This post covers some foundations which are often misunderstood. Radiation emitted from a surface (or a gas) can go in all directions and also varies with wavelength, and so we start with a concept called spectral intensity. This value has units of W/m².sr.μm, which in plainer language means Watts (energy per unit time) per square [...]
Archive for October, 2010
Planck, Stefan-Boltzmann, Kirchhoff and LTE
Posted in Atmospheric Physics, Basic Science on October 24, 2010 | 30 Comments »
Does Back-Radiation “Heat” the Ocean? – Part Two
Posted in Debunking Flawed "Science", Ocean Physics on October 23, 2010 | 81 Comments »
In Part One we looked at how solar radiation and DLR (or “back radiation”) were absorbed by the ocean. And we had a brief look at how little heat would move by conduction into the deeper ocean if the ocean was “still”. There were some excellent comments in part one from Nick Stokes, Arthur Smith and Willis [...]
Amazing Things we Find in Textbooks – The Real Second Law of Thermodynamics
Posted in Basic Science, Debunking Flawed "Science" on October 7, 2010 | 226 Comments »
Probably many, most or all of my readers wonder why I continue with this theme when it’s so completely obvious.. Well, most people haven’t studied thermodynamics and so an erroneous idea can easily be accepted as true. All I want to present here is the simple proof that thermodynamics textbooks don’t teach the false ideas [...]
Does Back-Radiation “Heat” the Ocean? – Part One
Posted in Basic Science, Debunking Flawed "Science", Ocean Physics on October 6, 2010 | 35 Comments »
In the three part series on DLR (also known as “back radiation”, also known as atmospheric radiation), Part One looked at the network of stations that measured DLR and some of the measurements, Part Two reviewed the spectra of this radiation, and Part Three asked whether this radiation changed the temperature of the surface. Very [...]
Absorption of Radiation from Different Temperature Sources
Posted in Basic Science, Debunking Flawed "Science" on October 2, 2010 | 29 Comments »
Following discussions about absorption of radiation I thought some examples might help illustrate one simple, but often misunderstood, aspect of the subject. Many people believe that radiation from a colder atmosphere cannot be absorbed by a warmer surface. Usually they are at a loss to explain exactly why – for good reason. However, some have [...]
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Meta
Updated Roadmap and Simple Models
Posted in Commentary on October 14, 2010 | 16 Comments »
I have done a partial update of the Roadmap section – creating a few sub-pages and listed the relevant articles under the sub-pages. It is a work in progress, the idea is to make it possible for new visitors to find useful articles. Most blogs have a high bias towards the last few articles. I [...]
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