CO2 Global Warming Alarmism: Hour of Reckoning

Driving in the wrong direction on a one-way street, firmly believing it to be a two-way street, is stupid and potentially deadly hazardous for other people.

The US Environmental Protection Agency EPA has now cleansed its web page from CO2 global warming alarmism and US Energy Sec. Perry declares

• We should ‘renegotiate’ the Paris Climate Change Agreement,

This signals the beginning of the end of the CO2 alarmism driven by EU politicians and US Democrats:

• Trump may pull US out of Paris agreement within two weeks. 
• White House leaning toward exiting Paris climate pact

This is a victory for rational science showing that the "CO2 greenhouse effect" has been artificially

boosted to seemingly dangerous levels without proper scientific evidence, only in order to fit a certain political agenda. 

I feel happy to have contributed to this insight through an analysis of the unphysical nature of the concept of "back radiation" which is central to the proclaimed alarmingly big "CO2 greenhouse effect". 

You find "back radiation" in many books on atmospheric physics as one part of a "two-stream" radiative transfer model originally proposed by Schwarzschild in 1905 with net heat transfer warm-to-cold as the difference of two gross heat transfers warm-to-cold and cold-to-warm. See also History of Radiative Heat Transfer.

But what you find in many physics books is not necessarily true physics, and this is the case with two-stream radiative heat transfer, which is fake-science. This is because heat transfer cold-to-warm violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. In the two-stream Schwarzschild equations this is present as an effect of unphysical absorption from unphysical back radiation. Schwarzschild formulated his model to allow analytical solution as first priority and did not worry about unphysical aspects. 

Two-stream radiative transfer is based on a mis-interpretation of Stefan-Boltzmann-Planck's Law $\sigma T^4$ as the radiative heat energy emitted by a black body of temperature $T$ Kelvin independent of the temperature of the environment of the body, while the physically correct interpretation is  radiative energy emitted into a background of temperature zero Kelvin. 

The radiative heat energy emitted by a black body of temperature $T$ in an environment of temperature $T_0$ is thus given by $\sigma (T^4-T_0^4)$ if $T_0\le T$. If $T_0>T$ then the body absorbs energy from the environment and emits no energy. 

The mis-interpretation of SBP law is widely spread and apparently accepted by many more or less prominent physicists. This is made possible by the fact that the standard derivation of the SBP law is based on statistics obscuring real physics. I have given an alternative derivation based on transparent physics exhibiting the mis-interpretation.  

CO2 alarmists like two-stream gross flow because small changes of gross flow can be big and support alarmism, while small changes of net flow will remain small and give no reason for alarm. And true radiative heat transfer is one-stream warm-to-cold. 

In short, the CO2 swindle is based on unphysical two-stream radiative heat transfer between the Earth surface and the atmosphere of size 300 W/m2 claimed to suggest a global warming alarm of 3 C, while the true net transfer is 10 times smaller about 30 W/m2, which can only suggest a harmless warming of 0.3 C. 

There is much evidence that CO2 alarmism is scientific swindle, a basic element being the unphysical idea of two-stream radiative transfer connected to a mis-interpretation of the SBP law. To be ignorant of physics may be inconvenient but to make a mis-interpretation of a physical law believing it to be true physics can be very dangerous; for example believing that a one-way street is a two-way street can be lethal...and the more convinced you are the more dangerous...

It is the responsibility of physicists to gard that basic physics of radiative heat transfer is correctly described in the physics literature.  Apparently physicists today have other priorities (like string theory and multiversa) and so the mis-interpretation of the SBP law as a basis for CO2 alarm has been able to survive under the wings of physics, but now the time of reckoning is here...as evidenced by EPA...

Murry Salby is today a leading skeptic to CO2 alarmism, but the mis-conception of two-stream radiative heat transfer was present in his 1996 book Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics as a result of mis-management of fundamental physics in modern times allowing violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics as the cornerstone of classical physics.

PS1 Schwarzschild's two-stream model for radiative heat transfer takes the following form for a horisontal slab atmosphere, with vertical coordinate $x$ with $x=0$ at the Earth surface and $x=X$ at the top of the atmosphere, in terms of a gross upward heat flux $F^+(x)$ and a gross downward heat flux  $F^-(x)$ satisfying the following advection-absorption equations for $0\lt x\lt X$:

• $\frac{dF^+}{dx} + F^+ = Q$               (1)
• $-\frac{dF^-}{dx} + F^- = Q$               (2) 

where $Q(x) =\sigma T(x)^4$ is supposed to express the SBP law with $T(x)$ the temperature at $x$ and $\sigma$ Stefan-Boltzmann's constant, and $x$ serves as an optical coordinate normalizing absorption. The atmosphere is supposed to be heated from below at $x=0$ by a heat source $H$, and the heat is radiatively transported to the top of the atmosphere from where it is radiated into outer space at 0 K. Conservation of heat energy gives the additional equation

• $F^+-F^- = H$,                                      (3)

from which follows by adding/subtracting (2) from (1) that $F^+ + F^-=2Q$ and $\frac{d(F^++F^-)}{dx}=-H$ and thus:

• $2Q(x) = H(X-x)+H$,                          (4)
• $F^+ =\frac{H}{2}(X-x)+H$
• $F^-=\frac{H}{2}(X-x)$                        

which determines the temperature profile $T(x)$. Schwarzschild's model resulting in linear $Q(x)$, is very simplistic. Only a model with $Q(x)$ constant could be more simplistic.

Schwarzschild's model (1-2) expresses conservation of upward and downward heat fluxes through a thin atmospheric layer radiating both upward and downward according to SBP in the form $Q(x) =\sigma T(x)^4$.

The model is unphysical because it is based on mis-interpretation of SBP and through the equation
$-\frac{dF^-}{dx} + F^- = Q$ introduces spurious absorption.

In a following post I will consider one-stream models for radiative transport based on real physics.

PS2 I have over the years had heated debates about back radiation and two-stream radiative with many people including Roy Spencer and Judy Curry and I have met the strong grip physics books, right or wrong, can have on peoples minds. Planck is primarily to be blamed because of his unphysical proof of the law of black body radiation using statistical arguments, which he himself did not believe in and was very unhappy with, but also secondarly all the leading physicists after Planck who uncritically have accepted what cannot be true physics.

I have many times met the reaction, when I express my view that two-stream radiative heat transfer to be unphysical, that people get upset and in anger block further communication. Thus the idea of two-stream radiative heat transfer has been protected from scrutiny allowing it to serve as a corner-stone of the "greenhouse effect" invented to serve CO2 global warming alarmism.