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!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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).
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.
What non-sequitur? Lets say we know that air in glass greenhouse is 2ºC warmer than the outside air. And we had two competing hypothesis for this phenomenon: florb effect and hothouse effect. So we constructed plastic greenhouse that does not absorb as much IR radiation and saw that the temperature in the greenhouse was also 2ºC higher thus proving that IR absorption does not play any significant role in greenhouse effect whole it would be in line with florb effect given that the only thing needed is to prevent convection with no role given to IR.
What did I not get?
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