Global Warming: Fake News from the Start -- Article by Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

Senator Tim Wirth, scientist James Hansen and others manufactured the climate “crisis”

President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America.

He could have made the decision simply because the science is false. However, most of the American and global public have been brainwashed into believing the science is correct (and supported by the faux 97% consensus), so they would not have believed that explanation. 

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and indeed the leaders of many western democracies, support the Agreement and are completely unaware of the gross deficiencies in the science. If they understood those deficiencies, they wouldn’t be forcing a carbon dioxide (CO₂) tax on their citizens. 

Trudeau and other leaders show how little they know, and how little they assume the public knows, by calling it a “carbon tax” on “carbon emissions.” But CO₂ is a gas, the trace atmospheric gas that makes life on Earth possible. Carbon is a solid, and carbon-based fuels are solid (coal), liquid (oil) or gaseous (natural gas).

By constantly railing about “carbon emissions,” Trudeau, Obama and others encourage people to think of carbon dioxide as something “dirty,” like soot, which really is carbon. Calling CO₂ by its proper name would help the public remember that it is actually an invisible, odorless gas essential to plant photosynthesis. 

Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is arguably the most misinformed of the lot, saying in a recent interview that “polluters should pay.” She too either does not know that CO₂ is not a pollutant, or she is deliberately misleading people.

Like many of her political peers, McKenna dismisses credentialed PhD scientists who disagree with her approach, labelling them “deniers.” She does not seem to understand that questioning scientific hypotheses, even scientific theories, is what all scientists should do, if true science is to advance.

That is why the Royal Society’s official motto is “Nullius in verba,” Latin for “Take nobody's word for it.” Ironically, the Society rarely practices this approach when it comes to climate change.

Mistakes such as those made by McKenna are not surprising, considering that from the outset the entire claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was built on falsehoods and spread with fake news. 

The plot to deceive the world about human-caused global warming gathered momentum right after the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) created the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.

After spending five days at the U.N. with Maurice Strong, the first executive director of UNEP, Hamilton Spectator investigative reporter Elaine Dewar concluded that the overarching objective of the IPCC was political, not scientific. “Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the global governance agenda,” she wrote.

The political agenda required “credibility” to accomplish the deception. It also required some fake news for momentum. Ideally, this would involve testimony from a scientist before a legislative committee. 

U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO) was fully committed to the political agenda and the deception. As he explained in a 1993 comment, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing.…” 

In 1988 Wirth was in a position to jump-start the climate alarm. He worked with colleagues on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to organize and orchestrate a June 23, 1988 hearing where the lead witness would be Dr. James Hansen, then the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Wirth explained in a 2007 interview with PBS Frontline:

“We knew there was this scientist at NASA, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So, we called him up and asked him if he would testify.”

Hansen did not disappoint. The New York Times reported on June 23, 1988: “Today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation, but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.”

Specifically, Hansen told the committee, “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming…. It is already happening now.”

Hansen also testified: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now…. We have already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important.”

Wirth, who presided at the hearing, was pre-disposed to believe Hansen and told the committee. “As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth's atmosphere gets warmer,” Wirth said. “Now the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend, and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.” 

More than any other event, that single hearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee publicly initiated the climate scare, the biggest deception in history. It created an unholy alliance between a bureaucrat and a politician, which was bolstered by the U.N. and the popular press – leading to the hoax being accepted in governments, industry boardrooms, schools and churches all across the world.

Dr. John S. Theon, Hansen’s former supervisor at NASA, wrote to the Senate Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “Hansen was never muzzled, even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.”

Hansen never abandoned his single-minded, unsubstantiated claim that CO₂ from human activities caused dangerous global warming. He defied Hatch Act limits on bureaucratic political actions, and in 2011 even got arrested at a White House protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. It was at least his third such arrest to that point. 

Like Trudeau and other leaders duped by the climate scare, Senator Wirth either had not read or did not understand the science. In fact, an increasing number of climate scientists (including Dr. Ball) now conclude that there is no empirical evidence of human-caused global warming. There are only computer model speculations that humans are causing it, and every forecast made using these models since 1990 has been wrong – with actual temperatures getting further from predictions with every passing year.

President Trump must now end America’s participation in the fake science and fake news of manmade global warming. To do this, he must withdraw the U.S. from further involvement with all U.N. global warming programs, especially the IPCC, as well as the agency that now directs it – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He should also launch a “Red Team” exercise that lets non-alarmist scientists examine climate cataclysm claims and the purported evidence for them.

Only then will the U.S. have a chance to fully develop its hydrocarbon resources to achieve the president’s goal of global energy dominance and long-term prosperity for America and the world. 

Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.

The Settled Science of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Violates the Laws of Physics

President Trump has just recently announced that the U.S. will not participate in the Paris Climate Agreement.  He implied that he regarded it as a bad deal for the U.S. economy, while not necessarily disputing its premise that man’s use of fossil fuels was going to cause a disastrous deterioration of the Earth’s climate.  Only a minority of Americans seriously claim that the science behind the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is wrong.  Most of mankind has been seriously misinformed on this critically important topic.

Almost all of the debate about the science is about whether the number of hurricanes of late; the world area under drought conditions; the area of melting ice somewhere in the arctic, Antarctica, or at the site of some glacier in the mountains is greater or reduced recently; the temperature of the ocean surface or at land stations near population centers has increased; or whether some area of the ocean has an increasing acidity or not.   Given the complexity of all the factors that might be linked to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and their cycles over decades and more, this debate could easily go on for decades with no certain conclusion.  The possible symptoms of man-made global warming are too much affected by weather, cycles in solar energy output, ocean heat cycles, and high altitude wind currents to clearly see the underlying long-term climate equilibrium trends.

Meanwhile, the alarmists will go on claiming that the Precautionary Principle requires us to make radical cut-backs in our use of carbon-based fuels, no matter the consequences in the cost of energy and its availability for the poor and most everyone else, on jobs, and on economic growth.  Preventing an imagined disaster decades into the future takes precedence over the well-being of billions of humans in the meantime in the eyes of the many advocates of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.

This long, drawn out debate is unnecessary.  Worrying about a future climate catastrophe has no basis in the physics of the climate.  It turns out that the so-called settled science has internal flaws in the physics that constitutes its very most fundamental basis.  The advocates of the global warming by carbon dioxide hypothesis have told us that the science is settled. They make some very specific claims about how so-called greenhouse gases cause the present temperatures of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere to be warm as a part of what they claim to be the settled science.  Consequently, we can challenge the physics they claim to be behind the present conditions that control the Earth’s basic climate.  We do not even need to wait to see if their catastrophic man-made (anthropogenic) global warming hypothesis makes correct predictions for the future.  In challenging the physics of their theory, we may well learn more about what the effect of additional carbon dioxide on the climate in the future will be.  In any case, if their reasoning for the present temperatures of the surface and atmosphere is substantially wrong and in violation of fundamental laws of physics, then any further predictions they may make have no basis in science.  If they do not understand the present, they certainly do not understand the future.

Let me first lay out what their basic argument for how infrared-active (so-called greenhouse) gases cause the Earth to be much warmer than it would be without them.  Having done so, I will proceed to demolish their argument by showing the many ways in which it defies well-known physics principles, none of which the scientific advocates of the strong greenhouse effect will actually deny are true principles of science.  In fact, they make a pretense of using these same principles of science themselves.

Let us begin with an examination of the Earth Energy Budget NASA currently has on its website to explain the effect of infrared-active gases in warming the Earth.  Because this and many similar Earth energy budgets have been a key part of the claimed science of anthropogenic global warming by infrared-active gases for many years now and because they are adamant in claiming that the science is settled, then any violations of scientific principles in this NASA Earth Energy Budget invalidate the complete argument for catastrophic man-made global warming.

When faced with a complex scientific problem, a good scientist should have the wisdom to first establish whatever limits he can on what the range of physically possible solutions might be by seeing if he can establish lower or upper bounds for the values of a property he wishes to measure or calculate.  He will learn something about the essence of the complex problem in the process and he will protect himself from becoming an advocate for a physically impossible solution to the problem.  This has the real benefit of protecting him from making ridiculous conclusions.

According to this energy budget, the total photon energy flux absorbed by the entire Earth system is the incoming solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere plus that absorbed by the surface, which is

P (solar absorbed) = (77.1 + 163.3) W/m² = 240.4 W/m²

Watts are Joules/second, or the rate at which energy flows.  This 240.4 W/m² is the largest possible photon energy supply that the surface might ever be able to absorb.  It is an upper limit, since nothing on the Earth can add to the energy introduced into the Earth system from the solar radiation, save a possible very minor contribution of heat leakage from the hot interior of the Earth, which they do not consider in their energy budget.  This upper limit is actually further reduced by the amount of any energy absorbed by the atmosphere which is directly emitted as radiation into space, which is the case for sure of much of the 77.1 W/m² absorbed from sunlight in the atmosphere.  This upper limit is a simple matter of conservation of energy.

Now we can immediately see that this energy budget claims that there is a miraculous supply of energy-bearing photons absorbed by the surface with a power of

P (surface absorbed) = (163.3 + 340.3) W/m² = 503.6 W/m²

Where does this addition energy in the form of photons come from?  According to the settled science, this is not additional energy because the total energy flowing out of the Earth system at the top of the atmosphere is the maximum power of the first equation minus the net absorbed heat (0.6 W/m² ) in the surface of a slowly warming Earth.  According to them, one can add as many photons as one wishes with as much energy as one wishes within the Earth system of atmosphere and surface, so long as enough of those photons have negative energy to cancel out the positive energy of other photons.

Of course, they never say it this way because there is no such thing as positive and negative energy photons.  The reality is that there are only positive energy photons and this settled theory has created a huge supply of energy carried by photons in violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy.  Somehow, greenhouse gases are supposed to have created a supply of photons with an additional energy flow rate of (503.6 – 240.4) W/m² = 263.2 W/m²  compared the maximum possible energy in the form of photons, which is even more energy than was absorbed in the entire Earth system from the sun!

If the total rate of energy into the Earth system is 240.4 W/m², this is the highest rate at which energy might leave the surface.  However, since the energy budget provides for a net absorption, thermals losses, and water evaporation, the largest possible flux of energy carried by photons leaving the surface on invoking the Law of Conservation of Energy is

P (photon energy flux leaving surface) = (240.4 -0.6 – 18.4 – 86.4) W/m² = 135.0 W/m²

But having no regard for the Conservation of Energy, the settled science insists that photons carrying energy at the rate of 398.2 W/m² are leaving the surface.  Somehow photons carrying energy at a rate of (398.2 – 135.0) W/m² = 293.2 W/m² have materialized out of nowhere through the miracle of greenhouse gases.  The photon flux leaving the surface is 398.2 / 135.0 = 2.95 times the theoretical upper limit.  Well, never let mere physics stop you from making whatever argument you might think will be good for the maintenance of the environment or the justification to propagate more governmental controls and taxes.

The ridiculous physics does not stop with these violations of the Conservation of Energy.  When once one has deviated so far from physical reality, it is necessary to violate still more well-known physics.  I will now apply a similar examination of physical limits to the issues of the amount of infrared radiation from the surface that is absorbed by the atmosphere and the amount of radiation from the atmosphere which is absorbed by the surface.

There is a well-known law of thermal radiation called the Stefan-Boltzmann Law which says that the power per unit area of thermal radiation from a black body radiator is

P (W/m²) = σ T⁴,

which is the maximum power that can be radiated by a black body when it has no competing power loss mechanisms to radiative cooling and is surrounded by vacuum at absolute zero temperature, or 0 K.  σ = 5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m² K⁴ and T is the absolute temperature in Kelvin, represented by K.  Of course, real materials usually radiate less power than this and do so to an environment which is not at 0 K, though deep space is at least close to that temperature.

The power that a cooler black body at T_c absorbs from a warmer black body radiator at T_w is

P (absorbed, W/m²) = σ ( T_w⁴ – T_c⁴ )

This power is greater than that which can be gained by a real material which is not a black body material from warmer real material which is more like a black body material.  Consequently, we will be using this to establish the upper limits of the transfer of heat by thermal radiation from the warmer Earth surface to the cooler atmosphere.

Returning to the NASA Earth Energy Budget, the Earth’s surface is shown to deposit 358.2 W/m² of energy flux into the atmosphere out of the 398.2 W/m² that it emits.  This surface emission of thermal infrared radiation from a black body behaving as though it were surrounded by 0 K vacuum implies a surface temperature of

P = 398.2 W/m² = (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴) T⁴, so T= 289.5 K,

Which is the highest average surface temperature for the Earth that I have ever seen claimed.  The usual range of temperatures claimed in the settled science is 287.5 to 288.5 K.

As I have done in some of the recent articles I have written, we will now calculate the temperature of a black body spherical shell surrounding the Earth which would be capable of absorbing the 358.2 W/m² said to be absorbed from the surface thermal radiation by the atmosphere.  This is

P (absorbed, W/m²) = 358.2 W/m² = σ ( T_w⁴ – T_c⁴ ) =

(5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴) [(289.5 K)⁴ – T_c⁴], so T_c = 163.0 K

As I have previously pointed out, there is no part of the Earth’s atmosphere with a temperature as low as 163.0 K.  Insofar as infra-red absorbing gases in the atmosphere fall short of absorbing all of the infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface as efficiently as a black body absorber would, the required temperature of the absorbing gas molecules would have to be lower yet.  In fact, since they simply cannot absorb some of the infrared radiation frequencies or wavelengths from the surface at all, even if the so-called greenhouse gas were at zero Kelvin, absolute zero temperature, those greenhouse gases could not absorb as much energy flux as a black body absorber can at 163K.

Of course water vapor tends to condense in the atmosphere when it reaches just 273.15 K (0⁰C), so there is a rapid decrease in the water vapor concentration even in the upper troposphere.  However, at pressures below 5.1 atmospheres carbon dioxide does not liquefy, let alone solidify.  In fact, the coldest part of the Earth’s atmosphere, the mesopause, at 86 km to 90 km has a minimum temperature of about 187 K because carbon dioxide radiates heat to space so efficiently from that super low density layer of the atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide is generally an effective coolant in the atmosphere above the altitude of water vapor condensation.  This is just one of many ways that CO₂ acts to cool the Earth.

So let us examine the spectrum of energies of the photons that make up the thermal radiation from the Earth’s surface modeled as a black body radiator in vacuum and surrounded by nothing but space at absolute zero temperature.  Because we are interested in the flux of energy carried away from this hypothetical surface, which is exactly the surface assumed real in the settled science of the NASA Earth Energy Budget, I will provide the spectrum of radiated energy flux versus the radiated photon energy E = h ν, where h is Planck’s constant equal to 6.625 x 10^-34 Joule-sec and ν is the frequency per second.

Because the energy of each radiated photon is very small, I will plot the energy scale in eV, a unit of energy equal to 1.602 x 10^-19 Joules.  One Joule/second is a Watt.  This plot of power in W/m² is for a more commonly accepted Earth average surface temperature of 288 K.  The area under the power output curve is the total power output due to the radiation from a black body radiator at 288 K, which is 390.06 W/m².

Below the power output of the black body model of the Earth’s surface is a plot showing the infrared absorption spectra of water vapor and carbon dioxide taken in my laboratory using my FTIR infrared spectrometer.  This spectrometer does not produce an infrared beam with adequate intensity to make absorption measurements below an energy of 0.05 eV, so the absorption spectra start there and extend to about 0.9 eV for generally useful data.  The carbon dioxide concentration was several times that of the normal atmosphere and the water vapor was above 50% RH measured against an instrumental background spectrum made at about 25% RH. 

The important point here is not one of the relative degree of absorption of water vapor compared to carbon dioxide.  The critical point here is that from about 0.09 to 0.155 eV there is no absorption by either water vapor or carbon dioxide.  A good fraction of the infrared radiation emitted by the black body modeled surface of the Earth lies in this range, which is called the atmospheric window.  This portion of the power spectrum in which no absorption takes place is about 35.5% of the power radiated from the black body modeled Earth surface.  This is about 138.5 W/m² which should be emitted to space if the Earth’s surface really radiated as a black body radiator as the settled science says it does.  Any incomplete absorption of the surface radiation at other energies would have to be added to this.

So how is it that the NASA Earth Energy Budget says that only 40.1 W/m² is emitted from the surface into space?  If a minimum of what they say is emitted from the surface and will not be absorbed by water vapor or carbon dioxide is 138.5 W/m², then the power they claim is emitted to space is only 29% of that minimum.  NASA says only 10.1% of the surface emitted radiation is emitted to space through the atmospheric window.  This sure would make the use of infrared sensors a lot more difficult than it is.  Fortunately, our military infrared sensor designers know that the NASA story on the atmospheric window is wrong.  In fact, many scientists in NASA surely know this is wrong, except for those steeped in Climate Change funding for their work there.  About half of the NASA budget recently has been directed at Climate Change investigations, so NASA has a huge incentive to hype climate alarmism.

The bottom line is that for the 358.2 W/m² to be absorbed in the atmosphere out of the 398.2 W/m² that NASA says is emitted from the surface, the absorber needs to be a black body absorber located about 6 Earth orbit radii from the sun.  That is how far one has to go out into our solar system to find sufficiently cold space to serve as the absorbing black body sphere to absorb so much radiation.  This is in no way a part of the Earth’s atmosphere and energy dumped into space cannot become significant back radiation to constitute a good part of the 340.3 W/m² that NASA is claiming is back radiation from the atmosphere to the surface.  Of course we already know that 340.3 W/m² of back radiation is impossible because there is only 240.4 W/m² of power entering the entire Earth system.  But if you are willing to violate the Conservation of Energy, it is hardly surprising that you are driven to violate the Stefan-Boltzmann Law of thermal radiation.  One violation of reality inevitably leads to numerous other violations of reality.

We can also ask what the temperature of the black body radiator would have to be to generate the 340.3 W/m² of back radiation that NASA is claiming in the settled science occurs.  We have

P = 340.3 W/m² = (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴) T⁴, so T= 278.3 K,

which in the U.S. Standard Atmosphere of 1976 means this radiation could originate from a black body sphere at an altitude of about 1500 meters.  Now we have learned that the 398.2 W/m² emitted from the surface could not contribute 358.2 W/m² to the atmosphere at an altitude of 1500 m.  Let us calculate about how much it could deposit into the atmosphere if it were a black body absorber.  This number will of course be a generous upper limit.  In fact, we could say the upper limit will be only 64.5% of this taking into account our measurement of the minimum power lost through the atmospheric window.

The maximum black body absorbed power at 278.3 K in the atmosphere from the surface would then be:

P = (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴) [(289.5K)⁴ - (278.3K)⁴] = 58.1 W/m²,

where I have used the NASA Earth average surface temperature of 289.5 K.  If we then subtract from this the minimal fraction lost through the atmospheric window, which is 35.5%, the power at about 1500 m altitude absorbed from the surface is only 37.5 W/m².

Now let us determine an upper limit for the amount of power available in the atmosphere at 1500 m altitude.  We clearly have less than

77.1 W/m² total atmospheric absorption from the sun, a large over-estimate

18.4 W/m² in thermals

86.4 W/m² in latent heat due to water condensation (much of which happens well above 1500 m altitude

37.5 W/m² absorbed from the surface

Total Upper Limit Power Available in Atmosphere near 1500 m altitude = 219.4 W/m²

Now converting this upper limit power into radiation properly would mean that it would flow from warmer air to cooler air and therefore would almost all be transported upward through the atmosphere.  But in the NASA mindset, one fallaciously a part of the settled science viewpoint, thermal radiation is isotropic.  If one accepts that viewpoint, then only half of this upper limit of 219.4 W/m² could become back radiation to the surface.  That value of half is then 109.7 W/m².  Any claim of back radiation in excess of this amount is clearly absurd.  So, the NASA claim of 340.3 W/m² of back radiation to the surface is at least (a lower bound) 3.1 times absurd.  In fact, any real back radiation is many times smaller than 109.7 W/m².

Having discovered so many ways in which the NASA Earth Energy Budget of the settled science is ridiculous, one has to wonder if they got anything right.  I find myself very suspicious of the surface power loss to thermals and to latent heat through water evaporation.  On the other hand, one would think that they might be able to make good measurements of the reflection of solar radiation at least in total if not separately for that from the atmosphere and the surface.  I would also think that they could measure the radiation from the surface through the atmospheric window quite well also.

Let us examine some implications of this atmospheric window measurement.  If it is minimally 35.5% of the surface emission, then the surface radiative emission is at least 113.0 W/m².  Let us now calculate the maximum power that the surface can emit in the form of radiation now that we have a very high upper bound for the back radiation under the assumption that NASA has the other absorbed and loss energy fluxes correct:

163.3 W/m² absorbed from the sun

-18.4 W/m² lost to thermals

-86.4 W/m² lost to water evaporation

-0.6 W/m² residual absorbed heat causing long term warming of the surface

109.7 W/m² in greatly exaggerated back radiation

Maximum total radiation emitted from the surface = 167.6 W/m²

This generous maximum is only 42% of what NASA claims the thermal radiative emission to be.  Apparently, the surface of the Earth cannot radiate thermal energy as a black body radiator in vacuum surrounded by absolute zero would.  This should be no surprise.  This is once again a consequence of the Conservation of Energy.  Consequently, we know that within the framework of some of the measurements claimed as a part of the settled science that the thermal radiation from the Earth’s surface has be between 113.0 and 167.6 W/m².

Why do materials emit thermal radiation?  The temperature of a material is determined by its kinetic energy.  Materials with internal modes of vibration share the kinetic energy they have equally with all the modes of motion available to the material.  The internal vibrations of atoms bound to one another necessarily cause electric charges to accelerate and decelerate due to oscillatory vibrations in the material.  The emission of electromagnetic radiation then depends upon the kinetic energy of bound atoms and their resonance states.  Solid materials tend to have so many modes of vibration that they emit radiation across a very wide spectrum of photon energies.  Liquids tend to be similar in this regard, though the range of energies tends to be a bit less.  Gas molecules, however, consist of very small numbers of atoms and consequently have few modes of vibration.  There emission spectra tend to have more discrete and narrow emission lines.  Contrary to popular belief, nitrogen and oxygen molecules do have electromagnetic emission spectra, though they lie outside of the infrared portion of the spectrum.  Oxygen actually has a small absorption and emission line near the border of the red visible light to near infrared spectrum that allows it to absorb some of the incoming solar insolation.

Let us suppose we are examining a few atoms on the surface of wet soil.  Each time a water molecule is evaporated from that wet soil, that molecule carries away an energy equal to its latent heat of evaporation.  This cools those atoms immediately around the site from which the water molecule evaporated from the surface.  Now heat will flow into this microscopic region from the warmer surrounding atoms, but for an instant in time this fractional area of the surface is cooler than the nominal average temperature of the surface.  As a result, any thermal emission of radiation from this microscopic area will be that from a slightly cooler surface.  This means that fractional area will be emitting slightly less power than will areas of the surface at the average temperature of the material.  The mean emitted photon energy will be slightly less also.  Similarly, if a cooler air molecule strikes a warmer surface and carries away a bit of energy as a result of that collision, then the surface will locally be cooler for a moment and that area will emit less thermal radiation.

Materials with water in them or in contact with air do not act exactly like black body radiators in space for this reason.  Energy is conserved.  Energy used to evaporate water cannot also be used to emit photons.  Energy transferred to the air molecules by collisions to increase their kinetic energy cannot be emitted as a photon.  This is not to say that there are not fractions of a macroscopic surface which are radiating on the microscopic level as one expects the same material to do in vacuum with no energy loss mechanisms except thermal radiation.  A square meter of the Earth’s surface might have 60% of the area emitting thermal radiation as though it were in vacuum, while the rest of the surface is radiating slightly less power and with a slight shift in the distribution of emitted photons to lower photon energies.

The emission is also limited by the temperature of the materials surroundings.  As we noted above, the radiation emitted is proportional to the difference of the fourth power of the temperature of the emitter and the absorber of the radiation.  Photon emission occurs because of electromagnetic fields and those photons travel along an electric field dependent upon the gradients of the electromagnetic field.  Photons are not just flung about as a primary entity.  They are creatures of electromagnetic fields.  The emitting higher temperature source is connected to the absorbing lower temperature photon sink by this electromagnetic field.  When you assume that every material is emitting radiation as a black body would when surrounded by vacuum at 0K, you will necessarily generate a host of non-existent photons which will upset the energy balance.

The act of ignoring the proper transfers of radiative power between objects has played a great role in the failure to recognize that the Earth’s gravitational field causes a kinetic energy gradient in the atmosphere.  Because the temperature of perfect or ideal gas is proportional to its kinetic energy, this means that gravity produces a temperature gradient in the atmosphere.  This long known gravitational temperature gradient does not imply a heat transfer or flow along the temperature gradient, though most scientists are under the misconception that any temperature gradient implies a flow of heat energy.  That belief is wrong.  Because the settled science ignores this gravitational temperature gradient and posits an exaggerated surface thermal radiative cooling compensated with a gigantically exaggerated back radiation, it could hardly be more in error.

As I have shown, the settle science represented by the NASA Earth Energy Budget is nonsense science.  It is self-contradictory in numerous ways.  It violates the Conservation of Energy.  It violates the transport of energy between objects of different temperatures by thermal radiation.  These are simple problems clearly and easily observed.  Given the huge expenditures of federal funds, United Nations funds, and the funds of many governments of developed nations around the world on issues relating to the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, it is impossible to believe that there are not many scientists who are aware of these violations of physics and reality.

Yet there are too few scientists who are trying to bring these colossal mistakes to light. There are many pressures on scientists to conform to the prescribed theory.  Most scientific research performed at universities is funded by the federal government and it has been the policy of the government to only fund those who accept or at least do not deny the truth of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  There are also many government employee scientists under great pressure to conform.  Publishing papers opposed to the hypothesis in scientific publications has been made very difficult by what can only be termed a conspiracy.  There are many scientists who have told me that catastrophic man-made global warming theory is wrong, but they will not tell the public that out of fear for their careers.  This is why many of the open critics of this nonsense theory are retired scientists.

Nonetheless, the claims that 97% of scientists believe in catastrophic man-made global warming are completely bogus.  A more realistic assessment would be that about one-third do believe in it, about one-third are not sure, and about one-third think the hypothesis is unlikely true.

I am not retired.  I operate a materials analysis laboratory which uses electromagnetic radiation extensively to characterize material properties.  Relatively little of our funding comes directly from government agencies.  We have performed analyses for carbon fuel companies, but have actually done more work for so-called green energy companies.  I really do not have a horse in this race from a financial standpoint.  I am only concerned about the integrity of science, the freedom to think and act independently, and the well-being of my fellow man.  There is much evil being done in the name of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis and the alarmist attempts to promote it at the expense of rational thought and action.

A Critical Lesson from the NASA Earth Energy Budget

The essence of the argument that an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide, an infrared-active or greenhouse gas, causes the Earth's surface to become warmer lies in a radiation-dominant viewpoint in the transport of energy between the surface and the atmosphere.  This viewpoint is depicted in the NASA energy budget shown below:

If the Earth's surface is simply viewed as a black body radiator at temperature T as though it were isolated in space with no other energy loss mechanisms, then the rate of energy loss by means of radiation would be

P = 398.2 W/m² = σ T⁴ = (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴) T⁴, and T = 289.5 K

Since the Earth's average surface temperature is usually said to be about 288 K, this means that the Earth's surface is assigned an emissivity of 1.02, making it a super black body radiator.  Real objects generally have an emissivity less than 1 and never more than 1.

Let us note a result discussed in my post mgh, Not Just Greenhouse Gases, Provides a Warm Earth because I do not want this critical observation to be lost among other observations.  I want to discuss its implications more here.

Of the 398.2 W/m² of infrared radiation emitted from the surface in this NASA Earth energy budget, 358.2 W/m² is absorbed by the atmosphere.  The atmosphere only absorbs infrared radiation at the wavelengths that water vapor and carbon dioxide absorb, aside from very minor absorption by other infrared-active gases.  It does not act like a black body absorber and it does not act like a black body emitter.  But we can establish upper and lower bounds on what the atmosphere is capable of doing if we treat it as though it were a black body radiator.  When dealing with complex physics problems, it is always good to know when the answers you provide are within the physically possible bounds.

Doing so, and taking Ta to be the temperature of the black body absorber in the atmosphere and Ts the temperature of the surface, we have 

σ (Ts)⁴ -  σ (Ta)⁴ = 358.2 W/m² ,

which is the maximum electromagnetic radiation the absorber can absorb from the higher temperature emitter black body.  We know that for the NASA Earth energy budget that the first term on the left is 398.2 W/m² , albeit with an emissivity of 1.02, so we calculate that 

Ta = 163.0 K.

Now this is a very interestingly low temperature.  There is no temperature this low in the U.S. Standard Atmosphere Table of 1976.  The temperature with altitude drops approximately linearly in the troposphere, stabilizes at the minimum temperature of 216.65 K in the tropopause, and then increases with altitude through the stratosphere until there is essentially no atmosphere left to do any absorbing of infrared photons.  At 86 to 90 km altitude, in the mesopause, there is another temperature minimum of about 186.9 K in that table, though other sources say the temperature can get as low as 173 K.  These very low mesopause temperatures are caused by strong cooling due to carbon dioxide radiation of heat to space.  At 1000 km altitude, the U.S. Standard Atmosphere of 1976 temperature is 1000 K and the density of the atmosphere is only 2.9 x 10^-15 times that at sea level.  Of course any surface thermal radiated heat absorbed in the upper atmosphere is generally going to be radiated out into space and not radiated back to the surface in any case.

So, there is no black body shell around the Earth at a temperature of 163.0 K.  But we can make an approximate calculation of where in the solar system we could place a black body absorber at a temperature of 163.0 K that could absorb such a large fraction of the power irradiated from the NASA Earth surface.  A black body radiator/absorber at a temperature of 163.0 K radiates 40.0 W/m² , which matches the power of the infrared radiation that NASA says escapes the Earth's atmosphere without absorption.  

So we ask where does a sphere around the Sun in radiative equilibrium with the Sun have an energy output rate of 40.0 W/m² corresponding to a temperature of 163.0 K?  This will be where the product of the power output per unit area of the photosphere of the Sun times the surface area of the sphere at the radius of the photosphere equals 40.0 W/m² times the surface area of the sphere centered on the sun with a radius r large enough that the temperature of that sphere will be 163.0 K.  That is a temperature far above that of the distant universe, so it should be found somewhere within our solar system.  We have:

Temperature of the sun on the photosphere = 5772 K
Radius, R, of the sun at the photosphere = 6.957 x 10⁵ km

We calculate the power output per unit area on the Sun's photosphere using the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to be:

Power output at the solar photosphere radius = 6.293 x 10⁷ W/m² 

For the solar photosphere radius R, the distance r at which the solar power will be reduced to 40 W/m² , will be 

r²  = [(6.293 x 10⁷ W/m² ) / ( 40 W/m² )] R²   = [(6.293 x 10⁷ W/m² ) / ( 40 W/m² )] [6.957 x 10⁵ km]²  

and so r = 8.726 x 10⁸ km.

The mean radius of the Earth's orbit is 1.496 x 10⁸ km, so according to the NASA Earth energy budget, 358.2 W/m² of power radiated as infrared radiation from the Earth's surface is dumped into the Earth's atmosphere at a distance from the Sun which is minimally 5.83 times further from the Sun than is the Earth.  Measured from the Earth, rather than the sun, the distance that portions of the surface emitted radiation is absorbed in space varies from 4.83 to 6.83 times the mean radius of the Earth's orbit.

NASA has a most interesting definition of the Earth's atmosphere.  What is more, how does that energy absorbed in the distant portions of our solar system manage to return to the Earth's atmosphere in any way that might increase the temperature of the Earth's surface?  Of course it does not.  This NASA Earth Energy Budget is a complete farce, as are the many similar Earth energy budgets used by the UN IPCC reports to justify their claims that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will cause catastrophic warming problems for mankind.

One must also take note that without the absorption of this 358.2 W/m² of power from the surface, the idea that the atmosphere can back radiate 340.3 W/m² to the surface becomes impossible.  It is the absorption of the surface radiated power coupled with the back radiation of a nearly as great power that is the very basis of the claim that adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will cause the Earth surface temperature to rise.  And no, there is no way that water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane gas can absorb and emit more infrared radiation than can a black body absorber.  They fall well short of being as effective as absorbers and emitters as is a black body absorber/radiator.

According to the U.S. Standard Atmosphere of 1976 table, the coldest temperature within the Earth's reasonably dense atmosphere is the 216.65 K of the tropopause, the layer of the atmosphere between the troposphere and the stratosphere.  A black body layer placed there could at most absorb a power of infrared radiation emitted from the surface of 

P = σ (Ts)⁴ -  σ (216.65 K)⁴ ,

where σ T⁴ = (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴) (216.65K)⁴ = 124.9 W/m² and  σ (Ts)⁴ =  398.2 W/m² 

so P = 273.3 W/m² 

This upper limit absorption of 273.3 W/m² is well less than the claimed absorption of 358.2 W/m² . What is more, this black body in the tropopause would radiate 124.9 W/m² to space, making this energy flux immediately unavailable in the Earth's atmosphere.

Even if the theoretical limit of absorption did occur in the tropopause, one would still have the insurmountable problem of finding a way to return any significant portion of this absorbed energy to the surface from the tropopause to provide any significant warming of the surface.  Equally important, such a violation of such an easily calculated upper limit on the fraction of the surface infrared emission which can be absorbed wipes out any confidence one can reasonably have in any of the NASA science used to create this Earth energy budget.  Indeed, there are many other errors in this fanciful creation.

This upper limit as defined by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law of Electromagnetic Radiation is itself much too high an upper limit for the following reasons:

1)  The surface of the Earth does not emit the 398.2 W/m² as claimed by NASA because this surface is not emitting radiation at a vacuum interface and has competing energy loss mechanisms cooling at least local submicroscopic areas of the surface briefly.  This is a matter dictated by the Law of Conservation of Energy.  Since less energy is emitted from the surface as infrared radiation, the atmosphere cannot absorb as much either.

2)  As noted earlier, water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and other infrared-active molecules can each absorb only a fraction of the wavelengths of infrared radiation that a black body absorber/radiator can.  These gas molecules also have many cases of overlap of those wavelengths they do absorb. Therefore, once again, the fraction of the wide spectrum of infrared radiation that the surface emits that can be absorbed by the atmosphere is much reduced.

3)  The mean free path for the absorption of such infrared as the infrared-active molecules absorb is much too short for surface emitted infrared radiation that can be absorbed to reach the tropopause before it is absorbed.  Indeed, in most areas of the Earth, the absorption mean free path for water vapor is many, many times too short for this to happen.  Even that for carbon dioxide at present concentrations is much too short for this to happen.  This means the temperature differentials are much reduced and consequently much less energy is absorbed.

4)  The density of infrared-active absorbers in the troposphere, even if each were a black body absorber/radiator, would not be great enough to absorb all of the radiation coming from the surface even if that radiation could make it to the tropopause.

There is still another important consequence.  The black body absorber/emitter we have placed in the tropopause to maximize the absorption of radiation from the surface is, as noted above, radiating 124.9 W/m² directly into space.  Since the surface is radiating 40.1 W/m² directly into space, all but 74.9 W/m² of the total radiation from the entire Earth system being radiated into space is accounted for.  Let us add up the remaining energy flux into the atmosphere:

77.1 W/m² directly absorbed from solar insolation
273.3 W/m² deposited into the black body absorber in the troposphere
18.4 W/m² deposited in the atmosphere by thermals (conduction/convection)
86.4 W/m² deposited in the atmosphere by the condensation of water vapor

Total = 455.2 W/m²

How could an atmosphere with an additional power input of 455.2 W/m² direct 340.3 W/m² of this power toward the surface and only 74.9 W/m² toward space?  The asymmetry of radiation to the surface and into space in the NASA Earth energy budget was already a red flag.  This asymmetry is now worse.  Note also that the sum of these two radiative fluxes is now 40.0 W/m² short of the 455.2 W/m² of remaining energy flux into the atmosphere.

In short, the NASA Earth Energy Budget is based on nonsense physics.  This, we are told, is the settled science of the climate.  Is it any surprise that computer models based on nonsense physics have been making wrong predictions of climate warming for 19 years now? Garbage physics in means no reality out.