Convection Is Instability and Does Not Rule

Believers in the global-warming "greenhouse effect" (of increasing temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, CO2) keep coming back to the idea that convection rules in the troposphere, and provides for the "adiabatic" lapse rate that really controls the global mean surface temperature. A commenter at wuwt wrote yesterday that "It is a fact that greenhouse gases increase convection cooling which reduces the lapse rate. Hot air rises which causes colder higher air to fall. That is convection cooling." My response:

So-called "convective cooling" does not take place over the full range of the troposphere at once (it comes under the general heading of "localized, transient weather"), so it cannot change the lapse rate over that full range (which means it cannot do it at all)--in fact, it can only act, insofar as it is able, which is not much, to destabilize (destroy) the lapse rate structure; but my 2010 Venus/Earth temperatures comparison shows that there is no such destabilization--and no global warming "greenhouse effect" due to increasing atmospheric CO2--all the way from 0.04% CO2 (Earth) to 96.5% (Venus). The empirically determined Standard Atmosphere, which the Venus/Earth comparison precisely confirms, indicates the specific heat (Cp) obtaining in the troposphere (=10.5 R/2, from the defining pressure vs. temperature equation ln (P/P0) = 5.2559 ln (T/T0), with 5.2559 = Cp/R) is just 50% higher than the specific heat at constant pressure of a diatomic ideal gas (7 R/2). This is too precise and simple a relationship to be a coincidence, which is what blaming it upon the accidental concentrations of "greenhouse gases" or even just water/water vapor changes (as consensus "experts", who call it the "adiabatic lapse rate" instead of the correct "hydrostatic lapse rate", do) amounts to. Why is the effective specific heat of the tropospheric atmosphere so precisely just 1.5 times that of a diatomic ideal gas? That is the question that the many upholders of the idea that "convection rules in the troposphere" probably need to confront--so that they can finally drop that idea, because it simply is not true on the global scale (represented by the global mean surface temperature). I know this is beyond the imaginations (not to mention expertise) of anyone but really good physicists (whose thinking takes no heed of a consensus, or ruling academic theory, in the presence of definitive contrary evidence)--and I have been surprised to find none even of such physicists, since becoming aware of the global warming debate 5 and 1/2 years ago--but the Venus/Earth comparison simply demands a general rethinking of the supposedly settled physics everyone keeps spouting, without the slightest thought that they could be wrong (yet they ARE wrong, as the Venus/Earth comparison clearly shows). The sad state of the official global temperature records--which includes outright fraud on the part of the "expert authorities" behind those records--underlines the general incompetence and underlying dogmatic intransigence of all the academic theorists, that makes all the debates insufficient to uncover the true physics involved.

It's interesting, too, that Venus, with 2400 times the concentration of CO2 in its atmosphere as Earth's, has a larger lapse rate, not a "reduced" one compared to Earth's, contrary to the above commenter's claim.