Sunday, August 28, 2016
My Bio, As I See It
I received (from one Scott Brooks) a request for my full "bio" (biographical information), so I wrote the following, for anyone who is interested (one caveat: this is not definitive, just what came to me just now):
We live in a time of general incompetence, in science and in society, which seems to have come upon us suddenly, yet which has had a long buildup. I'm afraid academic titles don't mean what they used to mean and, in my own case, nearly 40 years ago I walked away from academia before getting my PhD, with clear eyes and a light heart, untainted by any sense of regret or loss. Further academic education had lost its relevance to me-- after 3 and 1/2 years spent getting a Master's in Physics, and 2 more years of unfocused work to find a PhD topic of any interest at all to me--so I shed it, easily and casually. I did, however, retain the notion that I was a good physicist, and that I could correct or remake science, even on a rather grand scale, given the right circumstances. That, it has turned out, was not the vain pridefulness of untested youth, but a prescient notion, which took nearly 20 years to come to fulfillment.
Along the way, I have enjoyed, among many other things, scientific programming and high-tech electronics in the industrial sector. My specialty, one might say, was modelling physical systems, such as high-tech instruments--or simply, solving any problems associated with understanding the detailed physical workings of the things that were brought to my attention. (One might say these were my "Einstein at the patent office" years. Great accomplishments do not come out of nothing, and take time both to come to mind and to develop through focused, disciplined research.)
I was also unemployed for substantial periods of time, primarily because (looking back with philosophical hindsight) when I was employed I was generally underemployed, simply by being in a subordinate position doing what my employers wanted done. What I was really meant to do in life was to discover the new, not be a technician of the old. Our society and our educational system have gone down, just as I saw it coming 40 years ago, in demanding technicians instead of scientists, educating people to exercise the consensus (or the latest proprietary software), rather than to keep digging for the truth regardless of current beliefs and popular fads.
Let's make a long story short now. In 1992, I got a job as a Research Associate analyzing data on remote aerosols. My understanding split with what my employer/superior wanted to hear, and I ended up submitting my own papers to a peer-reviewed journal, for which I was "terminated due to cuts in funding" (the official line, false but unquestioned and unquestionable). It took me two years to get those papers published, but I did. And long before I even submitted them, I knew I was rewriting the "official" understanding of those remote aerosols. Basically, what I did was pursue my own research program into understanding how the constituents in those aerosols were measured. By the time I was ready to write the paper(s)--one paper became two--I realized I was my own Principal Investigator, for the first time, and I knew I was notably good at it. I now knew I could, and should, be such an investigator--a Discoverer, like the most famous discoverers of old, the founders of modern science.
So when I was "terminated", in 1994, I kept my head up and my mind open to new possibilities. And over the next 3 years a number of critical strands drew together, around the subject of the "ancient mysteries"--myths, superstitions, "sacred" texts, megalithic monuments, and the ever-sharp shards of ancient science and its attendant ancient philosophy, with the constellations on the celestial sphere not the least of it all.
In 1997, I discovered the Great Design of the "gods", and all that the world has done since is, it seems more and more the case to me, no more than the avoidance of that great truth. There is a new Foundation of the world to be studied, and I am the Discoverer of it, the Galileo (and Copernicus, and Newton) of this time--their spirit, that is. No, I'm not saying I'm great--I'm saying that is how great the Great Design is; but I would be a fool not to be proud of myself for discovering it, as no one else ever did. Discovering it was like walking into a valley of pure gold (quite literally so, when I came to realize the central meaning of "gold", or "golden", in the descriptions of so many things in ancient myths). Its attendant discoveries, of each separate mystery, were like an endless series of gold nuggets, lying out in the open waiting to be picked up since time immemorial, since the beginning in fact.
My small contributions to climate science (which I consider just those of a competent physical scientist) are nothing compared to that, but the world is hung up on the pathetic mess of scientific incompetence and political tyranny that make up the "climate debate". And false dogmas are generally ascendant over good honest reason in the world now. How can I bring forth the new foundation, the new paradigm, in such circumstances? False dogmas mean inevitable war, and today we see groups (like Muslim jihadists, and angry young black men in America) that seem hell-bent on going to war, any war they can lay their hands on. I would call on those groups to lay down their arms, their false dogmas, and listen to me. Listen to new, greater truth and understanding of the world that seems so eternally, hopelessly divided. The people of the world need to learn the true origin of it all, and unlearn the false dogmas that have kept the wars going, throughout history. And that means they--you--will have to take up where I leave off, and study it. Study the world, and what has been handed down since the beginning, and separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the true from the false. Above all, set "treat others as you want to be treated by others" above "an eye for an eye". The latter belief is being chained to a hateful, blind past; the former, seeing the truth and a hopeful tomorrow.
Friday, August 26, 2016
Dr. Roy Spencer and the Myth of a Valid Global Climate Science
The Dr. Roy Spencer site has a post, about an experiment to show a cold object can warm a hotter object (by interposing a cool object between the hotter object and a much colder object). My response:
"Now, this experiment does not prove that gases can do what the cardboard has done....It only answers the 2nd Law violation claims some have made against a cool object (here, the cardboard sheet) causing a heated object to be warmer than if the cool object was not present, which is what the Earth’s greenhouse effect does."
The "Earth's greenhouse effect" is theorized to work by CO2 re-emitting radiation back to the planetary surface, thus warming it. The cardboard sheet does not work that way; it works, metaphorically speaking (in analogy with the real atmosphere), by REMOVING the "cold of space" from around the "heated Earth" (i.e., the cold of the dry ice from the effective vicinity of the heated surface), by replacing it with the "cardboard sheet" of the atmosphere (or the CO2 in the atmosphere).
Obviously, what your experiment really does, effectively, is force a new, reduced temperature "lapse rate" (say the cardboard sheet effectively removes the dry ice, or "outer space", to infinity, or at least to a much greater distance), so that the heated surface stabilizes at a higher temperature. That is not possible in the real atmosphere; the lapse rate is just -g/c (i.e., it is governed only by the acceleration due to gravity and the effective specific heat of the atmosphere), and has nothing to do with the amount of CO2 (or any other constituent) in the real atmosphere. My own "experiment", the Venus/Earth temperature-vs-pressure comparison proves what I have just written, for CO2 concentration all the way from 0.04% to 96.5% (the two planets' T-P curves, over the full range of Earth tropospheric pressures, are essentially the same--and precisely so, above and below the Venus cloud layer--when only Venus's smaller distance from the Sun is taken into account, despite Earth having only 0.04% atmospheric CO2 while Venus has a nearly pure, 96.5% CO2). Obviously, only the intensity of the incident solar radiation affects the absolute global mean temperature, throughout the tropospheric air column.
I don't know why so many, including yourself, continue to waste their efforts arguing over the "2nd Law" when the First Law is the one obviously being broken in the consensus theory. See "Runaway Global Warming Is Scientific Hysteria". In the consensus theory, the Earth's surface is emitting a mean 390 W/m^2, which is greater than the mean 342 W/m^2 incident from the Sun. That is a gross violation of the conservation of energy. And, also obviously (to this independent physicist), it is 390 W/m^2 because that is the intensity of radiation coming off a blackbody, surrounded by vacuum, at the same temperature as the Earth's surface (288K global mean), and atmospheric scientists must be "measuring" not the radiation being emitted, but the temperature of the surface, misinterpreted as an equivalent blackbody radiation intensity. The only problem, aside from the clear violation of conservation of energy, is that the Earth's surface is not surrounded by vacuum; even a blackbody, with an atmosphere, would not radiate 390 W/m^2 from its surface, because it would also lose heat by conduction and convection, so it could only radiate 390 W/m^2 minus the power per unit area lost through those other transfers of heat from the surface.
And despite what radiation transfer theorists and defenders claim, the Earth is not a blackbody by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. Look at it from space: It is a "Big Blue Marble", not a "Big Black Marble", partially covered by fleecy white clouds.
Of course, the Earth's surface is assumed to be a blackbody in the radiation transfer theory as applied in climate science, so even that sacrosanct (to all you believers) theory is wrong, and wrong-headed, and clearly incompetent.
Nor is most of the incident solar power in visible light, as one commenter above claims. It is only about 45% visible, about the same amount infrared, and 8-10% ultraviolet. Nor is the atmosphere transparent to incident solar radiation, as the infamous Trenberth-Kiehl "Earth Energy Budget" shows fully 67 W/m^2 out of the mean incident 342 W/m^2 is absorbed in the atmosphere. That's about 20% of the incident solar, absorbed in the atmosphere. And that is how, according to my Venus/Earth findings, the atmosphere is REALLY warmed, to its stable global mean, not from the surface at all. (And of course, that is how all the other massive atmospheres in the solar system are obviously warmed, for their clouds absorb all of the incident solar before it can reach those other planetary surfaces, and all of them show a negative lapse rate structure, just like Earth does. That the troposphere might be warmed by incident solar, not from the surface, was the first great hole I found in the consensus theory, and again, my Venus/Earth comparison proves it is so--to any competent physicist, in my professional opinion.
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Democratic Party Authorities Are Acting Criminally to Suppress the Truth About Climate
The wuwt site has a post on "blowback" to the execrable effort by Democratic state attorneys general (AGs) and other Democrats in the Obama administration to make criminals out of "climate skeptics". My response:
You should all send a harsh letter to your local newspapers (and yes, to your congressional representatives, but the media are the main thing), and include the graph comparing the temperatures in the atmospheres of Earth (with 0.04% carbon dioxide) and Venus (with 96.5%) provided in my 2010 post, "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect". Tell them, don't ask them, to show the American public that even a runaway carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere (from 0.04% to 96.5%) has no warming effect at all upon the global mean temperature, at any level of the atmosphere, over the full range of pressures in Earth's troposphere. The only thing that affects that global mean temperature is the distance of the planet from the Sun (the graph I provided takes account of that, and shows that the curves for Venus and Earth are essentially the same, despite the huge difference in carbon dioxide in the two atmospheres).
You need to impress upon the media and your political representatives that the situation is NOT "normal", not due to the usual differences of scientific opinion, but that the consensus "climate science" is NOT REAL, a general scientific incompetence is behind the current POLITICAL "debate", and all of our supposedly most authoritative, and trusted, institutions have been suborned by this mass delusion.
It is useless to say things like "climate change MAY be real and is probably partially due to anthropogenic causes". It is incompetent to ignore or dismiss my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison.
Monday, August 22, 2016
The Continuing Enchantment of the Big Black Marble
The "lukewarmer" wuwt site has a post by fellow lukewarmer Christopher Monckton, purporting to derive the CO2 "climate sensitivity" by no-doubt-settled science (theory, that is). My response:
Lukewarmers like Monckton and Anthony Watts believe in the radiation transfer theory. I don't. As I wrote just a few weeks ago (June 30th), in the post "It Beggars the Imagination", "There are other obvious weaknesses in the radiation transfer theory ...but the main one is this error of making everything a blackbody or a quasi-blackbody, mitigated only by a fudge factor called the 'emissivity factor'."
I won't quote further, or at length, from what I wrote before. I will merely point out that Monckton's exposition of consensus theory assumes not only that the Earth's surface emits as a blackbody surrounded by vacuum, but that the so-called "emission level" in the atmosphere does also.
He says that 97% of the Earth's albedo, or reflected fraction of solar radiation, is due to clouds, not the Earth's surface. That is the same as saying the surface reflects relatively little, and is of course consistent with calling the Earth's surface a blackbody--as the radiation transfer theory assumes--but it is belied by looking at the Earth from space. The Earth does not look like a dark object (a black body) partially covered by bright clouds; it looks like "a big blue marble"--remember? One can see the landmasses, and their colors, clearly from low-earth orbit. It is simply NOT a blackbody, and cannot emit as one. (One might, and perhaps should, also question what fraction of Earth's clouds do not reach as high as the "emission level"--about 5km altitude--since Monckton subtracts the full value of the albedo from the incident solar intensity, and thus assumes all clouds rise higher than that "emission level"; but I don't know the precise answer, and it is of lesser importance than the "blackbody earth" error I want to emphasize.
When Monckton also says the emissivity of the "emission level" in the atmosphere is 1, that defines it as a blackbody also. This only underlines what I wrote in that "It Beggars the Imagination" post, that the theory assumes(!) every level, including the surface, is a blackbody or a quasi-blackbody. Monckton says there are two blackbody levels (and conveniently, just those he is interested in).
The obvious reason for such a ridiculous assumption, as I have written for years now, is that the scientists "measure" what they think are the radiation levels in the atmosphere, at the various levels, when what they must REALLY be doing is measuring the TEMPERATURE, misinterpreted as the equivalent blackbody radiation intensity.
I knew this must be the case years ago, when I realized the "radiation" "measured" coming off the Earth's surface was just that which would be emitted by a blackbody at the same temperature as that surface; but seeing it claimed by Monckton that the "emission level" is also essentially a blackbody drives home the point that the radiation transfer theory is fundamentally unsound, with local temperature responsible for the "radiation" being measured, not vice-versa. (And again, radiation transfer theorists are comparing the Earth's surface to a blackbody SURROUNDED BY VACUUM, which can only give off heat by radiation; while of course, the Earth's surface is surrounded by atmosphere, and heat is lost there by conduction and convection, as well as by radiation--so the whole idea is stillborn, unworkable according to basic physics, i.e., essentially by definition).
Again, it beggars the imagination, that even the "lukewarmers" (the heroes, to so many lay "climate skeptics") should be so enamored of the false radiation transfer theory (which is also disproved by the "global warming pause" of the last nearly 20 years, but an unwary layperson would hardly know it from the continued devotion to the dogma (or propaganda) of the "settled science", which is not science but only mass delusion).
Lukewarmers like Monckton and Anthony Watts believe in the radiation transfer theory. I don't. As I wrote just a few weeks ago (June 30th), in the post "It Beggars the Imagination", "There are other obvious weaknesses in the radiation transfer theory ...but the main one is this error of making everything a blackbody or a quasi-blackbody, mitigated only by a fudge factor called the 'emissivity factor'."
I won't quote further, or at length, from what I wrote before. I will merely point out that Monckton's exposition of consensus theory assumes not only that the Earth's surface emits as a blackbody surrounded by vacuum, but that the so-called "emission level" in the atmosphere does also.
He says that 97% of the Earth's albedo, or reflected fraction of solar radiation, is due to clouds, not the Earth's surface. That is the same as saying the surface reflects relatively little, and is of course consistent with calling the Earth's surface a blackbody--as the radiation transfer theory assumes--but it is belied by looking at the Earth from space. The Earth does not look like a dark object (a black body) partially covered by bright clouds; it looks like "a big blue marble"--remember? One can see the landmasses, and their colors, clearly from low-earth orbit. It is simply NOT a blackbody, and cannot emit as one. (One might, and perhaps should, also question what fraction of Earth's clouds do not reach as high as the "emission level"--about 5km altitude--since Monckton subtracts the full value of the albedo from the incident solar intensity, and thus assumes all clouds rise higher than that "emission level"; but I don't know the precise answer, and it is of lesser importance than the "blackbody earth" error I want to emphasize.
When Monckton also says the emissivity of the "emission level" in the atmosphere is 1, that defines it as a blackbody also. This only underlines what I wrote in that "It Beggars the Imagination" post, that the theory assumes(!) every level, including the surface, is a blackbody or a quasi-blackbody. Monckton says there are two blackbody levels (and conveniently, just those he is interested in).
The obvious reason for such a ridiculous assumption, as I have written for years now, is that the scientists "measure" what they think are the radiation levels in the atmosphere, at the various levels, when what they must REALLY be doing is measuring the TEMPERATURE, misinterpreted as the equivalent blackbody radiation intensity.
I knew this must be the case years ago, when I realized the "radiation" "measured" coming off the Earth's surface was just that which would be emitted by a blackbody at the same temperature as that surface; but seeing it claimed by Monckton that the "emission level" is also essentially a blackbody drives home the point that the radiation transfer theory is fundamentally unsound, with local temperature responsible for the "radiation" being measured, not vice-versa. (And again, radiation transfer theorists are comparing the Earth's surface to a blackbody SURROUNDED BY VACUUM, which can only give off heat by radiation; while of course, the Earth's surface is surrounded by atmosphere, and heat is lost there by conduction and convection, as well as by radiation--so the whole idea is stillborn, unworkable according to basic physics, i.e., essentially by definition).
Again, it beggars the imagination, that even the "lukewarmers" (the heroes, to so many lay "climate skeptics") should be so enamored of the false radiation transfer theory (which is also disproved by the "global warming pause" of the last nearly 20 years, but an unwary layperson would hardly know it from the continued devotion to the dogma (or propaganda) of the "settled science", which is not science but only mass delusion).
Climate Science and the Vampire of Societal Influences
The klimazwiebel site has a post, "What Future For Science?", and the answer to that question appears to be "societal influence" and sociology in particular. My response:
"science...has lost its innovative role in solving problems for society"
My response: That statement muddles the fundamental distinction that has to be made between SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE--"problems for society" are SUBJECTIVE accounts, while the findings of science are OBJECTIVE.
"...science being left to itself, operating under a mandate that is not responsive to societal demands"
My response: "Societal demands", being subjective (and divided and divisive/or often wrong, like the current climate alarmism) CANNOT (and MUST NOT ATTEMPT TO) rule science (see below, about "finding the truth").
"does science strive to find something we could call truth?"
My response: Yes, by definition. Any "scientist" who does not strive always to find the truth (and the current generation of climate scientists is not--see my climate science posts on my blog) is NOT doing science. There is today no valid "global climate" science (i.e., a true science of the global mean surface temperature and how and why it varies) and NO COMPETENT CLIMATE SCIENTISTS (and thus, it should go without saying, NO COMPETENT GOVERNMENTAL OR SOCIETAL CLIMATE POLICY POSSIBLE).
"science will be made more reliable and more valuable for society today not by being protected from societal influences but instead by being brought, carefully and appropriately, into a direct, open, and intimate relationship with those influences."
My answer: The politicization of climate science, and the Leftist agenda of coercing everyone to believe in the false science, obviously shows that "societal influences"--in this case, politics--are not making climate science better, they are only openly promoting tyranny and the suppression of critical scientific thinking and freedom of speech itself (the Democratic party in the U.S. is now obviously a criminal conspiracy, with its calls to treat "climate skeptics" as criminals).
"But many other branches of science study things that cannot be unambiguously characterized and that may not behave predictably even under controlled conditions — things like ... the earth’s climate. Such things may differ from one day to the next, from one place or one person to another. Their behavior cannot be described and predicted by the sorts of general laws that physicists and chemists call upon, since their characteristics are not invariable but rather depend on the context in which they are studied and the way they are defined."
My answer: That statement is so bad, it is "irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial", as Perry Mason would say. It basically says that earth's climate (and all those other examples mentioned in the text) CANNOT BE STUDIED SCIENTIFICALLY, or equivalently, THERE IS NO TRUTH TO BE FOUND IN THEM. And for sociologists, I would further state: TRUTH MEANS OBJECTIVE TRUTH, not subjective (e.g., sociological) categorization and feelings/emotional biases.
"science...has lost its innovative role in solving problems for society"
My response: That statement muddles the fundamental distinction that has to be made between SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE--"problems for society" are SUBJECTIVE accounts, while the findings of science are OBJECTIVE.
"...science being left to itself, operating under a mandate that is not responsive to societal demands"
My response: "Societal demands", being subjective (and divided and divisive/or often wrong, like the current climate alarmism) CANNOT (and MUST NOT ATTEMPT TO) rule science (see below, about "finding the truth").
"does science strive to find something we could call truth?"
My response: Yes, by definition. Any "scientist" who does not strive always to find the truth (and the current generation of climate scientists is not--see my climate science posts on my blog) is NOT doing science. There is today no valid "global climate" science (i.e., a true science of the global mean surface temperature and how and why it varies) and NO COMPETENT CLIMATE SCIENTISTS (and thus, it should go without saying, NO COMPETENT GOVERNMENTAL OR SOCIETAL CLIMATE POLICY POSSIBLE).
"science will be made more reliable and more valuable for society today not by being protected from societal influences but instead by being brought, carefully and appropriately, into a direct, open, and intimate relationship with those influences."
My answer: The politicization of climate science, and the Leftist agenda of coercing everyone to believe in the false science, obviously shows that "societal influences"--in this case, politics--are not making climate science better, they are only openly promoting tyranny and the suppression of critical scientific thinking and freedom of speech itself (the Democratic party in the U.S. is now obviously a criminal conspiracy, with its calls to treat "climate skeptics" as criminals).
"But many other branches of science study things that cannot be unambiguously characterized and that may not behave predictably even under controlled conditions — things like ... the earth’s climate. Such things may differ from one day to the next, from one place or one person to another. Their behavior cannot be described and predicted by the sorts of general laws that physicists and chemists call upon, since their characteristics are not invariable but rather depend on the context in which they are studied and the way they are defined."
My answer: That statement is so bad, it is "irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial", as Perry Mason would say. It basically says that earth's climate (and all those other examples mentioned in the text) CANNOT BE STUDIED SCIENTIFICALLY, or equivalently, THERE IS NO TRUTH TO BE FOUND IN THEM. And for sociologists, I would further state: TRUTH MEANS OBJECTIVE TRUTH, not subjective (e.g., sociological) categorization and feelings/emotional biases.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
It Is a Test, World
The question is, how to make people--especially "experts", and all those who follow them unquestioningly, as though they really were expert--get it into their heads that they are not thinking straight?
I cannot, as a hard scientist, take any part of climate science seriously. The very "global temperature" data on which all of it depends is constantly being revised, and always to make the "global warming" more "certain" and more "unprecedented". The systematic, always biased adjustments, and continued, late reformations of the temperature record, tell me and any competent scientist it is a lie, plain and simple, told to affirm and defend a delusion, nothing more. The atmospheric radiation transfer theory is founded upon the sand of a "blackbody" Earth, which imposes a gross violation of the fundamental law of conservation of energy from the very beginning of any consideration or debate, and the simple Venus/Earth temperatures-vs-pressure comparison proves there is no "global warming CO2 greenhouse effect" at all. The "experts" are reduced to averring, as holy "consensus", that heat energy escaping from the Earth's surface can be "trapped" by CO2 and transferred, against the ever-present and all-governing temperature gradient, as reradiated radiation ("backradiation"). It is a lie.
And after a century of supposed global warming, the "global mean temperature" today, as prescribed by current "expert" machinations, is still below what the Standard Atmosphere indicated it was a century ago. And the Standard Atmosphere is precisely confirmed by that Venus/Earth comparison, and so reveals--almost effortlessly--the blatant lie, or dogmatic delusion, of "global warming".
And the wider, non-scientific world is going insane, with the Left intent upon coercing the world into obedience to its delusional dictates, and the U.S. Presidential candidate on the "Right" being outright rejected, by the Right itself (not to mention, by the Left)--because he insists upon telling the truth, and they all find the truth too harsh for their tender ears.
People need to let go of personal prejudices, and look for the truth. Ask yourselves, who is telling the truth, and who is hiding it? That is the test, for the whole world, now; can people do that? Will they, or will they not, face the truth? Will you, or won't you? That is the simple test.