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.