Stop Being Stupid

Greenhouses impede heat transfer and warm the air below. Greenhouse gases impede heat transfer and warm the air below. All of the mechanisms are not identical.

Skeptics have no reason to cling to junk science. We have massive volumes of evidence that alarmists are wrong.

People who don’t accept the most fundamental science like the greenhouse effect, shoot themselves and all other skeptics in the foot. So you don’t like the word “greenhouse?” Go cry about it in your beer.

Stop doing that. Stick to science.

About Tony Heller

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39 Responses to Stop Being Stupid

  1. tom0mason says:

    I got the message good bye.

  2. markstoval says:

    So you concede the argument to Jim Hansen? OK, but the term “atmospheric effect” is far better and does not imply that CO2 is evil. You are loosing the PR war by letting the other side set all the rules and terms. Good luck with that.

    And calling those of us who know that the atmosphere and a real greenhouse are nothing alike “stupid” is … well … stupid.

    • Greenhouses impede heat transfer and warm the air below. Greenhouse gases impede heat transfer and warm the air below. All of the mechanisms are not identical.

      Skeptics who refuse to accept the fundamentals of science make it easy for people like Hansen to win.

    • markstoval says:

      “Greenhouses impede heat transfer and warm the air below.”

      They do this by not allowing convection. They do this by stopping the flow of air. Where on planet earth do you see this? Is there a glass roof over our heads?

    • Rich O says:

      I have to agree with this Tony, when you let them control the language (as they so often are allowed, pro-choice, un-documented immigrants, climate denier, etc…etc…) you are conceding half the debate.

    • daveburton says:

      I think everyone here knows that the “greenhouse gas effect” is poorly named. But it’s not a name which suggests CO2 is evil. Greenhouses are nice things, and acknowledging that there is such a thing as a “greenhouse effect” doesn’t imply that CO2 is evil.

      What’s more, talking about greenhouses often leads to opportunities to educate people who’ve been crippled in their ability to think critically, by overexposure to public education. When someone uses the phrase, “like a greenhouse,” while discussing climate, you can tell him about some things he probably doesn’t know, like CO2 generators.

      Most people have never heard of CO2 generators. They are used in most commercial greenhouses, to dramatically improve plant health and growth rates, by increasing CO2 levels to 1000 to 1500 ppmv. CO2 generators typically increase CO2 levels in greenhouses by 6 to 12 times as much as mankind has managed to increase ambient outdoor CO2, which is far more than we could ever hope to increase atmospheric CO2.

      When you’ve educated your student about that, you can move on to mention that anthropogenic CO2 is also responsible for part of the big improvement in agricultural productivity, world-wide, over the last 2/3 century. America’s most illustrious living scientist, Prof. Freeman Dyson, says that, “about 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO2 we put in the atmosphere.”

      Ask them to think for a moment about the suffering which would result if agricultural productivity were to fall by even half of that 15%, throughout the world. Well, that’s exactly what the 350.org pseudo-environmentalists are working for.

      Even after your pupil has internalized that, he may not recognize that Al Gore and his ilk are monsters. “Surely there must be a downside to CO2,” your pupil might wonder. Isn’t all that carbon pollution causing catastrophic sea-level rise, threatening to flood coastal communities? How much of that improvement in agricultural productivity will be lost when coastal farmlands are under the oceans?

      That’s when you can show your pupil a graph like this one, demonstrating that, as far as can be measured, the rate of sea-level rise has not been affected at all by the big post-WWII increase in CO2 levels. The left half of the graph shows sea-level rise when CO2 levels were steady around 300 ppmv; the right end of the graph shows current sea-level rise, when CO2 levels are up about 400 ppmv:
      http://www.sealevel.info/680-140_Sydney_uncropped_2014.png

      Then, when your wide-eyed pupil then wonders why, if all this is true, Al Gore and his ilk are still stirring up fears about CO2, you can tell your pupil about the Chicago Climate Exchange.

      • rw says:

        English and other languages are rife with words whose meanings are overloaded. The situation even has a name; it’s called polysemy. Even mathematics texts will sometimes use the same term in slightly different ways, which they generally warn the reader about, saying the specific meaning should be clear from the context. So … the fact that “greenhouse effect” is used in different ways shouldn’t be an issue.

    • Winnipeg Boy says:

      Totally agree about the nomenclature. Just do a thesaurus search on ‘Greenhouse Effect” Terms like ‘hot weather’ ‘swelter’ etc come up. The very title of the term implies what is the warmist side of the argument. Guys/galls smarter than I should be making an effort to steer the debate away from the term. Global Warming was such a laughing stock that the warmist got to pick their own term AGAIN. Seriously need a PR effort on this side. Just keep it legitimate.

  3. Ron says:

    Thank God for the greenhouse effect. I’d hate to think what my utility bill would be without it. We understand the GHE is essential. The alarmist see it as a reason to control others

  4. squid2112 says:

    Well, I see this site is now going down the same WUWT rathole … Can’t complain, it’s been nice for several years, but I think it’s probably time to wander on to a better place.

    Take care Tony .. and good luck!

  5. PeterMG says:

    Tony I’m flabbergasted at your “fundamental science comments” Even a quick journey around the internet’s science sites should be enough to see that most who are prepared to stake their personal reputation (as opposed to the reputation of the institute that pays their wages) don’t buy into the greenhouse theory. Arrhenius first postulated this theory over 100 years ago, and since then it has been thoroughly debunked several times over. However there nothing like modern science to resurrect something that was debunked and give it a new life.

    If you are half as smart as I hope you are you will quietly reflect on why this subject has seen so many more comments than you usually get and why so many disagree with your stance. We are continuously told that 99% of climate scientists agree on AGW when the truth is probably closer to the opposite now. You have performed the necessary task of showing how the political and policy responses to AGW have been nothing short of ruinous, how all the “scientific facts” about weather, ice and sea level etc have been bogus. Can’t you possibly see there is another step to be taken and that the underpinning science of the greenhouse may also be bogus? It could also be correct, but as of this moment it has no foundation. If there was any irrefutable proof of the greenhouse don’t you think in this political climate the scientist would be lavished with the Nobel science prize? But the reality is the debate is always stifled. You have to ask yourself why this is. For me the answer is simple. If there was a public debate with no consequences the greenhouse gas theory would lose, overwhelmingly.

  6. The alarmists claim that adding CO2 increases the greenhouse effect. We should stick to the argument that it does extremely little, not that there is no greenhouse effect at all.

  7. Mike Haseler says:

    “People who don’t accept the most fundamental science like the greenhouse effect, shoot themselves and all other skeptics in the foot.”

    Stevan, it is not as simple as you suggest. There are two simple reasons why people can legimately say the Greenhouse effect is garbage.

    1. Because Greenhouse trap heat by convection so it’s entirely the wrong terminology.
    2. Because the idea of IR trapping is far too simplistic in a real atmosphere where IR interactive gases can also lead to cooling (but on the whole tend to warm).

    And then I’m afraid there is a final group who don’t believe in IR radiation – who fail to make a coherent argument and I often think must be warmists trying to wind people up – but they appear genuine enough.

    If however, you are interested to understand why the “noddy” theory of Greenhouse gas warming is not adequate to explain the workings of a real atmosphere – and which I think explains why some very intelligent people don’t like the idea of IR warming, then you should read my article:

    Reconciling skydragons and mainstream skeptics?

    • markstoval says:

      It is good to see the “Scottish Sceptic” here. You did a series of 3 posts that included the one above. All were very good. I hope some folks here take the time to read them.

  8. davesix says:

    Climate science and economics have something in common, in that each discipline is an attempt to explain and analyse chaotic systems.

    In each, some people conflate basic principles, or “laws” with the effects of those principles. For example, some argue that, because there has been scant warming for eighteen years or so, or because the predicted tropical tropospheric warming seems to be absent, that the “greenhouse effect” does not exist.

    Similarly, some economists argue, falsely I think, that minimum wage laws do not affect the demand for low-skilled workers, that they are a “special case”- an example of a circumstance in which the laws of supply and demand do not apply.

    A condition precedent in some discussions of economic issues is “other things being equal”- an attempt to separate one set of variables from the aggregate, in order to examine it in a less noisy environment.

    That concept would be useful in discussions of climate science as well. That would allow an analyst to consider the greenhouse effect resulting from a given concentration of CO2 and to analyze the system with that as a “given”.

    It is obvious that the “greenhouse effect” does not explain the behavior of the climate in recent decades. It is apparent, for instance, that feedbacks are not well understood.

    The rational approach, then is to separate the effect of CO2 from forcings in the aggregate, in order to look for other explanations for climate behavior.

    What is important is not to conflate the “greenhouse effect” (a principle) with the whatever warming or cooling is occurring, which should be data driven (the effect).

    It would be a nice thing if the keepers of the data were not tempted, as appears to be the case, to manipulate the data in order to reach a predetermined conclusion, wouldn’t it?

  9. davesix says:

    What I meant to say is that many skeptical arguments turn on this basic error.

  10. Tom Bakert says:

    I don’t recall anyone saying that the Earth’s atmosphere is a greenhouse. The heat retention properties of the atmosphere are referred to as the greenhouse “effect”. It’s an analogy, get it? The debate centers on the physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect and whether it is significantly affected by small changes in the concentration of a trace gas. The fraud is the attempt to profit politically, economically and ideologically by accusing those who produce and consume fossil fuels of murdering Gaia.

    My position on all of this: the increase in atmospheric CO2 is beneficial because it warms the planet slightly and is a vital plant nutrient. The weather is, if anything, less turbulent, the rate of change of sea level is not an issue and Obama, Gore, Hansen, Mann, Trenberth, Serreze at al ad nauseum are lying hypocrital charlatans.

  11. Richard Smith says:

    Good work Tony. Sceptics who don’t understand very basic physics are an embarrassment to the sceptic side and provide easy targets for the alarmists.

  12. DedaEda says:

    Greenhouse gases moderate temperature changes. They prevent full sun’s energy reaching the surface and slow down cooling of the surface. And that is it.

    • Curt says:

      The greenhouse gases are virtually fully transparent to solar radiation, but significantly opaque to the earth’s thermal radiation. That is the whole point.

      • Gail Combs says:

        The atmosphere is not transparent to solar radiation. CO2 is not the only gas in the atmosphere and there is a lot of gas/solar radiation that happens in the upper atmosphere. If there was not you would be looking at skin cancer from the EUV/UV radiation.

  13. Edim says:

    “Greenhouses impede heat transfer and warm the air below.”

    Sorry, but this is handwaving. Heat transfer in the system ‘the Earth’s surface – the atmosphere – open space’ is multi-modal (evaporation, convection and radiation). It cannot be solved by handwaving about ‘radiative balance’.

    http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/sites/default/files/article_images/components2.gif

    A very useful concept of electrical cicuit analogy and thermal resistances can be used for analysis and solution of multimodal. This is the circuit model with some assumption and simplifications:

    http://file.scirp.org/Html/3-9801007/2786aedf-f5fe-470c-8af9-4710598bf569.jpg

    The paper:
    http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=1539#.VGVA28k4QxF

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