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srid  14d ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 14d ago   2918 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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Reading through the article I quickly found a couple errors in reasoning. Also overall the writing style doesn't give the impression that the author is deeply knowledgeable in the subject (or in heat transfer generally). Mostly this is unconvincing to me.

Figure 7.2 provides a helpful visual representation of it, and here we see something a bit odd. The total energy flowing out of the surface is more than three times larger than the amount flowing into it from the sun.

The author gives insinuates that this somehow violates the laws of thermodynamics, but it doesn't. I can't tell if he doesn't understand this or is being intentional misleading.

However, the described mechanism is rather puzzling. In normal sensate reality, heat only flows from hot to cold

Take two black body radiatiors at different temperatures and places them near each other. Would you say that the lower temperature body radiates in every direction /except/ the side facing the hotter? Of course not. While the net heat flow will be from hotter to colder, it is totally reasonable to talk about energy transfer from colder to hotter as a matter of accounting.

we can conjecture what one such proof [of the greenhouse effect] might look like: it would have to consist of an external energy source – such as the sun or a heat lamp – that is set to warm a surface. The energy input should be measured and the surface, in the presence of greenhouse gases, should get much hotter than that input alone can provide, emitting much more energy in response.

For 2263 w/m2 solar irradiance, 0.7 albedo, 0.85 emissivity, Venus "Should" only have a surface temperature of less than 200c, instead of the 400+c we observe. Internal heating of Venus appears to be negligible (10s of mW/m2 at the surface).

Venus can be explained by a thicker atmosphere and thus a larger adiabatic lapse rate effect. Also see: https://www.themotte.org/post/960/the-vacuity-of-climate-science/203479?context=8#context . It's just not a good demonstration of GHE.

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.

Your linked post mentions nothing about adiabatic lapse rate nor how it can explain Venus' temperature being much higher than would be predicted from blackbody equilibrium. Care to explain in detail what you mean?

The linked post is meant to show that using Venus to corroborate a model is foolish, as that same reasoning was used to predict it had the same temperature as Earth. It provides just as much support to any more modern theory, namely, none at all.

For an adiabatic lapse rate on Venus description see: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_4KG0-2ckac ,

as that same reasoning was used to predict it had the same temperature as Earth.

Yeah, and Lord Kelvin estimated age of Sun to be about 32 million years (IIRC). Noone claims that scientists are always right.

For an adiabatic lapse rate on Venus description see: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_4KG0-2ckac ,

Can you provide anything supporting this claim in text version? Crankery existing only in video format tends to be extraordinarily low quality and lame.

Yeah, and Lord Kelvin estimated age of Sun to be about 32 million years (IIRC). Noone claims that scientists are always right.

You're missing the point, perhaps deliberately?

The question centers around why experimentation is important. Anyone can observe something and then make a model up to explain that observation. This does not, and cannot, demonstrate the model is correct. Scientists were wrong about the surface temperature of Venus before it was measured -- yet they made models that perfectly predicted their (incorrect) surface temperature. That their model matched their prediction did not corroborate the model in any way, as is obvious by the fact that it was wrong.

Since then, scientists have measured the temperature of Venus. And now... they have made models to perfectly predict that (correct) surface temperature. Because this time around the temperature is correct, it feels like the model is thus more correct (on this basis) than the previous one. In a sense it is, in that it gives the right temperature. But it is no more (or less) validated by this than the incorrect model! The evidentiary value is exactly the same. You can always make a model fit certain data points, it doesn't mean the model is correct.

Obviously, since we learned about actual Venus temperature any models are expected to predict correct results there.

Doing anything else would be deeply silly.

Specifics how models are build/used/validated are depending on a model. But not rejecting reality and what we learned is hardly indictment of science.

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