Sabine still does not Understand the Greenhouse Effect

Written by Joe Postma on July 21, 2023. Posted in Current News

Rising YouTube scientist and quantum physicist Sabine Hossenfelder recently put out a video where she admitted that she misunderstood the greenhouse effect of climate science

Unfortunately, by the end of the video, it was clear that she still did not understand it.

Here is her video:

Well, who else to explain what the greenhouse effect of climate science is than someone (myself and the Slayers, and Principia Scientific International) who have done nothing but dissect the radiative greenhouse effect for the past decade?

One of the most important take-aways from Sabine’s video is where she demonstrates that climate science’s greenhouse is very poorly defined, resulting in the fact that she admits that she does not really understand what it is.

This is in fact something which we have been pointing out for many years! The whole point of physics is to pin-down and understand how something works, because there are principles of nature and principles of physics which underlie all phenomena, and which allow us to engineer them.

Newton’s Laws, for example, exist because of how momentum changes; Kepler’s Laws exist because of conservation of momentum. But Sabine says right at the beginning of her video:

SH: “What if we’re all just pretending to kind of understand something we’re spending trillions of dollars on?”

Could you imagine a scientist admitting this about anything else? This is in fact the situation in science, and not merely on the issue of climate science.

Sabine’s first description of the “greenhouse effect” is supposed to be that of a real actual greenhouse, but, she uses climate science’s radiative version to explain it and completely either overlooks, or simply does not know, that a real greenhouse functions by stoppage of convective cooling.

See the post “A Tale of Two Versions” which explains the difference. Basically, a real greenhouse works by preventing warm air from rising away. It is that simple. Sunlight is very hot and can warm things at the surface of the Earth easily to 80°C.

However, Sabine seems to think that it is not sunlight which warms the interior of the greenhouse! She says:

SH: “So all that glass in a greenhouse traps the infrared radiation and that warms the air. .. That’s how an actual greenhouse works.”

In other words, it is not the incoming 80°C sunlight which warms the greenhouse, but only the re-radiated infrared light which does so.

This goes directly to climate science’s position that sunlight does not heat planet Earth to any significant extent at all, but that it is backradiation from the cold atmosphere which provides twice the heating power of the Sun!

The Kiehl & Trenberth energy model shown below, if you run the numbers, claims that the Sun can only heat the Earth to -40°C (168 W/m² Incoming Solar Radiation Absorbed by Surface), and that backradiation does all the rest of the heating with almost twice the power of the Sun (324 W/m² Back Radiation Absorbed by Surface).

At least Sabine is consistent with the prevailing peer-review literature of climate science. And she is correct to think that, if the greenhouse effect she knows from climate science is a principle of physics, then, it should explain how a real greenhouse functions too.

However, the fact is that a real greenhouse works by stopping convective cooling by trapping air warmed by sunlight inside of itself, whereas in the open that warm air rises away leaving only cooler air behind.

And so, in fact, Sabine does not understand how an actual greenhouse works, and she does not mention convection at all.

If real greenhouses worked by the radiative method Sabine describes, then they should get much hotter than the temperature at which they are heated by the Sun, but, no greenhouse in the world has ever demonstrated this, and if Sabine but knew it, all real greenhouses therefore provide empirical proof that the backradiation heating method does not exist.

Sabine then continues to remark that she thought that this is how the greenhouse effect works for the planet Earth and the atmosphere. And she would be right to think that, if the backradiation heating method was an actual, real principle of physics and thermodynamics.

However, she continues on to explain that this is not how Earth’s “greenhouse effect” works! In fact, Sabine spends the next several minutes describing another interpretation of the greenhouse effect, where greenhouse gases are responsible for creating the gradient in temperature with altitude in the atmosphere.

In that discussion, Sabine completely neglects to explain the adiabatic gradient, to explain that the change in temperature with altitude is caused by the exchange of potential and kinetic energy as gas molecules rise and fall in the air column.

Sabine seems to think rather that it is the change in the gravitational strength of the Earth over 10km from the surface on the troposphere, due to the inverse-square law, which causes the change in pressure and temperature with altitude in the air column.

However, the change in gravitational strength due to the inverse square law over the 10km of the troposphere is only 0.3 percent, whereas the temperature changes in absolute terms by around 25 percent between the bottom and top of the troposphere, which is fully explained by the adiabatic gradient.

Given local thermodynamic equilibrium, then the total energy of air at a given altitude is

U = mgh + mCpT + c

To get the change in energy of air with altitude, and where local thermodynamic equilibrium applies, then you take the full differential of that equation to get

dU = 0 = mg*dh + mCp * dT

which gets you

dT/dh = -g/Cp.

dT is change in temperature, dh is change in altitude, g is the gravitational force, and Cp is air’s thermal capacity. The effect of the inverse square is to only change that result, through g, by 0.3% between the bottom and top of the troposphere, which in thus only an effect, and not a cause of the adiabatic gradient.

Sabine’s video simply becomes more and more of a train-wreck as she overlooks, and seems to have no knowledge of, the relevant principles of physics which explain how real greenhouses work and why the temperature of the atmosphere changes with altitude.

How can you talk about greenhouses and the temperature profile of the atmosphere, when you do not know anything, or the correct reasons, as to how these behaviors manifest from first principle of physics?

This really brings up the entire fundamental conflict between mathematics, physics, and spoken language, with respect to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, and the fact that most of the population is mathematically illiterate.

The only correct way to do physics is with math, and even then, the math can go wrong if the underlying principles are not consistent with reality: for example, deriving a mathematics model based on the Earth being flat, as climate science does, cannot actually produce valid physics, as discussed repeatedly and summarized in the following graphic.

Sabine also demonstrates that she is not aware that the -18°C temperature of the Earth is what is called an “effective” temperature which must apply to the Earth or any planet or star as a whole, and not merely to only the deepest slice of their atmospheres.

Sabine seems to think that the temperature of the Earth, calculated in equilibrium with the solar heating input, is not -18°C, when it emphatically is as empirically measured by satellite.

An “effective” temperature is related only to average temperature, and therefore by definition the effective temperature must be found at the average location of the atmosphere, not at the infinitesimal slice at an atmosphere’s very bottom.

The bottom of the atmosphere’s temperature is determined by the relation of the adiabatic gradient with respect to the average location and effective temperature of the atmosphere, which then gets you the near-surface temperature of +15°C.

This just goes to show the completely convoluted mess which modern science gets itself into, as I explained in the book Debunking the Simultaneity Paradox.

Science gets itself into such convoluted self-contradictions at so many points of its narrative, that it becomes impossible to address the errors on the terms of its own language at all. Thomas Kuhn explained this in his “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions“, where one simply must abondon the old language and adopt a new language, which he defined as changes in paradigm.

The current paradigm, and hence language, of climate science, is to explain greenhouses via processes by which they do not actually function, and which do not function in their own respect in any case given that they should function in real greenhouses, but do not, and ultimately, a narrative which is a product of flat Earth theory.

See more here climateofsophistry.com

Header image: CCCB

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