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The greenhouse effect and the 2nd law of thermodynamics

What the science says...

Select a level... Basic Intermediate

The 2nd law of thermodynamics is consistent with the greenhouse effect which is directly observed.

Climate Myth...

2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory

 

"The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist." (Gerhard Gerlich)

 

At a glance

Although this topic may have a highly technical feel to it, thermodynamics is a big part of all our everyday lives. So while you are reading, do remember that there are glossary entries available for all thinly underlined terms - just hover your mouse cursor over them for the entry to appear.

Thermodynamics is the branch of physics that describes how energy interacts within systems. That interaction determines, for example, how we stay cosy or freeze to death. You wear less clothing in very hot weather and layer-up or add extra blankets to your bed when it's cold because such things control how energy interacts with your own body and therefore your degree of comfort and, in extreme cases, safety.

The human body and its surroundings and energy transfer between them make up one such system with which we are all familiar. But let's go a lot bigger here and think about heat energy and its transfer between the Sun, Earth's land/ocean surfaces, the atmosphere and the cosmos.

Sunshine hits the top of our atmosphere and some of it makes it down to the surface, where it heats up the ground and the oceans alike. These in turn give off heat in the form of invisible but warming infra-red radiation. But you can see the effects of that radiation - think of the heat-shimmer you see over a tarmac road-surface on a hot sunny day.

A proportion of that radiation goes back up through the atmosphere and escapes to space. But another proportion of it is absorbed by greenhouse gas molecules, such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane.  Heating up themselves, those molecules then re-emit that heat energy in all directions including downwards. Due to the greenhouse effect, the total loss of that outgoing radiation is avoided and the cooling of Earth's surface is thereby inhibited. Without that extra blanket, Earth's average temperature would be more than thirty degrees Celsius cooler than is currently the case.

That's all in accordance with the laws of Thermodynamics. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant - while energy can be transformed from one form to another it can be neither created nor destroyed. The Second Law does not state that the only flow of energy is from hot to cold - but instead that the net sum of the energy flows will be from hot to cold. That qualifier term, 'net', is the important one here. The Earth alone is not a "closed system", but is part of a constant, net energy flow from the Sun, to Earth and back out to space. Greenhouse gases simply inhibit part of that net flow, by returning some of the outgoing energy back towards Earth's surface.

The myth that the greenhouse effect is contrary to the second law of thermodynamics is mostly based on a very long 2009 paper by two German scientists (not climate scientists), Gerlich and Tscheuschner (G&T). In its title, the paper claimed to take down the theory that heat being trapped by our atmosphere keeps us warm. That's a huge claim to make – akin to stating there is no gravity.

The G&T paper has been the subject of many detailed rebuttals over the years since its publication. That's because one thing that makes the scientific community sit up and take notice is when something making big claims is published but which is so blatantly incorrect. To fully deal with every mistake contained in the paper, this rebuttal would have to be thousands of words long. A shorter riposte, posted in a discussion on the topic at the Quora website, was as follows: “...I might add that if G&T were correct they used dozens of rambling pages to prove that blankets can’t keep you warm at night."

If the Second Law of Thermodynamics is true - something we can safely assume – then, “blankets can’t keep you warm at night”, must be false. And - as you'll know from your own experiences - that is of course the case!

Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "At a glance" section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!


Further details

Among the junk-science themes promoted by climate science deniers is the claim that the explanation for global warming contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Does it? Of course not (Halpern et al. 2010), but let's explore. Firstly, we need to know how thermal energy transfer works with particular regard to Earth's atmosphere. Then, we need to know what the second law of thermodynamics is, and how it applies to global warming.

Thermal energy is transferred through systems in five main ways: conduction, convection, advection, latent heat and, last but not least, radiation. We'll take them one by one.

Conduction is important in some solids – think of how a cold metal spoon placed in a pot of boiling water can become too hot to touch. In many fluids and gases, conduction is much less important. There are a few exceptions, such as mercury, a metal whose melting point is so low it exists as a liquid above -38 degrees Celsius, making it a handy temperature-marker in thermometers. But air's thermal conductivity is so low we can more or less count it out from this discussion.

Convection

Convection

Figure 1: Severe thunderstorm developing over the Welsh countryside one evening in August 2020. This excellent example of convection had strong enough updraughts to produce hail up to 2.5 cm in diameter. (Source: John Mason)

Hot air rises – that's why hot air balloons work, because warm air is less dense than its colder surroundings, making the artificially heated air in the balloon more buoyant and thereby creating a convective current. The same principle applies in nature: convection is the upward transfer of heat in a fluid or a gas. 

Convection is highly important in Earth's atmosphere and especially in its lower part, where most of our weather goes on. On a nice day, convection may be noticed as birds soar and spiral upwards on thermals, gaining height with the help of that rising warm air-current. On other days, mass-ascent of warm, moist air can result in any type of convective weather from showers to severe thunderstorms with their attendant hazards. In the most extreme examples like supercells, that convective ascent or updraught can reach speeds getting on for a hundred miles per hour. Such powerful convective currents can keep hailstones held high in the storm-cloud for long enough to grow to golfball size or larger.

Advection

Advection is the quasi-horizontal transport of a fluid or gas with its attendant properties. Here are a couple of examples. In the Northern Hemisphere, southerly winds bring mild to warm air from the tropics northwards. During the rapid transition from a cold spell to a warm southerly over Europe in early December 2022, the temperatures over parts of the UK leapt from around -10C to +14C in one weekend, due to warm air advection. Advection can also lead to certain specific phenomena such as sea-fogs – when warm air inland is transported over the surrounding cold seas, causing rapid condensation of water vapour near the air-sea interface.

Advection

Figure 2: Advection fog completely obscures Cardigan Bay, off the west coast of Wales, on an April afternoon in 2015, Air warmed over the land was advected seawards, where its moisture promptly condensed over the much colder sea surface.

Latent heat

Latent heat is the thermal energy released or absorbed during a substance's transition from solid to liquid, liquid to vapour or vice-versa. To fuse, or melt, a solid or to boil a liquid, it is necessary to add thermal energy to a system, whereas when a vapour condenses or a liquid freezes, energy is released. The amount of energy involved varies from one substance to another: to melt iron you need a furnace but with an ice cube you only need to leave it at room-temperature for a while. Such variations from one substance to another are expressed as specific latent heats of fusion or vapourisation, measured in amount of energy (KiloJoules) per kilogram. In the case of Earth's atmosphere, the only substance of major importance with regard to latent heat is water, because at the range of temperatures present, it's the only component that is both abundant and constantly transitioning between solid, liquid and vapour phases.

Radiation

Radiation is the transfer of energy as electromagnetic rays, emitted by any heated surface. Electromagnetic radiation runs from long-wave - radio waves, microwaves, infra-red (IR), through the visible-light spectrum, down to short-wave – ultra-violet (UV), x-rays and gamma-rays. Although you cannot see IR radiation, you can feel it warming you when you sit by a fire. Indeed, the visible part of the spectrum used to be called “luminous heat” and the invisible IR radiation “non-luminous heat”, back in the 1800s when such things were slowly being figured-out.

Sunshine is an example of radiation. Unlike conduction and convection, radiation has the distinction of being able to travel from its source straight through the vacuum of space. Thus, Solar radiation travels through that vacuum for some 150 million kilometres, to reach our planet at a near-constant rate. Some Solar radiation, especially short-wave UV light, is absorbed by our atmosphere. Some is reflected straight back to space by cloud-tops. The rest makes it all the way down to the ground, where it is reflected from lighter surfaces or absorbed by darker ones. That's why black tarmac road surfaces can heat up until they melt on a bright summer's day.

Radiation

Figure 3: Heat haze above a warmed road-surface, Lincoln Way in San Francisco, California. May 2007. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Energy balance

What has all of the above got to do with global warming? Well, through its radiation-flux, the Sun heats the atmosphere, the surfaces of land and oceans. The surfaces heated by solar radiation in turn emit infrared radiation, some of which can escape directly into space, but some of which is absorbed by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide, water vapour, and methane. Greenhouse gases not only slow down the loss of energy from the surface, but also re-radiate that energy, some of which is directed back down towards the surface, increasing the surface temperature and increasing how much energy is radiated from the surface. Overall, this process leads to a state where the surface is warmer than it would be in the absence of an atmosphere with greenhouse gases. On average, the amount of energy radiated back into space matches the amount of energy being received from the Sun, but there's a slight imbalance that we'll come to.

If this system was severely out of balance either way, the planet would have either frozen or overheated millions of years ago. Instead the planet's climate is (or at least was) stable, broadly speaking. Its temperatures generally stay within bounds that allow life to thrive. It's all about energy balance. Figure 4 shows the numbers.

Energy Budget AR6 WGI Figure 7_2

Figure 4: Schematic representation of the global mean energy budget of the Earth (upper panel), and its equivalent without considerations of cloud effects (lower panel). Numbers indicate best estimates for the magnitudes of the globally averaged energy balance components in W m–2 together with their uncertainty ranges in parentheses (5–95% confidence range), representing climate conditions at the beginning of the 21st century. Figure adapted for IPCC AR6 WG1 Chapter 7, from Wild et al. (2015).

While the flow in and out of our atmosphere from or to space is essentially the same, the atmosphere is inhibiting the cooling of the Earth, storing that energy mostly near its surface. If it were simply a case of sunshine straight in, infra-red straight back out, which would occur if the atmosphere was transparent to infra-red (it isn't) – or indeed if there was no atmosphere, Earth would have a similar temperature-range to the essentially airless Moon. On the Lunar equator, daytime heating can raise the temperature to a searing 120OC, but unimpeded radiative cooling means that at night, it gets down to around -130OC. No atmosphere as such, no greenhouse effect.

Clearly, the concentrations of greenhouse gases determine their energy storage capacity and therefore the greenhouse effect's strength. This is particularly the case for those gases that are non-condensing at atmospheric temperatures. Of those non-condensing gases, carbon dioxide is the most important. Because it only exists as vapour, the main way it is removed is as a weak solution of carbonic acid in rainwater – indeed the old name for carbon dioxide was 'carbonic acid gas'. That means once it's up there, it has a long 'atmospheric residency', meaning it takes a long time to be removed. 

Earth’s temperature can be stable over long periods of time, but to make that possible, incoming energy and outgoing energy have to be exactly the same, in a state of balance known as ‘radiative equilibrium’. That equilibrium can be disturbed by changing the forcing caused by any components of the system. Thus, for example, as the concentration of carbon dioxide has fluctuated over geological time, mostly on gradual time-scales but in some cases abruptly, so has the planet's energy storage capacity. Such fluctuations have in turn determined Earth's climate state, Hothouse or Icehouse – the latter defined as having Polar ice-caps present, of whatever size. Currently, Earth’s energy budget imbalance averages out at just under +1 watt per square metre - that’s global warming. 

That's all in accordance with the laws of Thermodynamics. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant - while energy can be transformed from one component to another it can be neither created nor destroyed. Self-evidently, the "isolated" part of the law must require that the sun and the cosmos be included. They are both components of the system: without the Sun as the prime energy generator, Earth would be frozen and lifeless; with the Sun but without Earth's emitted energy dispersing out into space, the planet would cook, Just thinking about Earth's surface and atmosphere in isolation is to ignore two of this system's most important components.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not state that the only flow of energy is from hot to cold - but instead that the net sum of the energy flows will be from hot to cold. To reiterate, the qualifier term, 'net', is the important one here. In the case of the Earth-Sun system, it is again necessary to consider all of the components and their interactions: the sunshine, the warmed surface giving off IR radiation into the cooler atmosphere, the greenhouse gases re-emitting that radiation in all directions and finally the radiation emitted from the top of our atmosphere, to disperse out into the cold depths of space. That energy is not destroyed – it just disperses in all directions into the cold vastness out there. Some of it even heads towards the Sun too - since infra-red radiation has no way of determining that it is heading towards a much hotter body than the Earth,

Earth’s energy budget makes sure that all portions of the system are accounted for and this is routinely done in climate models. No violations exist. Greenhouse gases return some of the energy back towards Earth's surface but the net flow is still out into space. John Tyndall, in a lecture to the Royal Institution in 1859, recognised this. He said:

Tyndall 1859

As long as carbon emissions continue to rise, so will that planetary energy imbalance. Therefore, the only way to take the situation back towards stability is to reduce those emissions.


Update June 2023:

For additional links to relevant blog posts, please look at the "Further Reading" box, below.

Last updated on 29 June 2023 by John Mason. View Archives

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Comments 1401 to 1425 out of 1517:

  1. BernhardB your misunderstanding about radiators has been addressed. Since you ignored my earlier comment, I'll ask you again the question, which was also asked before to other GHE deniers on this thread: if there is no radiative GH effect, where does the downwelling IR measured at the surface come from? No GHE denier has yet come up with a good answer, perhaps you have one.
  2. It is not often I am moved to defend Dr Spencer's reputation, but in this case I can make an exception. What Dr Spencer said, that has been misinterpreted by BernhardB, was:
    "The more you can reduce the rate of energy loss to the cold walls, the hotter the plate will get. Yes, the surrounding objects act to control the rate at which the plate can lose energy. I have no idea what happens if you can keep the plate from losing energy at all….I suspect the heater wire melts "
    I say misinterpreted because Dr Spencer is clearly discussing the case of no heat loss. The only way a convection based heat sink place in a vacuum would lose no heat is if all external surfaces emitted no thermal radiation. Of course, if they did that, then there would be no "back radiation" between adjacent fins of the heat sink so BernhardB's thought experiment would not hold. So BernhardB has taken a correct explanation by Spencer, applied it to a situation that does not satisfy the conditions Spencer specified, and then claimed that Spencer's prediction would fail, and that Spencer was talking nonsense when the prediction fails outside of the conditions in which it applies. I suspect Spencer would blow a fuse at this level of misrepresentation. Which brings me to the second point. BernardH claims that the only way the wire can be melted is by increasing the voltage. Given the large number of industrial applications for melting wires by increasing the resistance while holding the voltage constant, his claim is simply false. Perhaps the most common of those applications is electrical arc welding (most commonly as MIG welding), but others abound. (Image from wikipedia) So far BernardH shows that his arguments depend on not just miscomprehending the physics, but a complete failure to understand how common industrial processes and computer components works. It is not the esoteric, but the commonplace that shows BerhardH is ... (Image from BernhardB) Well, you get the idea.
  3. "I suspect Spencer would blow a fuse at this level of misrepresentation." Which is fitting since, as we all know, "blowing a fuse" is what happens when a wire designed to melt under certain conditions meets these conditions... :-)
  4. I wrote on the other thread: 33. Steve Case at 12:03 PM on 1 April, 2012 Tom Curftis #31 Wrote … Science of Doom has an extensive discussion of the difference of the ocean's response to heating by solar radiation and back radiation … I suppose this will be considered nit picking, but back radiation from the cooler atmosphere doesn’t do any heating of the ocean. It does slow the cooling of the ocean by canceling out part of the spectrum, but it’s the sun that does the actual heating and reestablishment of equilibrium. Yes, the effect is the same and it’s perhaps just semantics, but claiming that back radiation heats the ocean leads to erroneous thinking. Moderator Response: [DB] Your statement about back radiation is off-topic on this thread. Any who wish to respond to it please do so on a more appropriate thread. Thank you. So here I am and I find this right away:
      12. Daniel Bailey at 12:01 PM on 20 September, 2010 ...The downward radiation adds to the energy received from the sun and heats up the surface of the earth more than if this downward radiation did not occur. ... It simply means more energy flows from the warmer surface to the colder atmosphere than in the reverse direction.
    And it doesn't mean that the colder atmosphere heats up the surface. It doesn't mean that the downward radiation heats up the surface either. It means as I stated in the other thread (see above) that part of the radiation from the surface is cancelled out and the surface cools off at a slower rate and so the sun at nearly 5800K continues to warm it up until that rate is again at equilibrium with the incoming heat energy from the sun. Perhaps this is considered trivial, but I see over and over again, statements that the ocean is being heated by the back radiation and the downward radiation heats up the surface and so on. It's not exactly right, and leads to 2+2=5 thinking. And what is that downward radiation that makes me say 2+2=5 is comparable to claiming the downward radiation heats up the surface? It's around 15 microns isn't it? And isn't the temperature of a body that radiates mostly at 15 microns very cold? Around 200K or so which is (-100°F/-73°C) or about as cold as dry ice. Having said all that and from what I read, the greenhouse effect without considering feedbacks should warm things up about 1.2°C for a doubling of CO2.
  5. Increased back radiation (from increased levels of greenhouse gases) heats the ocean by altering the thermal gradient in the 'cool skin' layer of the sea surface. See SkS post: How Increasing Carbon Dioxide Heats The Ocean. It's true that back radiation doesn't penetrate into and heat the ocean but, by reducing the loss of heat to the atmosphere through conductivity, the oceans store more energy from the sun and therefore become warmer. That's why the ice core records show a strong relationship (correlation) between CO2 and global temperature:
  6. Steve Case @1404, the back radiation comes from a variety of frequencies, mostly associated with H2O emissions. Typically it is close to the surface temperature in brightness temperature. Globally averaged the back radiation has an effective brightness temperatures of 277 degrees K, compared to the globaly averaged effective brightness temperature of 289 degrees K for the upward surface radiation. Seeing we are into nitpicks at the moment, in some circumstances the overlying atmosphere is warmer than the surface so that it does warm the surface even in your use of the term. More importantly, the IR radiation from the atmosphere is absorbed at the surface causing an increase vibrational or translational motion in the absorbing molecule, which vibrational and translational motion is called heat. In the popular vocabulary, that means the atmosphere heats the surface. It is true that the surface radiates energy, and hence cools faster than the atmosphere can heat it, but that is almost irrelevant to the choice of terms. It is only "almost irrelevant" because some physicists have defined "heat" to mean "the net transfer of thermal energy" by which definition "heat" can only mover from the hotter to the colder body, and having moved ceases to exist (although the thermal energy doesn't) because heat only exists when thermal energy is being transferred. In so doing they have defined the term so that it is strictly inconsistent with popular usage of the term (causing endless confussion), and indeed, strictly inconsistent with the usage of the term by the greats of thermodynamics including Lord Kelvine, Rankine, Clausius etc. Any "2+2=5 thinking" as you put it, can be avoided by being aware that in the popular meaning of the term "to heat", the second law of thermodynamics must be stated as, "Net heat flow can only proceed from a warmer to a cooler body".
  7. @ RW1 at 11:08 AM on 16 December, 2011 "There is no violation of the second law with the Greenhouse Effect, because it's not about energy going from cold to warm through a conduction process." You are confusing radiation (electromagnetic waves) with creation of thermal energy (heat). Heat is a process involving transfer of energy based on temperature - as opposed to generic radiation of photons. It follows that thermal radiation (a process creating heat) from a cold to a hot body (i.e. from the atmosphere to the Earth) is a physical impossibility. The Second Law prevents this because otherwise it would be possible to obtain work from transfer of heat into the atmosphere; i.e power station cooling towers. Essentially, we could then reuse the energy and build a perpetual motion machine. AGW is predicated on a misunderstanding of the Second Law which is thoroughly debunked by eminent German physicists (as opposed to climate scientists who are generally not professional physicists) Gerlich and Tscheuschner.
    Response: TC: Link to RW1's post added.
  8. Not this again! Silas: There is an enormous body of theoretical, experimental, and most importantly empirical evidence showing that the atmospheric greenhouse effect, however misnamed, is fact. It does not violate any law of thermodynamics, it does not allow any sort of perpetual motion machine. Gerlich & Tscheuschner are, simply put, wrong, wrong, wrong. For more in-depth information you can check out the blog Science of Doom which has some reviews of the G&T paper here. You can also check out some other important Science of Doom posts regarding the relevant physics here and here. Science of Doom relies heavily on the actual maths of the situation and basic radiative physics known for decades.
    Response: [DB] In addition to the valuable links provided by Composer99 above, please see this SkS post, Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?.
  9. Silas - I would suggest, as Composer99 recommended, to look at the Science of Doom site (search there for "Gerlich"), including such gems as On the Miseducation of the Uninformed by Gerlich and Tscheuschner (2009) and Radiation Basics and the Imaginary Second Law of Thermodynamics. Quite frankly, I cannot think of another paper in the field that has been so definitively and repeatedly shown to be dreck. G&T's work is absolutely horrible...
  10. KR at 05:24 AM on 24 November, 2010 Heat flow is the unidirectional and is based upon the need for thermal equilibrium between bodies. Extremely basic physics. It is a process not a summation and therefore cannot be "negative" - an egregious nonsense. (-Snip-)
    Response:

    [DB] Please familiarize yourself with this site's Comments Policy before composing future comments.

    Egregious inflammatory snipped.

  11. @Composer99 at 05:27 AM on 27 July, 2012 I have read the G&T paper and have a background in engineering thermodynamics. It is incumbant upon proponents of the GHE to demonstrate their theory through (-Snip-) prediction of events in nature - i.e. unexpected and cataclysmic consequences of global warming. Confirmations do not count in science as such 'evidence' is always easy to find. (-Snip-) (-Snip-)
    Response: [DB] Multiple examples of unsupported sloganeering snipped.
  12. Silas, then can I suggest then that you read the Science of Doom articles to which you have been pointed to and if that is unconvincing, then try the physics textbooks from which the author draws his points? There is nothing contradicting basic physics/thermodynamics here, just a misunderstanding of the physics at work. If G&T were right, then how would explain the MEASURED back-radiation at the surface or the drop in the energy band as measured at the TOA? (among the many experimental confirmations of normal physical theory). The experimental evidence is with conventional physical theory, not with G&Ts strange interpretation of LTE. You might also like to check out AP Smith rebuttal here.
  13. Silas - I would strongly recommend you read through some of the posts referred to above, some of the >1400 comments on this thread, actual reviews of what G&T presented - before deciding that all the people who have looked at the G&T claims are idiots. Science of Doom in particular is sourced by a physicist - and you seem to have prejudged his expertise. I would also point you to the Real Climate collection on this, which links to various commentaries and a peer reviewed comment - all rebutting the G&T nonsense. You might also look at Dr. Fred Singer's (a rather notorious skeptic of just about anything - ozone holes, 2nd hand smoking, climate change) characterizing 2nd Law objections as unsupportable and embarrassing 'denial'. "It is incumbant upon proponents of the GHE..." No, it is not; that work has already been done. The radiative greenhouse effect is supported by multiple lines of evidence, physics, observations, etc. G&T (and you, apparently) feel that all this data is incorrect - that's an extraordinary claim, and requires evidence supporting that isolated view to be taken seriously. The burden of (dis)proof is on you.
  14. Silas - I think one of the best summaries of the G&T paper comes from Gavin Schmidt, who had some of the same reactions to it that I did:
    It's garbage. A ragbag of irrelevant physics strung together incoherently. For instance, apparently energy balance diagrams are wrong because they don't look like Feynman diagrams and GCMs are wrong because they don't solve Maxwell's equations. Not even the most hardened contrarians are pushing this one....
  15. Silas, you wrote:
    "You are confusing radiation (electromagnetic waves) with creation of thermal energy (heat). Heat is a process involving transfer of energy based on temperature - as opposed to generic radiation of photons. It follows that thermal radiation (a process creating heat) from a cold to a hot body (i.e. from the atmosphere to the Earth) is a physical impossibility."
    It is difficult to interpret this in any other way than a prediction that there is no thermal (IR) radiation originating in the atmosphere and being absorbed by the Earth's surface. I like that. It is a risky prediction that is easily checked by empirical means. You later write:
    "It is incumbant upon proponents of the GHE to demonstrate their theory through ... prediction of events in nature"
    Presumably you therefore think it is incumbent on you, since you have made a risky prediction to actually check the data to see if your risky prediction is verified, or falsified by the data. Fortunately, climate scientists believe the same thing. They have predicted the existence of downward IR radiation from the atmosphere, and have checked. Indeed, here is a comparison of some of their predictions with observations: (Source) I don't want you to notice the very good correlation between AGW predicted and observed Downward IR Radiation. I want you to notice that the downward IR radiation exists, in direct contradiction of your prediction. If you follow the link to the source of the diagram (Science of Doom), you will find many other examples of observations of this radiation you claim cannot exist. Indeed, even the noted "skeptic" Roy Spencer is not so foolish as to deny the existence of downward IR radiation (back radiation). In fact, he has measured it himself:
    "For instance, last night I drove around pointing this thing straight up though my sunroof at a cloud-free sky. I live in hilly territory, the ambient air temperature was about 81 F, and at my house (an elevation of 1,000 feet), I was reading about 34 deg. F for an effective sky temperature. If the device was perfectly calibrated, and there was NO greenhouse effect, it would measure an effective sky temperature near absolute zero (-460 deg. F) rather than +34 deg. F, and nighttime cooling of the surface would have been so strong that everything would be frozen by morning. Not very likely in Alabama in August. What was amazing was that driving down in elevation from my house caused the sky temperature reading to increase by about 3 deg. F for a 300 foot drop in elevation. My car thermometer was showing virtually no change. This pattern was repeated as I went up and down hills. The IR thermometer was measuring different strengths of the greenhouse effect, by definition the warming of a surface by downward IR emission by greenhouse gases in the sky. This reduces the rate of cooling of the Earth’s surface (and lower atmosphere) to space, and makes the surface warmer than it otherwise would be."
    (Source, this link should not be interpreted in any way as agreement with Spencer's views on other subjects.) So, to the extent that you have predicted that there is no back radiation, you are wrong. Perhaps you would like to show your commitment to the principles of science by stating clearly that you are wrong. If you are willing to do so, we may be able to progress in resolving your conundrum.
  16. A note to the unwary. 'Silas' is Girma Orssengo, who has in the past displayed an astonishingly blinkered misunderstanding of science. Arguing with this ardent Ayn Rand acolyte will get one nowhere, very fast. On the matter of the claim that 'cool' cannot radiate to 'warm', I'd invite Silas/Orssengo to visit http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2012/05/17/tim-curtins-incompetence-with/ where such nonsense might be kicked around the park, as was done with Tim Curtin, and thus save clogging the thread here. And as Orssengo is apparently a functioning engineer, I would invite him to explain somewhere in his discourse how energy moves through the lumen* of a Dyson sphere. [*Yes, it was deliberate...]
  17. Thanks Bernard. I've seen Girma's discourses on various forums so I wont waste my time. Just about anyone who jumps into this thread has to be viewed with some suspicion.
  18. @1407: "...eminent German physicists..." This must be a joke. A bad one. My turn: Italy once had one Gallileo. Germany must be truely blessed for it has got at least two.
  19. KR says ...... Science of Doom site (search there for "Gerlich"), including such gems as On the Miseducation of the Uninformed by Gerlich and Tscheuschner (2009) and Radiation Basics and the Imaginary Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Science of Doom site is an evolving platform. Leonard Weinstein has a recent guest post there. How the “Greenhouse” Effect Works – A Guest Post and Discussion. SoD agrees with the broad outlines of the post. Leonard Weinstein would agree with Silas that it is technically incorrect to say heat moves spontaneously from a lower temperature object to a higher temperature one. Why do some in climate science take issue with the technical language of thermodynamics? There is no debate in physics about whether or not heat can flow spontaneously from a lower to a higher temperature object. Thousands of physics textbooks and thousands of physics departments unanimously agree with Clausius that it cannot. To argue otherwise is to peddle pseudo science. To redirect folk to SoDs site may not have the result that KR intends.
    Response: [DB] Being argumentative, repetitive and pedantic constitutes sloganeering and is in violation of the Comments Policy. FYI.
  20. suibhne - I would refer you to the reference Chris Ho-Stuart pointed you to (his peer-reviewed reply) the last time you argued in support of G&T. I would note that suibhne has been repeatedly pointed to the errors in his physics (here, here), and stand by my recommendation
  21. The point of redirection to SoD is to help you understand the physics - that AGW does not in fact involve a mechanism that violates 2nd Law nor that it proposes a novel definition of 2nd law. Keep reading - try to understand what is actually happening.
  22. Soooo..did "PhysSci" ever get his paper published? We *could* have us an 'a-ha' moment from it! >;-D
  23. At the beginning of this thread there was b-j-m insisting that CO2 must block incoming and outgoing energy equally because both contain IR components, even after being shown that the emission spectrum of the sun and the Earth are nearly disjoint. Here, 1400 posts later, is suibhne, whom I remember from the the G&T debates years ago, still treating heat and energy as synonyms despite the many times that physicists and others have pointed out, with numerous familiar examples, that energy freely travels from cold to hot (and in every other direction). In between are numerous other examples of the same phenomenon -- simple, indisputable refutations of claims being rejected out of hand, ignored, or otherwise having no effect on the claimant, who simply repeats the claim in the same or a different form. All of the claims that the greenhouse effect is a violation of the 2LOT were already refuted in the original article, yet numerous people have simply repeated the claim. (And we even have at least participant here claiming in another thread that the assertion that people deny the greenhouse effect is a strawman.) People have patiently explained at length the errors in these claims, to no effect. Something can surely be learned from this, some lesson about pedagogy or psychology, but other than bad news I'm at a loss as to what can be taken from it ... how we can use this knowledge to improve our situation. Anyone?
  24. jibal - Appalling, isn't it? The lesson I take from this kind of discussion is simply this: There are, and always will be, idjits (IMO, apologies if strongly stated) who cannot be convinced (suibhne, Damorbel, Doug Cotton, others), who have blocks against a rational discussion, who are driven more by their personal worldview than facts that might contradict those. But clearly explaining their errors, even if they themselves cannot accept the data, provides the vast majority of reasonable people rational support they (I sincerely hope) appreciate for judging the issues. Most people can look at a discussion and recognize who is speaking from the data, from reason, and who is denying reality. While there is an element, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, of "At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid", I honestly believe that discussing the issues in a rational fashion can only assist those in the majority who might not have the time or training or inclination to personally dig into the for/against data issues. While I discuss matters with the deniers who raise objections, I try (insofar as as possible) to speak to the rather more silent majority. There are those who will never be convinced, but most people can clearly distinguish (given enough context, enough of an exchange) between a presentation of facts, and someone speaking from their nether regions.
  25. There are numerous thought experiments on 2nd law argued in this thread. Here is an actual experiment for those who think the 2nd law is broken to chew on.

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