Note on Resistors – The Fraud of Climate Science Analogies
No More Analogies
In my last post we developed the equations for the temperature of a powered resistor with or without an ambient environment.
As has been pointed out to me, and has now been made clear to me, is that “argument by analogy” is a trap. Analogies are an approximation to the “actual thing”, but are not the actual thing. Also, an analogy from an actual thing, to another idea-thing, doesn’t in any way indicate something else which is factually-actual.
What I mean is that a horse is analogous to a unicorn, however, this does not lend any support, not one iota of support, to the supposition that unicorns exist. You can have the proposition that unicorns exist, of course, and you can say that unicorns are analogous to horses and that since horses exist, then unicorns should also exist since “they’re so well known – everybody has heard of a unicorn!”, and you can have lots of people agree with you, and people can write papers about the properties of unicorns since they’re so similar to horses…however, none of this proves or supports in any way at all the proposition that unicorns exist.
Climate pseudoscience almost exclusively uses argument by analogy to attempt to support its version of the greenhouse effect. See, climate science has an alternative version of the greenhouse effect, compared to the one that actually makes a real greenhouse function in the first place. A real greenhouse works the opposite way that the atmosphere operates, by preventing convective cooling. The real greenhouse effect in a real greenhouse does the opposite thing of what the atmosphere does. Climate science invented an alternative version of the greenhouse effect, using the same name as the real greenhouse effect, where its version and the atmosphere behave and operate the same way. The only time that climate pseudoscience isn’t using an analogy to argue for the greenhouse effect, is when it is discussing the terms of its alternative version of the greenhouse effect; however this is very rare because, as soon as you point out that a real greenhouse does not operate the same way as the atmosphere, then immediately the climate pseudoscientist must switch to using an analogy, thus changing the focus away from that very central point.
That is, since simply stating the fact that unicorns don’t exist is a fatal blow to the proposition that unicorns exist, then the argument is switched over to the fact that horses exist and so we must discuss the properties of horses if we are to understand unicorns because they’re analogous to each other, and if you accept these properties of horses, then you must accept the same is true for unicorns which must therefore give tacit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of unicorns, according to the unicorn believer.
Obviously, this type of argumentation is a fraud, which maybe wins debates occasionally, but it doesn’t determine reality.
Argument by Analogy
When you start trying to make arguments this way out of good faith, out of an actual attempt to educate, the fact that you’re using analogies can get you into trouble. I have pointed out long ago that climate science and its version of the greenhouse effect is the only place in science where analogies to the real thing are presented as opposed to the real actual thing. Of course, this admission from the climate fraudsters only came after the Slayers and I exposed that the climate pseudoscience greenhouse models were a fraud; the pseudoscientist’s response was to say that those flat-Earth, cold-sunshine models were only an analogy! In which case 1) where’s the real thing? (they don’t know…they can’t actually say or point it out!), and 2) if in “the real thing” the Earth isn’t flat and sunshine isn’t cold, then why does it still have their version of the greenhouse effect?, 3) why didn’t you say this before we pointed it out and why did you present the flat-Earth cold-sunshine models as the real thing, and say that it was the same as how a real greenhouse functions?
Switching Words
So in the last month or two I’ve gotten myself tripped up by the pseudoscientists. The first time was when such a person, Joel Shore probably, stated that the greenhouse models are all based on the equation “Power in = Power Out”. That’s a bald lie of course. They’re based on “Flux in = Flux out” and that is a very different thing than power in/out, and it is also physically meaningless for the reasons I subsequently wrote about. However, I kept on using Joel’s terminology of “power” instead of “flux”, and that was an honest mistake by me which got sorted out simply by correcting the words from “power” to “flux”. The point is these are tricky sneaky bastards and their forte is in mixing up terms and conflating analogies in order to trip-up the well-meaning bystander. One of the readers of this blog helped point out what had happened.
Experiment by Analogy
The twin of “argument by analogy” is “experiment by analogy”. Of course, argument by analogy is completely meaningless, as demonstrated with the unicorn example. The real thing doesn’t need analogies. Experiment by analogy would be the act of actually getting a real horse, making it run around, do jumps, neigh real loud, and riding it, and thus demonstrating that since a horse can do these things, a unicorn can do them as well which must therefore necessitate and demonstrate that unicorns exist.
In writing about how Anthony Watts and Curt Wilson did just such an experiment using light-bulbs (measuring the wrong thing, lying about what the measurements meant, etc), I then got tripped again in writing about the heat-flow equation for resistors and their power usage.
People keep writing to me about wanting to do experiments with “one object held at a cool temperature and another at a warm temperature, and then raise the temperature of the cooler one to see what it does to the hotter”. Why? Well because, it’s analogous to the climate science greenhouse effect of course! Similar to this is holding an “ambient temperature fixed” and then having a powered heated object in that environment.
So I went along with that too, until I realized it was wrong. The climate science greenhouse effect is not any of these things. In assuming an ambient environment, such as a radiative one, you assume an independent source of energy to maintain it. In assuming a cooler powered source, you’re assuming an independent source of energy to power it. If you have TWO power sources and you’re manipulating their environment, you can get all sorts of stuff to happen, as ‘Neutrino’ demonstrated in the comments of the last post by combining two separately-powered boxes into one and reducing their surface area. But are any of these experiments actually testing the climate science greenhouse effect?
No! First, they’re not tests of the climate science greenhouse effect. Full stop. And second, the climate science greenhouse effect doesn’t have two independent sources of power into the climate! Well, it sort of pretends there are by making the atmosphere an additional source of power for heating the surface (even though it’s cooler than the surface, thus violating the law of heat flow, lol, and it has no intrinsic source of energy release), but really there is only one source of power for the climate and atmosphere – the Sun.
There’s no cooler second object with its own independent source of power, there’s no cooler ambient environment with its own independent source of power, etc. That was what I was working towards and thinking about (but not consciously enough!) in my last post when we got to the equation
TR4 = V2/(2σπlrR) + TAmb4,
for the temperature of the resistor. If the ambient radiative environment for the resistor was provided by the resistor, which IS what the climate science greenhouse effect is about, then the equation would be
TR4 = V2/(2σπlrR) + TR4,
so that
0 = V2/(2σπlrR).
In other words there is no possible solution for the proposition that the source of heat (the ground surface, after being warmed by the Sun) can heat itself further via the thermal environment it itself creates. The equation just “zeros out” and says that nothing can happen like this, if that’s what you want to try. And that’s of course consistent with the heat-flow equation
Q = σTh4 – σTc4,
which says that if the second “cool” term becomes equal to the first “hot” term, then no heat will flow between equal temperatures and so no temperatures will change. If the hot term is the “powered source” creating its own thermal environment, then the warmest environment it could create is that equal to its own temperature, and no more, since heat can’t flow back into itself to raise its own temperature.
Thanks to Tim Folkerts for pointing out that a resistor can not heat itself with the thermal environment it itself creates.
Direct Experimentation
Instead of all these theoretical and experimental analogies, it is not that difficult to directly test the alternative climate-science version of the greenhouse effect. Of course, since a real greenhouse doesn’t operate via the alternative version even though the alternative version says it should, then it already means that the alternative version isn’t correct. The real version of the greenhouse effect of a real greenhouse is still what makes a greenhouse function, and a greenhouse and the atmosphere do not operate the same way, but oppositely. The alternative proposition that the atmosphere and a greenhouse operate the same way via an alternative set of physics is thus refuted.
Direct tests of the real thing, done correctly, as discussed in this paper, are what I will accept as evidence for the climate science greenhouse effect, because they test for theactual thing using the thing, not an analogy of it. Basically you want to do the “Wood’s Box” experiment because it directly tests the exact mathematical proposition of the postulate of the alternative version of the greenhouse effect of climate alarm. The results are already known but I’d be happy to see more people confirming them.
Read more by Joe Postma at climateofsophistry.com
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