More Than a Conspiracy, More Than Climate Science

The Notrickszone site has a post on universities suppressing non-consensus climate views. One commenter derided the post as a "conspiracy" view, while another, on the other side of the climate debate, looked back to the 1950s, when, he wrote, continental drift was suppressed. My response to both sides:

Continental drift was not suppressed, just strongly argued against, because geophysicists (not geologists, but physicists) could find no reasonable physical cause for it. And no one has ever actually found the internal magma currents supposedly driving continental drift, nor have they ever found subduction actually taking place anywhere; the physics of the crustal materials involved still denies it CAN take place (i.e., lighter material diving into and below the denser material beneath it), much less that it HAS happened, or IS happening.

The truth is that it is not just climate science that fails today; all of the earth AND life sciences are in a yet-unrecognized crisis of incompetent theories, going all the way back to the rise (and consensus agreement that it was "settled science") of uniformitarianism and its most famous offspring, Darwinian (i.e., undirected) evolution.

See, for example:

The True Origin of Continental Drift

and

Challenge to Earth Scientists

So it is not a matter of just a "climate conspiracy" having taken over all of our most trusted and authoritative institutions; it is the culmination of a long-nurtured, dogmatic denial of deliberate design of our world, which has affected all of the earth and life sciences. I am the only scientist who can speak authoritatively about this, because I am the one who has uncovered and verified the re-formation and design that was imposed upon the Earth, and the entire solar system, by those who were called gods by ancient man. It was that deliberate re-formation that moved and shaped the continents, not plate tectonics. That is the FACT that no other scientific "expert" in the world will face today; too many theories, too many lifetimes of diligent but misdirected research, are at stake. The sacrosanct uniformitarian paradigm, the "undirected evolution" paradigm, is at stake. Against that, those who seek refuge in their political ideology--as if the debate were only between the enlightened Left and the reactionary Right--are the most deluded, the most misdirected in their thinking, and the most irrelevant and incompetent. But make no mistake, ALL are incompetent today, in the face of the great design I found to be the single source of all the ancient mysteries.

Standing Together: Sooner Would Have Been Better (But Still Is)

Jo Nova has a post on an "emergency meeting" this month of world leaders, apparently meant to make "backroom" deals among them in advance of the December "climate change" (a.k.a. global warming) conference. Jo commented that climate "skeptics" need to "stand together", a remark that seemed to me likely to have little effect--which would be unfortunate. My response:

The point is, there are too many "lukewarmers" and too few "deniers" (or, like me, defiers, though that means little since I have no influence on my own). The "greenhouse effect" should never have been taken seriously in climate science; it should have been laughed off the stage while still being bandied about by a few scientists, only at scientific gatherings, and never been allowed to metastasize into the public consciousness as an hysterical "meme", or sacred "scientific" commandment. You are all going to have to "stand together" with my kind, not me with yours, lukewarmers -- and that means showing some competence first of all in the DEFINITIVE evidence against the "consensus". Do not accept the "greenhouse effect", nor the "radiation transfer" theory with its "blackbody Earth", AT ALL. No more "radiative forcings"! Ban the use of "W/m^2" talking points, period, unless and until you can use them to explain, fully and precisely, why the Venus/Earth temperature ratio is due only to the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun (very precisely so, outside of the cloud region on Venus). And you will never be able to do that; the radiative transfer theory is simply wrong, because it takes the temperature in the atmosphere to be due to radiative transfer, and thus reverses the true cause and effect in the real, essentially hydrostatic atmosphere (whose set vertical temperature structure--the constant lapse rate structure--rules over all, especially the LW radiation "measurements").

Hydrostatic Vs. "Gravito-Thermal": Real Physics Vs. Latter-Day Incompetence in Science

The Hockeyschtick site has another post hyping a "gravito-thermal" greenhouse effect. My response:

This is just a rehashing of Nikolov and Zeller's "Unified Climate Theory" (N&Z), only claiming the use of "dimensional analysis methodology", presumably meaning their mysterious "Eq(10)"--mysterious because it is not deemed important enough to actually reveal it here--has physical units consistent on both sides of the equation, that refer to the physical parameters involved in the problem (and not to an arbitrary amalgamation of variables--an ad hoc fitting function--without physical consistency, as N&Z did). There is still the "atmospheric thermal enhancement" (ATE) factor, the airy reference to the "Poisson formula", and the apparently absolutely precise fitting of the global mean surface temperatures of all the considered planetary bodies to one formula, that featured also in N&Z -- and no physics involved, of course, just carefree mathematical modelling (and the claim that it "deserves further investigation and possibly a theoretical interpretation"). The Moon, Mars and Triton are practically meaningless in it, however, as the fitting function is vertical (insensitive to the pressure) for such small-to-nonexistent surface pressures as these 3 bodies possess. And they say Titan wasn't even used in the regressions, so only Earth and Venus really matter in them (and see below for my caveat on Titan). I already, nearly 5 years ago, compared Earth's Standard Atmosphere to the temperature vs. pressure profile of Venus, not at one point (the planetary surface) but over the full range of Earth tropospheric pressures.

None of this present hype goes beyond, or even rises to the level of, my Venus/Earth comparison as the definitive correction of the false physics embraced by climate and atmospheric science today. None of it rises to the level of the utterly stable Standard Atmosphere, which was known to everyone before scientists turned away from it to pursue the chimaera of "runaway global warming". None of it rises to the level of understanding, gained from simply looking at the temperature and pressure profiles of all the planets, that they all have the same form: Above approximately 200 mb pressure, they all have the negative, constant vertical temperature lapse rate structure that Earth has, and which is due simply to the hydrostatic condition: that the pressure at any level in the atmosphere is just the weight of the atmosphere above that level. The Standard Atmosphere is of course based upon assuming the hydrostatic condition.

But none of the other planetary bodies compares so precisely with Earth as does Venus, where only the ratio of solar distances is needed to explain the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, at any given pressure. So the "gravito-thermal" theory glosses over (simply does not recognize) any other variables that are necessary to explain the temperatures in the other planetary bodies considered. The comparison of Earth's Standard Atmosphere with Titan, for example, as I compared Earth with Venus, shows that the near-surface temperature of Titan's atmosphere is too low, by about 7K (while near the tropopause, around 300 to 200 mb, it comes into close alignment with Earth's atmosphere, corrected only by the effect of its different solar distance); the modelling touted here, and that done by Nikolov and Zeller, can't even recognize that awkward fact, much less explain it physically--whereas the Venus/Earth comparison can, because Venus's temperatures, inside its thick cloud layer, are also too low, by about the same amount (5K), and both are probably due to the same cause: Non-gaseous particles suspended in the atmospheres (water-based clouds on Venus, particulate haze on Titan) that increase the effective specific heat of the atmosphere, in those regions where they occur.

And, of course, my definitive contribution was left out of the list presented above. No one is learning anything. The "gravito-thermal" effect is nothing but the effect of the hydrostatic condition, so far as any real physics is concerned.

No Consensus (or Too Many Chiefs)

Bob Tisdale has a post (also posted on the wuwt site) showing "no consensus on Earth's top-of-atmosphere energy imbalance" among the models touted by climate scientists. These kinds of critical analysis are pretty dense (detailed), especially for laypersons, and I have much better, simpler evidence to offer, so I responded:

Consensus climate science is so bad, it should come as no surprise to learn that a much simpler (and definitive) indictment of it can be made, just from the figure 1 above (Trenberth’s “global earth energy budget”). Concerning that figure, I wrote back in October 2010:

“It all looks straightforward enough, but then when you look closely you see something strange, off on the right side: The radiation coming off the surface is huge, and there is an almost equally huge ‘back radiation’ from the atmosphere to the surface. To a physicist–or at least to this physicist–that strange, gigantic loop of energy between the atmosphere and the surface appears unphysical, out of all proportion to the rest of the diagram.

“And we don’t have to get into detailed physical theory or wordy explanations to pin down what’s wrong with it: The power coming off the surface (the number 390) is larger than the incident power from the Sun (342). (The power shown as ‘back radiated’ by the atmosphere is about as large as that from the Sun, too.)

“Just that one fact is enough for me to see that the ‘climate science’ of the U.N. and the consensus of (so we are told) 97% of all climate scientists–is absurd. No part of the ‘global energy budget’ can be greater than the incident energy. Either their numbers are wrong, or the model being illustrated is wrong. Period, full stop. You don’t have to know, or explain to the world, what is really going on, or why there has been recent ‘global warming’. Just know their explanation is nonsense, basic physics absolutely and undeniably forbids it. Everything else you read is either other scientists trying to show they know what is really going on (which obviously no one does at this point, entirely), or scientists or their followers trying to defend the indefensible, with complex, technical and always wrong-headed arguments.

“Of course, that unphysical loop of excess energy is just what they are calling the ‘greenhouse effect’. And it is garbage, and all the scientists who deny that, or refuse to see it for what it is, should be drummed out of science, or at least be required to undergo re-education. Because they are worse than first-year students, who are generally at least open to learning the hard truth.”

A little later, I realized the 390 W/m^2 supposed to be coming off the Earth’s surface was just that expected from a blackbody at the same temperature (288K), and then learned that the proponents of the radiation transfer theory (behind all those numbers in the “energy budget” diagrams and in discussions of “TOA radiation imbalance”) actually believe and teach, in their theory, that the Earth’s surface radiates like a blackbody poised in a vacuum. At this point, an honest and competent physicist can only recoil in horror, as if at a monstrous snake on one’s doorstep, and demand it be killed forthwith. And that’s where I stand, ever since. Trenberth is a miseducated idiot. All climate scientists are miseducated idiots, for not seeing that lie, of a huge loop of energy between atmosphere and ground, greater than that coming from the Sun, and expecting to get away with presenting it seriously to the world.

…and then I found the “skeptics” didn’t see it either, or pretended not to, because they never speak of it, that obviously ridiculous incompetence at the very heart of the consensus case.

And that (plus my Venus/Earth temperature vs. pressure comparison) is why I always say, there is no valid climate science, and no competent climate scientists.

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.

The Lord of the Climate Flies

Climateconversation has a post on the religiously-deluded (in fact insane) idea that climate skeptics have something wrong with their minds. A commenter mentioned the "latest GISS temperatures", which the alarmist cult claims debunks the "myth" of a "warming pause" over the last 20 years or so (I would claim there is no proof of any global warming over the last century--contrary to all the temperature data sets used in climate science--since my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison precisely confirms the Standard Atmosphere model, known for that century and more, and it allows for no global warming and shows a higher global mean surface temperature, for that century, higher than that admitted today in climate "science", in addition to the fact that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio shows there is NO global-warming "greenhouse effect" at all, even though Venus's atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide compared to Earth's 0.04%). My response to the continuing (and now entirely politically-correct) blindness to the hard truth about all of climate science:

The latest revisions to the GISS temperature data are bilge, based as they are on a hurried official acceptance of the incompetent paper by Karl (2015) et al., which deliberately tried to authoritatively (and condescendingly) erase the lack of warming over the last 20 years by subordinating good data with uncertain data (from an uncertain source unintended for such use). The scientific community should be up in arms over the whole sordid mess that is "consensus" climate science, and you shouldn't give an inch to any of those "experts" who have made it or any who now smugly promulgate it. I reject the GISS temperatures, and all others simiilarly suborned; I reject all of the adjustments that have been made solely in order to give the false indication of significant global warming. I reject the pronouncements of any and all climate scientists, who I know to be incompetent based upon the overwhelming evidence I have uncovered and brought forward myself, in my own way (and peer-review can go to the devil; it has been a monstrous lie, unfulfilling of its purpose and highest responsibility, that got climate science into this mess--the system, of self-correction in science, is broken). Shame on today's "leading" scientists, and all the leading voices that follow them. They are all nothing more than bratty children, recapitulating "The Lord of the Flies" (I suggest you all read that story, especially how it ends).