Professor Claes Johnson Dissects the Failed Greenhouse Gas Theory
February 14 2011
Dr. Judith Curry
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Interview by Ken Coffman (KLC—electrical engineer and Publisher of Stairway Press) with Dr. Claes Johnson (CJ—Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and co-author of Slaying the Sky Dragon – Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory). This interview was conducted via e-mail in February of 2011.
This conversation is mainly related to the challenges and interaction at Dr. Judith Curry's (PhD of Geophysical Sciences and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology) influential Climate Etc. blog in a thread called Slaying the Greenhouse Dragon ...a vigorous conversation that attracted nearly two thousand comments in less than two weeks.
KLC: First of all, from a purely radiative point of view (with no conduction or convection), is it possible for a passive radiator to increase the peak or average temperature of an active radiator? (An active radiator is one with an internal source of heat energy).
CJ: As posed, I cannot answer the question, because I my answer must be: 'It depends...'.
As a start, let me as a start clarify my standpoint. Heat transfer (or heat flow) by conduction and radiation is governed by temperature gradients described by Fourier or Stefan-Boltzmann laws, with the flow of heat in the opposite direction to the temperature gradient, which effectively seeks to decrease the gradient by taking heat from the hot (rich) and giving to the cold (poor).
Heat transfer by conduction and radiation is thus a diffusion process tending to decrease temperature gradients (differences) by smoothing or averaging. This process of (positive) diffusion of taking from the rich and giving to the poor—decreasing wealth differences—can be compared with the reverse process of negative diffusion of taking from the poor and giving it to the rich which increases wealth differences.
Now, a process of (positive) diffusion process is stable (Sweden) and is realized in the physics of heat transfer by conduction and radiation. However, a process of negative diffusion is unstable and breaks down (Egypt) and does not persist over time.
The above concerns heat transfer without forcing. With forcing anything can happen. By forcing (by a compressor, for example), heat can be transferred from the cold inside of a refrigerator to the warm outside. But if the compressor is shut off the warm exterior will heat the cold interior, inevitably and always.
With regard to radiation, it remains to prove Stefan-Boltzmann's Law of heat transfer from a warm blackbody to a cold. The standard proof is by statistics of quanta, which is difficult to understand and is questionable from physics point of view since there does not appear to be a department of statistics inside blackbodies nor between them.
I give a different proof based on a deterministic wave model subject to some form of finite precision computation, in analog form in real physics, and in digital form (finite number of decimals) in computational simulation. I show that a warm body with a spectrum containing high frequencies will heat a cold body, because a cold body cannot emit high-frequencies (because its "lips are too stiff"), but cannot protect itself from absorbing coordinated high frequencies in resonance, and the only way out is to break down and store these incoming high frequencies as uncoordinated high-frequencies (i.e. heat). In this model heating comes from "eating" high frequencies which cannot be directly re-emitted, and thus a cold body cannot heat a warm body because the "food of high frequencies" is missing.
Again, what is said above concerns the interaction between blackbodies without forcing. With forcing—as in a microwave oven—anything can happen, i.e. forced heating can occur via high-amplitude low-frequency waves.
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Let's discuss Svensmark! To Hell with CO2.
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