Well here's a summary then WIlliam ...

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Author :  D J Cotton

Well here's a summary then WIlliam ...

The Second Law of Thermodynamics never mentions thermal equilibrium or heat transfers from hot to cold. It is all about evolving towards thermodynamic equilibrium which is quite a different thing, involving mechanical equilibrium as well, and thus gravitational potential energy.

The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is derived theoretically for a non-gravitational field. Hence it is not strictly correct when a state of thermodynamic equilibrium (or close to such) exists and you are considering molecules at different altitudes, although it will apply in any horizontal plane.

It is a red herring to postulate a gas that does not absorb any solar radiation and re-emit it. If such an atmosphere did exist it would still exhibit a thermal gradient but, by the assumption made, it would be just as if it weren't there at all as far as radiation is concerned. Of course if it got too cold near the top, some would solidify and collapse.

It is energy from the Sun (mostly absorbed in the atmosphere) which heats the surface of Venus, for example, and actually raises its temperature from about 732K to 737K during the course of its 4-month-long daytime. But the whole temperature profile in the troposphere has to rise 5 degrees also for this surface warming to happen, and then indeed the surface is warmed by conduction from the base of the troposphere.

All planetary temperatures in tropospheres and even beneath any surface are determined by the gravito-thermal effect, and they have nothing to do with any greenhouse radiative forcing or sensitivity to carbon dioxide.

When they drilled the KTB borehole down to 9Km depth in Germany they were surprised at how much water they found underground. This then helps confirm that the gravito-thermal effect is also apparent in solids and liquids. At 9Km depth it was 270C, far hotter than they expected, with a thermal gradient in the outer crust at least 20 times as steep as the mean gradient to the centre of the core. That's because specific heat increases very significantly with the hotter temperatures in the mantle and core.

If you plotted just the temperatures between, say, 9Km and 4Km you would find that the near linear plot extrapolates quite well to the actual mean minimum daily temperatures at the surface.

Why is it so?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not a simplistic rule that heat always transfers from warmer to cooler regions if there is a temperature difference.

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Author :  D J Cotton
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The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not a simplistic rule that heat always transfers from warmer to cooler regions if there is a temperature difference.

In the early pre-dawn hours the lower troposphere still exhibits the expected thermal gradient, but meteorologists know that convection stops. Yes energy flow stops even though there is warmer air at lower altitudes. That is because there is thermodynamic equilibrium, and when we have thermodynamic equilibrium - well, you can look up in Wikipedia all the conditions and things that happen.

The real Second Law of Thermodynamics takes quite a bit of understanding and many hours, maybe years of study. You guys have absolutely no understanding of it, as I can detect from my decades of helping students understand physics.

To understand it you have to really understand entropy for starters. Then you have to really understand thermodynamic equilibrium and all the other states, such as mechanical equilibrium, thermal equilibrium etc which the Second Law embraces. That is why, for example, you cannot disregard gravity and gravitational potential energy when determining the state of maximum entropy attainable by an isolated system.

If you want to stay in the mid-19th century when much of this physics was not widely understood, and if you want to imagine, for example, that radiative heat transfer does not obey the Second Law, then all I can say is that you must live in a strange and isolated planet, because you sure can't answer my questions about other planets with your climatology paradigm.

When you truly understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics then, and only then, will you start to understand how it explains the so-called lapse rate and how the pre-determined thermal profile supports surface temperatures everywhere, not back radiation from a cooler atmosphere. Thus you will understand why it's not carbon dioxide after all.

Just remember there's going to be a genuine $5,000 reward for the first to come up with proof I'm wrong

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Author :  D J C
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Just remember there's going to be a genuine $5,000 reward for the first to come up with proof I'm wrong and proof IPCC are right about water vapour - see last paragraph..

In a horizontal plane you can observe diffusion of kinetic energy in your home. Just run a heater on one side of a room, turn it off or even remove it quickly from the room, and you will temporarily have measureably warmer air on one side of the room. Molecules then keep on colliding and as they do, kinetic energy is shared. Statistical mechanics tells us that temperature (that is, mean kinetic energy per molecule) will even out across the room assuming it's well insulated.
Suppose now that the room has double glazed windows and it's cooler outside. Which is more effective at insulating the room?

(a) A window with dry air or even argon
(b) A window with moist air - say 4% water vapour or water gas
(c) A window full of carbon dioxide only, like the Venus atmosphere?

The answer is the dry air or argon, as is well known in the construction industry. Why? Because radiating "pollutants" like water gas and carbon dioxide send the energy across the gap (and up through the troposphere) with inter-molecular radiation. Such radiation only ever transfers thermal energy from warmer to cooler regions. Otherwise what happens is as described in "Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

Why then does the thermal gradient reduce in magnitude because of the inter-molecular radiation between carbon dioxide molecules in the Venus atmosphere, or between a few methane molecules in the Uranus troposphere or between water vapour molecules in Earth's troposphere and Earth's outer 9Km of its crust?

All these thermal gradients (aka lapse rates) are less steep than they would have been in dry air or (nearly) non-radiating gases. Gravity would have induced a steeper -g/Cp gradient.
The thermal gradient in the Uranus troposphere does not level out (despite no solar radiation or any surface) because to do so would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It seems most of you don't understand why, but the reason is that entropy would decrease. If somehow a state were to evolve with more gravitational potential energy per molecule at the top, but no compensating reduction in kinetic energy per molecule (ie temperature) then there would be unbalanced energy potentials at the top, so work could be done and thus entropy would not have been at a maximum. The four molecule experiment demonstrates this and how it happens at the molecular level.
The vortex tube demonstrates it, and kinetic energy is re-distributed such that the inner tube gets far colder than the air that was pumped in. So you can't blame friction for heating the outer tube. Nor does pressure alter temperature, because pressure is proportional to the product of temperature and density: temperature is an independent variable and only varies when mean kinetic energy per molecule varies.

Finally, none of you can explain how the Venus surface actually rises in temperature from 732K to 737K during its four-month-long day, unless you start by understanding that the thermal gradient is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Then you need to understand the mechanism of "heat creep" explained in the second part of the four molecule experiment.

There will be a $5,000 reward for the first to prove me wrong with conditions explained in public advertisements and on all of a dozen or so of my websites. To win the award you will also have to show empirical evidence of the IPCC postulate that the sensitivity to water vapour is of the order of 10 degrees of warming for every 1% increase in the Earth's troposphere.

Climate models can’t tell us anything at all, because they are based on false assumptions, namely ..

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Author :  Doug. Cotton
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Climate models can’t tell us anything at all, because they are based on false assumptions, namely .. 

(I) That the troposphere would be isothermal in the absence of radiating gases.

(2) That radiating gases from a colder atmosphere can boost the incident Solar radiative flux to a combined sum which then supposedly can be used in S-B calculations to determine the temperature of the thin transparent surface layer of the ocean through which the UV, visible and IR Solar radiation all passes, but the low energy IR from the troposphere does not.

Neil King from the Skeptical Science team has been unable to fault the physics in my derivation and proof of the existence of the gravito-thermal effect

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Author :  Doug. Cotton
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Neil King from the Skeptical Science team has been unable to fault the physics in my derivation and proof of the existence of the gravito-thermal effect. I presume no one else from the SkS team can do so, even though about 1 in 6 of them have qualifications in physics, including John Cook.

So I think that just about wraps it up as cogent proof, because no one from Judith Curry, Jo Nova, The Air Vent, WUWT, DrRoySpencer, Australian Climate Madness, Clive Best, Stoat-Connelly, The Lukewarmer's Way or any other climate blog has been able to prove wrong the answer to the trillion dollar question, namely that the Loschmidt gravito-thermal effect is a reality..

Hence the greenhouse conjecture is debunked once and for all.

Are there any last minute challenges?

Well William show the world that you yourself have the guts to debate me on Lucia's thread where I'm not snipped

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Author :  Doug. Cotton
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Well William show the world that you yourself have the guts to debate me on Lucia's thread where I'm not snipped. Neil J.King (one of the SkS team) is being shown up.