BIG LIE: Most Scientists Agree Climate Change Man-Made, Urgent & Dangerous
There are so many empty slogans out there I wish we could tackle all of them at once. But the “97% of scientists agree” is surely the elephant in the room.
Lots of people have tried to rebut it by dismissing the notion of consensus itself, or by praising the historical examples of renegade scientists who went against a prevailing consensus and turned out to be right.
But that unnecessarily concedes the major claim itself, which the evidence shows is simply not true. I hope you enjoy the video, and that you’ll share it widely.
Transcript below:
Narrator
The claim that 97% of the world’s scientists agree is pretty much the ace of trumps in the whole climate debate.
After all, who’s going to argue against a consensus that strong, backed by so many experts. But what exactly are they supposed to agree on? If you look behind the curtain, no one seems sure what the experts actually said. Or who they are. Or… anything.
John
At first glance it seems straightforward enough. In 2013 President Barack Obama famously tweeted that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.”
In 2014, his Secretary of State John Kerry said 97% of “the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.” And that same year, CNN said “97% of scientists agree that climate change is happening now, that it’s damaging the planet and that it’s manmade.”
Narrator
That’s pretty much what most people think when they hear the 97% slogan: Every scientist believes man-made climate change is an urgent crisis.
But there are millions of scientists in the world. How many exactly were surveyed? When were they surveyed? Who did it? And what exactly did they agree on?
John
Let’s find out. I’m John Robson and this is a Climate Discussion Nexus Fact Check on the 97 percent consensus slogan.
To begin with, there are some ideas that pretty much all scientists accept. For instance that birds are descended from dinosaurs, though that idea was once dismissed as highly eccentric.
And when it comes to climate, you don’t need a poll to tell you that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, meaning it likely has some overall warming effect. That’s been known since the mid-1800s. And if you did do a survey, you would find overwhelming scientific agreement on that point.
Also, there are lots of indications that the world is somewhat warmer now than it was in the mid-1800s, the end of a natural cooling period called the Little Ice Age.
Finally, virtually nobody disputes that humans have changed the environment of our planet, by releasing emissions into the air, changing the land surface, putting things in the water, and so forth.
These aren’t controversial ideas, and they’re accepted even by most climate skeptics. What we don’t accept is that any of them prove that humans are the only cause of global warming, or that climate change is a dangerous threat.
If 97% of scientists believed that, it would be troubling. Though even so, we’d still have to find some plan whose benefits outweighed its costs.
In any event, that level of consensus that the problem was manmade and urgent would certainly be noteworthy. But the thing is, they don’t agree on that.
A close look at what survey data we have, and there isn’t much, tells us, yes, there is a great deal of agreement that CO2 is a greenhouse gas to some degree, that the Earth has warmed in the last 160 years, and that humans affect their surroundings.
But that survey data also tell us there’s far less agreement on everything else including whether we face a crisis.
So where did this 97% claim come from and why is it so widely repeated?
Narrator
The 97% claim seems to have begun with a historian of science named Naomi Oreskes who, in 2004, claimed she’d looked at 928 articles about climate change in scientific journals, that 75% of them endorsed the “consensus view” that “Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities” and that none directly disputed it.
By 2006, in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, this finding had somehow morphed into “a massive study of every scientific article in a peer-reviewed journal written on global warming for the last 10 years and they took a big sample of 10%, 928 articles, and you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we’re causing global warming and that it’s a serious problem? Out of the 928, zero.”
John
That was a fib. Gore took a study that found 75% endorsed the idea that humans have some effect on climate and turned it into proof that 100% of scientists believe it’s a serious problem. It does no such thing.
Narrator
And nor do the handful of other surveys on the subject. For instance five years later, in 2009, a pair of researchers at the University of Illinois sent an online survey to over 10,000 Earth scientists asking two simple questions:
Do you agree that global temperatures have generally risen since the pre-1800s? and
Do you think that human activity is a significant contributing factor?
[Note: They asked some other questions too, but didn’t report the questions or results in the publication.]
John
They didn’t single out greenhouse gases, they didn’t explain what the term “significant” meant and they didn’t refer to danger or crisis. So what was the result?
Narrator
Of the 3,146 responses they received, 90 percent said yes to the first question, that global temperatures had risen since the Little Ice Age, and only 82 percent said yes to the second, that human activity was a significant contributing factor.
Interestingly, among meteorologists only 64 percent said yes to the second, meaning a third of the experts in the study of weather patterns who replied didn’t think humans play a significant role in global warming, let alone a dominant one.
What got the most media attention was that among the 77 respondents who described themselves as climate experts, 75 said yes to the second question. 75 out of 77 is 97%.
John
OK, it didn’t get any media attention that they took 77 out of 3,146 responses. But that’s the key statistical trick. They found a 97 percent consensus among 2 percent of the survey respondents.
And even so it was only that there’d been some warming since the 1800s, which virtually nobody denies, and that humans are partly responsible.
These experts didn’t say it was dangerous or urgent, because they weren’t asked.
So far the claim that 97% of “world scientists” are saying there’s a climate crisis is pure fiction. But wait, you say. There must be more. Yes, there is. But not much.
Narrator
Another survey appeared in 2013, by Australian researcher John Cook and his coauthors, in which they claimed to have examined about 12,000 scientific papers related to climate change, and found that 97% endorsed the consensus view that greenhouse gases were at least partly responsible for global warming.
This study generated headlines around the world, and it was the one to which Obama’s tweet was referring.
John
But here again, appearances were deceiving.
Two-thirds of the papers that Cook and his colleagues examined expressed no view at all on the consensus. Of the remaining 34%, the authors claimed that 33% endorsed the consensus.
Divide 33 by 34 and you get 97%. But this result is essentially meaningless, because they set the bar so low.
The survey authors didn’t ask if climate change was dangerous or “manmade”.
They only asked if a given paper accepted that humans have some effect on the climate, which as already noted is uncontroversial. It could mean as little as accepting the “urban heat island” effect.
So a far better question would be: How many of the studies claimed that humans have caused most of the observed global warming? And oddly, we do know.
Because buried in the authors’ data was the answer: A mere 64 out of nearly 12,000 papers! That’s not 97%, it’s one half of one percent. It’s one in 200.
And it gets worse. In a follow-up study, climatologist David Legates read those 64 papers and found that a third of them didn’t even say what Cook and his team claimed. Only 41 actually endorsed the view that global warming is mostly manmade. And we still haven’t got to it being “dangerous”. That part of the survey results was simply invented, by politicians and activists.
Other researchers have condemned the Cook study on other grounds too. For instance economist Richard Tol showed that over three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsing even the weak consensus actually said nothing at all on the subject.
And evidence later emerged that the authors of the paper were drafting press releases about their findings before they even started doing the research, which indicates an alarming level not of warming or of consensus but of bias.
The reality is that neither this study, nor a handful of others like it, prove that 97% of scientists believe climate change is mostly manmade, let alone that it’s a crisis.
The fact that people who claim to put such stock in “settled science” accept such obvious statistical hocus pocus is both astounding and disappointing.
Narrator
So what do climate experts really think? The year before Obama sent out his tweet, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) surveyed its 7,000 members. They got about 1,800 responses.
Of those, only 52% said they think global warming over the 20th century has happened and is mostly manmade. The remaining 48% either think it happened but is mostly natural, or it didn’t happen, or they don’t know.
And while it’s possible that the three-quarters who didn’t answer split the same way as those who did, it’s also possible that committed alarmists are more likely to answer such surveys.
In any case, it’s a small sample, even of AMS members, let alone of the world’s scientists.
John
There was one more survey a few years later by the Netherlands Environment Agency that claimed 66% of climate experts believed humans were mostly responsible for warming since 1950. Which falls far short of 97% even if it outperforms the other studies.
A social psychologist named Jose Duarte, who specializes in survey design, published an analysis of that one, pointing out that they diluted the sample by including large numbers of psychologists, philosophers, political scientists, and other non-experts, making their results meaningless as a measure of what scientists think.
Just as you’ll find that the people who cite that 97% number are overwhelmingly not trained scientists, certainly not trained statisticians.
Narrator
So we’re no farther ahead than when we began. Most experts agree on the basics, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and probably causes some warming and that humans have some impact on climate probably including some warming.
But they actively debate the rest: How much warming will there be? Is it a problem? Should we try to stop it, or adapt, or wait and see?
These are all important questions and we need good answers.
John
And there’s the claim that many of the world’s national science academies, representing hundreds of thousands of scientists across the globe, have issued statements supporting the consensus about global warming and demanding government efforts to cut emissions.
The problem is, not a single one of those societies took a survey of their members before issuing their statements in the name of their members.
The statements were put out by a small number of activists using their committee positions to make it look as though their views are shared by all the world’s experts.
But if they are, why didn’t these authors survey their members before publishing the statements?
There are a couple of other studies that claimed to prove a consensus. But they run into the same problems. All they show is wide agreement on the uncontroversial bits.
They offer no information about whether a majority of scientists think global warming is a crisis.
And then they’re spun wildly by non-scientists to tell us things they don’t begin to say, often about questions they didn’t even attempt to investigate .
The problem isn’t just that we don’t know what percentage of scientists agrees with this or that statement about global warming.
It’s something much worse.
All this talk of a 97% consensus amounts to a dishonest bullying campaign to stifle scientific debate just when we need it most because the question looms so large in public policy.
As physicist Richard Feynmann once said, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” And that’s especially true when we’re asked to take drastic action based on those answers.
Not long ago that survey expert I mentioned earlier, Jose Duarte, warned his fellow scientists about the negative consequences of claiming consensus. He said:
“It is ill advised to report a consensus as though it is an aggregation of independent judgments. Humans are an ultrasocial species, and dissent is far costlier than assent to a perceived majority…
“A scientist who contests the prevailing narrative on human-caused warming, or merely produces smaller estimates, will likely end up on a McCarthyite blacklist of ‘deniers’.
“Self-described mainstream climate scientists refer the public to such lists, implicitly endorsing the smearing of their colleagues. This is disturbing, and unheard of in other sciences.”
The unfortunate truth is that there is strong political pressure for climate experts not to question claims of impending doom.
Those who do so face steep personal and professional costs, including a barrage of abuse that can be highly unpleasant for people who mostly wanted to devote their lives to the quiet pursuit of knowledge not to noisy polemics.
And that means we should listen carefully to them when they feel compelled to speak out anyway.
Whether they represent 50%, or 10%, or 3% of experts, what matters is the evidence they bring and the quality of their arguments.
And on that, I would hope we have 100 percent agreement.
For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson.
Source: YouTube.com / Transcript reference here.
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Alan
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This doesn’t bring any clarity to the problem.
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Joseph Olson
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Synopsis of Carbon Climate Forcing > Pied Pipper propagandists using
Chicken Little science to promote Jack in the Beanstalk energy failure
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Carl
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Instead of the endless debate over whether or not human activity has changed the Earth why not discuss why we have changed the Earth? The short answer is to survive the Earth’s naturally hostile climate. In order to survive the Earth’s incessant attempts to kill us off, humanity has developed a number of defense mechanisms—“adaptations” if you will. These survival mechanisms do, indeed, change the Earth’s naturally hostile climate into a climate that is more survivable. Some of these climate changes are small in size and others are major.
1) Using hydrocarbon energy we build enclosed structures called houses whose insides are “climate controlled” using various types of hydrocarbon powered heating and cooling mechanisms. If we didn’t the hostile northern climates would kill most everyone during the long winters and the hostile desert climates would kill most everyone during the long summers.
2) Using hydrocarbon powered machinery we plough down prairie grass, which we cannot eat, and in its place grow grain crops that we can eat. All kinds of agricultural endeavors worldwide necessarily cause changes to local and regional climates, because in their natural state these climates do not support human life on a large scale. Alterations of these agricultural climates includes pumping water out of the ground and diverting streams and rivers for irrigation. If we didn’t make these changes in the these local and regional climates most of the people currently living on the planet would starve to death.
3) When there is a drought in a certain region of the world we use hydrocarbon powered trucks to ship food in from other regions that are not in a drought. If we didn’t then droughts would again lead to the starvation death of those living in drought stricken regions as they used to.
4) When people build homes and farms on a flood plain (because flood plain soil is very fertile and flat land is easier to build on) they, using hydrocarbon powered machinery, build dams upstream to control flooding and to provide a water source for drinking and irrigation. If they didn’t then every time it rained a flood would wash their homes and crops away and during the dry season the people living on these flood plains would die of thirst and their crops would fail.
I could go on but I hope that you get the point. Human beings use hydrocarbon energy make a lot of changes in the Earth’s natural climate in order to make it more survivable. Before the age of agriculture, ~10,000 years ago, there were only about 5 million people on the planet who lived a very harsh existence by today’s standards. The changes that human beings have made to the Earth’s climate, small and large, since that time have allowed the human population to grow more than a thousand fold. I, for one, think that this is a good thing.
As an added benefit the fact that we have made these changes using hydrocarbon energy has raised the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide. Higher levels of the “greenhouse gases”–carbon dioxide and water–in the atmosphere is extremely beneficial to the planet’s biosphere, because these molecules are what plants use during photosynthesis to create more life. Ergo, the widespread use of hydrocarbon energy for the benefit of humanity has also been a boon for the Earth’s flora and fauna.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Carl,
I had composed a comment in which Judged that your comment stood head and shoulders above that of the posting and the other 3 comments. And somehow it disappeared. So now I only have energy to praise your effort.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Kurt Konrad
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The Earth has a “hostile” (sic) climate? How come all other species are able to survive just fine? Humans are the only species that need to burn everything left and right to warm up their bums to survive the winter. And now too cool them to make it through the summer too. Out ability to survive in our natural habitat is constantly atrophying. Which extends beyond the climate. People are now unable to bear babies without all sorts of medications and external help. Ditto most ailments, most everything. What we call progress is in fact constant deterioration of our abilities. Any random animal is vastly superior to humans – except the domesticated ones, which we’ve managed to fuck up just as we’ve fucked up ourselves.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Kurt,
Survival of a species depends on two things. Its ability to exploit existing conditions and its ability to adapt to changing conditions. Humans exist and exploit all existing condones on Earth better than any other species. This is due in large part by the community of the whole being able to use the advancement created by the individuals. As long as individuals are allowed the freedom to be different and make decisions on what is best for them the collective will be able to adapt and survive.
Look at a bee or ant colony where the individuals are programed for a set behavior. They are excellent for established conditions but extremely vulnerable to change. Also consider the solitary tiger, which is fully capable os providing for itself and the lion where there is a collective effort utilizing the different abilities of the individual members. There are too many lions, too few tigers.
Herb
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Kurt Konrad
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Human adapt through external means, technologies. That makes sense to some extent, but not indefinitely. If humans continue the current course of increasing reliance on technologies, they will ultimately replace themselves with machines, which we might be experiencing the onset of, as we speak.
Most humans wouldn’t make it through the day without this or that medication, this or that doodad, this or that crutch.
I’m not necessarily advocating climbing back on trees or going back to caves, growing fur, and so on, but it would behoove us to be aware of how much our survival ability has atrophied and to stop considering technologies the ultimate achievement.
On the contrary, people should strive at attaining inner peace and creating abstract things. Doodads a.k.a. technologies are no more than a reflection of our weaknesses, laziness, and, often, decadence.
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Binra
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Maybe we adapted a split mind from a species Separation Trauma – now largely relegated to a ‘mythological era’, as the means to seek to predict and try to evade or mitigate reliving it, and thus ritually re-enacting its themes through the very mind we developed to mask over, displace and in a sense work out inner conflicts as externally projected or cast out drama.
So this ‘mind’ development can be called a masking of fear and self-lack behind a lie made not just ‘convenient’ but necessarily driven by a psycho-physical identification, split off from Existence as if a mind or thing alone and apart – and in need of allies, levers and masking reinforcement!
Carl
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That the Earth’s climate is “hostile” on the one hand and that many animals are able to survive within it on the other are not incompatible realities. The reason is “adaptation”. Animals, like human beings, adapt. Certain birds fly south for the winter; bears hibernate during the winter; puffer fish developed the ability to puff themselves up to scare off would-be predators, etc., etc., etc. Even so, many species have failed to adapt to the Earth’s ever changing hostile climate and have gone extinct. Some estimate that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived on the Earth have gone extinct because they were unable to adapt to changes in the Earth’s hostile climate.
The humans ability to adapt to the Earth’s hostile climate is clearly superior to the ability of wild animals to adapt. You don’t see animals growing their own food, digging wells and building irrigation systems to supply their water needs, harnessing the power of fire and turning it into electricity, building vehicles that can transport them from place to place at speeds that far exceed their natural capacity to move about the Earth, building weapons to protect themselves from predators, building world encompassing communication systems, building vehicles that can carry them out into space, building hospitals and producing the wide array of medications that doubles their life expectancy, etc., etc., etc.
The human race’s superior ability to adapt to the Earth’s hostile climate has, in fact, allowed the human population to multiply a thousand-fold since the “hunter-gatherer” days as well as more than doubling our life expectancy.
Then: 5-6 million people with an average life expectancy of ~30 years old
Now: 7.6 billion people with an average life expectancy of ~78 years old
These adaptations have not actually resulted in an “atrophy” of the human race’s ability to survive a pre-agrigultural, hunter-gatherer life-style. I suspect that out of the current world population there are still 5-6 million people under the age of 30 that could survive a hunter-gatherer existence just as there was some 10,000 years ago. I also suspect that most of the other 7,594,000,000 of us living today would (without the benefit of hydrocarbon powered adaptations) be “culled from the herd” as it were because in a hunter-gatherer life-style only the very strongest and only the relatively young survived, because the Earth’s natural climate was as hostile back then as it is today.
In its unaltered, untamed state nature is merciless. It doesn’t care if you are too cold or too hot, whether you are hungry or thirsty, whether you are eaten by a predator, whether you die of birth defect, whether you fall and break your leg and/or die from an infection. 10,000 years ago few people suffered and died from cancer, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, etc., because no one lived long enough to get them.
Concerning women giving birth at home, even just one hundred years ago (before the advent of modern maternity rooms) 40 times more women died in childbirth than are dying today and two hundred years ago 80 times more women died in childbirth than die today. Who knows how many women died in childbirth in the cave-man days? So, its not that woman could not today if they wanted to give birth at home without the benefit of a modern delivery room. Rather they choose to use modern medical facilities because they are less likely to die in the process!
The fact is, anyone who wants to can go live out into the wilderness (“our natural habitat”) and leave behind the benefits of the food and material that human beings produce using hydrocarbon energy. They are free to revive the glory days when human beings lived a hunter-gatherer life-style–a life-style in which one is in full and un-advantaged competition with all of the other wild animals for survival–but I don’t see even the most radical anti-hydrocarbon energy activists eschewing the largess that hydrocarbon energy provides in favor of a more primitive life-style. Do you?
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Carl,
You wrote–“Then: 5-6 million people with an average life expectancy of ~30 years old. Now: 7.6 billion people with an average life expectancy of ~78 years old.”
I ponder this data and question if it applies to India and China. For I consider these two nations have a population problem relative to the other nations of the world.
I know very, very little about India and maybe not much more about China, which is in the news daily. And I was in China for 3 or 4 whole days. And I realize I was not in the industrialize part of China where are air pollution problems. I head quartered in anew city of more than 2 million which in the mid-80s’ was a fishing village just across from Hong Kong. But I was in Canton (an old city which is no long called Canton)..And in traveling between these two cities on a modern subway-train I saw small rice-paddies behind small homes being cultivated by hand just as I can image was being done thousands of years ago. The streets and sidewalks I saw were all clean and in good repair whether a year old or many centuries ago. I saw no broken windows or boarded up windows. I saw that billions of dollars were being invested in infrastructure which had to provide employment for those who wanted to work. For I saw lots and lots of people but no beggars.
I read in the Holy Bible that the Creator God disciplines those He loves. And I am not to deny that the Chinese government displines harshly those who need to be disciplined because of their bad behavior.
While in the USA it is easy to see that those who protest and beg and use the public sidewalks and streets as a toilet are not disiplined period. School children who do not try to learn are given more attention than those who behave and try to learn.
Finally China is building fossil fuel power plants for themselves and their numbers which provide employments for their billions to work at if they willing to find something productive they can do regardless of their natural born talents and abilities.
Carl, back to your data. Maybe I a wrong, but I see this world wide increase of 2 billion people is solely due longer life spans and not to more babies being born each year. Both which are positive news as machines continue to be invented that do the work of many labors and produce a less expensive product that ‘hand labor’ could produce.
For many, but not all, of the legal immigrants come here because they cannot find jobs to support themselves and their families in their own countries.
Carl, I agree with you totally. Thanks for writing the Truth. For I consider observed fact to be the truth. But another truth is that we do not and can not see everything. And these little, or big, new things may prove our ideas about was previously seen to be absolutions wrong but these new observation do not prove the old observations to be wrong. It is only our explanation of them that was wrong.
Have a good day, Jerry
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TL Winslow
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Why let the leftists run you around a sucker maze?
Robson isn’t a physicist, so he took the sucker bait and wasted a lot of time and energy, when for all of us, to even waste a minute worrying about the supposed consensus of scientists on anything is a mental dead end. The core issue is still all about physics not politics. Now that the Green New Deal and Great Reset are out of the bag, we all know that the U.N. IPCC has long had plenty of political reasons to push fake science for the advancement of their global Marxist utopia dream world. Too bad for them, they have been exposed as fakes by moi with my killer analysis of Planck’s Radiation Law that proves that atmospheric CO2 can’t melt an ice cube with its weak 15 micron photons that have a Planck radiation temperature of -80C like dry ice.
So when will their mental glaciers start melting and they are forced to drop their confirmation bias and give this CO2 warming hoax up no matter how much it slows their drive for the Great Reset?
http://www.historyscoper.com/thebiglieaboutco2.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2129319-liberals-are-no-strangers-to-confirmation-bias-after-all/
http://www.historyscoper.com/whatisenvironmentalismideology.html
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Readers of PSU,
At this point as I begin to compose this comment Alan, Joseph, Carl and TL has responded to Robson’s posting. I judge that Carl’s comment stands head and shoulders above Robson’s posting and the other two comments.
And I try to add to Carl’s review of historical facts (not arguments).. Humans cannot live without food. What Carl did not directly refer to was human invention. Buckminister Fuller stated his opinion was the were will never run out natural resources because humans always have done more with less.
And much of this invention began occurring the same time we began to burn fossil fuels as an energy source and not merely to heat our homes. In Europe m0st of the farms had been small farmers farmed with hand tools. I have read that cotton was not a significant commodity because the cotton gin had not yet been invented.
But North America was a new land with vast prairies as Carl reviewed. So Oliver invented the moldboard plow and McCormick invented the reaper. Both initially pulled by horses or ovens. In high school in the late 50’s took vocational agriculture in eastern South Dakota where the yields of corn were limited by lower nighttime temperatures, shorter growing season, and generally limited rainfall. In Iowa farmers could consistently grow 100 bushel corn per acre and where my farther farmed that was a dream. But now my family growing 200 bushel corn per acre with out pumping any water from the ground or using any reservoir water to irrigate their fields with modern no-till farming practices made possible by the synthesis (invention) of herbicides. And these modern farming practices greatly reduce the water and wind erosion which were common in the early days of farming in North America. And I could go on as Carl stated he could. But if you do not understand what Carl and now I have written. It is doubtful that more would help.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Doug Harrison
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Jerry, you left out the most important advance made in agriculture in the last 1000 years. The seed drill. This machine, invented and refined by Jethro Tull in the 18th century made a huge difference to the production of grain crops, increasing the yield from a given quantity of seed by 100% and ditto for area planted. Politicians couldn’t resist the opportunity to interfere as production overtook demand and passed the corn laws to protect a few friends, forbidding others including the Irish from growing grains. When the Irish suffered the terrible potato blight scourge they had no grain to fall back on and tens of thousands starved and millions emigrated to USA, Canada Australasia etc. While all this was happening Malthus was putting forth his eugenicist theories “because there wasn’t enough food to feed the population”!
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Doug,
Thanks for the information. I had never read that and I certainly did not question that which should have been obvious.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Doug again,
I just finished reading about Jethro Tull. Fascinating reading for he was much more than an inventor. He was farmer scientist who studied.the farming practices of farmers in other nations and faced the rejection of his ‘new’ ideas by those who clung to the old ideas of earlier philosophers.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Nick Schroeder
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Pull on your sciencey hip waders, enter only if you are truly curious.
It is my contention that up/down welling, trapped/”back” radiated GHG looping power flux, W/m^2, is allegedly “measured” because the users don’t understand that pyrgeometers use thermocouples/thermopiles to measure temperatures and do not measure power flux directly.
Power flux is inferred by applying the S-B equation to those measured temperatures and ASSUMING BB or 1.0 emissivity.
As I demonstrated in my experiments this assumption about radiation and BB is incorrect.
Because of the contiguous participating media, i.e. atmospheric molecules contributing non-radiative heat transfer, radiation does not function independently but in concert with the non-radiative processes and as such CANNOT function as a BB surface with 1.0 emissivity.
Attached is an annotated Power Point slide that confirms these points.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicholas-schroeder-55934820_greenhouseeffect-greenhousegases-ghgs-activity-6744030959290736640-RXQM
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