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srid  15d ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 15d ago   2926 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.

I'll second the request for something not a video.

I've collected these links as well, albeit they are more technical than the video. Will I next be asked to provide a simpler one? :)

  1. "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" https://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html
  2. "Why does this simple equation predict the Venus surface temperature so accurately?" https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/508573/why-does-this-simple-equation-predict-the-venus-surface-temperature-so-accuratel

Looking around a little online, I found some people arguing online that of course temperature and pressure make sense together, by the ideal gas law. But they were saying that this doesn't suffice to say that pressure suffices to explain the temperature, as it could be (for example) that temperature affects pressure, rather than the other way around.

What is your evaluation of that argument?

I would say observe that whenever a gas is compressed, the result is both higher pressure and temperature. Gravity compresses a gas as it pulls it to the ground, so this will of course heat it up as well as increasing the pressure.

"Why does this simple equation predict the Venus surface temperature so accurately?" https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/508573/why-does-this-simple-equation-predict-the-venus-surface-temperature-so-accuratel

See answers posted to that question?

Also, how it even relates to how supposedly "adiabatic lapse rate" can explain Venus' temperature being much higher than would be predicted from blackbody equilibrium?

adiabatic lapse rate here is effect of GHE on Venus. If GHE does not exist, why Venus is much hotter than blackbody equilibrium would predict?

The adiabatic lapse rate falls naturally out of the force of gravity, and non-radiative properties of gases. For the dry adiabatic lapse rate it's actually just the strength of gravity and the heat capacity of the air. You can find a derivation here: http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall10/atmo551a/AdiabaticLapseRate.pdf .

For the moist rate you have to factor in phase-change considerations of the water. This decreases the rate, i.e. the air cools more slowly when water is involved.

Any GHE would have to be on top of/in addition to this. But if the adiabatic lapse rate alone nearly perfectly explains Venus's temperature distribution...

I found those readable enough. Thanks!

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