The Wikipedia entry for the Greenhouse Gas Effect states:

“If an ideal thermally conductive black-body was the same distance from the Sun as the Earth is, it would have a temperature of about 5.3 °C. However, since the Earth reflects about 30{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the incoming sunlight, this idealized planet’s effective temperature (the temperature of a black-body that would emit the same amount of radiation) would be about −18 °C. The surface temperature of this hypothetical planet is 33 °C below Earth’s actual surface temperature of approximately 14 °C. The mechanism that produces this difference between the actual surface temperature and the effective temperature is due to the atmosphere and is known as the greenhouse effect.”

The statement is almost completely untrue. For instance not even the math adds up: the difference between the two temperatures +14 °C and -18 °C is not 33 °C but 32 °C. But it is not important, what is important here is the fact that there’s not a difference of 33 °C, nor of 32 °C between the hypothetical and real Earth surface temperature. In short, there is clearly a confusion about what is meant scientifically when describing the “surface” of Earth.

I don’t want to rewrite astronomic customs, but for such purposes as a black-body radiation flux equation to and from the planet using the Stefan-Boltzman law, we would think the surface of the Earth should be considered to be “the atmosphere”- not the surfaces of the sea and land. The reason being that it is only the uppermost layer of the planet’s mass that is capable of radiation – in the sense as defined by the Stefan-Boltzman equation – unlike the boundary of the vacuum of space beyond.

This confusion is a result of our human perspective. In the case of big gas planets like Jupiter we observe from the outside and hardly anybody would suggest the immediate exterior of its uncertain small diameter core was the “surface.”

Indeed,  there’s an even stranger boundary custom to consider whereby we could discern the “surface” and atmosphere arbitrarily just at the point where Jupiter’s immense atmospheric pressures crosses 10 bar. Nonetheless, when talking about the Stefan-Boltzman law (i.e. about black-body radiation) as applied to Earth and it’s radiation budget, we should consider the gaseous atmosphere as being the Earth’s surface, not the actual surfaces of sea and land below.

UPDATED SEPT 30, 2013: Pierre Latour, Vice Chairman of PSI, recently published his takedown of the so-called greenhouse gas ‘theory.’ An alleged key component of the so-called greenhouse effect (GHE) is the trace atmospheric gas carbon dioxide (0.04{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}) which has been blamed for causing global warming. But carbon dioxide (CO2) has been shown by PSI researchers to only act as a coolant in earth’s atmosphere. Either PSI members are fools or they will prove to be the instigators of perhaps the most important paradigm shift in science this century.

Latour’s essay triggered a lively response among defenders of the GHE faith unpersuaded of such claims. One such critic is Dr. Jack Barrett. Below we run Barrett’s critique and Latour’s reply. We hope Dr. Barrett and others will continue this lively and open debate, plus readers are also invited to post comments for wider consideration.

Dr Martin Hertzberg, a co-founder of Principia Scientific International (PSI), pens a damning letter of complaint to the New York Times about the multi-billion dollar folly of carbon dioxide capture and storage.

In ‘Challenges Await Plan to Reduce Emissions‘ (September 20, 2013) authors Matthew L Wald and Michael D Shear addressed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) legislative proposal on carbon emission limits on new power plants and the multi-billion dollar costs.

But nowhere in their 1054-word piece did the authors indicate that any such levy (which will be passed directly onto hard-pressed consumers) is based on discredited ‘greenhouse gas’ science. As such it may be entirely pointless.

Dr. Hertzberg (diehard Democratic and noted climate analyst) protests as follows:

       The above article summarizes the Industry objections to the EPA’s proposal to limit CO2 emissions from power plants. They are that the technology is not sufficiently developed (not ready for prime time) or that it would be too costly. However the most cogent reasons for rejecting draconian measure of CO2 control are that it will have only a trivial effect of atmospheric CO2, and no effect whatever on the climate.

The next version of the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report on global warming will be out in a week or so. Independent critics have been scathing as a leak of the report reveals alarmist ‘scientists’ are doubling down on doomsaying predictions, despite increasing real world evidence contradicting them.

OF POSSIBLE USE IN THE ANALYSIS OF CLIMATE POLITICS?

From Wikipedia: The Gold Effect is the phenomenon in which a scientific (often medical) idea is developed to the status of an accepted position within a professional body or association by the social process itself of scientific conferences, committees, and consensus building, despite not being supported by conclusive evidence.

The effect was described by Professor T. Gold in 1979.[1] The effect was reviewed by Drs. Petr Skrabanek and James McCormick in their book “Follies and Fallacies in Medicine”.[2] The Gold Effect is used to analyze errors in public health policy and practice, such as the widespread use of cholesterol screening in the prevention of cardiovascular disease.[3]In their book, Skrabanek and McCormick describe the Gold Effect as: “At the beginning a few people arrive at a state of near belief in some idea. A meeting is held to discuss the pros and cons of the idea. More people favouring the idea than those disinterested will be present. A representative committee will be nominated to prepare a collective volume to propagate and foster interest in the idea. The totality of resulting articles based on the idea will appear to show an increasing consensus. A specialised journal will be launched. Only orthodox or near orthodox articles will pass the referees and the editor.” 

So what gives with the climate theory that says more emissions of carbon dioxide means more warming? Despite atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) up more than 40 percent in recent decades global temperatures have stubbornly remained flat for more than 15 years. Indeed, in the mainstream UK press global cooling is fast becoming the big news story with Arctic ice growing 60{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} in 2013 and Antarctic sea ice extent breaking an all-time maximum (September 14, 2013)

Alarmists have long insisted increased human industrialisation was a dangerous ‘experiment’ and we should stop adding more ‘greenhouse gases’ to the atmosphere. But the planet’s stubborn refusal to get hotter has confounded expectations. At last, even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its upcoming Fifth Report admits the models may have exagerrated the impact of CO2.

The Myth of ‘Cold’ Outer Space Debunked

Laboratory Physics Shows Vacuum Space Inhibits Cooling

Moreover, you may find here, another experiment, conducted by Professor Colm O’Sullivan of Cork University, Ireland [no relation] showing exactly with graphics how a body is cooling in a vacuum chamber and the difference with forced (convective) cooling, and natural cooling. [2]

In O’Sullivan’s experiment, as you can clearly see, the body was always cooling LESS, when it was kept in the vacuum chamber. Thus the near perfect vacuum of outer space inhibits, not enhances, the loss of energy from our planet. As such, actual physics proves that ‘greenhouse gases’ do not keep our planet warmer.

One of the most prescient indicators clearly shows it, namely the Danish Meteorological Institute’s daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel. They have been measured for over 50 years which shows a long-term average of 90 days with the air temperature above freezing.

The Year 2013

The year 2013 has seen a dramatic departure from that routine. In 2013, the summer (above freezing temperatures) lasted for only 45 days, one half of the average number of days. Not only did the frost-free days start much later than on average this year, they also ended much earlier, see the figure below. In fact, the frost-free period seen this year was significantly shorter than in other year since 1958, when the recordings began.

The new data corroborate other findings of no global warming for the last 18 years. In fact, not a single of the 20-plus climate prediction models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even shows the recent temperature developments as within their model uncertainties. It begs the question: Is another ice age imminent?

Climate at the Poles

The climate at the earth’s poles is quite different from that at mid-latitudes or near the equator. To begin with, at the poles, the lengths of day and night vary with the seasons. At the earth’s equator, day and night periods are ALWAYS equal, 12 hours exactly. In contrast, near the poles, day and night periods vary from 24-hour sunshine in summer to 24-hour darkness in the depth of winter.

The Arctic winter temperatures average around MINUS 30 °C (MINUS 35 °F) but it can get much colder than that. If nature so wants it, that kind of cold weather can slide down to cover half of the North American continent; even in Minnesota, winter temperatures can reach MINUS 60 °F!

The ‘Hockey Schtick’ (HS) reports (September 10, 2013) on more problems for official climate models. Newly-published research shows that climate models do not realistically simulate the role of wind (convection) on earth’s climate.

The HS-highlighted paper is published the very same day as a damning new analysis exposing similar flaws in the upcoming UN climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

HS explains:

“A paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters finds climate models do not realistically simulate convection, “a key element of the weather and climate system for transporting mass, momentum, and thermal energy,” because of a large gap in the scale or resolution required to simulate convection [1-2 km] compared to global atmospheric motions [on the order of 10,000 km].” 

Meanwhile, Dr. Vincent Gray (Expert Reviewer of every IPCC report since 1990) publishes his own damning study in which wind, among other forces, is not factored into the official models, thereby causing climatologists to overestimate the effects of so-called “greenhouse gases.”

Taken together, both the GRL paper and the study by Dr. Gray form persuasive evidence that undue emphasise has long been placed on the roles of radiation and carbon dioxide (CO2) in climate change.

As the impacts of wind and the water cycle (via latent heat) are increasingly recognized this may persuade ever more scientists to question the greenhouse gas “theory” itself.

In this short article we identify what is meant by the ‘Standard Model’ greenhouse gas theory. We see climatologists have never formulated an agreed theory of the supposed greenhouse gas effect. Ironically,  it took critics of the consensus to finally put together, from all the disparate models, a single unified version that could be practically examined and refuted.

So why is this now such an issue?

Frankly, more and more scientists are now beginning to accept that the so-called greenhouse gas theory of global warming appears to be in trouble. Despite atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) up more than 40 percent in recent decades global temperatures have stubbornly remained flat for more than 15 years.

In a recent article on Principia Scientific International (PSI) independent analysts highlighted long-overlooked flaws. Among the flaws is the absence of ANY internationally agreed standard model of the GHE.

The closest to an ‘official’ version would be that provided by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their Fourth Report. [1]

The IPCC provide an even more simplistic version  that is bereft of any actual numbers. What the IPCC offer up would be inadquate for a science lesson for schoolchildren let alone as a reference source for serious authorities. As such, it may be regarded as the least informative of them all (see below).

Scientific method extended to all human thought

by

Pierre R Latour, Doctor of Philosophy in Chemical Engineering, Sept 21, 2013

Summary

Principia Scientific International, promotes discussion and debate using the scientific method for learning and teaching about how nature works. The method is part of the intellectual framework of human thought collected under the all-encompassing topic of philosophy. A professional philosopher, Christopher Langan, published his Theory of Theories and Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe which extends the scope of the scientific method to guide all human thought in a search for truth. It confirms the validity of the scientific method.

Introduction

The scientific method inaugurated by Francis Bacon around 1600 and codified by Galileo and Newton inspired the age of reason because it provided the way to elevate belief in how the natural world works, to knowledge, describing and predicting nature’s behavior in its own language, mathematics. Belief defined by authority was not sufficient to declare truth.

The method calls for intellectual formulation of a postulate from belief, then testing its predictions by comparison with experimental measurements. If the observations match predictions, the postulate is elevated to a theory, a form of knowledge to be accepted until something better comes along.

Engineers add additional requirements of utility, efficiency and value to apply scientific knowledge to build things people like and need. When engineered systems work as planned, the theory employed gains greater stature as valid and true.

The basic sciences are physics, chemistry and biology; with extensions like astronomy, geology, medicine, psychology, agriculture, engineering, military, political.

Philosophy

The Greeks recognized there is much more to reality than nature. Art, music, honesty, integrity, ethics, morality, epistemology, law, religion, good, evil, passion, emotion, success, life, death, truth, mathematics, beauty, love, knowledge, education, economics, history, fiction, war, peace.

Thomas Jefferson famously encapsulated this idea of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God in the Preamble of his American Declaration of Independence, 1776. “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary …. to assume separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them …” And then “We hold these Truth’s to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,”

Many men have died for that idea. So there is more to it than Nature and the study of Nature; science. The rest is the realm of Nature’s God. According to Jefferson.

I will never understand the kind of thinking behind a lie so big that it became an international fraud and swindle. I cannot understand why an international organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) operating under the umbrella of the United Nations, was permitted to issue reports of an imminent threat to the Earth, to mankind, that a freshman student of meteorology would know were false.

The claim that increase of human-induced “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere would cause “global warming” ran into serious trouble right from the start.

It happens that there is no current technology that is capable of measuring the average surface temperature of the earth. There is no way that temperature sensors could be situated randomly over the whole surface of the earth, including the 71{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} that is ocean and 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} that is desert, and measure it all instantaneously for sufficient time to find if it is rising.

It is not even possible to measure the temperature reliably in one place. James Hansen of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, who has made a reputation for promoting “global warming”, has an item on his website as follows:

“GISS Surface Temperature Analysis

The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature   (SAT)

Q. What exactly do you mean by SAT?

A. I doubt that there is a general agreement how to answer this question. Even at the same location, the temperature near the ground may be very different from the temperature 5 ft above the ground and different again from 10ft or 50ft above the ground. Particularly in the presence of vegetation (say in a rain forest) the temperature above the vegetation may be very different from the temperature below the top of the vegetation. A reasonable suggestion might be to use the average temperature of the first 50ft of air either above ground or on top of the vegetation. To measure SAT we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been adopted. I cannot imagine that a weather station would build a 50ft stack of thermometers to be able to find the true SAT at its location.

Q. What do we mean by daily SAT?

A. Again, there is no universally accepted correct answer. Should we note the temperature every 6 hours and report the mean, should we do it every two hours, hourly, have a machine record it every second, or simply take the average of the highest and lowest temperature of the day? On some days the various methods may lead to drastically different results.

Q. What SAT do the local media report?

A. The media report the reading of one particular thermometer of a nearby weather station. This temperature may be very different from the true SAT even at that location and has certainly nothing to do with the true regional SAT. To measure the true regional SAT we would have to use many 50ft stacks of thermometers distributed evenly over the whole region, an obvious practical impossibility.”

Having stated that there is no agreed way to measure the surface air temperature, he talks about the “true” value which nobody agrees to; Essex et al (2007) argue that “there is no physically meaningful global temperature”. There are theoretical reasons why the average temperature of the earth’s surface cannot be measured. Because of the fact that the sun does not shine for half the time, its variability is non linear. It is impossible to simulate it with any of the mathematical functions used by statisticians and even if this were possible there is a variety of possible averages, such as the arithmetic mean, geometric mean, or the harmonic mean.

Applied Mathematics professor, Claes Johnson of the School of Computer Science and Communication, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden publishes a lament of the failings of modern (post-normal) physics.

We take pleasure in reproducing it here:

The last sequence of posts on Quantum Contradictions 1 – 20 gives examples of the crisis in modern physics recently described by the Perimeter Institute Director Neil Turok as follows:

• Theoretical physics is at a crossroads right now…In a sense we’ve entered a very deep crisis.

• You may have heard of some of these models…There’ve been grand unified models, there’ve been super-symmetric models, super-string models, loop quantum gravity models… Well, nature turns out to be simpler than all of these models.

• If you ask most theorists working on particle physics, they’re in a state of confusion.

• The extensions of the standard model, like grand unified theories, they were supposed to simplify it. But in fact they made it more complicated. 

• The number of parameters in the standard model is about 18. The number in grand unified theories is typically 100. In super-symmetric theories, the minimum is 120. And as you may have heard, string theory seems to predict 10 to the power of 1,000 different possible laws of physics. It’s called the multiverse. 

• It’s the ultimate catastrophe: that theoretical physics has led to this crazy situation where the physicists are utterly confused and seem not to have any predictions at all.

• We have to get people to try to find the new principles that will explain the simplicity.

The crisis in modern physics resulting from the confusion of modern physicists originates from the  statistical mechanics of Boltzmann used by Planck in a desperate attempt to explain blackbody radiation as statistics of quanta, which led to the quantum mechanics of Bohr and Heisenberg based on atomistic roulettes without casusality and physical reality.  

But blackbody radiation can be explained without statistics in a classical model subject to finite precision computation as exposed on Computational Blackbody Radiation, which is simple and therefore possibly correct in the spirit of the above. 

Read more at ‘Claes Johnson on Mathematics and Physics.’

“It occurred to me….” people rush home to sit down, put their feet up and say, what will I do now.

Buying “a pig in a poke” refers to buying an unseen piglet in a sack. The piglet was actually a cat, so when you opened the sack after purchase “the cat was out of the bag.”

Governments bought the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ‘pig’ ‘that human CO2 was causing global warming wrapped in the ‘poke’ of their Reports. IPCC assured buyers it was a pig with 90+ percent certainty.

They fooled governments and media four times now they offer a new poke in Assessment Report 5 (AR5), but with 95 percent certainty it’s a pig. This despite the fact that the cat is already out of the bag. Their predictions have failed. For 17 years global temperatures have declined while CO2 levels continue to increase.

Arctic summer ice, supposedly all gone by 2013 has recovered by 60 percent in one year. Severe weather has not increased. Damage done by policies already implemented, such as green jobs and alternate energies, is already evident. Newspaper coverage declined dramatically as people sense problems even if they don’t understand (Figure 1). Decline followed the peak created by Gore’s false fantasy An Inconvenient Truth.

Instead of acknowledging error the IPCC try to defend the indefensible. This alone warrants disbanding of the agency.

They’re in a corner of their own design. They manufactured the poke through an organization, process, and computer models designed to prove their claim. Now we know it contains a cat. More frightening for them, people, including governments, are asking questions. A report by German scientists showing 65 climate models failed to predict the current no temperature increase period caused EU and US governments to ask questions.

“U.S. and European Union envoys are seeking more clarity from the United Nations on a slowdown in global warming that climate skeptics have cited as a reason not to “panic” about environmental changes, leaked documents show.”

Principia Scientific International’s affiliated organisation (OMSJ) once again is compelled to show it has legal teeth by going to trial to put a halt to ongoing defamation and business disparagement.

The Office of Medical and Scientific Justice (OMSJ) reports the matter as follows:

OMSJ Files Trademark Complaint Against AIDS Activist

(September 11, 2013, Austin, Texas) A Texas federal judge has set a January 2015 trial date in the case of OMSJ v. DeShong.  The federal lawsuit brought by Clark Baker, founder of the Office of Medical & Scientific Justice (OMSJ), seeks to halt ongoing defamation and business disparagement by Jeffrey Todd DeShong, a Ft. Worth AIDS activist and blogger and to abate DeShong’s use of Plaintiffs’ federally protected trademark.

A non-profit investigative agency, OMSJ provides medical, scientific, and legal support to the defense of those charged with criminal or civil offenses related to HIV and other diseases.  OMSJ has been involved in more than 100 cases – many that are still active.  Of the cases now closed, more than fifty have resulted in acquittal, favorable plea bargains, or the complete dismissal of HIV-related charges.

The lawsuit alleges that DeShong, 49, has spent the last five years posting defamatory emails and blogs under numerous fictitious names in an attempt to silence Baker and disrupt OMSJ’s business effort under the guise of exercising First Amendment freedom of speech rights. The suit claims that in 2009 DeShong directed his improper attacks at OMSJ’sHIV Innocence Group, which has successfully defended dozens of men and women who were accused of HIV-transmission crimes. Currently 32 states, the military, and two U.S. territories have laws that criminalize the intentional exposure of HIV to another person, even if the retrovirus is not actually transmitted.

On September 5, OMSJ filed its First Amended Complaint, along with Responses to the Defendant’s FRCP 12 (b) (6) and Anti-SLAPP motions to dismiss. A federal judge is now reviewing the motions and has set the trial for January 2015.

The amended complaint and responses can be found at:

• First Amended Complaint

• Response to Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss

• Response to Defendant’s Anti-SLAPP Motion to Dismiss

• Clark Baker’s Affidavit

A fundamental assumption of the “Greenhouse Climate Change” theory is that the energy entering the earth from the sun is “balanced” by the energy emitted from the earth.

This illusion is assisted by the assumption that all energy exchanges are by radiation, and therefore are instantaneous. Without this assumption it would be impossible to claim that all “change” of climate is exclusively caused by increases of human-emitted “greenhouse gases”

The latest official presentation of this theory is by Trenberth K E, J T Fasullo and J. Kiehl (2009), Earth’s Global Energy Budget. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 90, 311-323. It is depicted in what is commonly known as the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram (or K-T energy budget: Fig 1 below)

Near the beginning this paper states:

“For an equilibrium climate the outgoing long wave radiation necessarily balances the incoming absorbed solar radiation.”

Then it goes on to admit that there are many reasons why this is not true. These include scattering and reflection of incoming radiation  by clouds and aerosols, absorption by the atmosphere, transfer of absorbed heat to kinetic energy and latent heat. They also admit that energy may be stored for some time or be converted to other forms of energy.

The above diagram, which assumes constant values for all the assumed energy transfers, shows a global energy imbalance of +0.9W/sqm, presumably a result of the mentioned additional disturbing factors. If their figures are realistic this means that the earth is warming without increases in “greenhouse gases.”

A revision of this diagram, about to be launched by the Fifth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and which I am not allowed to show you, complicates this still further. They change several of their chosen figures but they now admit that the figures chosen are more or less arbitrary choices from a range of published estimates which they now add to the diagram.