Toddsterpatriot
Diamond Member
Well we finally thawed out here in Manitoba.
So I went outside to see if it was the sun that did it or all that "back radiation".
I used a laser thermometer which converts IR watts radiated to degrees C.
The sun had warmed the ground I stood on to +37 C which is a lot more than the +16C average used in Trenberth`s "energy budget" which zaps us with 333 watts/m^2 "back radiation"
Pointing the gun straight up at the clear sky it should have registered +3.8 C if there were 333 watts coming back down, but all I got was a bone chilling -18 C which corresponds to 237 watts.
So even with all that CO2 up there it`s still 100 watts/m^2 short of a climax scientist`s orgasm.
Conduction at ground level where air meets the warmer ground...(your registering ground temp) convection from water vapor in the air once warmed (your IR beam is bouncing off water vapor in the air)... and no measurement of what LWIR is doing (down welling) because your hand held device cant measure it.
Fooling yourself with equipment is easy to do.. However you have identified two elements in the atmospheres temperature. The question is, do you think that BBR (Black Body Radiation- LWIR) returning to the earths surface after being emitted from the surface (caused by CO2 or other gases) is capable of making up 170Wm^2 in the energy budget of the earth?
An infrared thermometer is a thermometer which infers temperature from a portion of the thermal radiation sometimes called blackbody radiation emitted by the object being measured. They are sometimes called laser thermometers if a laser is used to help aim the thermometer, or non-contact thermometers or temperature guns, to describe the device's ability to measure temperature from a distance. By knowing the amount of infrared energy emitted by the object and its emissivity, the object's temperature can often be determined. Infrared thermometers are a subset of devices known as "thermal radiation thermometers".
Sometimes, especially near ambient temperatures, readings may be subject to error due to the reflection of radiation from a hotter body—even the person holding the instrument[citation needed]—rather than radiated by the object being measured, and to an incorrect assumed emissivity.
The design essentially consists of a lens to focus the infrared thermal radiation on to a detector, which converts the radiant power to an electrical signal that can be displayed in units of temperature after being compensated for ambient temperature. This permits temperature measurement from a distance without contact with the object to be measured. A non-contact infrared thermometer is useful for measuring temperature under circumstances where thermocouples or other probe-type sensors cannot be used or do not produce accurate data for a variety of reasons.
Infrared thermometer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia