Back to basics: History of the gas laws

Ned Nikolov says:

January 25, 2012 at 11:54 am

Richard M

Where have we claimed that we replace the greenhouse effect with gravity?

What we state is that the GH effect, when measured as a dimensionless number (Ts/Tgb), i.e. the relative thermal enhancement, is completely explainable by pressure. Is pressure a gravity? No! Pressure is a FORCE resulting from the atmospheric mass per unit area AND gravity! What is the kinetic energy of a gas that determines its temperature? It is a product of Pressure and Gas Volume (PV), i.e. FORCE x Distance = Joules. In other words, you cannot have kinetic energy and temperature of a gas without a FORCE. On a planetary scale the force of pressure is INDEPENDENT of solar heating, atmospheric volume, or temperature, because we have on average an isobaric thermodynamic process at the surface. So, changing the mass of the atmosphere will change the FORCE generated by gravity at the surface, therefore, changing the temperature. Our non-dimensional NTE factor (the relative thermal enhancement) is a manifestation of that physical characteristic of pressure called FORCE … How is that for a physical explanation? We elaborate more on this in our Reply Part 2 …

The key to grasping our theory is understanding the actual physical meaning of different parameters such as pressure, irradiance, temperature, and energy and the best way to do that is to properly deciphering the units …

Let’s see if we can help Ned get the message across in terms everyone can understand. We’ll start with a potted history of the gas laws in this post.

Internet freedoms under attack again: Act now!

Most EU states sign away internet rights, ratify ACTA treaty
European Parliament observer resigns in protest

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Government

Representatives of 21 of the EU’s member states, including the UK, have signed off on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – the European version of the US SOPA and PIPA rolled into one and cranked up to 11.

Only Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Slovakia, and the Netherlands have held off on signing the treaty, which will give authorities even more power to enforce copyright than was contained in aforementioned online-piracy legislation currently on hold in the US.

Gavin Schmidt: Climate Homeopathy

Visit Cartoons by Josh

With our renewed understanding of the omnipresent force of gravity, and its profound effect on the heat distribution in planetary atmospheres via the pressure gradient it causes we can start to appreciate the numbers involved. If there was no gravity and we wanted to change the pressure of our atmosphere from its mid altitude value of 500Hpa to the near surface value of ~1000Hpa for the lowest kilometre, the force we would have to exert is vast. Our power stations churfing out enormous volumes of carbon dioxide 24/7 to power the compressors required would soon deplete all our fossil fuel reserves to hardly begin keeping up with the task.

Greenhouse gases cool planets: Volcanos warm them

Thinking about the logical outcomes of Nikolov and Zeller’s ‘Unified Theory of Climate‘, a couple of ideas emerge which turn conventional climate science ‘wisdom’ on its head. It has long been believed that ‘greenhouse gases’ cause warming of the planet’s surface. While this may be true at the local level near the surface at certain times of day, I think I agree with Markus that the overall effect of ‘greenhouse gases’ is to cool planets. Here’s why:

Nikolov and Zeller have shown that by far the greatest influences on the surface temperature of a planet with an atmosphere are their distance from the Sun, and the pressure generated  at the surface by gravity acting on atmospheric mass. Planets with more GHG’s relative to their surface pressure, like Mars, are cold relative to their distance from the Sun. Planets with less GHG’s relative to surface pressure like Earth and Venus are warm.

That was the week that was: Personal perspective

Well! After a week which started with a bit of a laugh over something funny Gavin Schmidt said (more on that soon), things went rapidly downhill, with Wyatt Erp Willis Eschenbach getting “a bit gruffy” about my decision to prevent Joel the AGW phantasy phixated physicist from making the threads here “a bit ragged and Shore worn”. What this self proclaimed “climate heretic” wants with the sheriff’s job is beyond me. Who ever heard of heretics getting into law enforcement? Is it a case of  “If you can’t beat em, join ‘em, and beat someone else up”?

The following day, the “reformed cowboy” let fly with another blast against Nikolov and Zeller, the two scientists who have wandered casually into the climate blogosphere with their interesting and promising  ‘Unified Theory of Climate‘ first published here at the end of last year. They thought they would get a welcoming reception from the sceptical side of the climate community because their theory shows that ‘greenhouse gases’ don’t have a whole lot to do with warming planetary surfaces up. They didn’t expect that some of the most prominent lukewarmers guest posters on the world’s biggest climate site would completely misrepresent what they were saying and try to strangle the newborn babe and bury it pronto. Why would this be? they wondered. Don’t we all?

Hans Jelbring: An Alternative Derivation of the Static Dry Adiabatic Temperature Lapse Rate

An Alternative Derivation of the Static Dry Adiabatic

Temperature Lapse Rate

Hans Jelbring

BSc, meteorologist, Stockholm University, Civil engineer, electronics, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, PhD, institution of Paleogeophysics & geodynamics, Stockholm University

Abstract

The ”static” dry adiabatic temperature lapse rate is derived for a hypothetical energetically isolated model atmosphere lacking advection and convection. The method of derivation is to investigate the energetic situation for two small equal atmospheric air masses at different altitudes in a vertical column of air. The difference of total energy between these masses is calculated. The ideal gas law is assumed to be valid. This derivation is just one version of several others but might be easier to understand for laymen. The adequate theory needed should have been learnt at high school in natural sciences.

 

David M Hoffer: Bad accounting causes climate confusion

davidmhoffer says:

January 23, 2012 at 5:56 pm

Joel Shore;
You are still not getting it. How is it possible to have 150 W/m^2 leaving the surface as radiation than leaving the TOA unless some of that radiation is getting absorbed (or reflected), i.e., unless there is a greenhouse effect?>>>

It isn’t and it doesn’t. You keep averaging things that should not be averaged and then drawing false conclusions from them. Here is the ERBE image of net radiance of the earth:

http://eos.atmos.washington.edu/cgi-bin/erbe/disp.pl?net.ann.

Note that the tropics are net absorbers of energy, and hence radiating at a temperature well below their SB Law equilibrium temperature for the amount of radiance they receive.

Note that the high latitudes are net losers of energy, and hence radiating at a temperature well above their SB Law equilibrium temperature for the amount of radiance they receive.

Oleg Sorokhtin: The adiabatic theory of greenhouse effect

Apologies for the language mash-up. If I can find a better way to scrape the translation without getting the original Russian too, I’ll update it. This looks interesting, and relevant to recent discussions on the Jelbring and Nikolov and Zeller theories. Good luck. H/T’s Lucy Skywalker and Yankov

Temporary, added English translation PDF via Lucy’s doc/odt files sorokhtin.pdf[ --Tim
[UPDATE} better formatting now in place - Thanks a million Tim!

Marathon-2005
Academician (RANS) OG Sorokhtin,
Institute of Oceanology. Shirshov Sciences
The adiabatic theory of greenhouse effect

The idea of ??heating the earth's atmosphere by greenhouse gases was first expressed in the late XIX century, the famous Swedish scientist Arrhenius S. [1] and since the obvious is taken for granted, with little or no verification [2-5]. This view is now completely dominates the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Greenpeace, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), World Meteorological Organization (WMO), as well as the withdrawal of Russian environmental and scientific organizations. The same view was fully supported by the decisions of international environmental conventions, in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1992 and in Kyoto (Japan) in 1997 is projected proponents of these ideas, by 2100, warming could reach 2.5 -5 ° C and cause sea level rise of 0.6 m ^-1, which already may be a problem for densely populated areas of the continental coasts, as well as for gas and oil production in lowland areas and most of the coasts of northern Russia. Projected, and other harmful consequences for the nature of global warming (the expansion of deserts, the disappearance of permafrost, soil erosion, etc.).

Fears of similar catastrophic events, the pressure of environmental organizations, and often simply speculation on this subject makes governments of developed countries to allocate huge resources to fight the effects of global warming, allegedly linked to anthropogenic emissions to the atmosphere of “greenhouse gases”. And how justified are these costs? Not if we’re fighting “quixotic”?

On closer acquaintance with this problem it turned out that the theory of greenhouse effect as such until the 90s. the last century did not exist, and all calculations of the effect of CO ₂ and other greenhouse gases in the Earth’s climate was carried out on different intuitive models with the introduction of numerous and not always stable parameters [4]. In this case the uncertainties in the estimates of various parameters of the model adopted (and they number at least 30) actually make the solution of the problem incorrectly. We decided to use a synergistic approach [6, 7] and an analysis of the most common positions, representing the Earth’s atmosphere as an open dissipative (scattering power) system described by nonlinear equations of mathematical physics.

NASA builds high pressure Venus surface simulation

From ‘The Telegraph’

H/T the Daily Bayonet

In the first of its kind, the American space agency has built the 12-tonne “Extreme Environment Test Chamber” to simulate the burning temperatures and intense pressure experience on the planet’s surface.

Scientists hope the new state-of-the-art chemical chamber, which includes two “Sapphire glass windows”, will recreate the toxic, probe-destroying atmosphere of Earth’s closest neighbouring planet.

In turn, they hope it will lead to better understanding of climate change on Earth based on experiments of a planet baked of its water and suffocated by greenhouse gases and sulphuric clouds.

Limited Availability: Wind Controlled Climate: Thesis by Hans Jelbring

Hans Jelbring has kindly sent me seven copies of his successfully defended 1998 Doctoral Thesis ‘Wind Controlled Climate’ from Sweden. Nicely produced and bound, these are rare. I’m keeping one, and to cover production and postal costs from Sweden, these copies are for sale at the special introductory price of £12 inc VAT + postage to your location.

Given this historical moment as the momentum gathers around the new understanding of the causes of the atmospheric thermal enhancement, and Hans Jelbring’s authorship of an early paper pointing the way to a study of other planets as the correct method of confirming the effect of atmospheric mass rather than composition as the major cause of surface temperature level above grey-body baseline, this is a truly smart investment, and a bargain.