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The narrative is very misleading. There are two directions to look at it: convincing yourself via a convincing story, or convincing yourself via a convincing c
by machina_ex_deus 3y ago
The narrative is very misleading.
There are two directions to look at it: convincing yourself via a convincing story, or convincing yourself via a convincing calculation.
The story they tell defies basic thermodynamic intuition, and seems to skip over all the parts that would put the narrative in doubt.
The premise is that greenhouse gases absorb black body radiation from the surface.
First of all, greenhouse gas is a bad name, greenhouses warm because of air convection. So the "greenhouse" intuition they try to abuse is misleading.
Secondly, think about this thought experiment: a layer of pure CO2 gas covers the lowest layer of air near the surface. By how much would that get warmer compared to air? The answer is there won't be any difference. That's because the surface and the air near it are at the same temperature, so they emit exactly the same amount of energy. All systems with same temperature are at an equilibrium.
So what can possibly cause warming is only the effect of the difference in temperatures between the CO2 gas and the surface. Which should only be significant in higher altitudes. Which have much less CO2 because it is heavier. And it's also not clear, in this situation, in which direction the weather near the surface will change.
But then you realize there are also effects of increasing methane / CO2 which decrease warming. The most obvious effect is that they have higher heat capacity. Heat capacity goes together with absorption: the absorption is possible only because the molecules have more degrees of freedom to vibrate. So it's usually around the same order of magnitude. And higher heat capacity means faster cooling from convection and it means the air requires more energy to heat up. In fact, you can think of the entire climate change claim as a statement about the entire earth heat capacity.
So I'm entirely unconvinced by the story. But that should've been OK because there are detailed calculations. There are models.
Except these models are dumpster fire. You can download some of them from NASA's website and judge the quality of code for yourself. Old fortran code, all the models copy code from each other, many things which aren't constant physically are constant in the code, functions full of tens of "if else" statements whose physical validity is highly in question.
But those models should've been tested? Except they don't. There's no way to test them. From basic software engineering perspective, it is insane to trust these things to make the kind of trillion dollar decisions they make.
But all models point to climate change! Well they all copy code from each other. But that's not the only problem. They are all thermodynamic simulations which substitute the full state of the system with average states.
In other words, they all, by design, underestimate the entropy of the system. And thermodynamic energy is entropy times temperature, and since they get the energy right (just the sun) you expect them all to get higher temperature. So it is actually expected from all simulations to overestimate warming.
There are also other glaring counter intuitive things about the narrative. Somehow CO2 effects continue to work slowly over decades, and the system doesn't reach an equilibrium with the current levels of CO2 until decades ahead.
This is completely against normal thermodynamic intuition. Meta stable states exist, yes, and there are out of equilibrium systems. But usually the reason for systems not reaching the more stable state, is that their fluctuations are too small. In this case, the fluctuations are much much bigger than the supposed stable state change. We're talking about barely a degree change over decades in systems that fluctuate by several degrees daily. It makes no sense to claim their equilibrium will only be reached in decades while their fluctuation exceeds the difference to equilibrium daily.
- jackmott 3y agoYet the warming continues at exactly the rate we expected since the 1980s, given the rise in co2 we are measuring. Strange coincidence, or maybe the fact that the code is fortran doesn’t say anything about the accuracy of the math.
- machina_ex_deus 3y agoI vouched for your comment just to tell you you're probably shadow banned, and I thought you would want to know. (I didn't do it, it was probably done long time ago by a moderator). I just feel bad looking at someone who doesn't know he's wasting time writing things nobody will see. Even if he only snarkly disagrees with me. Also, if you engaged seriously, maybe they wouldn't ban you in the first place. I just don't believe in ignoring people who are wrong, only in correcting them.
- brabel 3y ago> So what can possibly cause warming is only the effect of the difference in temperatures between the CO2 gas and the surface. This shows you have a complete misunderstanding of the basic physics going on. If you have a source of radiation directly hitting a surface, some of the radiation will warm the surface by being absorbed by the surface material, but some of that radiation will be reflected back into space. When you add air on top of such surface, the air will capture both some of the direct radiation, as well as some of the reflected radiation. That's what causes extra warming of the surface compared to the situation without air. Now, air is a mix of several gases... different gases absorb very different amounts of radiation in the sunlight spectrum... what we're saying when we say methane is much more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2, is that methane can absorb much more radiation, which makes it warm up much more than CO2, and that heat stays around until dissipated back into space, which takes quite a long time! Now that you understand the process at play, I hope it's obvious that your comment above is incredibly wrong on so many levels. IT's ok to be wrong, but I hope you're able to look for what's real and try to understand things better to avoid making such comments that may lead innocent people into a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
- 3y ago