O. M. G.
It appears that Mr Ludwig wasn’t pleased by a review of his photon exhibition here. It went on, and on, and on in a most angry tone:
Aye carumba. Let’s see if I can locate the essential misunderestimation going on.
This post is provided for the gentle reader to get a picture of how utterly stupid and divorced from science the typical science denier is. I recently wrote a very simplified picture of the the nature of greenhouse gases. It was purposefully written on a basic level so as to give an accessible, yet accurate picture of the basic driving mechanism behind AGW. There was a lengthy response amongst my devoted denier fans.
That was really dispassionate, wasn’t it? Let me cut to the chase: this was neither accessible nor accurate. And it wasn’t close enough to be “fake but accurate”, either.
I made a number of relatively minor points in order to support the argument that the whole thing was rough around the edges. I’m not going to argue all of them again, but this statement:
Those are statements of fact. They are absolutely correct and not more or less so.
Is simply nonsense.
But rather than chase all of those squirrels up all those trees, let’s concentrate on the major blunder, that he still doesn’t seem to get:
The flow of the argument is that for a certain reason, the sun puts out a large amount of IR light and that this has been measured and understood.
There is nothing in that, or any other statement that he has said, this time or before, that indicates that he understands a very simple fact; that it isn’t primarily IR from the sun that’s causing all of the heating. It isn’t, as he said in the original post, IR reflected from the surface, it’s visible and near IR being converted to far IR, which is what can be caught on the way back out by greenhouse gases.
Let’s go to our handy-dandy alarmist-approved wikipedia page here. OK? This is the site that William Connolley lives at 24/7, and erases dissenting views within minutes. So this site is 100% guaranteed alarmist consensus. Got that so far?
So let’s look at the outline:
The incoming radiation from the Sun is mostly in the form of visible light and nearby wavelengths, largely in the range 0.2 – 4 μm, corresponding to the Sun’s radiative temperature of 6,000 K.[11]. It is no surprise that this is the “visible” light; our eyes are adapted to use the most common radiation.
About 50% of the sun’s energy is absorbed at the Earth’s surface and the rest is reflected or absorbed by the atmosphere. The reflection of light back into space – largely by clouds – does not much affect the basic mechanism; this light, effectively, is lost to the system.
The absorbed energy warms the surface.
Let me repeat that. It’s not the longwave IR that CO2 absorbs, it’s a combination of visible and much shorter wavelength IR. Specifically, the radiation that comes from the sun is centered around 0.5 um (the center of the visible spectrum, which is roughly the color green), and tails off to 1% intensity at about 2 um. CO2 doesn’t start absorbing until about 3. This is made clear from this set of curves that are universal for all radiating objects; the yellow curve being at the temperature of the sun, and the red curve being at the temperature of the earth’s surface.
The rainbow stripe is the visible spectrum. To the left is ultraviolet, and to the right is infrared. The IR is conventionally broken into “near” and “far” IR, a distinction that the critic seems to ignore, but is crucial for understanding the greenhouse theory. The sun radiates UV, visible and near IR in toward the earth. The UV is intercepted by the ozone layer, and the rest, it it doesn’t reflect off of a cloud, sails right in. None of the greenhouse gases absorb at those wavelengths. If it reflects, it goes sailing right out the way it came, again unmolested by any greenhouse gases.
When they hit the earth, what doesn’t reflect turns into heat, and warms the surface. The surface then re-radiates according to the red curve. That is in that 4-20 um range that can be absorbed by greenhouse gases.
And that, is the greenhouse theory. Please learn it, if you’re going to pontificate on how it’s going to raise sea levels 200 feet.
Again, resisting chasing all of those squirrels, however some items need to be disputed:
He would like to convince you that because the sun gives out broader bands of IR than the ones that CO2 accepts, somehow CO2 does not cause warming. This is just stupid and utterly false. IF he were correct, energy would no longer be conserved.
Never said that. Never said anything even suggesting that. The guy has severe reading comprehension problems.
It should be noted that the fool who wrote this also denies in his other writings that methane is a problem, yet he is too stupid to realize that he posted the very spectra that prove that methane is a vastly worse GHG than CO2. Of course such a detail would never cross such a little mind.
It should be noted that the fool who wrote this also denies in his other writings that methane is a problem, yet he is too stupid to realize that he posted the very spectra that prove that methane is a vastly worse GHG than CO2. Of course such a detail would never cross such a little mind.
It seems like Donald Duck is getting angrier. The truth is that the series of charts show nothing of the sort. They are based on actual atmospheric concentrations, and they are exactly what they show. All the cussing in the world doesn’t change that.
He would like to convince you that because the sun gives out broader bands of IR than the ones that CO2 accepts…
Just thought I’d point out one more time that he’s still under the mistaken notion that IR is driving all of this.
The important thing to get straight is that space is a vacuum. For convection or conduction to work, one must have a medium to transport heat. Now to be sure, the atmosphere has many modes of conduction and convection, however, the only way it- and hence the Earth as a whole can cool is through radiation. Why? Because space is a vacuum and you can’t conduct or convect heat out into space.
This is actually the basic principle behind a thermos, and a supposed chemical engineer doesn’t get it.
And of course, the re-radiation is well modeled. It is after all, only QM.
Please show where that was disputed. This is a strawman.
It is at that point that you can be pretty certain that he is lying about his supposed degrees. Either that, or he once earned one, but suffered some sort of breakdown.
As was stated many times, Mr. Lensinger has proven himself an idiot and a fraud.
Stay classy.
Now in the comments of the stupid, was a particularly impressively stupid one because a fellow got it right but missed the point. He complains, in the context of re-radiation:
For the record, that was not my comment. The fact that that isn’t clear from this statement indicates a serious communication deficit on the part of the writer.
There is a very serious problem here. We have people falsely claiming to be experts, when in reality they would not pass freshman level physics or chemistry. This does not stop them from shooting their mouths off, but that is not the real problem. The real problem is that Americans - or at least some of them are so proudly ignorant, that they believe this shit.
The irony in that statement is enough to have a magnetic field. Just savor that.
And with that, his true tranzi nature reveals itself. Americans are the real problem. Not Russians who question climate alarmism, not Indians who criticize the IPCC, no. Only Americans. They must be liquidated.
No, the solution is Mr. Quixote needs to be ordered into anger management classes.
And btw, if I’m the one “denying” this, why do I have to explain how it allegedly works to him?
Recent Comments