A pocket guide to climate change or the basics of the science made easy

The temperature of air moving in, temperatures of clouds, dew points, humaidity, etc., etc. - all these things can be measured.

I have no idea why you would think our weather behavior can't be measured.

 

I'm constantly surprised that you would think that while we can reflect all other kinds of radiation, heat can't be even partially reflected.

Solar radiation, light, radio waves, etc., can all be reflected by natural substances in our atmosphere, but heat can not be?

And, that is all that is necessary in this thread.

Please cite an experiment from science that demostrates that heat can not be reflected.

I am absolutely uninterested in you citing laws, as the issues there have to do with how you think they may be applied. I want to see you cite an actual experiment, such as something in published experimental science.

 

The earth warms the atmosphere by a factor of 4.65 times as much as the sun. See the diagram below.

I'm not getting around the second law. You are misquoting the second law. Heat can glow from a colder reservoir to a warm one without violating the second law if such heat flow is not the sole result.

The average surface temperature of the earth can be calculated using 398 watts per square meter of mean surface radiation flux and the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. I got 15.85 degrees Celsius and that

compares well with the actual global mean temperature of 14.9 degrees C. Those numbers aren't going to be exact because the earth is not a perfect blackbody and the the global mean surface

temperature definition is not the same thermal radiation temperature used in this calculation. It is not possible to get this close agreement without considering the radiation emitted by greenhouse gases

towards the earth (340 watts/meter). The earth would be around 33 degrees C. cooler on the average without this greenhouse effect You cannot explain why the earth is as warm as it is with your thermodynamic model.





Earth's climate is largely determined by the planet's energy budget, i.e., the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation. It is measured by satellites and shown in W/m2.

NASA - https://web.archive.org/web/20140421050855/http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/energy_budget/ quoting Loeb et al., J. Clim 2009 & Trenberth et al, BAMS 2009

Earth's energy budget, with incoming and outgoing radiation (Values are shown in W/m2). Satellite instruments (CERES) measure the reflected solar and emitted infrared radiation fluxes. The energy balance determines Earth's climate.

 

This^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^is a perfect example of a scientific argument, backed with evidence.

The only way to rebut this would be to provide scientific evidence with experimentation showing it to be wrong. @gfm7175 simply says "nuh uh" when presented with scientific evidence and experimentation, and somehow thinks that is a valid argument.

 

Heat is not radiation.

Correct. Heat is not radiation.

Experiments are not science, nor are publications.

 

This is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics... e(t+1) >= e(t)
Here, 'e' is entropy, and 't' is time.

Heat CANNOT flow from cold to hot... EVER. It can ONLY flow from hot to cold. This applies to ALL systems where there is a difference in temperature.

The concept of an "isolated system" merely means that one has set the bounds of the system and those bounds STAY SET. However, you attempted to change those bounds mid-argument from a "Sun-Earth-Space system" to an "Earth" system (in an attempt to get around the 2nd LoT).

If you are only considering the Earth's surface and atmosphere as your system, you cannot in turn add the Sun and space to it while acting like you are still discussing the original surface/atmosphere system. Those are two entirely different systems.

In the Sun-Earth-Space system, heat flows from the Sun to the surface, from the surface to the atmosphere, and from the atmosphere out into space. It does NOT flow from the atmosphere back to the surface. That violates the 2nd LoT.

No it can't. You are making that 398 number up. The SB Law equation is as follows:

r = C*e*t^4
Where: 'r' is in watts per square meter, 't' is temperature in deg K, 'e' is a measured constant known as emissivity, which is how well light is emitted at all frequencies from a surface, as compared to an ideal emitter (an ideal black body), and an ideal reflector (an ideal white body), expressed as a percentage (value from 0 to 1, with 1 being the ideal black body at the same temperature), and 'C' is the value of 5.67 * 10^-8.

In order to arrive at your 398 number, you need to take 'C' (5.67 * 10^- and multiply that by the measured 'emissivity' constant (which for Earth is unknown), and multiply that by the temperature in degrees K to the power of 4 (which for Earth is also unknown).

Even if I grant you that 398 number (I don't, since I have no idea how the hell you are making it work in the SB equation since 'e' cannot be greater than 1), and we attempt to solve for temperature, we don't know the emissivity of Earth. Thus, we can't solve for 't' in that equation. You're just making **** up.

...a made up number. RandU Fallacy.

RandU Fallacy. It is not possible to measure the temperature of the Earth.

It is not beyond a perfect blackbody either, as that is not possible.

RandU Fallacy. You can't make up numbers and call them "data".

It is not possible to measure the temperature of the Earth using magick satellites. The emissivity of Earth is unknown.

 

No, it's a poor argument based on the RandU Fallacy and a denial of science, as I have described.

 

and right on que, you do exactly as I stated in the post you quoted. Your rebuttal is "nuh uh", and you have presented no counter evidence or experimentation to show he was incorrect. We all know why.

 

Readers of this forum can see for themselves what I did.

 

Okay, I figured out how you got this number now. You just left the emissivity value at 1 and rounded (explaining why I was getting an emissivity value slightly higher than 1 when I was solving the equation). Got it.

The problem, though, is that Earth is not an ideal blackbody. We don't know the emissivity of Earth. We don't know what that measured constant in the SB Law equation actually is, so we can't figure out the temperature of the Earth that way.

 

yes, they can clearly see that your only rebuttal is "nuh uh" and you have yet to provide a single shred of scientific evidence or experimentation to show he was wrong.

 

"Heat CANNOT flow from cold to hot... EVER. It can ONLY flow from hot to cold. This applies to ALL systems where there is a difference in temperature."

Consider a solid that is initially at a higher temperature, Ts, than its surroundings, Tsur, but around which there exists a vacuum. The presence of the vacuum precludes energy loss from the surface of the
solid by conduction or convection. However, our intuition tells us that the cool and eventually achieve thermal equilibrium with its surroundings. This cooling is associated with a reduction in the internal
energy stored by the solid and is a direct consequence of the emission of thermal radiation from the surface. In turn, the surface will intercept and absorb radiation originating from the surroundings.
However, if Ts > Tsur the net heat transfer rate by radiation q rad,net is from the surface, and the surface will cool until Ts reaches Tsur.

According to this example, From "Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer, 6th edition", Incropera and DeWitt (2007), during the cooling process the solid surface at a higher temperature than its surroundings,
will intercept and absorb radiation originating from the surroundings. The net heat transfer is from the surface to the surroundings.

 

I copied this graph fro Wikipedia, outgoing longwave radiation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgoing_longwave_radiation#/media/File:Spectral_OLR.png.

It shows a simulation of the earth;s surface as a blackbody. The emissivity of the earth's surface is not well known but water ice and foliage all have very emissivities close to 0.95 and 1.0 represents a perfect emitter.
Vegetation, water and ice have high emissivities above 0.95 in the thermal infrared wavelength range. - source NASA.

The area under the curve for the graph, Ts, should provide the earth's radiance of about 398 watts per square meter which would be in close agreement with the value obtained
by satellite remote sensing. The jagged graph of the outgoing longwave radiation has much less area under the curve and represents the radiation measured from the top of the
atmosphere which would correspond to a lower temperature of around 255 degrees Kelvin.





Simulated spectrum of the Earth's outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). The radiative transfer simulations have been performed using ARTS. In addition the black-body radiation for a body at surface temperature Ts and at tropopause temperature Tmin is shown.

 

Climate contrarian, Dr. Roy Spencer, defends the greenhouse effect at his blog: https://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/04/in-defense-of-the-greenhouse-effect/

Some portions from this article:

In an e-mail I just responded to this evening, I once again found myself defending the existence of the Earth’s “greenhouse effect”. I’m talking about the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect, not mankind’s small enhancement of it. And it’s amazing how many scientists, let alone lay people, dispute its existence.

To briefly review: because water vapor, clouds, carbon dioxide, and methane in the atmosphere absorb and emit infrared radiation, the atmosphere stays warmer in the lower atmosphere and cooler in the upper atmosphere than it would otherwise be without the greenhouse effect.

Even though the physical process involved in this is radiative, the greenhouse blanket around the Earth is somewhat analogous to a real blanket, which we all know tends to hold heat in where it is being generated, and reduce its flow toward the colder surroundings. A blanket � real or greenhouse — doesn�t actually create the separation between hot and cold�it just reduces the rate at which energy is lost by the hot, and gained by the cold.

In the case of the Earth, most sunlight is absorbed at the surface, which then heats and moistens the air above it. This
solar heating causes the lower atmosphere to warm, and the greenhouse effect of the water vapor thus generated helps keep the lower atmosphere warm by reducing its rate of cooling.

IT VIOLATES THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
A second objection has to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is claimed that since the greenhouse effect depends partly upon cooler upper layers of the atmosphere emitting infrared radiation toward the warmer, lower layers of the atmosphere, that this violates the 2nd Law, which (roughly speaking) says that energy must flow from warmer objects to cooler objects, not the other way around.

There are different ways to illustrate why this is not a valid objection. First of all, the 2nd Law applies to the behavior of whole systems, not to every part within a system, and to all forms of energy involved in the system�not just its temperature. And in the atmosphere, temperature is only one component to the energy content of an air parcel.

Secondly, the idea that a cooler atmospheric layer can emit infrared energy toward a warmer atmospheric layer below it seems unphysical to many people. I suppose this is because we would not expect a cold piece of metal to transfer heat into a warm piece of metal. But the processes involved in conductive heat transfer are not the same as in radiative heat transfer. A hot star out in space will still receive, and absorb, radiant energy from a cooler nearby star�even though the NET flow of energy will be in the opposite direction.

Furthermore, we should not confuse a reduced rate of cooling with heating.

THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT WORKS…FOR NOW
The greenhouse effect is supported by laboratory measurements of the radiative absorption properties of different gases, which when put into a radiative transfer model that conserves energy, and combined with convective overturning of the atmosphere in response to solar heating, results in a vertical temperature profile that looks very much like the one we observe in nature.

 

Dr. Roy Spencer is not science.

False Authority Fallacy.

Same with Wikipedia and the textbook and etc...

 

and again right on que, your rebuttal consists of "nuh uh". You provided not a shred of scientific evidence or experimentation to show he was incorrect.

 

**cue.

And I already did. Your refusal to address it doesn't magickally make it disappear.

 

you, and everyone else reading is fully aware that you have not. Your argument consists of "nuh uh" when presented with scientific evidence and experiments. You have yet to provide a single shred of evidence to support your denials, nor have you presented any experiments proving your hypothesis.

 

I already have done so.

 

you, and everyone else reading is fully aware that you have not. it's why you can't link us to the post where you provided your scientific evidence and experimentation, which proves your hypothesis.