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The Vacuity of Climate Science

cafeamericainmag.com

There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.

I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!

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I am curious, have they bothered to explain why temperature is growing? Or at least leave it as an open question?

Or are they denying that Earth gets warmer?

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.

Nope. It is about how efficient energy transfer from Sun (hot) to Earth (cold) is and how it happens. Second law of thermodynamics is not violated.

This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming

This is not a strong credentials at all.

Yes. EVERYONE agrees that earth's climate gets warmer, and cooler over time. Since the late 1970s, the trend has been warming. The disagreement is about : a. causes of that warming b. amount of the warming

a. A few years ago I think most skeptics accepted some role for greenhouse gases in earth's climate change. Today, I think most skeptics accept hardly any role for greenhouse gases. They skeptic case changed for at least 3, or 4 reasons. These reasons are:

  • skeptics listened to Tony Heller who was essentially auditing what authorities said about temperature changes. Official bodies have been replacing metered readings with model readings by applying a mathematical technique called homogenization. Recently mainstream climate scientists, increasing accepted Heller's claims regarding data corruption by the authorities. By deliberately corrupting data to scare-monger, the self-styled "climate consensus" burnt their credibility.
  • Other skeptics wrote better basic models of atmospheric behaviour to explain the so-called greenhouse effect without relying on the radiative action of CO2, H2O(g) or other so-called greenhouse gases. For example I'm thinking of the Zeller/Nikolov model using adiabatic warming to explain the Lapse Rate. Also - the work of the two Connelly's - who looked at real atmospheric behaviour (results from 20 million weather balloons) but could not find a greenhouse effect in the data they looked at.
  • the data improved. All of that improvement is associated with work done by skeptics. Climate alarmists gave us no better data - they only provide us with worse models. We know far more about other planets and moons in the solar system, and our understanding of the sun's affects on earth have vastly improved.
  • the old excuses given to us by climate alarmists for never validating their models no longer wash. Climate alarmist "scientists" could once get away with excuses such as "we cannot validate the greenhouse gas model because that can only be done on a planetary scale, and we only have one planet". That does not wash because their basic model which they swore was "settled science" is now blown to pieces. None of them will defend their settled science model in public because it's a garbage model, and they don't want to be laughted at.

So the increasing success of climate skeptics in not ONLY due to the failure of official science over COVID lockdowns, vaxxes and the cover-up of the lab leak. Climate skeptics today are more unified on what we agree on, and more certain that EVERYTHING the so-called consensus say about the climate is wrong.

Urban albedo changes are small but skew temp measurements. I am more inclinde to consider agricultural albedo changes as a darkening of 11% of all land for around 4 months of the year is in line with observed warming and in a similar trend. This also explains the warming affecting the Northern Hemisphere more than the southern as is claimed in the observations. This is also in line with winters becoming milder, as dark tilled and usually wet land has a high absorbtivity compared to grassland or other forms of pasture.

I seem to recall that some scientist recently showed that heating was largely an artifact of urbanization and location of temperatures. When corrected, there is heating but much smaller amount.

When corrected, there is heating but much smaller amount.

So, assuming that all claims made in this comment are true: there is still warming anyway.

Climate warming and cooling is normal because earth NEVER had a "stable climate". Stable climate is a gaslight and lie sold to us to get us onboard with the elite's renewable energy and decarbonziation agenda.

I mentioned D-O events. See diagram. This data shows earth's climate is pretty unstable - not stable. We cannot explain these because the D-O data shows sudden climate warmings. Greenhouse gases cannot explain such sudden warmings. I could attempt to explain sudden coolings (and subsequent rewarming). No one can explain sudden warming (with subsequent cooling).

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"there is still warming anyway" <- and cooling. The climate is always changing. Climate alarmists befuddle us by telling us we should have a "stable climate" when we reach net zero. They're lying. We will never have a stable climate. Over the past 2.5 million years there's been both long term and short term instabilities. For most of the past 2.5 million years earth has been in an Ice Age - with both poles heavily glaciated for most of the time. At least 20, dramatic short-term changes known as : D-O oscillations can also be seen in the climate during the last deep glaciation. In some of these oscillations parts of the Northern hemisphere warmed and cooled by up to 3C over a few decades. We can't explain such D-O events in the climate past; but NO ONE claims they are due to greenhouse gas changes.

PS: D-O means "Dansgaard-Oeschger"; named after the two scientists who discovered them.

On a significantly smaller scale suggesting that the models relied upon to suggest a problem are just fundamentally broken.

Your curiosity can easily be satiated by... reading the article :)

I tried, but from part when author apparently fails at understanding second law of thermodynamics (or thinks that Earth during summer is hotter than Sun) I started skimming.

Can you point me to relevant part if I asked about part I missed?

It appears you started skimming earlier than that, as this is in the 3rd paragraph: "Worst of all, the alleged recent warming trend that is said to confirm earlier model predictions is based on data that appears to be adjusted to match the very models it is meant to be independently corroborating." It is elaborated in the article on the "Correlation is not causation" section.

As to the 2nd Law: "As to the thermodynamics, the arguments are plentiful. I'll just point out two physicists believed that it does violate the 2nd Law and published a peer-reviewed paper to that effect (Gerlich & Tscheuschner). Most others, of course, disagree. The point in the article is that rather than debate it, let's demonstrate it experimentally, in the real world - and this has not been done for the GHE."

As to thinking the Earth during summer is hotter than the Sun... genuinely not sure what you're addressing here.

As to the thermodynamics, the arguments are plentiful. I'll just point out two physicists believed that it does violate the 2nd Law and published a peer-reviewed paper to that effect (Gerlich & Tscheuschner)

That is not giving any info whatsoever what the claim is - and if we are going via ad authority arguments then surely you are aware that you are going to lose here? And appeal to peer-reviewed papers is not going to help you much?

Why supposedly GHE would violate second law of thermodynamics?

@dale_cloudman thinks that 2LoT means "heat flow from cold to hot is zero" rather than the correct "heat flow from cold to hot is less than heat flow from hot to cold such that net local flow is from hot to cold". It's a reasonably-easy misunderstanding to make (at least, for someone trying to make sense of a topic without the proper grounding), since when you're dealing with conduction or convection there's no separation between forward flow and back flow, and non-scientists don't deal with radiative heat transfer often.

The reason to point out that two physicists published a peer-reviewed paper where they argue the GHE violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is to show that it's not a layperson's mis-understanding that underlies this claim. Trained physicists with extensive experience precisely with thermodynamics, made the argument. So it's just not effective to say it's because of lack of "proper grounding".

The terminology can be tricky. For a detailed explanation I refer readers to the paper in question, https://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161.pdf, p75-79 in particular.

Trained physicists with extensive experience precisely with thermodynamics, made the argument.

Not sure why you assume that scientists cannot ever be hilariously wrong, make stupid mistakes, engaging in harmful conspiracies, troll or be insane cranks. Also in their own field.

It is especially confusing given that you are claiming that massive number of scientists do at least one of this things or similar.

Mix of conspiracy theory about scientists engaging in conspiracy AND appealing to authority of scientists is weird. Can you decide on doing one of these?

"two scientists published paper about X" is not as strong argument as you think it is. Have you heard about replication crisis?

Well it appears my strategy worked. The critique went from "reasonably-easy misunderstanding to make" for someone "without the proper grounding" to: scientists can still be wrong. Mission accomplished.

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The paper's authors seem to be making the same mistake and/or a slightly-different one. The slightly-different mistake is to prove that the atmosphere can't warm the ground on net (true enough on a global scale, though there are local exceptions) and then assume that this means the ground can't warm because of atmospheric effects (AGW is strictly-speaking a case of the atmosphere and radiation-to-space cooling the ground less, and while 2LoT does indeed forbid the atmosphere or space net warming the ground it says nothing about the rate at which the cooling occurs; the ultimate source of the energy that warms the planet is of course the Sun).

The obvious analogy here is that a blanket can't warm you up - it does not generate or actively transfer heat - but you get warmer when you are covered in one because it reduces the rate at which the environment cools you and thus you get net-warmed by your metabolic activity.

Yes, I know the authors go around claiming that lots of people are wrong, some of whom say things similar to this. These claims are a mixture of straight nonsense and cherry-picking people who did indeed fuck up in either their understanding or their exact wording. It's not like thinking AGW is real is an infallible defence against being a moron or messing up a description, after all.

As for their supposed training: well, they're making script-kiddie mistakes. I legitimately don't know whether the reason they're making script-kiddie mistakes is that they're script-kiddies themselves or that they're deliberately lying to fool script-kiddies like you (to be clear, I'm a script-kiddie about a lot of things; no offence intended). I'm not sure it especially matters.

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.

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