The Emission Height Fallacy
This is another one of those “the greenhouse effect doesn’t work the way we’ve always said it does, it works this new way now” schticks.
If you’re logical, you may imagine that just as how the original climate alarmist backradiation “greenhouse effect” was debunkable, so is this one, the reason being that these arguments are not predicated upon any underlying fundamental truth, but are created sophistry for purpose of the hijack of science and politics.
Too bad scientists don’t care about logic, because if they did, these schemes wouldn’t get multiple chances. I mean, how many times does something need to change definitions before one acknowledges that nothing is being defined at all!?
A reader named Jim Fish sent me the following screencap from a Twitter thread he had been engaging with:
Aside from the gaffe of “heat is effectively emitted to space” which indicates a fundamental lack of knowledge of thermodynamics, this is all about Dr. Richard Lindzen and what made him a skeptic – the emission height increase is the “tropospheric hotspot” issue, where if greenhouse gas (GHG) theory theory were true, then the troposphere should be increasing in temperature in a tell-tale fashion.
But it isn’t.
There was/is no tropospheric hotspot, and therefore the emission height argument is bunk. Whoever uses the emission height argument is themselves contradicting the other climate scientists who use the backradiation or slowed cooling argument for the mechanism of the “greenhouse effect”.
However, what is it which is fundamentally, structurally wrong with the argument, in a similar sense to how the backradiation argument is predicated upon flat Earth theory and cold sunshine? (Of course, the emission height argument for climate alarmism is still founded in the fundamental error of climate science of treating the Sun as unable to create the weather upon a flat Earth.)
Given that the atmosphere is fixed in depth (material additions are negligible), then if the effective emission height increased you would have the same effective temperature of -18C but now emitting over a larger surface area and thus emitting more total energy.
That would therefore violate conservation of energy because there is no additional total energy to emit given that the solar energy input is constant. Remember, these people are so stupid that they believe that flux is what you use to conserve energy, and so as long as you have -18C or 240 W/m^2, then it doesn’t matter what size of sphere the emission comes from because 240 W/m^2 “in” equals 240 W/m^2 out.
But that it is not at all a statement of energy conservation. Remember what Willis Eschenback said about this incongruity created with differently-sized spheres though of identical flux emission? That this “only creates rounding errors.”
Here are the options for the emission height fallacy (EHF…it’s official):
a) same lapse rate, emission occurs at higher effective altitude but lower temperature: this therefore doesn’t affect the surface temperature, and so the argument here is moot. The atmosphere is fixed in depth and the lapse rate stays the same, the emission just gets pushed up to a higher altitude (larger shell) and lower temperature – this therefore has no effect on the surface temperature. The effective temperature of total energy emission would still remain constant here too.
b) same lapse rate, emission occurs at higher effective altitude and same effective temperature: this violates conservation of energy. Emission is moved to a larger shell, but at the same temperature as the smaller previous shell; thus, more energy is being emitted than before and thus conservation of energy is violated.
c) steeper lapse rate: disproven by derivation of lapse rate, and GHG’s do not change the lapse rate
Thus, the emission height argument doesn’t hold water – that’s not what GHG’s do, and they can’t do that, because if they did, you would get a violation of conservation of energy. Option a) is the only possibility that could occur due to increased absorption and scattering of IR energy from CO2…but it’s benign, and is consistent with no tropospheric hotspot and no surface warming.
See more here: climateofsophistry.com
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matina
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Boris Badenov
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Matina is a spammer, sadly we can’t block his butt.
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Joseph Olson
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Slaying the Sky Dragon” Chapter 13, Fig 2 shows apparent temperature in the Thermosphere of 185°K at 85 km altitude and 360°K at 115 km altitude. Part #5 of the Fetzer/Olson climate lectures will cover this anomaly
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Carl
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The “emission height” version of the “greenhouse effect” of course is not new.
Back in October of 2012 you wrote an article for PSI entitled “Versions Of The Greenhouse Effect” https://principia-scientific.com/versions-of-the-greenhouse-effect/ In that article, which named 20 conflicting versions of the GHE hypothesis, the “emission height” fallacy was #1. That article states, “GHG’s cause the atmosphere to emit OLR from a progressively higher and higher altitude. This forces the surface temperature to increase due to the lapse rate.”
Why are there so many versions of the GHE? Don't scientific truths have a singular definition? There are not, for example, multiple versions of Charle's Law, i.e., "the volume occupied by a fixed amount of gas is directly proportional to its absolute temperature, if the pressure remains constant." There is no other versions of Charle's Law.Here is what happened. As we progressively falsified one version of the GHE after another through both empirical experimentation and/or pointing out that they conflicted with the known laws of physic, true believers in the "greenhouse effect" hypothesis simply created, out of the fabric of their imaginations, new versions. Thus proving that the imagination is not constrained by the laws of physics. Unfortunately some people don't realize that just because you can imagine something (picture it in your mind) does not make it true.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Carl and PSI Readers,
Read more about Carl. (https://principia-scientific.com/?s=solar+Radiation+Sufficient)
I discovered PSI because Carl and Joe Postma were having an email conversation about Horace de Saussure’s hot box. Carl is the only other PSI reader, of whom I know has studied the environment in a natural laboratory.
Good to hear from you again.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Svend
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Just a comment – I have noted that the ‘Matina’ message on ‘Hepatitis’ is appearing on all comments on this website and the input out of scope and relevant for the topic – perhaps one should give it attention and just delete it – if possible?
Cheers
Svend
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Svend
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and ….of course a type error happened when I wrote the first note: … ‘and relevant for the topic’ – of course it should have been ‘not relevant’ – sorry
Svend
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Herb Rose
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The thermometer is an evacuated glass column containing mercury with an enclosed bulb reservoir of mercury on the end. A barometer is an evacuated glass column contains mercury with an exposed pool of mercury on the end. Both are measuring the same air molecules in the atmosphere. What is it about the thin layer of glass covering the reservoir on the thermometer that converts the units of those air molecules from mass/area (pressure) to mass times velocity squared (energy)? Neither instrument is measuring what is believed but the momentum of the molecules striking it. A thermometer is useless in measuring energy in a gas so any theory relying on the reading of a thermometer is based on false data.
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