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srid  1mo ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 1mo ago   3172 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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It's a little weird that the author repeatedly denies any experimental verification of the greenhouse effect but doesn't address the 19th century experiments that first identified it. Maybe there's something wrong with his results, but you wouldn't know it from reading this post.

I had a very negative reaction to this article. I think it reads much better with the following set up to contextualize it.

Start by contemplating the power of bench top science and theory. The partnership of bench top science and theory has some spectacular successes to its credit. You can experiment with Newtonian mechanics in your laboratory, verifying the basic laws. Then you get a top mathematician (Euler) to work out what those laws imply for gyroscopes. Later engineers build a gyrocompass for a submarine. Will this really work? Underwater? A thousand miles from the laboratory? Yes!

Or think of James Clerk-Maxwell, taking the bench top science of Ampere and Faraday and coming up with Maxwell's equations. The equations predict electromagnetic radiation. Hertz does the experiments in his laboratory and finds them; a great triumph for theory. Later Marconi takes this out into the real world. Theory shows that electromagnetic radiation goes in straight lines; Marconi's attempts at radio communication beyond the curve of the earth are not going to work. And sure enough they fail. Wut! Marconi actually succeeds! But rather than concede that there are problems getting out of the laboratory and into the real world, we discover the ionosphere and chalk it up as another spectacular success for the partnership of bench top science and theory.

Move on to contemplating the contrasting situation in medicine. The human body is too complicated for the human mind to comprehend. Basing medicine on theory works badly for the patient, no matter how much money it brings in for the doctor. This has lead to evidence based medicine. Never trust the combination of lab bench chemistry and theory. Always do a randomised controlled trial to check that medicines really work. Theory said that vitamin E was an anti-oxidant and would reduce oxidative stress and prevent cancer. Epidemiology confirmed this. Randomised controlled trials refuted it. Examples are so numerous that you can fill a book.

Returning to climate science, we must ask whether it is like gyroscopes or like Vitamin-E/Vioxx/vertebroplasty. Doing bench top science with an infrared spectroscope and a sample of Carbon Dioxide yields uncontroversial results. But does it have implications for the weather?

I've picked up the impression that every-one agrees on the importance of feedback loops. If you believed that climate science was a like a gyroscope, you would compute warming on the basis of the infrared characteristics of Carbon Dioxide and conclude that we are in for some warming, but not enough to constitute a crisis. No-one believes that climate science is like a gyroscope. Some think that warmer air means more water vapor which means more warming and more clouds and more clouds mean mumble. Subtle feedback in the atmosphere is putting us on a course for disaster. Others disagree.

The article emphasizes one particular disagreement. Scientists attempt empirical confirmation of the theory, but they mess it up. All the empirical work is heavily contaminated by theory. It cannot refute the theory because it assumes the theory.

For EM, straight-line propagation was a null hypothesis. Practical experiments rejected it, so the theory had to adapt. Science worked as intended.

For medicine, it’s a little trickier, because the category is defined by passing RCTs. The null hypothesis for any given treatment is that it doesn’t work; only those which can reject that are allowed into the category. Then anything which gets counted as effective must have some practical experiments behind it.

Flat Earthers object to the null hypothesis of, uh, Round Earth. In 2018, there was a documentary going around where one of them set up a practical experiment. Predictably for the rest of us, he failed to reject the hypothesis.

What’s the null hypothesis for climate skepticism?

The situation is different from EM or medicine because skeptics are unable to provide practical evidence of their own. After all, they’ve got all the same constraints as the IPCC—preexisting data, lack of a control group—but with less funding and less experience. Until they can move up a level and cite a practical experiment, they’re going to be stuck with the same kind of arguments as their opponents.

The flat earth documentary was fascinating because the guy actually proved the Earth was round in his experiment. Then they had to explain away their results and pretend it didn't happen.

Re: climate science, I think the situation is the same as with medicine. The default assumption on medicine is a new thing doesn't work. So you have to positively prove it. Only then can your intervention be recommended. For climate policy, it should be the same. You want to impose new taxes, de-industrialize (which industrialization has massively benefited humanity), ban synthetic fertilizer (which synthetic fertilizers are responsible for vast amounts of our food production), degrow the economy, etc? Then you have to actually prove, definitively, there is an issue, and that your policy would work.

This is not the state of affairs today. Today it's just presumed that the climate alarmists are right. If you question it they say "the science is settled" and smear you as a "denier" (which grew out of the "Holocaust denier" term). They've flipped the burden of proof in the public and policy sphere. But that's not how science is done. The person proposing the theory is the one that needs to prove it. It's not up to others to falsify it.

That being said I'm working on an experiment that could actually definitively falsify the GHE. Will see how it goes!

Out of curiosity, what's the experiment?

Essentially a repeat of Wood's 1909 experiment (http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html), except actually measuring the solar insolation and the backradiation with a pyranometer and pyrgeometer, respectively. Then experimentally measuring heat losses due to conduction and convection. Finally seeing if these add-up as they should on the different setups (IR-opaque glass vs IR-transparent rock salt). So we'll see definitively whether added backradiation causes warming or not.

Hi, the author does address it :)

“Origins of the Theory

If the greenhouse effect has never been demonstrated, then why does anybody believe that CO2 causes warming in the first place? The answer is somewhat embarrassing. The first to propose the effect was Fourier in 1824, who (according to Arrhenius) believed that an actual greenhouse works “because it lets through the light rays of the sun but retains the dark rays [i.e. infrared radiation] from the ground”. Fourier proposed the atmosphere had a similar property. When Tyndall discovered in 1859 that CO2 does indeed absorb infrared radiation, early climate modelers took this fact and ran with it, with Arrhenius doing “the first calculation of the warming of Earth due to CO2 increase” in 1896. But actual greenhouses do not work this way. They work by physically blocking hot air from escaping and mixing with the outside air. This was shown by R W Wood as early as 1909. It is more than strange that despite this falsification, and a lack of any further proof, the theory has persisted to this day.”

The key is that Tyndall showed CO2 absorbs IR, but this in and of itself isn’t the greenhouse effect. The effect is the (extra) warming a surface undergoes as a result of said absorption.

I don't get it.

The key is that Tyndall showed CO2 absorbs IR, but this in and of itself isn’t the greenhouse effect. The effect is the (extra) warming a surface undergoes as a result of said absorption.

If you agree that CO2 absorbs IR, and therefore an atmosphere with more CO2 gets warmer than an atmosphere with less CO2 given a constant heat input (as far as I can tell this is experimentally verified), I don't see what there is to discuss.

The digression about how greenhouses don't work this way appears to be totally irrelevant to the question of whether the greenhouse effect exists. A rose by any other name etc etc.

The greenhouse diversion is unfortunate due to the naming but also interesting. We can call it a hothouse instead and call the way it really works the “hothouse effect”, which is suppression of convection. HHE != GHE , of course, so it’s not relevant on that level.

What’s interesting to consider though is that a hothouse made of glass vs a hothouse made of a thin plastic, works essentially as effectively. But the glass absorbs and thus emits more IR, both into and out of the hothouse. This downward IR should, by the GHE, warm the interior much more than the plastic walls which don’t emit nearly as much IR. But, it doesn’t. This is peculiar and points to the GHE being weak rather than powerful as it’s said to be (causing the Earth to be +33°C warmer than it otherwise would be).

This is peculiar and points to the GHE being weak

So you are admitting that the GHE exists and we are merely quibbling over effect sizes? Otherwise, I still don't know why we are talking about greenhouses.

Greenhouses are relevant because the GHE should be the mechanism by which they work. But, they don't. That they work due to the HHE and not the GHE is evidence against the GHE.

Not really. You can search and replace "greenhouse effect" with "florb effect" and it won't change climate science one iota.

It also won't change the point here. I'll try it again with newly coined terms in bold.

The florb effect is a radiative phenomenon. Any object above 0K absorbs & emits infrared radiation. Certain gases, like CO2, also absorb & emit infrared radiation, while others don't. If you increase the concentration of CO2 in the air, the air now will be emitting more infrared radiation, both upwards and downwards back toward the surface. This downward emission of infrared causes the surface to become warmer. This warming is called the florb effect.

A hothouse, by contrast, works by the hothouse effect, a totally different phenomenon. The sun heats the inside of the hothouse, which causes the air inside to become warmer. This air rises, but is physically prevented from escaping by the hothouse walls. This allows the air inside the hothouse to get warmer than the outside air. It is an effect of suppressing convective loss rather than a radiative phenomenon.

The peculiar thing: A hothouse remains equally hot whether its walls are transparent to infrared, or absorbing of infrared! This is despite the IR-absorbing walls emitting infrared into the hothouse, while the IR-transparent walls don't. According to the depicted mechanism of the florb effect, the IR-emitting walls should result in a much hotter hothouse interior. Yet, it doesn't.

Thus, the fact that a hothouse works due to the hothouse effect, and not due to the florb effect, is evidence against the florb effect.

You see now?

I think that's a great edit because it makes the non-sequitur in the final paragraph very clear.

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HHE

What is that? Probably you are not meaning Health Hazard Evaluation.

"The greenhouse diversion is unfortunate due to the naming but also interesting. We can call it a hothouse instead and call the way it really works the “hothouse effect”, which is suppression of convection. HHE != GHE , of course, so it’s not relevant on that level."

HHE = the "hothouse effect" I just coined here for clarity in communication.

It’s a bit subtle although not really.

The GHE is actually that the surface gets warmer, not the atmosphere. Actually the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) is warmed far more by conduction and convection than radiative effects. The 0.04% quantity of CO2 actually is very relevant here, even if that amount it absorbed doubled, it’s still far outclassed by convection which 100% of the air participated in.

But that’s a furphy as far as GHE is considered, because GHE is really about the extra downward emission of IR, not the atmosphere itself warming due to absorption. This extra downward IR is said to warm the surface more, given same energy input.

This latter piece is what hasn’t been demonstrated and what some physicists argue is thermodynamically impossible. I don’t want to debate the theory of that (most say it’s possible, a vocal few say impossible; not much we can add to it ourselves here), I’d rather defer to experimental evidence, and it being lacking doesn’t look good for the “it’s possible” side.

If the atmosphere is warmer, it seems straightforward that the ground becomes warmer than it would be if the atmosphere was colder.

That would be not due to the GHE (which is radiative) but something else, like say convection loss being less because of warmer atmosphere. If this were the case it would mean all the climate models are wrong, because they all rely on the GHE (downwards IR causing higher surface temps). I'm happy to accept this and then we could talk about what that might look like.

Two points though:

  1. In the troposphere the CO2 absorption is already saturated, as Knut Angstrom's assistant found in 1900. So the effect on the lower atmosphere would essentially be nil

  2. The alarmists' rebuttal to #1 is that higher up in the atmosphere, at colder and lower-pressure layers, the effect is not yet saturated. Perhaps those, then would become warmer? Yet consider that if the air absorbs more IR, so, too, does it emit more IR. Added CO2 provides the air a way to cool that it wouldn't otherwise have. In fact, the standard understanding of the climate consensus is the stratosphere ought to cool with more CO2 rather than warm up.

    So if the troposphere doesn't warm due to more CO2 as its absorption is already saturated, and the stratosphere cools, and the downwards IR doesn't have a warming effect... where does that leave the warming theory then?

I don't know a thing about climate models so I can't answer your questions.

My only point is that you don't actually seem to deny that the greenhouse effect exists and is empirically verified. You seem to be quibbling about how exactly it works and how strong it is.

However, your article was very confident about the much stronger claims which you now, in my view, have walked back. In addition, you seem to evade a lot of questions in this thread and instead link various YouTube videos or otherwise unrelated content.

From this, it appears that you are in some way trying to hide the ball in this debate and therefore I have no choice but to spend many hours researching what is actually going on here or simply discount your claims as untrustworthy and going about my business. I'll go with the second option.

Ehm... at the time you wrote this, I provided two links. One was to another post I made in this thread, and one was to a YouTube video. There are no "various YouTube videos" linked, just one (which was related to the discussion), and no "otherwise unrelated content" at all (in fact, no links to other content at all besides the one video). So it seems you're operating on a mind-already-made-up, prejudiced basis and are interpreting what I'm writing via feelings, emotions, and pre-existing beliefs rather than sensible facts and clear-headed evaluation of what I'm writing here.

Your other points are equally invalid. I haven't evaded any questions -- you'll have to point out where I have if you want to make that claim, but you won't be able to, as I haven't.

I haven't written anywhere that I think the GHE is empirically verified. Rather to the contrary, I've written how it hasn't been experimentally verified (https://www.themotte.org/post/960/the-vacuity-of-climate-science/203568?context=8#context). And no, this is not a link to "otherwise unrelated content", it's a link to something else I wrote in this thread.

You are misinterpreting what I wrote about greenhouses. The point is that, the fact that greenhouses don't work according to the GHE (see https://www.themotte.org/post/960/the-vacuity-of-climate-science/203995?context=8#context if you are getting tripped up on the terminology here) does not prove, in and of itself, that the GHE doesn't exist, but it does speak very much against it. This doesn't mean the GHE exists, it just means the fact of how greenhouses work is not sufficient evidence to disprove the GHE.

Perhaps the only valid thing you did write here is that you "don't know a thing about climate models" (your words). I can accept that. But the salient question then is, whence do you draw the confidence with which you've formed your opinion about what I wrote?

To help you answer that question I will re-iterate something I wrote at the start of the article that is very relevant here, with emphasis added: "This is highly relevant because it means our current climate scare is based not on irrefutable scientific evidence but rather on hysteria and alarmist fear-mongering that fifty years of “failed apocalyptic predictions” have failed to abate. This is crucial to understand as it makes it clear that rather than debating how humans should mitigate this alleged impending disaster, the proper focus should be to question why those in power are employing psychological fear tactics to promote taxation, restriction, and degrowth, and why so many intelligent people have uncritically bought into the hysteria when these proposed policies are clearly to their own detriment."

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