Saturday, June 23, 2012

Why The Climate Debate Is Getting Nowhere in the End


I have submitted the following comment to the bishop hill site:

Unless and until they put my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison at the forefront of the debate, and everyone accepts that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, at points of equal pressure and over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is due only to the two planets' distances from the Sun, both sides will be missing the point, and embarrassingly, incompetently so.

It is not just that the climate consensus is wrong, or even that all of our institutions have been suborned by it. It is that this definitive evidence is actively denied, as "coincidence", and even the stoutest "skeptics" can't seem to hold onto it, and emphasize it above all other evidence, as they should--because the Venus/Earth comparison immediately shows just what is wrong in climate science, and how to correct it, on a whole handful of fundamental points. Perhaps above all, it shows that all of the attention given to problems with the temperature records, and how they have been manipulated, is a minor debate on a side issue, because my Venus/Earth comparison does not use those records in comparing Earth to Venus, it uses the Standard Atmosphere model, and confirms that model precisely(!) This tells us in no uncertain terms that the atmosphere is stable, and not at all subject to "runaway" warming OR cooling.

My Venus/Earth comparison should have been done by climate scientists, or atmospheric physicists, 20 years ago, and the "greenhouse effect" dropped from science then--if there had been ANY competent scientists around to do it. That today's scientists, alarmist and "lukewarm skeptic" alike, avoid confronting that simple comparison of two quite different, yet warmed precisely alike, planetary systems, is the fundamental problem in accepted climate physics today. It is simply incompetent, on the part of "97%" of consensus believers and skeptics alike, not to recognize this. But the egos of everyone will not let them imagine that they MUST go back and start over with climate science, back to the Standard Atmosphere--and give up those grandiose "worldwide mitigation" schemes to direct the peoples of the world. And, of course, give up their pretense to expertise on the subject, en masse.

It is a simple logical test, but an extremely difficult moral one, for every supposed "expert". (That is why I only call myself a competent physicist, and those who do not accept my Venus/Earth comparison, incompetent. I will brook no debate on this, among scientists; you are either competent or not--and I do NOT hold uneducated laypersons to the same standard.)

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Dismissive Academia: A Continuing Scientific Farce

I have submitted the following comment to Steven Goddard's Real-Science site, where the subject happens to be the intransigence and incompetence of climate consensus defender David Appell, a self-styled "science journalist" who also claims a Ph.D. in theoretical physics:

There is not a dime's worth of scientific competence in the wider public climate debate, particularly on the academics' side (which is Appell's side), otherwise the comparison of temperatures in the atmospheres of Venus and Earth, which simply disproves the "greenhouse effect" underlying the alarmist "consensus", would be front-page news worldwide by now, and all the defenders of that consensus, including David Appell, would be revealed for the science incompetents and academic cover-ups they are.

Any physical scientist, certainly any supposed "expert", having seen from my comparison that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio is a constant that is precisely--precisely--explained by the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun, and nothing else, and knowing the great differences between Venus and Earth (in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, cloud cover/albedo, and planetary surface) should quickly agree that the physical reason for that fact must be that both atmospheres are warmed by direct absorption of the same physical fraction of the incident solar radiation.

It has nothing to do with considering any part of a planet-plus-atmosphere system a blackbody (so don't even go there, Appell). It has to do with the Stefan-Boltzmann formula properly applied to ANY body in thermal equilibrium, and subject only to radiational warming (P, in Watts/m^2 ABSORBED RADIATION, properly averaged over the surface of the body--OR over some portion of the body that quickly attains local thermal equilibrium due to that warming, as is known for the airless Moon, for example):

P = σ (T)^4 (T to the fourth power)

I emphasize, P is the absorbed radiational power intensity, not the incident. (It should go without saying that, for a blackbody, the absorbed power is equal to the incident power, whereas for a non-blackbody, it is not.)

Thus, any two planetary atmospheres, which are warmed by direct absorption of the same physical fraction of the incident solar radiation, will have a temperature ratio governed only by the ratio of their distances from the Sun (I show the explicit equations for the two atmospheres, and their temperature ratio, at the above link). I claim this is the only reasonable physical interpretation of the Venus/Earth comparison, and that it should have been made 20 years ago, when the Venus data was taken by the Magellan spacecraft, and the "greenhouse effect" quickly dropped from the canon of "established science" then. It is a continuing embarrassment for all of physical science that it was not, and a scientific fraud that my findings have been, and continue to be, dismissed by the likes of David Appell, all the defenders of the climate "consensus", and even skeptics like Monckton, Lindzen, Spencer, and anyone else who insists there IS a carbon dioxide greenhouse effect contributing to global warming. THERE IS NO SUCH EFFECT.

My Venus/Earth comparison confirms the Standard Atmosphere model as the equilibrium state of Earth's troposphere, and the mean tropospheric temperature in that model is 259.3K. With the mean incident solar power 1367 W/m^2, at Earth's orbital radius, that temperature implies 18.75%, or approximately 19%, of the Sun's incident radiation quickly warms the troposphere directly beneath its rays (I would suggest, for the "expert's" consideration, perhaps over the entire daylit side of the planet) to the Standard Atmosphere equilibrium, vertical temperature lapse rate--and the Earth's surface, separately heated by the Sun during the day, and prevented by the atmospheric lapse rate from further heating the atmosphere beyond transient/local effects (i.e., just those effects we call "weather", and "climate"), acts to cool the near-surface atmosphere during the night (so that many locations see a local temperature inversion near dawn). I note, without further discussion, that the infamous Kiehl-Trenberth earth energy budget, shown here, shows some 19.5% of the incident solar radiation being directly absorbed by the atmosphere (though that would include not just the troposphere, as I am focusing upon here, but the stratosphere as well--so I suspect that energy budget is not necessarily accurate, or the albedo may be 0.23, rather than the widely touted 0.30--and this needs to be looked into by atmospheric physicists).

My Venus/Earth comparison (rather than any proposed "complete" theory of weather/"climate") is the definitive evidence needed for the fundamenatal correction of climate science. Academia needs to embrace it, and because it has already been published, and academia has dismissed it without proper, and public, consideration, they should not wait for it to be published in their favorite peer-reviewed (i.e., academic) journals (which are behind the times in this revolutionary time). Too much wrong has been done in the name of bad climate science, and everyone needs to be dragged, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the science shower, to come clean.