Wednesday 30 April 2014

Fly a helicopter to the top of Mt Everest in summer

Author : Wiki Watcher

Fly a helicopter to the top of Mt Everest in summer (July) and lower a large drum of very salty water (heated to near boiling point and opened at the top) onto the surface at the start of a nice sunny day – as it would be above the clouds up there. We will assume there is enough salt to lower the freezing point to -10°C. In July, the warmest month, the average summit temperature is -19°C. Will the water freeze? Yes. So how good is the Sun at raising ocean temperatures below the clouds with all its direct radiation? How absurd is it to imagine that the 1cm thin transparent surface layer of the oceans is warmed to 15°C by direct solar radiation? How absurd then are all the models which use ocean emissivity in Stefan-Boltzmann calculations and expect to get the temperature due to absorption?

Saturday 19 April 2014

You are totally wrong in thinking that carbon dioxide is a primary cause of warming

A new comment on the post "Meesc" is waiting for your approval http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/04/17/meesc/

Author : Dr Alex Hamilton

You are totally wrong in thinking that carbon dioxide is a primary cause of warming.

Radiation in just a few spectral bands from carbon dioxide can never cause a warmer surface to increase in temperature. It can have a minuscule effect slowing down radiative cooling, but virtually all the slowing of surface cooling is by conduction at the surface-atmosphere boundary. The energy thus absorbed primarily by nitrogen and oxygen molecules subsequently finds its way by diffusion into water vapor, carbon dioxide and other radiating molecules, all of which act like holes in the nitrogen-oxygen blanket, radiating energy out of the atmosphere.

There is no need for any warming by radiation anyway. It is now well-known and proven empirically that gravity forms a thermal gradient at the molecular level in the tropospheres of any planet with a significant atmosphere. On Earth the surface temperature would be a few degrees hotter if there were no water vapor, but it is cooler because water vapor and other radiating molecules (carbon dioxide included) help to cool the lower troposphere by radiating energy to higher altitudes and to space.

That is what physics tells us. From my reading of what climatologists have assumed, I find their writings to be a complete travesty of physics.

Saturday 5 April 2014

An attitude of "we don't care" by Wikipedia may warrant a legal opinion.

A new comment on the post "Foundation and Empire" is waiting for your approval http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/04/04/foundation-and-empire/

Author : Wiki Watcher (but really, this looks like Cotton again. Yup, its him. The formatting is a clue: this is stuff copied from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Venus (you'll need to poke into the history, around 1st April, is that a clue?))

Comment: An attitude of "we don't care" by Wikipedia may warrant a legal opinion.

I'm just making a suggestion as to what I believe Wikipedia administration ought to find out for themselves from their lawyers, because I don't think you can hide behind the cover of an encyclopedia (in the eyes of the law) and excuse the propagation of fictitious propaganda about the greenhouse effect, now disputed by hundreds (if not thousands) of scientists and academics. But I'm not a lawyer and I'm not suggesting that I would be involved, unless called to address some committee investigation or court hearing.

Just suppose, for example, when the truth comes out about the carbon dioxide political hoax, that large companies pool their funds to mount a global class action against those parties who have contributed significantly in the promulgation of biased "information" likely to be read by voters and politicians alike, and likely to have led to corruption in numerous ways pertaining to research funding, and also likely to have wasted many billions of taxpayer funds.

'''The radiative greenhouse conjecture is false.''' It is a part of a sinister political agenda. It does not stand up to the rigors of valid physics theory, such as (ironically) WP does also publish. Nitrogen and oxygen hold about 98% of the energy in the Earth's atmosphere, and they slow the surface cooling. But the cooling stops at night where the gravitationally induced thermal gradient supports the surface temperature. Carbon dioxide and water vapor cool by radiating energy (mostly from nitrogen and oxygen) out of the atmosphere, and also lowering the gradient so that lower surface temperatures result. The key fallacy in the radiative greenhouse effect is assuming that all the radiation from the surface is transferring thermal energy out of the surface, when in fact most of it is just scattering the back radiation.

== Venus ==

It cannot be substantiated with standard physics that the surface of Venus is kept hot by radiation from the colder carbon dioxide atmosphere. The small solid core of Uranus (55% the mass of Earth) has a surface temperature several times that of the Venus surface, and yet only about as much methane as Earth has water vapor. Uranus is nearly 30 times further from the Sun than Earth is, and thus receives little more than 0.1% of incident solar radiation.

In fact the surface temperature of Venus rises by about 5 degrees (from 732K to 737K) during the four-month-long day and so this requires an input of thermal energy, which cannot be coming by way of radiation from the colder atmosphere because, if it were, entropy would be decreasing.

Venus cools by 5 degrees at night, and so it could easily have cooled right down over the life of the planet if the Sun provided no insolation. So we can deduce that it is energy from the Sun which is gradually raising the temperature of the Venus surface during those four months of Earth time. But less than 20 watts per square meter of solar radiation gets through to the surface because carbon dioxide actually absorbs incident solar radiation.

If one tries to explain the 5 degree difference with Stefan-Boltzmann calculations for radiation, there is a difference of about 450 watts per square meter just between the two temperatures 732K and 737K, and so this is not supplied from the direct solar radiation which is only about one tenth of that which reaches Earth's surface.

Hence there is no scientific basis for assuming that direct radiation to the surface is the cause of the high surface temperatures on Venus, and thus there is no "runaway greenhouse effect."