Gordon Robertson's comment

[Sunsettommy]

From HERE

Quote:Gordon Robertson says:
February 19, 2012 at 12:20 PM

Roy…here is an article by experts in thermodynamics which has only been rebutted by people with foggy notions of the 1st and 2nd laws:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707...1161v4.pdf

Rahmstorf used your argument of a balance of energies, which these scientists dismissed as an obscure notion. Rahmstorf used a positive balance of energies to explain why the 2nd law was not contravened by the AGW theory. The authors explained that the 2nd law describes HEAT, not energy, which is the domain of the 1st law.

It’s difficult to absorb the difference between heat and radiative energy, but there is a difference. You said in one of your papers that most radiation from the surface misses GHGs in the atmosphere. That means the surface radiation escapes to space without even causing heat. The radiation needs to interact with a body, or molecules, to produce heat.

The 2nd law was developed to avoid situations like perpetual motion, which the 1st law allowed. The positive feedback talked about by AGW advocates is a form of perpetual motion, which is not possible in our atmosphere. Even you said positive feedback in climate science had been redefined to mean a not-so-negative negative feedback.

Specifically, Clausius talked about a warmer body warming a cooler body, and made it clear that back radiation from the cooler body could not raise the temperature of the warming body beyond it’s initial temperature. No one is arguing that back radiation cannot warm a body, the argument is that it cannot raise the temperature of the warmer body IF IT IS DEPENDENT ON THE WARMER BODY.

That’s plain common sense, Roy. You can’t get something for nothing when there are losses.

As Claes has correctly pointed out, you are describing two independent plates radiating against each other, not the situation in the atmosphere, where one surface is dependent on heating by the other. You have not accounted for losses, nor have you accounted for the fact that CO2 only radiates and absorbs in a very narrow bandwidth.

You have also totally ignored the density of CO2 in the atmosphere. All GHGs account for roughly 1% of atmospheric gases. How, in anyone’s terms can that be described as a blanket? If you had a greenhouse with 100 panes of glass, you would have to remove 99 panes to get the equivalent blanket.

CO2 accounts for 0.04% of atmospheric gases, and anthropogenic CO2, according to the IPCC is a fraction of that amount (about 4% of the 0.04%). Please explain how such a rare gas acts as a blanket, unless it is completely threadbare.