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srid  7mo ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 7mo ago   4108 thread views

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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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.

The terminology can be tricky here. In the Fundamentals of Thermodynamics, 6th Edition (https://www.kashaninejad.com/uploads/4/6/7/6/46761445/fundamentals_of_thermodynamics__6th_edition.pdf):

Heat is defined as the form of energy that is transferred across the boundary of a system at a given temperature to another system (or the surroundings) at a lower temperature by virtue of the temperature difference between the two systems. That is, heat is transferred from the system at the higher temperature to the system at the lower temperature, and the heat transfer occurs solely because of the temperature difference between the two systems.

This definition applies also to mutual radiation exchange between two bodies. From Gerlich 2007 (https://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161.pdf): "Clausius examines thoroughly, that the second law is relevant for radiation as well, even if image formations with mirrors and lenses are taken into account [178, 179].".

And from Clausius himself (https://www3.nd.edu/~powers/ame.20231/clausius1879.pdf): "Again as regards the ordinary radiation of heat, it is of course well known that not only do hot bodies radiate to cold, but also cold bodies conversely to hot; nevertheless the general result of this simultaneous double exchange of heat always consists, as is established by experience, in an increase of the heat in the colder body at the expense of the hotter."

Thus: the result of any exchange of energy as a result of a temperature difference, is that the hotter body gets colder and the colder body gets hotter: "an increase of the heat in the colder body at the expense of the hotter."

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.

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.

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.

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