Carnot’s Heat Engine and the Rankine Cycle Disprove the GHE
Astrophysicist, Joseph E Postma pulls no punches in his latest blog post exposing so-called global warming skeptics who appear to be propping up the increasingly discredited ‘greenhouse gas theory’ of climate change.
Naming and shaming those he suspects may be intentionally misrepresenting the facts, Postma points his accusatory finger fairly and squarely first and foremost at WUWT’s Anthony Watts, Dr Robert Brown and Dr Roy Spencer.
Postma has on many occasions – not only in private emails, but in detailed published articles – set out his scientific case as to why standard physics, chemistry and thermodynamics disprove the belief that carbon dioxide can play any measurable role in climate change.
The Canadian astrophysicist insists that such errors are:
“helping to destroy the credibility, use, and function of true science. You can not have a PhD in physics and insist that cold heats hot, that insulation in your walls determines the burn temperature of the natural gas in your furnace, that as something warm heats up something cold the cold thing heats up the warm thing in proportion, etc. You can not believe that turning on a lightbulb and putting it in front of a mirror will make it shine brighter.”
To quote Mr. Watts:
“Let me make this simple, the greenhouse effect is a well established property of radiative physics in our atmosphere, one that I have observed firsthand through experimentation.”
Oh really? He’s observed it first hand? Like when he turned on a lightbulb in front of a mirror and demonstrated no greenhouse effect? Like when the greenhouse effect “radiative physics” ignores the natural lapse rate gradient that already establishes that the bottom of the atmosphere must be warmer than the average? As when Watts and his associates didn’t know what a time-dependent differential thermal equation is.
Heat Does not Flow from Cold to Hot
Of course, that section title shouldn’t really need to be stated, even for the small number of people in academia and the climate alarmists who still believe in the greenhouse effect.
There is a single defined rule for heat transfer that has never been proven wrong or incorrect for classical-level physics, and that is that heat transfer is a function of the difference between the hot and cold temperatures. This is the very definition of the fundamental thermodynamic concept of heat. Using the italic ‘f’ to denote a mathematical function, the general equation for heat transfer (Q, which is the rate of energy flow) is:
Q ~ f(Th – Tc)
Sometimes the temperatures will be their own functions for representing energy, and so for a little bit more denotational accuracy:
Q ~ f(f(Th) – f(Tc))
For example, if the energy transfer is purely radiative and the energy basically follows blackbody output, then
Q ~ f(Th4 – Tc4)
which means that the radiative heat transfer is a function of difference between the fourth-powers of the hot and cold temperatures.
Two Hundred Years of Practical Thermodynamics Bypasses the Greenhouse Effect
Alright I’m going to change pace. I don’t need to write out a huge physics lesson here on Carnot and Rankine as if it is a week’s worth of notes and formula derivation for an undergraduate physics class. Let’s just get to the point. Everyone already knows about the heat-flow situation because it has been discussed at length on this blog:
Heat flows from hot to cold; cold does not cause hot to become hotter; hot in warming cold does not become hotter still because it warmed the cold; only the colder temperature rises when it is heated by hot; a temperature can not heat itself.
That long statement is as factual as existence itself and it debunks the atmospheric greenhouse effect in entirety. You don’t need anything else than that. But let’s have a look at the Carnot Heat Engine:
From Wiki:
[The] maximum efficiency
is defined to be:
where
-
is the work done by the system (energy exiting the system as work),
is the heat put into the system (heat energy entering the system),
is the absolute temperature of the cold reservoir, and
is the absolute temperature of the hot reservoir.
Let’s also have a look at the Rankine Cycle:
From Wiki:
is the thermodynamic efficiency where:
How important is the physics and thermodynamics which govern these processes? From Wiki:
The Rankine cycle, in the form of steam engines, generates about 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of all electric power used throughout the world
Usefulness of the Greenhouse Effect
Now what does the greenhouse effect (supposedly) do…what does the physics of the greenhouse effect allow you to do? The physics of the greenhouse effect allows you to take a heat input, and double its power (according to the steel greenhouse model), and in fact, actually allow you to arbitrarily amplify said heat input to any temperature you want depending on how well you engineer such a system (as mathematically proven here, pp. 12-14).
The efficiency (η – Greek “eta”) of both of these cycles is the same – it’s a very simple and obvious definition:
η = Wout/Qin
and as for any system that obeys the Laws of Thermodynamics, this value will always be less than one (η < 1), because you can’t have a perfectly efficient (η = 1) system, let alone a more than perfect (η > 1) system.
Engineers are the most brilliant people on the planet and can figure anything out, and so we could easily engineer a system to utilize “greenhouse radiative mechanics” to amplify the heat input temperature to the system.
Using the usual climate numbers, for example, we could input heat energy from outside (Qin) at a temperature of -40C, but produce an availability of heat at a temperature of +15C, which could then be used to do work. You’d be able to produce work at a temperature of +15C when all you supplied was heat at -40C.
Or generally, you could have an initial system that directly used the heat input for producing work. Then, you could re-engineer the system to use the radiative greenhouse effect which would allow you to cut in half (or more) the heat input you have to introduce from outside, and have the system amplify this heat back to the working temperature of the original direct-usage system and produce that amount of work once again. You would get an immediate massive boost in efficiency, and not only that, you could actually get the system to produce more work than you put in in the first place. Look at the efficiency equation again:
η = Wout/Qin
With the radiative greenhouse effect, you could keep reducing Qin to a smaller and smaller value depending on how well you engineer the “heat trapping”/”backradiation” mechanism, while keeping Wout constant or even increasing it, relative to the direct-usage system. If Qin gets smaller and smaller then eventually η become larger than one. This is born out directly in their greenhouse math mechanics, as referenced previously (here, pp. 12-14).
Do you Understand?
Do you understand that the Carnot Heat Engine, the Rankine Cycle, nuclear/gas/coal power plants, function because the greenhouse effect does not exist? 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the world’s electric power is produced because the greenhouse effect does not exist.
If the greenhouse effect existed, it would have been noticed by the physicists and engineers who discovered and engineered thermodynamics and created these modern technological thermal power systems, because as it is, all of these systems function without making any regard to the mechanics of the greenhouse effect. If greenhouse effect mechanics were real, it would have had to have been discovered and factored in, and it would be discussed and part of basic thermodynamic theory. It manifestly is not, and it obviously is not because the concept of backradiation heating is preposterous on the very face of it. There exists not a single experimental demonstration of the “physics” of the greenhouse effect as proposed for the atmosphere.
Everything works because there is no greenhouse effect. And that is a fact. Study these thermal power systems as much as you want and as much as you can, and get very familiar with them. Real-world non-climate-alarm systems function because they never have to take into account a greenhouse effect. Try to make a new cycle incorporating the greenhouse effect and then build it…you’ll be very famous, I promise you that.
For that matter: Real greenhouses function because there is no radiative greenhouse effect!
And isn’t that a convenient hijack of definitions and concepts. A real greenhouse gets warm because it traps hot air, it prevents air which has been heated by the surfaces inside the greenhouse which have themselves been heated by sunshine, from convecting away (hot air rises, the glass roof stops this) and being replaced by cool air from above. That is the physical mechanism of a real greenhouse and it has nothing to do with the supposed radiative greenhouse effect in our atmosphere. The underlying physical mechanisms are completely different, and so the term “greenhouse effect” which should correspond to a factual physical greenhouse and the physical trapping of warm air, gets hijacked and contorted and ambiguated with this other atmospheric radiative conception for the atmosphere. It’s a total disaster for clarity, definitions, conceptualization, logic, language, etc. But the most ironic thing about this is, is that the supposed radiative greenhouse effect (which is postulated for the atmosphere) should actually be found and exist in a real physical greenhouse too, because the physics should translate over – but it isn’t!
The only place the supposed radiative greenhouse mechanics exists is within climate alarm – it exists nowhere else in all of industry and all of science and all of physics, etc. It should exist everywhere else because as a basic principle of physics, it has to be universal, it has to be applicable anywhere else that similar situations exist. Alas, it is nowhere else to be found.
It should be seen in a real greenhouse of all places for goodness’ sake! The radiative greenhouse effect isn’t even found there.
Why and How Did the GHE get placed in the Atmosphere?
Simple. Because climate alarmists and skeptic believers who still support this junk science leave out the natural lapse rate gradient in any discussion of the physical characteristics of the atmosphere. That is as simple as how they do it… merely by ignoring the lapse rate gradient, and replacing it with an invented and thermodynamics-violating “radiative” temperature self-amplification mechanism.
Do you see the lapse rate gradient in the IPCC energy budget or in any of the GHE diagrams? I mean this is one of, if not the, most fundamental features of the atmosphere and it can be demonstrated with very basic undergraduate-level physics: U = mgh + mCpT so that when dU = 0, dT/dh = -g/Cp. This is the most basic and fundamental theory of energy conservation there is, and it is empirically confirmed precisely, and when you add in water vapour to the math the adjusted “wet” value is again precisely empirically confirmed. And meteorological theory precisely confirms these values and others methods of derivation also confirm these values. It’s the most fundamental thing about the atmosphere that can possibly exist, particularly if you care about energy conservation.
And so the IPCC and GHE energy budgets, in their pretense of conserving energy, leave it out. They make no reference to it anywhere. In its place, they invent a radiative mechanism to perform what the lapse rate already naturally explains – that the bottom of the atmosphere has to be warmer than the blackbody average of the system as seen from outer-space. It is just that simple.
Honesty
If someone can create a thermal power system that uses the greenhouse effect which will (given the pretext of what the GHE can do) increase the efficiency of the system beyond unity or even beyond existing Rankine & Carnot power systems, and demonstrate it (no mere wishful thinking about steel greenhouses!), then I will be more than happy to concede that I have to reevaluate things because I would not wish to deny such a wonderful and positive advancement to the human condition.
But really, we can forget about that right away, because the whole concept is already proven as bogus and it is junk science just on the face of it. To repeat the most intelligent words that could ever grace climate science (not that they ever will!):
Heat flows from hot to cold; cold does not cause hot to become hotter; hot in warming cold does not become hotter still because it warmed the cold; only the colder temperature rises when it is heated by hot; a temperature can not heat itself.
And as Greg House would point out: Does the thermal energy from your face, reflected back to your face, make your face hotter still?
You have to be the misguided Anthony Watts, Roy Spencer, or Robert Brown (etc…Shore, Folkerts, Colose, Curry, Allen, Monckton…etc.) to get upset and discombobulated at that question.
********
To read the full and unedited version of Postma’s article please visit climateofsophistry.com
Trackback from your site.