…but what does it do?

Rob Ellison wrote: “That’s what I have said a number of times now quite explicitly. Are you so cretinous you reply to what you think my comments are rather than actually reading them?”

I not only read them, but I quoted precisely the questionable claims that you made before explaining to you why I thought they were false.

Rob Ellison, it’s difficult to argue with someone who makes frequent dubious claims, and then flatly contradicts them whenever challenged, and then reasserts them, repeatedly, and never retracts anything or acknowledge any inconsistency. But you can’t just cover all bases in that fashion, and then when pressed about the falsehood of your assertion, protest that you explicitly made (also) the *contrary* claim.

Remember that this conversation began when I challenged your claim that: “The air is progressively cooler as it rises and expands – but it *doesn’t* lose energy.” (My emphasis). Did you not write that sentence? Do you still stand by it? You never retracted it.

I pointed out to you that the expanding parcel of air *does* lose an amount of energy equal precisely to the work preformed on the surrounding as it expands (and independent of the work performed by the buoyant force against gravity).

At first you seemed to agree (while pretending to be tutoring me on the process I had just explained to you) but then you quickly reverted to the previous false claim: (Rob Ellison) “We have molecules that expand into larger volume – Joule expansion or free expansion in a lower pressure environment – we simply have *the same amount of energy* in a larger volume. Hence lower T. As in the ehow quote.” (My emphasis) Do you still stand by this claim that “we simply have the same amount of energy in a larger volume”? Or do you still wish to both stand by it and deny it at the same time? Or were you referring to some kind of “energy” other than internal energy? I asked you this a couple times and you declined to answer.

Thereafter, you doubled down on the “Joule expansion” characterization of the adiabatic process and insisted that the eHow description is correct. But Joule expansion is a process where one assumes that is *no* macroscopic work at all preformed by the expanding gas on the surrounding boundary (and the same holds of the Joule-Thompson process).

When I point out that the relevant expansion process *isn’t* Joule expansion, and it is rather the process paradigmatically exemplified in the second stage of the Carnot cycle, you purport to agree, but decline to retract *your* earlier insistent claims that the process *is* Joule expansion and that there is *no* energy change within the volume of the expanding parcel of air.

If we can clear those things up, then maybe you can tutor me on the impact of the balance of kinetic and potential energy due to inter-molecular forces and how this modifies the result of the derivation of the dry lapse rate for ideal gases. But we are not there yet.

> … they were consistently unwilling to test their validity by the criterion of their accordance with the ordinary operations of nature.

That’s the point, Michael old sport

Doubtless you will say that we only have one planet, so a control cannot exist

We only had one Ordovician, Carboniferous, Permian, Jurassic etc era as well. Yet we’ve sorted those out reasonably well. I keep persisting in pointing out that the understandings from this should be applied today, not hypothetical, linear feedbacks that cannot be observed nor verified

>If I was self aware, I would probably be a different person

Ah yes, but would you *know* that you were different ?

‘It was as ridiculous as those terms you use to describe people who trust the science.’

Words of wisdom from Joseph. Trusting ‘the science’ of ‘climate science’ is not something you are well advised to do. I get sceptic – Michael just above referred to Botkin as one of mine – but also warmist from such as Flynn of the six impossible things before breakfast.

I am trained in engineering – I have actually built things. Planning and design in my world need an occasional reality check. Besides big boys toys are such fun. I have a degree in environmental science and tend to work mostly at the boundary of the natural and built environments. I have blown things up and saved turtles and wallabies from imminent destruction – and not by not blowing them up. What sort of evil person do you think I am?

I follow the evidence and have for decades. I read the 1st assessment report. By early this century however – regimes in the broader system were all too evident. Rainfall regimes were evident at least since the 1980’s. By 2007 it was apparent that these regimes were not cyclic at all but chaotic. This creates an entirely new – and unpredictable – risk profile that I have discussed recently.

http://judithcurry.com/2014/10/13/my-weeks-in-review/#comment-637507

This is actually where science leads – but at the core of ‘climate science’ there is cognitive dissonance – a denial of anomalies – informing a whole social movement of those who ‘trust the science’. This I refer to as the Borg collective cult of AGW groupthink space cadets. It just saves time Joseph – and the phenomenon seems very real. One can hardly expect space cadets to see it.

There are however – people who do believe in ‘climate science’ and have a whole different approach to solutions.

e.g. http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/Climate_Pragmatism_web.pdf

These seem not to the liking of the space cadets leading me to suspect another – and nefarious – agenda to dismantle societies based on classis liberal principles and replace them with some vision of a bucolic utopia. Call me paranoid – but bucolic visions always seem to end in people dying by the tumbrel load. .

‘consider a rising parcel of air –>>

As the parcel rises, it will adiabatically expand and cool (recall our discussion in chapter 5 about rising parcels of air)

adiabatic – a process where the parcel temperature changes due to an expansion or compression, no heat is added or taken away from the parcel

the parcel expands since the lower pressure outside allows the air molecules to push out on the parcel walls

since it takes energy for the parcel molecules to “push out” on the parcel walls, they use up some of their internal energy in the process.

therefore, the parcel also cools since temperature is proportional to molecular internal energy’

Pushing out is an imaginary process. What actually happens? Try to imagine it visually P-N – if you can manage it.

And note – it has gone well beyond the point where your handwaving is of any interest at all.

Interested Bystander is concerned about “bringing the 2+ billion people who live on less than $2/day up to an acceptable standard of living?”

Hmmm … 100,000 consecutive years of a global carbon-energy economy — wood, coal, gas, and oil — and a huge proportion of humanity *STILL* lives in desperate poverty?

Gosh … maybe carbon-energy economies don’t work all that well?

Do yah think?

The world wonders!

Rob Ellison asserts [without evidence] “bucolic visions always seem to end in  people dying by the tumbrel load  the moral, social, and economic foundations of the US Constitution“

Ignorant rhetoric by Skippy, Jeffersonian evidence by FOMD!

Justin Wonder,
Hey, thx fer the 100o points. I will use them ter help buy
me freedom.
bts

C’mon Faustino, I’m not that old, really I’m not

This from an apologist for the ‘radical enlightenment’ of the French revolution. Where does he think the symbol of the tumbrel comes from?

The US owes something of the rhetoric to the French but much more of substance to the Scottish.

‘The single most important influence that shaped the founding of the United States comes from JOHN LOCKE, a 17th century Englishman who redefined the nature of government. Although he agreed with Hobbes regarding the self-interested nature of humans, he was much more optimistic about their ability to use reason to avoid tyranny. In his SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT, Locke identified the basis of a legitimate government. According to Locke, a ruler gains authority through the consent of the governed. The duty of that government is to protect the natural rights of the people, which Locke believed to include LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY. If the government should fail to protect these rights, its citizens would have the right to overthrow that government. This idea deeply influenced THOMAS JEFFERSON as he drafted the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.’ http://www.ushistory.org/gov/2.asp

The Scottish enlightenment continue to fan the flames of freedom – democracy, the rule of law, free markets and free peoples.

‘We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.’ F. A. Hayek

FOMBS seems neither the liveliest of minds or overly concerned with the philosophic foundations of a free society. Or indeed of a functioning economy.

I don’t read FOMBS anymore – and certainly don’t (usually) follow any links. But OMG – Jefferson’s garden diaries as the foundation of the modern US state is too laughably nonsensical a claim to pass over.

Yes, but all this can happen in a perfectly insulated sealed cylinder of air wherein a gravitationally induced temperature gradient is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium, just as in the troposphere. But no need for rising air or expansion. You backed the wrong horse.

Yes Pierre, but there’s no need for any “parcel” of air to rise in order for us to observe the temperature gradient. It happens because the Second Law says thermodynamic equilibrium will evolve, and thermodynamic equilibrium has the temperature gradient which will even appear in a perfectly insulated sealed cylinder. Do you or do you not agree that it will? If you don’t agree, then do your own 800 experiments getting opposite results to those of Graeff.

These words of Charles Lyell have valuable teaching if they are read the right way.
They are not a recipe to link methods or data from geology to climate science.
They are a call for the philosophy of the advancement of science to attend to the lessons of the past. In geology, search the topic of uniformitarianism. It was developed and promoted by Lyell in his Principles of Geology in 1830. Its converse, which he deplored, was catastrophism, or more generally the invention of mechanisms that failed to learn from the lessons of the past.
Geology is a science that is far from settled. Further up, see John Vonderlin October 14, 2014 at 12:51 pm for the topic of whether plate tectonics is settled – it is not. One of the great investigators after Wegener was Prof S Warren Carey, a friend from long ago, was so concerned by the questions that plate tectonics failed to answer that he devoted great and professional effort to developing the Expanding Earth hypothesis further. Many of the Establishment enigmas he questioned are unanswered today.
A student of Prof Carey was my geologist/chemist boss John Elliston, who found similarly important observations enigmas with Establishment descriptions of rock and ore formation. He in turn has put great effort into mechanisms involving colloidal states, with parts of his colloidal hypothesis neatly answering some major enigmas on which Establishment geology fails.

Whereas Charles Lyell cautioned against invoking ‘way out’ theories, he would not have known that one day satellites could assist in seeing if the Earth is expanding or not; and he would not have heard of colloidal chemistry. He might have viewed these as catastrophism in his time. So,there is contradiction able to be built into his words if they are used for the wrong purposes.
However, people are still failing to learn from the past. There is a beautiful book, “the Apocalyptics” 1984 by Edith Efron (not yet in e-book) that details the Establishment reaction to a 1960-70s emergent hypothesis that American citizens were to experience a massive epidemic of cancers caused by man-made chemicals in society. The whole episode has eerie parallels to the climate change Establishment mistakes so close that it should be required reading. The major reversal of views of known ‘names’ was a major step in deconstructing the (false) cancer scare. The most prominent name was Bruce Ames, if you have followed the story.
Here are a few words from Efron that can be read in context with the Lyell invocation to learn from the past (p 388 paperback, attributed to Isaac Berenblum 1974)-
“The order in which discoveries are made is not always predetermined by logical reasoning.
“Instead of basic principles being discovered first and modifying or ancillary
factors later on, the opposite is usually the case. For instance, in the field of carcinogenesis, it would have been more helpful if the sequence of discoveries had been: (a) of naturally-occurring carcinogens; (b) of artificially-produced carcinogens which find their way in man’s environment; and (c) of “exotic” carcinogens (ranging from simple models to complex structures) synthesized in the laboratory. In fact, the historical sequence has been (b)-(c)-(a).
“Yet the historical approach cannot be altogether ignored. The very choice of experiments usually rests on working hypotheses derived from accumulated knowledge, and the interpretation of results cannot be divorced from the historical evolution of the subject.”
This sits neatly with earlier Prof Curry topics such as attribution of climate effects to natural or man-made.
Like Charles Lyell, Prof Curry is calling for methods to solve problems to build on past knowledge, rather than the catastrophic ways that do not heed past observation.

No Rob. Temperature is not proportional to (the sum of all) internal energy. You have to leave out every form of internal energy except the kinetic energy of the molecules. But, as I’ve told you before I am not talking about wind that causes bulk KE – I’m talking about convection. I also told you before that you need to learn and understand Kinetic Theory to understand atmospheric thermodynamics.

This is the problem of the dry adiabatic lapse rate.

Say we have a perfectly insulating and perfectly elastic sphere at ground level and atmospheric pressure. The internal pressure P is equal to the external pressure. Add some heat and the sphere expands, the air is less dense and the sphere rises.

As it rises the sphere expands to maintain an internal pressure Pa equal to the external pressure at the height. The energy for this is in the potential energy of the compressed air – like a spring uncoiling as a weight is reduced. All of the action is internal it seems and the question is what that implies for molecular and kinetic energies. But enough for tonight.

P-N’s schoolgirl physics notwithstanding – we have seen PdV repeated how many times by myself and others – the principles of action seem to be a type of free expansion in which no work is done and no energy lost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_expansion

Indi,

You seem to spend a lot of time responding to comments from people you don’t read.

‘No Rob. Temperature is not proportional to (the sum of all) internal energy. You have to leave out every form of internal energy except the kinetic energy of the molecules. But, as I’ve told you before I am not talking about wind that causes bulk KE – I’m talking about convection. I also told you before that you need to learn and understand Kinetic Theory to understand atmospheric thermodynamics.’

It is called the Kinetic temperature – but I all energy is conserved which is the this describes the system.

dQ + dW = dU + dEb

The kinetic theory of gases is fairly obvious to any engineer. dU is the internal energy – both potential and kinetic. dEb is the potential energy from buoyancy. dQ is the energy supplied to the system. dW is the work done.

We can neglect dQ and dEb in the derivation of the of the dry adiabatic lapse rate – always remembering that this is not the environmental lapse rate. dW is assumed to be the work of expansion against a constant pressure – although it is clear that there are problems with the assumption. dU is assumed to be entirely the result of molecular kinetic energy changes – and it is clear that it is not completely true. How not true I don’t know yet.

dU = mCvdV

This is very similar to Doug’s formula for gravitational potential energy – but uses a constant volume rather than a constant pressure specific heat. There are additional steps needed to derive the lapse rate in terms of Cp – as shown above. Cv and Cp are not the same for a compressible gas.

The potential energy we are concerned with is buoyant rather than the gravitational potential.

This makes Doug’s formula incorrect both in principle and in detail. I am very much inclined to think his horse has bolted – and joined the wild bush brumbies and the ‘roos loose in the top paddock. .