Thursday, September 8, 2011

Copernicus Meets the Greenhouse Effect

Astrophysicist Joseph Postma has a new recommended essay on the misconceptions of the 'greenhouse effect' paradigm that have resulted in falacious climate alarm:
h/t Hans Schreuder

2 comments:

  1. Everyone needs to remember that past generations of scientists labored long, and identified a simple, long-term equilibrium model of the atmosphere, known as the Standard Atmosphere. It is this Standard Atmosphere that I compared with the atmosphere of Venus, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, and showed there simply is no evidence of a greenhouse effect, as promulgated under the IPCC-sponsored consensus, on either planet. It is crystal clear to me that anyone who wants to correct and advance climate science from this point on, needs to base their theories on the Standard Atmosphere as the long-term average condition of the atmosphere, in which the hydrostatic temperature lapse rate structure defines the vertical temperature distribution of the stable atmosphere, and the incident solar intensity (and only this incident solar intensity) determines the actual temperature at a given pressure level (the surface, in particular). With this in mind (all you physicists take heed), Postma makes the same egregious mistake the consensus theorists make, by trying to apply the Stefan-Boltzmann equation where it is not applicable, and quite obviously and fundamentally not applicable, which is also confirmed by the simple and clear results of my Venus/Earth comparison (which applies the Stefan-Boltzmann equation properly, on a sphere drawn outside of the atmosphere, not at the surface of the Earth).

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  2. Hi Harry,

    Actually I did not make that mistake. I define the Earth system as including the atmosphere: in a diagram it looks like a surface for simplicity. The total output from the Earth has to be measured from space, it is an error to consider the Stefan-Boltzmann equation at the surface-air temperature as representative of the system. The last figure in the paper referenced in the above paper here shows the standard atmosphere: the lapse rate is included there, etc.
    However I do make the point that you need to be very careful in looking only at the "average" atmosphere, because then people start getting confused about "why is it warmer than -18C at the ground surface if the sunlight is only -18C?"
    The Sunlight is NOT -18C.
    I do like your Venus comparison and I think that we're arriving at what is the pertinent conclusion but from different perspectives: there is no radiative atmospheric GHE.

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