Planetary Rotation and Temperature: "Let go, Luke. Use the Force."

The Dr. Roy Spencer site has a post on "The Faster a Planet Rotates, the Warmer Its Average Temperature". My response:

As I have pointed out many times, for example here: The Venus/Earth temperature ratio, at points of equal pressure in the two atmospheres, over the full range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is essentially explained by the ratio of their solar distances alone (and precisely so both above and below the thick Venus cloud layer), despite a number of large differences in the two planet-plus-atmosphere situations that are assumed by climate scientists and their believers to affect the global mean temperature, but don't(!). (I won't repeat them all here, but Venus has 2400 times the concentration of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as does Earth, with no effect, so the "greenhouse effect" is precisely zero.)

It is quite foolish to take the position that the supposed effects of all those differences between the Venus and Earth atmospheres simply cancel one another out, by "coincidence", entirely, and as precisely as my Venus/Earth comparison indicates they would have to do. I wrote a little about this last April, here. And adding yet another large difference, between Venus and Earth, to the list of supposed causes for their temperature difference, only makes the "coincidence" argument more ridiculous. The reality, that only solar intensity is effective, is quite clear, and quite simply explained, physically, by the hydrostatic condition, as I have written over and over again.

Now Dr. Spencer (who is well respected by the "skeptics" in the climate debates, for his satellite measurements of global temperature, showing little or no global warming) brings up planetary rotation as yet another variable supposedly affecting the global temperature. Yet Earth rotates in 1 day, while Venus rotates in 243 days--yet the Venus/Earth temperature ratio shows that huge difference, just like all the other huge differences between Venus and Earth, has NO EFFECT upon the temperature. The temperature-vs-pressure curves of Venus and Earth are the same, when just their different solar distances are taken into account, and nothing else.

So please, Dr. Spencer, and every other atmospheric or climate scientist, and every other believer in the current climate dogma: "Let go, Luke. Use the Force."

Nikolov and Zeller Again

The tallbloke site has another post on Nikolov and Zeller's "Unified Climate Theory", about a Washington Post interview with Nikolov. Their latest paper was withdrawn (by "common agreement with the authors and editors") because they used pseudonyms to get past the consensus guardians that have long made a mockery of peer review (I gave up on peer review years ago--the defense of scientific dogma is just too strong, and universal). My response (and I have made the following criticisms many times before):

“Common agreement with the authors and editors” is a whitewash. If the paper passed on “scientific merit”, then the editor should have politely explained that they needed to publish the paper with the authors’ real names, and THAT should have been done “by common agreement with the authors and editors”.

Nikolov and Zeller still don’t get it, though:

“It is simply the hydrostatic condition”,

and that has been known for well over a century, in the Standard Atmosphere model, which my 2010 Venus/Earth temperature-vs-pressure comparison precisely confirmed.

And “The results from our empirical data analysis suggest that the thermal effect of the atmosphere is analogous to a compression heating” merely confuses the transient (and local) effect of compression with the constant (and global) effect of the hydrostatic condition (most simply described as “the pressure at any level in the atmosphere is just the weight of the atmosphere above that level”). The Standard Atmosphere, as everyone should know by now (I have been pointing it out for 6 years now), is based upon the hydrostatic condition.

And the figure really does no more than agree with what my Venus/Earth comparison showed more fully and clearly, that those two planets have essentially the same temperature-vs-pressure profile, over the full range of Earth tropospheric pressures, when only their different distances from the Sun are taken into account. Mars, Moon, and Triton are useless, as the curve is vertical–hence, the “thermal enhancement” is completely indeterminate–for very low surface pressure. I have also pointed out, many times, that the surface temperature of Titan is too low, by about 7K, when compared to Earth in the same way I compared Earth and Venus, and I have given the most likely reason for that (an observed haze in Titan’s atmosphere), while Nikolov and Zeller’s theory cannot even address it (I am surprised they even show Titan as a point off the curve, not on it, since previously they have reported that their theoretical relationship–the curve–predicts precisely the surface temperature of Titan). And Venus’s planet-wide, thick cloud cover does not affect its T-P profile, outside of the clouds themselves, so continually bringing in clouds to explain global temperature variations is also wrong. Sorry, but my Venus/Earth comparison is definitive, and everyone (consensus believer or skeptical critic) will have to admit that in the end.

My Venus/Earth analysis is earlier, better, and more simply and clearly explained, by the hydrostatic condition alone (without any “compressional heating”, which is irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial). The Standard Atmosphere, over a century old, contains that, so their “new understanding” is not new; it has just been ignored, for 2 generations now, by incompetent scientists and unethical politicians bent on world dominion.

Undirected Evolution: The False Religious Dogma Strangling True Science

The wuwt site has a post on news of research suggesting that "a Mercury-sized planet" collided with Earth relatively soon after the Earth was first formed, and this supposedly accounts for the amount of carbon in and on the Earth. My response:

Both this post and most of the comments following it (the uncritical ones) are all incompetent, dogmatic speculation (i.e., speculation within the limits of current scientific dogma), not science.

The current scientific dogma, of course, is the assumption that the Earth, just like the life on it, developed through undirected evolution, through undirected physical processes alone**. The only way today's "scientists" can imagine this for the Earth is through the intervention (remember that word, boys and girls) of an ever-growing list of "cosmic accidents", like the hypothesized formation (and the amazing Sun-eclipsing orbit) of the Moon***; the coming of all that water; the development of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and so on ad infinitum (and all in the proper order, though all of them essentially "in the beginning", as far as anyone can really tell)--and of course, whatever made the Earth's orbit so nearly a perfect circle, despite all those "accidents" (and despite Milankovitch's fantasies of a perpetual motion of repetitive orbital instability).

I know better. Undirected evolution is a failed hypothesis. The true history of the Earth, and no doubt of the life on it, is one of successive designs--call it Intelligent Intervention (the "Intelligent" in "Intelligent Design" is superfluous, by the way; design requires intelligence, by definition). The "Great Design of the 'gods"" was the last one, and that is the new paradigm my research ushers in. Bye bye, undirected "evolution". Bye bye, the easy dogmas of today's earth and life sciences, which have all been falsified, although today's "scientists" refuse to hear of it.

**Don't bother claiming "natural selection" directs evolution; that is a false bootstrap, to raise up all of life's order. "Natural selection" is really just a euphemism for design--just when is life supposed to have been sufficiently developed to allow "natural selection" to direct further "evolution"? Surely not "in the beginning".

***I hope that link still works. If not, just search for "The Clockwork Moon Science Ignores", by me. Or maybe I'll put it up here on my blog.