View Article

Bogus Greenhouse Gas Numbers Create Waterless Earth

According to the numbers fed into government equations for the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) Earth would not have any liquid water at all. This is a key revelation of astrophysicist, Joe Postma’s new paper.

“Is any model that can’t give us liquid water a model worth trusting?” So asks Postma as he goes about providing an alternative Earth climate model that uses the same starting and finishing points as does the GHE i.e. his numbers balance Earth's in = out energy budget.

Postma’s alternative model accommodates something utterly critical: it factors in a wet Earth made up of mostly liquid water. By contrast, the standard GHE model used by IPCC/NASA does not. Their version requires all water on Earth to exist only as frigid ice. "Hardly credible" and "junk science" says an emergent group of skeptics known as the Slayers.

An Earth Model with No Water is No Good

Astrophysicist Postma, one of their newer recruits, posits that any model of the Earth that doesn’t factor in liquid water is unphysical junk. Who can disagree with that statement? The first half of Postma’s paper sets out the numbers for the standard GHE model and thereafter he lays out his version and invites us to determine which is the more credible.
The numbers at the start and end points have to be the same for both models – we know this because the sun’s energy input and output is measurable as per the satellite data – no credible scientists disputes that. So both Postma and his adversaries, those government GHE aficionados, scrupulously start and finish with the same amount of (solar) energy: so that what comes into our atmosphere must also go out.

Anyone who reads Postma’s paper THOROUGHLY discovers that the standard GHE model is already on shaky ground right from the start because for it to fulfill it’s in=out balance, it has to make Earth so cold that no liquid water can exist. Is this the fatal flaw in the standard equations of the GHE that skeptics have been looking for? Postma gives us an emphatic "yes" and sets out his argument in great detail.

No Night or Day on Climate Scientists’ Earth

GHE aficionados integrate all incoming energy over day and night i.e. 24-hour periods, so that the peak insolation near Zenith is obscured. But water has a non-linear response to energy input that means the GHE model fails to capture important processes in the climate system that will affect the calculation of temperature without a GHE. Once water is warmed it creates its own microclimate which retains more heat and that is what climatologists failed to factor into their numbers.

Postma says:

“It’s a non-linear, step-function response to power input. Power input of 240 W/m2 could never breach that step function and so could never explain what exists beyond it. But a power input of 1370 W/m2 distributed over the hemisphere it actually impinges CAN breach that step function.

And so you have completely different worlds…completely different characterizations of the physics. You get an atmosphere and a water planet and warm surface all from sunlight.”

In essence climatologists botched their numbers, cut corners and chose to work with averages instead of real numbers and real boundary conditions. Postma and the Slayers group of climate analysts demonstrate the problem further by asking readers to consider certain real world analogies comparable to what is being debated by scientists in their less readily understandable and arcane parlance.

Simple Analogies Complement Complex Equations

For example, the Slayers use the 'cooking' analogy whereby in cooking food the outcome may be radically altered because cooking some foods for 2 hours at 200 degrees C., although mathematically ok will not give the same physical output as cooking for 8 hours at 50 degrees C.

Postma finesses this argument on Judith Curry’s blog and addresses the importance of the boundary conditions set for us i.e. the GHE equations are flawed because they do not permit liquid water to exist. He shows how by averaging the solar input of energy across the whole sphere the GHE gives only a weak twilight rather. But like the cooking analogy above, if we discard the GHE and model our planet more accurately with a day/night difference, the intensity of the daylight on the half-lit sphere suddenly warms the surface with sufficient intense energy to create liquid water.

On this he said, “The Wattage only impinges one side of the Earth." Once we adopt a night/day model it means the input is much warmer than the output on the daylight side. Joe concludes that thus, "The input is warm enough to sustain a water planet without a GHE necessarily.” |Joseph E Postma | August 17, 2011 at 1:54 pm |

The crux of Postma's message is that the GHE model is busted because climate scientists haven't learned the difference between temperature and energy such that their failing to accommodate the existence of liquid water is the fatal flaw in the standard GHE model.