My Venus/Earth Comparison Should Not Even Have Been Needed

I received a comment (from one Chris Carter) yesterday (on this post), agreeing with, and emphasizing, my continual refrain with respect to my November 2010 Venus/Earth temperature vs. pressure comparison, that the close (or rather, precise) agreement between the Standard Atmosphere for Earth's atmosphere, and the actual profile of Venus's atmosphere over the same range of tropospheric pressures, cannot legitimately or even competently be laid to "coincidence" (as all of the critics of that comparison essentially do).

I don't want to debate with such critics; I say I am only here to inform, and I only maintain my original analysis is correct, as originally written, and definitive against the consensus "climate science" theories, of radiational forcing of global warming within the atmosphere, due to a "carbon dioxide greenhouse effect". The comparison of Earth and Venus shows there is no such effect in the real atmospheres (and Venus has 2400 times the concentration of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as does Earth), and the simple physics of the Standard Atmosphere explains why -- because, for atmospheric pressures above approximately 200 mb (as can be observed in all the planetary atmospheres), the atmosphere overall, and thus globally, obeys the hydrostatic condition, and thus behaves like an unmoving ("static"), incompressible medium (to wit, water, hence the "hydro"). That condition enforces an increasing pressure with depth in the atmosphere, and the ideal gas laws in turn mean the temperature must also increase with depth in the troposphere (which, again, exists above 200 mb in all the planetary atmospheres). This explains the simple vertical temperature "lapse rate" structure, defined in the Standard Atmosphere (and based upon many years of temperature measurements throughout the real atmosphere), of -6.5 degrees Celsius per km of altitude above sea level. (The condition is quantified by simple calorimetry, in the equation mcΔT = -mgΔh, or ΔT/Δh = -g/c, where g is the gravitational acceleration and c is the effective specific heat of the air, determined empirically.)

I am only mentioning this yet again, because the very EXISTENCE of the lapse rate structure -- obviously a global constraint upon the temperature in the atmosphere, as any excess heat will only escape "down" that temperature gradient, without affecting the temperature at any point along the way, to outer space -- should have rung a bell in the minds of competent physicists, that there can be no radiative global-warming "greenhouse effect" in the real atmosphere (despite what radiation transfer theorists and laboratory physicists observe in an enclosed tank in a laboratory, for example).

This in fact is why I did the Venus/Earth comparison in the first place, because the subject of the lapse rate structure was brought up in the internet blogs earlier in 2010 (and not by me), and I quickly understood just how powerful a contradiction of the consensus it was, and I couldn't understand why others, of even the most pronounced "skeptical" positions in the climate science debates, weren't treating it as such. I felt a quick comparison of Venus, with its almost pure carbon dioxide atmosphere, with Earth should reveal, clearly and decisively, the truth of the matter. And of course, I found the utterly precise (!) agreement that I, and I thought any competent physicist should have, expected.

So my Venus/Earth comparison wasn't really even needed. Competent scientists should have agreed that, if in fact the Standard Atmosphere model correctly represented the temperature structure of Earth's troposphere (and of course it was developed, between approximately 1850 and 1920 -- the latter date, when the American Standard Atmosphere was first officially adopted -- to do just that), it should also, and just as accurately, represent Venus's atmosphere over the same range of pressures -- modified only by Venus's closer distance from the Sun.

And it did, and always will, due SOLELY to the fundamental nature of the hydrostatic condition. It should always be remembered that my comparison was between the Standard Atmosphere, known for decades, even a century, with the Venus profile on a much later, and single day, October 5, 1991 -- showing there can not have been any global warming in Earth's atmosphere since the development of the Standard Atmosphere model, a century and more ago. This negates all the research of all the alarmist "climate scientists" of the last two generations and more (since they turned away from the Standard Atmosphere in order to chase a chimera of unstable atmospheric temperatures) -- lifetimes, and generations, of work, wasted by miseducation and incompetent physics (and the resulting degeneration of modern science itself, as the many "skeptics" of the consensus have by now well shown).

So thanks for reminding me to emphasize this critical point once again, Chris.

Quantum Mechanics and Climate: Strange Bugs In the Head

The tallbloke site has a post highlighting the introduction of quantum mechanics into the physics of atmospheric warming, by none other than Richard Feynman, who everyone rightly respects as a physicist. As it seems a popular idea now (the tallbloke post is a spin-off from the original on Hockeyschtick yesterday), here is my response:

I almost submitted a comment to the Hockeyschtick post yesterday, but decided who was I to keep others from stumbling their own way to the truth, when all I had was definitive evidence against the consensus theories and somewhat better physical insight than just about anybody with a "climate theory" (and much better than anybody, or any government, with a "climate policy"). Perhaps I was wrong to refrain as I did (but the audiences on these blogs are small, and there's the rub).

I read the referenced Feynman lecture, or the parts that were at all interesting or relevant to the climate science debates. To put it bluntly, Feynman was a poor physics instructor, overall; while his lectures were filled with golden nuggets of solid information, he wandered all over the map to get where he was going, or to get not much of anywhere at all. (I see now he was a hippie in his teaching, and his popularity probably was responsible for all those later "Physics For Poets (and other non-scientists)" courses that were offered to non-physics majors (at least in the '70s, when I taught one).

There is not the slightest evidence, in the above graph or in Feynman's lecture, that quantum mechanics is responsible, or in any way needed, for the "anomalous specific heats" (as Roger Clague calls them above -- I don't remember what words Feynman used in the lecture to describe them). Note particularly, the graph does not present the quantum mechanical prediction for the specific heats, it presents "reality" vs. the supposed "classic" ("classical"?) physics predictions. Feynman highlighted TWO "classic physics" predictions, however, for the same diatomic ideal gas -- 1.4 and 1.286. He did this by counting the number of degrees of freedom in two different ways, and applying what is known as the equipartition theorem that says each degree of freedom provides 1/2 kT in energy to the molecule. What he failed to say, or even hint at, is that you don't have to bring in quantum mechanics to do that (nor did he show that evoking the name "quantum mechanics", as he did, provided for any, much less all, of the actual points on the "reality" curves in the graph -- or as I wrote above, the graph does not present any quantum mechanical predictions). His appeal to quantum mechanics was gratuitous and fact-free, purely speculative, and I'm sure he regrets it now, as he can look down and see how you all have glommed onto it as if it were sacred writ.

Strangely, I addressed the subject, of the specific heat of the atmosphere, in my most recent blog post, "Convection Is Instability, and Does Not Rule", and it is almost like hockeyschtick ignored me (that's a joke, alright? everyone ignores me--and everybody else with different ideas--as much as they can) when I hinted at the real problem in the climate science debates: "Why is the effective specific heat of the tropospheric atmosphere so precisely just 1.5 times that of a diatomic ideal gas?" (I disagree that it is due to the accidental concentration of any "greenhouse gas", particularly either carbon dioxide or water vapor, or to convection, or "convective cooling", and I reject, for now, the very idea of a "wet" versus "dry", so-called "adiabatic lapse rate" (because, again, the difference would depend upon the amount of "wet" involved, wouldn't it, and that would vary with altitude, and thus give an unreal, non-constant lapse rate, wouldn't it?); it is the hydrostatic lapse rate, period, and the only question is why, in the formula for it (-g/c), is the specific heat c exactly 50% higher than that for a diatomic ideal gas? (Or equivalently, why is the lapse rate -6.5 K/km instead of -9.8 K/km?)

I, for one, don't believe the answer is to be found in quantum mechanics (any more than I am prepared to accept the "wet adiabatic" theory). I expect it is to be found in the proper enumeration of the degrees of freedom actually involved, in the molecules of the atmosphere, and I do not think I am making only a formal distinction with quantum mechanics--or the "wet adiabatic" crowd, for that matter--when I say that. Only time will tell.

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.

There Is Still No Global Warming Greenhouse Effect

Steven Goddard is insisting that there is a "greenhouse effect" due to IR absorption by "greenhouse gases"; he claims they impede heat energy flow from the Earth's surface upward, like a dam across a river impedes the river's flow. My response:

From the Earth's surface to the tropopause, the energy flow is governed solely by the lapse rate in temperature, which is due solely to the gravitational acceleration g and the effective specific heat of the atmosphere--completely independent of just how the atmosphere is warmed, as for example by absorption and emission of IR radiation by IR-active ("greenhouse") gases in the atmosphere. "Greenhouse gases" don't impede the energy flow upward, as--again--my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison proved (simply: it precisely--precisely--confirmed the Standard Atmosphere, which is based upon the temperature lapse rate as the governing physical condition of the atmosphere--and this, despite local and transient, as well as latitudinal, variations of the real troposphere from its precise definition in the Standard Atmosphere). Your argument is based upon a false premise, and is therefore irrelevant, immaterial, and incompetent.

Atmospheric Warming and the Tropospheric Temperature Lapse Rate

I have posted the following at the Tallbloke site, where the tropospheric temperature gradient is being discussed: The fact that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, at points of equal pressure over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures (excepting only at points inside the Venus cloud layer), is a constant that is precisely and entirely due only to the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun, IS the definitive empirical evidence--of two detailed atmospheres, and thus the largest, and clearest, experimental test--revealing the fundamental physical mechanism of warming of planetary atmospheres by direct absorption of radiative (infrared) energy from the Sun. My Venus/Earth comparison establishes: 1) The tropospheres of both Venus and Earth must directly absorb, and be fundamentally warmed only by, the same physical fraction of the incident solar energy, whose intensity varies with solar distance r as one over r-squared (in which case, as I have shown at the above link, the temperature ratio is necessarily what it is observed to be); 2) The tropospheres, especially Earth's, are not fundamentally warmed from the surface at all, as most scientists currently believe, as any such warming would cause the Venus/Earth temperature ratio to be other than what it is, due only to the solar distances of the two planets; 3) The Standard Atmosphere properly represents the stable equilibrium state of Earth's troposphere, while Venus's atmosphere is always in its equilibrium state (this means the Earth is not subject to "runaway" global warming OR cooling--meaning no "ice ages" due only to undirected physical processes, and no need for auxiliarly theories, like the physically suspect Milankovitch correlation-model theory, to "explain" them); 4) There is no "greenhouse effect", of increased global mean surface temperature, with an atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide or any other so-called "greenhouse gas"; 5) There is no albedo effect, either from the planetary surface or from cloud tops, upon the equilibrium atmospheric temperature, since the great differences in these variables for Venus and Earth have no effect upon the Venus/Earth temperature ratio (and this is also the obvious physical consequence of atmospheric warming solely by direct absorption of solar IR); and 6) the proper handling of the Stefan-Boltzmann formula in analyzing the problem of atmospheric warming (it applies only in the case of warming only by incident radiation, assumes that all absorbed radiation is transformed into heat energy, and it cannot be applied anywhere within a system in which other forms of heat transfer--conduction and convection--are occurring). My Venus/Earth comparison also shows that the temperature lapse rate structure of the troposphere predominates over all other atmospheric conditions, including night and day, that it fundamentally and strictly governs atmospheric temperatures, and that the lapse rate structure does NOT depend upon gross vertical convection, especially from the surface, since each layer of the atmosphere is directly warmed by the Sun. The term "adiabatic lapse rate" should be replaced by "hydrostatic lapse rate" (as I have consistently emphasized) to be consistent with the fundamental physics--of real gases in a gravitational field--behind it.

Like It Or Not

I have submitted the following comment to the Claes Johnson blog, where commenters are still dogmatically adhering to the common, yet--to me, and to many of my readers--now known false belief, that the Earth's atmosphere is warmed from the surface, not by direct absorption of incident solar infrared radiation:

For those who visit this site open to new, definitive facts: The lapse rate, as a basic concept, does NOT require the surface heating the troposphere. The latter is just a naive assumption and, as my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison has revealed, such surface heating exists only as weather, overlaid on the fundamental equilibrium state described by the Standard Atmosphere (which climate science incompetently turned its back on over 40 years ago). That comparison clearly and simply shows that the troposphere is fundamentally warmed only by direct absorption of solar IR radiation; there is no other physical explanation (given the great differences in the CO2, albedo and planetary surfaces of Venus and Earth) for my factual finding that the observed Venus/Earth atmospheric temperature ratio, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is due only to the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun. From that finding (completely unexpected by defenders of consensus climate theory, although it should have been discovered 20 years ago), logic dictates that both atmospheres MUST be warmed by the SAME portion of the incident solar, diluted in each case only by the planet's distance from the Sun; and furthermore, this can only be through direct absorption of that portion of the incident solar, not by heat from the surface. Like it or not, this is elementary and inescapable reasoning, and a definitive, fundamental correction to the common belief of scientists--and insisted upon here, dogmatically and without factual support, by Michele, and unquestioningly accepted by Claes Johnson--that the surface warms the atmosphere; the latter has simply been disproved by my Venus/Earth comparison. So vertical heat transfer from the surface does not fundamentally warm the troposphere; that which does not simply follow the lapse rate up through the atmosphere, without heating it, and on out to space, must only manifest locally and/or transiently, as weather (including the observed variations in the general circulation of the atmosphere). All of the posturing by the miseducated and thoroughly deluded scientists of today will not keep my Venus/Earth findings from forcing the fundamental rethinking of climate science, and the rethroning of the stable Standard Atmosphere. It is just a matter of time.

Incompetent Skeptics II: Willis Eschenbach

In the interests of openness, which is one of my prime watchwords, the following is a submission I made today to Anthony Watt's site, wattsupwiththat.com (which takes a strong "lukewarm greenhouse believer" stance), and the quick result of that submission, which I made to correct ideas being promulgated on that site, according to the definitive facts I have uncovered, and to register my displeasure at the unbridled arrogance increasingly displayed by Willis Eschenbach on the WUWT site:

Submission:

In comments following a recent post by Willis Eschenbach, that author repeatedly and arrogantly dismissed those he called "Pressure-Heads", at one point with the following words:

" ... I have clearly shown, in 'A matter of some gravity' that if there are no GHGs and the atmosphere is transparent, then no pressure or gravity mechanism, or any other method, can raise the surface above the S-B blackbody temperature.... Duh."

The following is my response, for informational purposes only, to such naive hubris:

WARNING: The following does not come from a "Pressure-Head", so empty your mind of that prejudice. Of course pressure does not determine the temperature. But in a planetary gravitational field, with input solar energy, the atmosphere DOES take on a vertical pressure distribution, described by the elementary physics of the hydrostatic condition, which determines the vertical temperature distribution known as the lapse rate structure. The empirical Standard Atmosphere is defined by that structure, and the Standard Atmosphere is confirmed as the governing STABLE state of our atmosphere, by my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison (which also corrects current climate science on a whole handful of basic physical points).

Your assumptions, in your quoted words above, are irrelevant to the real situation in our atmosphere. The REAL atmosphere absorbs 15-20% of the incident solar energy. It is NOT "transparent" to IR radiation. Duh.

In fact, the atmosphere is fundamentally warmed, and the governing hydrostatic, vertical temperature lapse rate structure maintained, by that IR absorption (not by convection, and particularly not from the surface, which is independently heated by the Sun and does NOT fundamentally warm the atmosphere--does not change the governing lapse rate structure--but only contributes to the "weather"). Duh.

Atmospheric IR absorption does not mean there is a greenhouse effect, of increasing atmospheric temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Again, there is no such effect (that is the hard, definitive fact, from the comparison of two detailed atmospheres, having hugely different concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide). Duh.

But even without the definitive Venus/Earth comparison, there are no competent scientists defending the greenhouse effect (including, in particular, you), because such defenders fail to see that the atmospheric "backradiation", from the cooler atmosphere to the Earth's surface, is, in the theory, re-emitted by the surface at its own, higher temperature--which violates both energy conservation, as any first-year physics student SHOULD be able to see in the infamous Kiehl-Trenberth Earth Energy Budget diagram, and the second law of thermodynamics. Duh.

The reason you refuse to see the obvious is because you have been miseducated to believe in the radiative transfer theory, that falsely indicates the unphysical consensus greenhouse effect. Not only is that greenhouse effect nonexistent, but the radiation transfer theory that indicates that effect must also obviously be wrong--given my Venus/Earth findings--in its assumed thermodynamic effects, and misses the real thermodynamics of the atmosphere completely. The reason for that is also clear, to me: The radiation theory starts from the assumption of detailed thermodynamic equilibrium, that is, of a strict, set temperature distribution, because it ASSUMES not only that the surface is a blackbody--the 390 W/m^2 surface emission is just the power emitted by a blackbody at the 288K temperature of the Earth's surface--but also that every differential layer of the atmosphere emits as a "gray body", i.e., as local emissivity times the Planck distribution function. These assumptions are only valid, and only formally so, in the presence of a strict, set temperature distribution. It is therefore a formal theory only, whose apparent empirical confirmation is only the EFFECT of the lapse rate structure (which provides the set temperature distribution), not the CAUSE of it, or of any real thermodynamics. This point has also been made independently by Prof. Claes Johnson, who has written that so-called measurements of downwelling and upwelling longwave radiation are really only temperature measurements, (formally) converted to equivalent blackbody radiation levels.

Incompetent (duh) and angry (duh) arguments are damaging the credibility (duh) of WUWT (duh), and other sites critical of the consensus global warming scare. (DUH)

Anthony Watts e-mailed back:

"Sorry, not going to publish this, especially with all the 'duhs'. It will do nothing but create even bigger divides."

to which I replied:

"You are creating your own divides, that is now perfectly clear (you can't take your own medicine, as doled out by Eschenbach). Duh. Nevertheless, you--and Willis Eschenbach (duh)--have been informed of the facts, which is my intent. I will put this up on my own blog, for the sake of openness."

This is merely information for readers, and not intended to evoke arguments and vain debate over speculative theories. This is just how it is, between believers in the greenhouse effect--skeptic or otherwise--and those relative few of us who know better. I don't want to be part of vain arguments, and I don't think those who have become interested in my views would want me to indulge in them.

The Greenhouse Effect: Incompetence in Climate Science

At the heart of the anthropogenic global warming (or AGW) hypothesis is the so-called "greenhouse effect", which is widely discussed on the internet (so I won't go over what is readily available elsewhere). Climate scientists have, apparently, all been taught that the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect is a long-known fact, and confirmed by overwhelming experimental observations along many lines of evidence. Physicists, however, tend to have independent opinions and more critical views (which are spread out over the range from total acceptance to total rejection). A few of the current articles, available online, by physicists critical of the greenhouse effect, are: Prof. Claes Johnson, "Climate Thermodynamics"; Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner, "On the Barometric Formulas and Their Derivation from Hydrodynamics and Thermodynamics"; and Tom Vonk, "CO2 Heats the Atmosphere...A Counter View." The first two are math intensive, while the third is more narrowly focused and clearly physical in tone. I would not ordinarily feel the need to write an article on the subject myself, but I have to discuss openly the incompetence I see being played out in many sciences, across the board. I have lately found myself posting on forums I have come across, where the physicist's view of the greenhouse effect seems to be neglected, or even haughtily dismissed by climate scientists; and I might as well say here, in my own backyard so to speak, what I have said elsewhere -- particularly because I haven't seen anyone voice my own understanding of the physics of it, in a clear, strong manner.

Putting my position succinctly, I have come to consider the greenhouse effect completely wrong, the more I have read about it. The following is basically a copy of one of my most recent posts on the subject.

The imaginary character of the atmospheric greenhouse effect is most readily seen in the energy budget diagrams that are derived from it (look up "Trenberth energy budget", or see my last post here), where the surface of the Earth is shown as emitting more energy than is provided by the Sun (the sole power source for the global climate system). This is a clear violation of the conservation of energy (never mind the "laws of thermodynamics" that others talk about), but today's climate scientists as a whole seem to have been taught otherwise, and are simply incompetent.

So forget what even the AGW skeptics who believe in the greenhouse effect are putting out, it is all flawed, as the obvious violation of energy conservation should make clear. CO2 and other IR absorbing gases cannot "trap" or even "slow down" heat transport through the atmosphere. The radiation they absorb and emit is simply heat energy, and that heat flows from warmer regions to colder, by whichever path (convection, conduction, or radiation) is available and is the most efficient.

[In fact, to make it simple, I suggest that heat radiation should probably be considered as "heat conduction by radiation," and perhaps treated as an effective thermal conductivity of the atmosphere, rather than radiation per se, since climate scientists, and thermodynamicists in general, have stumbled badly trying to deal with it as the latter. This is my own, recent idea, which I have noticed an echo of in the article by Prof. Johnson, so it is certainly not a new idea in the world of science, although the IPCC and those who believe in the greenhouse effect (including many physicists) don't seem to have heard of it. The physics behind it can be stated as, the IR radiation from molecules in a cooler region cannot be absorbed by the molecules in a warmer region, because the "cooler" IR photon does not have enough energy to excite the "warmer" molecule to its next higher energy level. Heat, including heat radiation, can only flow from warmer to cooler regions.]

The temperature profile of the atmosphere is dictated solely by gravity acting on the ocean of air and the specific heat of the air, which imposes a temperature "lapse rate" (a declining temperature) with height given by -g/c, a constant rate, where g is the acceleration due to gravity and c is the specific heat. Note that this is entirely independent of the presence of any IR absorption by gases in the atmosphere. The available heat energy must be distributed in accordance with that constant lapse rate, and IR radiation is just one pathway for the heat to be distributed. Thus, IR absorption and emission in the atmosphere can only enable more efficient (faster) heat transport through the atmosphere, they cannot trap heat, or slow it down. And as you can read elsewhere on the internet (see, for example, www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/), the evidence from climate science itself is that the co2 greenhouse effect cannot explain the global temperature record, particularly over the last ten years or so, when atmospheric co2 has substantially increased, while the temperature has levelled off or declined very slightly.

The only thing that has kept the greenhouse theory alive, even after the lapse rate was observed and explained by simple thermodynamics, has been the breathtaking magnitude of the entrenched incompetence among climate scientists. It can be traced, to a substantial degree, back to Carl Sagan's popular appeal, around 1960, to a "runaway greenhouse effect" for the extremely high surface temperature of Venus. But he was wrong (and a bad, self-serving scientist), and the lapse rate for the huge ocean of air on Venus (providing a surface pressure 90 times that on the Earth) explains that too, although again, you will find climate scientists referencing Venus to "prove" the greenhouse effect. This is not just your usual scientific discussion or genteel disagreement, then, it is the tip of a world-sized incompetence in science. Indeed, it involves a religious belief among climate scientists in the greenhouse theory, a belief up to now immune to even the clearest logical and evidential arguments.