What specific chemical properties of carbon dioxide causes the greenhouse effect? Why, chemically, is carbon more reflective than other gases?

Questions like these are indicative of widespread ignorance about radiative and thermal physics. I have deeply studied the subject for decades, so let me attempt to enlighten you. Call it Climate Science 101.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NASA), CO2 doesn’t reflect radiation. Instead, it absorbs and reemits it, meaning after a delay:

“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas: a gas that absorbs and radiates heat. Warmed by sunlight, Earth’s land and ocean surfaces continuously radiate thermal infrared energy (heat). Unlike oxygen or nitrogen (which make up most of our atmosphere), greenhouse gases absorb that heat and release it gradually over time, like bricks in a fireplace after the fire goes out. Without this natural greenhouse effect, Earth’s average annual temperature would be below freezing instead of close to 60°F. But increases in greenhouse gases have tipped the Earth's energy budget out of balance, trapping additional heat and raising Earth's average temperature.”- Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

According to the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR):

“Molecules of CO2 can absorb energy from infrared (IR) radiation. This animation shows a molecule of CO2 absorbing an incoming infrared photon (yellow arrows). The energy from the photon causes the CO2 molecule to vibrate. Some time later, the molecule gives up this extra energy by emitting another infrared photon. Once the extra energy has been removed by the emitted photon, the carbon dioxide molecule stops vibrating.”

“This animation is somewhat of a simplification. Molecules are constantly in motion, colliding with other gas molecules and transferring energy from one molecule to another during collisions. In the more-complex, real-world process, a CO2 molecule would most likely bump into several other gas molecules before re-emitting the infrared photon. The CO2 molecule might transfer the energy it gained from the absorbed photon to another molecule, adding speed to that molecule's motion. Since the temperature of a gas is a measure of the speed of the molecules in the gas, the faster motion of a molecule that eventually results from the IR photon that was absorbed by a CO2 molecule raises the temperature of the gases in the atmosphere.”

“This ability to absorb and re-emit infrared energy is what makes CO2 an effective heat-trapping greenhouse gas.” - Carbon Dioxide Absorbs and Re-emits Infrared Radiation

NOAA and NCAR are part of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) global octopus of kept scientists, academics, journalists, politicians, and bankers that wants all world govts. to shut down their fossil fuel industries to stop CO2 emissions, which they claim are causing global warming, coincidentally costing trillions and destroying the entire Western capitalist understructure to pave the way for their real goal of global Marxism, which they no longer deny but brag about under the names Green New Deal and Great Reset, whose real goal is now revealed to be massive redistribution of wealth from shorn Western sheep for their idea of Marxist social-racial justice.

Ed Zuiderwijk: **Prologue: From a history book in the year 2100**:

“The story of the atmospheric sciences in the period 1980 to 2025 is one of the most puzzling chapters in the history of modern science. In a society claiming to be devoted to the improvement of the lives of its citizens a cabal of ignorant fanatics, half-literate researchers, political hangers-on and the odd charlatan was allowed control over research in atmospheric science and its applications. This event not only stifled the development of science, but also had far-reaching and destructive influence on the economies of many countries through misdirection of resources on a truly epic scale. To the outsider it was completely incomprehensible that societies capable of sending man into space could have entrusted something as vital as the energy provision, transport and food production to exploitation by obvious quacks. Even more curious was that the aberration was all the while loudly applauded by a sycophantic press and endorsed by learned societies that ought to have known better. Scientists of the subsequent period have long speculated about the machinery of that takeover and about the circumstances that made it possible.” - Climate Change Alarmism as a Class War

They can’t sell that plan on its own merits yet, because they haven’t made enough Woke people, so for three decades they have resorted to pushing the hoax that CO2 emissions are inherently evil to make useful idiot politicians who will give them what they want by bulldogging their program on the unwoke masses. The way they do it is to periodically publish Assessment Reports assessing CO2 climate sensitivity, which reduces CO2's global warming effect to a single number, meaning the amount the Earth's surface will warm after a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Never mind that all weather is local not global, and that the claimed values are a few degrees C rise in the global average temperature (GAT), which no living thing can even sense since temperatures rise and fall by many degrees each day, and their GAT is a computer-only statistic used for Communist-style Five-Year Plans that treat the world's population like sheep and cattle. Currently Joe Biden and John Kerry are their biggest useful idiots, who are totally hopeless to teach radiative physics to because physicists like moi dropped the ball and didn’t start speaking out decades ago while the global Marxist beast was still in its infancy, mea culpa.

What is the Use of Global Temperature If It Really Doesn't Exist? - T.L. Winslow

The IPCC never did any real science. Instead, they build computer games that consume huge amounts of time and power that pretend to model Earth's climate. The basic reason that IPCC-backed computer climate models (CCMs) are always wrong is their attempt to push the hoax that atmospheric CO2 doesn’t just help the rest of the atmosphere cool the Earth’s surface after the Sun heats it, but somehow sends the heat back down and actually heats it up, in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Here’s a quote straight from NASA’s Web site:

"The natural greenhouse effect raises the Earth's surface temperature to about 15 degrees Celsius on average - more than 30 degrees warmer than it would be if it didn't have an atmosphere. The amount of heat radiated from the atmosphere to the surface (sometimes called 'back radiation') is equivalent to 100 percent of the incoming solar energy. The Earth's surface responds to the 'extra' (on top of direct solar heating) energy by raising its temperature." - NASA: Climate and Earth’s Energy Budget

"We're completely certain that the increase in CO2 is warming the planet. I'm even more certain CO2 causes global heating than I am that smoking causes cancer. The world is already more than 2 (degrees) warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution." - Kate Marvel, NASA Goddard

TL Winslow's answer to Are The Global warming/climate change theory models oversimplified, and or, corrupted by data that is not accurately representative of reality, the main reason for their dismal track record on their predictions & could you straighten them out?

Sorry for them, no matter how much er, power they’ve amassed, there is no greenhouse effect caused by CO2. Call it reflection, absorption, or (re)emission, CO2 is a polar molecule and can absorb and emit certain wavelengths of infrared energy, but too bad, those wavelengths are unable to cause a greenhouse effect AKA increase in Earth surface temperatures, hence CO2 climate sensitivity is a big fat ZERO. The one big takeaway from this article is that CO2’s weak puny 15 micron photons with a Planck radiation temperature of -80C (colder than dry ice) can’t melt an ice cube or cause global warming.

Note: After several critics flamed me for not being a recognized authority (by the IPCC, which controls all govt. funding and owns all the academic journals, who ban any critics from their pal-reviewed journals), and accusing me of not knowing physics, only to give me lectures that immediately revealed their total ignorance of the subject, I found it necessary for self-protection to ward off the most ignorant ones by explicitly naming and describing all the key concepts. Yes, it makes this essay start out slow, but it’s my bad if I assume the reader knows something they don’t and let them become loose cannons on desk, er, deck. Rest assured, I know physics, in fact I’m a lone wolf freak that dropped out of the establishment decades ago to work for truth, and am now single-handedly refounding the field of climate science based on physics, threatening the global U.N. IPCC octopus’ existence. No wonder they studiously ignore and shadow-ban me while openly begging governments for trillions to save us from the nonexistent problem of CO2 emissions with the goal of massive redistribution of wealth, not to change the climate, which they can’t, but to foist “climate justice”, i.e., their idea of Marxist social-racial justice, siphoning the wealth of the capitalist West to give to poor countries, making them the only real problem. Knowledge will win in the end, so please give this online physics lesson due diligence to equip your mind to laugh off their nonsensical claims and save your bank account. You can be sure the IPCC doesn’t want you to know thermal physics or teach it to you, because their begging empire has always been based on fake physics and the ignorance of the public. The IPCC's incessant dubious claims of a "97% consensus" among scientists smells of Big Science coopted by pure baksheesh.

"So there you have it. An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization. What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to reduce trust in and support for science." - Dr. Richard Lindzen

I found it necessary to comment on the highly politicized situation first, but now I’ll move to pure sweet physics that no political organization can change.

The IPCC CO2 global warming hoax is supported by a bloomin’ onion of lies and a beehive of manufactured data. For adults and teenies, a favorite sales con job is the so-called (Very) Simple Climate Model. “This climate model is very simple. It knows nothing of changing wind or precipitation patterns that might accompany and in turn influence warming; it doesn't care where in the atmosphere the CO2 is; it ignores other greenhouse gases; and so on. In this simple model, the temperature is determined entirely by the atmospheric CO2 concentration via greenhouse warming of the atmosphere.” - The Very Simple Climate Model

One favorite sales con job for children is a lab experiment showing a tube of pure CO2 heating up faster than one of pure air (0.04% CO2) after being irradiated by an infrared lamp. That proves the no-brainer that CO2 can be heated with an infrared lamp, mostly by conduction with the tube walls, along with the pure air, but that would only mean it would become more buoyant and rise toward space, taking its heat with it, thus cooling the Earth’s surface not warming it. The pure CO2 tube might get a little hotter than the other one simply because of different heat capacities, but that’s all. Never do the experiments put a third tube of water and dirt next to the CO2 tube to see if pure CO2 radiation can raise its temperature, because it can’t even melt an ice cube and the jig would be up. Greenhouse Gas? The Two Bottles Experiment Explained | Principia Scientific Intl. (https://principia-scientific.com/greenhouse-gas-the-two-bottles-experiment-explained/)

Actually, pure CO2 is heavier than air, and it would have to get to 250F or so to rise, but when only a trace amount is mixed with air, it would be carried along with it.

That’s right, the leftist IPCC octopus is brainwashing our children. To kill a snake you lop of its head, not chop off each segment starting at the tail, giving it a chance to bite you or slither away.

Why can’t radiation from atmospheric CO2 melt an ice cube? This is the most important point in my physics lesson, so study carefully.

Physicists regularly pontificate that photons don’t have a temperature. No, not in themselves, but in streams, since temperature is a statistical concept. Via black body (Planck) radiation, photons are born in temperature and die in temperature, and are indeed the way that Nature transmits heat long distances at light speed.

It's all about Planck’s Black Body Radiation Law (1900), the basic law that governs all thermal radiation from a radiative black body, which absorbs all incident radiation then reemits it at a longer wavelength, with the emitted photons having a power-wavelength profile based alone on the black body’s temperature (not composition), and the power peaking at shorter wavelengths as the temperature increases. The law applies independent of the material involved. The curve has a characteristic shape that starts out rising polynomially (x^3), then peaks, then drops exponentially (exp(-x))), with the total area under the curve increasing as T^4. The region around the peak power wavelength contains most of the higher energy emitted photons, which allows one to talk about the Color temperature of a photon from Planck radiation when it’s at the power peak. One can see this visually when an iron rod is placed in a fire and turns red then orange then yellow as it heats up, allowing you to “see” its temperature.

"Peak spectral radiance can be thought of as the "color temperature" of radiation, the maximum temperature to which a black body could be raised when enough of that radiation was available." - Planck's Law (by an IPCC critic)

The deeper truth is that thanks to Einstein’s 1905 work with the photoelectric effect, Photon energy is quantized in multiples of the Planck constant (6.62607015×10-34 Joule·sec), and is inversely proportional to wavelength, causing the Planck radiation curve to shift to shorter wavelengths as the temperature increases, while the total power (area under the curve) increases as the fourth power of the temperature.

To repeat, a a single photon doesn’t have temperature, only energy, but a stream of photons from a Planck radiator does. Not just a stream, a torrent. For example, a black body at 28C (room temperature) radiates 466 watts per square meter. Just one watt of radiation is 1 Joule/sec., and 1 Joule has 1e+18 (1 million million million) photons, allowing fast temperature equalization between Planck radiators, which covers much of the Universe. The photon energy is inversely proportional to wavelength, as is the Planck radiation temperature, so with that huge stream of photons with the same energy bombarding some absorber to bring it up to the Planck temperature but no higher, independent of the material. Yes, you can consider those photons as collectively having a temperature.

Photons are pure kinetic energy with momentum but no rest mass, appearing in the more generalized version of Einstein’s energy-mass equivalence equation E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2, reducing to E=pc for a photon.

It doesn't have to be complicated. All black bodies absorb and emit radiation of all wavelengths. Independent of the type of material, Planck black body radiators have a characteristic power-wavelength curve parameterized on temperature T alone. If a hotter body is placed near a colder body, its Planck radiation starts raising its temperature, causing it to begin emitting Planck body radiation, switching curves as T rises until finally reaching the identical curve as the hotter body when the temperatures are equalized. Imagine the brass the IPCC fakers have to claim that the second body keeps rising in temperature indefinitely, even when the first body is not only way colder (-80C), but isn't even a Planck body radiator, but just a monochrome (single wavelength, no spectrum) emitter.

Viktor T. Toth's answer to Why is photon massless if it has energy?

Planck made use of the Boltzmann Distribution to derive Planck’s Law. It gives the probability that a system will be in a certain state as an exponentially-decreasing function of that state's energy and the temperature of the system, meaning that states with lower energy will always have a higher probability of being occupied. The Boltzmann constant kb relates the average kinetic energy for each degree of freedom of a physical system in equilibrium to its temperature. It is one of the seven fundamental (exact) constants of the Universe, equal to exactly 1.380649×10-23 J/K. It was originally derived in 1877 by Boltzmann as the entropy S of an isolated system in thermodynamic equilibrium divided by the natural logarithm of the number of distinct microscopic states available to the system W, which Boltzmann was so proud of he had the equation S = k log W inscribed on his tombstone. It’s also the energy per molecule in an ideal gas. This equation, which relates the microscopic details, or microstates of the system (via W) to its macroscopic state (via the entropy S), is the central idea of statistical mechanics. It wasn’t Ludwig Boltzmann but Max Planck who named Boltzmann’s constant in his 1900 publication of Planck’s Radiation Law after using it in the derivation.

For gases of rigid fixed dipole molecules, there are 5 degrees of freedom (3 translational, 2 rotational). For other gases there are 3 degrees of freedom. Solids can have 3, or as many as 6 when 2 vibrational modes are counted for each translational mode. CO2 gas has 6 because there are only 2 axes of rotation. A photon has a kinetic energy ke given by hc/lambda (wavelength). For a 15 micron photon it is 1.32E-20 Joules. The Boltzmann constant doesn’t apply to photons, but surprise, If you work out the ke/kb formula for CO2, you end up with T = 683C, yikes! If you divide ke by 5 before dividing by the Boltzmann constant, you get -81.7C, and if you divide ke by 3 instead, you get 45.84C (114.5F), perhaps pegging the heating power of 15 micron radiation in an imaginary world. Either way, a photon is not a physical system, but when it is absorbed by one its kinetic energy may or may not contribute to the system’s average kinetic energy, which gets partitioned among the degrees of freedom of the system. The way it does this is a mystery, but the Second Law can never be violated, so if the photon’s kinetic energy is lower than the system’s, it can’t raise it, and even if it’s higher, it can just raise the temperature of one molecule at a time to its own value, requiring a fast enough torrent of like or more energetic photons to permanently raise the temperature of the system, as required by the Second Law. Think of kinetic energy as whirling fan blades (v squared). If the blades are whirling too fast, they spit the weak photons out, but if the photon’s kinetic energy is great enough, it will overtake and cause the blades to whirl faster. A really hot system encountering a weak photon would be like sticking your hand in whirling fan blades and losing your fingers.

Back to black blades, er, bodies. The emissivity of a Planck black body radiator is not what you might think, namely, the fraction of incident energy that’s reemitted, but the ratio of emitted energy compared to that from an ideal black body on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. The Earth’s surface is an almost ideal black body, with an emissivity of 0.96–1.0.

But emissivity is also the fraction of energy that's reemitted, because if it's reflected and never absorbed, there's nothing to reemit. Kirchoff's Law of Thermal Radiation states that a good radiation absorber is a good radiation emitter, hence emissivity is the opposite of reflectivity, meaning that a perfect reflector has an emissivity of 0.0. Kirchoff's Law of Thermal Radiation insures that a watched pot will never boil, er, just kidding, it means that a highly reflective pot containing boiling water will have an optical infrared thermometer reading close to room temperature (e.g., 26C), but a mercury bulb thermometer in the pot or just touching the outside will read 100C. So to say that atmospheric CO2 is reflective is to rule it out as a Planck radiator.

"Emittance (or emissive power) is the total amount of thermal energy emitted per unit area per unit time for all possible wavelengths. Emissivity of a body at a given temperature is the ratio of the total emissive power of a body to the total emissive power of a perfectly black body at that temperature. Following Planck's law, the total energy radiated increases with temperature while the peak of the emission spectrum shifts to shorter wavelengths. The energy emitted at shorter wavelengths increases more rapidly with temperature. For example, an ideal blackbody in thermal equilibrium at 1,273 K, will emit 97% of its energy at wavelengths below 14 µm.[5]" - Emissivity - Wikipedia

The Earth’s Albedo is the percentage of solar radiation that’s diffusely (not specularly) reflected, mainly by clouds and snow. The planetary value hovers at around 0.3–0.35. Snow has an albedo of 0.4–0.85, clouds .35-.75, sand .2-.45, and water .05-.10. It is not to be confused with black body emissivity.

Atmospheric gases are transparent to short wavelength solar radiation, and almost transparent to long wavelength (far infrared) surface radiation, meaning they’re never close to balancing. Atmospheric CO2 doesn’t reflect infrared radiation, it absorbs it if it’s the right wavelength, then later reemits it at that or a slightly longer wavelength if it didn’t lose it to collisions with other atmospheric O2 and N2 molecules, which are nonpolar and don’t emit radiation. Too bad, CO2’s absorption/emission wavelength is wrong to cause global warming, and this is the killer bullet to the IPCC trillion dollar hoax once you deeply understand it and can stand up to them.

Wien's Displacement Law, derived from Planck’s Law gives the wavelength of maximum power radiation, the most likely wavelength, which is based inversely on temperature alone. Visual wavelengths from sunlight or glowing rods are in the range of 0.4–0.8 microns (6,971C-3,341C), while Planck max power wavelengths of normal Earth surface temperatures range from 12.98–8.97 microns (-50C to+50C) (-58F to +122F). In actual practice, with Earth’s climate, “heat” means temperatures of 70F (21.1C) (9.848 microns) to 122F (50C) (8.97 microns), which is a wavelength difference of only 0.878 microns. We thus live in a world that has close tolerances for livable temperatures, making it seem near-miraculous that the Sun provides just the right kind and amounts of radiation to keep us alive, and that the atmosphere moderates temperature swings to minimize extreme temperatures like the Moon has.

Check my work with this Wien's Displacement Law Online Calculator.

Solar visual wavelength energy travels through the atmosphere almost unhindered until it hits the surface, and either reflects harmlessly or is absorbed, pump-priming Earth’s climate system. Although the solar photons have very high Planck radiation temperatures, the Earth’s surface only slow rises in temperature because each photon can only be absorbed by one molecule, while Planck radiation goes on continually and conduction between molecules quickly distributes the energy.

For reference, ice at 0C has a Planck radiation max wavelength (most likely photon wavelength) of 10.6 microns, so you can say that an ice cube’s 10.6 micron photons have a Planck radiation temperature of 0C. A block of dry ice has a temperature of -80C, and it emits a Planck radiation curve peaking at 15 microns, so it’s a natural source of 15 micron photons if you need one. Nobody can get warm by sitting on a block of water ice or dry ice, can they? Ditto if one is sitting near one in such a way as to absorb its photons. Guess what CO2’s radiation absorption-emission wavelength is? 15 microns. RIP IPCC CO2 global warming hoax.

Why does the hoax still have widespread acceptance? Pure mass ignorance of er, radiative or thermal physics.

What the IPCC scientists don’t want you to know is that a single photon or stream of photons of temperature T can’t raise the temperature of an absorbing material higher than T, which is a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) that prohibits a colder object from raising the temperature of a hotter object because entropy must increase. Instead, they want you to believe that enough photons of any temperature can raise the temperature of an absorbing material, even a hotter material, and indefinitely, even reaching an infinite T eventually, did somebody open a can of pork and beans? A solar mirror farm with acres of polished mirrors focusing their solar energy on a metal block at a single point can never raise its temperature higher than the solar photons. A dozen 1000C torches trained on the same metal can't raise the temperature higher than 1000C.

As English physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) so aptly put it about the IPCC’s attempt to dispute the Second Law to bolster its CO2 global warming hoax: "The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." - Second law of thermodynamics

TL Winslow's answer to What would you say to someone who says “The greenhouse effect can’t be real because the Second Law of Thermodynamics says something cooler can't raise the temperature of something warmer”?

Alejandro Jenkins' answer to What is entropy?

Of course a single photon has no temperature because that is a statistical quantity, and could have come from Planck radiators at a variety of temperatures, but a full Planck power-wavelength curve from dry ice peaking at 15 microns and containing an army of photons can’t raise the temperature of anything higher than -80C because each photon is so weak and puny. The quantum world ceases to exist at the macro level where we live, so when I speak of a “15 micron photon” I don’t mean one photon but one of an army of photons from a -80C Planck radiator. In the real macro world you can only feel or measure the Planck radiation temperature because shorter wavelength higher energy photons are too few and longer wavelength photons are too weak to raise the felt/measured temperature above the Planck radiation temperature, which is the Wien temperature of the most probable emission photons. A given object can only have one temperature, and it determines the Planck maximum power wavelength, hence its color.

More precisely, photons from a colder object don’t even reach a hotter object. “Between two objects, one warmer and one cooler, the chemical potential increases in the intervening space as one ascends the energy gradient from cooler to warmer object. Thus photons from the cooler object will be subsumed before they ever reach the warmer object because warmer objects have higher energy density at all wavelengths than cooler objects.” - Hyperphysics fails at basic science, reasoning and math

A more succinct way of saying this is that Earth's atmosphere isn't a black body radiator like the surfaces of the Sun and Earth, and it's a category mistake to think that Planck's black body radiation law that connects the micro and macro worlds can be reversed by quantum-level radiation only. Black body radiators transmit heat via photon radiation. Gases can never be black body radiators, and thus can't transmit heat by their photon radiation.

This is how an Optical infrared thermometer (OIRT) works, by “seeing” and calculating Color temperature after using a lens to focus IR energy on a group of thermocouples (thermopiles) that absorb it and turn it into internal kinetic energy AKA temperature then into voltage. It relies on each photon having its own energy and hence equilibrium Planck radiation temperature, which it measures after collecting enough of them. This alone disproves the usual IPCC hoax that CO2’s weak puny 15 micron photons “trap and pile heat” and cause global warming by their intensity (watts per square meter) of radiation to the surface. You can point an OIRT at a block of dry ice all day and it won’t register, because -80C isn’t heat and isn’t building up the temperature above -80C.

To explain it so a fifth grader can understand it, the Earth’s surface is a black body because it absorbs all incident photons one-by-one into its molecules. The Sun’s photons are very high temperature, with a Planck radiation curve peaking at 5500C, but if the Earth’s surface starts out cold, say 2C, these absorbed photons are soon conducted into the other surface molecules to equalize the temperature, meaning it takes a lot of high temperature solar photons to slowly raise the combined surface temperature T, causing it to begin radiating Planck radiation based on T, not the Sun’s temperature. Never can those solar photons raise the surface temperature above 5500C because they each have only so much kinetic energy.

Now focus on atmospheric CO2, which can’t absorb any of that surface Planck radiation other than a dinky tail end at 15 microns. Let’s forget how much they really reradiate back to the surface and supposed they reradiate 100% of it. All that would do is cause surface molecules to absorb more puny 15 micron photons with a Planck radiation temperature of -80C, but since the surface is already at a way higher temperate (-50C to +50C), it would do nothing to change the surface temperature T. It’s a hoax that so many watts per square meter of 15 micron wavelength radiation is a threat for global warming.

Back to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. IPCC propagandists love to befuddle you by claiming that you don’t know the difference between a closed system and an isolated system, and that the Second Law only applies to isolated systems, and further that the only isolated system is the entire solar system, hence the hot Sun radiates all the planets and they heat up only so much before radiating back, while atmospheric CO2 can reheat the surface with its own heat because they’re still keeping it cooler than the Sun. This is total moose hockey. A closed system is an isolated system with no mass transfer, which is what the Earth’s atmosphere is, since the top of the atmosphere is stable and there is no mass escape or entry of new atmosphere. No, the atmosphere isn’t an isolated system since it receives solar energy and reemits some of it after downshifting some to infrared energy, but within the closed atmosphere the Second Law rules at all levels of Nature, and the IPCC can stuff it. Since the atmosphere is transparent to solar visual energy along with surface infrared 'energy except when absorbed by CO2 and H20 molecules, the fact that this radiation is entering and exiting the atmosphere doesn’t disqualify it as a closed system for heat. In order to push the CO2 warming hoax, the IPCC wants the Second Law only to apply to the whole solar system or not at all, when it actually applies to every process however small inside the atmosphere, even inside test tubes. It was originally discovered with lab experiments, and expanded to all of Nature long before the IPCC came along and hijacked science. Next thing you know they’ll be claiming that the entire Universe is an isolated system to bilk quadrillions.

The Earth’s atmosphere isn’t a greenhouse, it’s a blanket that slows the escape of surface heat while wasting a lot of it to work and entropy. Radiation vs. convection is an irrelevant distinction here. No atmospheric radiation can reheat (raise the temperature of) the Earth’s surface with its own infrared heat any more than the insulation in a thermos can turn lukewarm coffee into piping hot coffee. An insulator only slows escape of heat, but the original heat that sets the temperature comes from what it’s insulating, like a real blanket covering your body and its internal heat generation from metabolism of food. Quoting the Wiki article on the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

The First Law of Thermodynamics provides the definition of the Internal energy of a Thermodynamic system, and expresses the law of Conservation of energy. The second law is concerned with the direction of natural processes It asserts that a natural process runs only in one sense, and is not reversible. For example, when a path for conduction and radiation is made available, heat always flows spontaneously from a hotter to a colder body. Such Phenomena are accounted for in terms of Entropy. If an isolated system is held initially in internal thermodynamic equilibrium by internal partitioning impermeable walls, and then some operation makes the walls more permeable, then the system spontaneously evolves to reach a final new internal thermodynamic equilibrium, and its total entropy, *S*, increases.]]

To beat the dead horse to dog food, astrophysicists use color temperature all the time to calculate star temperatures. Here’s an example from a university physics textbook:

"Temperatures of Distant Stars. On a clear evening during the winter months, if you happen to be in the Northern Hemisphere and look up at the sky, you can see the constellation Orion (The Hunter). One star in this constellation, Rigel, flickers in a blue color and another star, Betelgeuse, has a reddish color, as shown in Figure. Which of these two stars is cooler, Betelgeuse or Rigel?" - Blackbody Radiation

Back to the fake CO2 warming lab experiment for kids. To stop the IPCC just harp on CO2’s -80C problem. Ask them to prove by a laboratory demonstration that CO2’s 15 micron wavelength radiation can melt an ice cube or STFU, disband and give the money back. If you’re into activism, hold counter-protests carrying a sign reading “Just Say No to the IPCC and -80C”. The IPCC’s CO2 global warming hoax can be killed with the truth of physics, so what’s keeping you if you’ve read this far?

Sometimes the IPCC hoaxers do something that gives away that they’re trying to hide the truth. One such is their bait and switch trick of switching the abscissa in the Planck radiation curve from wavelength to frequency, which is like apples and oranges because wavelength is length and frequency is oscillations per unit time. They could easily double-label the abscissa with wavelength (microns) (lambda) and frequency (Hz) (f), but actually they can’t because the graphs aren’t of emission radiance at each point of wavelength or frequency, but emission radiance per wavelength or frequency. To create the frequency version of Planck’s Law they have to modify the abscissa via the formula delta f = delta lambda/(c/f^2 ), which is a highly nonlinear transformation. Changing the abscissa to frequency makes it look like the peak of 67C Planck black body radiation is at 15 microns like CO2 instead of the real value of 8.5 microns. One so-called physicist claims that this disproves my whole theory. This abscissa switch means that a fixed wavelength interval in the wavelength version dramatically changes in the frequency version. In short, the shape of the frequency version is pretty much the derivative of the wavelength version because microns have been changed to cycles per sec (Hz), an apples to oranges comparison. The wavelength peak is at the max power per wavelength point, but the frequency peak is at the max power per Hz point, which means the point where the power is greatest per unit Hz, not micron. Indeed, the peak of the wavelength version would be zero in the frequency version. Nature doesn’t change by a graphing trick, and a 67C Planck black body still radiates most of its photons at 8.5 microns. Read it for laughs if you have time. He meant a narrow frequency region around 19.997 THz for 67C, and 11.357 THz for CO2.

How are Bob Wentworth's criticisms of T.L. Winslow's disproof of greenhouse gas warming theory dead wrong? - TLW

What would you say to someone who says the greenhouse effect can't be real because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics - Bob Wentworth

Indeed, who cares about the power per unit Hz? On the wavelength curve, that would be the point of the tail with the greatest slope, way down from the peak. The most photons are physically emitted at the peak wavelength, and the tail drops off polynomially. So to claim that a 67C black body has a radiation peak at 15 microns has no physical value. A body being irradiated only feels the temperature caused by the wavelength with the most photons, not greatest change in slope of frequency.

No wonder that some devious IPCC minds came up with it to disguise their problem with CO2. It’s not physics it’s mathematical masturbation, a bait and switch for physics pikers to disguise their weakness and discourage clear understanding. It would be like claiming in traffic court that you didn’t break the speed limit by displaying a graph of acceleration vs. time, which is all zero.

Different forms of Planck's Law

By the way, notice that the 15 micron CO2 wavelength is 100% saturated. So why is the IPCC obsessed with charging tens and hundreds of trillions to stop CO2 emissions?

That tricked-up frequency version of Planck’s Law has pretty much been discarded by the IPCC, but that didn’t stop them from pushing another hoax by displaying the Earth surface radiation black body curve using wave numbers, and bunching the emittance values for several wavebands together to change the peak from the true value of 10 microns to the area around CO2’s 666 wavenumber, making it look like CO2 blocks most Earth surface radiation. They use this fake diagram every day. Does it look familiar? NASA's great peak fake swindle As if they don’t realize that they’re proving me right about photons having temperature, the IPCC scientists like to wow you with diagrams of solar radiation vs. wavelength illuminating the Earth, alongside diagrams of surface radiation vs. wavelength as measured by satellites, showing a bunch of dents and notches, with a big notch at 15 microns caused by atmospheric CO2, as if that makes it case closed for atmospheric CO2’s “blocking and trapping of heat”. They don’t even try to cover up the physical truth that solar visual range (light) photons have way shorter wavelengths than surface infrared (IR) photons, they just want you to believe that any distortion in the upgoing thermal radiation Planck curve proves that they can “see” surface temperatures from space. But zonk! They can, not because of the distortion of the curve, but because of its peak, which occurs at a wavelength that sets the surface temperature via Wien’s Displacement Law, exactly like an OIRT would register. What they didn’t prove is that the surface temperature is dependent on atmospheric CO2 at all.

Back to Planck radiation and atmospheric CO2. It never omits Planck radiation, sorry, because no gas emits Planck radiation, for the reason that only coalesced materials (solids and liquids) with a distinct surface can do that. They don’t call it a black body for nothing. An ideal black body absorbs all incident radiation, and the Earth’s surface is a close approximation, with only a tiny fraction reflected to give objects color. Coalesced materials like water and dirt share their electromagnetic energy to establish a common temperature, and since all energy is quantized in multiples of Planck’s constant h, they cool by emitting quantized electromagnetic radiation AKA photons at the surfaces after downshifting the wavelength from visual to infrared. To derive Planck’s Law for a black body one must consider all the electromagnetic waves inside bouncing off the walls, which create an energy density based on the wall dimensions and internal energy sharing between photons. In contrast, gases just bounce against each other without exchanging electromagnetic energy, equalizing their kinetic energy to establish a common temperature, but can’t pool their common electromagnetic energy at a surface to emit Planck radiation. Instead, bouncing gas molecules emit radiation on a photon by photon basis, and only polar molecules can do it, whereas molecules in coalesced materials draw on the entire pool of internal electromagnetic energy.

To see this, check out another law derived from Planck’s Law, the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, which gives the total power per unit area emitted by a Planck radiator over all wavelengths, which is proportional to T to the fourth power, think of the rod in the fire. The S-B constant is in watts per square meter, not per cubic meter because a distinct coalesced surface is required for the combined shared internal kinetic energy reservoir to be emitted as electromagnetic radiation. In the Sun-Earth climate system, the only coalesced surfaces are the Sun’s surface and the Earth’s surface, and the Earth’s atmosphere has nothing to do with Planck radiation, so don’t ever think that atmospheric CO2’s Planck radiation does anything.

See all the equations for a black body derived mathematically: The Derivation of the Planck Formula

The killer observation is that a material being illuminated by 15 micron photons can absorb them into its “black box” of electromagnetic modes, but can’t change their wavelengths. So after all the modes are filled, the common temperature is limited by the 15 micron photons to be -80C. What a con game for the IPCC to want suckers to believe that more and more 15 micron photons can raise the common temperature to any value, even though they are still at 15 microns. This isn’t physics, it’s boogey man fake physics, and once the public wakes up, the IPCC hoax will pop like a limp balloon. If you want to raise the common temperature higher than -80C, you have to send it higher temperature shorter wavelength photons in enough quantity to fill the modes.

Look again at the above diagram from NASA showing the Sun’s Planck radiation curve in red and the Earth’s in blue, along with spectra of absorption by various gases. The latter just consist of series of absorption/emission lines, but no Planck radiation curves, because gases don’t have any.

On a second read, heck out my cool Quora answer Why do we say "no net heat flow between two objects of different temperatures" but not "no heat flow"?.

Bac kto what states of matter can be black body radiators. Not gases but Plasma, the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids, and gases, consisting of ionized gas molecules and free electrons, can emit Planck black body radiation because the free electrons and ions share electromagnetic energy as in coalesced materials. Everybody knows about lightning and neon lights. Too bad, Earth’s atmosphere isn’t plasma, like on the Sun, which is mostly hot plasma, and thus can emit Planck radiation, but the energy source is nuclear reactions at the solid core (density 12x Earth’s), which the Sun’s plasma atmosphere just convects to the edge of space then emits as Planck radiation.

Thus gaseous CO2 is limited to photon by photon quantum emissions based on being a polar molecule after being kicked into one of several vibrational states by absorbed photons, and one CO2 15 micron photon only has Photon energy of 797.5 J/mole divided by 6.022 x 10^23 molecules/mole = 1.3 x 10^-21 Joule, which is next to nothing. In contrast, Planck black body radiation from Earth’s surface is measured in Joules per second (watts) per square meter, and the total radiation over all wavelengths is proportional to T to the 4th power. Dipole radiation emissions are in all directions, not just toward the surface, and are subject to be reabsorbed, so even if the weak scattered dipole emissions weren’t at the wrong wavelength, they wouldn’t make a dent in surface or atmospheric temperatures because they don’t have the T^4 power punch, just photons at one wavelength.

Check my work: Energy of a photon calculator

But the IPCC claims that atmospheric CO2 is causing heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and all kinds of evil, so let’s look at it. CO2 gas doesn’t have a permanent dipole moment so it can’t absorb or emit most photons, but it has electron bond vibration modes activated by certain wavelengths that do create a dipole moment, permitting photon absorption/emission.

CO2’s main absorption/emission wavelength is 15 microns, which corresponds to a Planck radiation temperature of 193K (-112F) (-80C), not far from the coldest temperature recorded on Earth, -128.6F (184K) (-89.2C). Too bad for the IPCC, -80C is way outside Earth’s normal surface temperature range of -50C to +50C, so it can’t play any role in global warming no matter how much money they get. In fact, CO2’s weak puny 15 micron photons can’t melt an ice cube, or raise the temperature of any molecule absorbing them above -80C. The IPCC picked the wrong getaway driver for their great bank robbery, didn’t they?

Let's look at CO2's other absorption/emission wavelengths. 2.7 microns corresponds to a Planck radiation temperature of 797C (1070K) (1466F), and 4.3 microns corresponds to one of 401C (675K) (755F), none of which the Earth's surface is capable of reaching outside of volcanoes and geysers, so again atmospheric CO2 can’t affect surface temperatures except in limited local regions. Those wavelengths are used by CO2 in the thermosphere at 90km above the stratosphere (10km) and mesosphere (50km) to block high temperature radiation from a solar flare from reaching the Earth’s surface. See: CO2 solar flares and the thermosphere.

Check my work: Wien's Law calculator

Instead of putting it plainly this way and risking waking you up that there’s no “there” there, the IPCC scientists like to wow you with molecular diagrams of nonpolar CO2 showing its ability to absorb IR photons, kicking it into its mostly polar energy bond vibrational modes including its bending mode, symmetric stretch mode, and asymmetric stretch mode. What they don’t tell you is that only the bending mode absorbs/emits at 15 microns, which are weak -80C photons that don’t qualify as heat even if you’re an Eskimo. The symmetric stretch mode doesn’t create a dipole moment, so it’s not IR active. The asymmetric stretch modes are at such high temperatures that they are absorbed by atmospheric CO2 only over volcanoes, but the convection is so strong that those molecules are quickly rising to space with the rest of the heated air, taking the heat energy with them while losing it via collisions to the surrounding air, making them useless for surface heating. Usually the IPCC scientists don’t even specify wavelengths in microns but in wave numbers, which means 10,000/wavelength in microns, disguising the temperature con game further (15 microns = wave number 666, 4.3 microns = wave number 2350). Actually, atmospheric CO2 is almost all polar molecules except in isolation.

The above diagram shows CO2’s Planck radiation curve vs. one from some solid or liquid object at 15C, showing how most of its radiation is outside CO2’s narrow 15 micron wavelength absorption range around -80C. 15C is the Earth’s alleged avg. temperature. When it is even hotter, even less radiation is emitted in the 15 micron band. And this is surface radiation, not the far weaker radiation reemitted to the surface by you know what.

To beat the dead horse again, there is no way that photons of some wavelength and Planck radiation temperature can be absorbed by a colder object and cause it to emit photons of shorter wavelength, i.e., higher temperature. That would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and create a perpetual motion machine. Every exchange of energy increases entropy and lowers temperature. The Universe is systematically cooling, not heating. If you still claim I'm wrong then show me the patent for a dry ice-powered flamethrower or microwave oven.

By the way, the IPCC claims that atmospheric CO2 15 micron “back radiation” is on the order of watts per square meter. In contrast, a thin sheet of dry ice of 1 square meter area emits a total power of 78 watts. Stick your tongue out against a block of dry ice and tell me how much heat you feel. :) From my knowledge of Planck’s Radiation Law I know what weak puny 15 micron photons can’t raise the temperature of anything higher than -80C, so the IPCC fixation with them is pure Hoax City.

Check my work: Stefan-Boltzmann Law calculator

You should smell a rat the second you see IPCC diagrams trying to illustrate their alleged greenhouse effect via arrows going up and down in the sky labeled watts per square meter, meaning Joules of energy per second per square meter, not total Joules per square meter per 24 -hour day or 365-day year. The number one diagram by Kevin E. Trenberth of NCAR in Boulder claims 333 watts per square meter of back radiation. The double-shuffle here is that he first turns the Earth flat and stationary then tries to average an entire year’s worth of global energy flow, which even a 5th grader should see through. The ultimate insult is to weaken the Sun’s power to one-fourth because the flat Earth only has one-fourth the surface area of the real Earth. No surprise, he claims that CO2 back radiation (333) is almost equal to incoming solar radiation (341), as if there’s a second Sun in the sky. And the IPCC hoaxers like to call real climate scientists not under their control Flat Earthers.

Speaking of the IPCC's flat Earth hoax, their aim is to claim that the Sun alone can't keep the Earth from freezing, and that an additional 36C of warming is provided by CO2. Of course they don't actually prove that CO2 does anything, just that warming appears from somewhere. Too bad, when their 5th grader stunts of weakening the Sun and making the Earth flat are reversed, the Sun proves quite capable of providing the global temperature range actually observed, without any help from CO2.

How Much Does the Sun Contribute to Global Warming? - by TLW

So if you believe that a big block of dry ice can keep your kitchen warm in the winter, by all means sell your future to the evil grasping lying Marxist IPCC, else wake up and laugh them off and demand that they be dismantled and the former IPCC get new careers more at their level like plumbers, truck drivers, and hairdressers.

Want proof that the IPCC is lying to your face to get what they want? Here’s a graph straight from IPCC main org. NASA showing that almost all updwelling thermal radiation from the Earth in the wavelength range of 8–13 microns is transmitted to the top of the atmosphere. What they don’t tell you is that that range covers all normal Earth surface temperatures, namely, +89C to -50C. The absorption/scattering levels for water vapor and CO2 are way colder or hotter than that, hence irrelevant. The blip for methane is close to 8 microns hence is too hot. There is another small blip around 9 microns (+48C) for oxygen/ozone, but that’s up in the stratosphere, outside the troposphere where weather happens.

What about them Obama blankets which claim to reflect all infrared heat radiation back to the body, and are handed out to illegal immigrants in shelters? They have a reflective coating that supposedly reflects most of the body’s infrared radiation in the range of 70F-100F (21C-38C), but some still leaks through, so the blanket needs to have thermal insulation to stop heat loss via convection.

Zonk! These type of blankets only protect from RF radiation from cell phones, etc., blocking wavelengths way too long to handle human body temperatures.

Top 10 EMF Shielding Blankets

Anti Radiation Blankets - A Buyer's Guide - EMF Academy

I saved the best for last. The grand prize for IPCC fake physics goes to their widely-accepted explanation of CO2 global warming as caused by Planck black body radiation from the sky, attempting to wow you with the Stefan-Boltzmann Law that’s derived from the Planck Radiation Law, complete with equations full of temperature to the 4th power terms (T^4).

Here’s one example from Harvard, which is taught in all IPCC-run universities (Fig. 7–12): Harvard book chap. 7

Zonk! Gases don’t emit Planck black body radiation. They only absorb and emit radiation at specific wavelengths, on a photon by photon basis, while a Planck black body absorbs and emits radiation at all wavelengths. No gas radiates a total power curve proportional to T^4. In the Earth-Sun climate system, only the Sun and Earth are black bodies. The atmosphere and empty space aren’t. If atmospheric CO2 were a black body in the sky, that would solve all their problems, which stem from the original historic mistake of calling it the greenhouse gas effect, when a real greenhouse won’t work without a solid roof. When that mistake was realized, the greenhouse gas theory almost died until it was resurrected by devious leftist scientists with visions of trillions of dollars dancing in their heads.

Back to kiddie lab experiments. Here’s two adults at the U. of Oslo who did it professionally, and verified what I’ve been saying, that CO2 gas has no heating power at any concentration: Physicists’ Lab Experiment Shows A CO2 Increase From 0.04% To 100% Leads To No Observable Warming.

Speaking of microwave ovens, the IPCC CO2 warming hoaxers rely on a widespread misconception that microwaves can cook food, therefore global warming must be a snap. No surprise, being a religion masquerading as science, IPCC true believers can’t believe the truth about microwaves even when it’s carefully explained. Now it’s your turn.

The truth is that a typical Microwave oven klystron, er, magnetron tube’s output is typically at 2.45 GHz (7 cm) (70,000 microns) (2.74 in.), which has a Planck radiation temperature of 0.04K (-273C), which is colder than deep space and can’t melt a dry ice chip. Instead, it relies on water molecules being polar and always seeking to align with a strong electromagnetic field, and it oscillates the field at the right rate to make the molecule spin and rub against neighboring molecules to heat them up by simple friction like rubbing two sticks together. Never do the water molecules or any of the food molecules absorb microwave radiation into their quantum levels and turn it into kinetic energy to heat up. Instead, the microwaves merely cause the whole molecule to spin to pop popcorn or heat coffee. This is not Planck radiation heating but Dielectric heating. The half-power depth for water is about 12 mm at a frequency of 2.45 GHz.

Did I mention that CO2 radiation can’t melt an ice cube, and neither can microwave radiation? If you take a paper cup with an ice cube in it and put it in the microwave oven, it won’t melt because the water molecules aren’t free to spin, but if you then pour some water into the cup the water will soon boil and melt the ice cube. BTW, try microwaving a grape and see it create plasma and light up. Another source on dielectric heating from an academic publisher: Dielectric Heating

To pivot to a related topic, the Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits the atmosphere from raising the temperature of the Earth’s surface with its own heat no matter the mechanism, any more than a blanket can raise your body temperature, since the atmosphere has no independent source of heat, and is always cooler than the surface because it contains air heated by the surface that’s convecting upward and losing temperature to the thermodynamic Lapse rate, whereby rising air trades heat for work to expand against the decreasing pressure with height. No surprise, from day one only the IPCC has been trying to deny the Second Law because it makes their hoax too obvious to non-scientists, and deliberately ignoring the lapse rate because if atmospheric CO2 could really heat the Earth’s surface it would first have to reverse it. That’s why they invented the “CO2 back radiation hoax”, relying on general ignorance of Planck’s Law.

Now that I’ve gone through it in detail, CO2 global warming via “back radiation” is seen to be a fake physics hoax. For 30+ years it’s been relentlessly pushed by the leftist-run U.N. IPCC octopus of kept scientists, academics, politicians, and journalists to frame CO2 emissions as causing global warming as part of their master program to shut down the fossil fuel industry that underpins capitalism and its wealthy comfortable lifestyle and soften the world up for a global Marxist takeover.

Now that you know the IPCC’s lies about 15 micron CO2 radiation, look at how they try to snow the public with impressive-looking diagrams of Earth surface radiation as seen by satellites, which feature a big notch at wave number 666 (15 microns). That’s supposed to make CO2-driven global warming case closed, when all it proves is that atmospheric CO2 absorbs 15 micron surface radiation, then reemits it, only to be absorbed by other CO2 molecules, on and on, until collisions with nonpolar O2 and N2 molecules drain the energy. And none of this has anything to do with heat, so when will the IPCC give the money back?

Above is a graph of downdwelling radiation at Earth’s surface measured by the Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI). The blue curve shows a prominent peak at CO’s 666 wavelength number (15 microns), but, the high readings don’t stop there but go way up to 750 and down to 450, which is 13 and 22 microns. The highest values are at 500, which is 20 microns. Worse, the values are in milliwatts like at the top of the atmosphere, not in watts like the hoaxers need to affect surface temperatures. Duh, 666 is still -80C radiation and can’t melt an ice cube, and 13 microns is -50C, and 20 microns is -128C. All of these dinky values are a long ways from proof of Planck radiation from gases, only photon by photon radiation, and are too dinky to even affect surface temperatures. Earth’s avg. surface temperature is 15C, which is wave number 1000, where the downdwelling surface radiation on a clear day is almost zero, meaning that radiation from the air couldn’t be causing it. So this is an additional disproof of atmospheric CO2 global warming. The red and green graphs are water vapor radiation on a cloudy day, which is way higher than radiation from a clear sky and goes way up to Planck radiation temperatures of 100C, showing that water vapor can cause a little global warming, but very little. Zonk! None, because the clouds block the 5500C sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface, and just reemit some 100C infrared. So I guess the IPCC doesn’t have to seek to dry up the oceans too.

Wien's Law Calculator

Scientists Determine CO2 Levels Must TRIPLE To Yield A Tiny 0.5 W/m² Forcing At The Ocean Surface

Another big hoax pushed by the IPCC to bolster their CO2 warming hoax is to claim that there is an Earth's energy budget based on an alleged radiation energy balance between the Sun and the Earth, and that the satellite data showing a bit notch in the surface radiation at CO2’s 15 micron wavelength prove that the balance is being thrown off by atmospheric CO2. Zonk! It only proves that there is no radiation energy balance.

The Earth’s surface doesn’t rely on radiation alone to shed each day’s solar radiation. It also makes use of evaporation and convection. Water has a huge heat capacity, so it takes a lot of heat energy to raise its temperature enough to evaporate, making it the #1 cooling fluid that makes life on Earth possible. But pure dry air is also a great coolant because of convection, and CO2 being just 0.04% it just rides along with the 99.96% of O2 and N2, with no special role.

We already know that Earth’s surface has an albedo close to 1.0, meaning that it reradiates all the solar energy it absorbed after downshifting the wavelength. Since we know that all surface energy is dissipated via radiation and convection, that’s the only energy balance that matters, not a mythical one at the edge of space.

The onset of Natural convection is determined by the dimensionless Rayleigh number, which must be greater than 1708. For most Earth surfaces in direct sunlight, convection competes with radiation.

“Convection can only begin once it becomes energy efficient. Period. Basically, if the actual lapse rate is below the adiabatic lapse rate, the atmosphere is stable. If the actual lapse rate is above the adiabatic lapse rate, the atmosphere is unstable and will start to convect. This is in addition to any effects of conduction or radiation. The lapse rate thus acts as a ‘governor’. Any lapse rate BELOW the adiabatic lapse rate (including inversions that are common at night) can exist pretty easily. But the further above the adiabatic lapse rate you try to go, the more convection will kick in to try to return the lapse rate back to the adiabatic lapse rate. Basically, it is impossible to push the lapse rate noticeably above the adiabatic lapse rate.” - Tim Folkerts, Which wins out? Convection or Radiation

“On Earth today about 15% of heat is convected, 30% is radiated and 52% evaporated. The work done by convection and the latent heat is dumped directly to the atmosphere driving weather. About 40% of the surface radiation gets absorbed by the atmosphere and the rest passes through to space. Clouds, water vapour and CO2 radiate atmospheric heat to space from the top of the troposphere. The atmosphere receives 5 times more heat energy from convection and evaporation latent heat than it does from radiation. It is therefore more energy efficient for the surface to cool through convection and latent heat rather than through radiation. “ - Clive Best, Which wins out? Convection or Radiation

This is why the Earth’s atmosphere isn’t a greenhouse but a giant chimney, and CO2 has no special magical powers to heat the surface with its own heat like the IPCC claims. No surprise, the IPCC acts like convection doesn’t exist, because it explains why the Earth’s surface temperature swings are moderated over what pure radiation would cause (like on the Moon).

The IPCC scientists biggest false claim is that the Earth must balance its outgoing radiation energy with its incoming solar radiation energy instead of losing a lot of it to work in convection, making the surface seem to need to magically raise its temperature by 33C to keep the balance that actually doesn’t exist, again making CO2 global warming seem to be proved without need for actual proof. Every windy day sees Nature laughing at the IPCC’s fake Sun-Earth radiation balance. Their con is to deliberately confuse radiation energy with heat, which doesn’t exist until some molecules absorb it into their structure and convert it to kinetic energy of motion AKA temperature, and as we know is limited to a narrow wavelength range. There is no need for total energy to balance, which would imply that the Earth is a gigantic mirrored ball. Instead, different wavelengths have different fates. The 5th grader notion that a radiation energy imbalance would cause the Earth to melt ignores the variety of ways that it handles thermal radiation in the limited IR band to cool. And you can’t balance high energy solar radiation with low energy surface radiation in the first place, it’s junk science. Ironically because of a fluke this radiation energy balance does hold for the Moon, a lifeless rock that can only cool itself with radiation, simplifying the situation when reflection is added. There’s no way it works with the Earth with its thick atmosphere and oceans. What do the IPCC scientists think the public has stamped on their foreheads to try to apply the Moon situation to our Earth just to frame CO2 emissions as causing global warming?

So atmospheric CO2 can’t cause global warming at any concentration. What really happens? CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere (415 ppm, currently growing by 3 ppm/year), the entirety of which absorbs surface heat caused by the Sun via conduction (direct contact), raising its temperature and making it less dense (more buoyant) and causing it to rise toward space via Atmospheric convection, trading its heat for work via Adiabatic expansion against the decreasing pressure until it becomes the same density and temperature as the surrounding atmosphere, which eventually grows so cold and thin that all convection stops at the tropopause approx. 10 km high.

Each time heat is converted to work, some Gibbs free energy is irretrievably lost to entropy, which always has to increase for the reaction to be spontaneous, reducing the amount of work by that entropy increase multiplied by the temperature, meaning more work is lost the higher the temperature. This process goes on continually all over the Universe, threatening the eventual Heat death of the Universe. Even if the work can be turned back into heat, there would be less heat than originally.

Entropy (units: Joules/K) should be thought of as energy dispersal. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, but work and entropy spread energy around (disperse it) so it can never be in as useful a form again. Think of when the Universe was young. It might have only taken, say, one Joule of energy to create a million degrees of heat. As the Universe approaches heat death, it might take, say, 1 million Joules of energy to create one degree of heat. Every time work and heat are interchanged spontaneously, entropy increases, and energy disperses. With adiabatic expansion it’s easy to see that the gas molecules can’t be made to jump back into their original smaller volume. When the IPCC claims an Earth-Sun radiation balance, they act like there’s no entropy, when Planck radiation and air convection both increase entropy. Indeed, Planck blackbody radiation is defined as that containing the largest amount of entropy for a given energy.

If you insist on probing entropy dispersion more deeply, here's the concept of exergy:

"Notice that exergy is not conserved – only if entropy-free energy is transferred, which implies that the transfer is reversible. All processes in reality are, however, irreversible, which means that exergy is lost (and entropy is produced). Loss of exergy and production of entropy are two different descriptions of the same reality, namely, that all processes are irreversible, and we unfortunately always have some loss of energy forms which can do work to energy forms which cannot do work (heat at the temperature of the environment). So, the formulation of the second law of thermodynamic by use of exergy is ‘all real processes are irreversible which implies that exergy inevitably is lost’. ‘Exergy is not conserved’, while energy of course is conserved by all processes according to the first law of thermodynamics." - Exergy

I’m not framing them. Here’s an article straight from the IPCC claiming that climate change is caused by lack of Sun-Earth energy balance, which could only occur if the Earth were a giant polished mirror.

The Earth’s atmosphere is a Carnot heat engine that converts thermal energy from the surface to winds and storms when it’s not just wasting it in a treadmill of convection, which causes warmer air to rise by pulling colder air down in its place, only to cool itself via adiabatic expansion and start descending. Yes, when a parcel of air descends it gains heat, but no work is done since it isn’t expanding or contracting, and the parcel of air merely seeks its place in the lapse rate that is based on pressure. Since free energy was lost to do the rising, it will always take more heat energy to make the parcel rise again. The atmosphere’s Carnot engine increases entropy bigtime to blow off roofs and uproot trees, losing surface heat energy forever and keeping it from ever returning to space. The Earth and its atmosphere is nearly a closed system to mass, but that doesn’t mean there’s a radiation balance with the Sun. Only the lifeless airless Moon comes close to that.

The systematic drop of Earth atmospheric temperature with height by 9.8C/km (18.8F/mi.) known as the adiabatic Lapse rate is caused by the atmosphere’s specific heat and Earth’s gravity, permanently encasing the Earth in a thick frigid band of air that if the Sun quit shining would threaten an Ice Age, making climate alarmist claims of a runaway greenhouse warming effect into a big laugh.

Sometimes IPCC critics claim that since the atmosphere only contains 1 CO2 molecule for every 2500 non-CO2 molecules, CO2 could only raise its neighboring molecules’ temperature by 1C after increasing its own temperature by 2500C or some other huge number. Since most of the atmosphere is frigid, absorbed surface radiation can’t do much to raise its temperature, but the point of the IPCC CO2 warming hoax is that atmospheric CO2 absorbs surface radiation and reemits it on a photon by photon basis to reheat the surface, leaving it at the same temperature in the sky.

When it comes to global temperature, one has to realize that the Earth’s surface is 71% ocean and 29% land. The Water cycle (Hydrocycle) is a Carnot cycle where for every kilogram of water evaporated at the surface and returning as ice, snow, rain etc. some 694 Watts dissipates into the atmosphere. 86% of global surface evaporation happens in the oceans. No wonder that the oceans never get above 32C despite relentless solar radiation over millions of years. In the big picture the convection process over land is minor, and the oceans act as Earth’s global temperature regulator. - Introduction to Oceanography

One never-say-die IPCC objection I’ve encountered is that 15 micron -80C photons might not raise the temperature of Earth’s surface, but at least can slow down the rate of cooling. This is moose hockey because the normal surface temperature range of -50C to +50C is way hotter than -80C, and Planck’s Radiation Law ensures that the surface cools as fast as it can via radiation at the surface temperature wavelength, where it puts most of the radiation power. Hence colder radiation can’t slow down the cooling one iota, unless/until the surface radiates so much heat that it cools to -80C itself, where -80C radiation would finally have an effect. Anything but come clean and give up the hoax.

No surprise, the desperate IPCC also claims that methane (from cow farts and melting tundra) is a greenhouse gas. Let’s see. Its radiation absorption/emission wavelengths are 3.5 microns and 8 microns, whose Planck radiation temperatures are 555C (1031F) and 89C (192F). Again, I don’t think Earthlings would have to worry about cow farts, but maybe Venusians would. Actually, a cooked steak has an internal temperature of 145F, so God must have designed Earth for the convenience of cows and steak eaters. :)

Methane

Wien's Law Calculator

Other gases pushed by the IPCC as greenhouse gases to divert attention from CO2 and its problems are nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).

First, NO2. It’s radiation absorption/emission wavelength of .3-.65 microns has a Planck radiation temperature of 9400C to 4200C. This means that atmospheric NO2 absorbs some UV in the clouds during thunderstorms, but that does nothing for the climate because it’s just weather, and concentrations are in the parts per billion.

On the role of nitrogen dioxide in the absorption of solar radiation

SO2’s radiation absorption/emission wavelength .3-.325 microns, which is way up in the ultraviolet region, and has a Planck radiation temperature of 9400C to 8500C. Again, no effect on global weather outside of volcanoes. - exp-studies

“According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), SF6 is the most potent Greenhouse gas that it has evaluated, with a Global warming potential of 23,900 times that of Carbon dioxide (CO2) when compared over a 100-year period.” - Wikipedia article on Sulfur hexafluoride .

Let’s check out their claims. “The main absorption band of CF4molecules is located in the spectral range of 1280-1290 cm-1.” - aip.scitation.org

1280’s Planck radiation temperature is 98.3C /213F (7.81 microns). 1290’s is 101C/208F (7.75 microns). So atmospheric CF4 can’t even interfere with radiation from Earth’s surface (-50C to +50C) than CO2. Maybe over Old Faithful :)

As if they never run out of lies, some IPCC apologists point to the Carbon dioxide laser, which has an output radiation wavelength of 10.6 microns (0C like ice) and is used in laser cutting and engraving, and medical cutting like removing warts and facial resurfacing. Surely if CO2 can cut metal it can cause global warming, right? Wrong. A CO2 laser is a complex expensive device that mixes CO2 with N2 in an electrical discharge tube to collisionally pump up the 4.3 micron energy level of CO2, creating what is called a population inversion, which radioactively decays to the 15 micron level, creating a powerful beam (tens of watts) of collimated photons at 15–4.3=10.6 microns, which can be focused by a lens, giving a power density of millions of watts per square meter that literally explosively evaporates surface molecules it's aimed at, with natural Planck black body radiation bypassed. The 15 micron photons in the CO2 gas then decay to the ground state by colliding with cold helium (He) atoms in the tube, which heat up and have to be recooled to repeat the lasing cycle, either by colliding with the cold tube walls or by being expelled and new cold He atoms injected.

The typical gas ratio in a CO2 laser is 9.5% CO2, 13.5% N2, and 77% He. Nature has nothing like this, but maybe you can get Bill Gates to send some up in balloons :) - Frequently Asked Questions about CO2 laser lenses for cutting

Once again, too bad for the IPCC, since 10.6 microns have a Planck radiation temperature the same as an ice cube (0C), they don’t directly heat anything above 0C, but the great power breaks chemical bonds on a thin layer at the surface of the target (up to 20 mm), releasing heat if the bonds are exothermic. - Why do lasers cut? Is this a case of light acting as matter?

Did I mention 33C? The IPCC calculates its mythical radiation balance by first making the Earth stationary and flat with no atmosphere and no oceans, cutting the Sun’s power to one-fourth (340 watts per sq. meter) to go with the fact that a disk has one-fourth the area of a sphere with the same radius, then using the Stefan-Boltzmann pure radiation law backwards (fourth root instead of fourth power) to get an “average global temperature” (GAT) of -17C, which is 33C below the measured value of +15/16C, claiming that atmospheric CO2 supplies the missing 33C despite its Planck radiation temperature of -80C.

This ridiculous model bears no relationship to reality, yet the entire IPCC superstructure is built on this foundation of horse manure. The truth is that when the Sun is restored to full power and the Earth is restored to a rotating sphere with atmosphere and oceans, it’s the Sun that determines the GAT not CO2. Remember how the IPCC started with a diagram of solar radiation vs. Earth surface radiation at the top of the atmosphere based on satellite measurements, showing a big notch at CO2’s frigid 15 micron wavelength? Red Bull may give you wings, but there’s no way that CO2 shifts the latter curve right by 33C. All the satellite data proves is that CO2 just blocks surface 15 micron radiation from reaching the top of the atmosphere, while whatever happens to it, it can’t melt an ice cube. Probably it gets lost to collisions to way warmer air molecules, but if any -80C radiation bounces around between CO2 molecules and the surface it isn’t heating anything, and eventually gets dispersed harmlessly by entropy into the ever-growing Heat Death of the Universe. How sick of the IPCC hoaxers to show satellite views of Earth surface radiation that show the 15 micron CO2 wavelength not making it to space, and claiming that this proves that the CO2 molecules are causing an "energy imbalance" leading to global warming. BTW, all of it is blocked at the current atmospheric concentration, so how do they claim that increasing the concentration could cause more warming?

See my full explanation if you’re interested: TL Winslow's answer to How much does the warming from human CO2 contribute to the entire greenhouse effect of 33C?

CO2 emissions are therefore not threatening a global climate Armageddon, but are good because they feed plant photosynthesis and green the planet to feed the teeming billions. How evil to try to foist global Marxism by risking global starvation to trick you into “fighting climate change” by robbing the atmosphere of CO2.

Back to the thermosphere. The IPCC admits that CO2 in that thin high region blocks UV radiation from solar storms, protecting the surface. But what reason do they give? That the atmosphere is so thin that CO2’s radiation can’t be absorbed and reemitted by other CO2 molecules to change the direction from up to down. Never do they mention that CO2’s higher energy 2.7 micron and 4.3 micron absorption/emission wavelengths are doing the work, and the low energy 15 micron wavelength that is all that is left in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) isn’t involved, much less than that it can’t melt an ice cube. Instead, they claim that CO2 contracts the thermosphere by cooling it, when it’s only the UV from solar storms that it blocks.

Scientists detect carbon dioxide accumulation at the edge of space

A misinterpreted claim about a NASA press release, CO2, solar flares, and the thermosphere is making the rounds

If you’re still confused, I’ve published many more Quora articles dissecting the IPCC CO2 global warming hoax, all listed in my New Real Climate Science Course.

But who am I? It’s truly ironic that I studied radiative (thermal) physics for 50 years yet get no money or recognition, while the IPCC so-called climate scientists are mostly physics flunkouts who found a home with a pseudo or junk science based on leftist environmentalism, and get it all, basking in the er, Sun and even controlling the academic journals that shut me out, leaving only Web sites like Quora open to me, with an audience of one millionth of theirs. So instead of shutting me out too because I’m an amateur, be glad you found somebody speaking truth to power with no owners/trainers. Remember that the IPCC is influencing government policy and threatening to cost people trillions for nothing except Marxist social-racial justice under false pretenses, and it’s not too late to derail their train.

**So here’s my final plea to your reason. I’m the world’s smartest person, but at times like this I wish everybody were as smart as me so I could unhypnotize them and make them see the light. Let’s go back to the simplest terms. What makes it get hot every day in the summer? CO2? No, solar radiation, whose photons have a temperature of 5500C. Yet because of all of the cooling processes, the Sun can’t raise the Earth surface temperature above 50C even in the hottest part of the summer, and only for a short time before sunset. So how can CO2’s weak puny -80C photons add anything? The IPCC is trying to palm off CO2’s photons as equal to the Sun’s, able to raise the 50C to 51C, 52C, or higher. All Earth surface photons are recycled solar photons, not recycled CO2 photons. The IPCC has spent over 30 years and untold millions attempting to frame CO2 emissions as evil in order to destroy Western capitalism, pretending to find a pony in the manure while never allowing any theory to be seriously researched that the Sun alone heats the Earth. Nyuk nyuk nyuk, even the Three Stooges can see a scam that’s displayed plain in their faces.**

Let’s dream of the day when yours truly has finally been accepted by the public, and have become a glammed and glowing celebrity, nominated for the Nobel Physics Prize. Imagine the IPCC staging a last-ditch debate with me in the hopes that they can somehow discredit me and save their trillion-dollar scam. They soon pretend to have the killer argument that while CO2’s 15 micron radiation/absorption wavelength can’t heat anything, it’s 2.7 micron and 4.3 micron wavelengths can, and voila!, they just discovered that atmospheric CO2 absorbs and reemits solar photons at those wavelengths and torches the Earth’s surface with 400C and 800C photons. Zonk! Those photons along with way higher temperature ones are in sunlight whether CO2 absorbs (blocks) or reemits (passes) them or not, yet the total power of the Sun still can’t raise Earth’s surface above 50C. The IPCC has been pushing the hoax that CO2 absorbs and reemits Earth surface photons, raising surface temperatures even above that. What sick self-hating leftist buffoons. The king is dead. Long live the king.

DR TIM BALL MUST READ : Environmentalism – Evidence Suggests It Was Always And Only About Achieving World Government

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TL Winslow's answer to Why are we not switching to renewable energy when that can solve the problem of global warming. I know it's not cost effective yet, but isn't the life on Earth more important than some currency?

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