Saturday, July 30, 2016
Dr. Spencer, It Is Simply the Hydrostatic Condition
The Dr. Roy Spencer site has a post, "The Warm Earth: Greenhouse Effect or Atmospheric Pressure?". For what it's worth, that is the wrong way to pose the question, between those for and against the greenhouse effect. But too many "skeptics" of consensus climate science make the same mistake, even now, nearly 6 years after my 2010 "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" post. So I want to make the point yet again, as I have over and over, that it is not the atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the atmosphere that warms the atmosphere; it is the vertical pressure DISTRIBUTION, due to the hydrostatic condition of the troposphere, that produces the vertical TEMPERATURE distribution (the negative-lapse-rate structure) which governs the global mean temperature (at any given pressure level in the atmosphere, and for a given level of incident solar radiation).
So Dr. Spencer's question should be, "The Warm Earth: Greenhouse Effect or the Hydrostatic Condition?" And the answer, as my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison definitively shows, is the latter.
Back in the non-scientist cheap seats ( where we learn warm air rises ) there is still mental confusion about integrating this into a picture of global activity encompassing the variations, convections, changes of state of water, storm actions, day/night and seasonal cycles and more that comprise the active volume. And just to add to the confusion https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/13/a-conversation-with-an-infrared-radiation-expert/
ReplyDeletehttps://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/tropopause-rules/
Good Afternoon, opit,
DeleteNeither I nor anyone else has all the answers, to all the detailed atmospheric processes. I am dealing only with the definitive evidence I have uncovered, that definitively disproves the consensus theory, on many fundamental points. But all that a non-scientist like yourself really needs to remember is that the vertical temperature lapse rate structure (which is what makes warm air rise) is PREDOMINANT over all other processes and conditions in the troposphere, globally, including those you mention. (The reason that is so, is because my Venus/Earth comparison used the Standard Atmosphere model for Earth's troposphere, and it is a static model, and that Venus/Earth comparison CONFIRMS that model precisely.) Though it can obviously be overwhelmed locally and transiently (but I believe, so far as I have yet seen, only within a kilometer or two of the ground), it springs back into full force (through conduction between air molecules, not convection or radiation) quickly; it is so overwhelming, so unyielding in its global presence, that it must be viewed as the governor of every other process and condition ("warm air rises" being the most obvious aspect of its global governing, its global constraint on everything else occurring in the atmosphere). As I wrote in my 2012 post, "For Climate, All the World's a Stage", the hydrostatic lapse rate structure is the empty stage upon which all the natural variations, even the most extended (seasons, multidecadal ocean oscillations, etc.) and the most awesome (the "sound and fury of the elements"), play their roles, over and over since "time immemorial". That global stage NEVER CHANGES, quite obviously (a century and more old, it nevertheless precisely fits the Venus temperature-pressure profile on October 5, 1991).
You might be interested in what I have to say about the radiation theory of the "experts" in my post two days ago, "It Beggars the Imagination". I simply put no stock in it, as it is applied in climate science to the warming of the troposphere, for the reasons I give in that post (and one or two other reasons I didn't mention there).