Why did Anthony Watts pull a Bait and Switch?
Anthony Watts of the science blog Watts Up With That appears to have pulled a bait and switch to dodge Principia Scientific International’s (PSI) direct and forthright answer to his (and Dr. Roy Spencer’s) “put up or shut up” challenge.
On May 10th of this year, Watts and Spencer challenged PSI’s “Slayers” to provide a realistic model of earth’s energy budget, one that did not incorporate additional heating by “greenhouse gases.” We obliged.
But rather than acknowledge our response and cogently address our thermal model (illustrated above), Watts incongruously posted an “experiment” to attack us once again. An upcoming article will provide details about Watts’ experiment proving the opposite of what he intended. For now, however, the crux of the debate remains: Is radiative forcing – in other words, heating by greenhouse gases – a real phenomenon? Here and here we have clearly indicated no.
To clarify matters for anyone less familiar with the present debate, the Greenhouse Effect (GHE) has for 30 years been the centerpiece of claims about man-made global warming. The basic contention is that sunlight doesn’t provide enough heat to account for the Earth’s temperature, but additional radiation from about 1{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the atmosphere’s gases does account for it. These gases respond to the heat radiated by the Earth’s surface and send that energy back, which makes the surface warmer. Thus in effect the Earth is heated by its own radiation, much like a battery charging itself with the electricity it produces.
Spencer’s so-called “time-dependent” Earth model, then, presupposes the existence of such a heating mechanism and from this assumption he derives what he calls “reasonable surface temperatures.” Convinced his model proves that the GHE is real, he dared us to present an alternative. In promptly doing so we also demonstrated that Spencer’s version (below) is not only far from being “time dependent,” it’s not even capable of generating enough heat for clouds to form — let alone enough heat to melt ice. Reasonable surface temperatures indeed.
Yet after calling for an alternative to a heat source that augments the Sun, Watts instantly ignored or perhaps forgot that his call had been answered. He wandered instead into another playground, distracted by a picture which he found amusing. So it’s natural to ask: Is Watts seeking to confuse readers by pretending that what occurred did not occur? Or is the confusion inadvertent?
Anyway, Anthony Watts has now produced a video, New WUWT-TV segment: Slaying the ‘slayers’ with Watts, featuring a homespun experiment with a mirror, an infrared camera and a 65 watt incandescent lamp. Judging by comments to his post, Watts has certainly succeeded in drawing attention away from the original issue. We will address some of Watts’ most recent remarks nevertheless.
“[Slayers] tend to ignore real world measurements”
Astounding. Please open your eyes, Mr. Watts. PSI members have both performed experiments and used respected third party empirical data to validate our views. Look here, here, here and here. For example, in his PSI paper Observations on ‘backradiation’ during Nighttime and Daytime, professor Nasif Nahle carefully compiled a series of real time measurements of thermal radiation from the atmosphere and surface materials both night and day. Nahle demonstrated that radiant heat transfer from the atmosphere to the Earth’s surface simply does not occur. A cooler system radiating toward a warmer system is physically untenable as a heating mechanism.
“Most of what that group does is to spin sciencey sounding theories and pal reviewed papers by a mysterious members-only peer review system.”
On the contrary, Mr. Watts, offering pseudo-scientific garbage like Willis Eschenbach’s heat-magnifying shell and Ira Glickstein’s photon-slicer is your specialty. Our group deals with standard scientific principles. And we don’t mince the 2nd Law of thermodynamics into incomprehensible confusion like crafty lawyers would. Actual scientists understand the matter clearly. This is from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, for example:
Heat always moves from a warmer place to a cooler place.
Heat transfers in three ways:
- Conduction
- Convection
- Radiation
It’s as simple as that: heat always moves to a cooler place, which includes heat transfer by radiation. By the same token, this excludes radiant heat transfer to a warmer place, a point that Mr. Watts and his fans emphatically contest. Which places them on the outskirts of standard science, not us.
As for “a mysterious members-only peer review system,” no. In fact, PSI has pioneered a new kind of open peer review system: PROM (peer review in open media) which allows anyone to post feedback on all the papers submitted to us. Every such paper must pass PROM review and remain up for public scrutiny for a period of no less than one month. During that time authors must respond to any criticisms submitted to PSI on their work. PSI weighs the merits of feedback from members and non-members alike and compels authors to modify or withdraw the paper when objections are deemed valid. Thanks to the thoroughness of our open PROM system, every paper eventually published by PSI has been found in need of some amendment beforehand.
Now for some of Watts’ more serious misconceptions, however.
“a greenhouse atmosphere has higher temperatures near the surface, but lower temperatures at high altitudes”
Yet this trait is common to every planet’s atmosphere, irrespective of that atmosphere’s composition. Has Watts ever bothered to look?
As you’ll notice in every case, atmospheric temperature increases with depth and decreases with height. Above 0.1 bar of pressure, all planetary atmospheres do this. The presence of radiating trace gases aren’t responsible for this but the interaction of gravity with a gas’s ability to hold onto heat. Indeed, as this NASA page shows, the rate of atmospheric cooling (or heating) for a given unit of altitude can be predicted by accounting for the planet’s gravitational acceleration (<g>) and its atmosphere’s heat capacity (Cp) alone. For more information about this phenomenon see A Discussion on the Absence of a Measurable Greenhouse Effect, a PSI publication.
Incidentally, it is also the case with every planet’s atmosphere that its lower-altitude temperature exceeds a blackbody-based prediction. In other words, the same method for predicting a minus 18 degree Earth also fails everywhere else. Each planet’s atmosphere is warmer than predicted, even when it is principally composed of hydrogen and helium.
But will this prompt greenhouse theoreticians to reconsider their tenets? Don’t hold your breath.
“To be honest, I laughed when I saw this”
Now we are veering toward the biggest misconception yet. Watts here is referring to a picture that shows a bright light bulb facing a mirror. The caption explains that the mirror’s reflection doesn’t heat the light bulb or make it shine any brighter. This is only common sense, however, because anyone can readily verify such a thing for himself. Even a concave (light-collecting) mirror will demonstrate that an object cannot be brightened by its own radiance. The light it shines can only illuminate something that is shining less.
Believing that an object actually can be brightened by its brightness is rather queer, in fact, like standing inside a bucket and giving an honest effort to lift it off the ground. Yet Watts sincerely believes that by means of its own radiant power an object can increase its radiant power, and he finds it funny that others consider that a joke.
But this ties in to another of his odd beliefs, for Watts also objects to us mentioning that other greenhouse theorists propose that radiant energy is doubled when it is doubled back to the radiator.
“I’ve never made a doubling claim like that, nor am I aware that any of the others named have claimed a doubling”
This is a veritable WHOPPER. Because two of Watts’s greenhouse stars, Eschenbach and Glickstein have clearly explained on Watts’ own pages that radiant energy is doubled if certain conditions prevail.
Willis Eschenbach, for instance, has it that a steel shell suspended around a cold steel sphere will radiate back the sphere’s thermal light and increase its radiance from 235 watts per square meter to 470 watts per square meter. Check our math, but isn’t 470 equal to 235 times 2?
Likewise, Ira Glickstein has it that a greenhouse atmosphere is somehow able to split a single outgoing photon into an incoming photon and an outgoing photon, such that an incoming photon scale that would read “1” in the absence of greenhouse gases will read “2” when they’re around. Pardon us again, but doesn’t 1 + 1 = 2?
Here’s the real question, though: How can Anthony Watts be utterly unaware of what his own greenhouse explainers have been explaining? One might also ask whether Watts is aware that Eschenbach and Glickstein are merely regurgitating the basic concept of greenhouse theory as taught in universities. Outgoing surface heat rays turn into incoming atmospheric heat rays, which double the surface’s heat rays.
Richard Lindzen believes this too. His is one of the names we mentioned.
In Greenhouse Effect, A Scientific Analysis, professor Lindzen explains,
The basic idea of the greenhouse effect is illustrated by Figure 1. Suppose that the atmosphere and clouds can be represented by a single layer of gas and clouds at some temperature Tα , and that this layer of gas and clouds can be treated as a perfect emitter. The layer therefore emits radiant energy both upward and downward at the rate σTα 4 , while the surface emits upward at the rate σTs4 , where Ts is the surface temperature. At the top of the atmosphere, the total outgoing radiative flux, given by σTa4 , must balance the net incoming solar flux of 240 Wm-2, giving Ta = 255 kelvins. But the surface receives energy from both the sun and the atmosphere, and the thermal equilibrium of the surface requires that
σTs4 = 240 Wm-2 + σTa4 = 480 Wm-2.
And there it is again. Eschenbach transforms 235 watts per square meter into 470, Glickstein conjures 2 out of 1, and Lindzen turns 240 W/m2 into 480. Since on Watts’ own website Spencer wrote approvingly of yet another paper where Lindzen explains how surface heating by a back-radiating atmosphere works, and since another Watts favorite, Christopher Monckton, endorses both Lindzen and Spencer, we just naturally assumed that Watts himself was in on this doubling business. But no —
“I’ve never made a doubling claim like that, nor am I aware that any of the others named have claimed a doubling”
— it would appear that Watts objects to it. So we await his refutation of Lindzen et al.
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