Incompetent Skeptics IV: Dr. Judith Curry

The climate depot site has a link to a puff piece on Judith Curry and her views on climate change/global warming. The following is my response:

This is a puff piece, based entirely on a friendly, personal view of Dr. Judith Curry. But the climate change debate is not about any person, especially any academic who basically accepts the climate science as sound and, as they like to say in their own best interests, "settled". Those who have involved themselves in the debate--who have studied the science behind it, and the arguments about that science--are strung out over the full range, from complete acceptance of the academic science to complete rejection of it. A layperson must either choose an "authority" to believe in, blindly, or seek out the definitive facts that tell for or against climate science theory--for that is what they are getting from all sides, predigested theory presented, smoothly and easily, as fact.

I am a 65-year-old physicist by education and long experience, in the academic and high-tech industrial sectors, and in presenting my view to laypersons, I take the latter route, of uncovering the definitive facts that anyone can appreciate. I uncovered the definitive fact that disproves the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, and any need to worry about a "runaway global climate" at all, nearly 3 years ago, in November 2010 (see here).

When I found that definitive fact against the greenhouse effect, I knew the consensus climate science was not just wrong, it was in fact incompetent (for what I had done should have been done 20 years earlier, when the relevant data, on the atmospheric temperature and pressure profile of Venus, was obtained by the Magellan spacecraft. That it was not done at the time is a gross error by climate scientists at the time, and that it has been dismissed even after I pointed it out in November 2010 is a gross crime against all of science and the trust of the public that we scientists are both competent and honest.) In late November, when I first tried to inform Judith Curry and her blog readers of the definitive fact of the Venus/Earth temperature ratio--which depends only upon the two planets' distances from the Sun, and no additional "greenhouse effect" at all, despite Venus's atmosphere having over 2400 times the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide as does Earth's atmosphere (Venus 96.5%, to Earth's 0.04%)--the following telling exchange took place:

Judith Curry:

"whether atmospheric gases such as CO2 (and H20, CH4, and others) warm the planet is not an issue where skepticism is plausible."

Harry Dale Huffman:

"The issue is whether they warm by absorbing incident solar radiation, or by absorbing secondary LW [longwave, i.e., infrared] radiation from the surface. I say the former, and there is no bouncing and amplifying of heat between the surface and the atmosphere."

In other words, I identified for her the mistaken belief she (and every other climate scientist) was nursing, that the atmosphere is warmed, on the global scale, from the surface, when in fact it is warmed, to its stable, equilibrium vertical temperature structure, by direct absorption of incident solar infrared radiation.

No climate scientist, including Judith Curry, has ever shown the slightest interest in or serious consideration of the fundamental corrections to climate science dogma that are provided by the definitive fact of the Venus/Earth temperature ratio. Yet any STUDENT of climate science could have done what I did, and seen what I saw.

So, as nice as Dr. Curry may be, she is--as is every other climate scientist or academic who defends the science behind the "global warming" scare--simply and unavoidably incompetent. And to put this in the proper context (because I know that charge of general incompetence among the "experts" sounds flamboyant and hyped to the unwary), I suggest the reader here also read the short article, "The System Is Broken: Incompetent Science and Insane Politics".

Modern Science Has Gone Wrong

I have posted the following response to a comment on my November 2010 Venus: No Greenhouse Effect article:

Good Morning, Astrobiology,

The proper statement, of fact not theory, is that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, at points of equal pressure in the two atmospheres and over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is determined only by the ratio of their distances from the Sun (in accordance with the fundamental physics that relates mean absorbed radiation intensity with attained temperature, at equilibrium), and nothing else. That fact has implications for the temperatures in the other planetary atmospheres, but of course it should not be expected to predict their temperatures; it is not a theory of planetary warming, it is a fact relating the Earth troposphere with an equivalent (in pressures) portion of the Venus atmosphere.

The easy, even lazy, answer to your first question is that when you say, "Venus is hotter than Mercury", you really mean the surface of Venus is hotter than the surface of Mercury, despite being much farther from the Sun--that ignores the atmosphere, of course (and that little detail of comparing at points of equal pressure in the atmosphere, which my comparison emphasized), and any hack will tell you the surface of Venus is hotter because it lies at the bottom of a deep, heavy, heat-retaining ocean of air, while the surface of Mercury is essentially bare to the near-absolute cold of space. (All of this is so obvious, I suspect your question is merely disengenuous--suspect so strongly, that I say so here for any interested reader to see. David Appell, a charlatan who pretends to be a competent PhD physicist, recently tried to comment on this site with the same incompetent point, that the Venus/Earth comparison does not work for the other planets. I wouldn't be at all surprised if your comment was an attempt to get by my denial of any further comments from him, as an unthinking, determinedly dismissive, disruptive influence. If you follow his lead, you won't get anywhere worthwhile--here, at least.)

I have always emphasized that I do not have a theory, only that definitive fact, which disproves the greenhouse effect of increasing atmospheric temperature (at any given pressure) with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (for Venus's atmosphere has over 2400 times the level of carbon dioxide as does Earth's atmosphere, yet it makes no difference in the temperature--and note, if there WERE such an effect, it would be ADDITIVE to Venus's temperatures, not multiplicative as the constant Venus/Earth temperature ratio implies).

To explain the temperatures in the atmospheres of the other planets would require a general theory of atmospheric warming. I do not feel the slightest need to bail out climate and atmospheric scientists from their responsibility to produce such a theory--which MUST EXPLAIN the Venus/Earth result quantitatively and precisely, note. I have done some comparisons of the troposphere of Earth with the equivalent parts of the other planetary atmospheres, as I have said in earlier responses to earlier comments here, but nothing as definitive as the Venus/Earth result emerged from that preliminary work, and I am interested only in communicating definitive results--facts, not theory.

All of the earth and life sciences are now working with fundamentally false theories, to a lesser or greater extent. That is the larger point, that has emerged from my own research, with my discovery of a great world-encompassing design at the very beginning of mankind's intellectual history, and motivating every aspect of its development. Random cosmic events and undirected geological and biological processes are not the truth about Earth's origin and development. The Earth and solar system were subjected to deliberate wholesale reformation, to impose an overall design--and modern science has, thus, gone wrong.

The True Situation in Climate Science

I have submitted the following comment at Steven Goddard's Real Science site, where another commenter noted that he had only just noticed a change in the "Earth Energy Budget" diagram put out by NASA et al., no longer showing "back radiation":

They changed the diagram because it was so obviously ridiculous, as only I, so far as I am aware, first strongly pointed out in 2010, here. But they never changed their theory -- not just the "greenhouse effect", but the underlying, radiation transfer theory (which is basically just a simple-minded "light extinction" model, of light extinction in passing through a nearly transparent medium), which is also clearly wrong, because it ignores conduction and convection, and reverses the real physics, making the temperature the effect of radiative transfer, instead of acknowledging that the supposed radiative transfer is due to the fixed temperature structure of the atmosphere. The definitive evidence remains my Venus/Earth comparison, which disproved the greenhouse effect, precisely confirmed the stable Standard Atmosphere model for the troposphere, showed that the atmosphere is warmed, not from the surface but by direct absorption of incident solar infrared radiation, and should have opened everyone's eyes to the fact that radiative transfer--within the atmosphere, and between the surface and atmosphere-- is the wrong way to approach the problem of atmospheric warming. Dr. Johnson (cf, Richard Fowler's comment above) gets caught up in theoretical radiative transfer arguments, that boil down to "heat goes from warm to cold regions", when the simple truth of the atmosphere is that the vertical temperature distribution of the troposphere has nothing to do with radiative transfer (which is just one of the three ways heat is transferred, after all--the other two basically ignored in the consensus theory) but is provided by the hydrostatic condition of the atmosphere, which imposes the well-known temperature lapse rate structure, defined by the Standard Atmosphere model. That structure is stable and predominates over all other conditions, globally, in the atmosphere, including night and day (wind and weather are essentially local and transient variations in the underlying stable structure). Until this basic understanding is learned and accepted by climate scientists, there will be no correction, and no progress, in climate science.

Peer Review: Theory and Epicycles

I have submitted the following comment to the bishop hill site, where they are talking about proposed new changes to peer review:

There is an incipient, general revolution in science, a NEW PARADIGM (yet very old; I call it "The Once and Future Paradigm"), that needs to come out, and peer-review -- any review by current deluded and dogmatically defensive "experts" -- is incompetent to handle it. Imagine back in Galileo's day, "peer review" was by ecclesiastic overseers; the situation is similar to that. We are dealing with an incompetent fundamental belief system, maintaining an incompetent consensus, across many fields of science, and climate science is just the tip of the iceberg, with its deluded assumption of a globe poised on the razor edge of "runaway global climate", either too hot OR too cold. No isolated debate, over any one supposed "cause" or "effect" (such as the "greenhouse effect" debate in climate science) can properly address the underlying general incompetence (that makes both alarmists and skeptics fellow-travellers in the "global-warming greenhouse effect" delusion). Adding epicycles to peer review is meaningless in that larger, proper context.

There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth, Than Are Dreamt Of In Your Philosophy

I have submitted the following comment to the warning signs site of Alan Caruba, who asks if Edward Snowden is a spy or a hero:

The bottom line is that Snowden acted to protect the basic freedom of Americans to not be continually lied to by their leaders, and to not be subjected to unreasonable search and seizure of even our personal communications. He should be a hero to real Americans, those who seriously value their individual freedoms, so carefully laid down at the very beginning of the United States of America. Insofar as you think the jury is still out on him, you have already given up on your rights. You know Obama, and the Insane Left he represents, lies to the American people every day, in every way. Obama is the traitor, the Insane Left is traitorous of all our individual freedoms, and the Right is clueless and abetting of the treason. Enough of the KGB/FSB crap--you should be worried, and outraged, first last and always by the misinformation fed to us by the Insane Left and its pet media, and by the incompetence of the Right to stand up to it.

What is going on is not just a conspiracy by the Left, or the Communists, or any group of men. I have tried to tell people, including you and your readers, something of the greater tide running against all men today, but I don't have the kind of details needed to convince most--because what is going on is a general ascendance of dogma in the minds of the people of Earth, and the dogmas are specific to the specific groups and individual members of those groups who harbor those specific dogmas. What is going on is a meta-conspiracy, a general testing of mankind. And mankind is too grasping of what it has, or in many cases only thinks it has, to recognize, much less focus upon for long, the overriding threat, among all the lesser ones--revolution must come, even many revolutions all on top of one another, and considering the avoidance behavior of practically everyone, that means wars must come to enable the revolutions. I personally only know much about the scientific revolution, because I have started it with my own unprecedented discoveries, which will demand the fundamental rethinking of many fields of science, especially the earth and life sciences. I know there are other revolutions coming too, because it is obvious in everyday affairs, increasingly over the last ten years, in the same time frame that I have been trying to inform others of my scientific discoveries. It is all tied together, and at the bottom it is incompetence on the part of modern man, due to his clinging to his many different false and divisive dogmas, both ancient and modern. For you see, my scientific discovery, put succinctly, has been to uncover the single, objective origin for all the earliest, religiously-held dogmas of mankind, responsible for all the so-called "ancient mysteries". And the world IS NOT ready to handle that uncovering, and is instead grasping at its dogmas, even the most unforgiving and bloody. Never has the world needed gentleness, dispassionate reason, and a unifying love of God--or love of one's fellow man--like it does now; and, you see, it obviously doesn't have any of those prerequisites. Everyone's thinking is in common and sordid ruts, day in and day out.

Don't Tell the "Experts"

I have posted the following comment on my Venus: No Greenhouse Effect page, in response to someone wanting to argue theory, rather than accept the simple facts:

I received your second comment, but I will not reward you for ignoring the plain facts by allowing you to whine about how reasonable you are in questioning the Venus/Earth comparison presented on this page.

However, since I know that even the "climate science experts" are incompetent, I will make the Venus/Earth comparison very simple for you. But you can't tell any "experts", because I want to leave the analysis just as I originally did it here, back in November 2010, because any real expert would have, like me, focused upon the actual bottom-line of the comparison--the fact of the presented Venus/Earth temperature ratio, and the physical explanation of that ratio I have given, over and over for 2 and 1/2 years--rather than gotten sidetracked by how I came to do the comparison. And I want that to become clear to everyone, eventually--that any competent physicist should have seen that the actual Venus/Earth temperature ratio, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is explained (and precisely so, above and below the Venus cloud layer) by the ratio of the two planets' solar distances, and nothing else. That is the fact--I repeat, the FACT--you are ignoring.

Here is the simple way to look at the comparison. Make a table of temperature vs. pressure for the Standard Atmosphere troposphere, and the same for the Venus atmosphere as measured on October 5, 1991(over the same range, of Earth tropospheric pressures). You don't have to justify doing that, it is just something you can easily do (it is the first table in my article above), and it is what any competent student--much less experienced scientist--interested in comparing the two atmospheres would do as a matter of routine.

But, having done that little chore, a good physicist would ask if there is a simple explanation for the fact that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio is in fact basically a constant (1.176), and that particular constant. A merely competent student in the physical sciences would pretty quickly discover that the temperature ratio is just that expected from the different solar distances alone, from the Stefan-Boltzmann formula. (How using that formula can be justified is what most critics of my analysis homed in on, but they did so incompetently. And it was not until a year and a half later that I myself added an update that properly explained it, with the physically pertinent simple equations.)

Now here is where the really simple part comes in, that was not in my original presentation, but should have been brought out very quickly by any real "expert". Imagine if Venus were simply moved outwards to the same distance from the Sun as Earth (so it was still heated by the same portion of the incident solar radiation, but that portion would be reduced, as the total incident solar radiation would be, by the greater solar distance), how would the Venus temperatures, at the various pressures in your table, change? The answer is that they would be reduced, by the factor 1/1.176--and that is what is shown in the fourth column of my table above. Graphing the resulting T vs. P curves of Earth and the newly-moved Venus, one gets the graph I presented in the post here.

Now, don't tell anyone what I have just told you, about simply "moving" Venus to the same solar distance as Earth. I want to see how long it will take a competent scientist to come to the realization on their own, instead of incompetently saying, 1.176 is "just a coincidence", or "you failed to account for the difference in albedo". Of course, you are free to inform President Obama of how easy it is to disprove the CO2 "greenhouse effect", which he and the EPA are using for the most venal of political purposes (to wit, the exercise of ruinous and fraudulent power over the lives of millions of innocent and unwary people).

Comments on Dr. Murry Salby's Critique of the Climate Consensus

I have commented upon the Dr. Murry Salby presentation recently touted by the critics of the academic climate science consensus, at the claes johnson site:

I prefer the summary analysis presented at appinsys.com. And if you look at the temperature record (the first graph at the appinsys link), you will see what everyone should know, that the temperature decreased from 1880 to 1910, increased from 1910 to 1940, decreased again from 1940 to 1975, and increased again from 1975 to about 2000. Now the CO2 record from 1957 onward shows dC/dt has increased monotonically over that period, i.e., d/dt(dC/dt)>0 from at least 1957 onward. But your CO2 vs. T relation above requires d/dt(dC/dt)=dT/dt, and dT/dt was negative from 1940 to 1975 (including the period 1957 to 1975). So the posited relation dC/dt=T is empirically wrong. And physically, that relation flies in the face of what I (a general physicist, not a climate scientist) have heard repeatedly as common knowledge: That a warmer ocean cannot hold as much CO2 dissolved in it, and releases more CO2 into the atmosphere the warmer it gets (in line with the skeptic's claim, "atmospheric CO2 follows temperature, not vice-versa as the consensus claims"). So the posited CO2 vs. T relation is also falsified according to (the general understanding of) the basic physics of CO2 sequestration by the ocean as a function of T. So, again, I prefer the appinsys summary of the situation. I commented on Dr. Salby's presentation at hockeyschtick also.