The Gravity of Some Matter

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding around the issue of the gravito-thermal effect as it appears in the work of scientists such as Hans Jelbring, and Nikolov & Zeller. Without trying to recapitulate their theories in detail, I thought it might be worth going through a few basics in order to dispel some of the fog some people seem to be surrounded by. I’ve thought about a few different ways of doing this, and settled on the style of a Platonic dialogue to give it some continuity, rather than a set of disconnected facts, like you might get in a Q&A, or FAQ. Some people might think I’ve got some stuff oversimplified or just plain wrong. Feel free to offer alternatives in comments below. H/T kdk33 for improved phrasing in the Glickstein section.

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So these guys think most or all of the extra warmth there is at the surface of planets with atmospheres compared to those without is due to gravity? Are they serious?

Deadly serious. This is a real scientific theory.

But how can gravity cause heating of anything? It just pulls stuff together – right?

Right, but it’s what happens to the stuff that gets pulled due to other physical laws which come into play that causes the heating, not gravity itself.

Gerry Pease: Significant solar-planetary syzygies 1894-2013

Continuing the theme of discussing issues censored and banned at WUWT, here’s an article kindly submitted by Gerry Pease on the subject of solar-barycentric motion caused by the motion of the planets and its relationship (along with tides and electromagnetism) with solar activity levels. I’ve added some additional links to previous Talkshop articles for those who are not up to speed with the field.

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Significant solar-planetary syzygies, 8/18/1894 to 5/17/2013 by G.E. Pease

A couple of years ago, I examined Jupiter-resonant solar-planetary syzygies from 1894 to 2007, and was able to construct this plot:

The Massacre at Cowboy Corral – a bad day for science

The worlds most viewed and commented on climate oriented website had a hiccup yesterday. Guest Author Willis Eschenbach, who describes himself as “a reformed cowboy” decided that moderating his own thread on a contentious issue which he has strong views on was a good idea. Bad idea Willis – no cookies.

The purpose of the thread was manifold. Willis wanted to propagate his own view of the ‘greenhouse effect’ – the higher surface temperature of Earth than that calculated by an misapplication of the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation equation – which he believes is due to ‘greenhouse gases’ and their radiative properties. He also wanted to disprove the theses of Nikolov and Zeller, and Hans Jelbring, that this elevation in surface temperature is due principally to the gravitational compression of the near surface atmosphere. He attempted to do this with an argument by contradiction, which I contended failed due to it’s inapplicability to Jelbring’s argument.

Willis deleted my reply.

Gravity causing anomalous heating.

Part of crude simulation, showing crustal effects

The discussions to do with a planet acheiving an anomalous temperature relative to a simplistic theoretic temperature have so far reached stagnation, a null result.

I am not surprised. All the candidates are linear, anything else being contrary to thermodynamics. If it heats up, it cools down exactly the same.

Gravity does introduce asymmetry.

Hans Schreuder: Submission to Parliament commended by Ruth Lea

Hans Schreuder, a retired analytical chemist long involved in the climate debate, has made the following submission to parliament, commended by economist Ruth Lea. Hans has a few views I don’t go along with, but he’s speaking commonsense here:

.pdf here – H/T to ‘Turbobloke’

Public Submission to all Members of Parliament, January 2012.

Based on Submissions by The Carbon Sense Coalition, Australia, to their Joint Selection Committee on the so-called “Clean Energy Future Legislation”.

Climate Alarmism has clearly peaked and is sliding into oblivion.

Their “science” has collapsed and the public is losing their alarm.

But all the toxic laws passed during the mania now have to be repealed.

That is where the danger now lurks – the danger of complacency and the seductive sirens of the vested interests.

Why the Climate Change Act needs be repealed, urgently.

1. There is no factual evidence that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere controls the climate.

Chris Huhne: Feeling the heat – fan my brow with a wind turbine

Reposted from the European Platform Against Wind Turbines

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 10, 2012

Abuse of power against anti-windfarm movement

Chris Huhne on the hot seat

Legal Advisor to the European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW), George Watson is being investigated by the UK government under special powers which are only to apply to criminal/terrorist activities, claims the Platform. A letter, reproduced below, has been sent to Chris Huhne, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, denouncing this improper use of the legislation, and announcing legal proceedings against the UK government. A formal complaint has been made to the Metropolitan Police.

According to EPAW, Mr Watson was also harassed by a police officer who visited his home in a Scottish rural area … on Christmas Eve!

Mark Duchamp, Executive Director of EPAW, declared that he was respectfully asking UK government Ministers if they intend to investigate and harass other members of the public who oppose the destruction of the British landscape, the killing of protected bird and bat species, and the deterioration of the health of wind farm neighbours. Mr Watson’s only crime, he said, was to have found legal flaws in the way the UK government’s energy policy is being applied.

Minor legal update

I spoke with a stateside lawyer this evening.

Blencathra Dawn - Copyright Tallbloke

Two more theories relevant to the Unified Theory of Climate by Nikolov and Zeller

While we await the reply to comments on the Unified Theory of Climate (not long now!), I’d like to draw attention to more complimentary work done independently by William Gilbert and Dean Brooks. In no particular order these are:-

Bill Gilbert’s paper (E&E 2010)

THE THERMODYNAMIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
SURFACE TEMPERATURE AND WATER VAPOR
CONCENTRATION IN THE TROPOSPHERE
available here

and Dean Brooks

THE POT LID HYPOTHESIS
available on his website here

My reasons for taking these two together in one thread are pragmatic. Firstly, these two guys seem to get along fine. Secondly, their work is complementary, and so it is better to have the discussion in one place rather than to-ing and fro-ing between seperate threads. Thirdly, I don’t want the Loschmidt thread to drop off the bottom of the blog home page yet. 🙂

Joel Shore: The art of scientific discourse

This post consists of a behind the scenes exchange with Joel Shore, plus testimony from those he has commented upon. Public comments are closed, because it isn’t right to allow further comment beyond this without giving the right of reply. It is being posted here as a matter of record, because Joel chose to start posting piecemeal parts of our exchange at another blog. I don’t think Joel has said anything scientifically substantive here which we haven’t already considered and covered. However, if anyone wants to address anything specific they find in any of Joel’s comments regarding the science (and only the science), please do so on the relevant threads without any additional editorialising  since Joel won’t be joining us here to argue his side. He is of course free to comment elsewhere on the net, and I suggest anyone who wants to engage with Joel or his scientific beliefs does so over at WUWT. Thanks. For completeness, here’s the reply I left Joel on Deltoid.

131Hi Joel. I gave up on you at WUWT because you seem unable to comprehend or address the mathematically, and empirically supported result which resolves the issue you have with Nikolov and Zeller. If I do choose to re-engage with you it will be at WUWT where there is a team of moderators on hand to handle your tendency to noisy ears closed dispute and I won’t have to wear two hats at once. Since you have chosen to post parts of our behind the scenes chat here, I’ll post our entire exchange for the record and leave comments closed.Cheers.

Posted by: Rog Tallbloke | January 8, 2012 4:32 PM

Hans Jelbring: Reaching for Utopia and saving our world

Reaching for Utopia and saving our world

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

Image courtesy of fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com

England is caught in an economic trap because of its political wish to save the world. Some days ago the Swedish communist party nowadays renamed to the left party (6% of votes) elected a new leader. On his first day he declared that the left party will be more environmentally orientated than our environmental party (7% of votes). A similar reaction was shown by the leader of our conservative party (30% of votes), now leading our government since 1996 when toppling the social democrats which had been in power for a long time. Carbon dioxide reduction was then and still is a major responsibility for Swedish conservatives. This politics was identical to what the former social democrats implemented.

Saving our world seems a selling slogan for politicians of all colors. To save the country where they live seems harder to achieve. In Sweden the political rhetoric might not be that expensive since we get equal parts of our energy from hydro and nuclear power and only 10% from oil and gas for running cars and heating our homes. Most Swedish homes are nowadays using heat pumps, a solution much superior to wind power.

Book Review: Don’t Sell Your Coat by Harold Ambler

Harold Ambler, a well known contributor to the climate debate, has kindly sent me a copy of his new book ‘Don’t Sell Your Coat’ for review. Harold is a seasoned writer, with work published in the The Wall Street Journal, The National Review Online, The Huffington Post, wattsupwiththat.com, and elsewhere. His website also contains much of interest to all people following the climate debate.

Lavishly illustrated throughout by beautiful and interesting photos, informative and clear graphs, and with chapter headings sprinkled with delicious alarmist quotes, the book is nicely laid out. After a useful introductory chapter which explains the ‘lingo’ used to scare away non-initiates, it progresses through a history of the external forces shaping the climate debate – from the environmental movement and the media to  the politics and policy. Then onto the climate signs and their misinterpretation; icecaps get a chapter to themselves. Other major topics include climate models, the dominance of the English speaking science institutions, the background efforts of dissenting scientists, temperature measurement, solar variation, natural climate variation and the rise of the Green energy agenda. The book’s conclusion rounds off with a summary hinting at the open possibilities for future climate leading to the recommendation of the book’s title.

This is followed  by a comprehensive bibliography, though this unfortunately lacks URL’s to many online articles – something Harold might consider including in an e-book version. In the meantime, Google is your friend.

G & T weigh in on adiabatic atmospheres and raise the bar

Over on last year’s excellent SOD venusian mysteries part two thread occasional Talkshop contributor Bryan linked a .pdf by Gerlich and Tscheuschner which has large relevance to the current interest in Nikolov and Zeller’s and Hans Jelbring’s hypotheses. This is a technical paper and I don’t understand all the squiggles, but I’m sure the recent addition to the Talkshop of some real atmospheric thermodynamic expertise will make this an interesting thread.

Rather than the usual abstract at this point I’m going to quote the results section:

arXiv:1003.1508v2 [physics.ao-ph] 9 Mar 2010
On The Barometric Formulas
And Their Derivation From
Hydrodynamics and Thermodynamics
Version 2.0 (March 9, 2010)

3 Results
By combining hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, and imposing the above listed assumptions
for planetary atmospheres one can compute the temperature profiles of idealized atmospheres.
In the case of the adiabatic atmosphere the decrease of the temperature with height is described
by a linear function with slope −g/Cp , where Cp depends weakly on the molecular mass. As
elucidated in our paper [4, 3] mixtures of gases are covered in the context of Gibbs ther-
modynamics. Since the measurable thermodynamic quantities of a voluminous medium, in
particular the specific heat and the thermodynamic transport coefficients, naturally include
the contribution from radiative interactions, we cannot expect that a change of concentration
of a trace gas has any measurable effect. At this point, it is important to remember that the
barometric formulas do not hold globally but have only a limited range of validity.

“I am Spartacus!”: Stand up and be counted for science

Strong words softly spoken. This morning, I noticed someone had visited and commented on an old thread from last year about the Republican vote to defund the IPCC. The comment showed a strong belief in science, and condemnation of the way politics and other non-scientific forces have tried to turn science into a tool of propaganda. What impressed me the most was that this is a person of good standing in the science community, who was prepared to put his full name and list his qualifications and institutional affiliation at the bottom of his comment.

IPCC should not only be defunded, it should be deleted as an agency. The reason is its misuse of the concept of science. It has never been meant to rely on correct science and uses science for one simple reason. People believe in science, since people have seen the result of powerful applications of it during 100 years. IPCC uses this fact to “sell” its political message to get support from ordinary people. Science is a “brand” for selling propaganda. The only way to keep the IPCC is for it to skip any claim of being scientific at all and clearly declare what it really is: a political organization.

The Loschmidt Gravito-Thermal Effect: Old controversy – new relevance

My thanks to Talkshop contributor William Gilbert for drawing Loschmidt to my attention.

This is of  high relevance to the Jelbring and Nikolov-Zeller hypotheses.

Nice work if you can get it: 230k grant for exposing the decline your colleagues hid

WUWT Contributor ‘Green Sand’ writes:

Dr’s Briffa, Osborn and Melvin are working through a £230k NERC grant on:-

“The Dendroclimatic Divergence Phenomenon: reassessment of causes and implications for climate reconstruction”
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/research/grants.htm

More detailed description of the project can be found here:- http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/research/
Scroll down through “Current Projects”

The project is due to finish in 2012, the project description says May, the grant description states October.

The findings should be of interest to an ever growing number of interested parties.

For info:-
NERC – Natural Environment Research Council – http://www.nerc.ac.uk/

Stephen Wilde: Climate description now underpinned by UTC equations

Guest post by Stephen Wilde, fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and all round good egg.

People joining should read this thread for background first.

=========================================================

Tim Folkerts said:
“My revised conclusions are:
*RTE is real and very important. The “number of layers” is of primary
importance, and adding more GHGs will raise the temperature even if the
absorption is already “saturated”.
*GTE is real, but a much smaller effect (and fundamentally different that
the GTE that many people are discussing), primarily important when the true
lapse rate exceeds the adiabatic lapse rate.”

Here we come to the nub of the issue namely the relative significance of the
radiative and gravitational thermal effects. Joel [Shore] currently denies ANY
gravitational contribution even though he previously accepted the
contribution of gravity to creating the adiabatic lapse rate. That is an
inconsistency on its own but doesn’t matter for this post.

Robert Brown: Beer, Boiling and Bypassing the Greenhouse

Another guest post from Dr Robert Brown, Physicist at Duke University.

 I make beer. On part of making beer is boiling the wort for some hours to reduce the fluid volume of the barley-sugar-water to the right specific gravity to ferment to the desired target alcohol level (and do things to proteins and sugars and at the right point to bitter and flavor it with the hops). Big pot, lots of fluid, hot on the bottom, cool on the top (even before the boil). The otherwise reasonably clear liquid is full of little chunkies of coagulated proteins as well, so the liquid has a clearly visible “texture” that lets you see the movement of the fluid.

Robert Brown: What we don’t know about energy flow

I saw this comment on WUWT and was so impressed by it that I’m making a separate post of it here. Dr Brown (who is a physicist at Duke University) quotes another commenter and then gives us all an erudite lesson. If Nikolov and Zeller feel they need to take any of the complaints on WUWT about the way  they handle heat distribution from day to night side Earth seriously, they probably need to study this post carefully. this is also highly relevant to the reasons why Hans Jelbring used a simplified model for his paper, please see the new PREFACE added to his post for further elucidation.

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I can’t speak for your program, but I will stand by mine for correctly computing the ‘mean effective radiative temperature’ of a massless gray body as a perfect radiator. Remember, there is no real temperature in such of an example for there is no mass. It takes mass to even define temperature. (but most climate scientist have no problem with it and therefore they are all wrong, sorry)

I’d like to chime in and support this statement, without necessarily endorsing the results of the computation (since I’d have to look at code and results directly to do that:-). Let’s just think about scaling for a moment. There are several equations involved here:

P = (4\pi R^2)\epsilon\sigma T^4

is the total power radiated from a sphere of radius R at uniform temperature T. \sigma is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant and can be ignored for the moment in a scaling discussion. \epsilon describes the emissivity of the body and is a constant of order unity (unity for a black body, less for a “grey” body, more generally still a function of wavelength and not a constant at all). Again, for scaling we will ignore \epsilon.

swarms of Richter scale 5 and 6 earthquakes in Christchurch Plus a 7 off Japan

More earthquakes have frightened residents of Christchurch New Zealand and Japan. The worst possible start to the New Year. Our concern and good wishes go out to all affected by these events. According to the NZ Timeslive website:

New Zealand’s quake-ravaged city of Christchurch was rocked Monday by 17 earthquakes in 18 hours.

Image Courtesy of timeslive.co.uk

No serious damage was reported from the swarm, which included two shakes stronger than magnitude 5 and another six between magnitude 4 and 5.

The City Council issued a statement asking the “community to look after neighbours, friends and family and take care during this difficult time.”

NYT article on climategate: Ends with Mann innuendo

Leslie Kaufman’s previously expected article on the hunt for ‘FOIA’ has been published. As usual with such pieces, it avoids any discussion of the contents of the new emails released by ‘FOIA’ by saying that the scientists at the centre of the climategate controversy have been cleared by the investigations and inquiries which have taken place. This anachronistic, yet still standard boilerplate in my opinion marks the journalists who dish it up as being either incredibly lazy or incredibly biased or incredibly tightly constrained by editors who are fearful of backlash from politicians or even litigiously minded professors. We hear and see the same thing in Nikki Fox’s piece for the BBC and daily from the pro AGW bloggers.

It is a fig leaf which will shrivel and disintegrate under the light of truth.