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
Likeitwarm @1574....
Most of the cobalt that's mined is used for refining oil into gasoline. And with battery technology, there are alternatives to cobalt coming to market. For refining oil, there is no alternative.
Similarly, lithium mining is already less a problem than fossil fuels. And, lithium is found in sea water. Extraction technologies are currently in development.
Likeitwarm @1574 (and earlier),
I note and agree with your concern regarding harmful unsustainable activity related to renewable energy systems. But I share that concern in a more holistic way. It is undeniable that nasty ways of doing things also happened and continue to happen in the developed fossil fuelled system (but you seem to be unaware of that).
My concern is based on increasing awareness and understanding that the developed socioeconomic political systems have promoted, and will excuse and prolong, harmful developments. The more popular and profitable something becomes, especially with misleading marketing promotion, the more damaging it is and the harder it is to stop.
The lack of ethical governing of the socioeconomic political systems to limit harm done explains why the awful things you mention happen and are not rapidly ended. The desire for 'more benefit - cheaper and easier' can lead to all types of nasty unsustainable belief and interests that conflict with increased awareness of what is harmful and the need to limit the harm done.
I share the concern that those nastier ways of doing things can indeed be the ways that renewable energy systems get developed. But it has to be admitted that those nastier ways of doing things include 'prolonging fossil fuel use with the excuse that cheaper is better'.
Cheaper is only better if it is not more harmful. And it is understandable that more expensive ways of doing things that are less harmful should displace less expensive but more damaging ways. But that requires more people to be more aware of all the harmful realities of what has developed. And that awareness would lead to understanding that reducing the harmfulness of what has developed is not 'ruining the developed economy'. It is correcting the developed unsustainable perceptions by ending understandably damaging developments to create a more sustainable economy.
For anyone reading this thread and thinking about the various references that have been made to Eli Rabbet's Green Plate Effect post, Skeptical Science has created a new blog post that looks at the dynamics of the Green Plate Effect.
In reference to my original question,1529, I did some reading during which I had the following thought:
If radiation from a cool object can make a warmer object warmer and the warmer object makes the cooler object warmer than it was and so on, we have an infinite feedback loop wherein all objects get so hot that they eventually disintegrate as all objects above absolute zero emit radiation.
That be the effect if the GHE was correct.
[PS] " I did some reading during which I had the following thought:" Perhaps you could consider reading an actual textbook on radiative transfer instead of misreadings of how 2nd Law of thermodynamics works. Bob's link to the green plate effect explains it quite well.
The green plate does not transfer any thermal energy to the source because the source is equal to or warmer than the second plate. Heat only flows in one direction, hot to cold, and is irreversible. (Schoeder - Thermal Dynamics)
That reference should have been (Schroeder - Thermal Physics)
Likeitwarm :
you sound confused about what is energy and what is heat.
Energy (radiation) can flow in any direction but will be essentially rejected by a warmer object due to not being the high enough frequency according to Planck. So backradiation from the atmosphere will not warm the warmer surface. Heat flow is the difference in temperature between two objects. If the surface is warmer, heat will not flow to the surface from the atmosphere.
[PS] You do understand that noone has ever suggested that the atmosphere is warming the surface? This is not conductive heat flow like Schroeder deals with. A photon is going to heat the surface and transfer energy, even if it is the sun. You simply are not understanding the green plate effect at all. Try again, read a text book on Radiative heat transfer (or some of the zillion comments in this thread by others trying this nonsense).
Likeitwarm... "...but will be essentially rejected..."
And how does this happen? Where does the energy go? Are you saying it disappears? Does it make a U-turn?
Consider the idea that "flow" could mean "net flow." Energy going both ways, but more flowing from the hotter object to the cooler object until the point they are in equilibrium.
[PS] Maybe another adherent of the "sentient photon" theory from a decade or so ago. Likeitwarm and others might like go back to "The Imaginary second law of thermodynamics" paying close attention to the Real Second Law of Thermodynamics section.
Likeitwarm @1581/1582,
I assume the reference you make is to D. V. Schroeder (2000) 'An Introduction to Thermal Physics.' If read correctly, Schroeder is saying that it is entropy which is irreversable as it cannot decrease thermodynamically, pointing out in Section 2.6:-
Note that such "heat flow" includes both the flow from a hot object to a cold object as well as the lesser flow from a cold object to a hot one, the two flows being quite evident in a radiative system (as they are also in Schroeder Section 2.3.)
For convenience, here is the link to the SkS post "The Dynamics of the Green Plate Effect". It was linked in comment 1579, and in the Further Reading green box at the bottom of the OP, but those are not easily visible if you are reading this in the Recent Comments thread.
Likeitwarm is showing obvious confusion.
If Likeitwarm does not agree with some part of the Green Plate example, then go to that thread to discuss it.
...and instead of hand waving, Likeitwarm should really do the math.
Likeitwarm: "The green plate does not transfer any thermal energy to the source because the source is equal to or warmer than the second plate. Heat only flows in one direction, hot to cold, and is irreversible."
Indeed. And in the green plate example, the energy flow from blue plate to green plate is 266.7, and the energy flow from the green plate to the blue plate is 133.35. The heat flow is the difference: 133.35 from the hotter (261.9K) blue plate to the cooler (220.2K) green plate. So heat flows from hot to cold as it should.
"Heat flow is the difference in temperature between two objects": No, heat flow is the net energy flow, which should always go from hot to cold, and does in the green plate example.
"Energy (radiation) can flow in any direction but will be essentially rejected by a warmer object": This is an imaginary principle. Black bodies absorb *all* photons, even from cooler objects. This does not break the 2nd law, because the energy flow from the warmer object back to the cooler one will always be greater.
I'm curious: what do you think the solution to the green plate example is? (temperature of both plates) I don't think you can come up with an answer that doesn't break the laws of physics.
1584. "noone said the surface is heated"
Stated in the Energy Balance section at the top of this page some energy is "directed back down towards the surface, increasing the surface temperature". The energy budget graphic shows over 300 watts per sq meter going back to the surface. How does more energy get radiated from greenhouse gases than comes from the sun in the first place? Do greenhouse gases create energy out of nothing?
1585. Rob Honeycutt
"what's it do? a u-turn?"
Ha! You're funny!
Not exactly a u-turn, but effectively.
Re-radiated IR cannot warm the surface according to Peter L Ward at the U.S. Geological Survey.
https://ozonedepletiontheory.info/wp-content/uploads/Papers/Ward2016OzoneDepletionExplains.pdf
He explains as follows:
"Thermal energy can only transfer
physically via resonance in this way from higher
amplitude to lower amplitude at a given frequency
and, through mechanical contact in matter, from
higher frequency to lower frequency, thus
explaining the second law of thermodynamics.
…
It is the
frequencies and amplitudes of these radiating
oscillations that, when absorbed by cooler matter,
increase the amplitudes and frequencies of the
internal oscillations of the absorbing matter,
thereby increasing the absorbing matter’s
temperature. It is these frequencies and amplitudes
that appear to be reflected, rather than absorbed,
by warmer matter [22]. When radiation has lower
amplitudes of oscillation at each frequency than
the prevailing amplitudes of oscillation within
receiving matter, heat cannot flow into the matter
by resonance, cooler to hotter. Therefore, by
conservation of energy, “colder” radiation must be
reflected. It can only flow away from the matter,
hotter to cooler. There is no physical way for
warmer matter to absorb “colder” radiation.
Resonance does not work in that direction. The
flow of thermal energy is all about the propagation
of a broad spectrum of oscillations in matter, in
space, and in gas molecules from higher
temperature to lower temperature."
Frankly. likeitwarm, you are simply not understanding what you are reading....
In comment 1590, you quote a paper that says "Thermal energy..." and "mechanical contact"
IR radiation is not "thermal energy". It is "radiative energy". It does not need mechanical contact - that's why radiation from the sun reaches us through the vacuum of space.
The quote you provide, and the paper you link to, are very, very confused. Radiation does not have "temperature". Radiation has no memory of what temperature it was emitted from - it just has a wavelength and frequency.
In its figure 2, the paper provides Planck curves for perfect emitters. Gases are not perfect emitters.
The paper starts section 7 (titled "RADIANT ENERGY IS NOT ADDITIVE") with the following:
This demonstrates that the author is pretty much clueless as to what climate models and radiation models do. Nobody sums frequencies in the manner he suggests - they can and do (properly) sum the energy at different frequencies. That's called an "energy balance".
In section 11, the author cites Angstrom's 1900 paper. We've actually learned stuff since 1900, and Angstrom's errors are discussed on the advanced CO2 is saturated thread.
You need to find some less obvious sources of misinformation, likeitwarm.
FYI, there is a more complete debunking of Peter Ward's "theories" at this blog site:
https://hannahlab.org/climate-skeptics-peter-wards-ozone-depletion-theory/
Likeitwarm... Well, I guess Peter Ward believes, in effect and contrary to conversion of energy, that energy can be destroyed.
Ward also claims, "...however, [ozone depletion] provides a much more detailed and precise explanation for changes in climate observed since the industrial revolution and throughout geologic history." And this us pure, unadulterated BS.
You might be interested to know that Ward is a Seismologist, not an an atmospheric scientist nor a physicist. He speaketh from an orafice unbecoming for a serious researcher.
Sysop, Thank you for allowing this conversation with scaddenp and myself to continue.
1562 scaddenp
You said "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?"
I've been thinking about an answer for you.
I started looking into "global warming" back in the mid 2000s, 25 years ago,
I think with this site https://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html.
Many other places and books since then.
I find a lot, 1000s or more, of scientists that disagree with AGW.
One is Nasif Nahle who has calculated the emissivity of CO2 at less than .003 and and says that it doesn't absorb or emit much if any IR. You can see his calculations at https://jennifermarohasy.com/2011/03/total-emissivity-of-the-earth-and-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/
Then there is the Club Of Rome, a bunch of rich elitists that think they know best for the rest of us. Back in 1968-1974 they decided they needed a scare tactic to get people to reduce births, thus reducing the population of the earth and the resources used by them. They settled on AGW because CO2 is emitted when fossil fuels are burned. Reduce the available energy and you will reduce the birth rate.
The U.N. IPCC was not charged with finding out what makes the climate change but rather how to pin it on human causes. See https://shalemag.com/manmade-global-warming-the-story-the-reality/ and https://principia-scientific.com/the-club-of-rome-and-rise-of-predictive-modelling-mafia/
UN’s Top Climate Official: Goal Is To ‘Intentionally Transform the Economic Development Model’
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
You see, the goal was not to save us all from overheating the planet or acidifying the oceans. The goal was to scare everyone into giving up cheap fossil fuels.
I don't know what the goal of you and your colleagues at Skeptical Science is but I do know you can create logic and equations to describe anything, so I remain skeptical of your site.
Now you know where I'm coming from. See www.ourwoods.org.
Cheers
Likeitwarm... Your description sounds like a severe case of confirmation bias. You're deliberately rejecting the overwhelming body of research in favor of small cherry-picked bits that confirm what you prefer to believe.
LIkewarm @ 1594:
Oh, my Jennifer Marohasy is a completely unreliable source. The article it links to starts with this paragraph (leaving the grammatical errors intact):
This is absolutely, completely wrong. No such assumption is made. The reference provide is to a book (?) about "slaying the sky dragon". The Sky Dragon believers are about as nutty as it gets.
You then post links to principia-scientific.com, which has strong ties to the Sky Dragon believers and is about as reliable as the Flat Earth Society.. It is a collection of deniers - not a useful source of anything remotely scientific. You can read more about the organization here.
You then delve into the standard "it's a plot" that characterizes the conspiratorial thinking that saturates the common denier mentality.
You claim to "...find a lot, 1000s or more, of scientists that disagree with AGW." But what you are presenting here is just more of long-debunked crap.
There is no polite way to put it. You are believing sources that are obscenely wrong about climate science.
I counted on you guys reacting like you did. You are stuck on the false AGW theory and can't get over it. You denigrate all other theories. GHE is a hypotheseis, not fact. Where is your proof that increased CO2 causes warming of the atmosphere? You only have a correlation with rising temperatures and CO2. No laboratory proofs that the addition of CO2 does anything to temperature. Check this proof that CO2 does nothing to atmospheric temperatures. https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/E&E_21_4_2010_08-miskolczi.pdf
Sorry, Likeitwarm @1597 . . . but the Miskolczi "paper" proves no such thing. His "constant infrared optical depth" ideas are junk science.
Rob Honeycutt is pointing you in the right direction. Look inside yourself and ask why you choose to cherrypick these disproven ideas originating from a few - a very small handful - of "contrarian scientists". That is the question for you . . . if you are brave enough to face yourself in the mirror.
Let me hasten to add : AFAIK the good Dr Miskolczi may well be a nice guy and kind to children & animals. And AFAIK, lawyers would not consider him legally insane . . . but he is delusional about this area of climate physics.
Sadly, Likeitwarm, there's a small number of scientists who are simply delusional. It's a quirk of their personality, a crazy streak. But that is no reason for you to be sucked in by them.
Ah, yes. Likeitwarm brings out the strawmen of "AGW theory", "where's your proof?", etc. And now, he's using Friends of Science as a source. As Eclectic says, these sources are simply delusional about the science.
The last link provided by Likeitwarm is a paper published in Energy and Environment. As quoted on this Desmog page about the journal, E&E is "a journal that climate change deniers go to when their papers have been rejected by mainstream peer-reviewed publications."
The holes in the papers Likeitwarm has linked to are so large you could drive a Mack truck through them. They have been debunked many, many times in the past.
As for Likeitwarm's posting history here at SkS, he has pretended to have an open mind about the science, but his last couple of posts have made it clear that he has participated here with his mind made up, and that he only accepts information that fits his desired conclusion.
Likeitwarm... The difference here is this: Given enough evidence and strong research, any of us could be convinced there is something other than CO2 responsible for warming the planet in the modern era. You, on the other hand, will never accept the overwhelmingly research that currently exists regardless of how convincing it is.
Being truly skeptical means being convincible. Thus, I would term you a climate science denier. And that is the very premise of how this website was named.