Kevin Kilty
The original essay from February 24 to which this addendum applies had several opportunities for discussion items that could be expanded.
First, there was some question about what a radiometer would see if pointed down at the surface. Figure 1 is educational in several ways. It is from the SURFRAD site at Desert Rock, Nevada on June 22, 2024. The four curves correspond to total downward solar radiation, total upward solar radiation, Upward and downward directed LWIR. I have also included the local wind speed and 10m temperature in the lower diagram.
Figure 1. A description of the site’s 10m tower where many of these instruments are mounted, and a photo of the area, is available here.
Sunrise is around 6am local time (1300UTC; Local PDT=UTC-7hr). Almost immediately after the sun peeks over the horizon the surface begins to warm and the pyrgeometer detects a rise in upward directed LWIR. Downward directed LWIR rises with about an hour’s delay from the heating of the surface but well before surface convection begins to heat the atmosphere which is quite apparent on the wind speed chart starting at around 10-11 am. The peak of upward directed LWIR occurs a half an hour or so past noon at a value of 658W/m2. With an assumed surface emissivity of 0.97 this suggests a surface temperature of 137F – far above the peak temperature at 10m elevation of 100F which occurs late in the day. There is a super adiabatic layer of heated air near the surface. The situation is exactly as I described it, using two atmospheric soundings at Albuquerque, Nex Mexico from August 3, 1993 in this addendum. This also, perhaps, explains why GEOS Band 16 images taken around Winter Solstice sometimes show northern Chile to be 60oC.
Downward directed LWIR curve, the Greenhouse effect, begins its rise almost coincident with both the rise in upward directed LWIR and the rise in 10m temperature, but reaches its peak value well after the peak in upward LWIR but long before the peak in 10m temperature. The Greenhouse effect results from rising air temperature, but this, in turn, results both from bulk transport from the surface and from absorption and re-emission of LWIR from the surface. It is not exclusively a function of air temperature as was claimed.
That upward directed LWIR remains 80W/m2 above the greenhouse effect throughout the night demonstrates how it is that natives in elevated and dry places have traditionally made ice overnight even when temperatures remain far above freezing (20F above) [1] and something I observed while camping overnight at Joshua Tree Monument on March 6 of 1982.
Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
An idea that arises, it seems, in every post about the Greenhouse effect, is that energy cannot flow from the cold atmosphere to the warmer ground without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This argument will simply not go away.
Simply put, molecules and atoms do not have temperature – they have energy. Temperature is assigned by the distribution of kinetic energy in an ensemble of molecules and atoms, as in the Boltzmann distribution, where temperature is the only assignable parameter. Individual atoms and molecules are not guided by a temperature gradient in any way, but what net heat transport they accomplish is statistically in the direction from hot to cold.
Tom Shula provided a darned good reference to Harde (2013) that states…
“…any back radiation from colder and higher atmospheric layers can be absorbed by the lower and warmer layers, and this back radiation can also be absorbed by a warmer surface of the earth without violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics.”
I might mention that careless application of the Stefan-Boltzmann formula is almost guaranteed to end up with a violation of the Second Law.[2]
Is the radiation field isotropic?
There was some discussion about the radiation field being isotropic, in fact, about the necessity of it being so. The radiation field, meaning the distribution of emitted radiant energy in the atmosphere, cannot be isotropic when there are temperature gradients involved. At each point in space (we call this the field point) there is an emitted field originating at that point. This emitted field is isotropic.[3]
In addition there is also a contribution originating at other points in the domain of the problem and passing through the field point. This field component is not isotropic as it is reflective of whatever is emitted by all objects and material within view of the field point. The total field is a vector integration of the two. A truly isotropic total field could only occur inside a cavity at uniform temperature, which would be an instance of thermal equilibrium, of a true blackbody, and without net heat transfer in any direction. When heat is transported, the field doing so is not isotropic.
Collision rates being far greater than emission rates
There was a discussion about why the emitted power from a molecule like CO2 is so intense when collisions de-energize the CO2 15u line at a rate of “29,000” times the emission rate. The fact that this collision rate, which redistributes kinetic energy locally and continually, occurs with far greater speed than the emission or absorption rate is responsible for maintaining local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE).[4] It allows us to use atmospheric temperature in conjunction with the Planck function to calculate emission. It is what connects radiation to local atmospheric temperature.
Radiation annihilated?
Someone made a claim to the effect that “… The surface field is completely annihilated and converted into sensible heat. The thermal atmospheric field is produced exclusively by collisional excitation and exists throughout the atmosphere all the way down to the surface….”
For this to be so, radiation leaving the surface would have to be completely absorbed and through collisions converted completely to kinetic energy. Moreover, once converted completely to kinetic energy, would collisions be effective or not at raising IR active gasses from their ground state to a higher energy state?
The present radiational cooling of Earth involves different transport behavior at different wavelengths. In places the atmosphere is quite transparent and transport is ballistic, in other areas the emission is created locally through collisions. Just to drive this point a bit further, Figure 2 shows an LWIR spectrum measured from satellite over the polar ice cap from the publication by Harde (2013).
Figure 2. From Harde (2013).
Red arrows point to segments of the spectrum from within the atmospheric window where there is little IR active gas to absorb radiation. The spectrum nicely follows a blackbody spectrum (dashed curves) just below the 268K ice surface temperature. There is nothing nearer the satellite with this temperature than the ice cap itself. Meanwhile, blue arrows point to other portions of the spectrum which suggest much lower temperature. These occur over wavelengths where IR active water vapor and CO2 hide the surface from direct view and emit radiation from lower temperature higher in the polar atmosphere.
Even if Earth’s atmosphere were more opaque than it presently is (greater optical depth), radiation from the surface would still make its way skyward. Photons would “diffuse” through a very opaque atmosphere much like thermal conduction except with a “thermal conductivity” proportional to temperature cubed (the Rosselund approximation).
References:
[1]-My handwritten notes from 45 years ago are not entirely clear, but the report of natives of Bengal making ice overnight is probably: S. Tamara, Monthly Weather Rev., 33; 55, 1905.
[2]-A good example is Q=σ(A1T14-A2T24), where sigma is the Stefan constant. Just using areas for different radiators can lead to a large cold radiator delivering heat to a small hot one. Generally I don’t make reference to my own work, but this link will bring up a lecture I produced as a guest for a nearby community college nearly a quarter century ago that shows how little a person can accomplish with only the Stefan-Boltzmann formula and what little else is needed to make it useful.
[3]-Any radiation can be considered scattered. A phase function describes how the scattering takes place. For example, the “scattering” phase function of isotropic radiation is 1.0, unlike the phase function of, say, Rayleigh scattering which is 0.5(1+cos2Θ), where the scattering angle is measured from the line connecting the Sun and the scattering object or volume. It explains why the blue of the sky is not uniformly blue.
[4]-LTE is simply a state of being close enough to thermal equilibrium to make reasonable use of results from true thermal equilibrium.
“The four curves correspond to total downward solar radiation, total upward solar radiation, Upward and downward directed LWIR”
No they don’t. What do you think “energy” means, Kevin? And what do you think “radiation” means?
Why don’t you show us the raw measurements from the thermopiles, like an actual scientist, without adding any nonsensical fudge factors, and let us decide for ourselves how to interpret them?
so, I assume that any radiometer measurements of the intensity of sunlight are similarly suspect? Would you rather have just the voltages from those instruments, too? All of these instruments produce voltages (even electronic thermometers in use everywhere), but those raw voltages, by themselves, are of no use for “interpretation”.
BINGO! Years ago I sent of some instruments that measure gas flow to be calibrated, and I got back a certificate with a bunch of voltage readings and no mention of gas flow in liters per minute for a particular gas (O2).
In case anyone else other than Roy and Steve C think that I am complaining about the sensitivity factor, no, that’s not it.
If Kevin had posted the voltage readings along with the sensitivity multiplier, we could do the multiplication ourselves and check his work that way. It’s easier if he does that multiplication for us, of course. But he didn’t do either of those things, did he? No, not even close.
The raw voltages need to be multiplied by the corresponding conversion factor (sensitivity). That’s it. Everything after that is fake.
The process is not that simple… would you ask your hospital for the raw measurements and a scaling factor to make your own estimate of what a CT scanner (or other piece of imaging equipment) measures?. Start with the paper (link below) describing the SURFRAD instrumentation (download the pdf). From there find the references which describe how the radiative fluxes are estimated: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/81/10/1520-0477_2000_081_2341_sansrb_2_3_co_2.xml
“The process is not that simple…”
It is that simple, Roy. Anyone who told you otherwise is flat-out lying. All of the “obfuscation” that comes after the voltage measurement and the calibrated sensitivity multiplication is nothing more than “climate science” baloney. We’re not talking about a CT scanner here – that’s quite an egregious strawman. We’re talking about a thermopile. It does one job, and does it well. Much like a thermometer. Please just report the reading, and don’t “adjust” it because you think you know better. You don’t.
Yes, I’ve read the SURFRAD instrumentation papers. And because I have a solid physics background, apparently unlike you, I know that it is baloney to convert ambient temperature directly into power and then add that to your thermopile measurement – for some bizarre reason which they invented (and refer to as “self-irradiance”).
(I will also append ChatGPT’s opinion of this procedure, in case you don’t trust mine, which you shouldn’t – because naturally you don’t know me from Adam. However, I guarantee that every physicist in the world will also agree with me, if you ask any of them, as will every textbook – because that’s how physics works. And I’ve studied this subject very carefully my whole life, despite not being a professional physicist myself. My father was the professional, retired now – I’m just a dedicated amateur.)
Did you notice that the “correction” is both an order of magnitude larger than the original measurement, and of the opposite sign? As a scientist, does that bother you at all? Because it certainly should. Do you think you would get a passing grade in your physics lab making “adjustments” like that? Because you definitely wouldn’t.
What do you think “temperature” means? What do you think “power” means? What do you think “radiation” means? And who told you that it is perfectly acceptable to convert one directly into the other willy-nilly? Because it certainly wasn’t a physicist!
“Self-irradiance”, Roy? In Watts? Really? Do objects power themselves? Of course not. The world would look much different if they did, wouldn’t it? Do you know what “thermal equilibrium” means? How much power (radiant or otherwise) do you expect to see in a thermal equilibrium situation, such as the inside of a pyrgeometer? Or any other passive object? And if the answer isn’t 0, which physics textbook did you get that from? I would like to see the page, please.
Correct. But if they were measuring energy or a power flux they would not need to use a complex calibrated instrument. They could just use rate of heat uptake.
This is why “climate science” is so screwed. There is zero understanding of EMR apart from a few well-trained physicists like the late Michael Mischenko.
Read the linked paper and educate yourself on EMR:
11_1_online.pdf
“In spite of the extensive use of the theory of radiative energy transfer, no satisfactory derivation of its basic equation… from electromagnetic theory… has been obtained up to now.” In fact, even much earlier, in 1965, Rudolph Preisendorfer [29] complained about a profound disconnect between the “mainland” of fundamental physics and the island of the phenomenological RTT and DR.
If “climate scientists” understood basic physics they would not be talking about “greenhouse effects” and thinking that CO2 can alter Earth’s energy balasnce in a measurable way.
You can see evidence of the GHE with a simple handheld IR thermometer pointed at a clear sky at different angles… there is no other explanation for what it measures than a greenhouse effect: https://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/direct-evidence-of-earths-greenhouse-effect/
Roy, you wrote “there is no other explanation for what it measures than a greenhouse effect: ” Nonsense. You are pointing a temperature measuring instrument at a column air which has – a temperature! The instrument is not designed for the purpose for which you are using it, of course.
Oh my! You don’t believe air has temperature which can be measured, is that it?
Your appeal to your own authority in your link falls a bit flat. I am surprised that you haven’t worked out the answers to the two apparently insoluble questions you pose relating to your conviction that adding CO2 to the atmosphere makes it hotter!
I’ll help you out, if you like. Nothing mysterious, just basic physics.
Pretty sure Roy is beyond help… if he was capable of understanding basic physics, he surely would have done so by now. It’s not like he hasn’t been corrected hundreds of times before! I notice that on some of his self-published ignorant rants, he disables comments. (Not all of them, and not this particular one, to be fair.) Why is that??
He understands basic physics just fine.
“simple handheld IR thermometer”
Michael already answered this, but IR thermometers do not show “radiant power coming from a colder object”, which is the fundamental assertion of the “radiant greenhouse effect”. Are you using your ignorance of how IR thermometers work in an attempt to buttress your ignorance of radiation physics?
Yes they do. You can prove this for yourself by pointing the device at your freezer and then moving a body between the freezer and the device that has a temperature greater than the freezer, but less than the device and observing that the temperature displayed on the device increases when the body is placed between the two and decreases when the body is removed. The only way that can happen is if the body’s radiant exitance is being received by the device.
“Yes they do.”
No they don’t.
“radiant exitance”
You have no idea what that phrase means. Sit down.
It means precisely εσT^4. Most of us recognize that as the Stefan-Boltzmann Law which relates a body’s radiant exitance to its temperature.
“It means precisely εσT^4”
No it doesn’t. Objects do not emit power. Your physics teacher was an untutored buffoon. Sit down.
A typical IR thermometer measures in range of 8-14 μm, in the atmospheric window. The effects you see when you point it at the sky are the result of radiation in the atmospheric window being scattered by atmospheric aerosols and clouds. This is explained I my joint post with Andy May, just published on WUWT today.
The “temperature” from the IR thermometer under those conditions is not the real atmospheric temperature.
The atmospheric window is used so that absorption from water vapor or CO2 do not skew the measurement.
That’s the wrong tool for the job.
Here’s the specs, look at the distance to the measured object and the field of view.
https://www.te.com/content/dam/te-com/documents/sensors/global/tsd-digital-thermopile-application-note.pdf
“This is why “climate science” is so screwed. There is zero understanding of EMR”
Truer words were never spoken.
But how did you get rated +8 for this comment and yet I got a -20 for making the same point?? 🙂
(The score is irrelevant, of course… science is not a matter of voting, and naturally none of those 20 downvoters could explain or demonstrate how anything I said was false, nor could any of them defend Kevin’s nonsense, nor Roy’s for that matter… the usual bunch of ignorant uninformed non-physicist trolls, presumably)
“so, I assume that any radiometer measurements of the intensity of sunlight are similarly suspect?”
Your assumption is correct.
By “electronic thermometers”, do you mean non-contact “IR thermometers”?
As you imply, those instruments “interpret” a signal, and produce a number which may or may not be accurate. The manufacture generally assumes that the instrument will be used to measure IR from an object of a certain emissivity, with an assumed ambient temperature, and within a specified temperature range.
The common understanding, as in “They use a lens system to focus infrared radiation emitted from a surface onto a detector called a thermopile. The infrared radiation is absorbed by the thermopile which turns it into an electrical signal that is displayed in units of temperature.” is partially correct, and quite misleading.
In case you are interested in the correct explanation, I would recommend Tyndall’s “Heat – a mode of motion”. You won’t believe me, but you might accept Tyndall’s meticulous experiments.
Nobody has ever managed to make air hotter by adding CO2. As Feynman wrote “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong“.
Oh my, no experiment to show that adding CO2 to air increases temperature? That’s sad.
“Oh my, no experiment to show that adding CO2 to air increases temperature? That’s sad.”
Really, put Nitrogen in a cell and pass 15µm IR radiation through it and you’ll observe no increase in temperature, add CO2 to the N2 and you will see an increase in temperature.
Phil,
Add CO2 to air. Tell me the air got hotter.
Your “thoughtless experiment” is nonsensical. How does it demonstrate that adding CO2 to air makes the air hotter?
Here’s AI for you –
“According to Wien’s Law, a source emitting 15 micron photons would be a relatively cool object with a temperature around 193 Kelvin (-80°C”. So you are going to heat CO2 at say 20C with IR from a -80 C source, are you?
Nothing to do with making air hotter by adding CO2 is it?
Try again. Lose again.
I’d be very cautious about quoting an AI interpretation of Wien’s Law. That law simply indicates where the peak of the black body spectrum from a cavity at some temperature is located. It has nothing to do with the temperature of CO2 molecules radiating at 15um, which could come from an object at any temperature above the cryogenic region. Molecules do not have a temperature — an ensemble of molecules in equilibrium does.
In fact some industrial lasers operate at 10.6um, which, using Wien’s law once again inappropriately, would suggest a temperature of around 295K — burns a hole in steel, though.
“I’d be very cautious about quoting an AI interpretation of Wien’s Law” Be as cautious as you like. You don’t seem to understand physics – adding CO2 to air does not make the air hotter.
Just writing nonsense like “Downward directed LWIR curve, the Greenhouse effect . . .” confirms to me that you really have no clue about physics, particularly when you then say “The Greenhouse effect results from rising air temperature . . .”.
So the Greenhouse Effect is a “downward directed LWIR curve” resulting from “rising air temperature”, is it? Sounds like complete nonsense, but I’m open to further explanation.
Your point about 15 micron radiation from objects above the “cryogenic region” is true – and completely irrelevant and misleading. Ice can radiate 300 W/m2, but even if you have squillions of these “Watts”, you can’t even use them to make a single droplet of water hotter!
You also wrote – “Molecules do not have a temperature — an ensemble of molecules in equilibrium does.” So just how many molecules in an “ensemble”? Can’t say? Won’t say?
You can’t even rigorously define temperature, can you?
Are you trying to say that a molecule emitting photons is not above absolute zero? Or that absolute zero is not a temperature of 0 K?
It doesn’t matter, does it? Adding CO2 to air does not make it hotter. Even you don’t believe it, do you? Otherwise you’d be prepared to come right out and say – and laughter be damned!
I don’t blame you for being cautious.
“ “Molecules do not have a temperature — an ensemble of molecules in equilibrium does.” So just how many molecules in an “ensemble”? Can’t say? Won’t say?”
Check out the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution which describes the range of energies that the ‘ensemble’ has. It would take a few thousand molecules to get an accurate fit to the distribution.
The average kinetic energy of a N2 molecule at STP is 5.65×10^-21 J whereas the excitation energy of a vibrationally excited CO2 molecule is ~1.3×10^-20 J.
If you read Planck in detail he says his theory doesn’t spply to individual atoms and molecules because of quantum effects (i.e. probability distribution). His theory requires enough particles to mask quantum variability – i.e. an ensemble of molecules in equilibrium with other ensembles.
What do you think “radiation” means, Kevin?
Again illustrating you don’t have a clue about the science involved!
Wien’s law does not say what you think it does, It says a source with a maximum intensity at 15µm would have a temperature of -80ºC. A hotter source would actually emit a higher intensity at 15µm but the maximum would shift to a different wavelength.
Here’s a figure illustrating Wien’s law.
I would heat the CO2 with a hotter IR source with a filter to isolate the radiation around 15µm.
Unfortunately, 15um photons cannot heat anything warmer than about -80 C. Just like the photons emitted by ice cannot make anything hotter than the ice.
You don’t have a clue, do you? You’re trying to say that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter, without actually saying so. Cunning move, but ultimately fruitless.
Too clever by half.
“Unfortunately, 15um photons cannot heat anything warmer than about -80 C.”
The 15µm photons emitted by vibrationally excited CO2 are from a source with a vibrational temperature of ~1000K, why would they be unable to heat something beyond -80ºC?
Because there are not enough of them. You simply have no clue. That’s about as silly as saying that given enough ice emitting 300 W/m2, you have enough appropriate high 3netgy photons to heat a single droplet of water.
Feel free to demonstrate your ignorance.
Phil:
So what?. That doesn’t mean that trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause global temperatures to rise.
In fact, it can be proven that CO2 has NO climatic effect.
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-0884.pdf
Sorry but that link doesn’t work!
Phil:
The correct link is
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0884.pdf
I tried to correct the link, but was told to slow down, you are commenting too fast!!!
Mr. Flynn,
This is probably a hopeless task, but I am going to explain to you 3 things:
1) No one says directly that adding CO2 makes things hotter. That is your interpretation of what they said. We almost all are trying to convey the idea that adding CO2 to a gas changes ithe interaction of the gas with radiation of specific wavelengths. The CO2 may make a gas warmer or colder — it’s context dependent.
2) Molecules and atoms do not possess a temperature; neither do photons. What they all possess is energy. Temperature is a concept that can be applied to a collection of atoms, photons, or molecules, if you can ascertain what the distribution of energy among the atoms, molecules or photons is. Temperature is a parameter in the Maxwell speed distribution, or the Boltzmann energy distribution — take your pick. Find the distribution, then find the temperature that best fits the function describing the distribution.
3) How large an ensemble of particles do you need to know the temperature? Well, how accurately do you need to know the temperature? And can you guarantee that the ensemble’s properties are not changing in time. Temperature does not have a clear meaning without equilibrium, and the fluctuations in the mean value of an ensemble decline as one over the square root of size. Most of what you are demanding people do for you is not possible without you clearly stating the conditions of your demand, first.
Kevin, thanks.
“No one says directly that adding CO2 makes things hotter.” and later – “The CO2 may make a gas warmer or colder — it’s context dependent.” I point out that gas is a “thing”.
“Find the distribution, then find the temperature that best fits the function describing the distribution.” As I said before, you can’t even say what “temperature” is, can you? Feel free to waffle away. Try to sound as though you know what you’re talking about.
“And can you guarantee that the ensemble’s properties are not changing in time.” Of course not. Otherwise, nobody could measure continuously changing air temperature, could they?
You have written a load of garbage supposedly about “energy balance”, without actually managing to anything at all. You seem stuck – you now claim that CO2 may make a gas warmer or colder – but not if it’s added to the gas. Surely that sounds ridiculously evasive, even to you.
I’ll say again – adding CO2 to a gas does not change its temperature. Removing CO2 from a gas mixture does not lower the temperature.
There is no GHE.
What do you think is the relationship between “temperature” and “power”, Kevin? And what do you think “radiation” means?
FWIW, the plots are of power density.
The raw readings wouldn’t be very useful without the calibration data for the sensors. What isn’t stated is the wavelengths that constitute “solar” versus “infrared”.
In his above writing, Kevin demonstrated that he does a have very good grasp of radiative heat transfer.
They are not measuring power density. Nothing to do with measuring power. They imply radiating power based on the S-B equation. A pyrgeometer does not measure power. It infers a power based on its calibration curve and rate of heat loss for its calibration band when pointed at a cooler object than the device or rate of heat gain when pointed as something hotter..
Kevin does not have any idea what “radiation” or “energy” mean. Why don’t you ask him those questions? He can’t answer them for me correctly.
The plots are “adjusted” power readings. What was the original reading before the fake “adjustment”, and what is the physical validity of the “adjustment”?
doesn’t the sun also produce, directly, lwir? won’t that be included in the green trace?
Good point. The Sun is very high temperature — in the neighborhood of 5800K. At this high temperature most blackbody energy ends up in the visible and near infrared part of the spectrum. I’ve calculated the 4-100 micrometer (thermal) contribution from the Sun and calculated it as only about
. Not zero, but not terribly significant either, and especially so as this is input at the top of atmosphere and fights its way to the surface with the usual trouble.
Yep. I get about 12 W.m-2 of the 1360 W.m-2 total TSI so we’re in the ballpark. And in terms of the average spread over the spherical area at TOA it is only about 3 W.m-2. This compares to terrestrial radiation in the same 4-100 um band of about 240 W.m-2. So the outgoing LWIR is about 80x that of the incoming LWIR. Please double check my math there.
In the ball park is good. Most engineering transport texbooks have a universal table for blackbody radiation. Figure two dimensionless numbers from the temperature, and these are your limits by row in the table. Subtract one table number from the other and you have done the definite integral. At high temperature you are fussing with the thin tail of the function and plus or minus 10-20% is just fine for engineering.
Nope, solar EMR mostly in the visible, because any emissive temperature will be too high for LWIR frequencies.
Brian, you didn’t read what Kevin said. He was referring to long-wave >4 while you are referring to SW in the visible light range which is below 4 microns. Incoming solar is 1360 W/m^2 or 340 average.
By my Planck spreadsheet only .00841 fraction of that, about 11.4 watts, is in the range from 4 to 100 microns. If say, that incoming energy heats a square meter of the surface to 300 C, then the IR radiation leaving that 300 C surface will be about .99 fraction in the range of 4 to 100 microns, with about .38 fraction in the transparent atmospheric window, 8-14 microns, where most of it goes to outer space unless it clouds or dust get in the way.
Hello Kevin,
Where can I get this raw data for the site you list. This is very interesting. Looking at the graphs, there is a correlation between the perturbations of the surface temp, upwelling and downwelling infrared. Is this real or an instrumental artifact from the measurement method?
Another observation is that when the convection starts, the downwelling radiation infrared ceases to follow the upwelling, and the delta change reduces. While both curves cease to be as smooth, the downwelling IR it is still has much less high frequency changes and amplitude as the upwelling. Is this instrument artifact, or an affect of the physical nature of the absorption/emission mechanism?
This some interesting stuff.
Thanks.
It’s extremely interesting data. Unfortunately there are few such sites around. You can pick the graphics that I cludged together from this site :
https://gml.noaa.gov/grad/surfrad/index.html
There is a button to download the raw data. Note that once convection kicks in, the upward welling LWIR becomes noisy and fails to follow the trajectory of earlier in the day. The pyrgeometer is observing fluctuating and variable surface temperature. I think if you took the difference between a smooth trajectory and the noisy one you’d have a pretty good measure of what dry convection removes.
Best of luck in your investigations.
“Moreover, once converted completely to kinetic energy, would collisions be effective or not at raising IR active gasses from their ground state to a higher energy state?”
Not particularly effective since only a small percentage of the molecules possess enough kinetic energy to raise CO2 molecules from their ground state to the first vibrational energy level.
Yes, but its in keeping with the statistical equilibrium at temperature. Still, its effective enough to measure with a spectrometer and produce greenhouse effects. As I said, if the emission rate is so high that it rivals the collision rate, you lose local equilibrium and then the source term becomes much more difficult to figure — it isn’t the Planck function any longer.
Kevin, you wrote “As I said, if the emission rate is so high that it rivals the collision rate . . .”.
No, all matter above absolute zero emits infrared photons, and “collisions” are just convenient lies told to children.
Are you trying to imply that adding CO2 to air makes the air hotter?
You can’t produce any experimental support for such a speculation, because it’s just not possible, given our understanding of physical laws.
Sorry about that, but your speculation seems pretty rubbish.
There are entire chapters in textbooks on the thermal engineering of: furnaces, boilers, ovens, rocket engines, jet engines, etc because CO2 and H2O, the products of combustion, have a great effect on heat transfer. You are saying all that knowledge is imaginary?
Michael has no knowledge of the Physical Chemistry involved and continually trots out the same mantra.
“You are saying all that knowledge is imaginary?” Am I? Maybe you could quote me, rather than just making stuff up.
I’ll ask again – are you trying to imply that adding CO2 to air makes the air hotter?
No? I’m fairly sure that your ignorance is equal to your gullibility. Even GHE believers like Raymond Pierrehumbert can’t do any better than “CO2 is just planetary insulation” – as is the atmosphere, aquasphere and lithosphere in relation to the much hotter interior.
How many of your authorities describe the GHE? None?
Ah well, you can always make up more stuff and hope those more ignorant and gullible than yourself will believe you.
“Maybe you could quote me, rather than just making stuff up.”
“Unfortunately, 15um photons cannot heat anything warmer than about -80 C.”
This for example which indicates that you don’t understand Wien’s law
Phil, unfortunately the contents of your imagination are not reproducible experiments, are they? Start off by trying to warm some water with ice. Surround the ice with water, to ensure that none of the photons emitted by the ice get away.
Are you dimwitted?
Why on earth would I want to do that and what relevance does it have to your total misunderstanding of Wien’s law?
Good grief, Michael…you miss the entire point….adding CO2 isn’t what makes the air warmer, it’s sunlight that makes the air warmer due to the added CO2 with it’s much higher IR absorption than N2 and O2 which are transparent.
There is some validity to the argument that there is much more water vapour in the air at about 20000 ppm than CO2 at 400 ppm. But one must realize that at Top of troposphere, only 10-12 km up, where the big jets fly, water vapor is less than 10 ppm and CO2 is still 400 ppm….and a program that does line-by-line and layer-by-layer integration must be used to calculate the change due to additional whatever…CO2, humidity, cloud cover….such as Modtran.
Remove the CO2 from air, even in sunshine, and the temperature of the air does not drop. However, surface temperature will rise, as Tyndall’s experiments demonstrate.
Remove the most important GHG from the air – Death Valley, Lut desert – and the surface temperature goes up, as does the air temperature.
You say “But one must realize that . . .”.
You obviously don’t.
No, the surface temp won’t rise if you remove CO2 from the atmosphere. it will drop. IR from warm surfaces will have a more direct view of cold outer space, causing them to become slightly cooler. Tyndall’s IR absorption experiments would confirm that.
Yes it will. Death Valley shows the temperature you can get with little H2O in the atmosphere. The Moon, at around 127 C max. Is an extreme example.
You might care to read what Tyndall wrote – he agrees with me.
Bad luck for you?
An interesting and related comment I just posted. It’s Grok3’s response to the question: Can you give me a percent of earths radiant energy absorbed uniquely by co2? I wanted to compare the response to this same question that was also given to CoPilot.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/03/08/10315414/#comment-4046441
The 10-15% figures I would agree with entirely. I estimated it through adjustments to the atmospheric profile in MODTRAN. I see that up thread from your post is another link to an article that tries to calculate the relative influence of CO2 by just counting ppm. This neglects entirely the cross sections for absorption/emission which have outsized influence on the result.
Yep. It triggers commenters here every time.
The example I always give is that of your kitchen oven. Turn it on high (so it doesn’t cycle) with the door open and allow the inside to achieve a steady-state temperature. Then close the door. The thermometer inside the oven will show that the temperature begins increasing. The act of closing the cooler door causes the warmer inside to warm further.
I have yet to post this demonstration without someone proclaiming how misinformed I am (often with acerbic language) and outright denying that the cooler door could possibly cause the increase in temperature of the inside so it would not be a surprise to witness it happening here as well. And of course those commenters refuse to actually perform the experiment that indisputably and unequivocally proves that cooler bodies can and frequently do cause warmer bodies to warm further in certain situations.
Anyway, this does not violate the 2LOT because 1) the oven is not an isolated system and 2) heat is still flowing from the burner (hot) to the inside (warm) to the door (cool) to the outside (cold) in the typical 2LOT pattern regardless.
There are 2 common misconceptions I see regarding the 2LOT. The first is that commenters often forget about the isolation clause. The 2LOT only applies to isolated systems or systems that are evolving by their own means. There are many ways the isolation clause is communicated. For example, Clausius used the archaic phrase “without some other change” to express what we now formally recognize as the isolation clause. The second is that commenters often conflate heat with energy. Energy is the ability to do work. Heat is the net flow of energy. A cold body in an isolated system can and does transfer energy to a hot body. But the net flow energy (heat) is from hot to cold. I have underlined net to drive home the point that it is the net flow that matters when discussing heat.
Good comment. You have to admit, however, that even the concept of temperature is difficult to fully grasp. When it comes to a collection of atoms, then one can only say that the temperature is the one adjustable parameter of the Boltzmann distribution, that best fits the actual statistical distribution of energy. Tell people that and they think you have gone daft.
By the way, another engineering use of the term “heat” is that it is waste energy that can no longer produce work, but has been rejected to the “dead state”.
On topic of “difficult concepts” and use of terminology, I have to object to the term “back radiation”. There is only radiation, which rises exponentially with temperature. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
Tom Shula provided a darned good reference to Harde (2013) that states…
“…any back radiation from colder and higher atmospheric layers can be absorbed by the lower and warmer layers, and this back radiation can also be absorbed by a warmer surface of the earth
Harde (2013) is just nonsensical.
Harde (2013) preceded van Wijngaarden and Happer by 7 years. Harde’s treatment was much more rigorous, but unfortunately reached the same incorrect conclusions as vW&H.
Unfortunately Kevin did not use any of the bits I cited from Harde in my comments to his previous post, but chose the quote HE selected from Harde to support the “back radiation” argument. I take no credit for that.
You can’t make the assumption that a CO2 molecule only absorbs upward radiation. If the surface can absorb radiation from a colder CO2 molecule, then CO2 can absorb radiation from a colder CO2 molecule above it. This really complicates the radiation gradient through the atmosphere.
Part of the problem is concentrating on A photon. Heat can’t be analyzed by doing this. Even Planck recognized this in his Theory of Heat Radiation. He was very clear that one can only analyze heat transfer by having a volume large enough that it appeared isotropic, i.e., radiates in all directions equally.
Obviously, he assumed no conduction or convection as those cause innumerable complications to analyzing radiation effects. One can not do this when analyzing the atmosphere.
Two other things. One, back radiation can not raise the temperature of the surface. It radiates at the temperature that it’s source makes it, and any absorbed energy just zips away. Two, absorbed energy zips away based on the Planck distribution, which means a lot of it disappears through the atmospheric window, thereby complicating any gradient associated with the GHE.
While much of the discussion here is beyond me, the fact that these disagreements continually recur on WUWT convince me that there are “innumerable complications to analyzing radiation effects”. In other words, the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, therefore unscientific.
“In other words, the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, therefore unscientific.”
Hear, hear.
I remember deciding at an early age that the solution to most philosophical questions was a meticulously careful definition of all the parameters of the question.
It has been far too long since I took my physics classes on thermodynamics for me to remember all the details to allow me to make a contribution. However, I suspect that the solution is the same meticulously careful definition of all the parameters, simply because it is missing in most of the contradictory assertions.
“Careful definition of all the parameters… is missing in most of the contradictory assertions” and I would say in general education.
The popular exposition of the greenhouse effect is simply “it’s just like a greenhouse”, and people accept that that’s all you need to know.
Try to find a government climate website that refers to any laws of thermodynamics, or find a ‘believer’ that can explain them to you.
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
Einstein
“On the Method of Theoretical Physics” The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933)
I completely agree. Temperature is indeed a concept that can often transcend intuitive reasoning.
‘The example I always give is that of your kitchen oven. Turn it on high (so it doesn’t cycle) with the door open and allow the inside to achieve a steady-state temperature. Then close the door. The thermometer inside the oven will show that the temperature begins increasing. The act of closing the cooler door causes the warmer inside to warm further.’
What will those clever oven manufacturers think of next?!
Seriously, you don’t think closing the door has something to do with eliminating convective heat transfer?
Seriously, you don’t think closing the door has something to do with eliminating convective heat transfer?
You mean like a greenhouse?
You and I have had this discussion before. My position has not changed.
My position…cold bodies can be the cause of warm bodies warming further. This is true regardless of the mode of transmission which includes conduction, radiation, and convection. It is true for the kitchen oven experiment which has a large and significant convection component just as it is true for Cloudman and Swanson‘s experiments which have a significant radiation component.
Go on, tell me “your position” is that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter!
Isn’t that the proposition that GHE supporters subscribe to?
CO2 can cause an increase in the temperature of air, all other things being equal. However, it is the answer to the wrong question. The question should be, “Are extant concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere sufficient to cause a significant increase in temperature of the atmosphere in the context of the numerous complex feedback loops, especially the diffuse reflectance from clouds, and the convective transport of heat energy above the bulk of the absorbing CO2?”
I think that the answer to the correct question is, “No.”
42 is not always the correct answer. One has to choose the question carefully.
As temperature goes up by 1, radiation goes up by T^x. That is one of the major feedbacks that always gets ignored. It is a negative feedback that limits maximum temperature.
Yes, I used this in a technique to more accurately measure the exhaust gas temperature in a gas turbine engine. The thermocouple I used would glow red-hot and radiate and was in equilibrium with room temperature surroundings, which lead to a cooling of the ThC of about 100º. When I surrounded the ThC with a quartz tube that became the cooler object and since it was immersed in the flame the ThC measured a significantly hotter, more accurate, temperature.
“The thermocouple I used would glow red-hot and radiate and was in equilibrium with room temperature surroundings”
So the quartz tube became red-hot and radiated?
Presumably, the quartz tube immersed in the flame became just as hot as the thermocouple. Or maybe hotter? You say the thermocouple became hotter – why was that, if it was immersed in the same flame?
How do you know which temperature was more accurate? All seems a bit fishy to me.
“Presumably, the quartz tube immersed in the flame became just as hot as the thermocouple. Or maybe hotter? You say the thermocouple became hotter – why was that, if it was immersed in the same flame?”
Because instead of exchanging the radiation with a surface at 300K the ThC was now exchanging with one that was slightly cooler (the quartz tube which was now exchanging with the surface at 300K. The ThC temperature was cooler than the actual flame temperature because of radiative heat transfer to the surroundings. This is a well established procedure for measuring flame temperature, Here’s a paper describing the various techniques used: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0734904120963812
also https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346324970_Development_and_validation_of_simple-shield_thermocouple_in_fire_environments
Phil, neither of your references mention quartz tubes at all. You are just making stuff up again.
You also ignore the fact that the flame (consisting of hot matter) is constantly losing energy to the environment.
Maybe you could make up something about adding CO2 or H2O to air making it hotter. Or removing CO2 or H2O making the air cooler?
“Phil, neither of your references mention quartz tubes at all. You are just making stuff up again.”
No, the quartz tube is just the version of a shield that I used in my research lab. Read the paragraph after equation 1 in the first paper to find out how it works.
As I mentioned before the shield is heated/cooled to a temperature that is intermediate between the ThC and its surroundings and given the strong dependence of radiation on temperature significantly reduces the radiational heat loss from the ThC.
“You also ignore the fact that the flame (consisting of hot matter) is constantly losing energy to the environment.”
No I don’t the measurement was of a steady state flow. The use of shielded ThCs was pioneered by NACA in the late 40s and early 50s.
“No, the quartz tube is just the version of a shield that I used in my research lab.”
So you were making stuff up, implying that your references might support your use of the term “quartz tube”, is that it? Your references don’t mention temperatures of “red hot gas” at all.
Now presumably, your quartz tube was glowing, and emitting light consistent with its temperature? That would mean, of course, that the thermocouple was being heated by the radiation from the glowing quartz tube, or are you now going to say what you didn’t earlier?
I don’t believe you are being truthful, to be honest. You are just making stuff up, implying that adding CO2 to the atmosphere results in “global warming” (whatever that is supposed to mean!).
You don’t even comprehend the content of the links you provided. Hopefully, your “research lab” is a figment of your imagination. You don’t seem terribly competent.
If all else fails, you could buy any one of a number of commercial EGT (exhaust gas temperature) sensors – already calibrated. Feel free to make more stuff up.
From one of the papers cited.
“Thermocouples are one of the most widespread used sensors for temperature measurements in several applications, thanks to their robustness, low cost and ease of installation. However, when used in high temperature environments or in the presence of flames or elevated hot sources, the measurement can be affected, for example, by radiative exchanges to and from the ambient.”
“So you were making stuff up, implying that your references might support your use of the term “quartz tube”, is that it? Your references don’t mention temperatures of “red hot gas” at all.”
No, I just described the simple shield we used in my research lab to correct the flame temperature measurements. Quartz tubes were one of the early types of shield used in the original NACA studies.
“Now presumably, your quartz tube was glowing, and emitting light consistent with its temperature? That would mean, of course, that the thermocouple was being heated by the radiation from the glowing quartz tube, or are you now going to say what you didn’t earlier?”
Technically the ThC was being cooled by radiational heat loss to the shield.
In the absence of a shield the ThC is heated by convection from the flame but a lower temperature than the flame temperature is reached because of radiational heat loss to the surroundings. The shield is also heated convectively and also radiates to the surroundings and so reaches a similar temperature to the original thermocouple. When the ThC is surrounded by the shield its radiational heat loss is now to the much hotter shield and its losses are much less and so the recorded temperature is much closer to the flame temperature, that’s why shields are used.
The commercial EGT you mention would be useless for measuring flame temperatures.
Hang on there, Phil.
You initially claimed “Yes, I used this in a technique to more accurately measure the exhaust gas temperature in a gas turbine engine.”
So you were lying about measuring exhaust gas temperature, or do you think that commercial exhaust gas temperature sensors are useless to measure exhaust gas temperature?
I was measuring the gas temperature in a gas turbine combustor, as I mentioned a thermocouple without a shield has an error of approximately -100º, the sensors you mentioned would have an error greater than that. (if they didn’t melt).
From Planck’s Theory of Heat Radiation:
This where everyone always gets messed up. The fluxes between A, B, and Bi do not add at A. The sun (Body Bi) heats the surface of Body A to a temperature warmer than Body B. The atmosphere (Body B) is the one that builds heat (temperature rise) from Body A. Body B can not “heat” Body A. If it could, you would have an infinite series of heating.
Look at Kevin K’s Figure 1. Downwelling never reaches the upwelling from the surface, not even at sunrise. That tells you that the surface is always warmer than the atmosphere and that equilibrium is never reached. I might even posit that the dew point may come into play shortly before sunrise.
Please note, I’m not saying that Body A doesn’t absorb radiation from Body B, it does. However, body A does not receive “heat” from Body B.
Unless I’ve missed something I don’t disagree with anything in your post. In fact I wholeheartedly agree with you about A not “heating” B. It’s a point I talk about all of the time and it’s why I’m always very careful not to say that the over door “heats” the inside or that the atmosphere “heats” the surface. I only ever say that those cooler bodies cause the warmer bodies to warm further. Anyway, don’t let it be said that I cannot recognize factual statements when I see them.
“ I only ever say that those cooler bodies cause the warmer bodies to warm further. “
This *is* wrong. It doesn’t cause warmer bodies to warm further. It causes warm bodies to cool slower. Warmer bodies are *never* pushed back *up* the temperature gradient by cooler bodies. Cooler bodies only change the negative slope of the temperature gradient, they never make the temperature gradient turn positive.
Tim, these nitwits point blank refuse to accept reality.
If you ask them to describe the “greenhouse effect” in any consistent way, they can’t. It either warms the atmosphere or the surface, by either adding or removing “greenhouse gases”, and may involve a “negative greenhouse effect” or even an “anti-greenhouse effect”, apparently.
An effect for all seasons!
This is absurd. Closing the door to the oven does not cause the inside to cool slower. In fact, it doesn’t cool at all. It warms.
“This is absurd. Closing the door to the oven does not cause the inside to cool slower. In fact, it doesn’t cool at all. It warms.”
When was the last time you used an oven to cook anything? Do you think the heating element is on all the time?
Again, there is absolutely no way for the oven door to push the air in the oven UP the temperature gradient, NONE. All that closing the door does is slow down the cooling so that the heating element doesn’t have to run as long to keep the air temp at the set point. If that heating element goes off, the air in the oven cools. The temperature never goes above what the heating element provides for.
I asked you what would happen if you closed the door immediately after the oven air reached 350F and the heating element turned off. You didn’t answer.
The fact is that closing the door will *NOT* drive the air temperature up past 350F, the oven door will *not* add energy into the system to push the temperature up, it won’t even hold the air temperature at 350F, it will immediately start falling. It just falls at a slower rate with the door closed then with the door open.
You can say you agree, but then you say something like this that shows you don’t understand.
You appear to say radiation from a cold body can cause a warm body to warm further. Read the Planck quote again. A IS COOLED BY B, it isn’t made warmer.
Show us a gradient equation that defines how a cool body causes a hot body to warm further.
Note: don’t confuse absorption/emission of energy with the movement of heat. They are two entirely different phenomena and have different mathematical treatments.
I guess I was wrong about you. It sounds to me like you do, in fact, still reject the indisputable and unequivocal fact that the door to the oven (which is cooler) was the cause of the temperature increase inside (which is warmer). If you don’t reject this fact then you are doing everything you possibly can to convince me otherwise.
Don’t think the irony of someone who rejects the indisputable and unequivocal fact that cooler bodies can and often do cause warm bodies to warm further, like is the case with the oven experiment, is lecturing me on movement of heat went unnoticed.
BTW, I’m curious…how deep does your rejection go? Do you also think, like your brother, that the inside will actually cool when that door is closed?
“the cause of the temperature increase inside (which is warmer)”
The cause of any warming is the HEATING ELEMENT! Closing the oven door on an idle oven doesn’t cause the temperature inside the oven to go up, it will remain at ambient temperature.
I think the key to understanding this is that the heat content is the sum of the energy of all the captured photons, minus any losses to the system. That is to say, an object can be heated to the same temperature by a collection of a very large number of low-energy photons or a smaller number of higher energy photons, assuming that nothing changes the rate of loss of heat.
The temperature achieved by a solid object is a result of the reflectivity for photons of different wavelengths, which determines how many of a particular energy are captured. The receiving object doesn’t ‘care’ what the temperature of the source is, the only thing that matters is that every photon supplies a quantum of energy. But, depending on what the receiving object is, it may reject (either by reflection/scattering or not absorbing them and allowing them to pass through) a large number of photons of some wavelengths, which is independent of the source, but determined by the composition of the object receiving the photons. That is, the function that describes the reflectivity with respect to wavelength is actually controlled by an imaginary number called the Complex Refractive Index. Fresnel’s Equation provides how specular reflectivity varies with the angle of incidence and the Complex Refractive Index for specular reflection off smooth solid objects. While the absorptivity (1-reflectivity) and emissivity are related for solid objects, I don’t know if there are actually any true Black Bodies for small objects or non-opaque parcels of air.
The second order of complexity involves Kirchhoff’s law of thermal radiation, which states that, “For an arbitrary body emitting and absorbing thermal radiation in thermodynamic equilibrium, the emissivity function is equal to the absorptivity function.” That means that the emissivity is equal to the absorptivity (in equilibrium), which implies that there should be strong emission lines for a gas that are at the same wavelength(s) as they absorb. For strongly absorbing gases, they should therefore also emit strongly at the same wavelengths, which is a bit of a conundrum for the model of a gas behaving like a Black Body and having a smooth curve.
To wrap up, the final temperature (at equilibrium) should be determined by the total energy acquired from captured and retained photons, of whatever energy, and the mass of the molecules holding that energy, and the Specific Heat Capacity of the different gas molecules, at a specified pressure — pV=nRT Ideal Gas Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_law_of_thermal_radiation
Of course it does, Frank, but I think you are being too hard on what bdgwx is attempting to say. His analogy is good only for a very short time as the door is closed, and before the “insulating” affect of the door is seen. The trouble is he stated “so it doesn’t cycle” which with the door open it will do constantly, and might have better said “so the temperature doesn’t cycle” meaning the oven is steady-state.
At any rate, Pat Frank asked me to look at a recent experimental paper by Harde and Schell and here they say something similar…
“In an open system (the solar system) with external heating (the sun) this even leads to an increasing temperature of the warmer body (planet earth) in the presence of additional (
back-) radiation from a colder body (the atmosphere).”This “simultaneous double heat exchange by radiation” is in fact a prefect description of the greenhouse effect.
This fundamental physics, even here among informed and earnest commenters, is misunderstood. The average man in the street would have no idea, so they simply defer to the “experts” who tell them ” trust us, the science is settled”.
Thanks, Kevin for posting this addendum. Let me say upfront that you have the patience of a saint, and, if I can address both you and bdgwx concurrently, I have absolutely no doubt that two plates, aka objects / surfaces, in close proximity will emit / absorb thermal radiation to /from each other in accordance with the basic laws of Planck, Wien, Stefan-Boltzmann, etc.
What I question is how applicable this all is within a highly convective lower troposphere, where thermal radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface and absorbed by IR active gas molecules is overwhelmingly converted into kinetic energy and convected upwards within meters of the surface due to the preponderance of collisions with non-IR active gas molecules relative to the half-life of spontaneous emissions.
I did read the Harde & Schell paper, which was much more rigorous than the ‘bell jar’ experiments cited by bdgwx, but in all cases convection is suppressed, so it’s hard for me to attribute any significance of these to the real world.
However, I’m willing to deal – if bdgwx et al agree with Harde that our CO2 emissions don’t amount to a hill of beans with respect to ‘climate change’, I’m more than happy to accept the idea that collisions and convection don’t matter, a mostly non-opaque atmosphere can be treated as a black body and photons pin-ball up and and down through the troposphere just like the ping pong balls in the weekly lottery drawings.
“I have absolutely no doubt that two plates, aka objects / surfaces, in close proximity will emit / absorb thermal radiation to /from each other in accordance with the basic laws of Planck, Wien, Stefan-Boltzmann, etc.”
Unfortunately, if you are referring to the supremely idiotic “Green plate/blue plate nonsense”, you are led to the inescapable conclusion that merely separating two plates in intimate contact will cause an increase in temperature!
These same dimwits who believe this are trying to convince people that adding CO2 to the atmosphere makes the Earth “hotter”!
No, the assumption in the thought experiment is that the two plates are not in equilibrium, i.e. at the same temperature at the beginning of the experiment. The warmer plate will cool, and the cooler plate will warm, thus conserving energy.
Frank, I tend to agree with you that the issue is not as serious as many people think; not nearly so serious as trying to run the modern world on windmills and solar panels. So, while I can agree with bdgwx on many basic issues, he and I might disagree on that one. Yes, Harde and Schell did a really good job on that experiment. If you recall I wrote a pretty serious criticism of the Seim and Olson try at the same experiment way back in Spring of 2021.
Roy Spencer has said that when it comes to climate change, the problem doesn’t realy involve “weather” but is largely a matter of radiative transport surface to space, which is why 1-d models work about as well as global climate models. I agree, but only to a point. I think convection, and advection from tropics to poles are also important, but not even included on the list of feedbacks. Lindzen has lately been emphasizing that poleward transport processes are very important. The whole question is so complicated that it is bound to generate strong disagreement.
“Roy Spencer has said that when it comes to climate change, the problem doesn’t realy involve “weather”.”
Seeing that climate is just the statistics of weather observations, maybe you could provide a quote from Dr Spencer, if you are appealing to his authority.
He won’t actually come right out and say that adding CO2 to air makes the air hotter, because that would be silly.
Wouldn’t it?
Radiation absorption and heat transfer are two separate things. The violation of the second law occurs when one relies on heat transfer from a cold to a hot body. Heat cannot spontaneously flow from cold system to hot system without external work being performed on the system.
You must read this closely or miss the “trick”
in this case, the increase in temperature of the warmer body, therefore “heating” as a result of back radiation from the cooler body….Oh my…the “heating” of the warmer body is due to the “external heating” mentioned. There is a caveat in Stephan Boltzmann transfer of heat between 2 objects…when you do the math correctly such that the photons emitted by the hot Black Body will be absorbed by the colder Black body with the result that heat flows from hot to cold. Of course, we humans are pretty inventive and have lasers and microwave ovens whose frequency is quite cold by Wein’s law but can pump enough photons into say a steel surface to vaporize it or burn your lunch….so you need to be talking about the right kind of emissions…..
Edit you are right for bdgwx here what happens when you ” allow the inside to achieve a steady-state temperature.” That only happens when the turnover hot air with the cool air from the outside equals a state where the turnover for that volume of air cannot increase from the heat it can absorb. It is all about air flow due to warm air rises. Second, to achieve this the metal surface and the coil will be a lot hotter than the air, remember the air is constantly being turned over. Next when you close the door you end that turn over and simple conduction between the metal surfaces and the trap air will achieve equilibrium, which will be hotter than the escaping air was. The increase of heat is due to mass difference between the trapped air and the metal in the oven. Hint the metal has a lot more mass.
I take is you are to use, to thermostats controlling the temperature of and room or cabin. If you had ever used wood stove and over loaded it and it got to hot before you closed down the air feeding the fire. The only way to cool the room down was to let the heat out(open door or window.) The room of cabin on a cold night will cool down quickly and get rather cold fast. At the point you must regulate the temperature by limiting the air flow and you can only close the door or window completely when you cooled the stove down. At that point you can regulate the stove at a point where the stove only produces enough heat to keep the room at a temperature that you want at a rate that offsets it losses being lost by the room or cabin with the door or window closed.
Why do you keep going with your oven example. It’s stupid.
It’s not only stupid, it’s extremely stupid and disingenuous. Absolute garbage.
Have you done the experiment?
What is the “experiment”? I just opened and closed my oven door. It didn’t get any hotter after I closed it. Do I have to put it in the Sun? Fill it with CO2?
Are you confused, or simply one of those deluded souls who believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere makes the air hotter, but who absolutely refuse to say it out loud, for fear of the laughter which would ensue?
Yes. I’ve done a lot of cooking in my life, and I’ve seen this “experiment” hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with radiation or the temperature of the oven door. It has everything to do with preventing hot air from rushing out of the oven.
It is interesting that you’ve actually done the experiment. You are the first person to do so. It’s interesting because despite doing the experiment you still think it is “garbage”, “stupid”, and “disingenuous”.
You are not doing “a” (singular) experiment. You are doing two experiments. One, what occurs with an open door, and another with sa closed door. They both have different initial conditions, different gradients, and different final values. Kinda like what happens at night and then when the sun rises.
You consider opening and closing an oven door an “experiment” demonstrating the existence of the GHE which you can’t even describe?
You are simply confused, I think.
If you are implying that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter, it doesn’t.
If you are implying that adding GHGs to the atmosphere raises surface temperatures, rather the exact opposite, as John Tyndall observed as an alpinist, and confirmed through meticulous experiment.
At least, opening and closing your oven door repeatedly will no doubt reinforce your handwaving ability. Carry on.
It is a simple and intuitive demonstration of a cold body being the cause of a warm body warming further.
Isn’t “closing the door” simply changing an “open system” to a somewhat more closed system where the generated heat cannot escape as easily. This has nothing to do with the “temperature of the door” but with heat that cannot equilibrate with the outside. The system is not at equilibrium so the second law doesn’t apply.
He doesn’t understand the concept of thermal resistance.
Exactly. The transmission of energy and mass out of the system with the door open is higher than when the door is closed at least initially.
Exactly. The door does not have to be warmer than the inside for the inside to warm further when the door is placed into service.
I’m not sure what you mean by “heat” or “equilibrate”. Note that in thermodynamic discussions heat is the net flow of energy and equilibrate can be taken to mean the process by which the temperature of two or more bodies become the same. Refer to the 0LOT for the definition of equilibrium.
The system is not in equilibrium with the outside regardless of whether the door is open or closed. Refer to the 0LOT for the definition of equilibrium. The 2LOT does not strictly apply because the oven is not an isolated system. But like I said that is moot since the flow of heat is always from hot to cold regardless.
If you close the door when the heating element is off, what happens?
If you close the door when the heating element is on, what happens?
Hmmmm, no answer. I wonder why?
Because your questions are irrelevant and because I’m not going to waste my time debating with someone who thinks the inside will cool when the door is closed.
From the post:”The 2LOT only applies to isolated systems or systems that are evolving by their own means.”
Please be more precise as my thermodynamics book has sections on “Second Law Analysis of Closed Systems” and “Second Law Analysis of Steady-flow Systems”. Neither of those are isolated.
I have objected to your example of the oven because it seems to me you are analyzing two systems with different boundary conditions and declaring them equal.
I can try. What specifically needs clarification?
What does this have to do with anything?
Do the authors of your thermodynamics book reject the fact that the thermometer inside the oven will show a higher temperature when the door is closed vs when it is open?
Do the authors of your thermodynamics book reject the fact that cold bodies can be the cause of warm bodies getting warmer?
Have you done the experiment?
I have never declared two system with different boundary conditions as equal…ever.
“What does this have to do with anything?”
In particular, with the bizarre notion that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter!
No wonder you babble about everything else but the supposed “Greenhouse effect.”
Maybe you could talk about overcoats, or bank accounts?
I think that you are misstating the premise. Adding CO2 does not cause the air to become hotter. Rather, it changes the equilibrium conditions which allows the air to heat, IF nothing else changes. However, the real world isn’t a stoppered bottle sitting in the sun. The world we live on is moderated by a largely, poorly-understood system of complex feedback loops that are almost certainly negative. Thus, warming is going to be minimal.
Part of the issue is that no one really knows what happens with CO2. The air heating doesn’t mean the temperature goes up. You mentioned pv = nRT in another message. This means that “heating” can cause pressure or volume to change while the temperature stays the same. It’s what powers a hot air balloon, heated air expands creating buoyancy (convection). Yes, temperature may go up as well. but at a far lower delta than just assuming the heat all goes into temperature.
Try this for a concept – I say it is impossible to raise the temperature of air by simply adding CO2 to it.
No GHE, and anybody who claims that CO2 makes the Earth “hotter”, is either a fool, a fraud, or supremely gullible.
Thank you for sharing your opinion. However, unsupported opinions are what drives the click bait of the internet.
Not a good analogy. You are in essence creating a real greenhouse where convection is stopped. Of course there will be an accumulation of energy. I can do the same thing by wrapping the heat sink on my computer with aluminum foil. The temperature will rise to whatever the source can reach at max.
Your example is creating an experiment that changes into a second one rather than taking the time to evaluate what each experiment does.
You need to show the gradients that exist for conduction, convection, and radiation in each experiment then analyze why they change.
I agree that the oven is a poor analogy.
It’s not analogy. It’s a test of the hypothesis that cold bodies cannot cause warm bodies to become warmer. Why do you feel that this test does not adequately falsify the hypothesis?
Your “experiment” is not well designed to determine radiative heat transfer. Ovens operate via conduction and convection. Radiation from the heating element is dwarfed by convection and conduction heat transfer. Closing and opening the door is modifying the conduction and convection but not radiation.
Planck in his Theory of Heat Radiation, goes to great lengths to eliminate any effects of conduction and convection. He even deals with gases which is very pertinent.
Here is what Planck says about different bodies.
You need to reconcile this in your mind in order to understand radiative heat transfer.
No offense, but duh.
Let me get this straight so I’m not accused of putting words in your mouth. Are you seriously trying to argue that it is only possible for cool bodies to cause warm bodies to warm further when the dominant mode of heat transfer is convection and isn’t possible when radiation is the dominant mode?
I would not have quoted Planck’s Theory of Heat Radiation if I was discussing convection/conduction. Your oven example has all three heat transfer mechanisms that make it impossible to isolate any attribution.
So what? The experiment is testing any hypothesis that requires isolating convection, conduction, and/or radiation.
Yes, the key to understanding the problem is the word “net.”
Yep. I tried underlining “net” to drive home the point, but it kept getting removed.
A very good article, Kevin. Nice to see intelligent tech talk here after a long term overdose of political complaints.
I do have one point of discussion regarding your attachments:
“
[2]-A good example is Q=σ(A1T1^4-A2T2^4), where sigma is the Stefan constant. Just using areas for different radiators can lead to a large cold radiator delivering heat to a small hot one. “
The formula is more correctly stated with Thot^4 -Tcold^4 to incorporate the mathematical absolute value nature of the Planck formula. This results in a cold surface NOT being able to cause a temperature increase in a warmer surface regardless of area. Of course electromagnetic radiation moves from the cold to the hot surface according to Planck’s equation. It just can’t heat anything in the “temperature increase sense” because it is always less than the “Thot” radiation. Of course such calculations can be made quite confusing if you try to do them in an “IR field” as you mention, which implies there is another radiating body (say the sun at 5800 C) involved, which is actually doing the “heating”, again in the “temperature increase sense”.
It helps to keep in mind
EM radiation isn’t “heat” until it is absorbed and vibrates those atoms in the material, else outer space from the Sun to the Earth would be quite hot instead of -270 C “in the shade”.
You touch upon the endless complications to this subject, and indeed one such complication is that no interesting problem doesn’t have a context in which it is embedded. As you say, many problems don’t make much sense until a person realizes that there is an environment that may or may not have a big influence.
I was refering in this footnote mainly to violations of 2nd Law when people fail to take the view factors of solid bodies into account.
I get what your are saying, but your stating of the boltzman equation “:Q=σ(A1T1^4-A2T2^4)” doesn’t actually include view factor (F). Not all the energy that radiates from the low temp surface will intersect the higher temp surface. At the control volume boundary where the radiation from the two bodies intersect, they share the same area and it will be the two bodies radiative intensity that dictates the direction of energy flow.
Yes, and the view factors will take care of this problem and prevent an apparent, but erroneous, violation of the 2nd law. Now as you say, at the control volume boundary they share the same area. Yes! So the reciprocal relation involving view factors, which is
reduces to just 
. Interesting approach…
which once again reduces the issue to intensity, not overall energy. a higher temp body will emit at a higher intensity and energy will flow toward the “cooler” body. Someone once described the physical mechanics as the higher temperature body is emitting at all the wavelengths the cooler body is and some additional. When two waves of the same wavelength going opposite directions the form a standing wave, and the principle characteristic of a standing wave is that it does not work. Without work there can be no energy transfer. For the higher temp body to continue radiating at it’s generation rate it will increase in temperature.
People making the 2nd law claim seem more about semantics than physics. It’s all about NET energy work not total. Some people don’t get that, others like me are just annoyed at the sloppiness of the description because the cooler body does no thermodynamic work, yet id does effect the system.
dang, can’t find the edit function to clean up my typos. sry.
“a higher temp body will emit at a higher intensity and energy will flow toward the “cooler” body”
No. The emitted photons have shorter wavelengths, but the number may be significantly less, and the resulting intensity in say W/m2 may be unable to prevent a colder body to continue cooling. An example might be a low level inversion at night, where the air is demonstrably hotter than the ground, energy is being absorbed by the colder surface – which continues to cool anyway.
You are simply repeating irrelevant diversions.
Adding CO2 to air does not make it hotter.
Their number my be fewer, but the energy is higher. Higher energy per unit photon is called…get this HIGHER INTENSITY.
Generally inversion layers form because of radiative differences (generally expressed as emisivity/absorbtivity to express grey body radiation) between the surface and the air above it .
The surface radiates energy in bandwidths that pass through the local atmosphere without interacting with it, the intensity of that energy flow out paces the radiation/conduction from air to land and the land surface cools faster than the air above it. Energy flows from the high temperature air to the low temperature ground at one rate, but leaves the ground through a different heat transport mode that is capable of traanporting energy at a greater rate. The direction of heat flow is air—>ground—>space or much colder higher altitude IR absorbent gases.
Sometimes you can get inversion layers through convection/advection as warmer air masses move over a cooler surface. There are also cases where they from due to evaporative cooling of the surface transporting energy to the air directly above it (cool but exceptionally dry air moves over a surface causing evaporation to further reduce surface temperature) but that is latent heat transfer not radiative/conductive
“Higher energy per unit photon is called…get this HIGHER INTENSITY.”
Well, no, it isn’t. Shouting HIGHER INTENSITY just shows that you don’t understand what you are talking about. I’m guessing you are referring to something like radiosity, measured in W/m2. Correct me if I’m wrong.
If you are talking about this quantity, then you probably don’t realise that emissivity can reduce “intensity” of higher energy photons, to less than lower energy photons.
An example might be the intensity of radiation from boiling water (in W/m2) in a low emissivity container can be less than that of ice! A Leslie’s cube demonstrates this phenomenon nicely.
My point was that the statement was made “…can lead to a large cold radiator delivering heat to a small hot one…” but this is NEVER the case by proper application of Planck’s equation alone. The usual reference to the 2nd law or the zeroth law or whatever is actually unnecessary. Area and view factor can change quantities transferred but the direction of net HEAT from Thot to Tcold is always the case.
For the uninitiated, yes back radiation exists, but say when 2 flat plates of equal temperature face each other, there is just equal and opposite “back radiation”. Lots of photons or EMR transferred between the plates, but no net “heat transfer”. It’s an important distinction often far too cursorily covered in textbooks, usually because radiative transfer is far less that conductive and convective heat transfer for engineering applications, and the author didn’t want to spend much time writing the chapter, and maybe didn’t really delve into the subject all that much him/herself.
“large cold radiator . . “
Like a billion tons of ice? Unfortunately, it can’t “deliver heat” to a droplet of water.
The dreamers who believe that adding H2O to air makes it hotter should visit Death Valley.
Not well-attached to reality, GHE believers.
Michael, unfortunately your understanding of thermodynamics and heat transfer is so different from mine that I run a risk of PTSD when I read your comments…😳…even though we’d both probably enjoy the discussion over a cold beer.
I was agreeing with you, as far as I know. Maybe you could quote me, and explain any disagreement?
You might notice that some GHE supporters are now saying that adding CO2 to the atmosphere does not make the atmosphere hotter, except when it does – or something similar.
Adding “greenhouse gases” to the atmosphere decreases surface temperatures due to the sun, as Tyndall pointed out over 100 years ago.
Death Valley and the Lut desert are examples of higher temperatures due to reduced greenhouse gases. The Moon is an extreme example – 127 C or thereabouts, after the same exposure time.
Sorry about your potential PTSD. Probably better than having an apoplectic fit! Relax, have a beer. Assume there is no GHE. Enjoy life.
Adding water to DV air does not make it warmer, it probably cools it slightly. However, more importantly, the rate of evaporation decreases, causing a perceived discomfort because sweat is less effective for cooling.
Clyde, you may disagree with John Tyndall’s observations and experiments. As far as I am aware, nobody has performed any experiments which contradict his conclusions.
If you would like to quote something I said, and then provide facts to support your disagreement, find.
Waffling about evaporation, sweat, perceived discomfort and similar strawmen, just makes me wonder if you actually understand what I wrote. If you have some cognitive impairment, you could let me know.
I want to pull my hair out every time I read articles or supposedly peer reviewed research that tacitly or directly claims that CO2 has a direct, linear warming influence based entirely on the concentration in the atmosphere…in other words, it’s a “climate control knob”. If CO2 goes from 300 ppm to 600 ppm, the warming influence “doubles”.
They never tell you that CO2 is transparent at most wavelengths. They never tell you that the current bands at which it absorbs IR are already largely saturated. They ignore H2O, albedo, and in particular clouds, although they sometimes admit that they can’t account for the influence of clouds. They won’t tell you about the evidence in ice cores that temperature changes first, then CO2 follows suit, likely because the cooler oceans will sequester more gasses (think how cold soda fizzes less than warm soda).Wikipedia is the worst at pushing the “CO2 as climate control knob” BS.
Good work here, Kevin. Much appreciated.
It’s good you dropped by. Do you recall that Band 16 Image you put up from around Christmas time that had “temperatures” of 60C in northern Chile? Rick Will commented that it was not possible that 2km high in the atmosphere was 60C. This data from Desert Rock shows that a 60C surface is hardly unexpected. So, assume also that the Atacama was also so dry on that day that the post processing of the satellite data is wrong by virtueof a poor atmospheric model — all is explained. I looked for that conversation…it was around Dec 28 or so, but failed to find it…
I remember that exchange, but I’ll have to look for it. Here is 1700Z today. Same thing, which indicates it’s really “seeing” the skin temperature as you suggest.
This may be what you were asking about. Now I see I erred in my response to RickWill, having air temperature near the surface on my mind. It has to be mainly skin temperature in the midday sunlight, with little overlying H2O vapor to attenuate the signal, and only partial absorption by CO2 in this band.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/12/25/christmas-day-open-thread/#comment-4012665
Yes!
Thank you for correcting that. It becomes clear why Venus is so warm. It is not the LW absorption but rather the SW absorption of CO2 that matters on Venus.
Fortunately for Earth, water makes a phase change to hihly reflective ice particles at 273K and that is what actually controls Earth’s energy balance. That bright white in your image in the tropics, where the sunlight is most intense, radiating at -90C. But also not allowing much insolation to the surface.
Venus is hot because its atmosphere has about 10 C per km lapse rate from an altitude of 60 Km high down to surface. Lapse rate is a result of convection and the buoyancy properties of the gases in the atmosphere as the surface temperature warms them. Not saying IR absorption has nothing to do with those convection cells.
“It becomes clear why Venus is so warm.”
It hasn’t cooled as quickly as the Earth. Combination of dense atmosphere, and, more importantly, apparent lack of tectonic plate activity – oh, and no convective liquid sitting on the surface.
Nothing to do with any mythical GHE.
The surface of Venus is covered with a supercritical fluid over six times more dense than water. This ‘sea’ transfers heat very efficiently so that the surface temperature is constant during both day and night (~460ºC).
Phil, are you disagreeing with something I said, or just commenting for the sake of it?
Water is wet – about as relevant as your comment, wouldn’t you say?
You said “no convective liquid sitting on the surface.” I was responding to that.
Fair enough. No GHE, though, is there?
Actually GHE on Venus is stated to be ~390ºC
Oh, GHE is a number now, is it?
That is nothing like what I wrote. I was pointing out that CO2 is a better absorber of SW than emitter of LW so out warms up in the absence of ice. That is why it was hot. If you had a pure CO2 atmosphere, you would expect it to be quite warm.
What I really pointed out is that ice in the atmosphere is grossly misunderstood. It is literally viewed as some nebulous cloud that is unrelated to the surface conditions.
Yes, I had misremembered what you’d said. That’s why I was glad DD found the thread. I’d searched but couldn’t find it.
This does not exist. It is an inference – not real. Do you know what pyrgeometers actually measure. (and it is definitely not energy transfer)
This is why “climate science” is so lost. There is zero understanding of EMR and the fundamental physics of electromagnetic energy transfer..
If you want to educate yourself then read the linked paper:
11_1_online.pdf
“In spite of the extensive use of the theory of radiative energy transfer, no satisfactory derivation of its basic equation… from electromagnetic theory… has been obtained up to now.” In fact, even much earlier, in 1965, Rudolph Preisendorfer [29] complained about a profound disconnect between the “mainland” of fundamental physics and the island of the phenomenological RTT and DR.
Your link doesn’t seem to work. Links to the two Mishchenko summary papers are here.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20140012672/downloads/20140012672.pdf
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article/1531/1/11/922276/125-years-of-radiative-transfer-Enduring-triumphs
We are in complete agreement on this. Have you read Curtis Mobley’s “ A Short History of Radiative Transfer Theory” published last year? It provides a concise historical context of the discipline and explains the “disconnect” in detail.
It is my impression that these discussions in this forum are difficult because for most “radiative transfer” is a phrase used freely without understanding that “radiative transfer theory” is a quite complex branch of mathematical physics that until Mishchenko’s groundbreaking work was based on purely phenomenological and heuristic principles, not fundamental physics as explained at a simple level in Mobley’s book but in great detail by Mishchenko.
When one understands that the IR active gases respond the electromagnetic field, and one understands the nature of the field in the atmosphere, all of the observations can be explained based on fundamental principles.
As Mishcheko stated (in the quote “RTE” is Radiative Transfer Equation” “DR” is “Directional Radiometry”, and “WCR” is “Well-Collimated Radiometer”):
“It is thus fundamentally important to understand why the phenomenological RTT and DR have often “worked” in the practical sense and determine the range of their applicability. The ultimate way to achieve this key objective is via the microphysical approach based directly on the Maxwell equations since it can clarify the physical nature of measurements with WCRs and the physical content of the RTE. This approach has finally been developed and has been used to demonstrate that the radiance has no fundamental physical meaning besides being a mathematical solution of an equation formally coinciding with the phenomenological RTE. Only under certain restricted conditions can it be used to compute the time-averaged local Poynting vector as well as be measured by a WCR. These firmly established facts make the combination of the RTE and a WCR useful in some well-defined applications and help “rescue” the majority of documented uses of the phenomenological RTT. However, outside the range of validity of the microphysical RTT the practical usefulness of measurements with WCRs remains uncertain. It is likely that in many cases the measurement with a WCR must be modeled with a more sophisticated tool than the RTE, which implies that the use of WCRs in quantifying the energy budget of the Earth’s climate system can be problematic and requires a detailed first-principle analysis.”
(Emphasis added)
“the energy budget of the Earth’s climate system ” Meaningless word salad. Climate is the statistics of weather observations.
The Earth has cooled, and continues to do so.
No CO2 or H2O heating.
Suggest you maybe buy an IR camera and point it at your surroundings including the sky…then spend some time figuring out how it works, photons, Planck, emissivity, reflectivity, absorption and all that…after that you might be able to determine where CliSci’s understanding of EMR is lacking. So far, your link to an unavailable paper is not convincing.
I posted active links to the Mishchenko papers as well as his most relevant comment regarding the current state of the measurement of “energy balance”.
“An idea that arises, it seems, in every post about the Greenhouse effect, is that energy cannot flow from the cold atmosphere to the warmer ground without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This argument will simply not go away.”
For good reason. It’s true.
I hope that you are not trying to imply that adding CO2 or H2O to air makes the air hotter, are you? That would be really silly! Nobody has ever managed to do so.
From one of your links –
“We investigate the interaction of infrared active molecules in the atmosphere”
All molecules and atoms above absolute zero absorb emit infrared radiation. The rest of the paper is similarly flawed. Not worth a cracker.
What are you trying to say? At night, even when the atmosphere is warmer than the surface, say a low level inversion, the ground still cools – in spite of absorbing energy from a hotter source. Were you not aware of this?
“All molecules and atoms above absolute zero absorb emit infrared radiation. The rest of the paper is similarly flawed. Not worth a cracker.”
Not true in the gas phase! Which is what we’re talking about in the atmosphere, I suggest you go read a freshman Physical Chemistry textbook: W J Moore, ‘Physical Chemistry’ is a good start.
“Not true in the gas phase”
Wrong, Read again – all matter above absolute zero emits and absorbs infrared radiation. All matter. No exceptions for GHE believers.
If your textbook states otherwise, the author is wrong.
Adding CO2 to air does not make it hotter. Maybe you don’t realise that removing CO2 from air doesn’t cool it either. Guess what? You can even measure the temperature of air which has had the CO2 and H2O removed! How amazing is that – it doesn’t change at all!
Maybe you have believed “experts”? As Feynman wrote “Science is belief in the ignorance of experts”. I’m sure he meant it in the nicest possible way – some experts know what they are talking about, but you don’t know which ones.
““Not true in the gas phase”
Wrong, Read again – all matter above absolute zero emits and absorbs infrared radiation. All matter. No exceptions for GHE believers.
If your textbook states otherwise, the author is wrong.”
No you’re wrong, no surprise!
“No you’re wrong, no surprise!”
Oooooh! How cutting – pity you can’t back up your bizarre assertion that you have found some matter which doesn’t emit IR!
You could try shouting or stamping your foot – it won’t make any difference. All matter above absolute zero emits (and can absorb IR). Adding H2O to air won’t make it hotter.
“All matter above absolute zero emits (and can absorb IR).”
Care to provide a source for that assertion.
KE = (1/2) mv^2
If m > 0, and
v > 0
then an electron is in motion and can be excited.
What does this have to do with the subject?
An atom where v > 0 means there is electron movement and can be excited. If you don’t understand why this answers your question, you need help.
It doesn’t because electronic transitions are due to UV light, not IR.
No. You can believe what you like. You might even be deluded enough to believe that adding CO2 or H2O to the atmosphere makes it hotter.
So you have no source for your assertion, what a surprise!
Yet another well done article that, as usual, brings out the cool things can’t make warm things warmer crowd.. For the record, I dislike the oven door analogy. I use different examples which make the matter clearer:
You are in a cold room. You are cold. There is a sweater in the room. It is the same temperature as the room. You put the sweater on, and minutes later, you are warmer. How did the cold sweater do that?
You are in the arctic on a windless night at 40 below. You, being quite certain that cold things cannot make warm things warmer, lay down on the ground and shiver. I on the other hand build an igloo out of blocks of snow. Sometime in the middle of the night you will either die, or crawl into the igloo where you will have to admit that the frozen blocks of snow are making me toasty warm and you’d like to share that with me.
CO2 and water vapour in our atmosphere operate on the exact same principles as the sweater and the igloo. If there were no GHG’s in the atmosphere, it would be exactly like slamming earth surface directly up to the cold of space which -270 Deg C. I will take a layer of CO2 at -80 C every time, because that is WAY better than being exposed to -270.
Lastly there was a lot of fussing about various laws, I would make this point. If both the 2nd Law and SB Law are correct, then cold surfaces can absolutely make warm surfaces warmer. The only way for them to co-exist is for this to be true. Which it is. Remember, the alternative to the cold surface is an even COLDER surface, and it should not take a great deal of thought to understand an atmosphere at -80 is still WAY hotter than outer space at ~ -270.
That this remains controversial after so many years baffles me.
“CO2 and water vapour in our atmosphere operate on the exact same principles . . .”
Just “atmosphere” will do. No need for analogies – the Moon demonstrates temperatures (after the same exposure time) without any atmosphere.
Arid desert regions like Death Valley and Antarctica demonstrate temperature extremes which occur without much H2O (as Tyndall pointed out, and backed up with experiment). Now demonstrate how baffled you are by claiming that adding CO2 or H2O to the atmosphere makes the atmosphere hotter.
Not that baffled, are you?
Oh I’m not baffled by you. You show up, stamp your feet, throw out the exact same arguments using the exact same words. Here and there you throw in some unrelated facts that have perfectly logical explanations.
I just heated up a bowl of soup in a microwave oven, which, according to you, doesn’t work. No part of the microwave oven is as hot as the soup. I can only conclude that the hot soup is an illusion. In fact it is a mass illusion, as millions of people all over the world have been duped into buying these things that cannot possibly work. Microwaves being absorbed by the water molecules in the soup and then via collision heating up everything else in the soup? Nonsense! Water molecules don’t do that!
In fact this mass illusion goes well beyond microwave ovens. Induction cook tops, RF heaters, infrared lasers, dielectric heaters, plasma cutters and ultrasonic welders are all clearly impossible. My TV remote also doesn’t work btw, I thought it was just dead batteries. My cell phone is dozens of degrees warmer than the antenna of the GPS satellites, which operate as low as -100 deg c, but somehow the GPS in my phone still works. Or not, I guess that’s an illusion too as millions of people all over the world crash into walls or go over cliffs because of an illusion. Chemists and engineers design all manner of working equipment that apparently also operates on an illusion.
Yup, I’m baffled.
When I was a kid I took great delight in setting things on fire with a magnifying glass. Oddly, the magnifying glass never got hot enough to set things on fire, it too must be an illusion. Every time I think about it I come up with something else that has to be an illusion. The fire trucks that responded to the prairie fire I started? Illusion also obviously.
“Oddly, the magnifying glass never got hot enough to set things on fire.”
Exactly. Visible light, plus some infrared passes through glass, without significant attenuation. However, your glass’s temperature did increase, because some of the incoming photons interacted with the glass, were absorbed, and caused heating as a result. You just didn’t notice it.
The fact that you could set things on fire should not baffle you. You were concentrating the diffuse energy of a source of some 5500 K – even though about 30% of the Sun’s radiation is prevented from reaching the surface by the atmosphere. This of course results in lower maximum temperatures on the Earth’s surface – compared with the atmosphere-free moon.
Do you really believe that adding CO2 or H2O to the atmosphere will raise the temperature of the Earth? Silly question – of course you do.
Feel free to correct my assumption if I’m wrong.
Well Mr Flynn I absolutely noticed that the magnifying glass got a bit warmer. Apparently you also missed both the point that I was making and the sarcasm.
David, “Apparently you also missed both the point that I was making and the sarcasm.”
So you didn’t really start a prairie fire, and there were no fire trucks, is that it? Do you continually suffer from these hallucinations?
What point were you making?
That you think attempted sarcasm is the sign of a powerful intellect?
I did start a prairie fire and there were fire trucks (though I actually had the fire out by the time they arrived). That’s the whole point Mr Flynn.
I needed a good chuckle this morning. Thanks, David.
Oh dear. “I just heated up a bowl of soup in a microwave oven, which, according to you, doesn’t work” Strawman, much? No wonder you don’t want to quote me – you have much more fun making stuff up!
Go on, be a man – tell me that adding CO2 or H2O to air makes it hotter!
You are no doubt baffled by the process involved where electrical energy is used to power a magnetron, which transfers some (up to 50%) of the input energy to heat water. However, much energy is waste heat – the filament can reach white heat (mostly wasted), and even the magnetron itself will get hot enough to burn you severely. Luckily, no natural magnetrons exist.
I don’t know whether you are really ignorant, or just incredibly gullible – maybe both?
I still like this experiment.
“Think of the common water heater. The heating element heats the water to 120F and shuts off. You immediately wrap the water heater in an insulating blanket. The water will *not* immediately rise to 130F. It just takes longer to cool to 100F so the heating element doesn’t cycle on as quickly as without the insulating blanket. You use less fuel in heating the water.”
The cooler object doesn’t warm the hotter object. It just slows the cooling.
The only thing that can *raise* temperature is a hotter object. Turn your oven on with the thermostat set to 350F and open the oven door. When the air in the oven reaches 350F the heating element shuts off. Immediately close the oven door. The air in the oven will not immediately jump up to 400F (or something greater than 350F). It just won’t cool off as quickly causing the thermostat to turn on the heating element again.
If the Sun went out in the next second would adding more CO2 afterward *raise* the temperature of the earth with no input from the sun? Or would it just cool off more slowly?
It shouldn’t work according to you because based on your faulty understanding of Wien’s law the temperature of 2.45 GHz photons is 0.04K
Microwave cyclotrons and lasers are definitely NOT the black bodies of Planck’s equations nor Weins law. You can use a laser, even though its “temperature” by Weins law would be quite cold, to burn holes in metal. Because many more photons are being emitted by the laser to the surface than a black body emits. By definition a black body just emits by virtue of its own temperature, which is the vibrations of its atoms.
Exactly.
“Exactly.”
Well, that’s informative, isn’t it?
Just jump right past all the other examples I gave you, stick with one you think you know the answer to, pretend all the other ones do not exist. So let’s dissect that one since you fell right into the trap.
The inside surfaces of the microwave are cool to the touch. Cooler than the soup. How’d that happen? Well they are of a material that the wavelengths from the magnetron go right through them. Hmmmm. Sort of like visible light from the sun goes right through the atmosphere? Yes Mr. Flynn, like that.
So what happens next? Well, assuming you’ve used a microwave safe container, the container doesn’t heat up either, the microwaves go through it too, so it is also cool, yet the soup inside heats up. The microwaves are tuned to a frequency that water molecules absorb readily. So the soup heats up until it is hotter than the container, and hotter than the inner sides of the microwave. Now what?
Well if you keep the soup hot, say on a setting so its just under the boiling point, something interesting starts to happen. By collision and emission the water molecules in the soup heat up everything else in the soup. Again by collision and emission, the container is heated by the soup and given enough time, will get just as hot as the soup. The container then starts emitting radiated energy also, but at a frequency the sides of the microwave can absorb, and so they also heat up.
Now let’s make the experiment a bit more complicated, let’s say we started with two bowls of soup. We wait until the inner sides of the microwave are warm, shut off the microwave, then take one bowl out. Which one cools faster?
The bowl of soup taken out will cool much faster. If you want to put a cake dome over the second bowl to suppress convective processes since that’s the effect of the microwave on the other bowl, by all means.
The bowl inside the microwave will cool slower than the bowl outside the microwave because the inner walls of the microwave are warm enough to emit toward the bowl of soup, EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE NOT AS WARM AS THE SOUP.
So a microwave is neat little appliance almost everyone has that allows them to do this quick experiment. The magnetron is just a specialized little sun emitting electromagnetic energy just like the real sun. The inner walls of the microwave are just like the atmosphere, the energy from the magnetron goes right through them just like SW from the Sun goes through our atmosphere.
Then those microwaves go through the container, and get absorbed by water molecules, just as SW from the Sun gets absorbed by water and land on earth. The excited molecules heat up, by emission and collision heat up everything in the soup, and the bowl. They now start radiating long wave, just like earth does.
So the sides of the microwave heat up. They selectively let microwaves go right through them to the soup, but they selectively absorb the LW the heated up soup and bowl start emitting, EXACTLY LIKE CO2 AND WATER VPOUR SELECTIVELY ABSORB AND THEN BY EITHER COLLISION OR EMISSION RELEASE THAT ENERGY TO SURROUNDING MOLECULES.
So you take one bowl of soup out, put it under a room temp cake dome and then see which one cools faster. The one under the cake dome does as it is not getting any energy form the inner sides of the microwave like the other bowl is.
So there you have it, an entire experiment you can do at home that uses the exact same principles as the GHE.
Thanks for playing Mr Flynn.
(Oh and yes, CO2 and H2O slow the cooling of the atmosphere, so resulting in an atmosphere that is warmer than it otherwise would have been).
“So there you have it, an entire experiment you can do at home that uses the exact same principles as the GHE.”
Now try it with no power to the microwave oven – simulating nighttime. The sun isn’t present. Terrestrial surface temperatures vary between around -85 C and 60 C. Are you really sure that a microwave oven “uses the exact same principles as the GHE?”
You may have fooled yourself again. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere does not make it hotter. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere reduces maximum temperatures.
But keep trying – it’s interesting watching you resort to pointless and irrelevant analogies, and totally avoiding reality.
It already simulates night time. In order to take one of the bowls of soup out, I have to shut the microwave off. The interior sides still being warm, will slow the cooling of the bowl of soup still inside. Exactly the experiment you just suggested.
If you want to get really fancy, you could get two microwaves exactly the same, but don’t turn one on at all. When you take one bowl of hot soup out, put it in the other microwave, then watch which one cools faster.
This is not an analogy. It is an experiment.
You don’t like it because it demonstrates all your claims to be false.
David, you don’t have to boast how stupid you are.
Bowls of soup? Experiment?
You heat soup using electrical energy. You remove the energy supply, and the soup cools.
And? You didn’t know this?
Wow. You missed the part about two bowls of soup, one in a warmed up microwave and the other in a room temperature microwave to see which one cools faster.
You really, Really, REALLY want to skip right by that, don’t you.
So you just remove 90% of what I said, pretend it doesn’t exist, and restate the experiment as something completely different.
You don’t even seem aware that you are doing this.
You need help. I’m qualified to explain the physics, but the kind of help you need I’m not qualified for.
“You missed the part about two bowls of soup, one in a warmed up microwave and the other in a room temperature microwave to see which one cools faster.”
Two bowls of soup? One in a warmed up microwave? Are you completely off with the fairies?
For example, if the “room temperature” happens to be below zero (common in some locations), the warmer may cool faster than the cooler. This is due to the Mpemba effect, and the “Mpemba effect has been observed in a number of controlled experiments.” – according to the physics department of the University of California, and numerous other sources.
But of course you knew this, and were just trying to divert attention away from the fact that nobody has ever managed to cool air by removing GHGs, nor heat air by adding them!
Explain the physics involved – and provide reproducible experimental data in support. Only joking, you can’t, can you?
But that magnetron used in a microwave oven performs that heating using microwaves with a wavelength of ~12cm, which according to your perverted concept of Wien’s law couldn’t heat anything!
Phil,
What are you babbling about? Maybe you aren’t lying about what I said, but if you can’t quote me saying that ~12cm waves in a microwave oven can’t heat water, then you must be insane.
Are you lying, or just suffering from delusions?
I can’t really tell.
You’re the delusional one.
You have repeatedly stated: “Unfortunately, 15um photons cannot heat anything warmer than about -80 C.”
That is false of course, but the logical inference is that you believe that lower energy microwave photons (e.g. 12cm wavelength) will heat less than 15µm photons.
Perhaps you could explain the logic behind your belief?
From Wikipedia:
Energy is inversely proportional to wavelength. The shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy.
IR
15×10⁻⁶ m – ~20,000 GHz – ~82 meV
Microwave
60×10⁻³ m – 5 GHz – 0.02 meV
It looks to me like 60,000 μm microwave has a lot less energy than a 15 μm IR EM wave.
Indeed that was the point that I was trying to make to Michael.
davidmhoffer:
The microwave heats the soup by causing its molecules to vibrate. As do all other heating devices.
what if the jumper was made out of copper thread?
What if it was made of platinum thread or gold thread or spider web? I fail to see your point.
David, that’s because you don’t understand physics – things like insulators, heat, temperature, energy, and so on.
You probably believe in fairytales, and that adding CO2 or H2O to air makes it hotter.
The question wasn’t directed to you Mr Flynn, butt out.
David, you wrote –
“The question wasn’t directed to you Mr Flynn, butt out.”
This is a public forum. In any case, what if I don’t “butt out”?
Don’t you like me pointing out the deficiencies in your comments?
You are free to be as rude as you wish and butt into my conversations with others. I will be free to ask you not to.
Or solid CO2 or H2O.
They are both supposed to be wonderful insulators.
Well solid H2O, known colloquially as snow is a wonderful insulator. That’s why igloos work. That’s why the early settlers piled snow up against the sides of their farm houses and barns in the winter.
Solid CO2, known colloquially as dry ice, has a temperature below -78.5 deg C. It sublimates straight into the atmosphere. So no, it would be a terrible insulator except under very specific circumstances
Any other silly questions?.
“If both the 2nd Law and SB Law are correct, then cold surfaces can absolutely make warm surfaces warmer. The only way for them to co-exist is for this to be true.”
This is terribly vague. The cold surface doesn’t make the warm surface *warmer*. It merely slows down the cooling rate of the warm surface. But it cannot *raise* the temperature of the warm surface. The warm surface can only be as warm as the inner heat generator.
Think of the common water heater. The heating element heats the water to 120F and shuts off. You immediately wrap the water heater in an insulating blanket. The water will *not* immediately rise to 130F. It just takes longer to cool to 100F so the heating element doesn’t cycle on as quickly as without the insulating blanket. You use less fuel in heating the water.
Tim, absolutely correct. An insulator merely slows the flow of energy from hotter to colder. A vacuum does not impede the flow of energy at all, which is why the speed of light is specified in a vacuum. Copper is considered a good conductor, which is another way of saying it is a poor insulator – but technically it is a better insulator than a vacuum. A vacuum allows the energy from the Sun to traverse 300,000,000 km to the Earth without significant loss. Copper cables have losses when conducting, as any electrical engineer knows.
A vacuum flask will reduce the transfer of heat from hot soup to the environment, but equally serves to reduce the flow of heat from the environment to say, ice cubes.
The vacuum in a vacuum flask does not insulate. It serves two purposes at least – to prevent convective loss due to gas movement (there isn’t any gas), and to prevent any deleterious effects on the mirror finish on the inner surfaces.
GHE believers have odd ideas about the physical world. At least they refrain from admitting that they believe that adding CO2 or H2O to air makes it hotter! Hence, all the nonsense about overcoats, ovens, saucepans and bank accounts.
What a joke!
CO2 and H2O keep the atmosphere from cooling as fast as it would have without them, resulting in an atmosphere that is warmer than it otherwise would have been.
It is remarkable how much you get right in your explanation above will still unable to grasp that last little part of the process.
No joke, nothing funny about it, just sad that you mislead yourself and others with the exact same haughty arrogant remarks in nearly every comment.
“CO2 and H2O keep the atmosphere from cooling as fast as it would have without them, resulting in an atmosphere that is warmer than it otherwise would have been.”
This is still vague. Temperature is not heat. “Warmer” doesn’t really say what is being discussed, is it temperature or heat? Enthalpy is heat. Enthalpy depends on a number of factors including pressure and humidity as well as temperature.
This is a problem with the “radiation model”, it typically only speaks to temperature. The addition of heat, even in the form of radiation, can cause pressure or volume to change while temperature remains the same.
From a radiation point of view, if the atmosphere starts at the same temperature, you will get more radiation in total because the intensity of the radiation is base on T^x and the longer the atmosphere remains at an elevated temperature at night because of slower cooling, the more radiation is released. You have to integrate the entire radiation curve to find out how much heat is released. And then you have to relate that to pressure. humidity, and temperature.
All true Tim. But you’re getting into the weeds. CO2 intercepts photons that otherwise would have escaped to space. In that instant, for that molecule, it is at an elevated energy state, and it will give up that energy in some way. Warmer is as good a descriptor as any. What happens in terms of pressure, volume, convection and any one of dozens of other factors is real. But for that one photon for that one molecule for that one instant in time, warmer covers it.
It may be good enough for you. For me it confuses the issue. Too many interpret “warmer” as a “higher temperature”.
Well Tim its vibrational temperature is ~1000K so that’s “warmer”.
David, you wrote –
“CO2 and H2O keep the atmosphere from cooling as fast as it would have without them, resulting in an atmosphere that is warmer than it otherwise would have been.” You are correct – at night, in the absence of the Sun. The minimum temperature in Antarctica is about -85 C or so. Warmer than it would otherwise have been – and what difference does it make?
As Tyndall showed (and observations from places like Death Valley confirm), less GHGs in the atmosphere result in higher, not lower maximum temperatures. Adding GHGs results in lower maxima – ensuring a reduction in the intensity of the Sun’s rays at the surface.
That’s why you can’t produce a reproducible experiment to back your speculation.
I should also point out that a good absorber is also a good emitter. This means that fast heating also implies fast cooling. In any case, as Fourier said “During the night, all the heat of the day is lost, plus a little of that peculiar to the Earth itself” (I paraphrased the French).
Hence, four and a half billion years of planetary cooling.
No GHE required.
radiative heat loss is a negative feedback. Radiation goes up faster than temperature. For every degree up, radiation goes up T^x. More CO2 gives you more radiation out for every delta increase in temperature.
The temps in Death Valley are dominated by the wind patterns unique to that valley.
The GHE is reversed over the Antarctic. More CO2 makes it colder.
Its not vague at all Time. If you wish to slide the words “make the warm surface warmer than it would have otherwise been” to make the explanation more detailed, by all means.
The point is that the 2nd Law and SB Law co-exist in everything engineers build, every day, all over the world, except for the stuff that Mr. Flynn buys, he must have a special store.
“make the warm surface warmer than it would have otherwise been . . .”
Except where it’s very hot? Death Valley, for example.
Accept reality if you wish.
Death Valley is hot due to the unique wind patterns that dominate temperature there.
You hilariously used the Antarctic as an example upthread. The GHE is reversed over Antarctica, more CO2 makes it colder.
Thanks for playing, no cookie for you.
“Death Valley is hot due to the unique wind patterns that dominate temperature there”
Gee, and here I am thinking it was due to solar radiation. You are delusional – the ground is actually hotter than the wind (air in motion). If you think your fantasies are more believable than the meticulous experiments of John Tyndall, who showed that less GHG results in higher surface temperatures, that is your choice.
“You hilariously used the Antarctic as an example upthread. The GHE is reversed over Antarctica, more CO2 makes it colder.”
Ah, I see more GHG makes it colder – but only in Antarctica?
No GHE – the coldest temperature on Earth occurs in Antarctica for exactly the same reason that the highest occurs (possibly) in Death Valley.
I won’t bother explaining – John Tyndall explains it better than I could, but you obviously prefer fairytales.
Good for you!
Yes, only in Antarctica. Since Antarctica gets much of its heat from warm wind over the ocean blowing across the continent at high altitude, the LW energy they radiate is intercepted by CO2 and some reradiated back upward before it ever gets to the surface. Hence the GHE making Antarctica colder than it would otherwise be.
I’d explain Death Valley to you also but its even more complicated an explanation and clearly your brain cannot absorb it.
I concede that there are many everyday examples of this some of which may be more intuitive or easier to explain depending on the audience. Your magnifying glass example below is pretty good.
Sorry for this seemingly disconnected post, but the analogy is most apt.
The first and last time i saw confected “outrage” was at an urban & regional planning conference some years ago at which an American demographer unpopular with the self-important local academics was attacked following his keynote address. There was a deathly shocked silence of this immature academic display of intemperance. Having wide experience of residential development, what Wendall Cox said bore out exactly in practice. I gave them both barrels in thanking Wendell and confirming my practical observance of his theories. The academic twats scattered for the exit and were not seen again.
And so my belief that the more picky and ridiculous sounding the rebuttals become, the less credibility they have.
It then occurred to me that, that is all they know and what they don’t know, they don’t know, and so much of what they do know just ain’t so. It must be a terrible feeling when you’ve hitched your career to the wrong train. In property development we quickly abandon sunk capital and change direction … those that throw more money at what doesn’t work aren’t around today … the kind of competitors I liked. They never knew when to back off until their financiers took them down.
With Trump back bigger and bolder than ever, the evolving desperation is what we might be seeing unfolding as their is turned off.
Kevin, I am disappointed that (likely without your intent, but perhaps lack of understanding) you took a number of my comments from your previous post out of context. You also used none of my references to Harde, and instead pulled statement from his paper that I did not, and would not claim as valid. The links to my comments are here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/24/earths-energy-imbalance-part-ii/#comment-4042059
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/24/earths-energy-imbalance-part-ii/#comment-4042060
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/24/earths-energy-imbalance-part-ii/#comment-4042964
Regarding the isotropic radiation field, annihilation of surface radiation, and collisional excitation, I said:
“Outside of the “atmospheric window” where the radiation escapes directly to space, there is NO PATH for radiation from the surface to get to space. The Planck radiation field generated by the surface is completely annihilated via absorption by IR active species, primarily water vapor and CO2, which are immediately thermalized completing the conversion of the surface generated field into sensible heat. This is not controversial.
The primary radiation field in the atmosphere is self-generated by collisions. The energy for these collisions is maintained by the sensible heat from thermalization and direct conduction from the surface. This sensible heat also drives convection. The self-generated field is radiatively independent of the surface radiation.
Within this self-generated field, there is a balance of collision excitation (aka “reverse thermalization), collisional de-excitation (aka “thermalization”), absorption, and spontaneous emission.
Until conditions allow some of the radiation to escape this field, there is a continuous exchange of energy at the molecular level but no net change of energy or energy transport. The intensity of the field decreases with altitude due to energy lass from convecting parcels. The intensity and spectral content of the field is a function of temperature, pressure, and atmospheric composition, and one can observe a spectrum of the random radiation field with a spectrometer pointed in any direction.
This field generated by collisions exists all the way down to the surface. This is the source of the “back radiation” that is observed. It is the downward component of the isotropic, random, self-generated field.
Regarding whether or not the collisions have enough energy to generate the radiation field, I said:
“If you read Harde’s introduction carefully, in describing section 2 and section 3 he correctly describes “…the interaction of molecules with their own thermal background radiation under the influence of molecular collisions…”, and he distinguishes that background radiation from the Planck radiation field generated by the Earth’s surface, discussed in section 3.
In section 2, he does the complete derivation of Einstein’s “Theory of Quantum Radiation” (1917), where Einstein shows the relationship between the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of particle energies and the Planck distribution of the radiation generated by the radiatively active molecules.
Einstein recognized that these two distributions are intimately related by the factor exp(ε/kT), where ε=kinetic energy for the particles and ε=hν for the radiative quanta. Locally, the radiation field is in equilibrium with the energy distribution of the particles. It is also locally random and isotropic, meaning that it does not transport any energy. It is simply a continuous exchange of energy between the IR active molecules and the radiation field.
Because of this exp(ε/kT) relationship, the frequency distribution of this radiation field will have the shape of a Planck curve conforming to the local temperature and composition, i.e., the concentration of IR active species.
This is where the subtlety and choices made by modelers creates confusion. In the following, with reference to the Earth, we are discussing radiation outside the “atmospheric window.” …..
The concepts of complete absorption of surface radiation (outside of the atmospheric window) and collisional excitation and de-excitation of IR active species in the atmosphere are not controversial.
The use of radiative transfer theory to describe energy transport in the atmosphere is a “crutch” used because the tools to mathematically model a convecting atmosphere based on fundamental principles do not exist.
I will address your SURFRAD data in a separate comment.
Tom Shula:
This is not directly related to your comments, but I need to put my oar in, again.
Early on, I had made the comment that it can be proven that CO2 has NO climatic effect.
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0884.pdf
ALL of our modern warming (since circa 1980) is simply due to decreases in the amount of industrial SO2 aerosol pollution in the troposphere due to Clean Air legislation. Decreases in the amount of pollution in our atmosphere increases the intensity of the solar radiation striking the Earth’s surface, INEVITABLY causing warming. This cannot be refuted, but it is not acknowledged, and instead the warming is wrongly attributed to CO2!
Tom,
I had no intention of ignoring any of your commentary, I read it all, and I have ordered and read some the Curtis Mobley book which was a good suggestion. I was merely pointing out a statement that I can’t agree with, being…
The words “completely” and “exclusively” are difficult for me to get past. The trouble is, that no matter what I say by means of the tools at my disposal, you will likely argue that I don’t understand this “new thinking” of Mobley, Mishcenko, and maybe even stevekj.
Using MODTRAN with its
resolution, and using the midlatitude summer/winter atmosphere, at 10m looking down the atmosphere is still 64% to 76% transmissive. That is, a majority of the surface black body radiation is still in the field and has not been absorbed. “Completely” is the wrong word. This also suggests that collisional excitation is not the exclusive source of of the field in the atmosphere, part of the field, up to 76%, is what rose from the surface as thermal radiation.
Now what you mean by “thermalized” is not clear to me, but I would assume you mean that radiation and KE of molecules are in near thermal equilibrium; maybe what I call local thermal equilibrium. Sensible heat must mean what a thermometer would respond to, or what I could feel, as heat; but this is simply what energy is transmitted to a solid object by a combination of the KE transferred in collision plus radiation absorbed.
I’ll admit that a majority of the heat transferred upward at the Earth’s surface is via convection, but the proportion carried by radiation increases to the tropopause. As far as tools go to model convection plus radiation; well, that is difficult but not impossible. A time ago I wrote a WUWT essay entitled something like “model atmospheres” and stated that a major difficulty with the Schwartzschild transport equation is that it is not a true energy equation. On the other hand, a true energy equation in this context has too many degrees of freedom available to possibly arrive at a unique answer. I am hoping in Part III to illustrate some progress; in my M.Sc. thesis I successfully handled convection plus conduction in geothermal systems.
I appreciate your commentary, but you and I are bound to disagree about several important items. Now, let me read what you had to say about SURFRAD.
Hi Kevin,
I apologize for my impatience and kudos to for actually taking steps to get more information. Very few understand something you stated, i.e., that Schwarzschild’s radiative transfer equation is NOT an energy equation..
I believe in Mobley’s book he mentioned that Mishchenko’s complete derivation of radiative transfer based on Maxwell’s equations was 485 pages. I have not read that, but there are two summary papers he published that provide a great deal of insight into this issue.
Links to these two summary papers are here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/03/08/energy-imbalance-part-ii-an-addendum/#comment-4046898
My follow up comments to RickWill, including a most pertinent quote from the first paper are here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/03/08/energy-imbalance-part-ii-an-addendum/#comment-4046907
In the second paper, section 3, Mishchenko explains how a well collimated radiometer (WCR) can detect radiative energy where no energy flow exists (an isotropic field), and also how an energy flow can exist but NOT be detected by a WCR.
Regarding annihilation of the surface field, I specifically stated “outside the atmospheric window.” Heinz Hug measured and showed that in 10 meters the 15 μm IR attenuation from CO2 and H2O is 99.94%.
The Climate Catastrophe – A Spectroscopic Artifact? – Andy May Petrophysicist
Programs like MODTRAN that produce simulated spectra in my understanding are all based on Schwarzschild’s model in one form or another. These programs use boundary conditions including surface temperature, atmospheric composition, and the temperature and pressure profiles of the atmospheric column. They are sophisticated calculators that provide a result based on user input. There is nothing particularly remarkable about them. They are designed to produce an output that mimics a spectrometer, but they cannot in general inform us regarding energy flow.
Happer has claimed that “Convection is irrelevant to radiative transfer.” He also alludes that the ability of their models to reproduce the satellite spectrum validates radiative transfer as the mechanism for energy transport in the atmosphere.
Thermalization, generally, is the process whereby an ensemble of molecules attempt to redistribute sensible heat in order to reach thermodynamic equilibrium.
In the context of molecular atmospheric dynamics, “thermalization” is not well understood by many and is often used in an improper context. In most of my writings you will see me describe “thermalization” as “collisional de-excitation” or “non-radiative de-excitation.” Likewise, “reverse thermalization” as “collisional excitation” or “non-radiative excitation.” These terms are precise and unambiguous.
Thermalization here means the rotovibrational energy of the molecule is transferred to its collision partner and it is converted into kinetic energy (sensible heat) of the collision partner. The formerly excited molecule returns to the ground state.
This is how the radiation from the surface is converted to heat in the atmosphere. It is a continuous process. It is augmented by conduction which is almost always occur as well, particularly during periods of insolation. These two sources of heat drive the convection in the atmosphere.
Perhaps with a better understanding of these terms it will make more sense if you re-read some of my earlier comments.
Van Wijngaarden and Happer (2023) claims, “Radiative heat transport is negligible compared to convective heat transport below the tropopause.” They illustrate this in their figure 3. Yet they claim radiative transport is a valid model for describing energy transport in the atmosphere.
That you and I are in disagreement on certain points and that we can discuss them is a blessing.
In scientific discourse, disagreement is necessary in order find the true nature of the phenomena that manifest in our observations.
What is dangerous is the suppression of competing ideas by those who hold control of communications. I am grateful that despite their reservations the editorial staff at WUWT is finally allowing these discussions to take place in an open forum. Hopefully this will lead to more such discussions in the larger sphere.
.Kevin Kilty, your 2001 lecture that you reference is an interesting read (that’s the one titled How to freeze to death in Wyoming..). I was initially going to just mention this as a simple acknowledgement of reading your presentation there, but there is another point to be made here, I think!
I notice that in this lecture, you cover several different topics relating to the complications of explaining the temperatures of objects in practical situations, even describing the effect of situations, like say, the effect of a katabatic wind going down a ground slope, effects of solid angle related ‘shape factors’, etc. At the same time, it happens that none of the examples covered in that presentation show any need to take the percentage of atmospheric CO2 into account?
Now, without jumping to any easy conclusions myself, what I find when I try to understand what you are saying here in the main article about radiometer detected emissions at Desert Rock, Nevada, it’s just ‘not at all’ a straightforward conclusion that atmospheric CO2 content is going to appreciably affect the upwelling and downwelling IR measurements, etc!
I mean, a whole lot of Modtran, or other simulation, has to get added in here, in order for greenhouse gas theory to somehow mean what it is conventionally supposed to mean?
So, even some sophisticated ‘area vs solid angle’ engineering formulae won’t quite get us to the usual greenhouse theory conclusions, not even to start?
.
I am really glad you wrote to me about this. I was hoping someone sought that lecture. I recall it being a lot of fun.
Putting an IR active medium between two objects at different temperatures changes the physics of the problem quite a lot. Luckily, in many instances, you can get a good idea of most of what goes on without need to even invoke the effect of the atmosphere on radiation transfer. In the case of the firemen and their doomed engine, we don’t need to be concerned about CO2 air water vapor at all, because the whole problem was solid angle of the inferno as viewed from the truck
In terms of handling IR active atmospheres in engineering, engineers often resort to rough rules which will calculate heat transfer to maybe plus or minus 10% accuracy. Of they resort to numerical tables. This is good enough for engineering because designs always apply some margin against unknown things. 20% margin is bare minimum in most cases.
Thanks for the link to the SURFRAD site. The photos were helpful. It shows the down facing pyrgeometer mounted on the 10 m tower and the up facing one on a stand nearer the ground with a clear sky view.
It appears both are Eppley, with an optical bandwidth specification of 4-50 μm.
I’ll share with you my interpretations of the IR curves, incorporating some of your comments.
I’ll assume that the calibrations of the instruments are consistent, and for now set aside stevekj’s concerns regarding what the instruments are actually measuring, concerns that I share. We’ll just look at the reported “flux” from the instrument, the temperature, and the wind speed.
To begin, because the downward facing sensor is at a height of 10 m, it will not detect any “flux” from the surface that is outside the atmospheric window. At 10 m from the surface 99.94 of that flux has been absorbed by IR active gases and thermalized into sensible heat. This was shown by Hug (1998) The Climate Catastrophe – A Spectroscopic Artifact? – Andy May Petrophysicist
The radiation that the downwelling sensor will see is a combination of “atmospheric window” radiation direct from the surface plus the “upwelling” component of the atmosphere’s self-generated field as explained in my comments in your previous post. The thermalization of surface radiation and atmospheric field generated by collisional excitation and de-excitation are not controversial amongst those who understand the quantum mechanical behavior of IR active gas molecules in the atmosphere.
The upward looking sensor sees the downwelling component of the self-generated atmospheric field plus the “downwelling” scattered radiation from the atmospheric window due to aerosols and particulates, and clouds when present.
In both cases, the contributions from the atmospheric field are limited to a 10 m hemisphere within their field of view for the same reasons discussed above.
If we look at 1200Z, just before sunrise where there is a near “equilibrium” condition, The difference of upwelling-downwelling (~ 80 W/m^2) can be explained by the difference between the upwelling “window” radiation and the downwelling scattered “window” radiation (presumably small in clear skies.) I will note that at 294 K the S-B “upwelling” power is 423 W/m^2 which is pretty close to what is indicated on the graph, even though the surface radiation has been fully thermalized. This could be explained by the upwelling component of the atmospheric radiation and the conversion of some of the energy to sensible heat, though I’ll have to think about that a bit more.
As the sun rises and the surface temperature with the insolation does the same, the direct upwelling “window” radiation will increase, and the scattered window radiation will increase as well, though not necessarily at the same rate. This explains some of the increase in the gap between the two curves.
You correctly point out that the surface temperature increases much more rapidly than the 10 m air temperature. This “superadiabatic” condition is due to direct conduction of heat from the “diffuse molecular boundary layer” at the surface. This is very difficult to measure and sources are difficult to find, but with mild wind speeds it is typically <1 mm. In my own analysis based on the operating parameters of a typical Pirani gauge, I estimated the conductive flux at 40 W/m^2-K.
Living in the desert myself, I have seen surface temperatures ~ 80 C with air temperatures in the 42-45 C range on some surfaces st peak insolation. If we choose a conservative value of 25 W/m^2-K, the surface temperature of 137 F (~58 C) and assume a conservative 10 C (18 F) drop across the boundary layer, this is an additional 250 W/m^2 sensible heat flux from direct convection only. The rate of this direct convection increases with wind speed.
This additional sensible heat will result in a significant rise in temperature of the atmospheric gas pool near the surface, and there will be an increase in the intensity of the self-generated field within the range of the downward facing sensor. This would further increase the gap between the “upwelling” and “downwelling” curves during periods of peak isolation.
Let’s compare this to the one-dimensional plane parallel radiative equilibrium climate models promoted by the “mainstream.”
If we superimpose the results of these models on the SURFRAD chart, the plots for the two pyrgeometer outputs would be two flat lines. This highlights the absurdity in believing these models can tell us anything about the dynamics of the Earth atmosphere.
I can’t disagree at all except to say that I am sometimes unsure what you mean by a few terms like “thermalization”. Yes thermalization, in the sense of energy transfer to/from collisions, goes on all the way to the ground surface, but it could only be “complete” with a sufficient thickness of atmosphere, even at 15um a sufficient atmosphere (1 optical depth for instance) requires maybe 5 meters. On the other hand does thermalization mean reaching true thermal equilibrium? Happer has said that the 15um line has a total optical depth through the atmosphere of 500,000, which is to say about 13 e-foldings. This is an extreme example.
But I do have to say that people who say the field is isotropic don’t seem to realize an isotropic field is a blackbody cavity. There is no net heat transfer. Yet, there is plenty of vertical transfer in the atmosphere — it is not all convection. The atmosphere is no such thing as isotropic anywhere. Or, people who say that there is no GHE — they’re simply wrong. Or the issue of the 2nd law and GHEs which won’t go away.
While I too am not so impressed with models, I must say that I don’t have a feel for what you and Andy are proposing. The same is true of many people who post here and seem pretty smart — maybe we are speaking past one another.
“Or, people who say that there is no GHE — they’re simply wrong.”
Have you declared yourself as the arbiter of truth?
You can’t even describe this “effect”! Presumably, like scientific effects in general, you believe that the GHE is a phenomena which may be observed, documented, and measured reproducibly.
The problem is that neither you nor anybody else can describe any observation that cannot be explained using current physical laws, without the need to invoke a “GHE”. Go on, try me – you don’t need word salad, just a documented phenomenon which cannot be explained without a “GHE”.
You might need to be able to describe this “GHE” in clear, unambiguous language before you start.
I’m hoping that my prior response helped explain the role of thermalization.
I believe that when I initially described the isotropic random field in the atmosphere, I indicated that it was a function temperature, pressure, and composition and that the intensity decreases with altitude.
The spectrum of the field will have the shape of a Planck (blackbody) distribution, but it is not a blackbody…the spectrum has gaps.
here is an explanation from Perplexity, which is reasonably accurate:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/does-the-stefan-boltzmann-law-3ILe3rqKTJWSxHz4iBXlEA
With regards to talking past each other, it is difficult to stick to the physics in a forum such as this. My impression is that many here do not have formal training in physics and bring common misconceptions regarding thermodynamics, radiation, and quantum mechanics. This it why “rabbit holes” regarding things like oven doors and cooler bodies heating warmer ones come up so often.
Electromagnetic radiation is a field, It is not quantiized. It is the excited states of the matter that radiation interacts with that are quantized. Planck was clear on this. There is no position wave function for a “photon.” If you search for the 1995 paper “Anti-photon” by Willis Lamb, he wrote a thorough treatise in this topic.
There are also misconceptions regarding measurement instruments and what they measure. The hand held IR thermometer measuring the GHE is a good example of this. I was gobsmacked when I was told by Andy that this was the basis on which many insisted the GHE was real.
Another is the “diffusion of photons in an opaque atmosphere.” If an atmosphere is opaque to radiation at certain frequencies, one cannot bypass “opaque” to create the desired outcome.
There is a reason Mishchenko’s shorter summary paper is titled “125 years of radiative transfer: Enduring triumphs and persisting misconceptions.”
The misconceptions in the case of these conversations is the belief that energy transport in the Earth atmosphere is via radiative transfer. That is an illusion that persists because the scalar radiative transfer equation does produce a proper TOA spectrum, but it does not reveal the underlying processes that produce the result.
The difference seems subtle but it is not. In the case of the “radiative equilibrium” model, the 2-stream solution that Schwarzschild used to model the stellar atmosphere creates a “radiative imbalance”, AKA the “greenhouse effect.”
When the actual processes in the atmosphere are taken into account, and given the atmosphere is open to space, it is not possible for trace radiative gases to create a “greenhouse effect.”
Energy is received from the sun at the speed of light. It leaves the Earth at the speed of convection. The time delay for energy transport prevents the Earth from becoming a snowball under current insolation conditions The energy moves around on its way back to space as weather.
One more thought…the Band 16 image from Chile at 2 km. They call Band 16 the “Carbon Dioxide” band, with the quotation marks in the product description. At 13.0 to 13.6 microns, it’s very close to the water vapor emission peak, the strongest emission in the spectrum. At 2 km altitude, the atmosphere begins to allow water vapor to escape to space. The bright yellow is radiation from water vapor that has evaporated from the surface and immediately started emitting energy to space. The same occurs at the tops of dense clouds and especially storm systems. This is how the “missing heat” escapes the atmosphere.
“Electromagnetic radiation is a field, It is not quantiized. It is the excited states of the matter that radiation interacts with that are quantized.”
A couple of observations.
Since radiation is generated by changes in energy states of electrons, that results in the radiation also having some elements of quanta. That doesn’t mean the field thus generated contains “photons” as particles. A particle can exist at zero velocity. A particle can be accelerated. The concept of a “photon” doesn’t meet these definitions for being a “particle”. In other words “quanta” is not equivalent to “photon” or “particle”.
Since the radiating molecules for H2O and CO2 are “dipoles” the radiation from an individual molecule is probably not “isotropic”. It is probably directional just like from a radio dipole antenna. Therefore multiple molecules would be necessary to create an isotropic field. I’m not sure exactly what the implications of this would be for energy transport in the atmosphere.
This is exactly what Planck requires in his Theory of Heat Radiation. He notes that dealing with heat by analyzing individual atoms or molecules was an impossible task. Consequently, he defined a volume of size dτ.
The excited rotovibrational states of IR active gases are at much lower energy levels than the electronic excited states of atoms. That is why they can be excited by collisions.
Even if there is some directionality to their emission of radiation, the numbers are so massive that statistically it creates a locally isotropic, random field.
The implication for energy transport in the atmosphere is that under those conditions, there is no energy transport via radiation. There is just a continuous exchange of kinetic energy and radiation with no net energy flow.
Nice explanation.
The only thing I might add is that the poor radiators in the atmosphere, N2/O2, act as a heat sink during the day, storing some of the heat. It is released at night through “dethermalization” via CO2 and some amount of water vapor.
Just a nit. The second law is about thermal energy, not electromagnetic energy.
Too many conflate IR with heat, which is an error by definition. Heat is the flow of thermal energy across a temperature gradient – hot to cold. EM is not so constrained.
Nice. Good explanation.