Climate & Climate Change

It’s quite amusing that, according to Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, the developing world wants the developed world, primarily the U.S., to pay them to cooperate with us on CO2 emissions. I say amusing because any money we send to China for its help, we first have to borrow from the Chinese. The world’s “richest” nation is its largest debtor nation.  Eric Dalton, the Wall Street Journal.

CLIMATE concerns look surreal when you examine modern assumptions (“the settled science”) on the basis of first principles like conductive, convective and radiative heat transfer, specific heat (where water is king) and density. To me, they paint a picture 180° contrary to the greenhouse theory consensus.

In my view, the earth’s surface can do nothing except heat the air molecules that surround it, and thus be cooled in turn (convective transfer follows, of course, but the surface must heat the air first). Yet the prevalent gossip is all about how air molecules heat the surface. That alone is surreal.

Listed below is mostly a collection of what various academic and engineering sources say about heat transfer, i.e., the conditions by which Body A is able to raise Body B’s temperature. While they don’t explicitly refute the IPCC’s notion of back-radiation, they DO insist that if A is radiating 100 watts per square meter at B and B is radiating 50 at A, heat transfer follows a one-way path from A to B. That is, B alone gets hotter and no “mutual heating” occurs. By contrast, observe what the IPCC  depicts: mutual heating. 
 
One-way heat transfer renders null and void the repeated assertion that A (the earth’s surface) gets hotter by thermally exciting B (IR-reactive gases). The unalterably more-to-less flow of thermal energy is the very essence of the second law of thermodynamics and it prohibits “mutual heating,” meaning that “radiative forcing” by IR-reactive gases is entirely a product of the imagination, a complete reversal of cause and effect.

Moreover, if earth’s surface temperature then shifts focus to heat RETENTION rather than heat GAIN, the FIRST thing to investigate is a substance called water, which covers 70% of our planet, is 800 times denser than sea-level air, and is FAMOUS for retaining heat! Solids are roughly 2000 times more dense than air and must also be considered.

In any case, hinging the whole affair on trace gases that intercept a small portion of the earth’s IR spectrum is so outlandish a premise I’m amazed that anyone can offer it with a straight face. Gases are the runt of the litter, the least able to hold onto heat and the first in line to confront the vacuum of space. Light passes through air at 99.97% of its optimum speed and yet we propose that a few of the gases it contains CONTROL the earth’s emission to space? As I say: surreal.

[Read more…] about On the First Principles of Heat Transfer: A Note from Alan Siddons

CENTRAL to discussion of climate change models is the concept of “forcing” and “feedback”.   So, reference is made to global warming from radiative “forcing” from elevated concentrations of carbon dioxide in the troposphere and then “positive feedback from water vapour”, adding to global warming.  

Everyone talks in these terms, and it is politically correct to do so.  But there are two problems.

According to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formalism, their “forcing” can include any amount of internal state variable contribution, as well as external driving function contributions.  And according to this IPCC formalism, there is only one dynamically distinct internal state variable, the climate temperature, that functionally determines the apparently distinct but really merely functionally dependent “feedbacks” of their formalism.

In physics, an external driving function qualifies unequivocally as a cause. But internal state functions must always be counted as effects that are themselves caused by external drivers interacting with internal state functions acting as internal causes.

This important cause-effect structure is erased in the “forcing” concept of the IPCC formalism. It follows that cause and effect will be muddled in work that uses the IPCC formalism for simplified models. The simplified models are made of ordinary differential equations as in the qualitative theory of dynamical systems including deterministic chaos originated by Henri Poincaré in the 1880s. Poincaré used the method of phase portraits, which make explicit the presence of several dynamically distinct internal state variables.

The IPCC limitation to only one dynamically distinct internal state variable makes the IPCC concept of “feedbacks” verge on nonsense.

[Read more…] about Climate Models Confuse Physics of Cause and Effect: A Note from Christopher Game