The Bigotry of Radiative Transfer Believers

I received the following comment this morning, submitted to the November 2010 "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" post. The commenter was apparently too impatient to notice that comments were closed to that post a long time ago, and readers directed to submit any further comments to the May 2015 "Venus No Greenhouse Effect Comments Overflow" post.

From "Anonymous":

"I suspect you got no response because it's pseudoscience crap.

Try this instead: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/PhysTodayRT2011.pdf "

This is the work of a bigot, and an immature or easily-unhinged mind; for the Venus/Earth comparison I performed is a presentation of fact, which cannot be equated with pseudoscience. It shows that one can use the Standard Model of the Earth's atmosphere to accurately predict the temperatures in the Venus atmosphere, over the full range of pressures found in the Earth's troposphere.

That is a clear fact, that immediately and clearly indicates that the physics enshrined in the Standard Atmosphere model is the ruling physics for Venus's atmosphere as well. There are two exceedingly good reasons for this: First, Venus's atmosphere differs hugely from Earth's atmosphere, in several ways, that are each presumed by climate scientists to have their own individual effects upon the temperature, but which in reality do not have any effect whatsoever, as only the distance from the Sun is shown to account for the difference in temperature in the two atmospheres, at a given Earth tropospheric pressure.

When an entire set of supposedly potent conditions is shown to have no effect, the overwhelming probability is that none of those conditions has any effect; the alternative is that their various effects cancel one another almost exactly, and that is highly unlikely, increasingly so with the number of conditions considered, and with some supposedly having additive effect (e.g., the "greenhouse effect" of increasing carbon dioxide) while others have a multiplicative effect (e.g., the albedo, or fraction of incident solar radiation reflected rather than absorbed).

The second reason to put one's money on the physics of the Standard Atmosphere is because it is simplicity itself, compared to the "greenhouse effect". I have written about this many times over the last 6 and 1/2 years, and won't do it again for this post.

These two reasons are why, from the day I first performed the Venus/Earth comparison, I have maintained that that comparison definitively separates the competent from the incompetent among scientists studying climate theory. I always will so maintain it.

Now, I see that the anonymous commenter referenced a Physics Today paper, from 2011 apparently. And I happen to remember--without even bothering to use the commenter's link--that the January 2011 issue of Physics Today contains a paper by Raymond Pierrehumbert, steadfastly asserting the radiative "greenhouse" effect to be "unassailable". I have, of course, assailed it many times.

It is therefore obvious, to me (especially in the present intellectual atmosphere, of "true believers" in false dogma doubling down on their longtime attempted suppression of critics), that Mr. Pierrehumbert himself is probably the author of that comment. Or perhaps it is after all only an obsessively loyal follower of his cult (of "atmospheric warming by radiative transfer within it").

You will get nowhere with me, Mr. Pierrehumbert. I consider you a humbug (no, no "Dr." for you), and your radiative theory incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial to the warming of the atmosphere.