Why APS Supports CO2 Alarmism

What would the physicists of the 1927 Solway conference (with Planck 3rd left-first row with hat) have said about CMB and DLR and related global warming?

This is a continuation of the previous post The Fiction of Heating of CMB.

The American Physical Society APS gives crucial scientific support to the CO2 alarmism of IPCC by its (famous) Statement on Climate Change:

• The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
• If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.
• We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

I have asked physicists why they support CO2 alarmism and here is the argument that emerges:

1. Stefan-Boltzmann's law (SB) reads $R = \sigma T^4$, where $R$ is the radiance in W/m2 from a blackbody of temperature $T$ and $\sigma$ is SB's constant.
2. Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) is a "faint glow" of empty space with heating effect according to SB with $T\approx 3\, K$.
3. Downwelling Longwave Radiation (DLR) is a similar "glow" of the atmosphere at $T\approx 255\, K$ heating the Earth surface at $T\approx 288\, K $, about 100 million times stronger than CMB.
4. Since the heating of DLR is so much stronger than that of CMB, and CMB is incontrovertible, global warming is incontrovertible.

When I inform a physicist that this argument uses Stefan-Boltzmann in a wrong way (False-SB discussed in previous posts), he/she stares at me as if he cannot believe what is being said.

I then carefully explain that the true Stefan-Boltzmann's Law (True-SB) concerns radiation from a blackbody of temperature $T>0$ into a background at $0\, K$, that is more generally, True-SB expresses radiation into a background of lower temperature. I carefully explain that the above argument speaks about radiation from a blackbody of a low temperature into a background of higher temperature, that is a False-SB is used.

The physicist then stares at me angrily, and says that I am wrong, that he is in charge of SB and that he is a student to a student to a student of Planck and that the SB is derived from Planck's law and thus neither he nor the SB can be wrong.

When I carefully explain that Planck's law concerns radiation into a background of lower temperature (o K), and not the other way around as expressed by False-SB, the physicist gets really angry and says that only physicists can understand Planck's law, because only physicists can understand the proof of Planck's law, which was given by Planck himself, and because they are all students of Planck and I am not.

When I then point out that Planck's proof concerns radiation into a background of lower temperature (o K), the physicist says that I must be mistaken and anyway the proof is not so relevant, and therefore is certainly not remembered by todays physicists because it is now so old and in fact so difficult that it can no longer be taught, and the only thing that counts is Planck's law, and Planck's law has been verified by infinitely many experiments.

So there we stand:

• I claim that physicists are using a False-SB and that a True-SB does not give support to the idea that CMB is a "faint glow" from empty space which together with a "glow" from the atmosphere is contributing to global warming.
• A physicist is not willing to give up CMB as a "faint glow" from empty space and thus certainly not DLR as a "glow" from the atmosphere adding to global warming.

But the scientific question remains: Is False-SB true? Or is False-SB false?

If Planck was alive, we could have asked him about his proof of his law. To help the discussion I have formulated a new proof of Planck's law presented in Computational Blackbody Radiation.