The Earth Is NOT A Greenhouse

After posting in another thread about the recent letter from NASA, I realized from some of the responses that there is still a lot of misinformation floating around about man-made global warming - aka - Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

Since a lot of scientists still stand on principle rather than just to get a buck or impress a politician or two, there has been an onslaught of resistance from the scientific community, across all fields, to demonstrate just how ridiculous it is to blame humans for warming an entire planet with a single gas. The difference we've made over the last 100 years is akin to a gnat farting in a cat 5 hurricane. (sorry to be so crude, but trying to also come across in a simple analogy)

I'm going to attempt to bring out some of the more "recent" work being done in climate science, which has been used to basically crush the man-made portion of the theory. Everything in climate science is still theory because of how massively complex it is to measure. However, there are enough theories that have been peer-reviewed and are supported across the spectrum of fields involved in climatology for the majority of "real" scientists in the field to agree that it is not man-made and so the hunt continues. Does CO2 contribute to warming? Absolutely! But not anything like what the media and various political organizations would have you believe.

Contrary to what people are forced to believe by those with motivation other than the pursuit of truth, CO2 rises due to temperature rising, meaning it is the effect, not the cause. I will show the arguments for this below.

When papers are peer-reviewed, they are scrutinized by several other scientists in the same or related fields before it is published in journals or referenced by other scientists. Most of the work being presented here has been peer-reviewed, published and for some pieces, are in the process of being peer-reviewed or published. These are serious works, not armchair scientists, so please don't come back with responses like "we're killing the planet", "you're a shill for big oil", "you must be a conservative"... I expect those answers, but I can assure you that this thread is to present the science and explain why man-made global warming is a farce and meant only to advance political agendas, not to mislead for any reason. Let me be clear that I don't agree with polluting the planet, with keeping the status quo or with the destructive nature of corporations. I also don't believe YOU should give up your rights, liberties, or money because "they" want you to stay uninformed and blind with junk science. With that said...

The Greenhouse Effect
This term has been so completely skewed and abused, that it was probably the starting point for the misunderstanding about climate change. A greenhouse is a closed system. It is an enclosed glass structure that allows the radiation from light, to pass through the glass and allows the resulting heat to be trapped. It's a closed system because there is nowhere for the heat to go. The Earth is an open system. It has no glass ceiling that traps heat, and you can not compare a gas like CO2 to a solid like glass. Greenhouses are usually limited in size. The Earth has an entire solar system to radiate heat out. The Earth is therefore NOT a greenhouse, and so to apply the greenhouse effect, as it's used to describe global warming, is ridiculous and would violate all of the known laws of physics.

Speaking of physics, to claim that CO2 "forces" the heat that rises through entropy (cold to hot) and is trapped in the atmosphere back to the ground would violate the laws of thermodynamics. CO2 can not "force" the temperatures on the ground to become warmer. The wavelengths of energy passing back into the atmosphere excites the carbon dioxide, which will cause a further release of energy. This process happens in seconds, not days, months, years or centuries. It's the same process that allows us to create lasers by exciting atoms of a certain type of gas, which will then emit a photon (which determines the color of the light), except in this case, the energy is a form of heat. To think that this energy can be somehow "forced" back to the ground to warm the Earth's surface is not how things work.

The Hockey Stick - Al Gore's Famous Graph
This is where most of the confusion about global temperatures took place because of the "splicing" of ground-based temperature data and CO2 station data (such as ones on top of the volcanoes in Hawaii) into the Vostok ice core data. This is not disputed and has been proven many times around. Dr. Bradley and Dr. Mann both have been hammered over it, and so I'm not going to re-hash the Climate Gate details. The important part is that the upward curve is not based on ice-core data because it was not available for the last 35 years, so the data had to be related to something else. This is why the graph had such an impact. Ground-based temperature readings are not accurate, and have been proven to fluctuate by as much as +-15 degrees, as well as the majority of them being placed around densely populated areas, and in some cases, next to air conditioners or in parking lots. The more accurate temperature measurements come from satellites and weather balloons measuring the troposphere, not the ground, which is going to measure heat emitted from the ground, not the air temperature across the Earth. Here is the graph in question, just to refresh.



Another problem with this graph is that it is impossible to see any of the subtle correlations that you would need to make a correlation between CO2 and temperatures in a way that allows you to see which is the cause and which is the effect. Remember, correlation doesn't equal causation. The data is tightly woven and overlaid so that you can't see the cause from the effect. However, if you take the RAW data from the ice cores, it doesn't take much effort to see that there is a problem with the claim made by AGW proponents because in most turning points on the graph, the CO2 rises AFTER temperature, not the other way around.

Vostok Ice Cores
A lot of AGW proponents love to refer to the Vostok ice cores. There is a tremendous wealth of information that can be obtained from the ice, however, there is also a lot of correlated data that can not, such as solar radiance, cosmic rays, cloud cover. These can't be ignored when looking at climate, yet the references to ice cores never include any of this data. When looking at the raw data, which can be found here and here, you can clearly see that temperatures rise before changes in CO2 occur. The following graphs further illustrate this and allow you to see the real correlation that can't be viewed in the hockey stick graph:

















These results have been confirmed by multiple groups of climatologists across several different ice core samples besides the Vostok Cores and at this point in time, is not in dispute.

(continued below)

Clouds and Feedback Sensitivity
This is what is currently known as the "Holy Grail" in climatology. In a nutshell, it is the determination of how sensitive the climate is to variable changes. Clouds are probably the biggest feedback mechanism related to climate, yet not fully understood. The IPCC suggests that clouds are feedback positive (ie - warmth-amplifying) - rather than negative (ie - cooling). This is a major flaw in the modeling and interpretation of the feedback sensitivity. When low cloud cover is observed to decrease with warming, is the cloud change the result of the warming, or is the warming the result of the cloud change? This is the single most important issue in predicting whether or not our CO2 contributions can be catastrophic. As Dr. Roy Spencer eloquently states:

Imagine you are out in space, observing the Earth, and feeling the radiant energy it gives off from sunlight reflected off of clouds and from the infrared (heat) radiation it emits in proportion to its temperature.

Now imagine that the Earth’s surface and atmosphere suddenly warm by 1 deg. C, everywhere. In this case the Earth would immediately give off an extra 3.3 Watts per square meter of infrared energy (just as a hot stovetop element gives off more infrared energy than a warm one).

This example represents the "no feedback" case…only the temperature has changed in the system, resulting in extra infrared energy being given off, at a rate of 3.3 Watts per square meter for every degree C of temperature increase. But in the real world, any source of warming (or cooling) causes other changes in clouds, water vapor, etc., to occur. These can cause extra warming if they either increase the amount of absorbed sunlight (e.g. fewer low clouds), or reduce the rate of infrared radiation to outer space (e.g. more water vapor, our main greenhouse gas). These warmth-amplifying changes are called positive feedbacks.

Alternatively, cloud and water vapor changes could decrease the amount of absorbed sunlight or increase the amount of emitted infrared energy, thus reducing the warming. This is called negative feedback.

That number (3.3) thus represents the magic boundary between positive and negative feedback. If satellites measure more than 3.3 Watts per square meter given off by the Earth per degree of global warming, that is evidence of negative feedback. If the number is less than 3.3, that is positive feedback. If the number reached zero, that would correspond to a borderline unstable climate system. The 20 climate models tracked by the IPCC have feedbacks ranging from about 0.9 to 1.9 (all corresponding to positive feedback since they are less than 3.3).

The central importance of feedbacks to the global warming issue can not be overstated. How the radiant flows of energy in and out of the Earth system change with temperature is THE most critical piece of knowledge we need in order to predict whether manmade global warming will be benign — or catastrophic. It is obvious that good estimates of feedbacks are needed from our observations of natural climate variability.

In a nutshell, what Dr. Spencer is demonstrating is the inaccuracy of the models being used and why. He goes on to say:

The bottom line from the model and observational evidence presented here is that:

Net feedbacks in the real climate system — on both short and long time scales — are probably negative. A misinterpretation of cloud behavior has led climate modelers to build models in which cloud feedbacks are instead positive, which has led the models to predict too much global warming in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

What climate researcher Bob Cess said in a 1997 interview with Science magazine’s Richard Kerr seems to be still true today:

“…the [models] may be agreeing now simply because they’re all tending to do the same thing wrong. It’s not clear to me that we have clouds right by any stretch of the imagination.”

I challenge climate modelers to “validate” their models to the level of detail I have in my comparisons here between satellite observations (Fig. 4 & 5) and a simple climate model (Fig. 5 & 6). Once their climate models can behave in the same way as the satellite observations suggest the real climate system behaves on a year to year basis, then we can revisit how much global warming those models predict for the future. Until that happens, I consider the IPCC climate model forecasts of strong global warming in the coming decades to be completely unreliable for basing policy decisions on.

(cont'd below)

I strongly recommend reading his full work. A little more about Dr. Spencer:

Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.

Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.

Conclusion
The preponderance of evidence and science suggests that what we are experiencing currently is a natural warming cycle that follows the glacial rebounding that happens after an ice age. We will likely see a major cooling trend start soon (geologically speaking) based on previous patterns, as is seen in the Vostok ice cores over each inter-glacial period, but it is likely that additional warming will occur before then. The data shows that there have been warmer periods in Earth's climate than current temps, and going back 400,000 years or more is a drop in the bucket in geological time. The fact is that the 'scientific properties involved to “calculate” the chaotic interplay of such a myriad and unquantifiable array of factors that is beyond even the abilities of the most powerful of modern supercomputers' is the reality of climatology and the reason why it will be a really long time before we can accurately predict climate change with any certainty. Today's local weather forecasts are still inaccurate for that very reason, and no meteorologist will deny that. The Vostok ice core data from 2003 shows CO2 rising as an effect rather than the cause, and this is one of the reasons the AGW debate has quieted down significantly, but has not been shared outside of the science community for fear of retribution. It would be irresponsible of all humans to take a brand new field of scientific study and alter our entire way of life without giving the necessary time to collect more data and do more observation.

I did not include factors such as solar radiance, sunspot cycles, the Milankovich cycles, cosmic ray radiation, the Medieval Warming Period, the Maunder Minimum and several other factors that directly impact climate, because they are not in question over what effect they have on climate and are accepted (by most) as hard fact. If any of those factors changed significantly, the scientific community at large agrees that the climate would respond almost immediately depending on the severity of change.

I encourage you all to keep an open mind. Don't align science with politics. Make up your own mind based on the real science, not speculation and computer models alone. Realize that there is a growing body of scientists (31,000 of them and growing) that all agree that humans are not the cause of global warming, but that the Earth is definitely warming... so the challenge to you, and every scientist out there is to figure out what it is first. We must know the problem before a solution can be devised.

Sources

All of the information in this thread is referenced in the following:

Falsication Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics


Global Warming as a Natural Response to Cloud Changes Associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)


Historical Isotopic Temperature Record from the Vostok Ice Core

Historical CO2 Record from the Vostok Ice Core

Temperature change and CO2 change:
a scientific briefing

The Climategate Emails

The 800 Year Lag Graphed

Ice Core Studies Prove CO2 Is Not the Powerful Climate Driver Climate Alarmists Make It Out to Be

Interesting data from an off-topic blog - this is my only questionable reference, but has good points.

~Namaste

Many thanks for bringing some clarity to a very foggy subject, I tend to agree with your view. I believe on the other hand that if mankind abuses their position of power, they will feel the force of the cosmos and nature as she settles the balance. The big corporations will destroy themselves if they do not take this in to account, we should all do our best to form part of what is more beneficial for all. This is not easy I know, but currently we are working on it. We will learn the hard way I believe.Thanks for you efforts to reverse the missconception.

reply to post by ancientthunder


Thank you. I agree that we must take responsibility for our misdeeds and those of the corporations, because there will be consequences.

I just wanted to clarify for so many others that "consensus", which is used by the IPCC and so many others, is not a scientific term, it is a political one.

AGW was always a consensus. I'm happy to be able to present as much data as possible while not involving politics. It just makes things harder to understand for people who want to be involved, but don't know which side of the fight to be on.

~Namaste

You're right, the Earth is not a greenhouse but you have some misconceptions.

To think that this energy can be somehow "forced" back to the ground to warm the Earth's surface is not how things work.

You are misunderstanding the term forcing as applied to radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is described as positive or negative. Positive forcing results in a net energy (temperature) gain and negative forcing results in a net loss. When forcing is discussed in terms of climate change it has nothing to do with the Earth's surface being warmed or cooled, it has to do with the atmosphere being warmed or cooled. The surface is warmed by sunlight (all wavelengths). The atmosphere (greenhouse gasses in particular) is warmed by longwave (infrared) radiation from the Sun and also by infrared radiation emitted by the surface of the Earth after being heated by shorter wavelengths. At night, that outgoing radiation from the Earth's surface escapes into space...unless something prevents that from happening.

The wavelengths of energy passing back into the atmosphere excites the carbon dioxide, which will cause a further release of energy. This process happens in seconds, not days, months, years or centuries. It's the same process that allows us to create lasers by exciting atoms of a certain type of gas, which will then emit a photon (which determines the color of the light), except in this case, the energy is a form of heat.

Your discussion of the emission of photons from atoms is not relevant and does not apply. The atmosphere is warmed because so called greenhouse gases absorb longwave (infrared) radiation. Other gasses (N2, O2) are more transparent to infrared and other wavelengths, these molecules are not heated by sunlight. CO2 absorbs infrared and it does not emit it. It, and other greenhouse gasses retain the energy in the form of heat which is molecular motion, not electromagnetic radiation. The more greenhouse gasses, the more heat the atmosphere can hold. Here is a nice demonstration of the absorption (and not emission) of infrared radiation by CO2. The infrared radiation emitted by the candle flame disappears with increasing amounts of CO2.



But you are also right that the global climate system is far more complex than most models represent...in support of either side of the argument.

Here's a great video from one of my sources that shortly and sweetly summarizes a lot of good information:



~Namaste

reply to post by Phage


Thank you for the clarification Phage.

I do understand what you are saying, I did a bad job of conveying my thoughts on it. I should have included more reference material on it instead of trying to distill it down.

~Namaste

So my question still remains and I'm really interested in what ATS members think is the cause of the warming?

The oceans will act as a heat sink, but how long does it take before the oceans will start radiating that heat back out or equalize temperature? At what point does that happen and at what point does CO2 begin to be released from the oceans?

I think these are important questions to answer to understand what's happening. The Earth is definitely getting warmer, and there is an increase of CO2, supposedly as a result of the change, so what is fueling the warmth?

Is it just a perfect storm of cosmic rays increasing, interstellar gas increasing solar radiance, Pacific Decadel Oscillation and other factors?

We're obviously not going to turn into Venus, because we have clouds and Venus does not... but what history shows us is that this trend in warming happens right before going into a glacial period and things get really cold for a few hundred or possibly, thousand years. What might we see in our lifetimes?

~Namaste

The Greenhouse Effect This term has been so completely skewed and abused, that it was probably the starting point for the misunderstanding about climate change. A greenhouse is a closed system. It is an enclosed glass structure that allows the radiation from light, to pass through the glass and allows the resulting heat to be trapped. It's a closed system because there is nowhere for the heat to go. The Earth is an open system. It has no glass ceiling that traps heat, and you can not compare a gas like CO2 to a solid like glass. Greenhouses are usually limited in size. The Earth has an entire solar system to radiate heat out. The Earth is therefore NOT a greenhouse, and so to apply the greenhouse effect, as it's used to describe global warming, is ridiculous and would violate all of the known laws of physics.

And I stopped reading after this paragraph. A: a greenhouse is NOT a closed system; sunlight enters via the glass roof and heat escapes via infrared radiation. B: why can't CO2 reflect heat again? Do you know how absorption/emission in gasses works?

The Greenhouse Effect is very simple. Even a basic Earth science or astronomy course can teach you how it works. A large amount of sunlight enters the Earth's atmosphere. Some of it gets deflected back out into space by our atmosphere, but the lion's share makes it to Earth's surface. A portion of the sunlight that hits the surface is reflected back into the sky. A portion of that reflected light is absorbed by molecules in our atmosphere and re-emitted.

Now since these molecules are randomly distributed, their re-emissions are also random. About half of the sunlight reflected off of Earth's surface is allowed to escape back into space, whereas about half is redirected back to earth again.

Therefore, the higher the concentration of gasses that absorb this light, the higher the amount of sunlight that is reflected back to Earth. This is how the Greenhouse Effect works, and the paragraph above shows that you have little to no understanding of this. Global Warming, man-made or otherwise, is real.

Well said, man, S&F!!!

Well said, man, S&F!!!

reply to post by SonOfTheLawOfOne


The Earth is a very big greenhouse, it doesn't look like the other planets does it? You are right though, it is not just one gas. It is a combination of many things that causes an Ecosystem to collapse. Destruction of trees, increasing CO2 and methane gasses, overconcentration of chemicals entering the system, even releasing metalic minerals too quickly into the environment hurts things. Rapid change causes rapid change. Man can destroy this planets Ecosystem. This fact is not accepted by people readily. At no time in history has man created this big of a mess on a global scale. We cannot even guess the consequences of these actions. CO2 is just a little part of the problem. If they only target CO2, the Ecosystem will still fail but may extend it's survival for another twenty years There has to be a drastic reversal of what's going on to slowly start a reverse of this failure. The only way I think this would be possible is a drastic reduction of human populations. I am not the only one who thinks this way. I do not like the concept because I and my family are not necessary in the eyes of those with the power to initiate something like this. I also could never choose who was good enough to survive.

Compare the Earth to the Titanic. An unsinkable ship that encountered the right combination to make it sink. We cannot destroy this planet but we can destroy it's ability to sustain life. Even though we have seemingly improved our pollution, we have only changed our ability to see it. I see the people complaining of cigarette butts on the shore, seeing that as pollution. They are not what is destroying the Ecosystem, it is the clear water full of chemicals entering the lakes. It doesn't look mucky but it is just as dangerous. Medications, detergents, soaps, beauty products, chlorine, Lithium, benzoates, Parabens, car care products, residues in food not from the local ecosystem, shipping topsoils and manure all over the country, etc... These things cause a chair reaction to occur in the food chain. Even hauling earthworms around from out of a local bio-dome can cause destruction of the Bio-dome. All of this needs to be lumped together.

When solar activity picks up the radioactive decay in earth is supposed to slow down causing a balance of heat. That doesn't appear to be happening for some reason. If it works right it should bring us into another ice age. Something seems messed up

Originally posted by AshOnMyTomatoes

The Greenhouse Effect This term has been so completely skewed and abused, that it was probably the starting point for the misunderstanding about climate change. A greenhouse is a closed system. It is an enclosed glass structure that allows the radiation from light, to pass through the glass and allows the resulting heat to be trapped. It's a closed system because there is nowhere for the heat to go. The Earth is an open system. It has no glass ceiling that traps heat, and you can not compare a gas like CO2 to a solid like glass. Greenhouses are usually limited in size. The Earth has an entire solar system to radiate heat out. The Earth is therefore NOT a greenhouse, and so to apply the greenhouse effect, as it's used to describe global warming, is ridiculous and would violate all of the known laws of physics.

And I stopped reading after this paragraph. A: a greenhouse is NOT a closed system; sunlight enters via the glass roof and heat escapes via infrared radiation. B: why can't CO2 reflect heat again? Do you know how absorption/emission in gasses works?

The Greenhouse Effect is very simple. Even a basic Earth science or astronomy course can teach you how it works. A large amount of sunlight enters the Earth's atmosphere. Some of it gets deflected back out into space by our atmosphere, but the lion's share makes it to Earth's surface. A portion of the sunlight that hits the surface is reflected back into the sky. A portion of that reflected light is absorbed by molecules in our atmosphere and re-emitted.

Now since these molecules are randomly distributed, their re-emissions are also random. About half of the sunlight reflected off of Earth's surface is allowed to escape back into space, whereas about half is redirected back to earth again.

Therefore, the higher the concentration of gasses that absorb this light, the higher the amount of sunlight that is reflected back to Earth. This is how the Greenhouse Effect works, and the paragraph above shows that you have little to no understanding of this. Global Warming, man-made or otherwise, is real.

edit on 15-4-2012 by AshOnMyTomatoes because: (no reason given)

It's nice of you to try and ride on the coat tails of Phage, but I knew exactly what I was referring to.

Yes, I understand how CO2 absorbs heat, but it is not the same physical effect as a greenhouse. You can stop reading anytime you want, that's your choice, but try checking the sources provided because I'm sure they do a better job at explaining. I'm trying to distill HUNDREDS of pages of information into a single 3 post thread, so do with that what you may, but don't try to insult me.

Your concept of physics is fundamentally flawed if you believe that half of the heat emitted from the Earth escapes and the other half is trapped from the CO2 in the atmosphere and then "redirected to the Earth". I would like you to show proof of the "half of the heat is redirected at Earth" or some kind of source to back up your claim because it is far-fetched at best. This "forcing" effect that you are talking about is exactly what was completely shredded apart by German Physicists and the scientific community at large in the link below. Your understanding is skewed, which is why I wrote this post in the first place.

I suggest you read the following: Falsication Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics

As well as the following: NASA Blows Hole In Global Warming Alarmism (credit goes to PacificBlue for sharing this)

And then go look at Dr. Roy Spencer's site to understand why. You completely dismiss the law of thermodynamics by believing that entropy fails to happen due to CO2. As Phage already mentioned, and I failed to correctly express in my post, the heat is held by the CO2 for a period of time and then emitted into space like all other heat. This is happening in the atmosphere, not on the ground, and you're talking about a total amount of CO2 gas in the entire atmosphere of .03%, so not much of a factor.

Read the paper on arxiv.org or choose to believe what you want, but the facts speak for themselves. The Earth is not a greenhouse and does not exhibit the greenhouse effect as it's commonly thought of for growing things.

~Namaste

I'd like to quote one of the papers to give a bit more context to the discussion (from section 1 of the paper):

In the language of physics an effect is a not necessarily evident but a reproducible and measurable phenomenon together with its theoretical explanation.

Neither the warming mechanism in a glass house nor the supposed anthropogenic warming is due to an effect in the sense of this definition:

- In the first case (the glass house) one encounters a straightforward phenomenon.
- In the second case (the Earth's atmosphere) one cannot measure something; rather, one only makes heuristic calculations.

The explanation of the warming mechanism in a real greenhouse is a standard problem in undergraduate courses, in which optics, nuclear physics and classical radiation theory are dealt with. On this level neither the mathematical formulation of the first and second law of thermodynamics nor the partial differential equations of hydrodynamics or irreversible thermodynamics are known; the phenomenon has thus to be analyzed with comparatively elementary means.

However, looking up the search terms "glass house effect", "greenhouse effect", or the German word "Treibhause ekt" in classical textbooks on experimental physics or theoretical physics, one finds - possibly to one's surprise and disappointment - that this effect does not appear anywhere - with a few exceptions, where in updated editions of some books publications in climatology are cited. One prominent example is the textbook by Kittel who added a "supplement" to the 1990 edition of his Thermal Physics on page 115 [92] :

"The Greenhouse Effect describes the warming of the surface of the Earth caused by the infrared absorbent layer of water, as vapor and in clouds, and of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere between the Sun and the Earth. The water may contribute as much as 90 percent of the warming effect."

Kittel's "supplement" refers to the 1990 and 1992 books of J.T. Houghton et al. on Climate Change, which are nothing but the standard IPCC assessments [23, 25]. In general, most climatologic texts do not refer to any fundamental work of thermodynamics and radiation theory. Sometimes the classical astrophysical work of Chandrasekhar [93] is cited, but it is not clear at all, which results are applied where, and how the conclusions of Chandrasekhart into the framework of infrared radiation transfer in planetary atmospheres.

There seems to exist no source where an atmospheric greenhouse effect is introduced from fundamental university physics alone.

Evidently, the atmospheric greenhouse problem is not a fundamental problem of the philosophy of science, which is best described by the Munchhausen trilemma, stating that one is left with the ternary alternative:

infinite regression - dogma - circular reasoning

Rather, the atmospheric greenhouse mechanism is a conjecture, which may be proved or disproved already in concrete engineering thermodynamics [95[97]. Exactly this was done well many years ago by an expert in this field, namely Alfred Schack, who wrote a classical textbook on this subject [95]. 1972 he showed that the radiative component of heat transfer of CO2, though relevant at the temperatures in combustion chambers, can be neglected at atmospheric temperatures. The influence of carbonic acid on the Earth's climates is definitively unmeasurable [98].

The remaining part of this paper is organized as follows:

- In Section 2 the warming effect in real greenhouses, which has to be distinguished strictly from the (in-) famous conjecture of Arrhenius, is discussed.
- Section 3 is devoted to the atmospheric greenhouse problem. It is shown that this effect neither has experimental nor theoretical foundations and must be considered as fictitious. The claim that CO2 emissions give rise to anthropogenic climate changes has no physical basis.
- In Section 4 theoretical physics and climatology are discussed in context of the philosophy of science. The question is raised, how far global climatology ts into the framework of exact sciences such as physics.
- The final Section 5 is a physicist's summary.

Please check out the paper. It changed the structure of the debate and a lot of people are behind. I'm not making this up, this is an accepted understanding of climate. These physicists explain at length, how ridiculous an idea it is to call the effect of atmospheric CO2 the same as a greenhouse effect.

~Namaste

reply to post by rickymouse


Rickymouse, you're missing my point... there are completely different sets of physics involved in the atmosphere of the Earth than a greenhouse, and therefore the greenhouse effect is the improper idea to put into people's minds.

Population reduction is not the answer, but that's what people in power want you to think so that if or when they decide to take such steps, people such as yourself won't disagree with it, even if they choose you to be one of those people.

This is why I'm trying to help people understand the problem. Please read the whole post and the referenced material.

CO2 rises because of temperature as I've shown in this thread based on empirical evidence, but it's .03% of the entire atmosphere. Oxygen is responsible for why our Earth is different than other planets, as well as our magnetosphere that helps keep the gases contained. It's not because we have the greenhouse effect at work.

To think that this one gas is going to cause the end of mankind is how they will guilt us all into taking more money out of our pockets and more of our freedoms away. We should be responsible for the planet and take care of it, not destroy it, but we have to be practical about it as well and not jump to conclusions without following due process and scientific discovery. I am as passionate about my planet and keeping it healthy as you are, and I admire your outspoken nature to bring attention to it because it is important, but for the sake of keeping the information "clean", I'm trying to stick with just the science.

I can only explain things in MY own way in the best way that I can, which may not come across in the right way or I might not explain it how it needs to be, even if I understand it in my mind, it's not always simple to convey those thoughts properly. But I have provided all of the necessary reference material so that you can understand it too, at whatever level you can.

~Namaste

Originally posted by Phage

Your discussion of the emission of photons from atoms is not relevant and does not apply.

Phage, according to the paper I referenced, it most certainly is relevant and does apply:

Nevertheless, one should have a look at the classical glass house problem to recapitulate some fundamental principles of thermodynamics and radiation theory. Later on, the relevant radiation dynamics of the atmospheric system will be elaborated on and distinguished from the glass house set-up.

Heat is the kinetic energy of molecules and atoms and will be transferred by contact or radiation. Microscopically both interactions are mediated by photons. In the former case, which is governed by the Coulomb respective van derWaals interaction these are the virtual or off-shell photons, in the latter case these are the real or on-shell photons. The interaction between photons and electrons (and other particles that are electrically charged or have a nonvanishing magnetic momentum) is microscopically described by the laws of quantum theory. Hence, in principle, thermal conductivity and radiative transfer may be described in a unified framework. However, the non-equilibrium many body problem is a highly non-trivial one and subject to the discipline of physical kinetics unifying quantum theory and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.

Did you mean something else or did I misunderstand?

~Namaste

This document shows a different view of manmade heat, this is what i believe is the real reason for global warming on a big scale, the co2 is a small part of the overall picture but do ad to it.
The reason the co2 today is made the main point, is to tax people and make them believe something is done.

It's a couple of pages long, but a good read, kind of old to.
The Effect of Localized Man-Made Heat and Moisture Sources in Mesoscale Weather Modification
www.nap.edu...

reply to post by Mianeye


Good paper, I'm reading it now... will probably take some time to get through, but he seems to be addressing the more general idea of equilibrium on a planetary scale. He's right, there is a natural balance that we can tip, but I still think we're not quite there yet, although getting closer every day with our way of ignoring the other issues he points out... such as deforestation and how it leaves bare ground to absorb more heat instead of the green covered areas that will stay cooler. Enough of that on a wide enough scale, will cause enough localized conditions to start a more systemic reaction.

Excellent paper, thanks for sharing.

~Namaste

I'm glad that there is not a huge dogfight ensuing on this thread...

It shows that either people aren't reading it, ignoring it because they are set in their ways, or actually reading what I'm presenting and realizing that it's time to take a different approach to the planet and its climate.

I hope it's the latter.

Either way, the point of this thread is to understand why we shouldn't call it the greenhouse effect, and even more so, why we have to look at other explanations for the changes in temperatures.

~Namaste