Arguments
The greenhouse effect and the 2nd law of thermodynamics
What the science says...
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The 2nd law of thermodynamics is consistent with the greenhouse effect which is directly observed. |
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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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
I see. So when you wrote 1998, you actually meant 2016. Makes sense. How much scrutiny have you applied to that CO2 science website, exactly?
The first paper (which I had to track down since there's no link at CO2 Science) reads as fairly ridiculous. There are a ton of graphs in the paper that clearly demonstrate correlation but he (a single researcher) says there is none. Better to stick with Dana Royer and his collegues who've done extensive research on this topic over the years.
Second link and comment: You don't define trends by peaks and troughs, but by long term trends.
Third link: These guys I tried to contact at one point to ask them why their data looked so different than everyone else's. The guy wouldn't identify himself nor would he identify anyone who was working on their supposed team. He wouldn't explain how they processed their data. After a few polite questions he blocked me.
My suspicion is he's not gridding his global data, which means his data is going to be more a representation of temperature in the most densely measured regions. And that makes his representations of global temperature, well, not global. It also makes it worthless.
This one is just comically bad.
Likeitwarm @ 1550:
Your first link claims to be presenting the results of a Nature paper from 2007, as indicated under the figure. A link to the paper itself is this. Although paywalled, Google Scholar finds free copies, such as this one.
The last sentence in the opening paragraph (visible at Nature) says "Our results are consistent with the proposal that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations drive or amplify increased global temperatures."
What does it tell you when the CO2science web site tells you the exact opposite of what the authors of the paper they reference are saying?
Continuing to look at likeitwarm's links.
As Rob Honeycutt points out, looking at peaks is not good practice. The second link provided in comment 1550 actually provides linear trends for all three datasets they display, and all are within agreement of climate model predictions. The temperature series with the greatest amount of short-term variation is the UAH one - which is not surface temperature. It is satellite-derived tropospheric temperature.
Looking at the peaks and seeing "flat spots" is a classic error. So classic that Skeptical Science produced a graph call The Escalator. It has recently been updated. You can read about that update on this blog post.
For convenience, here is the graphic in that post (and you can always see it in the right margin of each web page here.)
Actually, Bob, I think this is the paper CO2 Science is discussing.
But you're also right, they're referencing Came et al at the bottom for some inexplicable reason.
RH - well CO2"Science" have long history in misrepresenting what science papers actually say, secure in the knowledge that their intended audience won't read them to check. LikeitWarm, I agree that the Idso's are intelligent and smart - just not in a good way.
Likeitwarm - I appreciate that it is very difficult to evaluate material that you dont know very well. However, a common strategy for the deniers is the"strawman fallacy". Ie they claim that "science says X", which means that it follows that Y should be observed. If Y is not observed, then clearly X is wrong. (eg Idso is effectively claiming "Science says CO2 is only thing that effects temperature, therefore past temperatures must reflect CO2 concentration" ). If you discover that science says no such thing (eg check with what the IPCC reports claim instead) and that your source would likely be aware of that, (eg quoting or misquoting IPCC) then you have reasonable grounds for assuming that the source is bad actor, and not to be compared with what peer-reviewed science is saying (no matter how appealing their presentation is).
...and continuing with likeitwarm's third link on comment 1550:
The web site, temperature.global, has been discussed previously here. Read this comment.
I agree with what Eclectic says in that comment, and with what Rob says in comment 1554. With no idea what their methodology is, there is no way of knowing how many basic errors they are making.
To properly process weather station temperature data, you need to account for station location density and coverage. You can't take 10 stations in one small area that all record 15C, and one station in another small area some distance away that records 25C, and say that the average temperature across all the area is 15.9C. It is probably closer to 20C.
Trend analysis also requires accounting for changes in station locations, and measurement methods.
You also linked to that site in a comment last August. Attempts were made to correct your errors at that time, including pointing you to The Escalator. Please re-read the responses you got on that thread.
You can read additional details on how to properly assess global temperatures in a four part series of posts here at SkS that starts with this one.
Rob Honeycutt @ 1557 and 1558:
Yes, I see that Davis paper mentioned at the top of the page - I had grabbed the reference listed at the bottom of the page.
Even the Davis paper says, at the end of its abstract (emphasis added):
Over 425 million years, many factors affect climate. Solar output, orbital variations, continental drift, mountain building. A quick glance at the paper suggests that they have not really made any attempt to consider confounding variables. They mention them, but do not quantify them.
[BL] Considering that this discussion has rapidly progressed into a number of side-issues, I am going to recuse myself from further participation as a regular commenter, and switch into a moderator role again. I cannot do both.
Note that one part of the Comments Policy says:
No dogpiling. In the interests of civility and to enable people to properly express their opinions, we discourage 'piling on'. If a comment already has a response, consider carefully whether you are adding anything interesting before also responding. If a participant appears to be being 'dog piled', the moderator may designate one or two people from each side of the debate as the primary disputants and require that no other people respond until further notified. On topic comments on other matters not being discussed by the primary disputants will still be welcome.
In order to give likeitwarm a chance to keep up with and respond, I ask all participants to try to limit their somewhat-off-topic responses.
Likeitwarm, your link to temperature.global does point to what interests me most. There are numerous global temperature records (eg HadCrut, GISS) which have peer-reviewed methodologies, public source code and validation by hostile review (eg Muller's BEST project). Instead you are giving credence to a site with short time frame, no review and refusing to reveal their methodology.
That to my mind means you have very different priors to me, different biases, and that is what interests me most. Different priors is normal and we all have different biases. What I am asking is whether you can remember what switched you into looking for sites like CO2Science or temperature.global? Was it just disbelief about trace gases or were there other considerations?
[BL] In order to try to limit the range of the off-topicness of this discussion, I am going to ask likeitwarm to focus on this branch of the thread.
I gave scaddenp limited permission to go off-topic in comment 1549, and in the current comment, scaddenp is trying to dig further back in time to see how likeitwarm came to the positions that he arrived here with.
likeitwarm: as this discussion continues, please try to give additional detail on how your thought process developed. When you link to a specific source, please try to tell us in your own words what it is you read into that, what it is about that source that you found convincing, what it is about that source that confirmed or contradicted previous ideas that you had, etc.
Likeitwarm @1550 commented: "These things are put out there by people I don't think are dummies. I wonder if they would put them out there if they knew they were wrong?" [answer: Yes, because of Cognitive Dissonance]
Thanks for the chuckle !
Yessir indeed. Even some very intelligent Denialists repeatedly put stuff out there when they know it's wrong. Over and over again, they put out there some favorite pieces of wrongness, despite repeatedly being shown wrong by scientific literature or repeatedly being shown wrong in science-based blogs such as SkS= SkepticalScience / ATTP= And Then There's Physics / etcetera.
Why do Denialists keep posting wrongness? ~ because they are angry and have huge cognitive dissonance and they indulge in Motivated Reasoning. And a small percentage are paid for such propaganda [looking at you, Heartland Institute and GWPF= Global Warming Policy Foundation ] of using half-truths & other misleading stuff.
Likeitwarm ~ there certainly is some value in reading denialist blogs such as WUWT= WattsUpWithThat , and ClimateEtc [blog by Dr Judith Curry]. You won't learn much genuine climate science there, but you will learn something of the flaws & follies of Human Nature. ~Which can be entertaining . . . as you see the persistent wrongheadedness of 90% of the commenters there.
The big question, the interesting question, is why do those people (both the intelligent ones and the moronic ones) keep on persistently misunderstanding and/or misrepresenting stuff**
** An amusing example from just a few days ago on ClimateEtc ~ a certain regular commenter stated: "many studies on sea level [show] rising for centuries at approximately the current rate" and he cited a scientific paper. When I myself accessed that paper: it showed the complete opposite picture in its very first diagram [which showed centuries of flatness followed by a spectacular "Hockey Stick" upwards trend in the past 200 years]. The original commenter's egregious error was pointed out by another commenter . . . whose post mysteriously disappeared a day later.
Large amounts of speculation about the motives of various people can be counterproductive.
Without reference to motive, the aspects of Cognitive Dissonance (one flavour of Motivated Reasoning) can indicate how a person can genuinely develop and maintain non-logical conclusions.
Morton's demon also provides an interesting look at this phenomenon, and is worth a read.
Bob... There's also a very weird part of the Davis paper where he goes on at length explaining the non-linear aspect of GHG forcing, as if anyone reviewing or reading the paper wouldn't already understand that. In a paper on paleoclimate that aspect should get one sentence and maybe a reference and be done with it.
I'm not conviced this is an actual peer reviewed paper.
RH - it is an MDPI journal - open access, aim to publish within 7 weeks of submission!! I'd say just lazy review.
[BL] Beall's List is a good resource to check out the reliability of various journals and publishers. The list mentions MDPI at the bottom, under "Excluded - decide after reading", and links to this Wikipedia page for further details.
Rob Honeycutt @1564 , regarding the Davis paper [Davis W.J., 2017], he does indeed go on at length about the GHG forcing from CO2 . . . and yet overall he appears to have little understanding of the physics of terrestrial GHGs.
"... large variations in CO2 exert little or negligible effects on temperature" [unquote]
"The generally weak or absent correlations between the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and T [Temperature] ... imply that other unidentifiable variables caused most (>95%) of the variance in T across the Phanerozoic climate record." [note the "unidentifiable variables"]
A one-line mention of water vapor.
No mention of Faint Young Sun.
Extensive mention of statistical analysis of CO2 / Temperature . . . from which Davis seems only to have identified "a prominent 15 million-year CO2 cycle" ~ but he makes no attempt to link this alleged cycle to any physical processes or occurrences on planet Earth.
"anthropogenic emissions of CO2 accelerated at the start of the Industrial Age in the mid-18th century" [did he mean to say mid-19th ?? ]
I could go on.
Rob ~ as you stated earlier, this Davis paper is ridiculous.
[ Moderator ~ I would prefer to say that Motivated Reasoning is a consequence of Cognitive Dissonance . . . but as you rightly indicate, this is not really the thread for such discussions. ]
A couple more tidbits on this Davis paper, and then I think that one is sufficiently put to rest.
The paper lists his primary association as the Environmental Studies Institute, which on close inspection appears to be a one-person operation where the website hasn't been updated since 2015 (implied by the copyright).
The ESI has Davis' CV listed and it clearly demonstrates he doesn't even have a background in physics. He has a PhD in biology and apparently works in sports medicine, according to his certification in 2002.
This all seems par for the course in climate denial world.
[BL] Yes let's please let this one rest. The 2017 paper also gives an affiliation of University of California at Santa Cruz, although the linked CV indicates that he ceased to be employed there in 2004.
scaddenp 1549 and sysop
"how far a photon of appropriate wavelength would travel up through the atmosphere on average before encountering a CO2 molecule"
Depending on the humidity it might get caught first by H2O. It could travel 3 inches or 300 inches. I haven't calculated the odds. I guess it would be like shooting into a flock of birds to see if you hit one.
I read somewhere that the maximum amount of earths radiation that is of an appropriate wavelength to react with CO2 is about 16% of the total. I think that is attributed to John Tyndall.
"what did likeitwarm think would happen to that energy?"
If the object was inert and isolated from the rest of the universe and emitted to a perfect reflector/re-emitter and absorbed this redirected energy, Its temperature would not change. In order to emit it must lose energy and it would just regain that energy back at absorption. I think it would need an external input to rise in temperature.
"I do not believe we should be destroying the world economies..."
I think is has been shown in the development of all economies to-date that cheap energy is key. Solar and wind energy have been shown that they are anything but cheap and dirtier to build, at this time. I do acknowledge that we need incentive to work on new technologies but I think we are turning off fossil and nuclear energy too soon. China certainly doesn't give a hoot about global warming.
I really feel this thread could get way off topic fast and needs to go to some general discussion. These things are not the science, but affect the science or are affected by the science.
These articles are not science but the problems noted in them will be solved by it, eventually. I just wonder how soon?
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/06/21/why-everything-they-said-about-solar---including-that-its-clean-and-cheap---was-wrong/?sh=3c94bf1c5fe5
https://daily.jstor.org/the-downside-to-renewable-energy/
[B} I will only respond to the part of this comment that is answering my question ""what did likeitwarm think would happen to that energy?".
First of all, you need to think about just what you mean by "inert and isolated from the rest of the universe". What you then describe is a system where an object is emitting, and then another object is sending all that energy back. And that leads to a constant temperature. You then say an external input is needed to raise the temperature.
In this system, ask yourself the following questions:
All-in-all, what this demonstrates is that to really understand the behaviour of "the system", you need to define all objects, all energy fluxes, etc. If you only have a vision of a partial system, then you will make errors in drawing conclusions about its behaviour.
...and on the topic of the blog post and the 2nd law, the serious part that is left out of the "system" by people that believe the myth is that our earth/atmosphere system has a huge external source of energy in the sun. We do not live on an isolated (energy-wise) system, and the real behaviour is not what the myth-believers think it is.
...but from your earlier comment (after reading The Green Plate post at Eli's) tells me that you already realize that not including the energy source of the sun was part of your misunderstanding.
Sysop,
I posted and could not find it. Got a page expired message. Could not see that a new page was added(63). It still said 62.
So could you please delete 1569 as it is a second incarnation of the same post.
My apologies.
Likeitwarm... This conversation is becoming a classic Gish gallop.
Regarding your HBR article, please read down to the bottom of the article.
This article clearly isn't making the claim that you seem to think it does. They're not saying renewables are dirtier. They're merely discussing the challenges we're going to face with waste from renewables. No one denies that, but the alternative of continued use of oil for energy is vastly worse.
And on this comment you are also wrong: "Solar and wind energy have been shown that they are anything but cheap and dirtier to build, at this time."
See table 1b here.
Liikeitwarm,
I think you have a lot of misconceptions about what is known and understood about IR behavior in the atmosphere and what is not. This is an extensively researched subject, it has produced results used in many engineering fields that require precision and reliability. You need to peruse through Iacono and Clough (1995) and take a long studious look at the famous graph that is in that paper. Then look at the work that has been done since. IR absorption and re-emission is thoroughly modeled by the MODTRAN line by line model and to an even finer degree by HITRAN. The full IR atmospheric profile is known. Accumulating GHGs raises the effective emission altitude. Do some reading about that too. MODTRAN is a major component of IR weapon guidance systems. The US Air Force holds patents on MODTRAN. They don't care about anyone's opinion or what is on this or that website.
This is one of these areas of knowledge where your opinions and beliefs (or anyone else's, for that matter) are of no importance whatsoever. All the heavy lifting has already been done, and there is a right answer: the physics-based theoretical calculations, painstakingly accumulated to form the line by line models, have been validated by measurements at all applicable altitudes. This is not an area of uncertainty that is the subject of significant scientific debate.
No matter what you think happens to IR radiation leaving the ground, what actually happens has been very well studied, very well quantified, and is based on physics. It is possible that a major discovery could revolutionize our understanding, but the practical consequences of it on this particular subject would be similar to that of general relativity on the workings of an internal combustion engine, i.e. negligible.
[BL] Likeitwarm is responding to this question from scaddenp, which included the following phrase:
Please dont look it up or attempt to calculate it- I am really interested in your intuition on this, not your knowledge.
Let scaddenp respond to likeitwarm's intuition. I'm sure he will ask more questions.
Likeitwarm - thanks for those answers, though if you realize that IR leaving the surface is captured by GHG (CO2, water) without having traveled very far; and then re-radiated, I am surprized that you were not understanding that GHG gases result in a warming surface. ok, file that away.
I leave others to discuss sources of your beliefs about renewables and chinese efforts, but I would have to ask this: If you became convinced that conversion to renewables was not going destroy world economies would that reduce your skeptics about global warming do you think? If it had been obvious to you when you first heard about global warming that getting off fossil fuels was both possible and economical, then would you have been so skeptical of science?
Do you feel differently about CO2"Science" now that you have seen them play with strawman arguments or would like other examples of their game before you wrote them off?
sysop 1568
Very good points. You obviously are much more thorough than myself. My reference to an external energy source was just to point out that the imaginary object did not have one. I know I could have expanded on it to give everyone a more complete picture of my idea and realize that now. I'm not a good scientist.
Rob Honeycutt 1571
I was thinking of the dirty production of Lithium in China and cobalt by children in africa.
scaddenp 1573
It has been said, I think on Rabbet's site, that CO2 rarely loses gained energy by emitting a photon. Usually by collisions with N2 or O2 lower in the atmosphere. Just read that today.
I am convince that "some day" in the future, we will not be burning as much fossil fuel,but that day is much farther off than the politicians say it is. I think a slow phase out will work and not destroy the economy. My reasoning is that the cost of fuel is in everything we use every day, so when fossil fuel production was reduced 2 1/2 years ago prices of everthing started to rise. Not smart. We can transition to electric everything but at a slower pace. I think someday we will discover the equivalent of the Star Trek dilithium crystals.
I have been interested in electric vehicles for 50 years. I bought Nikola stock because that market is huge and I will make money on electric trucks. Everything we use come to us on a truck, today.
All that aside, I have learned a lot from all of the more educated that post here. I think I'll quit posting because I really think I cause everyone on this site undue consternation. I'll just read for a while and post a question now and then after due dilligence on my own research. I still have questions but I'll see if I can find the answer myself on your site.
[BL] I wasn't born a "good scientist" either. It takes time to learn things, and if you want to see what path I took to get where I am, you can see it by clicking on the About menu option and choosing "Team".
If you look at the Comments Policy, in the first paragraph it says "we welcome genuine discussion as both an aid to understanding and a means of correcting our inadvertent errors." Asking questions is reasonable, but it is generally expected that people will read the material in the blog post before asking a lot of questions.
When you first arrived here, you were following a pattern of questioning that we often see from people who are not here to learn. Often, they are not interested in the answers, because they are already convinced that "science" has it wrong. They think that there is no answer to their question, and they are just here with an attitude that they can "show the scientists up". That provokes an "oh, no, not again" kind of reaction that can be tough on someone who really does want to learn.
It is clear that you have read a number of web sites that, frankly, are poor sources of information. Without a background in the subject, identifying those sites for what they are can be very difficult.
Do continue to read, do continue to learn, and do ask questions when you encounter information that is difficult to understand. But do make an effort to provide focused questions - starting with an explanation of how you got to where you are and why the question is in your mind. The best answers follow good questions.
...and I think you would benefit from the on-line course (free!) that BaerbelW pointed to in this comment.
...free online course (MOOC) "Denial101x - Making sense of climate science denial"?
As you look through the different pages here, you will often see that we have included video segments from that course. That can give you a sampling of what to expect.
Closing on your comment about CO2 losing energy by collision: you were probably reading this blog post. A key point in that article is that CO2 will also gain energy by collisions. Most of the energy transfer is from molecule to molecule (all gases), and that is what leads to all gases having the same average temperature - but CO2 and other greenhouse gases do emit IR radiation. And how much they emit depends on the atmospheric temperature - because it is collisions with the other molecules that gives the CO2 molecule the energy it gets rid of by emitting radiation. Absorbed radiation by the smaller number of greenhouse gases leads to heating of all gases, and when all gases get hot, greenhouse gases get more energy from them so they can emit more radiation. We're back to needing to follow all the steps involved - not just one or two in isolation.
Likeitwarm @1568
I am happy to help answer questions, as long as I am being taken seriously and not just being taken for a ride. @1533 and @1534, you asked for a simple answer. I provided answers in @1535 and @1536. Perhaps you didn’t understand them, but since you repeated the same question in @1544 by saying that you “just could not believe a trace gas of .04% of the atmosphere could have such an effect, especially with the history of CO2 volumes and estimated historic atmospheric temperatures not jiving with each other.” Without saying what it was about my answer that you didn’t understand, but conclude that you don’t believe CO2 can have such an effect and then jump to an incorrect distraction that CO2 and temperature do not jive, you rejected my answer. I find that to be disingenuous.
If you are sincere, we could try again at this simple answer. Even at 0.04%, there are sufficient CO2 molecules in the cold upper atmosphere between 11 and 20 kilometers to create an emitting layer. Because it is cold, radiant energy emission to space is reduced. By the global energy balance, reduced energy lost to space means increased energy captured in the global system. There is no math for you to do, but you do have to trust that scientists do understand Beer’s Law and are capable of doing the math for you. Phillipe Chantreau @1572 made an excellent post regarding just some of the background hard science of radiant energy transfer. There are many more posts of excellent research throughout this site, although it does take some digging to find them. Please do as you suggest and do some homework, including on the topic of economics of costs for damage and abatement. It’s all there.
Trust in good science should have been earned by years of research and detailed calculations. There are a few so-called scientists out there who have published bad information, like the Gerlich & Tscheuschner paper that started this whole thread on the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This site is all about rebutting the bad information. See my post @1528 about this myth started by G&T. Or maybe you did that before posting @1529. So go back and read @1535 and @1536 again. Then, if you are still confused, maybe I can help clarify a specific concept before you jump to conclusions.
By the way, consider conservation of energy, not conservation of photons. A CO2 molecule absorbs a photon. Its energy state increases. Since it was in thermal equilibrium with adjacent molecules of any gas, it may lose the extra energy by collision. But then the adjacent molecules are at an increased energy state, so they may give the energy back by collision. Or the CO2 molecule may emit a photon to shed the extra energy. By Kirchoff’s law, absorptance = emittance at thermal equilibrium. Any disturbance in the energy balance upsets thermal equilibrium. Finally, note that it is the energy lost to space that can be determined by the global energy balance. It is problematic and not productive to worry about all of the collisions, absorptions, and reemissions as energy works its way through the atmosphere. That will only get you lost. Similarly, that is why it is not production to worry about convection and the water cycle. All of that just moves energy around in the atmosphere and sets of the atmosphere’s temperature profile. It is the atmospheric temperature profile that sets up radiant energy transfer.