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srid  18d ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 18d ago   2991 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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I can't comment on most of this, except the following:

This makes it all the more peculiar that nobody has been able to experimentally demonstrate and therefore verify the greenhouse effect.

Wouldn't the existence of Venus be pretty definitive proof that such a thing is possible?

This makes it all the more peculiar that nobody has been able to experimentally demonstrate and therefore verify the greenhouse effect.

Experimentally proving the greenhouse effect is a common science class task for sixth graders. The author of this could probably do it with materials that exist in his house. This is a rather extreme self-imposed ignorance.

The ignorance is coming from this reply not from the author of the article. It is salient that you didn’t actually provide a link, source, or explanation of how the GHE can thus be verified. It also doesn’t address why the referenced 2021 peer reviewed paper said a lab verification was lacking — because the typical demonstrations (involving gas in glass jars or plastic bags) don’t demonstrate the GHE. Their results are an effect of gas densities affecting convective heat loss, not radiative effects. They work equally well with Argon.

They work equally well with Argon.

Is it based on experiment or a guess?

On experiments:

  1. "Benchtop Global-Warming Demonstrations Do Not Exemplify the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect, but Alternatives Are Available", https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b01057

    _

    (It must be noted the "alternatives" provided are analogues, not demonstrations of the GHE.)

  2. "Climate change in a shoebox: Right result, wrong physics", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243492513_Climate_change_in_a_shoebox_Right_result_wrong_physics .

Here is a benchtop experiment. Figure 6 apparently shows that variations in the density of air in a balloon do not affect it's cooling rate, whereas it does for a CO2 filled balloon. This would seem to contradict your claim that it's a spurious density effect.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.192075

It may be worth reviewing the links I just provided as to why Argon is a valuable control for these experiments (https://www.themotte.org/post/960/the-vacuity-of-climate-science/203988?context=8#context).

In short: carbon dioxide is more dense than air. CO2 and Argon are about the same density as each other. A typical experiment involves adding CO2 to a beaker and observing the surface temperature get hotter. But the reason is that the convective loss of the bottom is suppressed because the air is prevented from rising due to the heavier CO2 above it. This works equally well with Argon. In closed containers, the differing gas density still affects the rate of convective loss, as #2 points out.

The experiment you linked must therefore also be performed with 100% Argon (as it was with 100% CO2) as a control.

I dont see how those are relevant to the study I posted. Those were open systems where mass exchange with the environment is possible, but in the one I posted the gasses are sealed in balloons.

This was the relevant part: "In closed containers, the differing gas density still affects the rate of convective loss, as #2 points out."

Quoting from the paper, emphasis added:

Even if the experiments were done in a sealed container, and CO2 were compared with Ar, differences in convective transport could not be ruled out.

[...]

In some of the reported demonstrations, the container is sealed so that interfacial mixing should not be a factor, but a temperature difference between air and CO2 was still reported.[3–5] Sealing the container brings into play additional factors, which are difficult to quantify, especially the infrared characteristics of the “window.” In Ref. 5, for example, T is reported to be 25% greater for CO2 than for air. As we have argued, a difference of this magnitude cannot be accounted for by far-infrared absorption. This experiment probably involves the direct absorption of sunlight rather than of reemitted far-infrared radiation, but that effect should be even smaller. [7] Simple models of natural convection suggest that the difference in the heat flow between the two gases should be less than 10%.[17] The calculations depend on the geometry, however, and the conditions are in a transition regime between laminar and turbulent flow, and thus it is possible that small changes could have disproportionate effects. These uncertainties reinforce the value of including a comparison case that uses a heavy gas without infrared absorption, such as argon.

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