zen_brassica
19d ago
I'm sure there are a ton of exceptions and caveats, but this is the rough shape of things in my mind: If you're concerned about building more, then the two major parties may have opposite effects depending on whether you're talking about the local level or higher levels. Locally, conservatives who favor less regulation and more individual freedom will tend to lead toward allowing more building. But we also have a problem of most municipal governments already being overly restrictive with their zoning codes and regulations, and progressives seem to be more willing to use power at the state and national levels to incentivize/force municipal governments to allow more building.
zen_brassica
5mo ago
Now bring the grand canyon back into existence and allow that air to fall. What happens? As it falls, gravity compresses it, and thus heats it up. By the time it reaches the ground it will be hotter. On its way down, this falling air will displace the air further below it, causing that air below to rise and, due to the lower pressure, expand and cool on its way back up. Thus you have a circulating effect, with the equilibrium temperature increasing with depth.
It doesn't violate thermodynamics as gravity is doing work on the gas, converting potential energy to kinetic energy and increasing its temperature on the way down, while via buoyancy pushing the lower, warmer air up. With no further energy inputs the whole column of air would gradually cool (and eventually freeze and fall out of the sky), but the sun provides the "seed" energy by warming the surface which then warms the air via conduction & convection.
Here's an interesting question: How would it gradually cool? If the greenhouse effect is not a thing, how can air lose energy to space? Convection and conduction require molecules to impact each other to transfer energy -- but there's nothing in space for the molecules to bounce off of. Are you claiming that first the earth would have to radiate energy to space through a long-wave-transparent atmosphere, then the atmosphere would cool down by losing energy when molecules bounce and impart energy to the cooler earth?
If what you are saying is true, then wouldn't we see that the surface actually cools down faster than the air at night?
zen_brassica
5mo ago
With regards to the atmosphere, the proposed greenhouse effect mechanism is thus that you have a, say, -18ºC surface in an atmosphere without any GHGs. Now, by adding CO2 to this atmosphere and thus doing nothing but changing the atmosphere's absorption and emission properties, the colder body (the atmosphere) results in a warming of the hotter body (the surface), in a tight feedback loop that essentially doubles the surface's energy level (as well as increasing the atmosphere's in the process).
To which I say: well that is not quite in direct accordance with the above sources on thermodynamics. I understand diagrams and graphs can be drawn and that the resulting steady-state is one in which the surface is still hotter than the atmosphere. But drawing a diagram does not make it so. All the laws of physics thus far have been determined experimentally, including the laws of thermodynamics.
Ok, so in the absence of any other energy flows, yes, this would violate the laws of physics. Heat can't flow from a colder to a hotter. But the sun is constantly adding energy to the surface in the form of radiation at a frequency that passes through CO2 without being absorbed, sort of "skipping past" the atmosphere, while the long-wave radiation given off by the earths surface (because it's at a much lower temperature than the sun) does get absorbed/re-released by CO2. So the heat is all starting at the VERY HOT sun, flowing to the medium hot earth, then out to the slightly colder atmosphere and cold of outer space.
So the energy flows, simplified, are:
(without atmosphere) Sun -> earth earth -> space
(with atmosphere) Sun -> earth earth -> atmosphere atmosphere -> earth and also atmosphere -> space
The proof that the GHE works can only reside in an experiment demonstrating the phenomenon. There are none. There have been none since the mechanism was first proposed two centuries ago by Fourier. Do you really think the climate alarmists would not have done one by now if they could have? Rather than do so, they have simply stopped trying (if they ever did) and merely started asserting that the science is settled. Yet they skipped over that crucial experimental step! This is not science, it is ideology, beliefs, and politics.
I mean, if you think that you can demonstrate, via experiment, that the greenhouse effect does not exist, nobody's stopping you. You could get millions of dollars from oil companies to prove that fossil fuels don't cause climate change. I don't want to be rude, but I think you are just misunderstanding the way that the energy flows and what that does.
zen_brassica
6mo ago
Sure. The grand canyon is a good starting point. The temperature at the bottom of the canyon is hotter than at the top. Why is that? It's not due to the greenhouse effect. It's due to earth's adiabatic lapse rate.
Essentially, gravity pulls air in the atmosphere downwards, doing work to compress it, which increases its pressure and temperature. The hotter air then starts expanding and rising (being displaced by the cooler air being brought down), which causes it to cool and decrease in pressure. This is an ongoing process. Notably, it has nothing to do with any radiative properties of the atmosphere (i.e. the greenhouse effect). It can be calculated from basic values of the mass of air and gravity:
This doesn't make any sense to me. The adiabatic lapse rate describes how the temperature would change if you took a parcel of air, did not allow it to exchange heat (that's the adiabatic part, right?) and moved it up or down so it expands or contracts. As pressure increases or decreases, so does temperature.
But in the Grand Canyon, if gravity is pulling cooler, denser air down, and letting warmer, less dense air rise (as must happen), that's going to result in a cooling effect, not a warming effect. Yes, the cooler air may get a bit more compressed as it falls, and thus rise a little in temperature, but you're also losing warm air that was even warmer when it was at the same altitude, so air circulation would result in a net loss of heat. If you have two regions of air at the same altitude and one is warmer, it will have a rising force compared to the other. Gravity can't make it fall relative to the other one. (To be precise, they could both be rising or falling, just that the cooler one will always fall relative to the warmer one, unless there's momentum of air coming in from outside the system and interacting with the geometry of the landscape, like winds blowing across the canyon).
Gravity is not pulling air downward in a thermodynamics-violating way. If we started out with an atmosphere that was not in steady state, where it was a lot more diffuse and bigger than it should be, then yes, as gravity pulled it down and compressed it, it would get warmer. But that would only happen once (or rather it would oscillate like a spring for a while but eventually settle down).
So yeah, I don't get this at all. I don't know if the temperature gradient at the Grand Canyon is completely due to the greenhouse effect, but I'm pretty sure it's not anything to do with what you're saying, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
zen_brassica
6mo ago
Right, because the activists (the people who matter) have more important goals than cutting emissions.
As a counterpoint, one of the biggest, most effective climate change activism groups (Citizens Climate Lobby) focuses almost exclusively on practical policy to cut emissions, mainly a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Going back to the root though, with things like geoengineering -- I'm not 100% against it, but I'm much more in favor of addressing the root cause, rather than trying to put a band-aid on it. First issue, and maybe the biggest, is the moral hazard -- if you start geoengineering, that means countries won't try as hard to reduce emissions, immediately negating some of the benefit of geoengineering. Second, specifically for putting sulfur into the atmosphere to reduce solar irradiance, you don't get to control where that goes. It wanders all over the place, changing weather patterns, possibly causing storms or droughts. Third, cooling the earth but leaving CO2 levels higher doesn't solve ocean acidification.
I suspect that we'll need to do it at some point, but I think it is best to push hard on reducing emissions first and foremost. And maybe I partly believe this because I think that practically speaking, we can do it without a substantial reduction in living standards, if we start using carbon taxes effectively, and streamline nuclear regulations to the point where it's actually viable again.
zen_brassica
6mo ago
I came here to post something similar. The short version is, while the article author says:
In normal sensate reality, heat only flows from hot to cold, but the greenhouse effect appears to involve an inverted heat flow within this system.
Heat DOES flow from cold to hot, it just must be less than the heat flowing from hot to cold, and that is what the referenced diagram shows.
zen_brassica
6mo ago
Many climate activists are very much in favor of nuclear power, myself included. Sometimes it's a matter of going with the flow and allocating your advocacy resources where you think the'll make the most difference. Nuclear is a hard sell for a lot of people, and getting new plants open will take a long time mainly due to regulatory barriers -- which have to change before you can even start constructing. Solar and wind are seeing a lot of growth right now, and while they don't solve the baseline load problem, will make a dent in the issue in the meantime.
I don't disagree that many people who label themselves "climate activists" are irrationally fearful of nuclear, but they are not as representative of the entire group as the article.
I think it's it's just that, car travel has pretty large negative externalities in terms of pollution, parking spaces that need to be allocated, and injuries / deaths due to accidents, compared to other modes of travel. So while more people getting to travel where they want to go is good, many of those trips are outweighed by these negative externalities, and essentially make life worse overall. Other forms of travel also have negative externalities, but they're much less severe than car travel.
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