Pierre R Latour, PE, PhD Chemical Engineer, July 11, 2013

I wish to provide you with sound scientific and chemical engineering analysis of the faults with the Greenhouse Gas Theory, GHGT, proposed to drive Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change, AGW & CC, especially as it pertains to CO₂. I want to arm you for this huge, ongoing debate. I seek and receive no financial support from any government, business or organization; I finance my own work in retirement.

For the life of me I cannot get a solid, consistent grip on the underlying physics supporting the notion first proclaimed by James Hansen, Science, 1981, atmospheric CO₂ has any quantitatively verified effect on Earth’s temperature. It is the duty of AGW & CC promoters to provide it, not skeptics like me. So I claim political leaders promoting GHGT have not explained the physics and quantified the effect to my satisfaction. They make claims and charges with little or no relevant evidence to back it up. In American law courts these are called frivolous claims and dismissed (thrown out). When their expensive schemes collapse due to foreseeable engineering consequences, their claim they are unintended consequences rings hollow.

While it is not my job as skeptic, I will offer eight objections to their GHG Theory, each of which falsify it. It is their job to prove me wrong. I will present my assertions in simple terms with justifications; I have detailed chemical engineering mathematical analysis verified by experiment to support them.

1. GHGT science is settled, consensus is established, skeptics and deniers are crackpots. Wrong.

2. GHGT effect 15C – (-18C) = 33C is wrong.

3. GHGT says atmosphere acts like a blanket. False.

4. CO2 is green plant food.

5. GHGT neglects the effect of absorbing CO2 on incoming solar irradiance.

6. Kiehl-Trenberth Energy Budget back radiation is false.

7. Thermostat adjusting fossil fuel combustion will never work.

8. Modeling temperature data is worthless.

Rise in the level of carbon dioxide in the air is causing desert “greening” and has increased foliage cover by 11 percent reports Sam Lehman in hngn.com (July 9, 2013)

Up until now the negative aspects of rising levels of carbon dioxide have been highlighted in almost all studies conducted on this matter. A new study, based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU) reported that the rising levels of carbon dioxide have caused deserts to start greening and  increased foliage cover by 11 percent from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa.

Phase separation of gasoline — avoid it if you can! I’ll tell you why and have a simple experiment that lets you measure the ethanol content in your gasoline too.

Phase separation (PS) is what you can get from the ethanol content in your gasoline. It can damage your engine and possibly get you stranded at an out of way place. It is more likely to occur with lubricant-added gasoline used for two-cycle engines commonly found in ATVs, outboard motors, motorcycles, snowmobiles and other equipment with small engines, but can also happen with regular gasoline.

“New” Gasoline

Gasoline without any ethanol used to be what you got when filling up your gas tank a decade ago or so, but the wannabe-savers-of-the-world had a “better” idea. Why not dilute the gasoline with ethanol. At first your “new” fuel was limited to an ethanol content of 5{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} (E5). Then the US Environmental Agency (EPA) mandated up to 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} ethanol content (E10) and as of late EPA is talking about a 15{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} ethanol (E15) mandate.

If you have experienced problems with E5 or E10 gasoline, E15 could just about be disastrous. The main reason is that the likelihood of PS occurring increases exponentially with the ethanol content in the gasoline.

The design of Curt Wilson’s experiment–a little glass greenhouse over top of a heat source–perpetuates the idea that the thermodynamics of a gaseous atmosphere tens of km thick can be modeled using a glass dome (as do all of the mathematical models that portray the atmosphere as a sheet of glass suspended some distance above the surface.)  What one cannot learn about the thermodynamics of the 11,000 meter thick gaseous troposphere by studying a solid piece of glass is one of the fundamental elements of the first law of thermodynamics.

 Unlike a solid piece of glass, air is compressible, therefore “work” can be done on air which will raise its temperature and “work” is done on every kg of air that is pulled down from aloft to replace air that is ascending, expanding and cooling.  These two processes are symmetrical; one cannot exist without the other.  Ascending air cannot expand and cool unless there is an equal amount of air somewhere else descending, being compressed and warming.  The equilibrium temperature of the “Standard Troposphere” is actually about -20.6 C and can be found at an altitude of ~5.5 km.  The temperature of the tropospheric air above this altitude is lower by the same amount ( about 35 C) as the temperature of the tropospheric air below that altitude is higher due to the energy imbalance created by this “adiabatic process.”  Remember that the “adiabatic process” does not create nor destroy energy but rather just moves it from one place to another.

      So, in reality there exists within the atmosphere opposing movements of heat–four are spontaneous and one is active.  The spontaneous heat transfer modes of conduction, convection, latent heat transfer and radiation that are all moving heat from the “hot source” of the ground and lower troposphere upward towards the “cold sink” of the upper troposphere.  At the same time the adiabatic process (the active mode of heat transfer) through the vehicle of “work” is moving heat from the the “cold sink” of the upper troposphere down to the “hot source” of the ground and lower troposphere.  This is in line with the “Clausius Statement” “Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”  Of course the “other change” is the uneven solar heating of the surface and surface level air, which acts like the early refrigerators that were driven by a propane burner that cycled on and off.  At any rate the result of this tug-of-war between the one active mode and the four passive modes of heat transfer is that the dry adiabatic lapse rate of 9.8 C/km is reduced to an average of 6.5 C/km.

      The “greenhouse effect” hypothesis denies the fact that the lower troposphere is actively being heated by the “work” being done on descending air by ascending air and instead insists that the ground and lower troposphere are actively being heated by “back radiation” from “greenhouse gases”.  For example James Hansen in his 1981 paper – Climate Impact of increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide referred to the “adiabatic lapse rate” as a “radiative vertical temperature gradient” as opposed to a “work” induced vertical temperature gradient.  The difference may seem subtle but the former violates the second law of thermodynamics while the latter does not.  IR radiation cannot spontaneously create a temperature differential within a body of matter, such as the troposphere, “through warming the lower atmosphere and cooling the upper atmosphere.” (Spencer 2013)  This would mean that the same trace gases are having opposite affects at different places within the same atmosphere.  In reality, it is the adiabatic process, via the “work” done by ascending air on descending air, that warms the lower troposphere and cools the upper troposphere just as is taught in basic climatology courses.

“It occurred to me….” When somebody says “let me be honest with you” does it mean they haven’t been previously?

Two videos reveal important information about why and how the global warming/climate change deception was, and continues to be, successful. The major reason is because only 20 percent of the population is comfortable with science. Even among scientists the degree of specialization makes most of them unfamiliar with climate science or climatology. Everyone else was vulnerable to the deception that occurred, especially because it was deliberately conceived and exploited.

A presentation by Professor Murray Salby illustrates what is wrong with climate science and the climate models and why people don’t understand and were easily fooled. A presentation by Simon Buckle tries to justify the models and define the terms skeptic and denier central to public misunderstanding. He gets it wrong and only underscores the effectiveness of the deception.

Official climate science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is disintegrating from self-inflicted wounds. They did not carry out proper scientific testing of the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing global warming and latterly climate change, known as anthropogenic global warming (AGW). They worked to prove rather than disprove the hypothesis, but failed. Despite the failures they made false claims now exposed by actual events.

Professor Karl Erdmann, a senior member of Principia Scientific International (PSI) is part of the Canadian research term now widely feted in Canada for their important breakthrough in the medical isotope race towards better cancer treatment.

Canada’s national news broadcaster, CBC News has reported (Jun 9, 2013) that Professor Erdman and his colleagues at Advanced Cyclotron Systems “have reached an important milestone in the development of a new source of medical isotopes that does not rely on Canada’s aging nuclear reactors. Radioisotopes are vital diagnostic tools used on 30,000 Canadians each week to detect medical conditions such as cancer or heart disease.”

The modest Professor Erdman, a key figure from the outset, told PSI, “I have never been one that has craved publicity. I didn’t know it was going to be on the news and didn’t really see the photographer as one of the technicians was explaining to me how he had changed a design of a part of the measuring apparatus in the system.”

Radioisotopes are vital diagnostic tools used on 30,000 Canadians each week to detect medical conditions such as cancer or heart disease.This new device promises to provide large-scale production of TC-99m, the isotope needed for medical imaging such as CT scans.

Stephen J. Crothers recently published (June 5, 2013) his long-awaited ‘Black Hole and Big Bang: A Simplified Refutation‘ announcing that “the non-mathematical reader is no longer disadvantaged. The black hole and big bang are laid bare for all to see.”

Crothers asserts: “Certain professors might be particularly disturbed, given their penchant for appearing on national television in Australia where they told Tall Tales from the Legendary Past.”

Certainly, Crothers correctly points out that complicated mathematics has prevented many people from understanding black hole theory and big bang cosmology. But as Crothers demonstrates with his new paper, anybody with knowledge of arithmetic and very basic high school algebra is actually equipped to also understand the salient mathematics.

This new paper presents in basic form and mostly without mathematics, why the black hole and big bang cosmology are mutually exclusive, and why General Relativity itself may be shown to be “inconsistent and therefore untenable as a scientific theory,” says Crothers.

The Steel Greenhouse as proposed by Willis Eschenbach and published twice on the “Watts Up With That” website is a misinterpretation of the fundamental rules of physics governing the radiative transfer of energy.

Below are 2 statements of this fundamental principle from 2 modern physics references.

It is trivial to use this fundamental principle to prove the “Steel Greenhouse” proposition as proposed and its ability to double the energy flux is a complete fallacy.

“The energy an object absorbs comes from its environment, which consists of other bodies that radiate energy. If an object is at a temperature T, and its surroundings are at a temperature T₀, the net energy gained or lost each second by the object as a result of radiation is –

P_net = A ξ σ (T⁴ – T₀⁴).”

College Physics 7^th Edition

“While a body at absolute temperature is radiating, its surroundings at temperature T_s are also radiating, and the body absorbs some of this radiation.

If it is in equilibrium with its surroundings, T = T_s and the rates of radiation and absorption must be equal.

For this to be true, the rate of absorption must be given in general by H = A ξ σ T_s ⁴. Then the net rate of radiation from a body at temperature T with its surroundings at temperature Ts is:-

H_net = A ξ σ (T⁴ – T_s⁴).”

Sears and Zemansky’s – University Physics With Modern Physics – Young and Freedman.

The “Steel Greenhouse” proposal is a sphere with an internal source of energy capable of causing it to radiate at 235 Watts per square metre.

A steel shell is then closely “fitted” and it is claimed this action causes the sphere to increase in temperature until it emits double the original flux at a temperature that is approximately 1.1892 (the fourth root of 2) times its original temperature.

It is assumed ξ is unity.

Let’s analyse this proposal from first principles.

Professor Will Steffen, Executive Director of ANU Climate Change Institute College of Asia and the Pacific and The Australian National University and Professor Lesley Hughes Head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University are named and shamed for alleged fraudulent public presentations last month.

In a damning open letter (July 9, 2013) by Australian scientists, Dr Judy Ryan and Dr Marjorie Curtis, professors Steffen and Hughes are being called out for their biased and unscientific presentations given at the Canberra Community Forum on June 17^th 2013. The professors are accused of not only making “misleading” and “false” statements but it is being suggested their bogus climate claims may rise to the level of actual fraud.

Drs Ryan and Curtis have now made their letter open to the wider scientific community and the public so they may judge for themselves how egregious are the cherry picked claims of professors Steffen and Hughes.

Below we publish the full Ryan/Curtis letter so our readers can get the full picture of this sorry tale:

Highly qualified and well-respected professor, academic teacher and climate scientist, Murry Salby has been performing important and groundbreaking research exposing myths about the so-called “settled science” around greenhouse gases and their impact on climate. Uniquely, his work is based solely on empirical evidence rather the dubious ideological whims of post-normal climate ‘science’. Other leading researchers have validated his findings and, as such, Salby is now very much a thorn in the side of promoters of man-made global warming alarmism.

For simply pursuing the truth, as any good scientist should do, Salby has been fired by his employer, the University of Macquarie, Australia.

This is despite the fact Macquarie University had originally appointed Salby as their Chairman of Climate Science. He is a scientist of such repute that he has held visiting professorships at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto, and he’s worked at the Bureau of Meterology in Australia.

Principia Scientific International (PSI) is so horrified and angered by the retaliation of pro-green anti-scientist administrators at Macquairie University that we have secured a generous donation from our publisher, Stairway Press, to sponsor Professor Salby’s visit, if he agrees, to London in October to make a high profile public presentation of this attack on science.

As such, PSI and other supporters of traditional scientific methods will ensure this outrageous attack on an honorable researcher will be exposed at a key British climate science gathering.

Below is Professor Salby’s outline of the backstory of his victimization proving that essential academic freedoms in Australia are being supplanted by unprincipled self-serving promoters of Big Green.

Or, What is the difference between the engine that runs the human body and the combustion engine? None!

The molecule carbon dioxide (CO2), a trace gas in our atmosphere is just about reaching concentration of 400 parts per million or 0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}, as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory, better known as MLO. The current public view of CO2 is that of a villain causing practically everything that is wrong on our planet, from prostitution to tsunamis, from schizophrenia to earthquakes, from overheating to overcooling, from floods to droughts and so on.

Since well over one thousand peer reviewed papers say so, since all of the major television and newspapers outlets say so, since lot of national academies say so, surely it must be so? Surely, to accuse someone of mass murder and even genocide one would expect overwhelming evidence against the CO2 molecule; not by thousands of unreliable witnesses that never met or saw the murderer, but by the hard forensic data, in this case experimental data.

Since the standard definition of excellence in the climate sciences is ‘the less you know about CO2 and the calibrated thermometer, the more eminent scientist you are’, I will humbly present to you some basic facts about CO2 that all those “ignorant specialist” in respiratory mechanisms and carbon chemistry are using in their daily jobs of pushing the frontiers of science forward, not backwards.

This report is about toxicity of CO2 and I will answer that infamous $64,000 question, or the way that the things are going at the moment, $64 trillion question: At what concentration does CO2 become toxic to humans?

So let me start with the first question raised in the title of this report. You see, there is no difference between the engine that runs the human body and the combustion engine – they both run on the molecules that are based on the element called carbon with the symbol C, they both need the O2 molecules to break the fuel down to smaller chunks, or rather oxidise the fuel/food that is needed for the engine to run, and they both produce CO2 as a product of that oxidation process. For every single carbon that enters that engine (human body or combustion engine) one molecule of CO2 comes out.

Let us now turn to the medical sciences and our knowledge of the respiratory mechanism that is the key to our survival. For a long time scientists working in the field of human physiology have wandered why evolutionary forces made humans breathe out and assign the function of breathing in and out to the brain?Whether you are awake or asleep, every breath in is followed by the breath out – why is that?

We could easily understand breathing in – the human body cannot function without oxygen and therefore we should be OK by just breathing in. The answer became obvious once we realised that all life is based on the carbon atom with the molecules of DNA and proteins being the two main engines of that life. Since everything that supports life is based on carbon, it follows that the major fuel which runs the human engine needs to be based on carbon. For clarity, whether you eat meat or are vegetarian, you are consuming carbon! And then the knowledge of chemistry comes in – oxygen function is to ‘oxidise’ and since all the food is based on carbon, the result is CO2: C + O2 = CO2. It therefore follows that inside your body lots of CO2 has been produced as a by-product which needs to be taken out of the body – hence breathing out. As any textbook on respiration will tell you:

“The primary function of the lungs is to obtain oxygen for use by the body’s cells and eliminate the carbon dioxide that cells produce”.

The figure at the top of the page below shows the general principle of the exchanges of different gases that occur between the lungs and the blood stream:

Professor Vincent Gray provides a neat summary of a recent lecture by Professor Murry Salby in Hamburg, Germany, that throws more cold water on western governments’ global warming claims.  Gray’s full analysis is copied below:

NZCLIMATE TRUTH NEWSLETTER NO 313

by Professor Karl Erdman*

Introduction

The simple estimation of the temperature of the surface of the earth assuming the earth behaves as a black body, and using the measured value of the radiation arriving from the sun, averaged over the total surface area of the earth, gives a value of –18°C at the necessary average radiative equilibrium at which the temperature is neither rising or falling.

To raise the temperature from this calculate value, to the actual measured average of +14.5°C of the surface it has been postulated that the infrared radiation emitted by the surface is inhibited from leaving the earth by being captured by infrared absorbing gases in the atmosphere. This energy is subsequently emitted by these so called “greenhouse” gases back to the surface (backradiation) as well as into outer space. The radiation going back to the earth is postulated to raise the temperature of the surface to its measured value. The validity of this theory is in dispute as the process contravenes both the 1^st and 2^nd laws of thermodynamics.

CO₂ has the second largest cross section of the gases in the atmosphere for the absorption of the radiation emitted from the surface, although its absorbing power is only a tenth of that due to the much larger concentration of water vapor. The concentration of the CO₂ has increased by 50{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} since the 1940s due to the burning of carbonaceous compounds for the production of energy. It has been postulated that this increase in the concentration of the CO₂ has produced a rise in the temperature of the earth causing the melting of glaciers and a rise in the level of the oceans, and unless the production of CO₂ is curtailed an environmentally catastrophic increase in the temperature of the climate will result.

The scenario has been given the name Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). The transfer of the energy in the theory is postulated to be done by radiation. A detailed description of the process and a criticism of the theory was given by Joseph E. Postma in March of 2011 under the title: Understanding the Thermodynamic Atmosphere Effect. The paper can be found on the internet.

This short note is an overview of how the energy arrives, is converted to heat in the atmosphere and eventually leaves as infrared radiation. It is distributed throughout the atmosphere as heat according to well known thermodynamic rules discussed by Claes Johnson in his paper: Climate Thermodynamics (also available on the internet). The distribution of the heat is mostly done by conduction and convection. The energy eventually leaves the atmosphere as radiation in the final conversion process that takes place at the altitude in the atmosphere where the radiation leaving the earth has been measured to have the temperature corresponding to the calculated black body value.

A more detailed discussion of the controversy can be found in the book titled: Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory.

Legal recourse accepted by EU Court of Justice

The Court of Justice of the European Union has accepted the recourse presented by the European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW) (1). The 608 associations composing the platform are hailing this as a first victory in their fight towards holding the European Commission accountable for the catastrophic results of its energy policy. The rights of European citizens have been violated, they claim, and at long last justice will be done.

The Commission has failed to conduct technical studies calculating how many tonnes of fossil fuels will really be saved by the hundreds of thousands of wind turbines it wants to force onto rural populations and on avian and marine life. “As it turns out, various independent engineers estimate there will be no savings at all (2), so the people are more than justified to seek redress,” says Mark Duchamp, the conservationist who runs EPAW.

The Aarhus Convention (3) requires that programmes that will affect the environment be elaborated with the participation of the public in a transparent manner. This means that Europeans should have been fully informed of the benefits of the EU renewable energy programme, as well as of its costs and undesirable impacts. “Instead”, argues Duchamp, “the Commission has been parroting the claims of the wind industry without verifying them.”

A recent edition of our newspaper had a 24-page insert with the title “Green Agenda.” Actually, it’s a so-called Special Information Feature, AKA an “infomercial” on new car models and technologies.

That insert could lead you to believe that the touted “green technologies” will save both the planet and your wallet, neither of which is true though.

The Hydrogen Pipedream

Especially amusing or annoying (mostly the latter) are claims about elemental hydrogen as energy carrier of the future. It’s the same nonsense which you could see in TV commercials and read in the newspapers fifteen years ago. At that time we were told that hydrogen-powered cars were to be in car dealers’ showrooms by 2001, “ready to drive away.” Now, a dozen years later, the hype is still the same and nothing has changed, except for the “green alliances” for “sustainable future technologies” between some car manufacturers and the new date when it is all supposed to come together, now predicted for 2017. Of course, big government-sponsored handouts are available for such developments.