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srid  15d ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 14d ago   2919 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 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.

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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