An Inevitable, Unavoidable "Learning Moment"

I received a comment this morning on my "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" page, the point of which was reaffirmed by a brouhaha at WUWT (wattsupwiththat). Instead of submitting a comment there, I offer the following here:

This is just another "learning moment" (an emotional clash of character and personality) due to the entrenched incompetence in climate science (and beyond), which has the proponents on either side of the "greenhouse" debate merely repeating themselves ad nauseam (i.e., to the point of mutual disgust). That incompetence is really just the following of (rickety, shaky, wrong-headed) theory over experimental fact.

The fact is, there is no greenhouse effect, of increasing atmospheric temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The lapse rate rules over the radiation transfer theory, not because it is more "fundamental", but because it fits the facts of two planetary atmospheres. The radiative transfer theory, which allows the consensus greenhouse effect, is simply wrong in its application to the atmosphere, according to those facts; it misses the real thermodynamics of the atmosphere entirely. And those who look closely at it find that it violates the laws of thermodynamics, quite apparently because it misuses the blackbody concept. When Willis Eschenbach says (on the above-linked WUWT site), "As a result of absorbing that energy [so-called backradiation] from the atmosphere, the surface is warmer than it would be in the absence of the GHGs", he doesn't see (and believers in the greenhouse effect refuse to see) his words are nonsense. A commenter to my blog known as "truthseeker" just directed my attention this morning to an article containing this statement: "GHG theory postulates back-radiation from cold atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by the surface, heating it more. This violates Second Law of thermodynamics (energy can only be transferred from hot to cold bodies), leading to creation of energy, a violation of the First Law of thermodynamics (energy conservation), and the impossible perpetual motion machine AGW promoters need to cause eternal global warming." I replied to truthseeker, "He is saying that the energy imparted by the 'backradiation' is re-emitted by the surface at a higher temperature, the temperature of the surface. He is right, this is an obvious error in the consensus theory, which consensus scientists refuse to understand. To me, the most obvious and fundamental violation is that of the conservation of energy, which I pointed out in my blog post, 'Runaway Global Warming is Scientific Hysteria'."

There is no way out of this mess until each defender of the consensus greenhouse effect comes to realize that he/she is simply wrong about it. And there is the rub: the belief of the overriding majority of scientists is wrong, and MUST be overthrown, by scientists themselves and using a proper scientific understanding of the most basic physics.