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Exposing the glaring errors in Climatology Energy Budget diagrams

image credit: NASA
Douglas Cotton's picture
Principal Researcher, Centre for the Refutation of False Science

Qualified in Physics and engaged in private post-graduate research into atmospheric and sub-terrestrial physics since 2010 in which I made a significant discovery explained in my 2013 paper...

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  • Dec 26, 2023
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Above is an early "Energy Budget" diagram for Earth published by NASA.  The only trouble is that when we quantify the 51% of solar energy shown as being absorbed by land and oceans we get about one-eighth of the solar constant, resulting in a figure of about 168w/m^2 that could not achieve a global mean temperature above 233K which is -40°C.  Yes, that is a minus sign, and yes the 168w/m^2 figure did appear in a later diagram seen here

And so it was that they thought up the "Radiative Forcing" conjecture and they added 324w/m^2 of back radiation, a figure calculated so as to get the right answer.  This concept was documented by Raymond Pierrehumbert and actively self-promoted.

The problem with these new climatology energy budget diagrams is that they clearly imply that surface temperatures can be correctly quantified by adding to solar radiation about twice as much "back radiation" then deducting convection and evaporative cooling and using the net total in Stefan-Boltzmann Law calculations.  That law was derived from the Planck function for a single source of radiation and it never applies for the sum of two or more sources of radiation as may be demonstrated with a simple, cheap experiment.  

I have spent many thousands of hours in comprehensive post-graduate study and research. Over 20,000 others have read my papers without any proving them wrong in any way.  That, I would suggest, is very compelling peer-review in open media.  I was first in the world to discover and explain from the laws of physics what I called the "heat creep" process for which there is evidence throughout the Solar System.

What happens on Uranus (and Venus and other planets) compellingly supports the validity of the "heat creep" hypothesis which is based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  There is no solar radiation reaching the base of the Uranus troposphere and there is no solid surface there.  Nor is there any compelling evidence that the planet is cooling off.  Only the "heat creep" process could be what is maintaining temperatures of about 320K there, despite the planet being over 19 times further from the Sun than we are.  Nor does that temperature have anything to do with so-called "greenhouse" gases.

So, as we saw above, Earth's surface temperature is not able to be explained by the amount of solar radiation reaching it.  The Venus surface receives barely a tenth of the direct solar radiation that Earth's surface receives.  The Venus temperature is not caused by radiation from the less-hot atmosphere as such would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Likewise, if back radiation on Earth were thermalized in the warmer surface it also would violate the Second Law which reads "in a natural thermodynamic process the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases."  There are no other interacting systems.

The temperatures at the base of planetary tropospheres (and any solid surfaces there) are not raised above the temperature at the "radiating altitude" by radiation from "greenhouse" gases. 

Instead, those temperatures are as observed for one reason and one reason only:  the brilliant 19th century physicist Josef Loschmidt has now been proven correct when he explained that gravity forms a non-zero temperature gradient in solids, liquids and gases by acting on individual molecules.  The gradient forms (as has been shown) even in sealed, insulated cylinders of gas when rotated from horizontal to vertical positions.  

The fact that gravity does this (as does centrifugal force also in experiments) enables the non-radiative heat creep process to support surface temperatures, which you will probably only understand when you study the heat creep diagrams in this paper.

I don't know how any physicist (or anyone with a degree in physics) could look at the figure of 324w/m^2 for "back radiation" and not question it.  Most of the "greenhouse" gas is water vapor and most of that is at sub-zero C temperatures which, even for a blackbody would not radiate that much.  

But all the "greenhouse" gases comprise barely 1% of the atmosphere.  So, imagine them all gathered together into a cylinder of the atmosphere covering just 1% of the Earth's surface.  Even if you then argue that radiation from that cylinder could raise the surface temperature a few degrees, what effect would that have on the global mean surface temperature when the energy is spread over the remaining 99% of the surface?

In fact, as climatologist Dr Roy Spencer admitted, the back radiation figure is merely calculated so as to get energy balance.  It is wrong because the atmosphere could not possibly emit anywhere near as much.  Climatologists have not known about the non-radiative "heat creep" process happening in all planetary systems even down to the core which should have been taken into account.

You only have to think of Venus: according to the Stefan-Boltzmann Law it would require well over 16,500 w/m^2 of radiation coming out of the base of its atmosphere to support its surface temperature, warming it a bit on the sunlit side to compensate for inevitable cooling on the dark side.  But the solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere supplies less than 2,600w/m^2 so how could the atmosphere be amplifying energy?  In other words, how could the less-hot Venus atmosphere raise the hotter surface temperature with its radiation?  The heat creep hypothesis provides the only correct explanation of such temperatures anywhere in world literature.

Pierrehumbert's writings might well seem "extremely well documented" but so too are the laws of physics which his writings assume can be ignored.

Perhaps some of you might soon say something like this physicist wrote ...

"Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data - first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it."

Klaus-Eckert Puls, German Meteorologist, Physicist

Discussions
Tom Rolfson's picture
Tom Rolfson on Dec 26, 2023

Thanks for the insightful post, Douglas. As someone with a physics degree, the problem I have always seen is that these things are just incredibly difficult to explain to lay-people, even those who have a reasonable amount of scientific education (but not as deep as the true experts like yourself). Even for me, it is not easy to follow every path in this complex "equation." 

Sometimes trying to make something understandable for more people ends up corrupting the science behind it. So, too, does trying to make the science work for the answer you want. There's not a good answer for either of those situations, but one part of the long-term solution is certainly better STEM education world-wide.

Douglas Cotton's picture
Douglas Cotton on Dec 27, 2023

It's not all that hard to understand if you study the "heat creep" diagrams in "Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures" and my other papers at https://ssrn.com/author=2627605 which even secondary school students have understood. Also read http://climate-change-theory.com and watch this video.

Douglas Cotton's picture
Thank Douglas for the Post!
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