Thermorons

What I don’t like about climate in blogland is people who don’t understand science at all, yet pretend they do.   Outside of climate science, there are plenty of people who reject climate science completely simply because they recognize it for the political nonsense that it is.   They have no real concept as to whether the underlying physics actually functions, nor do they care, because they are smart enough to see through the lies and exaggerations and we all know if you catch the salesman in one lie, there are probably others as well.   Of course that is why Climategate is still being talked about.   The lies were exposed quite clearly so no amount of political committee “investigation” can shove it back under the carpet.

But it is the thermal whacko’s that bother me.   I cannot stand some of the inaccuracy or wrongheadedness spouted with respect to global warming.   People run around all the time spouting off about the second law of thermodynamics, in a manner which has Clausius flipping in his grave.   It is disastrously misleading what they write, and like the exaggerations of politicians climate scientists, it can do no good for those who would accurately expose the science problems with climate extremism.

The second law does not prevent radiation from a cooler body being absorbed by a warmer body….

That is not what it says.   Nobody with any thermodynamics background of useful proportion believes that.   Only fools who think they know something even dare write it and I’ve been told that by people far too often.  I can’t really fathom how people make such bold statements about the laws of thermodynamics when it is absolutely obvious they have no understanding whatsoever.  What is wrong with people such that they don’t feel the need to actually learn something before opining?  It seems an important step in making bold statements — that you know what you are talking about — as it prevents accidental jackassissm from occurring.  Hell, every radiative physics equation would break down were that true.  The very concept is so effed up that it even creates time paradoxes, yet opine they do!!   And quite loudly.  Isn’t the internet wonderful………..

Unfortunately for those large numbers of us who would rationally dispute the nonsense of climate science, there are still too many of the hard-core anti-AGW thrill-seekers in the world.  They are self-appointed saviors from the obvious exaggerations of the equal but oppositely self-appointed savior scientists who are in the business of making those exaggerations!  Attracted like magnets perhaps?

The second law does not prevent energy conduction from a cooler body to a warmer body either….

That is not what the second law of thermodynamics says and NOBODY with even a semi-functional thermodynamic understanding thinks otherwise.  If someone tells you that energy cannot transfer from the cold body to the warm one,  find someone else to explain it because you have just found yourself in the presence of a serious non-expert on thermodynamics.

I’m sick and tired of the whole mess.   Really, if you find yourself falling for that nonsense, turn it off and consider reading a thermodynamics book.  They are absolutely dry reading but if you are going down the thought path described above, you need to do something or you will break your brain!!  Broken and lost!

Alternatively, if you don’t want to spend months reading the driest literature you ever imagined, (it ain’t Dr. Suess folks) you could simply understand that the second law was written as a bulk property law.   If you flip a coin a quadrillion times, you will get an average of 50% heads every time.   Thermal interactions between billions of atoms are very fast and repeatable as energy is never lost, thus they can be well described by probability.  Thus we can say with absolute 100% certainty that NET heat always flows from a hot to cold body.

Energy as heat conducts and radiates in both directions between hot and cold bodies.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is FLAT WRONG and will eventually cause you brain damage!  If you escape thermodynamic brain damage caused by one of these a train-wrecks of a mind, you might find yourself next hearing about politics or gravity or spacetime with equally accurate descriptions.  The result of bad data, tearing trough your delicate neural structure like a bull in a china shop. Ignorance is absolutely contagious, and you don’t want to spend your days repairing your mind from such damage!

Consider that in each body there exists molecules and atoms at completely different quantum energy states – all at the same time.  On that scale, there are hot and cold molecules in any body, all the time.   Absolute zero temperature is the only possible exception where a body of molecules doesn’t exhibit multiple simultaneous energy states that I am aware of, but I’m an engineer, not a particle physicist.  But the point I’m trying to make is, how the hell would one atom would know enough about its neighbor atoms to know NOT to absorb a photon from a colder body than the average energy of its immediate neighbors?  Average energy of course being temperature.   Are there labels on the photons, do atoms take polls of each other?  Clearly not and that alone proves the mind-breaking, neuron-trashing concepts these people spout is flat stupid.  The NET heat flow however, is from hot to cold, always, because of the higher probability of energy transfer from a body which has higher excitation to a lower excitation body- and thus the second law of thermodynamics holds true.

So don’t be a thermal moron.   Be a thermal truther.  I’m sure the one thing we can agree on is that the world has enough morons.

The good news for skeptics is that on the other side, it is the “main stream” AGW scientists who are the whackos, exaggerators and cause-driven lunatics who see thermal trends in tree-rings, sheep or fish dimensions, and mollusk shells and finger-paint pictures of climate doom using weak math and really bad data.   It leaves actual climate skeptics squarely in the reasonable middle, and there are a lot of us.

How do you find us?  How do you know when you’ve run into a reasonable climate opinion?  We never dispute whether absorbing gasses — actually absorb.  We don’t fret about imperfect performance of a blackbody or reasonable approximations or parametrization of equations (although we can question some of them).   There is no room for us to imagine that some form of magic bullet is going to come along and prove the basic concepts of climate science wrong.  And we universally recognize that climate models have failed.  Unbeknownst to the thermorons, those opinions come from understanding rather than some hopey-feelie happy thoughts far too often used as a substitute for logic by the extremes on both ends of this particular discussion.

I don’t really care to be in the middle, but as is often the case in this life, nobody really gave me a choice.  Stay safe folks, the world is a dangerous place and a brain is a terrible thing to waste!