Doug Cotton says:
The guts of what Johnson actually proves computationally (though I doubt she would follow the mathematics) is that spontaneous radiation coming from the atmosphere is not converted to thermal energy when it meets a significantly warmer surface.
That is simply a falsehood…Johnson does not prove anything. You can’t prove anything by computation about the physical universe. You can only prove that the results follow from your assumptions. If your assumptions are nonsense, that means the results will likely be too.
I have done experiments which confirm for me the truth of this. So too has Prof Nasif Nahle in September last year when he showed the atmosphere cools faster than the surface at night.
Frankly, neither of you has an ounce of credibility, showing an inability to even get simple things right. And, you expect us to believe either of you knows how to conduct a rigorous experiment and that your experimental results should overthrow a century of physics?
My 50 years of physics tells me it is right.
According to what I have seen you advertise elsewnere, you have just a B.Sc. in physics….and it is unclear what sort of career you have had in physics. (You went on to get a higher degree in business administration. You know how the saying goes: “Those who can do, those who can’t teach, and those who can’t teach administrate.” Even for some whom this doesn’t apply to it has been my experience that for many of them, a degree in business administration can be equivalent to getting a lobotomy in terms of hampering their abilities to think rationally.)
Never before the days of the IPCC et al was there anything in physics textbooks claiming that thermal energy can in this way be transferred from a cool body to a significantly warmer body.
That is just prove-able nonsense. For example, my copy of Serway from 1983 says
A body radiates and also absorbs electromagnetic radiation at rates given by Eq. 17.11 [the Stefan-Boltzmann Eq.]. If this were not the case, a body would eventually radiate all of its internal energy and its temperature would reach absolute zero. The energy that the body absorbs comes from the surroundings, which also emit radiant energy. If the body is at a temperature T and its surroundings are at a temperature T_0, the net power gained (or lost) as a result of radiation is given by
P_net = sigma*A*(T^4 – T_0^4) (17.12)
When a body is in equilibrium with its surroundings, it radiates and absorbs energy at the same rate, and so its temperature remains constant. When a body is hotter than its surroundings, it radiates more energy than it absorbs, and so cools.
Nothing in there about thermal radiation from a colder body not being absorbed by a warmer body.
No one has produced an experiment showing any backradiation actually warming anything. They can’t, because it doesn’t, if it even exists to anywhere near the extent claimed.
A hundred years of use of the accepted equations by scientists and engineers shows this claim to be nonsense.
Johnson has brilliantly derived a computational explanation of the UV catastrophe without resorting to a “particle” nature of radiation (just using a wave nature) and, in my view, yes he does deserve a Nobel Prize for advancing physics in this way and solving a problem that baffled even Einstein.
Some statements are so silly that it is just breathtaking to see them made. Next, perhaps we ought to start putting Nobel Prizes in Crackerjacks boxes. Johnson hasn’t solved anything. His notion can’t explain the photoelectric effect. His overturning of statistical physics with a new notion can’t explain the huge amount of stuff that has been explained by statistical physics.
It is absolute garbage to imply that Johnson has overturned 100 years of physics theory.
Yes, he has. And, he proposes to replace it with nonsense that hardly explains anything of what the 100 years of physics has explained. The fact that people like you are embracing such crackpot notions just shows how desperate and anti-scientific some of the “AGW skeptic” movement has become.