Observation on a "Unified Climate Theory"

In the past week, a so-called "Unified Theory of Climate" has been excitedly debated on a number of climate blogs. The introductory paper can be found here. That theory has been compared by some to the procedure I used in my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison, which disproves the consensus "greenhouse effect". I want to make just a few simple observations here of the "Unified Theory of Climate", to distinguish my own, factual position, and my professional concern for physical cause and effect relationships, from that theory.

My blog is not about climate science per se, and my aim in my relatively few climate science posts has been to clearly point out the simplest, definitive evidence, which reveals an entrenched incompetence in the current, consensus theory, which is basically that of the supposed "greenhouse effect", claimed to cause an increase in the average global surface temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (supposedly due to mankind's ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels).

First, I do not claim to have a theory of climate, and I consider my Venus/Earth analysis to be a simple presentation of fact, not theory. While my mathematical procedure involved a usage of the Stefan-Boltzmann "blackbody" equation that seems to be widely derided by current climate scientists, it was a usage that was taught to me as fact in my earliest days as a university physics major (and which I physically understand as motivated by the traditional description of a blackbody as a cavity inside an object maintained at constant temperature, with only a small hole to allow radiation -- but neither convection nor conduction of heat -- to pass into and out of the cavity). And of course, the results of my Venus/Earth analysis, which are mathematically precise, confirm my usage as correct, and thus the fact I always thought it to be; in contrast to that clear confirmation, defenders of the "greenhouse effect" are not able to explain my amazingly simple finding -- that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, outside of the Venus cloud layer, is due only to the ratio of the planets' distances from the Sun, nothing else -- within their own theory. They are all reduced to dismissing it as a "coincidence"; and they don't even stop to realize that it is a "coincidence" piled upon even more unlikely coincidence, that I just "happened" to learn (at a well-respected university, the University of Colorado at Boulder) just the wrong physical "fact" that allowed me to effortlessly uncover that "coincidence", of the Venus/Earth temperature ratio being precisely and solely explained by the planets' distances from the Sun -- in perfect mimickry of a coherent physical reasoning that (in my scientific judgment) corrects and simplifies our understanding of basic atmospheric warming by the Sun.

In looking to apply my procedure more widely, by comparing temperatures in Earth's troposphere with temperatures in other planetary atmospheres, I found detailed temperature and pressure data on only one other body having pressures in the range of Earth's troposphere: the Saturn moon, Titan. The stipulation of that range of pressures is due to the fact (!) that for atmospheres equal to or greater than Earth's, the atmospheric mass is enough to impose a quite general hydrostatic condition, exemplified by a negative temperature lapse rate throughout the range of Earth tropospheric pressures. Scientists over many years developed the Standard Atmosphere model of our atmosphere, based upon the hydrostatic condition, and my Venus/Earth comparison confirmed that model as the stable state which the atmosphere is constantly trying to attain and maintain. This of course is directly counter to the modern idea of "runaway climate", which has enmeshed climate scientists in ever-more complicated "explanations" for the observations that continually challenge, rather than confirm, their theories.

I will not try to give a complete critique of the "Unified Theory of Climate", since I have not paid particular attention to the recent debates over it, nor given it any sustained study in the few days it has been in the climate news. In the following, I will assume the reader has the above-linked article relating the theory at hand, and is familiar with its basic contents.

The following illustration shows the basic equations developed in the theory.

The theory puts forth a relationship between 1) the surface temperature (Ts) of a planet or moon with an atmosphere, 2) the temperature (Tgb) of a so-called "gray body" reference body, at the same distance from the Sun as the planet or moon, but having no atmosphere, and 3) the surface pressure of the planet or moon being considered. The first equation above gives the definition of Tgb, according to the authors of the Unified Climate Theory (Nikolov and Zeller).

My first observation is that the equation for Tgb can be immediately simplified. This simplification is shown in the second and third lines above. The equation contains two physical parameters (the "gray body" albedo αgb, and the emissivity ε) which are in fact the same for all of the planetary bodies considered by the authors. The factor containing these parameters, which is thus a constant, can be taken out from under the fourth-root expression containing the incident solar intensity S0. Also, the parameter added to S0 -- cs -- is a constant, which is so much smaller than S0 for all of the planetary bodies considered, that it can be removed entirely, as shown in the third line above.

This simplification allows us to see that the use of a "gray body" temperature, involving the albedo and emissivity of the planetary body, is irrelevant to the theory as presented, for the same value of albedo is used for all the bodies considered in the paper, and the same emissivity. The only variable parameter is the incident solar intensity, which depends upon the distance from the Sun. (σ, of course, is just the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, a fundamental physical constant.) The fourth line above shows the definition for the temperature of a "blackbody", and thus reveals that the "gray body" temperature is just a constant times that blackbody temperature. So all consideration of possible real variations in albedo and emissivity are in fact dropped out of the theory at this point.

The fifth line above shows the empirical, ad hoc relation found by the authors to hold across all the bodies they consider in their paper. The sixth line shows that this relationship can be obtained by using a blackbody temperature (with no albedo or emissivity correction) instead of the author's gray body temperature. The indicated ratio of temperatures, which they denote as NTE, is just multiplied by a constant (about 0.554, for the values of albedo and emissivity they use). In their theory as presented, the surface temperature can be recovered from the calculated value of NTE as Tgb times NTE; but we see we can equivalently use the blackbody temperature with an NTE that is the constant γ times their NTE function.

Either way, it should be emphasized that the functional form of NTE is not motivated by any physics, but simply by an arbitrary fitting of the planetary data to that functional form. To me, the theory stops being a physical theory at this point, and is just an arbitrary mathematical model.

Nevertheless, it appears to give good results -- which is itself a problem, because, by using the blackbody temperature, as just indicated above, I would expect them to get the same results as my procedure for comparing Venus and Earth, and they do not. When my procedure, which calls for comparing the Standard Atmosphere Earth temperature at a given pressure with the temperature in another atmosphere at the same pressure, is applied to the surface of Titan (using a slightly different surface pressure I found, 1,452 mb, rather than their indicated 1,467 mb), I obtained a predicted Titan surface temperature of 99.9K, or approximately 100K, whereas the true surface temperature was 93.2K, or nearly 7K lower than my procedure predicts. But Nikolov and Zeller, the authors of this theory, claim no error at all (93.7K predicted, versus 93.7K true surface temperature). I obtained the Titan data here.

The physical data they use differs from my (limited) data, by 1 or 2% in some cases. I have just mentioned the slightly different values they used for the surface pressure and surface temperature of Titan. Their value for the surface pressure of Earth is some 2.4% lower than that given in the Standard Atmosphere, which I used, and it doesn't seem to be due to their using a slightly different surface temperature in the Standard Atmosphere equations. (They write that the surface temperature of the Earth is 287.4K, while the Standard Atmosphere, for nearly a century, has consistently used 288.15K.) So I wonder if they have effectively calculated their own version of the Standard Atmosphere rather than the presently official 1976 American Standard Atmosphere, and if so, on what basis did they see fit to do that on their own. The thought arises -- and I can only bring it forth, not as a suspicion but only a logical possibility -- that they might have done so, inadvertently or otherwise, to make the data more exactly fit their theory. I would not bring up the possibility, except that, as I already noted, their theory is not entirely a physical one, as my Venus/Earth comparison is physically reasoned -- using only known facts (or once-known, when I was a student) -- but accomplished through arbitrary mathematical modelling of a "best fit" function. Again, this is just my dispassionate consideration, not an accusation or insinuation of dishonesty on their part.

"There are more things..."

A small example of the largely vain public debates about "proper" science today is provided at wattsupwiththat.com, focusing upon one individual who rants about climate change, against the "deniers", in the media. The scientific skeptics of the climate "consensus" are outraged that they should be wrongly linked with "creationists" by that individual, and others. Here is my view on the matter:

It doesn't matter what subject you exclude from "proper scientific discussion", the mere fact that you do so means you need to first learn one thing above all else, if you even hope to become a true scientist, someday:

"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio."

There are even objective and compelling reasons behind the ancient belief that the world was flat (no, it is not literally, physically true, but as a cogent metaphor, for an anciently-organized and literally overwhelming system, of physical facts (!), hidden for all of recorded history behind the misdirected concreteness of ancient myth and other earliest religious dogma, there is a world -- even a universe -- of understanding behind it).

Until you learn Shakespeare's immortal warning, above, once and for all, you are only a child, playing childish games in the nursery. As Isaac Newton famously said of himself:

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

I have learned enough to actually swim in that (literally) great ocean -- where no one, scientist or not, has ever swum before. And you can too, if you forsake petty squabbling about what is "proper" to investigate scientifically, and determinedly seek the truth -- physical, mental, or spiritual -- wherever it leads.

An Inevitable, Unavoidable "Learning Moment"

I received a comment this morning on my "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" page, the point of which was reaffirmed by a brouhaha at WUWT (wattsupwiththat). Instead of submitting a comment there, I offer the following here:

This is just another "learning moment" (an emotional clash of character and personality) due to the entrenched incompetence in climate science (and beyond), which has the proponents on either side of the "greenhouse" debate merely repeating themselves ad nauseam (i.e., to the point of mutual disgust). That incompetence is really just the following of (rickety, shaky, wrong-headed) theory over experimental fact.

The fact is, there is no greenhouse effect, of increasing atmospheric temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The lapse rate rules over the radiation transfer theory, not because it is more "fundamental", but because it fits the facts of two planetary atmospheres. The radiative transfer theory, which allows the consensus greenhouse effect, is simply wrong in its application to the atmosphere, according to those facts; it misses the real thermodynamics of the atmosphere entirely. And those who look closely at it find that it violates the laws of thermodynamics, quite apparently because it misuses the blackbody concept. When Willis Eschenbach says (on the above-linked WUWT site), "As a result of absorbing that energy [so-called backradiation] from the atmosphere, the surface is warmer than it would be in the absence of the GHGs", he doesn't see (and believers in the greenhouse effect refuse to see) his words are nonsense. A commenter to my blog known as "truthseeker" just directed my attention this morning to an article containing this statement: "GHG theory postulates back-radiation from cold atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by the surface, heating it more. This violates Second Law of thermodynamics (energy can only be transferred from hot to cold bodies), leading to creation of energy, a violation of the First Law of thermodynamics (energy conservation), and the impossible perpetual motion machine AGW promoters need to cause eternal global warming." I replied to truthseeker, "He is saying that the energy imparted by the 'backradiation' is re-emitted by the surface at a higher temperature, the temperature of the surface. He is right, this is an obvious error in the consensus theory, which consensus scientists refuse to understand. To me, the most obvious and fundamental violation is that of the conservation of energy, which I pointed out in my blog post, 'Runaway Global Warming is Scientific Hysteria'."

There is no way out of this mess until each defender of the consensus greenhouse effect comes to realize that he/she is simply wrong about it. And there is the rub: the belief of the overriding majority of scientists is wrong, and MUST be overthrown, by scientists themselves and using a proper scientific understanding of the most basic physics.

Continuing Vain Climate Debates

The blogosphere continues to waste time on vain, incompetent climate debate on the part of non-experts, due to the failure of "expert" climate science, most recently on the WUWT site. The three most pernicious and most basic misunderstandings that plague such debates, especially among the consensus "experts", as brought to light by my Venus/Earth comparison, are:

1) Equating the "greenhouse effect" with the atmospheric absorption of infrared radiation. The latter is a physical reality, but the former is an hypothesis. When believers (and that is the only proper term for them, "believers") in the greenhouse effect go through their calculation that purports to prove that the "greenhouse effect" is responsible for warming the surface by 33°C, above what it would otherwise be, they are really (and rather obviously) arguing that the PRESENCE OF AN ATMOSPHERE is responsible for that added surface warming. But the real question is, and always has been, how is the atmosphere warmed, not how is the surface warmed by the Sun and THEN how does the surface warm the atmosphere? The unquestioned assumption of the latter question is what drives the nearly universal belief that planetary albedo affects the atmospheric temperature, which greenhouse believers use to incompetently dismiss my definitive factual findings.

2) Believing (again that word) that the atmosphere is warmed by heat from a warmed planetary surface, rather than by direct absorption of radiation from the Sun. This, in spite of the fact that even among consensus climate scientists, it is generally understood that at least 15% of the incident solar radiation is directly absorbed by the atmosphere. So, when pressed, they will admit that the atmosphere is partly warmed by direct absorption of solar radiation, and partly by heat from the surface (by both surface-emitted radiation and by convection and conduction). And so the complications begin to multiply for them, and for anyone trying to follow their explanations. The only reason they believe that the surface warms the atmosphere is because it is warmer than the atmosphere, so heat must flow upward from the surface and they cannot imagine that upward heat flow does not further warm the atmosphere. And they are right, in a limited sense: Heat from the surface can and does warm a part of the atmosphere -- but only transiently and locally (as within a temporary, rising column of warm air, or within a few meters of a "hot spot" surface, such as a fire or urban pavement). They fail to keep in mind that the general atmospheric temperature gradient, from surface to top of troposphere, is well explained by the vertical pressure distribution due to the weight of the atmosphere itself (in the governing hydrostatic condition of the atmosphere, the pressure at a given altitude is due to the weight of the atmosphere above that altitude, and the temperature necessarily increases with the pressure). There is no need to hypothesize a general atmospheric warming by surface heating, but it is an ingrained, unquestioned belief today among most scientists, and thus among their followers. And of course, my Venus/Earth comparison now makes it obvious that the atmosphere is fundamentally warmed ONLY by DIRECT absorption of incident solar radiation, specifically a portion of the infrared solar radiation (and the same portion, for both Earth and Venus). Since the visible portion of the Sun's radiation is not responsible for warming the atmosphere, the fact that Venus reflects 70% of the visible light from the Sun while Earth reflects only 30%, makes no difference in the warming of their atmospheres, and thus there is no albedo effect in the observed Venus/Earth temperature ratio, in my simple comparison.

3) Believing that the surface of the Earth is a blackbody. In the words of (for example) Raymond Pierrrehumbert, "The ground below the atmosphere emits as an ideal blackbody, characterized by the Planck function B." This belief underpins the radiative transfer theory and those who interpret the spectra of radiation emitted upwards from the top of the tropopause as "proof" of the greenhouse effect. The fact is, those spectra merely show the PRESENCE of water vapor, carbon dioxide and the other infrared-active gases in the atmosphere, and measured variations of those spectra over time can show the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- but they do NOT show increased atmospheric warming due to the increase in carbon dioxide, that is merely an unsupported assumption (particularly during the periods, such as 1940-1970 and the last decade or so, when the carbon dioxide has increased substantially, but the global average surface temperature has not increased at all, or even gone down, so that the assumption is not just unsupported, but positively invalidated). The question everyone should ask themselves is, is there any reason to believe that upward heat transport (including by absorption and emission of "upwelling" infrared radiation), along a temperature gradient governed solely by the hydrostatic distribution of pressure, will actually further heat the atmosphere; currently, in the present childish "scientific" debates, almost everyone laughs and says, "of course", but the real, factual answer, again provided by my Venus/Earth comparison, is "NO". In the absence of a change in the intensity of incident solar radiation, the temperatures at the top and bottom of the troposphere are held constant (as indicated by the empirically-determined Standard Atmosphere, which is confirmed by my Venus/Earth analysis), and increasing carbon dioxide or water vapor can only increase the efficiency, or speed, with which local temperature variations are dissipated by heat transfer, both vertically and around the planet (the temperature on Venus's dark side is just as hot as on the sunlit side, due, I claim, to the nearly pure carbon dioxide atmosphere there).

Christopher Monckton: Incompetent Skeptics

Recently, my earlier post, "Blackbody: The Key Error in Climate Science", was attacked by Christopher Monckton (a widely-known "lukewarm" believer in the consensus greenhouse effect), on Jo Nova's site. I became aware of this about a day later, but since I had not been contacted by anyone (in particular, either Jo Nova or Monckton) to participate, and no one had submitted any comments about it to my "Blackbody..." page, I did not, and will not now, go there to respond. I generally only answer comments made directly to the relevant posts on my own site, or e-mailed to me at newhdh@netzero.com. I will just say here that Monckton's points (which I came across during a casual internet browsing session just now, some four days after their posting) are scientifically and logically empty, merely consensus dogma sprayed forth without even noting that my blackbody claims are confirmed by my earlier Venus/Earth analysis, which used my understanding of the proper use of the blackbody equation. His detailed attack (which I, rather obviously, consider simply wrong in its basic blackbody assertions, and wrong-headed in its use of consensus theory) adds up merely to saying that my factual finding -- that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures (particularly outside of the thick cloud layer on Venus), is precisely and solely explained by the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun (and nothing else) -- is only an amazing coincidence. This is of course pathetic, on the part of a supposed "expert". Mr. Monckton, you have not explained my (yes, amazing) results with your irrelevant theoretical cant; you are miseducated, and incompetent in neglecting the factual results of my Venus/Earth analysis (you merely misdirected attention from them -- even Jo Nova had just enough integrity to quote from my blackbody article, "This of course was confirmed in my previous Venus/Earth analysis..."). In your attack upon me, you accomplished nothing real; you merely pontificated before an audience that accepts everything you say as gospel. There is no greenhouse effect as promulgated by you and the consensus, and your supposed expert knowledge about using the blackbody equation is worth precisely nothing, against the facts I have brought forward in my Venus/Earth analysis. Your loyal followers are ill-served by your dogmatic defense of the greenhouse effect, against those definitive facts.

How To Save Science

The "Climate Etc." blog of Dr. Judith Curry has a post on the fundamental problems with peer review. Instead of adding a comment there, I offer the following:

Scientific fundamentals like peer review are broken because science has not been self-correcting, but figuratively adding epicycles to planetary circles, for a long time, so that incompetence proliferates instead of the expertise that is advertised and expected. Materialistic scientism (dogmatically opposed to religion and, by false logical extension, to a higher meaningful reality than the merely physical) is leading science on a dead-end street; the "undirected evolution" paradigm is a failure, but that is largely unknown, especially among self-proud, cloistered academics. I am already showing the way to correct science--by identifying and focusing upon the definitive evidence that disproves key scientific errors of understanding. All scientists have to do is be willing to have even their favorite theories and supposed understanding undone, when the definitive facts say so. Science should be organized learning, first , last and always, not memorized, ritualized explanation.

Recent Responses to Consensus Defenders

Followers may be interested in recent comments I have fielded from climate consensus, or greenhouse effect, defenders.

Here is my latest response on my "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" page.

Here you can find my response to another inane critic, on Climate Etc (although you will have to look for my name).

You can see those dismissing me are clearly incompetent, obviously because they refuse to take any fundamental criticism of the consensus seriously. If they are competent otherwise, they cannot be trying very hard to make sense on this subject.