Incompetent Skeptics IV: Dr. Judith Curry

The climate depot site has a link to a puff piece on Judith Curry and her views on climate change/global warming. The following is my response:

This is a puff piece, based entirely on a friendly, personal view of Dr. Judith Curry. But the climate change debate is not about any person, especially any academic who basically accepts the climate science as sound and, as they like to say in their own best interests, "settled". Those who have involved themselves in the debate--who have studied the science behind it, and the arguments about that science--are strung out over the full range, from complete acceptance of the academic science to complete rejection of it. A layperson must either choose an "authority" to believe in, blindly, or seek out the definitive facts that tell for or against climate science theory--for that is what they are getting from all sides, predigested theory presented, smoothly and easily, as fact.

I am a 65-year-old physicist by education and long experience, in the academic and high-tech industrial sectors, and in presenting my view to laypersons, I take the latter route, of uncovering the definitive facts that anyone can appreciate. I uncovered the definitive fact that disproves the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, and any need to worry about a "runaway global climate" at all, nearly 3 years ago, in November 2010 (see here).

When I found that definitive fact against the greenhouse effect, I knew the consensus climate science was not just wrong, it was in fact incompetent (for what I had done should have been done 20 years earlier, when the relevant data, on the atmospheric temperature and pressure profile of Venus, was obtained by the Magellan spacecraft. That it was not done at the time is a gross error by climate scientists at the time, and that it has been dismissed even after I pointed it out in November 2010 is a gross crime against all of science and the trust of the public that we scientists are both competent and honest.) In late November, when I first tried to inform Judith Curry and her blog readers of the definitive fact of the Venus/Earth temperature ratio--which depends only upon the two planets' distances from the Sun, and no additional "greenhouse effect" at all, despite Venus's atmosphere having over 2400 times the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide as does Earth's atmosphere (Venus 96.5%, to Earth's 0.04%)--the following telling exchange took place:

Judith Curry:

"whether atmospheric gases such as CO2 (and H20, CH4, and others) warm the planet is not an issue where skepticism is plausible."

Harry Dale Huffman:

"The issue is whether they warm by absorbing incident solar radiation, or by absorbing secondary LW [longwave, i.e., infrared] radiation from the surface. I say the former, and there is no bouncing and amplifying of heat between the surface and the atmosphere."

In other words, I identified for her the mistaken belief she (and every other climate scientist) was nursing, that the atmosphere is warmed, on the global scale, from the surface, when in fact it is warmed, to its stable, equilibrium vertical temperature structure, by direct absorption of incident solar infrared radiation.

No climate scientist, including Judith Curry, has ever shown the slightest interest in or serious consideration of the fundamental corrections to climate science dogma that are provided by the definitive fact of the Venus/Earth temperature ratio. Yet any STUDENT of climate science could have done what I did, and seen what I saw.

So, as nice as Dr. Curry may be, she is--as is every other climate scientist or academic who defends the science behind the "global warming" scare--simply and unavoidably incompetent. And to put this in the proper context (because I know that charge of general incompetence among the "experts" sounds flamboyant and hyped to the unwary), I suggest the reader here also read the short article, "The System Is Broken: Incompetent Science and Insane Politics".

Modern Science Has Gone Wrong

I have posted the following response to a comment on my November 2010 Venus: No Greenhouse Effect article:

Good Morning, Astrobiology,

The proper statement, of fact not theory, is that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, at points of equal pressure in the two atmospheres and over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is determined only by the ratio of their distances from the Sun (in accordance with the fundamental physics that relates mean absorbed radiation intensity with attained temperature, at equilibrium), and nothing else. That fact has implications for the temperatures in the other planetary atmospheres, but of course it should not be expected to predict their temperatures; it is not a theory of planetary warming, it is a fact relating the Earth troposphere with an equivalent (in pressures) portion of the Venus atmosphere.

The easy, even lazy, answer to your first question is that when you say, "Venus is hotter than Mercury", you really mean the surface of Venus is hotter than the surface of Mercury, despite being much farther from the Sun--that ignores the atmosphere, of course (and that little detail of comparing at points of equal pressure in the atmosphere, which my comparison emphasized), and any hack will tell you the surface of Venus is hotter because it lies at the bottom of a deep, heavy, heat-retaining ocean of air, while the surface of Mercury is essentially bare to the near-absolute cold of space. (All of this is so obvious, I suspect your question is merely disengenuous--suspect so strongly, that I say so here for any interested reader to see. David Appell, a charlatan who pretends to be a competent PhD physicist, recently tried to comment on this site with the same incompetent point, that the Venus/Earth comparison does not work for the other planets. I wouldn't be at all surprised if your comment was an attempt to get by my denial of any further comments from him, as an unthinking, determinedly dismissive, disruptive influence. If you follow his lead, you won't get anywhere worthwhile--here, at least.)

I have always emphasized that I do not have a theory, only that definitive fact, which disproves the greenhouse effect of increasing atmospheric temperature (at any given pressure) with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (for Venus's atmosphere has over 2400 times the level of carbon dioxide as does Earth's atmosphere, yet it makes no difference in the temperature--and note, if there WERE such an effect, it would be ADDITIVE to Venus's temperatures, not multiplicative as the constant Venus/Earth temperature ratio implies).

To explain the temperatures in the atmospheres of the other planets would require a general theory of atmospheric warming. I do not feel the slightest need to bail out climate and atmospheric scientists from their responsibility to produce such a theory--which MUST EXPLAIN the Venus/Earth result quantitatively and precisely, note. I have done some comparisons of the troposphere of Earth with the equivalent parts of the other planetary atmospheres, as I have said in earlier responses to earlier comments here, but nothing as definitive as the Venus/Earth result emerged from that preliminary work, and I am interested only in communicating definitive results--facts, not theory.

All of the earth and life sciences are now working with fundamentally false theories, to a lesser or greater extent. That is the larger point, that has emerged from my own research, with my discovery of a great world-encompassing design at the very beginning of mankind's intellectual history, and motivating every aspect of its development. Random cosmic events and undirected geological and biological processes are not the truth about Earth's origin and development. The Earth and solar system were subjected to deliberate wholesale reformation, to impose an overall design--and modern science has, thus, gone wrong.