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The following "reply to article" is from Alan Siddons and concerns the recent "opposing view" from discovermagazine.com - Big Picture Science: climate change denial on Fox News, and was their reply to Joe Bastardi's MUST SEE VIDEO LINK: Fox's Huddy Falsely Claims Skeptic's Questionable Study "Seems To Debunk" That Global Warming Is "Man-Made"

As you will see, Alan's reply has "science" on his side........your have to make up your own mind about what scientificamerican.com used!!

Clicking an embedded link in Discover Magazine’s polemic against Joe Bastardi will take you to Scientific American’s polemic.

Here’s where Bastardi goes wrong, according to SA:

What climate science says is not that CO2 carries energy into the atmosphere or somehow magically generates it out of nowhere. Instead, it says that CO2 and other gases acts as a blanket, keeping heat from escaping into space. This, as Bastardi should know, is called the greenhouse effect.

Remember that: “keeping heat from escaping into space.”

But this is what else “climate science” will tell you:

Earth’s thermal emission with a greenhouse effect = 239 W/m²

Earth’s thermal emission without a greenhouse effect = 239 W/m²

The same.

For in greater detail, as this “science” purports to explain, the greenhouse blanket reduces the heat spilling out to space but in doing so makes the earth so hot that it spills out what it did before. In other words, the evidence we have of a blanketing effect is that there is no evidence. A blanketing effect is unobservable because the earth releases the same amount of heat with or without a blanket on. Indeed, Scientific American admits this in the very next sentence.
The Earth radiates into space roughly the same amount of energy that it receives from the sun.

So how can SA say that heat is kept from escaping? Or are we to imagine that the greenhouse effect doesn’t yet exist because it is understood to trap heat?

I don’t know why, but apparently it never occurs to a lot of people that real blankets don’t work the way they do in “climate science.” In the real world, a heated object emits infrared radiation according to its temperature. The temperature of this object will naturally be less than optimum if it’s also heating its surroundings, however. Insulation reduces such heat loss. Instead of warming the world around it, an insulated object reserves more heat for itself and thereby reaches a higher temperature. Its relative heat gain is the direct result of less heat lost to the environment.

Insulation isn’t a heat source, then; it’s merely a passive barrier that reduces the rate of loss. An insulator can only make something warmer by making something else cooler. As such, a blanketed object necessarily emits less heat than it did before. But the greenhouse blanket is obviously a different kind of blanket, for the earth radiates the same magnitude of heat with it as without, which can only mean that this blanket IS a heat source.

Those who argue for a passive greenhouse “blanket” are just kidding themselves. The real theory of the greenhouse effect can be found on many university websites. One just has to look. The actual theory makes the atmosphere a second source of heat, the first source being the sun. Here is Derek Alker’s very nice depiction of how this process is supposed to play out.



Sun-induced warmth on the earth’s surface heats up “greenhouse gases,”which thereafter turn around to heat the surface that’s heating them. In other words, if these gases absorb 239 watts per square meter from the surface, they send back the same, and increase the surface’s temperature till it’s emitting 478 watts per square meter, double the energy it got from the sun. It hardly needs saying, of course, but no laboratory experiment has ever demonstrated the existence of such a heating mechanism. No device has ever been invented to show us how this works. For such a device would defy the laws of physics.

So who is more in error — the formerly distinguished Scientific American, which clumsily contradicts itself in the gap between two sentences, proposing that the earth’s heat is simultaneously trapped and released, a queer sort of process that does indeed “magically generate energy out of nowhere”? Or Joe Bastardi for reminding us that extra energy CANNOT come out of nowhere?

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IceCap.us notes

Joe Bastardi has written this follow up to his brief Fox News interview that got under the skin of the church of global warming, now meeting in New Zealand.