Did you know that there are only two (2) ways to increase a body’s temperature?  Indeed, there are only two ways to increase a body’s temperature.  One is with work, the other is with heat.

241 million years ago: Instead of amidst high mountains, a small reptile suns itself on an island beach in a warm shallow sea, where many fish and marine reptiles frolic. This is the story told by an excellently preserved new discovery of the reptile Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi studied by paleontologists from the University of Zurich.

Scientists have narrowed the date range for a 9th-century volcanic eruption in Iceland to within a span of just a few months. It’s the oldest volcanic eruption among the northern latitudes to be precisely dated.

Woolly mammoths could be coming to a park near you sometime before 2027, thanks to funding from PayPal founder and tech luminary Peter Thiel.

The criminals behind the global warming scam insist that hot weather was impossible at lower CO2 levels and are trying to erase the 1913 heat record of 134 degrees. They also say that heat waves are getting worse, which is a blatant lie and the exact opposite of reality.

Ahvaz, Iran, reached 129 degrees: Earth’s hottest temperature ever recorded?

When the next big impact will be, nobody knows.

But the pressure is on to predict—and intercept—its arrival.

“Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there.”
-Konstantin Batygin

The Curiosity Mars Rover is now smart enough to pick its own targets for exploration, according to a new study.

Alan Siddons writes: I want to comment about rational and irrational energy budget models here. First, consider the rational example show above.

In this kind of model there’s a constant flow of radiant heat to several absorbers, which mix to some extent but maintain a certain temperature DUE TO a constant flow. It’s like warming your hands over a campfire: Your warmer hands are a consequence of the fire’s heat, not a means of cooling it.

So too, if there were nothing in the way of the surface’s 51{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} emission here, that 51{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} would exit directly to space. As it stands, of course, all of the various absorbers/emitters and reflectors together form a 100{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} return to space.

Now the irrational:

As presented (above) by the National Center for Atmospheric Research:

• In this model, something being heated by the surface represents a TEMPERATURE DROP for the surface. Observe the arithmetic at play.
• 161 hits the surface, which “loses” 17 and 80, i.e., 97, and its temperature FALLS to that extent.
• 161 minus 97 equals 64.
• And 64 W/m² equals minus 90° Celsius for a blackbody!
• So how much compensatory radiation is required to bring the surface arithmetically up to the desired 396 (16°C) with an extra 1 watt for “net absorbed”? 333. Because 64 plus 333 equals 397.
• And that’s exactly what the “downwelling” supplies.

Given what SHOULD be a constant 161 W/m², however, and a consequent steady temperature of minus 42°C, “downwelling” would only have to be 235 to bring the surface (arithmetically) up to 16°C. One may object to such flimsy physics but at least this standard is more honest.

Dr Charles Anderson adds:
You are on the right track Alan, but you can go much further with this.

There is no way that the surface of the Earth radiates as much infrared radiation as it would if there were no competing thermal loss mechanisms at the surface. A surface in vacuum satisfies the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, while a wet surface in air does not. To be more exact, portions a macroscopic surface area will obey the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, but other portions will be losing energy to bombarding air molecules or to the latent heat of evaporation of water.

The net total power emitted from that macroscopic surface area cannot equal that predicted by Stefan-Boltzmann though you will see a lower power spectrum of the expected frequency distribution with a wee bit of superposition of lower temperature frequency distributions superimposed.

The Earth’s surface does not and cannot emit the 396 W/m^2 here. Also, the atmosphere cannot absorb the 374 W/m^2 of the surface emitted radiation as shown in the 2nd Energy Budget. A black body absorber would have to be at a temperature of 140K to absorb that much of the radiation from the surface. The atmosphere is not a black body absorber. It has a window which allows about one-third of all surface radiation to escape to space. No part of the atmosphere is at as low a temperature as 140K either.

To find such a low temperature in our solar system, one has to go a distance of more than 6 Earth orbit mean radii from the sun! This particular diagram claims only 22 W/m^2 is emitted through the atmospheric window. More recent Earth energy budgets make that value about 40 W/m^2. This is one value NASA ought to be able to measure with some reliability. Three times the atmospheric window loss of 40 W/m^2 would imply about 120 W/m^2 was emitted from the surface as IR radiation.

Now adding up 161 – 0.9 – 17 – 80 -120 = -56.9 W/m^2. Back radiation cannot be great enough to supply even 56.9 W/m^2, especially once one realizes that surface radiation cannot be as great as 396 W/m^2 and the atmospheric absorbed portion of that cannot be anything like 374 W/m^2. Some other mechanism has to warm the surface.

Thanks to the fact that water vapor does absorb about 80 W/m^2 of outgoing surface emitted radiation, it absorbs a substantial portion of the incoming solar radiation in the atmosphere also, it transports a great deal of energy into the atmosphere as latent heat of evaporation, and thermals carry still more heat up into the atmosphere, there is a great deal of power to be radiated from the upper troposphere.

This in turn allows the temperature gradient in the atmosphere due to the exchange of potential energy for kinetic energy as one proceeds to lower altitudes to provide the surface with a much higher equilibrium temperature. The temperature of an ideal or perfect gas is proportional to its kinetic energy.

If you are interested, here is a set of articles I have written recently that discusses these and related issues:

mgh, Not Just Greenhouse Gases, Provides a Warm Earth

A Critical Lesson from the NASA Earth Energy Budget

The Settled Science of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Violates the Laws of Physics

Water Vapor and Gravity Act Together to Warm the Earth

The fact that infra-red active gases, together with competing surface cooling mechanisms, and the transport of large amounts of energy by non-radiative means to the mid and upper troposphere causes the Earth to be warmer, does not mean that the addition of more water vapor or carbon dioxide would warm the Earth. We know that more water vapor actually cools the Earth and the same is almost sure to be true of more carbon dioxide as well.

In any case, once you realize that the absorption of surface emitted IR is only a part of the reason that the Earth’s surface is not much colder than it is and that CO2 plays no role at all in two of the main mechanisms out of the three main ones, it is very clear that the role of CO2 has been greatly exaggerated.

Knocking down the surface emission and the back radiation greatly already much reduces any role that carbon dioxide can play.

As NASA makes plans to one day send humans to Mars, one of the key technical gaps the agency is working to fill is how to provide enough power on the Red Planet’s surface for fuel production, habitats, and other equipment. One option: small nuclear fission reactors, which work by splitting uranium atoms to generate heat, which is then converted into electric power.

As computing has moved into the nanoscopic realm, it’s getting harder and harder for engineers to follow Moore’s Law, which says, essentially, that the processing speed of computer chips should double every year or two.

Russia is only two weeks away from launching a new satellite that will become one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

Oklahomans are no strangers to Mother Nature’s whims. From tornadoes and floods to wildfires and winter storms, the state sees more than its share of natural hazards. But prior to 2009, “terra firma” in Oklahoma meant just that—earthquakes rarely shook the state.

Neanderthals treating toothaches?

A discovery of multiple toothpick grooves on teeth and signs of other manipulations by a Neanderthal of 130,000 years ago are evidence of a kind of prehistoric dentistry, according to a new study led by a University of Kansas researcher.

Seven years ago, a cover of The Economist showed Barack Obama, head down on a Louisiana beach in front of an oil rig — the picture of lonely despair. The image perfectly encapsulated the news magazine’s story about the massive pollution caused when BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform exploded, and what the president of the United States could possibly hope to do about it. But Obama was not alone when the picture was taken.