Promoted from comments
This would change everything
Bulaman said “Bula. Check the latest over at Chiefio’s” so we did. The Chiefio says:
It looks like the only thing with black body radiation is a real black body and that transparent things, like gasses, are not quite the same. In particular, CO2 likes to heat up instead of emit a photon. Now that also means they will tend to hold onto any energy input long enough to whack into one of the other gasses in the air and thermalize any IR they absorbed. Which in turn means that the bulk of the air (Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon, Water Vapor) will be holding that energy, not the CO2.
The tireless Richard Cumming provided a handy summary of a lengthy story.
What do you think of the physics?
Visits: 105
>”CO2 not a greenhouse gas after all”
Not as much of one (“greenhouse” being a misnomer anyway) as we are led to believe by climate scientists in conditions of increasing temperature and concentration. It’s still an absorber.
The key is the difference between radiative energy transfer and heat transfer, or, as the continuation of Chiefio’s quote above puts it:
“That, then, means were (sic) are back to “hot air rises” and all the convective processes of the troposphere as “what matters” and that “back radiation” just isn’t going to cut it. All the calculation and hand waving based on “black body” and “back radiation” needs a bit of a do-over.”
[Still have “Not found” problem after Post Comment]
Numerous other issues too e.g. the IPCC’s CO2 forcing curve has never been verified as other similar expressions have been (or not), and climate science has yet to quantify the posited heating effect of DLR (“back radiation”) on surface materials. I wish them luck with the latter when they get around to it. Not that I’m holding my breath, they haven’t tried in 25 years so far since FAR.
Climate science will be forced eventually to acknowledge conventional physics that energy transfer specialists of the different forms have dealt with for decades (200 yrs in the case of HVAC and CO2). They might also check out optics and medical laser physics.
>”The tireless Richard Cumming”
Actually very tired after 10 weeks of flat-out 7:30 – 6am nights in a kiwifruit packhouse. Eye and nasal infections from the detritus flying around and hot/cold work doesn’t help either. Only a couple more weeks then a break before controlled atmosphere (CA) packing starts – if I’m still alive for that.
>”What do you think of the physics?”
Easier to decipher at The Hockey Schtick commentary linked in Chiefio’s post:
‘New paper questions the ‘basic physics’ underlying climate alarm’
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/new-paper-questions-basic-physics.html
The 2 graphs of carbon dioxide and water vapour emissivity (= absorption) are telling. The HS explains:
“Dr. Robitaille demonstrates CO2 and water vapor act in the opposite manner of actual blackbodies [climate scientists falsely assume greenhouse gases act as true blackbodies], demonstrating decreasing emissivity with increases in temperature. True blackbodies instead increase emissivity to the 4th power of temperature, and thus the blackbody laws of Kirchhoff, Planck, and Stefan-Boltzmann only apply to true blackbodies, not greenhouse gases or most other materials. The significance to the radiative ‘greenhouse effect’ is that the climate is less sensitive to both CO2 and water vapor since both are less ‘greenhouse-like’ emitters and absorbers of IR radiation as temperatures increase.”
# # #
>”climate scientists falsely assume”
The basis of climate alarm in a nutshell.
I quite like the new format.
One has to keep in mind that they are only a method of conversing and if they work, that’s fine. If they don’t, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Infrared Radiative Cooling in the Middle Atmosphere (30–110 km)
William R. Kuhn and Julius London
Dept. of Astro-Geophysics, University of Colorado, Boulder
Kuhn, William R., Julius London, 1969: Infrared Radiative Cooling in the Middle Atmosphere (30–110 km). J. Atmos. Sci., 26, 189–204.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1969)0262.0.CO;2
Abstract
The infrared contributions to the heat budget by the 15 µ CO2, 9.6 µ O2, and 80 µ H2O bands are evaluated for the upper stratosphere, mesosphere and lower thermosphere as a function of latitude for both summer and winter. Flux divergences are numerically evaluated for a quasi-random band model with the appropriate line-broadening mechanism. A general discussion of the source function applicable to a multi-vibrational level molecule is given, and this formulation is applied to the 15 µ band of carbon dioxide.
The flux divergence of infrared radiation acts to cool the atmosphere in the 30–110 km height region except in the vicinity of the mesopause. Here there is a small, but nevertheless significant heating which increases in value toward the summer pole (∼4K day−1). Centers of cooling appear near the stratopause for low latitudes (∼10K day−1) and in the lower thermosphere over the winter pole. Thermospheric values may vary by a factor of 4 because of uncertainties in the collisional lifetime of the 15 µ transition; the rates of temperature change in this region have been parametrized in terms of the collisional and the radiative rates.
Ozone makes a significant contribution to the cooling in the vicinity of the stratopause (∼3K day−1). The water vapor contribution is approximately 1K day−1for a mixing ratio of 10−6 gm gm−1. Our calculations indicate that both these gases, when compared with carbon dioxide, give a negligible contribution to the flux divergence in the upper mesosphere.
Received: September 3, 1968; Final Form: December 9, 1968
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469%281969%29026%3C0189%3AIRCITM%3E2.0.CO%3B2
http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/