Comment: Jane/Lonny Eachus goes Sky Dragon Slayer. (Score 1) 255
@ClimateRealists That's the first I had read about O'Sullivan's rebuttal of the Greenhouse Effect. He makes a compelling argument. [Lonny Eachus, 2012-02-23]
@GreatDismal See John O'Sullivan's "Slaying the Sky Dragon", for instance. If you think there is solid science behind AGW you are mistaken. [Lonny Eachus, 2012-02-23]
The 2010 fantasy novel Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory claims the second law of thermodynamics disproves the greenhouse effect. At first this seemed like a parody of creationists who claim the second law disproves evolution, but the Slayers seem very serious. They claim warm surfaces can't absorb back-radiation (*) from cold atmospheres because they mistakenly think heat can't be transferred from cold to warm objects at all. In fact, this is only true for net heat transfer. Cold objects can slow the rate at which warm objects lose heat without transferring more heat to warm objects than vice versa. That's how the greenhouse effect works.
(*) Also called downwelling longwave irradiance.
"We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static system."
This is where you are wrong. It has been shown that most of the models (at least) that are based on radiative forcings due to CO2 are based on flawed physics. See No, Virginia, Cooler Objects Cannot Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer. Their whole premise is based on a falsehood.
... [Jane Q. Public, 2012-04-14]
And so I have read explanations of how the greenhouse effect is supposed to work. And almost all of the CO2 warming models
... rely on the concept of "back radiation", in which the gases radiate some of their absorbed energy back to earth. But that is in fact impossible. First Spencer's explanation of how back radiation is supposed to work: bit.ly/HZ04KR ... Spencer is a weird case, because he recently jumped the fence and said his research showed CO2 warming to be true. So anyway, here is physicist Pierre Latour, refuting Spencer's explanation: bit.ly/JV9XmI The important point here being that most, not just a few, CO2 warming models rely on this "back radiation" concept. I'm not trying to pick on Spencer, it's just that he probably wrote up the best explanation of the mythical back radiation. [Lonny Eachus, 2012-05-21]
Again, Dr. Latour's Slayer fan fiction is fractally wrong:
... the absorption rate of real bodies depends on whether the absorber T (radiating or not), is less than the intercepted radiation T, or not. If the receiver T > intercepted T, no absorption occurs; if the receiver T < intercepted T the absorption rate may be as great as proportional to (T intercepted – T absorber), depending on the amounts reflected, transmitted or scattered. What actually happens is the chiller radiates to the hot plate, but the plate cannot absorb any of it because it is too cold. The hot plate reflects, transmits or scatters colder radiation, just like my roof does for cold radio waves.
... Energy from colder cannot heat hotter further because the second law of thermodynamics says so, because nature says so; always and everywhere. ... Conclusion, the hot plate remains at 150. All physics I know supports it; no physics offered refutes it. Spencer mistakenly assumed the 150 plate absorbs incident 100 radiation ... The generalized claim that a cooler object placed near a warmer object cannot result in a rise in temperature of the warmer object stands. ... [Dr. Latour, 2011-11-06]
If Dr. Latour understood the second law refers to net heat, he'd agree that adding a cold plate makes the heated plate lose heat slower. That's okay because net heat still flows from hot to cold, i.e. more heat moves from hot to cold than vice versa. But Dr. Latour disagrees, wrongly claiming that hot objects can't absorb any radiation from colder objects. He's not alone:
Continued here due to Slashdot's filter.