Similarly, 〈S(r,t)〉 represents the local monodirectional energy flow averaged over time. Unlike the Poynting vector, the specific intensity, by its very construct, is intended to describe polydirectional energy flow: electromagnetic energy is postulated to propagate simultaneously in all di- rections at any moment in time at any point r. The situation becomes even more problematic if we recognize that even the Poynting vector cannot describe the direction and rate of instantaneous local energy flow [27]. Indeed, add- ing the curl of any vector field to S(r,t)=E(r,t)×H(r,t) yields a vector field Sʹ′(r,t) which also satisfies the Poynting theorem for the same pair of the electric and magnetic fields {E(r, t), H(r, t)}.
A traditional phenomenological way of addressing this profound inconsistency has been to claim that, in fact, the electromagnetic field must be quantized, which, allegedly, results in the emergence of photons as localized and “in- dependent” particles of the electromagnetic field forming a “photon gas” (see, e.g., [32]). The specific intensity is then claimed to quantify the instantaneous directional distribution of all the photons passing through the differential surface element dS in Fig. 3b. However, this approach faces an insurmountable problem: the real photons appearing in quantum electrodynamics (QED) are neither Newtonian corpuscles nor Einstein’s energy quanta localized at points in space. Each QED photon is a quantum of a single normal mode of the electromagnetic field and as such occupies the entire quantization volume (e.g., the entire cloud in Fig. 4) and cannot be localized [28]. Therefore, the photons cannot be used to define the specific intensity at an observation point r [27].
The 400W/m^2 you state here:
does not exist physically. There is no possible way to measure something that does not exist. So it has to be derived from an equation. That means all your calculations are not based in physically verifiable processes.
The measurements show that the sun’s output is not constant.
But WE has assumed it constant at 340W/m^2. He is using the varying thermalised value based on the 340W/m^2 minus reflection to arrive at the variation in thermalised solar used in Figure 5 so nothing tio do with solar variation.
Translation:
Poynting vector, a quantity describing the magnitude and direction of the flow of energy in electromagnetic waves.
Alternate translation:
Climate change will kill your dog.
The thing I would like to know is what would the temperature of the planet be if we had the same mass of atmosphere, but none of it was radiative active. If the atmosphere could not radiate energy, what would the temperature be at the surface.
see http://www.climate-veritas.com
The less GHGs there are , ie near zero H2O over very dry deserts…
… the closer that lapse rate is to 9.8C/km
There’s no simple answer to that question. Best answer I know of is from Dr. Robert Brown below.
Enjoy,
w.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/12/earths-baseline-black-body-model-a-damn-hard-problem/
The link does not even mention the most important feature of Earth’s climate – ice.
Understanding Earth’s climate is fundamentally the study of ice formation, melting and sublimation. In the atmosphere, it has orders of magnitude more influence than CO2 and approximately one order greater than water vapour and at leat twice as much as water condenstae.
Ice is so reflective that it is present in the scorching irradiation of the tropical sun at locations above 5000m.
For the 100th time: the exchange of radiation between surface and atmosphere is not doing anything.
And by the way: good luck with measuring the “downwelling radiative flux” with a satellite… *facepalm”
Hey, WE and others got some stuff wrong, but now they are starting to see the light. Be more positive.
Richard, this is why I ask people to quote what I said. You are just throwing mud at the wall and hoping it sticks.
As far as I know, you haven’t shown that I “got some stuff wrong”, or even one thing wrong.
If you believe differently, please quote what I said where, and quote your argument for why it was wrong. Not your modern argument. Your words from the time when you claim you showed I “got some stuff wrong”.
w.
Willis, you have been a lukewarmer for years. That’s all I was saying. It also means you accepted the opposite of this reality:
You’ve now demonstrated there isn’t any increasing GHG warming effect at all. Nothing to produce even minor warming. Didn’t mean it in a negative way, all good scientists change their views based on new data.
Richard, again I ask, quote what I said. I can defend my words. I can’t defend your misunderstandings of my words.
Best regards,
w.
As I explained, it was not any single quote, it was many articles where you have made claims supporting the mainstream view that GHGs cause some warming. For example, in this article:
As I stated above, there is no downwelling flux. You are confusing a flux an increasing LOCAL downwelling IR which increases as density increases.
I believe you also had an article explaining why the 2nd Law doesn’t apply to AGW. The implication being there must be some warming effect. Turns out the 2nd Law does explain why downwelling IR doesn’t warm the surface.
Even your thunderstorm hypothesis is often described as a feedback to warming which could be caused by greenhouse warming. I have no problem with your hypothesis, it just doesn’t apply to mythical AGW.
So, once again, I was referring to a general view from many of your articles that a greenhouse warming effect was real.
Of course there is DWIR. The SURFRAD network is an example of a network that records DWIR. For example, in Desert Rock, NV it was 248.9 W.m-2 a few moments ago.
It explains why it doesn’t usually heat the surface. It absolutely can be the cause of the surface getting warmer though. Note that heat is the word used to describe the net flow of energy. A body does not need to provide heat for it to cause another body to warm.
A familiar example of this is the door on your kitchen oven. If you turn your oven on high so that it does not cycle the temperature inside will achieve a steady-state with the door open. If you then close the cooler door it will cause the warmer inside to warm further.
There is DWIR from just about the surface. There is no downward flux in the atmosphere.
Not from CO2 DWIR which is emitted so close to the surface that it simply get conducted back into the atmosphere according to the 2nd Law.
“There is DWIR from just about the surface. There is no downward flux in the atmosphere.”
Then why do satellites see the earth’s temperature as 255K?
Which at midnight last night was at an altitude of 5km over my house.
Whist the air outside was at 5C – a difference of 23C !
If you want all the energy that heats the atmsphere via the GHE – in your *theory* to only apply to “just about the surface”, then what do you think the temp would be? and in consequence the world would be a roiling mass of convection.
“CO2 DWIR”
And just how is this special GHE only limited to CO2?
Does water vapour somehow have a different GHE ?
They both have an overlap at around 15 micron after all.
This surface energised heat must then energise other, mostly O2 and N2 molecules that rebounds to others that then give off LWIR photons that travel up, hitting other WV/CO2 molecules etc etc.
Your “simply get conducted back according to the 2nd Law” must then violate the 1st law by magically disappearing the energy.
CO2 is well mixed, much more so than WV, and it’s greatest effect comes from aloft, where the air is very dry.
In other words the exact opposite of your *theory*
Satellites don’t “see” DWIR. The 255K is the average temperature of the atmosphere and rate at which the LW energy flux leaves Earth.
The GHE on Earth appears all throughout the atmosphere. Surface energy is absorbed “just above the surface” (sorry about the typo) and flows upward warming the various altitudes based on their density.
The ability to warm is based on the amount of energy absorbed. It has a limit which is known as saturation. After that point is reached the greenhouse effect remains constant. It’s really very simple.
Water vapor works in a similar manner. It also absorbs most of its energy “just above the surface”. In fact, the upward energy flux is a combination of all atmospheric energy. There isn’t CO2 energy and water vapor energy. There’s just energy which is influenced by CO2 and H2O and any other radiative gas.
Yup, that’s how it works. It’s called thermalization and dethermalization. This is how the solar energy gets spread throughout the atmosphere.
I’m only referring the DWIR which was emitted “just above the surface”. The energy doesn’t disappear. It 1. (radiates from the atmosphere to the surface) and then 2. (conducts from the surface back into the atmosphere).
The first step creates a warmer surface and colder atmosphere. According to the 2nd Law heat moves from warmer to colder. hence 2. works according to the 2nd Law.
“Satellites don’t “see” DWIR. The 255K is the average temperature of the atmosphere and rate at which the LW energy flux leaves Earth.”
Then integrate the vertical temperature profile of a radiosonde upper air sounding to come up with “the average temperature of the atmosphere”.
It will deffo not be 255k.
And no the Earth sheds it’s solar absorbed heat via the wavelength consistent with the SB law at its average surface temperature which is where that ASR thermalises.
That is at an average of 288k.
SW seen by satellite is reflected, and not part of the terrestrial EMR that is returned to space having been thermalised.
The Earth receives solar energy via SW but it emits that gained energy from itself via LW.
Which is what satellites can/do measure.
And it corresponds to a temp of 255k.
Yet the Earth’s average temp is at 288k.
The reason.
The GHE.
“All solids and most gases are constantly absorbing and emitting longwave radiation. “
Go on, then, Willis. Defend away – name your fantastical gas that neither absorbs nor emits “longwave radiation”.
Or just try being patronising and sarcastic – that will divert attention away from your lack of knowledge, won’t it?
“Go on, then, Willis. Defend away – name your fantastical gas that neither absorbs nor emits “longwave radiation”.”
How about hydrogen, H, as in the sun’s photosphere?
Tim,
You wrote –
“How about hydrogen, H, as in the sun’s photosphere?”
How about it? Are you trying to imply that hydrogen in the photosphere does not emit infrared?
If you are trying to say that the photosphere does not emit heat (the outer layers being at around 4500 K or so, with temperatures increasing with depth), then I would classify you as insane, and divorced from reality.
Maybe you meant to help Willis out because he is ignorant, but lack the language skills to do so.
If it emits in infrared then it should absorb in the infrared. I can’t find any reference that says the H atom absorbs infrared.
Tim,
Hydrogen does indeed absorb infrared. That’s why you don’t come across much liquid or solid hydrogen lying around. It absorbs IR from surroundings hotter than itself, and promptly turns into a gas.
Just like any other gas which has been liquified by allowing it to radiate away energy sufficiently. No magic involved.
I suspect you are speaking of the H2 molecule and not the atom by itself. You won’t find much H gas anywhere.
Tim, you wrote –
“I suspect you are speaking of the H2 molecule and not the atom by itself.” Your suspicions are unfounded. Hydrogen is matter. All matter above absolute zero constantly emits photons.
Wilful avoidance of reality is your choice.
Nice job of moving the goalpost.
“All matter above absolute zero constantly emits photons.”
At infrared frequencies? That is the issue at hand.
Rubbish, your fantastical theory of how gases vaporize is complete nonsense.
Phil, you wrote –
“Rubbish, your fantastical theory of how gases vaporize is complete nonsense.”
Well, that’s helpful, isn’t it?
What “fantastical theory” are you referring to? You sound like a “climate scientist”!
As Shakespeare said “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,. Signifying nothing.” Don’t blame me!
“Just like any other gas which has been liquified by allowing it to radiate away energy sufficiently.”
Hydrogen is liquified by cooling its surroundings and cooling it by conduction, nothing to do with radiation (which a homonuclear diatomic like Hydrogen in its ground state doesn’t do).
Phil, you won’t accept this, then –
“Finally, liquid hydrogen can be obtained by a typical adiabatic expansion process (J-T expansion or turbine expansion) and stored at 20–30 K.”
Of course, an adiabatic process involves no conduction.
From Wikipedia –
“An adiabatic process (adiabaticfrom Ancient Greek ἀδιάβατος(adiábatos) ‘impassable’) is a type of thermodynamic process that occurs without transferring heat between the thermodynamic system and its environment.” See that? No conduction.
Still no GHE.
‘And by the way: good luck with measuring the “downwelling radiative flux” with a satellite…’
Ditto the ‘Surface Upwelling Radiation’. Looks too large to be limited to the atmospheric window.
Yep. It always amazes me how people think “measuring by satellite” is the answer to everything. As if satellites were some kind of oracle, especially when it is about something a satellite obviously can not do.
And as far as surface emissions are concerned, we know the emissivity is ~0.91, predominantly because water has a hemispheric spectral emissivity of said 0.91. That is something I can discuss with a G.Schmidt, who would not dispute it, despite “his” consensus science always had it wrong. The “critical side” however is not interested in such accurate physics, falsifying “consensus science” btw., because it is not flatearthy enough.
Yet the implications are huge. We know the GHE is overstated and WV with it. We do understand how WV is actually cooling Earth, not warming it and that WV feedback is an illusion. But hey, who cares..
Good points. Back to DLR (‘downwelling radiative flux’), in response to a question I posed about its veracity / magnitude, one of the leading alarmists here suggested I ‘look it up’. Turns out it’s not measured globally at all, but is actually ‘parameterized’, using inputs for, wait for it, water vapor, temperature and cloud cover. It also seems to be applicable to / arise from the ‘lowest several hundred meters’ of the atmosphere.
“coupled, non-linear, chaotic system”.
Exactly. With unknown Degrees of Freedom. Almost certainly a Very Large Number.
To expect such a system to respond linearly and predictably is a mathematical nonsense. Add CO2 and by chance temperature may go up down or remain unchanged.
Pretty sure i read posts from a Zoe Phin years ago indicating this lack of GHG effect using CERES data but can’t find her links..me thinks she’s moved on. Also recall WE having issues with it. Perhaps a seed was sown?
The OLR is a very close match to UAH atmospheric data, except at El Nino events
OLR is also basically linear with lower troposphere temperature…
Radiative transfer is related to T⁴..
Conduction, convection etc are linear with temperature change.
What? No T^4?
Article says:”All solids and most gases are constantly absorbing and emitting longwave radiation. The amount of radiation emitted depends on the temperature, so this is sometimes called “thermal radiation”.”
Unclear what you define as most, but this statement is not correct. Gases are not black bodies and do not radiate depending on temperature.
Quote from “Heat Transfer” by J.P. Holman seventh edition, “Unlike most solid bodies, gases are in many cases transparent to radiation. When they absorb and emit radiation, they usually do so only in certain narrow wavelength bands.”
From Teledyne a maker of IR cameras,”Because OGI cameras visualize gas as a lack of infrared energy, they can only image gases that absorb infrared radiation…”
CO2 has three bands at about 2.7 um, 4.5 um, and 15 um. Nothing to do with temperature.
All matter above absolute zero emits infrared radiation. Anybody who says otherwise is wrong. Waffling about CO2 “bands” demonstrates your lack of acceptance of reality.
Do you really think that CO2 at 1K and 1000K emit the same wavelengths?
I suppose you must.
mkelly is right, Michael. CO2 (and many other materials) do not emit and absorb at all wavelengths. Your claim about “all matter above absolute zero” only applies to blackbodies, and gases are not blackbodies.
Check the emission spectrum of a sodium lamp, or a neon one, and tell me if you think that looks like a blackbody to you.
There is a pressure dependence of emission and absorption lines in gases, which I believe (and this is a little bit outside my expertise) results in a slight spreading of the frequencies. I am not so sure about a temperature dependence, but I don’t think so. Higher temperature (energy) just increases the rate at which photons will be emitted from the atoms’ available energy levels, which correspond to photon energies and therefore frequencies. The energy levels themselves don’t change. They are fundamental characteristics of the way atoms are held together, and how their constituents are held apart.
Here are the basic principles: https://dept.harpercollege.edu/chemistry/chm/100/dgodambe/thedisk/spec/5back4.htm
And this quote is relevant: “The characteristic wavelengths do not change with temperature but the intensities will.”
From here: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/200619/temperature-dependence-of-spectra
“Your claim about “all matter above absolute zero” only applies to blackbodies, and gases are not blackbodies.”
Nope. All matter above absolute zero emits infrared.
if you don’t want to accept reality, suit yourself. You might care to deny that Wien’s Displacement Law exists, but the universe doesn’t care.
You may be confused about the spectra emitted by excited gases – sodium vapour or neon lights, for example.
In any case, writing “ I am not so sure about a temperature dependence, but I don’t think so.”, is just silly. What are your “thoughts” based upon? Something you can’t quite put your finger on, perhaps?
Hi Michael, you are ‘mostly’ correct, but the correct statement is “all matter above absolute zero emit thermal radiation”, the wavelength is dependent on the energy…near the ‘0-point energy’ or ‘near 0 kelvin’ a substance can emit microwave or even radiowaves…yup…you read that correct (lower energy = longer wavelengths, wavelength = hc^2/E). Of course at higher energies the thermal radiation can reach visible (which is why your stove ‘glows visibly red’), and of course eventually ultraviolet, X-Ray’s and GammaRays.
I suspect you know this so forgive me for being ‘pedantic’. So mostly this is for others as there are some clearly smart people on here either using a non-standard definition (in thermodynamics) of ‘thermal radiation’ or misunderstanding that what is being called GHG’s just HAPPEN to have an ‘internal vibration absorption and emission spectrum’ that overlaps Infrared which in the common human experience is ‘heat’ or equate to temperatures common to the human experience.
In the ranges of energy most common to the human experience infrared is ‘king’ but that doesn’t make it the only type of thermal radiation emitted which is only ‘dependent’ on the energy of the substance.
I can be a bit pedantic myself – all matter above absolute zero emits infrared radiation. Infrared defined as those wavelengths longer than visible light ie infra red.
All of them. GHGs, like all other matter, emit radiation with wavelengths according to absolute temperature – no exceptions. Under very specific conditions, gases can emit spectral lines enabling identification by frequency. Neon lights, sodium vapour lamps, the Aurora Borealis are common examples. External energy inputs causing excitation.
Nothing to do with the properties of atmospheric gases under normal conditions, much to the chagrin of amateurish “experts” like Willis Eschenbach.
Any so-called “climate scientist” promoting some mythical GHE is purely demonstrating his ability to fool himself, and believe the physically impossible.
All part of the rich tapestry of life. Another passing fad.
The “temperature dependence” guess was based on the following (in my above post) link that I included to back it up. Do you have a contrary explanation, with a source?
No, I don’t consider it silly to guess when you have a legitimate-looking (as far as I can tell) source to back it up.
Are you referring to the difference between quantized line emission of energy (based on transitions between energy levels in an atom) and the EM emission/absorption process of bremsstrahlung? I know about charged particles radiating energy as they are accelerated or decelerated in a field, and this includes electrons being accelerated around a positively charged nucleus, but I had not previously thought of bremsstrahlung as a significant process in monatomic gases in particular at temperatures up to room temperature or thereabouts. A quick bit of research on the topic still doesn’t unequivocally tell me that this would be the case (and not too many people seem to be thinking about this question in all that much detail, either, and many of the discussions seem to involve quite a bit of waffling).
For example, the description here states that at lower temperatures like we get here on Earth or below (not the temperature of the Sun), something like Argon simply doesn’t emit radiant energy at any frequency, via any mechanism:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/522745/how-does-a-moderately-hot-gas-emit-radiation
“Atomic argon gas has a rich infrared spectrum […] but the upper levels of these transitions aren’t going to be excited by collisions at 200 K. I expect therefore that an Argon gas just couldn’t cool radiatively”
Yes, he is a bit unsure and says “expect”, but do you have any different evidence? Would argon gas cool all the way to 0 K purely via radiation if surrounded by black body matter at 0 K? Setting up an experiment like that would be a bit tricky, to say the least, but do we even have a continuous spectral energy measurement of a gas like argon with a smooth bell curve shape (or even a sharp IR peak/line) at room temperature? I couldn’t find one.
Not trying to be mean or anything, just trying to improve my quantum physics knowledge.
You wrote –
“Are you referring to the difference between quantized line emission of energy (based on transitions between energy levels in an atom) and the EM emission/absorption process of bremsstrahlung? “
No. I am simply referring to the fact that all matter above absolute zero constantly emits photons. All – argon included.
Richard Feynman wrote “ “I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics”. That certainly includes me.
You don’t have to believe me, of course. You can prefer to believe any passing idiot who claims that argon cannot cool radiatively. Don’t ask him how argon can be liquified by cooling, nor how the temperature of argon could be measured if it neither absorbs nor radiates infrared photons.
He’s an idiot.
When you write “but do we even have a continuous spectral energy measurement of a gas like argon with a smooth bell curve shape (or even a sharp IR peak/line) at room temperature? I couldn’t find one.”, what do you mean?
Any commercial IR thermometer converts emitted wavelengths to temperature in a roundabout fashion, which is why objects with different emissivities appear to have different temperatures, and gases are simply invisible except to specially designed equipment.
You write –
“Not trying to be mean or anything, just trying to improve my quantum physics knowledge.”
No you’re not. Otherwise you wouldn’t believe idiots who tell you that argon cannot cool radiatively! All matter can cool radiatively. The Earth is just one example – argon and all!
Don’t need a deep knowledge of quantum physics to know that you can’t warm water with ice, and the atmosphere and surface cool at night. No GHE.
The ‘idiot’ is the one who continues to assert that Argon at room temperature ‘constantly emits photons’! Contrary to all the science on the subject. Argon at room temperature can not ‘cool radiatively’ because it does not emit any photons, it cools by conduction.
Well, by ” continuous spectral energy measurement of a gas like argon” I just meant that if every type of matter emits radiant energy (e.g. infrared) continuously at all temperatures, like you said, then we should certainly be able to measure that. And it should be a continuous spectrum, not a quantum spectral-emission-line one, which you already ruled out. So can we actually do that?
You said “gases are simply invisible except to specially designed equipment.”
That sounds like it matches my idea of physics better than yours, but of course I could be wrong. What is the “specially designed equipment”, and what does it show about the “visibility” of gases at room temperature?
My comment has nothing to do with “greenhouse effect”, that notion is nonphysical rubbish, and I never said anything about it. It also has nothing to do with warming water with ice. The claim under discussion is “All matter above absolute zero emits infrared radiation.”
In response to “how argon can be liquified by cooling”, I would also point out that this topic has nothing whatsoever to do with the ability to arbitrarily cool any matter conductively. That is how argon and every other gas is liquefied today. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquefaction_of_gases , and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampson%E2%80%93Linde_cycle . All of the heat exchanges in these processes are conductive, which is of course a much more efficient energy transfer technique than radiation at lower temperatures. But I’m sure you knew that. And that is why I said that an experiment that could show that gases can cool radiatively to arbitrarily low temperatures is extremely tricky to set up. You have to exclude all the conduction effects, and of course everything conducts at least a little bit.
Don’t worry, I’m not just believing any random claptrap I read on the Internet. First it has to fit into the physics framework I already have, which comes not just from textbook work, but also from my father, who is a professional physicist, and loves to talk about this kind of thing. I’ll be asking him about this idea later today, to make sure I’m not missing anything. Second, and much more importantly, it has to match the results of all available experimental evidence, which is why I am asking for a spectral measurement of the effect you are claiming exists. I looked, as I said, and I couldn’t find it. If you have one, and if it doesn’t look like it was just fabricated out of whole cloth by some random goof on the Internet (such as our dear mutual
idiotfriend Willis for example), then I will certainly believe it. And then I will have to make some adjustments to my mental physics framework. Possibly by increasing the low-temperature importance of the aforementioned bremsstrahlung effect. Or whatever other effect can explain the evidence. But if you don’t produce any such experimental evidence, then I’m going to call BS on your claim, and be fully scientifically justified in doing so.(the “simply invisible” that you wrote sounds like you are indeed calling BS on your own claim, but I will await the presentation of the “specially designed equipment” before I jump to any conclusions)
Unfortunately, your Wikipedia reference specifically mentions isentropic cooling, where no heat is exchanged or lost by conduction.
NASA’s Glenn Research Centre gives a fairly detailed basic explanation. However, you decline to believe the information on the Webb Telescope site about all matter above absolute zero emitting infrared, so I guess NASA will fare no better. Or Harvard University stating “All matter above a temperature of zero kelvin also gives off thermal or continuous radiation spread over all wavelengths.”
Feel free to demonstrate that Webb Telescope, NASA, and Harvard are wrong. One rigorous reproducible experiment will suffice. As Einstein said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
Go ahead – apply the scientific method. Prove me wrong.
“isentropic cooling”
A fictional phenomenon, which you’ll see if you keep reading just a little further.
James Webb Telescope site says: “interstellar material, illuminating it, warming it, and causing it to glow in infrared light”
Interstellar material is not argon gas. I have no trouble believing that interstellar material glows in the infrared, but argon gas doesn’t.
The only Harvard reference I can find with your quote in it, which is a paper on Cosmic Microwave Background radiation similar to what JWT is talking about, also says, in addition to your quote, and just preceding it, that “Matter absorbs and emits radiation at discrete wavelengths characteristic of its elemental content, with absorption and emission lines due to electron transitions to higher or lower energy states.”
How do you propose to reconcile these two apparently contradictory claims?
(there is further verbiage about “other features may be due to collisions etc.”, but you got pretty annoyed with me when I said “I don’t think so”, so you had better apply the same irritation to their phrase “may be”, in order to be self-consistent)
Bottom line: I need to see an infrared emission spectrum measurement of argon gas at room temperature. You have yet to produce the “specially designed equipment” that you claim can do this, or an actual graph. Until then, I’m not buying it. I can see why you do, because Harvard specifically said so, and they should know what they are talking about. But I’m fairly sure they are talking about the same interstellar medium as above, in the context of CMB, despite their phrase “all matter”, which is probably just a shorthand in this paper. Without hard evidence, that statement as written and interpreted literally is clearly false. I am also fairly sure every physicist knows this, even if you don’t.
Sorry you don’t know how to search. Don’t blame me for your shortcomings.
From the James Webb telescope site (again) –
“Matter gives off light. Every object emits, or gives off, light of one sort or another simply because of its temperature. Glowing objects like stars, galaxies, light bulbs, and lava are all sources of visible light. Cooler objects like planets, dust grains, rocks, trees, animals, and icebergs don’t glow in visible light, but they do emit significant amounts of infrared light. Matter can also give off very specific colors of light depending on what it is made of and how it is interacting with other forms of matter and energy.”
and
“Matter is the scientific catch-all word for stuff—anything that has mass and takes up space. Matter is made of microscopic particles called atoms. Atoms are made of even smaller, or subatomic, particles known as protons, neutrons, and electrons. Atoms can combine to formmolecules.
Solids, liquids, and gases are all forms of matter. Planets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies are all made of matter. Rocks, water, air, dust bunnies, giraffes, viruses, spinach, coffee cups, and cowboy boots are all made of matter.”
You don’t have to believe it. You say that “you need to see . . .”
Honestly, your “needs” are of precisely zero concern to me. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. If my statements are based on incorrect data, let me know. Your “opinions” are not facts, “consensus” does not create facts.
Whether you are “fairly sure” about something is irrelevant, in regard to fact.
Quote something I presented as fact, prove me wrong, tear me to shreds, and I’ll thank you. Carry on like a dimwitted fool, and I’ll laugh at you.
Fair enough?
A “dimwitted fool”? No, Michael, I asked you for evidence for your claims. What is the “specially designed equipment” you referred to? Vague wording on a web site isn’t going to cut it. That isn’t how science works. It’s got nothing to do with my personal needs, it’s about every scientist’s need to prove that you know what you are talking about, and can demonstrate your knowledge with evidence. So far you are simply misunderstanding quantum physics and consequently blowing smoke, nothing more. Your myth is therefore judged “busted”.
(I really would be fascinated to see evidence of this phenomenon you are describing, because it doesn’t match anything I’ve learned about quantum physics so far. Getting the evidence from you is harder than pulling teeth, though.)
No, science doesn’t work that way. Nobody is required to “prove” anything to you
As Einstein said “no amount of experimentation can prove me right, a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
if you can prove, by means of reproducible experiment, that any matter above absolute zero does not emit infrared radiation, I will change my opinion, of course, and admit I am wrong. Fat chance!
“I really would be fascinated to see evidence of this phenomenon you are describing, because it doesn’t match anything I’ve learned about quantum physics . . . “
Not surprising – you understand nothing about basic physics, let alone quantum physics.Even Willis’s latest authority, AI chatbots, says “Yes, according to quantum physics, all matter emits infrared photons because any object with a temperature above absolute zero will radiate electromagnetic energy, and for most everyday objects, this radiation falls primarily within the infrared spectrum; essentially, all matter constantly emits infrared photons due to its inherent thermal energy”.
Not the brightest chatbot, but it has the essentials correct.
But hey, feel free to demand “proof” of a physical law. Demand proof of Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation – universal? Can anyone prove that every particle in the universe attracts every other particle. . . ?
You don’t have to accept anything that you don’t want to. Nobody will care. You can’t identify a single person who assigns any value to your bizarre views on physics, can you?
Shows what the unsupported opinion of a dimwitted fool is worth.
“if you can prove, by means of reproducible experiment, that any matter above absolute zero does not emit infrared radiation”
Sure. It is right there in black and white, in your own words: “simply invisible”. Done. You are hallucinating.
stevek,
No, that’s not a reproducible experiment. That’s just you being nutty, claiming that because water vapour, CO2, and methane are invisible to the naked eye, they can’t absorb or emit infrared!
Maybe you could find a reproducible experiment to contradict the statement that all matter above absolute zero emits infrared radiation?
Of course not. You are ignorant. That’s why nobody values your weird opinions!
Me being nutty? No, you wrote “gases are simply invisible”. Which is correct. And we are not talking about WV, CO2, or methane, but monatomic gases, which is why I wrote “argon” as a “concrete” (if gaseous) example, right at the beginning. Nor am I talking about “the naked eye”, which you only added just now. No, by “invisible” we both mean “to any form of detecting apparatus”, as any good scientist would surely infer. Right? And if anyone, such as you, failed to infer all of those stipulations from the foregoing, I am stipulating them now. Again.
Say, why don’t you come up with an experiment that shows argon gas emitting EM radiant energy in the infrared? As I asked you to do earlier? You don’t need to do the experiment yourself, of course, just point me to where someone else has done it. Should be easy to do, according to all your vociferous and misinterpreted claims. No one else has managed to do it yet, though, so good luck. You’ll need it. Here’s one way to set it up: obtain one bottle of argon gas at room temperature, with the bottle made of potassium bromide, all enclosed in a black body container, with a potassium bromide window in it, in a fairly hard vacuum, at freezer temperature or below (say -20 C); and a cheap handheld IR thermometer or camera outside the container. Then see if the bottle of argon gas is visible to the IR thermometer against the colder background, through the window, with no other radiant interference present. What do you predict the outcome will be?
(I observe that none of the other physicists in the second half of this thread are buying your nonsense either. That’s because I am not the “ignorant” one with “weird” notions here.)
CO2, H2O, methane, argon, oxygen are all invisible – that is transparent to visible light. All are opaque in varying degrees to light (whose wavelength varies between infinity and zero).
The only truly transparent medium is a vacuum – nothing at all!
You refuse to accept that you need to find a reproducible experiment demonstrating that any matter at all emits no infrared above absolute zero – which of course you cannot do.
As to “other physicists”, if they are as ignorant as you, their opinions have as much value as yours – none at all!
I won’t point out the physical impossibilities, contradictions, vague generalisations, and general silliness of your “experiment”. You don’t need my help to demonstrate your witless foolishness.
All matter above absolute zero emits infrared radiation – unless you can show otherwise by reproducible experiment. The contents of your febrile imagination do not constitute reproducible experiment, sorry to say.
“CO2, H2O, methane, argon, oxygen are all invisible – that is transparent to visible light.”
Correct
“All are opaque in varying degrees to light (whose wavelength varies between infinity and zero”
In varying degrees, indeed. What is the actual opacity of argon to infrared radiation, though?
“All matter above absolute zero emits infrared radiation”
except monatomic gases
Unfortunately, your assertion is worthless – being based on your febrile imagination. It doesn’t really matter, you cannot name even one sane person who values your opinion.
Here’s Willis’ authority –
“Yes, all matter emits infrared radiation proportional to its temperature, meaning the hotter an object is, the more infrared radiation it emits; this is a fundamental principle of physics based on the concept of blackbody radiation and governed by Stefan-Boltzmann law where the emitted energy is directly proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature of the object.”
Read it and weep – no exceptions. None.
Unless you can show otherwise by reproducible experiment – and of course you can’t! You might as well claim that a GHE exists – you just can’t describe it! How sad, too bad.
Carry on.
“blackbody radiation”
We are not talking about black bodies though, are we? No, we are not.
All you have presented so far is a misunderstood generalization, no theoretical mechanism, and zero physical evidence. Plus quite a few insults. None of that sounds very scientific to me.
“Yes, all matter emits infrared radiation proportional to its temperature, meaning the hotter an object is, the more infrared radiation it emits; this is a fundamental principle of physics based on the concept of blackbody radiation and governed by Stefan-Boltzmann law where the emitted energy is directly proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature of the object.”
All matter emits infrared radiation . . . .
You say “We are not talking about black bodies though, are we? No, we are not.” Good for you – don’t talk about the reasons why all matter above absolute zero emits infrared. You don’t have to accept Planck’s Law, Wien’s Displacement Law, or any other physical law that offends you.
But hey, some GHE worshippers actually claim that non-monoatomic gases like N2 and O2 don’t absorb or emit infrared either! Crazy, huh?
All my best, of course. Sorry that you feel insulted – sounds like you have low self esteem.
No, you emitting insults has nothing to do with my self esteem. That sounds like psychological projection on your part.
And no, I am not “offended” by physical laws. That’s probably just more psychological projection.
“N2 and O2”
“blackbody radiation”
“GHE worshipper”
None of those are the topic under discussion. Please try to concentrate and focus for a few minutes in a row, if you can.
What do you think is the emissivity of argon gas, at standard temperature and pressure, at infrared frequencies?
Sure, argon gas in room temperature and pressure conditions will emit infrared energy occasionally, following all the laws of physics we know – according to quantum mechanics it has to be able to do this, as does everything else – but at a rate so low that no one has been able to detect it with any equipment whatsoever. The rate not precisely 0, as you said, but practically it is 0.0, or even ε. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes type of situation. That’s how little IR is being emitted, which is why I said you are hallucinating. You have yet to present any actual evidence to the contrary, of course. I’m still waiting for it. The spectroscopists tell us that you will be out of luck in your search. What have you got?