Finally Physics Laurate in Physics Speaks Out on Climate Alarmism

Climate alarmism can continue to bog down western societies into preindustrial state in a meaningless race to reduce CO2 emission as long as physicists do not speak out and tell that this has no physics rationale. Sadly to say, physicists have kept silent and so the destructive charade has been allowed to continue.

Now finally a Nobel Laureate, Prof John F. Clauser, Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, speaks out in unmistakably clear terms as reported by CO2 Coalition: 

• The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that  threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. 
• Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. 
• It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. 
• In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. 
• There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. 
• The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.

This should open the mouth of all physicists with some knowledge of basic physics, Nobel Laureates or not. Let us see this happen. In particular, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences handing out the Nobel Prize in Physics, now must retract its stated support to climate alarmism formed to serve a political agenda and return to science. I have reminded the Academy about its duty to serve science and not opportunistic politics and report the response.  

Photon Foolishness and CO2 Alarmism

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his 1905 discovery of the Law of Photoelectricity (discovered by Hertz already in 1887) based on an idea of light as a stream of light particles or light quanta later named photons, in a return to an idea of Newton abandoned since the discovery of light as an electromagnetic wave phenomenon captured by Maxwell's equations published in 1873.  

Einstein was not happy with the Prize motivation, since it explicitly stated that he was not awarded because of his theory of relativity, which he considered to be his main work, while he viewed his early work on photoelectricity rather as a misconception, since concerning photons/light quanta he confessed in 1951:

• All these 50 years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question, "What are light quanta"? Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken.

Unfortunately, the Tom, Dick and Harry misconceived idea of light as a stream of photon particles has survived into our days, in parallel with the wave picture, and has come to serve as the basis of CO2 alarmism in the form of Downwelling Long Wave Radiation DLWR of Back Radiation as a stream of photons from the atmosphere to a warmer Earth surface with a massive global warming effect. 

In the spirit of Bohr the particle and wave nature of light are not considered contradictory but simply complementary although behaving differently:  

The Tom, Dick and Harry particle misconception is captured in an incorrect Planck-Stefan-Boltzmann Law PSBL stating that a black body at temperature $T$ Kelvin emits/radiates heat energy in the form of light quanta/photons scaling with $T^4$ (per unit area and time), independent of the surrounding temperature. The radiation has a Planck spectrum scaling with $T\nu^2$ with $\nu$ frequency (modulo high-frequency cut-off scaling with $T$). The misconception is that the radiation is independent of the surrounding temperature based on a primitive idea of radiation as a stream of photon particles being ejected independent of surrounding. This misconception is widely spread and embraced by otherwise very knowledgable physicists and laymen. 

A correct PSBL states black body radiation scaling with $(T^4 - T_s^4)$, where $T_s$ is the surrounding temperature. In this form the radiation can be seen as a wave resonance phenomenon between black body and surrounding, see Computational Blackbody Radiation. 

The Planck spectrum scaling with $T\nu^2$ directly connects with the wave nature of light with the energy of a harmonic oscillator of frequency $\nu$ scaling with $\nu^2$. 

To fit this into a particle idea Einstein suggested to view a photon as a localised wave packet of length scaling with $\frac{1}{\nu}$ and energy scaling with $\nu$ (captured in Planck's formula $E=h\nu$ with $h$ Planck's constant). The total radiation from a a stream of photons would then scale with $\nu^2$ since $\nu$ photons of length $\frac{1}{\nu}$ (traveling with the speed light) would pass in unit time. 

Einstein thus in 1905 associated the energy $E=h\nu$ to a concept of light quanta, which gave him the Nobel Prize in 1921 with the Law of Photoelectricity taking the form $E+P=h\nu$ with $P$ electron release energy and $E$ kinetic energy of an emitted electron upon impact by one photon with energy $h\nu$, but then misled generations of physicists into a misconception of PSBL misused by CO2 alarmism, while his insight in 1951 that light quanta has no physical meaning passed by without notice.  

This post directly connects to the following recent posts:

• Discussion with Will Happer on Back Radiation 
• Radiation as Resonance     

and to a wave analysis of the photoelectric effect (p 97). The idea of light as a stream of photon particles is as misconceived as an idea of sound as a stream of phonon particles which you spit out when you speak, while we all know that sound is transmitted by sound waves as a resonance phenomenon from loud speaker to your eardrums carried by air. 

The idea of light from Proxima Centauri as the closest star to our own as a stream of photon particles traveling at the speed of light one by one all alone 40,208,000,000,000 km on a journey taking 4.37 years without ever getting lost in cosmic dust or atmosphere until finally being captured by a human eye, is to fantastic to be credible. Light as particles is not physics, as Einstein said.

PS Typical misconception of photon particles each one ejecting an electron thus creating photoelectricity:

Compare with Mathematical Physics of Blackbody Radiation describing instead photoelectricity as a wave threshold phenomenon asking for a high enough frequency for electron ejection. See also this post.

Logarithmic Effect of More CO2 without Theoretical Basis

To serve as a basis for CO2 alarmism (together with back radiation), IPCC put together the following formula with inspiration from the Beer-Lambert law (exponential transport decrease in an absorbing medium):

• $\Delta RF = 5.35\ln (C/C_0)$ 

where $RF$ is Radiative Forcing from CO2 as a greenhouse gas, $\Delta RF$ is additional forcing caused by a change of concentration of atmospheric CO2 from $C_0$ (preindustrial) to a present $C$. Doubled concentration from preindustrial level would then cause an additional (warming) forcing of about $4$ Watts/m2, which is translated to 1C warming by Stefan-Boltzmann, which by feed back can become anything you like 1-5C with 5C utterly alarming! Note that without the 1C from the formula, feedback has nothing start from and so it is an absolutely crucial element of CO2 alarmism!

In CALCULATION OF ATMOSPHERIC RADIATIVE FORCING (WARMING EFFECT) OF CARBON DIOXIDE AT ANY CONCENTRATION by H. Douglas Lightfoot and Orval A. Mamer an effort is made to improve the formula from the starting point:

• Even though there is no theoretical basis for the Beer-Lambert formula, ∆RF = αln(C/Co), it has been accepted by the scientific community as a reasonable approximation.

but somewhat disappointingly ending up with:

• In this paper we propose an improved mathematical approximation that, like the Beer-Lambert law, has no theoretical basis.

Does a formula with no theoretical basis have a serious defect? Not always, since a formula may capture observations as some form of condensed experience. The validity of the formula can then be checked against observation/experience, and so be falsified. 

However, if there is no way to check the validity of the formula by observation, and this is the case with the above formula, then lack of theoretical basis is a serious defect because theory is what remains if you take away observation. 

So IPCC relies in its prediction of the warming effect of doubled CO2 on a formula which has neither theoretical basis nor observational support. You can say that this is shaky. How can you proclaim Net Zero with all its devastating consequences from nothing? It seems you must have some hidden agenda. You can learn about the agenda in new best seller The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation by Jerome R. Corsi.

The Catch of CO2 Alarmism vs Homeopathy

The catch of CO2 alarmism is that CO2 as an atmospheric trace gas is claimed to have considerable impact on global temperature as a "greenhouse gas", by IPCC estimated to 3-5 C warming upon doubling of the concentration from 0.03% in preindustrial time, with today 0.04%. It is also claimed that this reflects a near saturation (logarithmic) effect of CO2 with additional warming from another doubling being very small. The catch is then that CO2 as a greenhouse gas of very small concentration is claimed to have a big effect up to 0.03% as a very substantial part of an estimated total atmospheric effect of +33 C, but much smaller effect above 0.03% by saturation. 

Now, a physical system for which a small cause can have a big effect is an unstable system and as such cannot persist over time. This is like steering your car with a very small joystick sensible to every little shake of your hand. You do not get far with such a control mechanism. 

So, if global temperature is largely controlled by CO2 as a trace gas as a very small cause, the Earth faces the possibility of a "runaway greenhouse effect" with huge warming upon doubled CO2. But this is not what we see when observing less than 1 C warming with CO2 raising 0.01% from preindustrial level. The proposed explanation is saturation of the warming effect of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, which then must have been reached already today. 

But there is another more natural explanation of the little observed warming from increased CO2, namely that CO2 as trace gas has no (observable) influence on global temperature at all. This is like removing the control function of steering your car from the sensitive joystick to a conventional steering wheel. You can then let your kids play with the joystick as much as they want under an illusion that they steer the car. 

This connects to a principle of homeopathy of dilution where the concentration of a substance supposed to be beneficial can be reduced to only a trace while keeping/improving the effect. You can then be a believer, or you can as a non-believer say that the substance has no beneficial effect whatsoever independent of dose. 

The catch of CO2 alarmism is thus to claim a big effect from a small cause without runaway effect and then eliminate the possibility that the small cause de facto has only a small effect. This dilemma has not been resolved. 

The big effect of CO2 as trace gas is claimed to be demonstrated by its blocking effect (causing warming) on Outgoing Longwave Radiation OLR as the big ditch in the radiation intensity spectrum around frequency 600 as reported by AIRS spectrometers in satellites with the green curve representing OLR from an atmosphere without CO2 as presented by William Happer (time 25.00) (see also article):

The effect of doubling CO2 is represented by a slight broadening of the ditch in red upon doubling as a small effect by saturation. The ditch in OLR causing global warming is thus presented as a big effect up to 0.03% and a small effect upon doubling, as discussed above with connection to homeopathy.

But there is a catch in the above spectrum, since what AIRS de facto measures is the temperature of atmospheric CO2 at the highest level where it can be detected (220 K at the tropopause), which is possible even at trace concentrations, but what is reported is radiation intensity from Planck's Law as if CO2 as a trace gas is blocking considerable amount of radiation. The above diagram is presented as the main evidence that CO2 as trace gas causes considerable global warming, but then without runaway effect. But the diagram can be questioned since it reports something which is not directly measured. Maybe a true OLR has no ditch and so no (observable) warming from CO2. Maybe the spectrometer acts as a ghost detector like that detecting Downwelling Long Wave Radiation DLWR discussed in this post. What do you think? 

Happer is a skeptic claiming little warming from doubled CO2 as the slight broadening of the ditch. But Happer seems to believe in its present big effect represented by the green curve without ditch. It would be interesting to hear what Happer says about the possibility that the diagram is the result of ghost detection, and so I have asked him and am waiting for response.

PS1 The fact that an AIRS spectrometer directly measures temperatures and not radiation intensity (like a pyrgeometer) is supported by the fact that it contains both coolers and radiators at 150 K and 190 K. Also recall this post.

PS2 Communication with Will Happer: (see invitation to TNT Radio)

Claes: 

Does a pyrgeometer directly record temperature or radiation intensity? 

Will: 

RADIATION INTENSITY AND TEMPERATURE ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. PYROMETERS MEASURE RADIATION INTENSITY (OR FLUX), NOT TEMPERATURE. IN EARTH'S ATMOSPHERF RADIATION IS SELDOM EVEN CLOSE TO A THERMAL EQUILIBIUM STATE (THE PLANCK STATE) WHICH CAN BE DESCRIBED BY A TEMPERATURE. THE CLOSEST THING TO THIS SITUATION IS THE INTERIOR OF OPTICALLY THICK CLOUDS AT NIGHT, WHEN SHORT MEAN FREE PATHS FOR THERMAL RADIATION AND THE ABSENCE OF SUNLIGHT PRODUCE NEAR EQUILIBRIUM THERMAL RADIATION AT THE TEMPERATURE OF THE LOCAL CLOUD PARTICULATES.

Claes: 

Thanks for response, which I much appreciate. We are both (CO2 alarmism) skeptics and so a main question can be what arguments are best to debunk CO2  alarmism. You seem to say that a pyrgeometer directly measures radiation flux and not temperature, whereas I have the opposite impression. 

Let us seek an answer by looking into the design of a pyrgeometer, which consists of (1) a thermopile reading/measuring voltage U scaling with end temperature difference dT, (2) a silicon dome/window and (3) temperature sensor measuring the temperature T_dome of the dome. The source temperature T_source can then (after calibration) be determined as T_source = T_dome + dT. Again, what is de facto measured is (1) voltage U scaling with dT and (3) thermopile temperature. 

There is, as far as I understand, no sensor measuring incoming radiation flux into the dome. Incoming radiation is calculated by postulating outgoing radiation according to Planck-Stefan-Boltzmann of magnitude sigma T_dome^4, but this is a fictional quantity as if the dome is in radiative contact with outer space at 0 K but in fact is in radiative contact with a source of higher temperature.

A. Can we agree that what de facto is measured is (1) thermopile voltage scaling with end temperature difference and (3) dome temperature?

B. Can we agree that there is no sensor directly measuring incoming radiation?  

C. You compute a climate sensitivity (without feedback) of about 1 C, about the same as that presented by CO2 alarmists. Is that a complication for a skeptic? Would it help us if climate sensitivity could be estimated to be less than 0.1 C?

Hope you can sort out A-C for me. 

My attempt to understand blackbody radiation is here https://computationalblackbody.wordpress.com

Will:

If I have understood you correctly, I don't agree with what you say about temperature and intensity or flux measurements. But I don't have time for extensive correspondence on this topic. Spectral intensity measurements are often expressed as equivalent temperatures. But the basic measurement is of energy fluxes which produce voltages or currents in sensor elements. I attach a paper that describes one such instrument. If you are not already familiar with how high-resolution spectrometers work, it would be worth your time to study the paper. A black-body calibrating source is needed to convert intensity (voltage) measurements to equivalent temperature.

Temperature is both obvious from our sensations of hot and cold, and at the same time profoundly subtle from a thermodynamic point of view. Here it is intimately associated with the idea of systems in thermal equilibrium, and with the abstract concept of entropy. The most fundamental definition of the temperature of a body in thermal equilibrium is the rate of change of its internal energy with entropy, under conditions that no work is done. This definition is usually too abstract to be of much use.

Ideal Planck radiation has a temperature and has the maximum possible entropy for radiation of a fixed total energy. But it is unusual to find real Planck radiation in nature. Besides having the Planck distribution of intensity over frequency, the radiation must also be completely isotropic. Sunlight can be roughly isotropic inside an optically thick terrestrial cloud, but the spectral intensity is orders of magnitude too weak for the sunlight to be in thermal equilibrium. Except in the interior of optically thick clouds, Earth's thermal radiation is highly anisotropic, and it usually does not have a Planck spectral distribution because of the complicated absorption spectra of greenhouse gases. But cloud particulates are pretty good grey bodies with no sharp spectral features. The particulates absorb, emit and scatter much more powerfully that greenhouse gases. So multiple scattering, emission and absorption of thermal radiation inside optically thick, isothermal clouds can produce radiation which is close to the Planck limit for the temperature of the particulates in the cloud.

Claes:

Thanks for response! I think you can settle the following issues quickly understanding that your time is limited.

1. It seems we agree that what a pyrgeometer de facto by its design measures, is temperature. Is this your opinion?

2. The instrument you refer to uses bolometers which according to definition are sensitive thermometers whose electrical resistance varies with temperature. Can we then agree that bolometers de facto by design measures temperature?

3. You say that "Spectral intensity measurements are often expressed as equivalent temperatures”. Yes, there is a connection between the temperature of a (black/grey) body and the radiative transfer/flux of heat (or in short radiation) from the body, but it depends on the temperature of the surrounding of the body and thus cannot be concluded from temperature alone. Can we agree on that?

4. A bit more precise: The idea that a body at temperature T radiates according to Planck’s law with radiative flux scaling with T^4 independent of the surrounding/background temperature, is a misinterpretation of Planck’s Law, which in correct form states that the radiation scales with (T^4 - T_b^4) with T_b the background temperature. Can we agree on this? 

(This is analysed in detail on http://computationalblackbody.wordpress.com including a new proof of the correct Planck law without resort to statistics). 

Will:

Measuring Downwelling Long Wave Radiation by Ghost Detector

In previous posts I have shown that CO2 alarmism is based on the idea that the atmosphere is warming the Earth surface by Downwelling Long Wave Radiation DLWR or Back Radiation as the physics of the Greenhouse Effect, the existence of which is supposed to be documented through measurements with various instruments such as pyrgeometers and radiometers reporting data of the typical form (with clear skies in the beginning and end of the period and cloudy in between):

We see here depending on cloudiness measured DLWR ranging from 280 to 400 Watts/m2, to be compared with around 200 Watts/m2 from Short Wave Radiation from the Sun, thus very substantial, about two extra Suns. The conclusion from measurement is thus that the atmosphere depending on cloudiness is warming the Earth surface more than the Sun, and from that discovery send an alarm message that just a tiny bit of change of the atmosphere like doubling of the concentration of the trace gas CO2 can cause catastrophical global warming of up to 3-5 C. The argument is that if you can measure something (DLWR) with some instrument (pyrgeometer) that something which your are measuring must exist. But is this a valid scientific argument?

No, it is not necessarily so without looking inte the functioning of the instrument: In earlier posts (compare with Wikipedia pyrgeometer) I have shown that a pyrgeometer is a ghost detector, which reports massive DWLR from a formula of the form 

• DWLR = pyrgeometer measurement + OLWR   (1)

where OLWR is assumed to be Outgoing Long Wave Radiation from the instrument into a background of zero Kelvin according to Planck's Law. But OLWR is a fictional massive ghost radiation since the instrument is communicating with the atmosphere and not the zero Kelvin outer space. What the pyrgeometer actually measures is in fact the temperature difference between the warmer Earth surface and the somewhat colder atmosphere (but not outer space at zero Kelvin), which is of moderate size and according to Stefan-Boltzmann's law scales with the heat transfer from the Earth surface to the colder atmosphere. 

The pyrgeometer thus measures a moderate heat transfer from Earth surface to atmosphere, which together with the massive fictional non-physical OLWR of size 390 Watts/m2 at mean Earth surface temperature around 15 C, becomes massive fictional non-physical DWLR of size 280-400 Watts/m2 as reported by (1) as the postulated physics of a fictional non-physical Greenhouse Effect.

Recall that a pyrgeometer measures (as a voltage) the difference between the end temperatures of a thermopile with one end in contact with a dome/window directed to the atmosphere and the other with the instrument itself together with a thermometer measuring the instrument temperature. Although apparently a temperature difference de facto is measured, calculated DWLR according to (1) is reported with OLR postulated (but unphysical).  

We may compare with a situation where you have hired a plumber or lawyer to do a certain job and after completion the net work accomplished is recorded and you are presented with a bill of the form

• total cost = net recorded result  + claimed invested effort by plumber/lawyer    (2)

and where the claimed invested effort can be anything and the net recorded result can even be negative, which is the analog of (1), while the total cost to pay is big. This can be the case if you have not agreed on a total cost for the job ahead, and just hope that you will not get ripped off in an open-ended contract (current account) like (2). 

But in climate alarmism you do get ripped off by the use of a ghost detector reporting a DLWR, which does no exist because it is the Earth surface which warms the colder atmosphere and not the other way around. 

Why should you allow to get ripped off, if it is not necessary? By getting fooled about a fictional non-physical Greenhouse Effect recorded by a ghost detector? But the cheating is so simple that it may be difficult to discover. More details in this presentation from Climate Sense 2018.

Note that the above picture reports more warming from cloudy skies at night, which fits with experience and so deceptively can be used to sell the idea that DWLR is real.  

For physically correct versions of Planck-Stefan-Boltzmann's Law see Computational BlackBody Radiation. 

If you are not convinced about the role of DWLR/Back Radiation in selling CO2 alarmism, take a look at the following energy budget diagram presented by NASA:

See (with support from slides and hand-out to innocent students) that the Earth surface absorbs 48.0% of incoming sunlight (yellow) and an additional 100% (two extra Suns) from Back Radiation (brown), while the Earth surface emits 117.0% more the twice what is absorbed. How do you react when you understand that you are being fooled?

Nobel Prize in Physics to Climate Models which Do Not Model Climate

The Nobel Committee in Physics has as an act of scientific political correctness today given half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for the physical modelling of Earth's climate quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.

In other words, the Prize has been given to Climate Models which Do Not Model the Climate, as is shown in the following graph of Global Warming over time comparing Climate Model predictions with Real World observations (second image from Roy Spencer Global Warming) : 

These graphs must have been unknown to the Committee. What is the meaning of "reliably predicting global warming" when the prediction has nothing to do with the actually observed absence of observable global warming (0.2 C over 40 years)? Is the "reliability" that all climate models show too much warming, or that the spread is so big that even virtually no warming is included in the predictions?

Good Example: NRK Denies Denial

Klimarealsitene reports that Norwegian State Radio NRK has declared a new Strategy on Climate Alarmism:

• Dekningen skal i hovedsak handle om hvordan, og ikke om, det skal handles for å tilpasse seg eller dempe den globale oppvarmingen.
• De stadfester at menneskeskapte klimaendringer er reelt, og at NRK skal legge dette til grunn for journalistikken.
• NRK skal være oppmerksomme på den «falske balansen». Hvis de slipper til klimafornektere, skal de stille de rette motspørsmålene.

In English:

• NRK is to report only about how to stop global warming, not if it is needed or meaningful.
• NRK declares that humans control the climate.
• Climate denialism will only be allowed to be voiced if directly countered with complete denial by NRK. 

We now await Swedish State Radio SR to follow with a similar declaration to meet the mission of public radio, although effectively such a policy is already implemented.  

Strong State: Scaring or Comforting?

Swedish Social Democracy 2020: Stronger Safer

A Strong State pretending to have a mission, can use one of two basic strategies:

1. Fear-Mongering: Imminent Threat! Alarm! The State protects you.
2. Comforting: No Threat! No Alarm! The State takes care of you.

There are many examples of 1. through history collapsing to state terror. Swedish Social Democratic Society peaking in the 1950s is an example of 2.

Today we see a Swedish Social Democratic Society, which has switched mode from 2 to 1, in the name of climate alarmism set on a road supported by a new climate law to be the first fossil free welfare state by 2050 in another great leap forward, as an example of a new brave world to be followed by the entire world. 

Once that new brave world is reached, Swedish Social Democratic Society will return to mode 2. Only 30 years of great leap state terror with the end as usual justifying the means.

But is climate alarmism starting to crack already today? Yes, there are signs like this one.