Jenny – ” “We should create a competitive climate for investment and for renewables and alternatives that are economical and doable and none of this snake oil science stuff that is based on this global warming, Gore-gate stuff that came down where there was revelation that the scientists, some of these scientists were playing political games.”

Way to go Sarah! You have the liberal media having to taking your words out of context to find anything wrong with them.”

Would you like to help me tell her where to stick it? 🙂

You have a stove. It goes out, but is still warm.

In one situation, you put it in deep space and the temperature around it is as close to absolute zero as possible.

In another situation, you put it in the same place, but this time you put another stove, smaller, a little cooler, but still warm.

In which situation will the stove cool faster, or are they, as the skeptical thermodynamics has it, equal?

And if you think the stove will cool faster without another cooler stove near it, and you accept (by the 1st law, by the way) that energy is additive since matter/energy is neither created nor destroyed, then all you have to do is postulate you’re firing up the stove again, and decide in which conditions it will heat up faster – out in deep space with nothing around it and no heat sources, or with a cooler, but radiating heat source near it, and one which, furthermore, is being heated by it.

when you have black bodies heated up, they radiate in all directions, from their surfaces. in terms of a planet’s energy budget, you can disregard conduction and convection and focus on radiaton.

When you have two bodies, the hotter one is radiating more packets of photons at its surface (in all directions) If they’re near each other, the colder one is sending out less heat and therefore, on average, more radiant heat from the other body is striking it than radiant heat from it is striking the other one. And that’s it.

It’s related to the 2nd law because one way of expressing the 2nd law of thermodynamics is that statistically you don’t get net heating of a hotter body from a colder one.

But their thermodynamic argument, such as it is, and it’s been sanctified by real scientists who know better but have no scruples, such as Gerlich and Tscheuschner, is this:

First, you rephrase it to make it incorrect:

There can be no transfer of heat between a colder and a warmer body. So thinking of those photon packets as little arrows of heat radiating away from the black bodies, the colder one is not getting its net heating from statistical results of random absorption – no, what’s happening is that up to the moment of equilibrium, a Maxwell’s Demon of some sort prevents any radiation in the direction of the hotter body. Another Demon on the hotter body gradually turns off a tap on that body, so the radiation in the direction of the cooler body tapers off. At equilibrium, the pattern of radiant heat is normal in the hemisphere (assuming they’re spheres) away from each body, and zero at the equator and everywhere on the side turned to the other body.

Okay, with this unicorn husbandry manual as our physics guide, we turn to the so-called greenhouse effect. The sun’s rays come down and strike the earth and then are re-radiated as longer wavelength radiation. These in turn are absorbed by CO2 and water molecules, among others. This is all acknowledged by all parties, along with the fact that while clouds do a reasonable job reflecting incoming radiation, CO2 and water vapor don’t, whereas they do absorb longer-wavelength re-emitted radiant energy. Some of the skeptics even acknowledge limitations on the saturation argument for CO2, which IMO was at least a sane argument that took research to correct.

But where they part company with the consensus is when they say either the CO2 molecules are hotter or the Earth’s surface is hotter. By the 2nd Law of Thermodynamic Alchemy, if the CO2 is hotter, the Earth won’t radiate towards it. If the Earth is hotter, then there won’t be any radiation back (by the so-called Greenhouse Effect, which can’t exist). Only if you postulate that the CO2 molecules start out colder, are warmed by the Earth, reach equilibrium, then an X factor warms them more than the Earth, could they exhibit the Greenhouse Effect.

I think it’s probably really, really hard to believe, after all these years, and all the debunking of so much better arguments, and in a climate where most of the denialists have switched to delaying tactics like “wait and geoengineer,” that this could POSSIBLY be the argument, but, in fact, it really is.

BTW for purposes of analyzing radiation, it’s not a problem that the Earth is a sphere and the atmosphere is a shell around it, because you’re just adjusting to a specific point or region’s energy balance.

What’s at fault here is simply the alleged thermodynamic law, and the postulated model. In fact, no law says it’s entirely impossible for an ice cube to heat up a cup of coffee, it’s just vanishingly unlikely. And that’s consistent with all thermal and statistical physics situations. the other thing they do is play with the definition of heat, and say there’s no transfer of heat from A to B if B does not get hotter. The best way to deal with that is to say that energy is transferred both ways, and the net result is more heat in the colder body. There’s no reason to fixate on the term heat at all.

“Glenn Beck just taught me a word: thermodynamics. Some day I’ll figure out what it means, but it’s supposed to make scientists obey your mental commands.”

Sometimes it seems like the entire Republican party is stuck in 10th grade.

. . . in Fulton, Mississippi.

The scandal in climategate is that the media treated it as anything more than a bad joke. And, please, Nixon resigned in 1974. Do we still have to use “gate” as the scandal suffix?

So exactly who are these physicists and what are their claims about the “thermodynamic” “issues”?

Tyler, I’m guessing these claims about physicists, and “thermodynamic issues”, that plague evolution. When investigated, they aren’t really raised by physicists and there really aren’t any issues.

No it isn’t. It was a smoke and mirrors show based on bad faith interpretations of out of context emails.

“Physicists are pressing the thermodynamic issues underlying glogal warming but their concerns are being ignored by many otherwise knowledgeable people who may not understand the thermodynamic issues.”

I’ve seen this claim cropping up more and more among the denialists, and I can’t help but suspect that it’s just more smoke and mirrors. So exactly who are these physicists and what are their claims about the “thermodynamic” “issues”?