To check if the basic postulate of climate alarmism (= "greenhouse effect" of
"backradiation" from "greenhouse gases"), violates the 2nd Law of thermodynamics, it is useful to understand what the 2nd Law says.
But if there is a mystery in science, then the 2nd Law has the first place: It comes in many forms and nobody seems to know which one is the right one and why it should be valid. Some of the formulations of the 2nd Law read:
- heat cannot by itself flow from cold (but what is "heat" and "by itself"?)
- entropy cannot decrease (but what is "entropy"?)
- disorder is always increasing (but what is "disorder")
- a heat engine cannot be more efficient than a Carnot engine (but what is a "heat engine" and a "Carnot engine"?).
To come grips with this mess I propose in
Computational Thermodynamics a resolution of the mystery in terms of
finite precision computation, where the 2nd Law states that
- a system evolving in time with finite precision necessarily has to destroy fine details or high frequency information in order to move ahead,
- which effectively means grinding high frequency details into heat.
Next, recall that "backradiation" is supposed to mean that a blackbody B of a certain temperature (top of the atmosphere) can radiatively heat another blackbody A of higher temperature (Earth surface).
But Planck's Radiation Law including Wien's Displacement Law tells us that a blackbody radiation spectrum has a cut-off of high frequencies proportional to the temperature, which means that the high-frequency end of the spectrum of A is missing in the spectrum of B, which means that B cannot heat A. The fine details in the spectrum of A cannot be created out of the coarser details in the spectrum of B, because a blackbody spectrum has a unique form (up to cut-off).
On the other hand A can heat B because the (coherent) fine details in the spectrum of A can be grinded to heat (= decoherent fine details) increasing the temperature of B.
In short: coherent fine details can be destroyed by a coarse process (into heat), but a coarse process cannot create coherent fine details (from decoherent heat).
We conclude that backradiation violates the 2nd Law and thus is non-physical.
What people refer to when they claim that a cold object can warm a hot object is probably the effect of increased pressure and heat capacity which results from adding mass to the system. However, by definition it cannot increase the temperature.
SvaraRadera