AGW: atmospheric physics

[jon_berzerk]

Youre full of the silly hope that those devices won't keep getting hotter because "they stop operating as a processor".. Well -- that's what UL is for.. For folks like you who depend on the hope fairy to prevent another Chicago fire.

Whether they work as processors is irrelavent and you are more than smart enough to know that isn't what I am saying. I don't know how much simpler I can make it and I don't know why because you are a bright fellow.

The processor, or whatever will heat up to the maximum temperature it can reach according to how much energy it has coming in. Once that temperature is reached, that is it. It won't get hotter unless you provide it more energy and putting a blanket over it does not provide more energy.

So --- clouds at nighttime in the desert do not make the NIGHT warmer at the surface? That's news to the people of Nogales, I reckon... Try substituting your N&Z "ideal gasses" for clouds and see how chilly your night in the desert turns out to be..

They don't really make it warmer...they just slow the rate of cooling. Night time in the desert isn't warmer than day time. Unlike CO2, water vapor can actually capture and store heat but even with that, the temperature is still decreasing. A clear sky with 100% CO2 if you could somehow manage that would result in the same temperature as a clear sky of regular air. Hell, 100% CO2 might result in a lower ambient temperature because radiation would move heat away from the surface far faster than convection and conduction.

And are you really arguing that the temperature at the bottom of a column of air is not greater than at the top of that column?

being the conductor that CO2 is

i would venture that an atmosphere at 100 percent CO2 would make the surface colder

 

[flacaltenn]

So if you slow the cooling rate at night when no energy is being added with clouds, the temperature will be HIGHER at morning than it otherwise would be at the rocks on the surface.

Higher than otherwise is still cooler. Slowing the rate of cooling will never equal heating.

keep that up for a week and the surface temp should continue to rise.. Even if (and especially) the clouds get switched off in the daytime when the sun gets switched on.

Keep it up for a million years and it will never get warmer than the incoming radiation from the sun can heat it.

You can't win; you can only break even.
You can only break even at absolute zero.
You can't reach absolute zero.

Put six frogs into a pot of water. Let it reach thermal equilibrium. Switch on just 2 watts of constant power for 10 hours a day.

1) If the outflow of heat energy (cooling rate) from this heat process is GREATER than the integrated inflow from your cheesy heater --- the temp will rise (over time -- probably days) to a NEW thermal equilibrium with a pleasantly warmer environment for your frogs.

2) If the outflow of heat energy from this heat process is EQUAL to the integrated inflow from your cheesy heater --- the temp will eventually rise to the MAXIMUM temperature that can retained at equilibrium (if the water doesn't all leave as vapor in the process). You'll probably lose your frogs.

3) If the outflow of heat energy from this heat process is LESS than the integrated inflow from your cheezy heater --- the temp will continue to rise until the water boils and there's nothing but memories of your frogs in the pot.

Now if at night when the cheezy heater is off, you cover the pot to reduce the cooling rate, you hasten the demise of the frogs by shortening the time integral to reach equibrium or to raise the temp to the point where something in the thermal system changes or breaks. (like boiling off the water or melting a hole in the pot). Theoretically barring catastrophic collapse of the system or negative feedbacks -- the temp continues to rise.

You still aren't going to get that water any warmer than the cheezy heater can make it without adding energy. By the way, you didn't say what the surface area of your cheezy heater is. Your end water temperature will be quite a bit different if the radiating surface area of your cheezy 2 watt heater is 100 square inches vs 0.10 square inches.

Naww.. As usual, this is completely hopeless.

1) "slowing the rate of cooling will never equal heating".. Correct if there is NO INFLOW of new energy. But in the FrogPot and the GreenHouse, there is a modulated periodic reliable source of new energy into the system everyday.. And if you slow the rate of LOSING heat energy to that big sink of space -- the energy reservoir fills and that's what pumps temperatures higher. Direct result in the increased thermal resistance added to impede energy outflow...

2) Protocol is -- the area of the heater doesn't matter as long it delivers NET 2 watts to the froggy water when it's on. Could be a fish heater, a tiny 2mm resistor or an IR lamp for all I care. GEEZ -- the PURPOSE of the cheesy heater is to add periodic energy to the system. OF COURSE the system has an energy inflow.. So does the EARTH!!! That's the point.. HEAT BUILDS when it's outflow is impeded. In practice the area and materials that make up the heater will affect the efficiency of that device. Only lefty dirtpeople care about efficiency.. In the lab --- we don't..

You need to reboot and realize that the GreenHouse effect is NOT an actual energy source. You shouldn't expect it to produce NEW energy. It's a thermal IMPEDANCE that affects the cooling rate of the system.. It is not expected to actually add energy to the system. It conserves and RETAINS existing energy. (that's what makes the dirtpeople love it <sarcasm>) HOWEVER, with the TRUE ENERGY SOURCE held constant --- increasing the impedance of the cooling path is essentially equivalent to adding Watts/M2 at the surface..

Similiarly --- my choice is to buy a bigger room heater or throw on more insulation.
If we can't get past that -- I capitulate.. You win.. I'm done.. Although I will feel a bit guilty if you don't know enough to avoid freezing yourself and your family to death in the near future..

 

[Saigon]

This has been a very interesting couple of days posting.

I haven't always agreed with Flacaltenn in the past, but I have to say I'm impressed by his posting here. I don't think many posters who have read the past few pages will be left in much doubt about the science involved here.

When this issue first came up I went and read an article about the Second Law of Thermodynamics in relation to climate change which was very useful, and which SSDD might also benefit from, but I actually think Flac's posting here was as good.

 

[flacaltenn]

This has been a very interesting couple of days posting.

I haven't always agreed with Flacaltenn in the past, but I have to say I'm impressed by his posting here. I don't think many posters who have read the past few pages will be left in much doubt about the science involved here.

When this issue first came up I went and read an article about the Second Law of Thermodynamics in relation to climate change which was very useful, and which SSDD might also benefit from, but I actually think Flac's posting here was as good.

Since you're so full of thermodynamic and radiation physics knowledge now, perhaps you can appreciate the MAJOR ERROR in the famous Trenberth diagrams now..

If this is the Warmers Definitive Bible on "Energy Balance" --- WHERE IS THE TIME parameter? Watts per meter squared is a POWER parameter --- not an energy parameter.
And we've just acknowledged that its the rate of cooling that "warms the GreenHouse". Unless you actually account for the ENERGY storage in the equivalent of WattHours/M2 or similiar --- you're not balancing energy are you?

What meaning do the Trenberth numbers have for the GreenHouse at NIGHT?

It's actually a very sloppy explanation of the GreenHouse energy budget..
But the warming cheerleaders think it's just great because it LOOKS official...

Maybe I'll take a year off and go back for a PhD in Climatology and clean it up..

 

[Saigon]

Flac -

I don't claim to be an expert on these issues - I just read what I can and do my best to make sense of them.

I have two interesting articles on the so-called 'energy budget' recently - one of which suggested that the 'missing' energy from Trenberth's budget may not have been missing at all (Loeb, see below) and of course others suggesting that the ocean depths are the real smoking gun in this aspect of the debate.

My starting point for all of these questions is that the best physicists in the world are working on these issues, so while they may be wrong about some things, they are unlikely to make the kind of basic errors that posters her accuse them of every day. I do think most Professors of Physics probably have a better working knowledge of thermodynamics than most lay people have.

"Loeb (2012) takes an updated look at the issue and finds that, using observations rather than modeled estimates, the Earth's energy imbalance is consistent with heat building up with the Earth system. They have this imbalance at 0.5 (±0.43) W/m2, much smaller than previous estimates, but the error margins are huge. Not unexpectedly the authors confirmed that heat is continuing to build up in the sub-surface ocean, which agrees with other recent sudies on ocean heat. The persistent energy imbalance measured by this study is essentially future global warming, or "warming in the pipeline". It puts paid to wishful thinking-based claims that global warming has halted."

Trenberth can't account for the lack of warming

 

[SSDD]

being the conductor that CO2 is

i would venture that an atmosphere at 100 percent CO2 would make the surface colder

That would be my bet as well so long as atmospheric pressure were the same.

 

[SSDD]

Naww.. As usual, this is completely hopeless.

OK. I dug around in the closet of my son's old room and found a "Repti Therm" under tank heater. It is a gadget he had to keep a snake tank warm when he was a kid. It says that it puts out 4 watts. It has no thermostat that I can see and doesn't even have an on off switch. Plug it in and that's it. It looks like it might be waterproof but I can put some silocone around the area where the power cord goes in. In short, it looks like a source of constant output.

How big of a water container do I need for your experiment? The biggest thing I have is a crab and crawfish steamer....33 quarts. Is that big enough? And are frogs or kittens really required? If it is all the same, I would just as soon just use water.

I will run your experiment and we will see what we see.


Since it is clear that you know more about electronic equipment than I do, would you care to check out the Repti Therm under tank heater and let me know if it is cheezy enough even though the one I have has a 4 watt output. If there is no thermostat and it is a steady output, that in itself would seem to put down your hypothesis as the thing resided under my son's snake tank, always on for about 4 years but I am willing to drag out the crawfish steamer and take its temperature for a while to prove my point.

 

[SSDD]

I have two interesting articles on the so-called 'energy budget' recently - one of which suggested that the 'missing' energy from Trenberth's budget may not have been missing at all (Loeb, see below) and of course others suggesting that the ocean depths are the real smoking gun in this aspect of the debate.

The missing energy is the greenhouse effect that doesn't exist.

My starting point for all of these questions is that the best physicists in the world are working on these issues, so while they may be wrong about some things, they are unlikely to make the kind of basic errors that posters her accuse them of every day. I do think most Professors of Physics probably have a better working knowledge of thermodynamics than most lay people have.

Why do you make claims like "the best physicists in the world", when it simply isn't true. The best physicists in the world are not to be found in climate science. Ivar Giaever was at or very near the top of the heap as far as physicists go who are involved in climate science.. he was a nobel winner...he left because the APS's position on climate change is hokum...Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara. also, an eminent physicist also quit because the claims of manmade global warming wer a scam and a "pseudoscientific fraud." And those two aren't the only eminent academics who have left societies because they are supporting pseudoscience.

It is interesting to note that mostly scientists nearing retirement are the ones quitting the societies and making such statements and they say that younger scientists who still need to make a living aren't at liberty to follow their examples as speaking out on the pseudoscience isn't conductive to making a living in their chosen fields.

By the way, I am still waiting for you to give me a description of how you believe I have rewritten the second law of thermodynamics. You made the claim, now explain it in some detail if you don't mind. Or simply acknowledge that you got caught up in the moment and made a statement on a topic on which you have no grasp.

 

[Saigon]

SSDD -

These are the two errors in your thesis:

1) The atmosphere would need to be a discrete body in order to qualify as a &#8220;body of lower temperature&#8221; and clearly it is not when considering electromagnetic transmission from sun to earth to space and;

2) The 2nd Law would have to preclude any feedback (return of energy in any form from atmosphere to non-gaseous surface) that could slow the cooling of the &#8220;body of higher temperature&#8221;.

If anyone would like to read a rather lengthy and detailed explanation of this, you can find it here:

Is there a conflict between Greenhouse Effect and the Second Law of Thermodynamics? | JunkScience.com

 

[flacaltenn]

From Saigon Post...

"Loeb (2012) takes an updated look at the issue and finds that, using observations rather than modeled estimates, the Earth's energy imbalance is consistent with heat building up with the Earth system. They have this imbalance at 0.5 (±0.43) W/m2, much smaller than previous estimates, but the error margins are huge. Not unexpectedly the authors confirmed that heat is continuing to build up in the sub-surface ocean, which agrees with other recent sudies on ocean heat. The persistent energy imbalance measured by this study is essentially future global warming, or "warming in the pipeline". It puts paid to wishful thinking-based claims that global warming has halted."

Error budget is actually LAUGHABLE in the Trenberth numbers. Not just HUGE. It purports to know ONE GLOBAL NUMBER for each of those energy paths regardless of whether it's day or night, summer or winter, raining or snowing or Siberia or Fiji... That's not even in the ballpark of producing an analysis capable of FINDING a 1 or 2% imbalance of ANY KIND.. It takes more faith to believe that those numbers are solid enough to find GW -- than it does to believe that God brought plagues of locusts to Egypt...

"wishful thinking"?? That statement ITSELF is wishful thinking unsupported by any comprehensive measurements or analysis.. How gullible are you Saigon? These assertions are "works in progress" and sometime mathematical fabrications not reflecting the complexity of the system under study --- and YET --- you swallow them whole and treat them as gospel...

 

[SSDD]

1) The atmosphere would need to be a discrete body in order to qualify as a “body of lower temperature” and clearly it is not when considering electromagnetic transmission from sun to earth to space and;

No it wouldn't. Energy won't move from regions of cool to regions of warm even if they are part of the same body. Put a piece of sheet metal half in the sun and half in shade...no energy will move from the cooler area in the shade to the warmer area in the sun while energy will certainly move from the warm area in the sun to the cooler area in the shade.

2. The 2nd Law would have to preclude any feedback (return of energy in any form from atmosphere to non-gaseous surface) that could slow the cooling of the “body of higher temperature”.

Second Law of Thermodynamics

I repeat: Second Law of Thermodynamics: It is not possible for heat to flow from a colder body to a warmer body without any work having been done to accomplish this flow. Energy will not flow spontaneously from a low temperature object to a higher temperature object.

And energy doesn't care whether it is moving from solid to gas or gas to liquid or liquid to solid...what matters is the temperature of the emitter and the temperature of the "receiver"

If anyone would like to read a rather lengthy and detailed explanation of this, you can find it here:

 

[flacaltenn]

Naww.. As usual, this is completely hopeless.

OK. I dug around in the closet of my son's old room and found a "Repti Therm" under tank heater. It is a gadget he had to keep a snake tank warm when he was a kid. It says that it puts out 4 watts. It has no thermostat that I can see and doesn't even have an on off switch. Plug it in and that's it. It looks like it might be waterproof but I can put some silocone around the area where the power cord goes in. In short, it looks like a source of constant output.

How big of a water container do I need for your experiment? The biggest thing I have is a crab and crawfish steamer....33 quarts. Is that big enough? And are frogs or kittens really required? If it is all the same, I would just as soon just use water.

I will run your experiment and we will see what we see.


Since it is clear that you know more about electronic equipment than I do, would you care to check out the Repti Therm under tank heater and let me know if it is cheezy enough even though the one I have has a 4 watt output. If there is no thermostat and it is a steady output, that in itself would seem to put down your hypothesis as the thing resided under my son's snake tank, always on for about 4 years but I am willing to drag out the crawfish steamer and take its temperature for a while to prove my point.

I have many ReptiTherms, that would work fine. It will pretty much distribute the heating evenly over the extent of its surface.

The reason your snake didn't cook is that the tank temperature reached an equilibrium over time due to thermal losses in the system. That equilibrium represents the time intervals of energy in versus energy out. The temperature it settles at is representative of the heat difference profile that forces the amount of energy out to cancel the energy in.

Don't waste the pot.. Toss in a scoop of crawdaddies..

BTW: Unless your kitchen is temp regulated to less than +/-2 degF --- this will affect your starting and following measurements. The starting measurement should be averaged over many hours (or even a day) before you even turn on the heater.

 

[Saigon]

SSDD -

Well, once again, we see that you are right, and all of the physicists and experts in the field are wrong.

I am surprised.

I do have another couple of articles here by professors of physics which make the same claim - I do hope you'll contact them and explain their errors.


btw. The second law does not say a cold object cannot pass heat to a warmer object, it states that NET heat flow is always from warmer to colder. Try re-reading my points above with that in mind.

 

[Saigon]

Flacaltenn -

The text you quote from is not written by me, but appears in an article I found interesting.

Because I agree with you that this area is a bit of a "work in progress", I tend to avoid making bold claims or triumphing anything I read as being the last word on the topic. Hence, I don't think I'm particularly gullible.

I do think it is possible to find different research projects interesting and respect the science involved without assuming them to be somehow beyond reproach.

 

[numan]

being the conductor that CO2 is

i would venture that an atmosphere at 100 percent CO2 would make the surface colder

That would be my bet as well so long as atmospheric pressure were the same.

Oh, yeah, sure -- like the surface of the planet Venus!!! · ·

Whoo, boy---in my wildest and most malevolent dreams I could not imagine scientific dodos like the ones raving on this thread !! · ·

.

 

[westwall]

being the conductor that CO2 is

i would venture that an atmosphere at 100 percent CO2 would make the surface colder

That would be my bet as well so long as atmospheric pressure were the same.

Oh, yeah, sure -- like the surface of the planet Venus!!! · ·

Whoo, boy---in my wildest and most malevolent dreams I could not imagine scientific dodos like the ones raving on this thread !! · ·

.

When you mention Earth and Venus in the same breath you expose your massive ignorance of the subject. Venus has a atmospheric density 93 times greater than the Earth. Do you even know what that means? The Venusian atmosphere is 96% CO2, O2 is a trace gas in that atmosphere. We could burn EVERY CARBON BEARING ROCK ON THIS PLANET AND CO2 WOULD STILL BE A TRACE GAS.

Do you have a clue what that means?

As a start I suggest you take a look at the Ideal Gas Laws.

 

[IanC]

1) The atmosphere would need to be a discrete body in order to qualify as a “body of lower temperature” and clearly it is not when considering electromagnetic transmission from sun to earth to space and;

No it wouldn't. Energy won't move from regions of cool to regions of warm even if they are part of the same body. Put a piece of sheet metal half in the sun and half in shade...no energy will move from the cooler area in the shade to the warmer area in the sun while energy will certainly move from the warm area in the sun to the cooler area in the shade.

2. The 2nd Law would have to preclude any feedback (return of energy in any form from atmosphere to non-gaseous surface) that could slow the cooling of the “body of higher temperature”.

Second Law of Thermodynamics

I repeat: Second Law of Thermodynamics: It is not possible for heat to flow from a colder body to a warmer body without any work having been done to accomplish this flow. Energy will not flow spontaneously from a low temperature object to a higher temperature object.

And energy doesn't care whether it is moving from solid to gas or gas to liquid or liquid to solid...what matters is the temperature of the emitter and the temperature of the "receiver"

If anyone would like to read a rather lengthy and detailed explanation of this, you can find it here:

who is claiming that a heat is moving from a cooler body to a warmer one? no one is but you keep trotting that strawman out.

you look at a diagram that shows radiation flowing in both directions and then proceed to ignore one side of the equation. not that I agree with Trenberth's diagram but it does show that the net flow of IR energy from the surface is outward. if the surface is warming up because of decreased IR flow outwards, the actual energy being used to heat the surface is from the Sun, not the backradiation that just cancels out a portion of the heat loss to space by IR.

again, if two objects are at the same temperature that does not mean they stop radiating at each other, it only means that there is no net flow. there is no SLOT (second law of thermodynamics) God that takes the temperature of everything in the universe before anything is allowed emit radiation.

 

[SSDD]

Don't waste the pot.. Toss in a scoop of crawdaddies..

Never going to get hot enough to even turn them pink...much less cook em.

BTW: Unless your kitchen is temp regulated to less than +/-2 degF --- this will affect your starting and following measurements. The starting measurement should be averaged over many hours (or even a day) before you even turn on the heater.

Actually, I was goint to run it in the closet in my son's old room. I keep guns, fishing equipment and cigars in there and have a small system installed that keeps the temperature and humidity remarkably stable.

 

[SSDD]

btw. The second law does not say a cold object cannot pass heat to a warmer object, it states that NET heat flow is always from warmer to colder. Try re-reading my points above with that in mind.

No, the second law says that it is not possible for heat to flow from a colder body to a warmer body without some work having been done to accomplish the task. gross flow back and forth is a theoretical, mathematical artifiact which remains unproven by any experiment.

One way net energy flow is reality and the statement of the second law of thermodynamics...two way gross is not and has no physical meaning.

 

[jon_berzerk]

btw. The second law does not say a cold object cannot pass heat to a warmer object, it states that NET heat flow is always from warmer to colder. Try re-reading my points above with that in mind.

No, the second law says that it is not possible for heat to flow from a colder body to a warmer body without some work having been done to accomplish the task. gross flow back and forth is a theoretical, mathematical artifiact which remains unproven by any experiment.

One way net energy flow is reality and the statement of the second law of thermodynamics...two way gross is not and has no physical meaning.

that is why C02 being a good conductor of heat

would spin heat off into the colder space

rather then store it or send it back to warm the planet