After 6 months and 2000 comments on Judy Curry's blog about my refutation of the basic postulate of CO2 climate alarmism of backradiation, I can make the following sum up:
- My new derivation of Planck's radiation law has stood the test. Nobody has shown that it is incorrect.
- In my version of Planck's law there is no radiative transfer of heat from one blackbody to a warmer blackbody, only from a warmer to a colder. In other words, there is no backradiation.
- The reason is that such a process would be unstable and real physics cannot operate with unstable processes. Backradiation thus is fiction without reality.
- Backradiation is not described in the physics literature.
- Backradiation has been invented out of the blue to serve CO2 alarmism by supplying gross two-way radiative transfer of heat energy back and forth between the Earth surface and the atmosphere, and the instability of this exchange is the root of the alarmism.
- CO2 alarmism based on a fiction of backradiation is fiction.
I ask Judy to make her own sum up of the debate and compare with mine.
PS Measuring backradiation or DLR by an IR camera is also fiction. DLR is computed by Stefan-Boltzmann Q = sigma T^4 from measured temperature T and thus is self-fulfilling: Since Stefan-Boltzmann in the alarmist version is postulated to include backradiation/DLR, the instrument records DLR because it uses Stefan-Boltzmann and not because it directly measures real backradiation. DS
Inlägg
Your ideas are trivially shown to be false. Radiation from the atmosphere is very easily detected - ask any astronomer about telluric emission. Your fourth point only shows that you have not read, or did not understand, the physics literature on this.
SvaraRaderaWhich is the original source describing backradiation, which I should read?
SvaraRaderaYou say "..such a process would be unstable.."
SvaraRaderaWhy do you claim this? Do you have a concrete example of the kind of instability that you are talking about?
The SB-law for several bodies is fully linear, something that in most situations is unlikely to give rise to instabilities, especially in connection with the type of energy diffusiion processes involved here.
It would be unstable in the same way an economy with very big taxes form the people and big revenues back to the people, is unstable.
SvaraRaderaOr unstable in the same sense as backwards heat conduction, which represents un-smoothing, is unstable, by increasing gradients until break-down.
The instability has nothing to with non-linearity and just expresses that perturbations grow quickly with time.
I don't give much for the comparison to taxes, that's just words, not mathematics.
SvaraRaderaWhat you seem to be saying, but avoid to state in a precise mathematical way, is that you think the system will be sensitive to perturbations in the initial conditions. Why would this be unphysical? The position of the water molecules in a glass of water is also highly sensitive to initial conditions, but there is no physical problem with that. All this says is that the exact point in phase space that the system will develop to after some time T is difficult, close to impossible to predict. But almost all points in the phase space with the same energy, and other conserved properties, will have near identical macroscopic properties. Being chaotic of a microscopic scale does not mean that the system is unstable, or even unpredictable, on the macroscopic scale.
Backradiation is unstable on a macroscopic scale and thus unphysical.
SvaraRadera"Backradiation is unstable on a macroscopic scale and thus unphysical."
SvaraRaderaDo you simply claim this as an article of faith with no mathematical justification? Where have you proven that backradiation give rise to an unstable system and in which sense is it unstable on a macroscopic level?
This is a scientific discussion not a political or theological one. If you want to convince me that you are right you must provide an argument, not just state things which I am supposed to believe in without questioning them.
Yes it is science we are talking about. As I said the instability is analogous to that of back conduction, or un-smoothing since heat conduction or diffusion is smoothing. This is like un-smoothing a picture in Photoshop, which has been smoothed: it does not give back the original picture because little details are lost in the smoothing and cannot be retrieved. Smoothing is stable by decreasing gradients, while un-smoothing or backdiffusion is unstable by increasing gradients. The diffusion approximation of radiation is stable and indicates that radiation is stable, but also indicates that backradiation like backdiffusion is unstable.Get it?
SvaraRaderaJust more words. I have not asked for analogies, I asked the very concrete question of whether you have or have not proven mathematically that the backradiation situation is macroscopically unstable, and if you have done that in which mathematical sense the system is unstable. Which macroscopic properties are sensitive to the initial conditions?
SvaraRaderaI ask for mathematics, not analogies and pictures. Have, or have you not, done this mathematical analysis?
Claes, please answer all questions.
SvaraRaderaIt seems to me that it doesn't really matter if warmists cling to their belief in backradiation, provided they understand it can never warm the surface. The end result is that it is as good as reflected. The arguments on Science of Doom make out that not all is reflected, hence some warms. But if we show it is all as good as reflected, then nothing is left to warm the surface. It's the lack of warming that matters and the concept of the cut-off.
SvaraRaderaI'm curious as to whether there is any of the Sun's IR radiation that would be above cut-off for cold areas of the surface. If so, then carbon dioxide has a cooling effect when it absorbs some of this IR and returns it to space, rather like increasing the albedo.
All in all, I believe Claes deserves a Nobel Prize for this as he has outsmarted even Einstein.
I refer to his work extensively on my website http://climate-change-theory.com
Doug Cotton
We should not lose sight of the fact that Nasif Nahle's September 2011 experiment confirmed that there is no warming effect from whatever backradiation there may be.
SvaraRaderaThere are many simple home experiments that help people understand that radiation from a cooler source will have no warming effect on a source that is already warmer. You can reflect the light of a headlamp back onto itself and it won't appear brighter. You can place two identical metal plates either in open shade or in the dark of night and shield one from any backradiation, then measure temperatures. You can get two identical electric radiators and see if they warm any faster when facing each other (in open air) compared with not facing. Then check that a hot one will help a cold one to warm faster or cool more slowly.
But I do have a question regarding any radiation that is of such low frequency that it cannot resonate with the material it meets at the surface. In a footnote on this* page I have suggested that perhaps it may experience multiple deflections from the molecules which cannot absorb and re-emit it, the end result being that it eventually breaks free of the surface after being effectively turned around by these deflections. Is this plausible, or are you sure all IR below cut-off must get absorbed (actually I prefer the word "captured") and then re-emitted?
* http://climate-change-theory.com/RadiationAbsorption.html