The Greenhouse Effect: Incompetent to the Point of Insanity

Global warming "skeptic" Anthony Watts, on his wattsupwiththat site, has once again shown his intense antipathy towards those who disbelieve in the "greenhouse effect" (although, as a "lukewarmer", he limits his own belief in it, and disavows the "catastrophic" global warming of consensus climate scientists). I simply pointed him and his readers to the main points of my definitive posts:

No part of the "global energy budget" can be greater than the incident energy,

There is NO increase in atmospheric temperature with an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, at any given pressure in the troposphere,

and, last but not least,

The System is Broken (and Anthony Watts and others of like mind are not helping as much as they think).

The System Is Broken: Incompetent Science and Insane Politics

The Steven Goddard site has a post on "It must be the CO2" (he rightly ridicules the idea), and the following is my response:

My Venus/Earth temperatures comparison (the key of which is to do the comparison at points of equal pressure in the two atmospheres, and over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures) established that the Standard Atmosphere model for Earth--as developed over many years of temperature measurements around the globe, and well-known for over a century--agrees precisely with the actual vertical temperature distribution on Venus as measured on ONE DAY (October 5, 1991) by the Magellan spacecraft: The temperature vs. pressure (T-P) curves of the two planets are essentially the same, when they are corrected for the difference in incident solar radiation, due only to the two planets' different distances from the Sun AND NOTHING ELSE (which, first of all, immediately and completely disproves the carbon dioxide "greenhouse effect", since Venus has over 2400 times the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide as does Earth, yet that difference has no effect on the T vs. P curve).

Most fundamentally, however, my Venus/Earth comparison establishes that the Venus atmosphere must be always in equilibrium (if October 5, 1991 on Venus agrees precisely with the many years of temperature measurements, throughout Earth's atmosphere), and further, that the Earth's atmosphere is also always in near-equilibrium--on the global scale, with minor local and transient variations, due to day and night, wind, and weather--with that equilibrium being well and truly represented by the Standard Atmosphere model.

Beyond that, my Venus/Earth comparison (which, as competent scientists should already know, is the definitive correction to climate science now) establishes that both atmospheres are warmed by direct absorption of incident solar radiation, not from the separately warmed planetary surface. Again, that is on the global scale; obviously, there are local and transient effects, again the main players being day vs. night (with many cities, in particular, being urban heat islands, which often see a local temperature inversion developing overnight, in the lowest 1 km or so of the atmosphere, as the surface cools faster than the near-surface tropospheric temperature lapse rate structure can handle) and local weather (due to uneven heating of the daylit surface, as a function of latitude, or incident solar angle, for example).

So unless there is a change in the strength of the incident solar radiation--in particular, in that portion that is directly absorbed by the atmosphere (which incompetent critics of my Venus/Earth comparison can't seem to get into their heads, preferring instead to claim I "failed to consider the difference in albedo")--the ruling Standard Atmosphere model (as precisely confirmed by my Venus/Earth comparison) assures us there can be no change in the global mean surface temperature.

Promulgators of the multidecadal ocean oscillations theory, on top of a presumed warming since the minimum temperature of the Little Ice Age (around 1680, in the expositions I have read) have shown their theory matches the global mean temperature record since that time (while the "greenhouse" theory does not). In the context of what my Venus/Earth comparison has demonstrated about the constancy of the global Earth atmosphere, however, and in view of the uncertainties in the temperature records (especially with the fraudulent adjustments to some of those records that have been uncovered, by Steven Goddard, and even myself), one has to wonder if any scientific confidence at all should be placed in those temperature records; in particular, as I have commented numerous times, if the climate scientists have not really been measuring the true global mean temperature with their sampling algorithms, but have instead merely been unintentionally measuring a proxy for the multidecadal oscillations (the ocean covers 71% of the globe they are trying to sample, after all), that would explain the observed strong correlation of global temperature and ocean oscillations, and even the modest 1° or so of supposed global warming over the last century may be fictitious; until recently, I was amused by the fact that some scientists were saying (as if it were common knowledge) that the global mean surface temperature (GMST) was around 14.7°C, when for a century the Standard Atmosphere has given that temperature as 15°C--higher than the supposed current temperature, despite a century of supposed warming. (However, lately I have seen efforts being made to counter my miniscule but definitive ridicule, with the inner cadre of "consensus" climate scientists claiming the GMST is 15.7°C. So I know they are listening to me, and working hard to stay ahead of the ridicule they so rightly deserve. But the 15.7°C claim is still at odds with the definitive(!) Venus/Earth comparison, because the latter confirms 15°C, not 15.7--that is how precise the comparison is.)

All of this, of course, is happening in the immediate context of a political war, being waged by what I call the Insane Left, upon all those they want to demonize and marginalize in the public mind. The majority of voices you gather information from, particularly the mainstream media (but even the "lukewarm skeptics" in the climate debates), are incompetently and/or fraudulently pretending the system is working as it should--but it is not, and reality and recognition of the objective, scientific truth were the first victims in the war. You cannot stop the insanity if you will not recognize it as insanity, if people will not recognize the system is broken.

Too Many Chiefs in the Climate War

The wuwt site has a post on "Categorical Thinking"--unfortunately, done in the service of the categorical thinking of lukewarmists in the climate debate (actually, political War)--and the following is my response:

It is as if, in a large classroom, one student has stood up here and made the above speech. In reality, he is just a student, and not a particularly good one, yet he talks like he is the professor, who has the answers required in the course. If it were not a classroom situation, everyone could spend time on his points, agreeing here and disagreeing there, but in the end his inexpertness--indeed, his incompetence in the handling of categories (so that he succumbs to them: "I am unable to understand why people act this way, but at least now I can categorize it!")--is what should shine through. He himself categorizes falsely. He thinks the proper way to think about climate is "how much warming?", and that of course is in line with Anthony Watts' thinking, known as the "lukewarm" position. Unfortunately, it is incompetent thinking, the result of forty years of miseducation of climate scientists. And it is all of the incompetent scientists who have allowed the fearful and tyrannical dogma--not "category", childish moderns, but good old fashioned dogma (the "greenhouse effect", of increasing atmospheric temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide)--to energize what is now, in fact, political insanity at the highest levels of governmental authority.

The bell rang on the scientific bottom line--that the Standard Atmosphere model describes the real, equilibrium state of the atmosphere, and there is no destabilizing, global warming greenhouse effect--long ago, and without a real professor in sight, who knows that bottom line, this class has been dismissed for some time now. You are merely keeping the insanity going, by deluding yourself, and those who follow you blindly (dogmatically), that you have the answers.