lördag 16 oktober 2010

Arrhenius and his Greenhouse Effect



Seeking the roots of CO2 climate alarmism we now turn to Svante Arrhenius and his On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground from 1896:
  • It is only the variation of the temperature with the transparency of the air that we shall examine.
  • For this radiation we will suppose that Stefan's law of radiation, which is now generally accepted, holds good, or in other words that the quantity of heat (W) that radiates from a body of the albedo (1-n) and temperature T (absolute) to another body of the absorption-coefficient b and absolute temperature q is W = nbg(T^4-q^4).
  • I have calculated the mean alteration of temperature that would follow if the quantity of carbonic acid varied from its present value to a doubled value: 5-6 C.
  • If the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression. This rule--which naturally holds good only in the part investigated--will be useful for the following summary estimations.
  • I should certainly not have undertaken these tedious calculations if an extraordinary interest had not been connected with them.
Yes, the calculations were tedious, but unfortunately meaningless with extraordinarily small interest, because the model used is way too simplistic and cannot tell anything about global temperature and its dependence on CO2.

We have now traced the origins of CO2 climate alarmism to Fourier-Tyndall-Arrhenius and found no science and mathematics, only loose speculations and hand-waving about an evasive
"greenhouse effect".

Compare with Carbon Dioxide and the Climate by Plass, Fleming  and Schmidt (1956)
  • Although the carbon dioxide theory of climatic change was one of the most widely held fifty years ago, in recent years it has had relatively few adherents... 
50 years ago nobody believed in Arrhenius. What happened that resurrected his outdated theory as the basis of climate alarmism? Or is it still outdated with "relatively few adherents"?


5 kommentarer:

  1. Hand-waving indeed. I've become more and more impressed by the versatility of the physics and minds behind the greenhouse effect. First the atmospheric layers are blackbodies with the following relationship between temperature and pressure:

    P = 1/3aT^4

    After a while the temperature gradient becomes so steep due to the greenhouse heatpumping that convection sets in and, by magic, the atmosphere turns into an ideal gas for which the following relation holds:

    P = nRT/V

    Which ultimately sets a limit to the steepness of the temperature gradient.

    In other words: A blackbody heatpump and an ideal gas ventilation all in one !!

    And these guys have fooled an entire world to believe in this! They could probably make an even bigger fortune out of selling vacuum-cleaners over the internet.

    SvaraRadera
  2. Yes, they have been selling vacuum...

    SvaraRadera
  3. A few years later, Knut Ångström published a paper showing that Arrhenius had overestimated the warming from "carbonic acid" and that the warming from a doubling would be about one degree.

    SvaraRadera
  4. Yes, but was Ångstöm right just because Arrhenius was wrong?

    SvaraRadera
  5. Any person with the slightest knowledge of thermodynamics and who accepts the fact that the net heat flow goes from higher to lower temperature (which climatologists also do) asks himself the question:

    "What is the thermal conductivity of CO2?"

    Which can be measured and was done comprehensively by Shack back in the 70s.

    Only a whacko goes into the lab and measures the IR absorption and emission coefficients of CO2. Because these figures alone don't tell you anything about the thermodynamics, which is a many-body problem obeying some elementary conservations laws.

    SvaraRadera