Climate According to Weathermen

I don't feel there is anything of scientific value (other than as illustration of scientific incompetence of the "experts", and mass delusion on the part of the public) in the ongoing political climate debates, but in the interest of informing the many who still do not understand the most basic underpinnings of the debate (or war), I have made the following response, on the American Thinker site, to an article on statements about climate change made by TV weatherman Al Roker:

Roker is a purveyor of weather on TV, a performer and entertainer. A weather propagandist, if you will. He is like the weathermen on the Weather Channel, who you can watch present the weather -- around the nation, and even around the world -- in a hyped, overwrought or biasedly enthusiastic manner, ever hour of every day.

If you want to have a serious discussion of climate, climate change, or global warming, start with this: Weather changes, all the time. Climate does not, and global climate -- as represented by the only measurement of it that scientists have, or communicate, the global mean surface temperature -- changes least of all. "Global climate" does not change at all; the global temperature record(s) that purport to show that it does change have all been shown to be inadequate at best and fraudulent at worst. See, for example:

US Temperatures Have Been Fraudulently Adjusted

Weathermen, and climate scientists as well, think they can predict the climate by following the weather, for they have been mis-educated to think, simplistically, that "climate is just the long-term average of weather". As silly as it may sound to anyone with common sense, climate models are an attempt to predict climate change by using weather models, simplistically extrapolated far beyond their effective range in time and space.

The reality is that climate is the unchanging stage, while weather is the coming and going of transient players upon the stage. This is approximately so even for regional or local climates, and it is rigorously so for the global climate, or global mean surface temperature. I have written of this many times, for example:

True Situation in Climate Science

Just remember: Weather does not affect the climate; rather climate -- the stage upon which weather plays its transient parts -- constrains the weather, within a fundamentally unchanging environment globally.

The Truth Is Where You Find It

Many critics of the current, false, climate consensus (on "global warming", or "climate change") like to point to plate tectonics (or continental drift) as an example of a once-heretical idea that overcame the former consensus to become the central idea of all the earth sciences today. Steven Goddard has made the latest such posting, and the following is my response, based upon my own, much more "heretical" research findings:

The bottom line is, truth is where you find it, not where everyone else is looking for it. Reality is what it is, not what you would like it to be. And the truth is, the older generations of geologists--geophysicists especially--had good reason to reject continental drift: They could see no physically acceptable cause for it. And it turns out Wegener only started a revolution whose real depth and breadth only my work now encompasses. (That is why I started a blog in 2009, as one more experiment in getting recognition of a new-yet-ancient paradigm, a new frame, particularly for the earth and life sciences.) See

The True Origin of Continental Drift

The Earth's surface was, in fact, deliberately reformed, to a great design:

Challenge to Earth Scientists

The whole solar system was reformed, and reoriented (and witnessed by men on Earth, and incorporated in what are dismissed today as the earliest myths, of men worldwide):

Challenge to Science III: The "gods", the Design, and Man

And there has even been independent confirmation of the Earth design (follow the "Independent Confirmation" link here).

Why is there still continental movement? I don't know (yet--and I see no reason to hurry to explain that). I only know the reason the continents moved in the past, to their present positions and orientations (and shapes): They were deliberately moved, to a great design, the mere shattered remembrance of which has guided, even dictated, the intellectual voyage of mankind on Earth ever since.

The words, "be not quick to judge", come to mind here, and so I pass them along to you as well.

Man Vs. Gods: Designs Big and Small, and Whose Will Likely Win Out In The End

The Real-Science site has a post entitled "Politicians on Opposite Sides of Reality", which deals with the same idea as the old story of the blind men and the elephant (remember, each man only felt a different portion of the elephant, so none of them could agree upon what it was they were encountering). I respond here, from a slightly higher perspective:

Self-love (which the author bemoans as the overweening vice of mankind) is not a vice per se, because it is just a very small step away from the greater realization that it took a God to make such a wonderful being as man--unless you actively ban the idea of God, as modern scientists are enjoined to do by the "consensus" (which has been failing ever since Darwin). Still, reality is not just a matter of man and God, because the "gods", known from all the world's oldest "myths", actually existed, and in fact re-made the world and the solar system, to a coherent design, with an undying (and encyclopedic) message for mankind on Earth--and barely 20,000 years ago, as my unprecedented research has proven.

The author writes, "I am starting to think this series of winters is not a coincidence." No, nothing about the trials currently occurring among men is a coincidence. The basically ignorant and petty designs of men like Obama and the Insane Left, or the perennially clueless designs of the Conservatives, are no more adequate to address the greater design, than is climate science, to address the reality of Earth's climate. (But beware of over-thinking, or striving for the ultimate answer: The meaning of the "series of winters" of unusually heavy snows is most likely just a reminder that the globe is not undergoing runaway warming, after all--a hint, that is all, to let go of the incompetent "consensus" that has suborned all of our institutions, in favor of understanding of a more benign reality--and, of course, to hint, for one's future understanding, that it was designed, after all, and that even the "experts" have become far too free with their lazy judgments of "coincidence"). What is going on is a general testing of man, and his many divisive, and false, dogmas. There are no experts now; there are only men and women who are honest professionals, or not...competent, or not.

Solar (UV) Variation and Terrestrial Climate

"Simplify, simplify!" is the famous admonition to writers, in Strunk and White's "Elements of Style". It should equally be taught to students of physical science, as the necessary tool of every good scientist.

The following is my response to an article on "Solar Variation and Terrestrial Climate" at the climaterealists site, in which the subject of simplicity of hypotheses came up:

"Many of the mechanisms proposed at the workshop had a Rube Goldberg-like quality."

Yes -- the examples given above, and the "busy" yet strangely irrelevant "Atmospheric Structure" figure (which doesn't even include UV, but only cosmic rays and solar protons) well demonstrate the incompetence of scientists today. Obviously, if the temperature lapse rate (decreasing temperature with increasing depth) in the stratosphere is due to the decreasing effect (molecular smashing) of UV absorption with increasing depth, and the tropopause merely marks the altitude (or altitude range) of balance between the opposing lapse rates of stratosphere and troposphere, then the first hypothesis that needs to be considered is that an increase in solar UV would tend to force the tropopause (whose temperature would be a constant, -53°C) closer to the Earth's surface, thus decreasing the temperature at the surface (and a decrease in that UV would act to increase the surface temperature). Even if that hypothesis is quite wrong, it needs to be aired, and aired FIRST, in a public forum like this.

Of course, it also needs to be emphasized, yet again, that my view is that of the independent scientist who did the first proper Venus/Earth comparison of temperatures (fully 19 years after the necessary Venus data was obtained, and before any climate "expert" apparently--since it is so easy--even thought of doing it):

Venus: No Greenhouse Effect

The "Catastrophic" Origin of Climate Science and Science Fiction

I have submitted the following comment at the Bishop Hill site, where science fiction has been linked to the current climate consensus/hysteria:

Scientific hysteria is always science fiction. In fact, the scientific hysteria of the late 19th and early 20th century--when the Darwinian dogma, particularly, became the unquestionable law in science, despite the gross evidence of non-uniformitarian, large-scale processes at work in the past, that required "ice ages" (or Noah's flood, heaven forbid) or other catastrophes(!) to explain--gave emotional birth to science fiction (the flood of technological and scientific knowledge advances didn't provide the spark--it took the idea of world-shaking, world shattering energies, combined with the new idea of mankind confronting, and even harnessing, such energies). The earth and life sciences have since Darwin been stuck with that catastrophic dichotomy, of uniformitarian evolution of a world in which catastrophic forces are precariously balanced, so that a global temperature change of only 5°C, or 9°F, they say** separates the current "interglacial" period from a full-blown global ice age (which of course means the world would be in the latter, frozen state, with a mean surface temperature of 50°F, since it is 59°F--15°C--today).

**Andy Lacis mentioned this, when his paper on CO2 as the "Control Knob" for atmospheric temperature came out. He said it casually, as an accepted "fact", so it is evidently "settled science" among the academic hoi-polloi. Too bad it is childish nonsense, just like the "greenhouse effect"--too bad, because it means the radiative transfer theory, considered sacrosanct even by skeptics/deniers, is also nonsense (and no one knows how to fix it, so we mustn't talk about it in front of the children/academics). There is no climate science worthy of the name. And you have Darwin, Agassiz and H.G. Wells to blame, not Hansen (poor little, miseducated kid--and obvious science fiction fan--that he is).

Climate Science Not the Greatest Hoax, After All

I have submitted the following comment to Alan Caruba's Warning Signs site, where the subject is "The Greatest Hoax", referring to the "global warming" hysteria:

I am an independent (and therefore unwanted) physicist (64 years old, and educated before the great educational train wreck of the last 40 years, which has miseducated the last two generations of physical scientists), and I disproved the "greenhouse effect" supposed to underpin the global warming hysteria, with the definitive evidence I know is needed to correct climate science. It is not just the man/woman on the street who pays no attention, what is frightening to me is that there are no climate or atmospheric scientists competent enough, or honest enough, to listen to that definitive (and quite simple, for a scientist) evidence.

I have been saying for some time that all of our institutions (AAAS, NAS, APS, AGU, etc.) have been suborned by the incompetent climate consensus (and of course, the cheerleading media). What makes this climate hoax greater than even the insiders among the "consensus skeptics" (a.k.a. "deniers") know, is that the greater the authority of the institution, the more its subornation is tied to a religious belief in evolution theory. That is to say, they think that opposition to the global warming idea is tied to a "creationist" denial of evolution (when they don't put such "denial" down to the evil of "Big Oil corporations").

And it is, in a larger context that both they AND the skeptics don't yet even imagine can possibly be true: The bad theory behind global warming is just the tail of the dog of the general evolution paradigm, that science has hewed to since Darwin: That everything we observe in the natural world is the product of undirected physical processes, without any deliberate design as even most scientists believed before Darwin. In such a paradigm, the Earth is all too easily seen as unstable (rather than the harmonious, repeating dynamic stability man has observed throughout history), and therefore can be subject to runaway climate ("ice ages", as well as "global warming"). That paradigm is now failing, increasingly openly, as the incompetence of scientists grows, as they struggle to tack on layer after layer of theoretical "natural" processes--like the non-existent "greenhouse effect"--to their "explanations". I am the only scientist in the world, so far as I know, who really, professionally knows this, because of my discovery and verification of the "great design of the gods", the highly fragmented and misunderstood knowledge of which--passed down by the "gods" to their offspring, historical man--was responsible for all the "ancient mysteries" of mankind's most ancient religiously-held beliefs.

For Climate, All the World's a Stage

I have submitted this posting as a comment on the tallbloke site:

adolfogiurfa (March 12, 1:58 am) wrote, "There is nothing of the above without the SUN…"

tallbloke responded, "...Hans plays safe and treats solar output as constant in his thesis presentation."

This exchange is a fleeting but vital clue to a fundamental point, which I have tried to focus upon, as a result of my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison (which basically says, the global mean temperature at any given pressure level in the atmosphere depends, above all else, only on the Sun, not on atmospheric carbon dioxide, nor--most surprisingly to everyone--even on the planetary albedo). The fundamental point is, what IS climate and what comes BEFORE it? For example, those who speak of the "complexity" of the "climate system", or label the system "chaotic", are simply not focusing upon the larger picture, which is: The stage, upon which "weather" and "climate" play their parts. My small but definitive contribution to climate science has been to sweep the stage of those players and their never-ending entertainment, and show its bare simplicity. I am not a climate scientist, nor even a meteorologist, but all those with theories of climate have largely confused non-specialists--and too often themselves--with too many details, given without a sense of their proper scale in the overall picture; in other words, they mistake the forest for the trees, or they fail to frame the system, but rather consider it a roiling mass of incoherent (not well understood) processes, always on the verge of being an out of control, or "runaway", climate.

My Venus/Earth comparison--which compared Earth's Standard Atmosphere model, developed over many years of painstaking observations, with the Venus temperature- and pressure-profiles obtained on a single day (October 5, 1991)--should first and foremost be understood as confirming the Standard Atmosphere as the true, unchanging stage upon which weather and climate (or weather/climate) play their parts (or its various parts).

The atmosphere is subject to heat from the Sun and from the independently warmed surface, and the understanding I have so far gleaned is two-fold:

1) Solar forcing is primary, and vertical--it sets the stage.
2) Surface forcing is secondary, and horizontal--it drives the weather/climate.

In other words:

1) Direct heat from the Sun (in the infrared portion of the solar spectrum) fundamentally warms the atmosphere, and gravity parcels that heat, in accordance with the hydrostatic pressure distribution, into the observed vertical temperature lapse rate structure. The Sun essentially warms every body exposed to its rays, separately--you, me, the surface of the planet, and every level of the atmosphere.

2) Heat from the warmed surface (mostly ocean, on the Earth) diffuses horizontally, as it tries to escape toward space along the governing temperature lapse rate, the temperature gradient. That diffusion is huge (and the surface heating is uneven, primarily latitudinally), producing the winds, whose detailed causes range from the rotation of the planet down to local topography and land/ocean boundaries. My Venus/Earth comparison should tell everyone that the heat from the surface (which is dependent upon the albedo) has no effect upon the fundamental level of warming of the atmosphere. It basically acts to generate horizontal forces to spread the heat retained by the Earth, from one day to the next, around the planet. Those horizontal forces, nevertheless, are nicely balanced with the vertical flow along the lapse rate, so that vertical heat transport predominates at the equator and poles, while horizontal flow predominates in between, and an impressively coherent, general circulation is maintained (the details of which, I have not studied, and know little).

This is not a theory, but only the merest sketch, connecting the stage conditions, as exposed by my Venus/Earth comparison, with the resulting grand play of weather/climate.

The Stratosphere: An Indication of Design

I submitted the following comment to the bishop hill web site this morning, where the solar influence on climate was being discussed, and the variability of the Sun in its output of ultraviolet radiation was brought up. I think a wider, deeper understanding is necessary, particularly in the face of my epochal finding of a wholesale re-design of the Earth and solar system, less than 20,000 years ago:

Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun may be quite variable (and dangerous to living tissue), but it is only 8% of the Sun's power output, and is almost entirely absorbed in the stratosphere (causing the distinctive, positive temperature lapse rate there), above the troposphere and our own, (yes) protected, environment. This circumstance is not merely convenient for us, and all the life on Earth, it is indicative of design. The bottom line is, climate science is today a fool's science, and the stable Standard Atmosphere rules, not "runaway climate". Science and the world have simply been on the wrong track, and miseducated for generations, by the belief in a climate that can periodically, even routinely, crash into a global "ice age" (so why not, they childishly thought, an equally catastrophic global warming?). The vain public debates over climate science, and revelations of its fundamental incompetence, are all just a matter of false dogma in science, bred and raised to a destructive level worldwide, now biting everyone where it hurts the most.

The True Energy Balance of the Earth+Atmosphere

Update 10 March, 2012: I have realized (on my own) that my blackbody understanding was wrong, and why my physical interpretation of the facts of my Venus/Earth comparison is nevertheless correct. I have posted on this at "My Own Blackbody Error". This post no longer reflects my scientific position, and should not be taken as such.

-------------------------
UPDATE 03 March, 2012: I have obtained a better value for the mass mean temperature in the stratosphere [T(strat)] used in this article. From computerized numerical integration of the relevant stratosphere formulas (for T(h) and ρ(h)) in the 1976 US Standard Atmosphere, I found T(strat)=223.9K, not the 240K used in the article below. This does not change the analysis here or its conclusions substantially, as I will allow others to verify; it basically only means a slightly larger amount of solar absorption by the surface (from 50-52% of the incident solar, in the original article here, to perhaps as high as 54%). I also obtained a more precise mass mean temperature in the troposphere, through finer numerical integration on the computer, which merely confirms the 259.3K used here.
-------------------------

When I posted the landmark article, "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect", which fundamentally corrects climate science, in November, 2010, I hoped that other competent scientists would quickly see the validity of my contribution and use it to re-establish climate science on a sound basis, stop the insanity of a politically promulgated, false consensus, and also establish my scientific worth to the world, thus allowing my far greater discoveries to gain serious attention and the worldwide recognition they deserve.

But that has not happened. I have seen NO positive advance in climate understanding since I proved, with the definitive facts, that there is no greenhouse effect, of increasing atmospheric temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

So here is yet another advance of my own, elementary but decisive.

In my recent post, "On the Fundamental Warming of the Atmosphere", I summarized the energy taken up, from the incident solar radiation, by the Earth-plus-atmosphere system, using widely used numbers (see, for example, the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget). Based upon my simple Venus/Earth analysis, the relevant fractions are:

Incident solar energy = 100%

Solar energy reflected = 30%

Solar energy directly absorbed by surface = 50%

Solar energy directly absorbed by atmosphere = 20%

Of the 70% that goes to heating either the surface or the atmosphere, 2/7 directly heats the atmosphere, and 5/7 directly heats the surface. In the new understanding provided by my Venus/Earth comparison, the atmosphere and surface are separately and independently heated by incoming solar energy, and the governing hydrostatic temperature lapse rate structure of the troposphere moderates any inequality in their heating, with upward heat transport, "down" the temperature gradient, contributing to no further warming of the atmosphere, in my view.

The question should quickly have been taken up by any real climate experts, or competent scientists: Can the above energy balance be quantitatively validated (or invalidated)? The answer is yes, it can be validated.

The consensus claims that the radiating temperature of the system is 255K, based upon using "incident minus reflected" solar intensity in the Stefan-Boltzmann formula:

342 W/m^2 (mean incident) - 30% reflected = 239 W/m^2 (mean absorbed)

which gives a mean radiating temperature of 255K. (I am using whole numbers as much as possible throughout, reflecting the uncertainty I have seen in the numbers used by others.)

I know this 255K is wrong, and the radiating, or equivalent blackbody, temperature, is to be found from the incident radiation alone:

342 W/m^2, giving an equivalent blackbody temperature of 279K,

BUT THE CONSENSUS CALLS THIS RIDICULOUS, and everyone, from alarmists to the mildest skeptics, seems to accept the consensus radiation numbers, and believes 255K is the physical fact.

Here is what I find:

Incoming solar energy is absorbed in both the stratosphere and the troposphere, as well as by the surface. Because my Venus/Earth comparison looked at the Earth troposphere region, and got such definitive results, I first left out the stratosphere as being of minor importance, considered the troposphere the sole relevant atmosphere, and considered the following:

If we know the mean temperature of each of the two absorbing systems, atmosphere and surface, we can determine the mean temperature of the total surface-plus-atmosphere system, in the following way:

fraction of absorbed power given to atmosphere = f1 (= 2/7)

fraction of absorbed power given to surface = f2 (= 5/7)

mean temperature of atmosphere (troposphere) = T(trop)

mean temperature of surface =T(surf)

mean temperature of surface-plus-troposphere system = T(all)

where the consensus says T(all) is 255K, and I (and other critics of the consensus) say it should be 279K.

Then

f1 x T(trop) + f2 x T(surf) = T(all) (Equation 1)

Physically, this means that the fraction of the total power retained in the total system by a given subsystem, times that subsystem's mean temperature, gives that subsystem's contribution to the mean temperature of the whole.

For T(trop), I calculated the mass mean temperature of the troposphere, according to the formula:

T(trop) = Integral [T(h)dm] / Integral [dm] (Equation 2)

where h = altitude above the surface, and

dm = element of atmospheric mass,

with dm = ρ(h) dV, ρ = density and dV = element of volume,

and dV = volume of spherical shell of thickness dh, radius = Re + h
with Re, the radius of the Earth.

The following equations hold in the Standard Atmosphere troposphere:

T(h) = To x (1 - 6.5 h/To)

ln[ρ/ρ(o)] = 4.2559 x ln(1 - 6.5 h/To)

I plugged these into Equation 2 and solved it numerically, by dividing the troposphere between 0 and 11 km into spherical shells of thickness 0.2km, and found:

T(trop) = 259.3K (NOT 255K, note)

T(surf) = 288.15K, so Equation 1 becomes

(2/7)259.3K + (5/7)288.15K = 279.9K = 280K approximately.

Compare this to 279K obtained by using the Stefan-Boltzmann formula with INCIDENT mean solar intensity. I consider this a quantitative verification of my usage of the Stefan-Boltzmann formula, and a disproof of the consensus usage.

But WARNING:

If one uses 255K for T(trop)--as many do in their narratives, both consensus and skeptics--in the above equation, one gets

(2/7)255K + (5/7)288.15K = 278.7K,

an apparently more exact result for the true radiating temperature of the total system--by a mere 1.2K, however, which I suspect is well within the uncertainty of the calculation. And using 255K for the troposphere alone is inconsistent with making that the radiating temperature of the whole Earth-atmosphere system, and still makes the consensus wrong in its usage of the Stefan-Boltzmann formula, since 279K is still clearly the true effective radiating temperature of the total system, not 255K.

Even more importantly, from the use of Equation 1 it should be clear that the warming of the atmosphere must be independent of the warming of the surface, since the coefficients f1 and f2 on the left-hand side of the equation are independent of my Venus/Earth findings (they represent the actual solar power absorbed by the troposphere and the surface, as shown in the Kiehl-Trenberth Earth Energy Budget), and the above verification is thus an independent check upon my Venus/Earth conclusion (that is, it uses my conclusion, as expressed by Equation 1, with real-world numbers). So the atmosphere IS fundamentally warmed only by direct absorption of a fraction of the incident solar radiation (and the other upward heat transfers from the surface, in the K-T Energy budget, DO NOT CONTRIBUTE TO THE FUNDAMENTAL WARMING OF THE ATMOSPHERE--the incident 20% directly absorbed by the atmosphere does the job).

Now let's do the same budget calculation, but with the stratosphere properly included, so that we have an equation with three absorbing terms:

f1 T(strat) + f2 T(trop) + f3 T(surf) = T(all),

where f1 etc. are the fractions of the total absorbed radiation in each subsystem.

I do not have what I consider a definitive number for T(strat), the mean temperature in the stratosphere, so I estimated it from a graph of the TEMPERATURE PROFILE of the atmosphere, as a function of altitude (I leave it to the reader as an independent exercise, to check my work). I estimated T(strat) = 240K (+/- 5K, judging from what I could glean from a short internet search on the topic). The stratosphere absorbs ultraviolet (UV)--as much as 95% of the incident solar UV, internet sources say--and UV comprises between 8% and 8.5% of the incident solar energy, so I first took 8% to be the fraction of the incident solar absorbed by the stratosphere, leaving 12% to warm the troposphere and about 50% to warm the surface. The absorption equation becomes:

(8/70)x240K + (12/70)x259.3K + (50/70)x288.15K = 277.7K = 278K

I have provided this sample calculation to show that, given the uncertainties in the absorption numbers, one can still see that the true radiating temperature of the Earth-plus-atmosphere system MUST BE 279K, not 255K.

One can also play with the above equation (with 279K, on the right-hand side, as a physical constraint). Using numbers in the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget, the reflected solar is 107 W/m^2, which is 31.3% of the incident 342 W/m^2. This makes the total absorption, spread over the stratosphere, troposphere, and surface, 68.7% of the total mean solar, rather than the 70% I used earlier. This gives us some idea of the uncertainties involved in the numbers used by different sources.

Using a reasonable variation in the absorbing fractions attributed to each of the three subsystems of stratosphere, troposphere, and surface, and using a total absorbed percentage between, say, 68.5% and 70% of the incident solar, I found 7-8% stratosphere, 10-12% troposphere, and 50-52% surface to be the most likely range for the solar fractions absorbed by each subsystem. For example, for a total of 68.7% of incident solar absorbed, as in the K-T Earth energy budget, I found 7.5% in the stratosphere, 10% in the troposphere, and 51.2% at the surface to give particularly good results:

(7.5/68.7) 240K + (10/68.7) 259.3K + (51.2/68.7) 288.15K = 278.7K

but I consider that just a good educated guess, and about as good as one can do with the numbers provided by climate science so far.

Summarizing: My evaluation of the fundamental warming of the atmosphere, separately from the warming of the surface, and both by direct absorption of entirely different fractions of the incident solar radiation, is quantitatively verified by a correct usage of the blackbody formula (to obtain 279K for the radiating temperature of the Earth-atmosphere system).

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).

Venus: No Greenhouse Effect

Comments are closed here. Comments about this post should be made here

The flip side of the entrenched incompetence in science today is that all it takes is scientific competence to make revolutionary discoveries, or fundamental corrections to current dogma. Being a competent physicist rather than an incompetent climate scientist (which 97% of them demonstrably are), I was able recently to post an answer on yahoo.com to a question about the greenhouse effect on Venus, an update to which I give here:

Surprisingly to most, there is no greenhouse effect at all, and you can prove it for yourself.

From the temperature and pressure profiles for the Venusian atmosphere, you can confirm that, at the altitude where the pressure = 1000 millibars, which is the sea level pressure of Earth, the temperature of the Venusian atmosphere is 66ºC = 339K.

This is much warmer than the temperature at the surface of the Earth (at pressure = 1000 millibars), which is about 15ºC = 288K. HOWEVER

Venus is closer to the Sun, and gets proportionally more power from it. Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, on average, while Venus is only 67.25 million. Since the intensity of the Sun's radiation decreases with distance from it as 1 over r-squared, Venus receives (93/67.25) squared, or 1.91 times the power per unit area that Earth receives, on average.

Since the radiating temperature of an isolated body in space varies as the fourth-root of the power incident upon it, by the Stefan-Boltzmann law, the radiating temperature of Venus should be the fourth-root of 1.91 (or the square-root of 93/67.25) = 1.176 times that of the Earth. Furthermore, since the atmospheric pressure varies as the temperature, the temperature at any given pressure level in the Venusian atmosphere should be 1.176 times the temperature at that same pressure level in the Earth atmosphere, INDEPENDENT OF THE DIFFERENT LEVELS OF INFRARED ABSORPTION in the two atmospheres. In particular, the averaged temperature at 1000 millibars on Earth is about 15ºC = 288K, so the corresponding temperature on Venus, WITHOUT ANY GREENHOUSE EFFECT, should be 1.176 times that, or 339K. But this is just 66ºC, the temperature we actually find there from the temperature and pressure profiles for Venus.

[Note: The derivation of the radiating temperature above is for absolute temperature, in degrees Kelvin (K), so the 1.176 factor relates the Kelvin temperatures, not the Celsius temperatures.]

So there is no greenhouse effect. You have just proved that climate science is utterly wrong to think otherwise. This is the scandal that so many "experts" in climate science, and all the scientific authorities, will not face. Listen to the physicists that tell you there is no greenhouse effect; they know without having to go to the Venus data -- and I am one of them. The continuing incompetence on this vital point among so many scientists, for more than a century, is amazing, and tragic.

Here is a table more precisely comparing the temperatures at various pressures in Earth's atmosphere (the standard atmosphere) with the corresponding temperatures in Venus's atmosphere:


(updated 12/02/10)

My uncertainty in finding T_Venus from the graphs is +/- 1.4 K, so any error less than about 1.2 K (in the last column) is negligible. I don't know why the comparison falters slightly between 600 and 300 mb, or why it improves suddenly at 200 mb (~60 km altitude), but the Venus cloud top is given as 58 km, between the 300 and 200 mb levels.

The Venus atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide, and supposedly superheated due to a runaway greenhouse effect, yet that portion of it within the pressure bounds of the Earth atmosphere is remarkably like the Earth in temperature. This is student-level analysis, and could not have been neglected by climate scientists, if they were not rendered incompetent by their dogmatic belief in the greenhouse hypothesis. (Again, the overwhelming extent of fundamental incompetence exhibited by scientists today is the real underlying story.) This result also flies in the face of those who would say the clouds of Venus reflect much of the incident solar energy, and that therefore it cannot get 1.91 times the power per unit area received by the Earth -- the direct evidence presented here is that its atmosphere does, in fact, get that amount of power, remarkably closely. This in fact indicates that the Venusian atmosphere is heated mainly by incident infrared radiation from the Sun, which is not reflected but absorbed by Venus's clouds, rather than by warming first of the planetary surface. (It also indicates that the Earth atmosphere is substantially warmed the same way, during daylight hours, by direct solar infrared irradiation, and that the temperature profile, or lapse rate, for any planetary atmosphere is relatively oblivious to how the atmosphere is heated, whether from above or below.) This denies any possibility of a "greenhouse effect" on Venus (or on Earth), much less a "runaway" one. This has already been pointed out recently by physicists Gerlich and Tscheuschner, who have written succinctly, "...since the venusian atmosphere is opaque to visible light, the central assumption of the greenhouse hypotheses [sic] is not obeyed." Yet they are ridiculed by climate scientists, who thus behave like spoiled children who refuse to be chastised by their parents.

Update March 14, 2012: This analysis is so easy, the result so immediately amazing, and the interpretation just above so obvious to me, yet the opposition to accepting it so universal and so determined, that I was led to unconsciously accept, partially but nevertheless wrongly, the premise of incompetent critics, that my findings were invalid because I had not "corrected for albedo", or in other words had wrongly assumed the Earth and Venus atmospheres were blackbodies, absorbing all the radiation incident upon them. I inadvertently got caught up, over time, in claiming the Earth-plus-atmosphere system behaves like a blackbody (although I never claimed it absorbs all the radiation incident upon it, as a blackbody is defined to do, and as the incompetent dismissers of my analysis have determinedly, dogmatically insisted). Although this has thoroughly hindered the acceptance of my analysis, my initial approach to the problem was in fact sound (even if too simple-minded for most), and my above, initial interpretation is quite correct, and in fact unavoidable, although it is not a complete statement. The complete interpretation, which I have stressed (as a logical fact) ever since, both in comments below this article, and on other internet sites, is that the two atmospheres must DIRECTLY absorb the SAME FRACTION of the incident solar radiation. For, supposing that both atmospheres do so absorb, and are solely warmed by, the same fraction (f), and given that the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun--Venus/Earth--is (A), the governing formula becomes, for the Earth and Venus atmospheres in turn

This result is independent of the fraction f absorbed, which is why naively approaching the problem as if f = 1 nevertheless gives, without the need to even consciously consider albedo beforehand, the amazingly clear result that the temperature ratio depends only--and amazingly, quite precisely--upon the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun. Any "expert", upon seeing this amazing result, should quickly have realized it means both atmospheres must absorb the same fraction of the incident solar radiation, and be warmed only by that fraction. So I apologize for not presenting the explicit equations above sooner, for it would have saved me stumbling into error later, and embarrassing my few defenders, in my "blackbody" defense of the original analysis--but I insist my critics have all been more incompetent than I in this matter, in refusing to even consider my correct interpretation, because of what they merely assumed was a fatal error. There was no physical error in my original analysis, because the temperature ratio I obtained was an empirical fact, and the absorbed power ratio I implied from that was a logical fact (simply stated, Venus's atmosphere DOES absorb 1.91 times the power that Earth's atmosphere does, as their temperature ratio shows--and that ratio is precisely that predicted simply from the ratio of their distances from the Sun). Since the two atmospheres DO, factually, absorb the same fraction of the solar radiation incident upon them, there was, in reality, no physical reason to extend the analysis by "correcting for albedo". But I seriously underestimated the level of determined ignorance--alias incompetence--of the "experts", and dropped part way down to their level for a time.

Another way to look at the Venus/Earth data is this:

Venus is 67.25 million miles from the Sun, the Earth, 93 million.

The radiating temperature of Venus should be 1.176 times that of the Earth.

Without ANY greenhouse effect as promulgated by the IPCC, at any given pressure within the range of the Earth atmosphere, the temperature of the Venus atmosphere should be 1.176 times that of the corresponding Earth atmosphere.

The facts:
at 1000 millibars (mb), T_earth=287.4 (K), T_venus=338.6, ratio=1.178
at 900 mb, T_earth=281.7, T_venus=331.4, ratio=1.176
at 800 mb, T_earth=275.5, T_venus=322.9, ratio=1.172
at 700 mb, T_earth=268.6, T_venus=315.0, ratio=1.173
at 600 mb, T_earth=260.8, T_venus=302.1, ratio=1.158
at 500 mb, T_earth=251.9, T_venus=291.4, ratio=1.157
at 400 mb, T_earth=241.4, T_venus=278.6, ratio=1.154
at 300 mb, T_earth=228.6, T_venus=262.9, ratio=1.150
at 200 mb, T_earth=211.6, T_venus=247.1, ratio=1.168
(Venus temperatures are +/- 1.4K, Earth temp. are from std. atm)

The actual ratio overall is 1.165 +/- 0.015 = 0.991 x 1.176. It does not vary from the no-greenhouse theoretical value at any point by more than about 2%.


There is no sign whatever of a greenhouse effect on either planet. The fact that the temperature ratios are so close to that predicted solely by their relative distances from the Sun tells us that both atmospheres must be warmed, overall, essentially in the same way, by direct IR solar irradiation from above, not by surface emissions from below. Keeping it simple, the atmospheres must be like sponges, or empty bowls, with the same structure (hydrostatic lapse rate), filled with energy by the incident solar radiation to their capacity to hold that energy.

There is no greenhouse effect on Venus with 96.5% carbon dioxide, and none on the Earth with just a trace of carbon dioxide.

On Innovation in Science and Society

I have posted a short comment at Die Klimazwiebel, on the present state of climate science, and more generally on where innovation comes from and the tasks facing society in a time of vaguely-sensed revolution, whether natural or man-made.