The Sun Heats the Earth
I saw this quote within a recent email exchange among the Slayers, and although I don’t know the exact paper source, R.W. Wood is well-enough known to just quote him directly:
R.W. Wood:
“The solar rays penetrate the atmosphere, warm the ground which in turn warms the atmosphere by contact and by convection currents.”
Did you know that climate scientists think that the Sun can’t heat the Earth, and that they vehemently disagree with Wood’s conclusion? Climate science and climate alarmism believes that sunshine is freezing cold, unable to heat the Earth’s surface above -18 °C (-0.4 °F), and by some other climate alarmist accounts, not even above -40 °C (-40 °F)!
How could they make such a grotesque mistake? How could they not be cognizant of the difference between standing in full sunshine and feeling its significant heat, and standing in the shade? Are they vampires that only come out at night? You would almost have to conclude that the core climate alarmists must be vampires who have never stepped into the light of the Sun. Even if they do faulty mathematics and science, you would think that the empirical sensation of standing in full sunlight would have helped them discover the error in their maths. Why doesn’t it?
Well, the vampire thing is all well and funny, but the problem truly is one of extremely bad science, terribly bad physics, and sophistical abuse of mathematics. Do you want to know the mistake they make? It’s actually really kind of ridiculous…funny, but then immediately not funny when it becomes clear just how stupid it is:
They spread incoming sunlight over the entire surface of the Earth at once…
Think about that for a minute. Think about what it means. Think about shade. Think about where sunlight makes shade on the entire planet Earth. …Half of the planet Earth is in shade, right?
So if you take the actual incoming sunshine, but then in your maths you spread it out over the entire Earth at once, i.e. twice as much area, what does that do to the power of the sunshine in your maths? Look at it this way: If you have one scoop of peanut butter meant for one slice of toast, what happens to that scoop of peanut butter when you spread it over two slices of toast? You better like dry toast! That’s what happens. The same is true for sunshine being spread over and into area it does not actually physically go in reality, except instead of “dry” the effect of the maths on paper is to make sunshine cold. I mean come on – it’s day and night people!
In the graphic below is how they dilute sunshine over the entire surface of the Earth at once. The accompanying mathematics is taught to students in physics classes throughout the world, and I myself was taught this exact thing in my own first-year of undergraduate university physics education for my B.Sc. degree.
They treat the surface of the Earth – get this – as a flat plane, with the sunshine that the spherical Earth actually physically gets spread over the entire flat surface, twice the area it should be, at once. Look at their diagram: the Earth is a flat line…WTF?!
This reduces the power of sunshine by a factor of 4! You see that divisor of 4 in the equation on the top left of the diagram.
Umm…the Earth isn’t a flat line or a flat plane, it is a sphere. Umm…the Earth gets the actual sunshine it actually gets, not sunshine reduced in power to 25{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of it actual value on paper.
SMH! Can you believe that they teach this to students? In university. In astrophysics! Astronomers of all people should know that the Earth is a sphere, that only half of the Earth is lit by sunshine at a time, the other half in shade, etc. Yet they are able teach these people, and teach themselves(!), that the Earth is a flat plane, like a flat line in space, that gets 25{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the power of sunshine that it actually gets. …WTF!? What are you doing!?
Reducing the actual power of sunshine by 75{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} equates to making sunshine unable to heat anything above -18 °C (-0.4 °F). Far from able to melt ice. Climate science can’t explain why ice tends to melt under sunshine! That’s what they’ve done with their maths on paper, and that’s what they believe. In even fancier diagrams, that undoubtedly cost much much more money to produce and created much much more prestige for the academics who produced it (and they make a very good living “producing” this stuff), they reduce the power of sunshine to a heating ability of now only-40 °C (-40 °F)! It’s all in the numbers in the diagram below, where only 168 W/m² are absorbed by the Earth’s surface.
They nicely draw the Earth’s surface here with a curve, but the numbers are still all for a flat-plane Earth with Sunshine diluted over the entire surface at once. Are they aware of this graphical contradiction to their maths? Or are they just that deceptive? Drawing the Earth as a curve doesn’t hide the fact of the meaning of the numbers being for a flat plane!
What madness drove them in there, into this state of affairs, to produce such terrible science at best, to lie and sophize like this at worst, is unknown. Whatever madness it is, it seems to be an archetypal force of nature given that so many people and so much money has been spent promoting it. It’s just disgusting idiocy, in the end. Really, really sad stupidity. Well, stupidity is certainly a force of human nature, and evil has long been said to be as well.
And so do you know what climate scientists and climate alarmism do to try to fix this mistake, to reconcile the fact that the Earth is much warmer than what they believe their paper-equations tell them? This is what they do: they make the atmosphere an additional source of heat! They make the atmosphere to have equal the heating power of sunlight as in their first diagram, and in the second it has almost twice the power of sunshine! Can you believe that? The atmosphere isn’t on fire…the atmosphere isn’t combusting, or fusioning…the atmosphere is not a source of power! The Sun is a source of power because it is undergoing nuclear fusion in its core, releasing tons of energy. The Earth’s atmosphere is not a source of power. But this is what they call the greenhouse effect.
This is the entire reference frame of climate science and climate alarm. It is within this preposterous reference frame of a flat Earth, cold sunshine, and atmosphere which produces more power than the Sunshine, that climate science is established and from which climate alarmism and the greenhouse effect comes forth. If you begin with the wrong ontology and epistemology, everything you subsequently conclude from that position is false, full stop.
The fundamental mistake they make is that of a child, in elementary school, when they have a class about cooking: You can’t cook a pie at lower temperature, but for longer time, and get the same pie. Mathematically on paper it may be the same amount of energy spent, but the effect that energy has on matter is totally dependent on how fast and in what area that energy is used. This is the difference between math on paper and physics in reality. All scientists should know such a basic thing, so it is curious that climate scientists don’t know it and that so many scientist supporters of climate alarm seem to have conveniently forgotten it. Talk about poor standards in science…in academia.
Guys, you can’t bake a pie at low temperature but for longer time and get the same pie! Likewise, you can’t bake a pie at higher temperature for shorter time and get the same pie! And finally, you can’t cook the pie at lower temperature, but for the same time, and expect the pie to help cook itself with its own (non-existent) power!
A more rational simplified-diagram showing the fundamental energy exchange with the Earth would be something like the following diagram:
Climate science can’t explain why ice tends to melt under sunshine, whereas the diagram above clearly explains why – sunshine is warm! And this is a huge difference, because like the pie getting properly cooked, the Earth is “cooked” by sunshine in such a way that ice can be melted into water, and sustained as water and also as water vapour – this is reality, whereas the paper-fiction of a flat Earth clearly is not.
Isn’t that an amazing difference? The climate science approach of a flat Earth experiencing 25{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of solar power makes it so that, on paper, sunshine can’t heat the Earth and melt ice. And then from that position they have to make the atmosphere an additional source of heat. Whereas using the actual, spherical Earth, and the actual sunshine it actually experiences, then the sunshine can melt ice, can heat the Earth, and no other phantom sources of energy need to be postulated to explain things. Two paper models, one ridiculous and which says ridiculous things and makes ridiculous assumptions, and one realistic making no assumptions and says nothing ridiculous. Take your pick.
Not the Whole Story
Let it be clear that sunshine, and only sunshine, is what heats the surface of the Earth, sustains its temperature, and allows an atmosphere to exist at all. Without sunshine, the atmosphere would freeze out entirely and just be ice on the ground.
With an atmosphere being sustained, however, it develops an important temperature gradient due to the local gravitational field. In mechanical vertical equilibrium, meaning that there is no bulk movement of the atmosphere either up or down, then for any given horizontal infinitesimal slice of atmosphere there must be conservation of mass for any gas passing through that slice. Why would any gas move through that slice? Simply because of thermal movement on the molecular scale. Some molecules will move up through the slice, and an equal number will move down through the slice when there is mechanical equilibrium. The conservation of mass equation is:
ρ↑V↑ = ρ↓V↓
where ρ is the density of the gas and V is its average velocity. The upward and downward arrows indicate upward movement and downward movement through the infinitesimal horizontal slice.
But in an infinitesimal time period ‘dt’, and if the average velocities are initially identical at ‘V0‘, how does the velocity change for the upward and downward moving molecules given that gravity is acting upon them? If the local gravitational field strength is ‘g’ (positive value), then the upward moving particles will have their velocity reduced by g*dt, and the downward moving particles increased by g*dt. And so:
ρ↑(V0 – g*dt) = ρ↓(V0 + g*dt)
and as a ratio:
ρ↑/ρ↓ = (V0 + g*dt)/(V0 – g*dt)
The right-hand-side is always larger than one, which then for the left-hand-side means that the density of the gas below the slice must be higher than the density above. And so density must decrease with altitude. At the same time, the particles crossing to below the slice will have a higher average velocity as compared to the ones crossing to above the slice, and so therefore temperature must decrease with altitude since this velocity corresponds to a component of the thermal molecular speed of the gas. An equal number of particles pass either up or down, but the particles moving above are slowed, whereas the particles moving below are hastened. Thus, lower density and lower temperature as altitude increases.
It is very easy to derive the temperature gradient from another first-principles approach, that of conservation of energy. When there is no longer any gain or loss of energy in a column of gas, then the energy ‘U’ of an arbitrary parcel of gas is given by the sum of its thermal and gravitational potential energies. The sum of thermal and gravitational potential energies is:
U = mCpT + mgh
However, this energy is constant since there is no other energy input (or loss), and so its differential is equal to zero:
dU = 0 = mCp*dT + mg*dh
which results in
dT/dh = -g/Cp
The actual numerical value of that equation is what is observed experimentally, and so first-principles really works. Temperature must decrease with altitude and this is the energy equilibrium state of the atmosphere.
Given that the atmosphere is expected to revolve around some average temperature state, and given that the state of the atmosphere must decrease in temperature with altitude, then the average by definition must be found around the middle regions of the atmosphere, with the bottom of the atmosphere being where the warmest region, warmer than the average state, is found. This doesn’t require that the atmosphere is a source of heat, sending heat from cold to hot and violating thermodynamics as the climate alarmists believe! It’s just basic physics, with no climate alarmist radiative greenhouse effect sophistry required.
So not only does the Sunshine heat the surface of the Earth to high temperature all by itself, once this done then the bottom of the atmosphere is also where the warmest atmospheric gas is going to be found, and this warmest region will by definition be warmer than any required or expected average temperature state of the atmosphere.
This explains why the bottom of the atmosphere of planets like Venus can be so very hot (~470 °C), even though the effective blackbody temperature is quite low (~ -13 °C). Venus has an extremely deep atmosphere and so the natural temperature gradient has lots of room to increase the atmospheric temperature at the bottom of the atmosphere above that of the average state of the atmosphere. It also explains why the effective blackbody temperature of the Earth is -18 °C, but the bottom of Earth’s atmosphere is +15 °C.
And all of this is done in reality, and explained on paper, without the atmosphere being postulated as a source of heat twice as strong as the sunshine!
You just have to get your starting point, and your first principles, correct, and then the math and physics usually works out. Clearly, starting with a flat Earth, cold sunshine, and the atmosphere as a source of heat, as climate science and climate alarm does, is not the correct starting point! Hello?
Read more at climateofsophistry.com
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