The Fraud of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Part 3: In Pictures

We have been discussing the problem with flat Earth models and understanding that they artificially invent an atmospheric greenhouse effect.  What I haven’t shown yet is an actual schematic (drawing/ picture, etc) of a flat Earth model from climate science.

From this link, we find a peer-reviewed climate science publication demonstrating their understanding (lack thereof) of how energy comes in and goes out of the system Earth; their model is copied in the figure below:

Global Energy budget from the climate science point of view.
(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society)

My own model is copied once again, below, for comparison.  But let us first take a look at the surface in the figure above.  Yes, it is flat – it is circular, but it is a flat circle.  But because it has numbers all over the place and even drew in clouds and rain, you honestly get tricked into accepting it because your sense-perception functions accept that such things (clouds and rain) occur in reality.  On the other hand, your senses only ever experience the Earth as flat, and so no one actually has an intuitive sense-based understanding that the Earth is actually spherical; therefore, it just doesn’t consciously register that you should have rejected this model based on a flat Earth.  Whether by accident or on purpose, you get tricked into accepting everything that follows about this diagram, even though it has nothing to do with real reality; it takes advantage of the inherent rational limitations of sense-perception.

Take a look at the incoming power of Sunshine in the climate science model: it denotes a value of 341 W/m2.  What is this value?  It is our old friend of P divided by 4; or in other words 341*4 = 1364 W/m2, which is (rounding for error) the actual value of sunshine power that I show in the reality-model below of 1370 W/m2.  So there you have it right there: the input power of sunshine is diluted by the factor of four.

Then, factoring in losses from reflection and the atmosphere, the power of heating at the surface is listed as only 161 W/m2, which is a temperature of -42oC. That’s minus forty two Celsius.  So how is the difference made up then, given that this entirely unrealistic and fictional power of Sunshine is literally freezing cold?  The difference between reality and fiction is made up by inventing another fiction, “back radiation” heating, on the right hand side of the figure, which requires a power of an additional 333 W/m2 of heating for the system.  This figure is literally just stuck right on to the side of their diagram out of nowhere, with no justification other than that it is required to make the model work, to “save the appearances”.  And thus the greenhouse effect is born.  With 161 W/m2 plus 333 W/m2 of heating power, the climate science model can now get up to 494 W/m2 worth of heating power, which is 32.5oC.  Note that this still isn’t even as warm as reality and the reality-based model below of +49oC of heating power, and I don’t need to do anything to my model to make it work – it works because it represents reality.

A realistic energy model which is rational, not insane and fictional.

A question I have for you is:  If you were to compare my model and the climate science model side-by-side, which one would you pick?  Even forget about paying attention to the numbers and what they mean, and just based visually on the aesthetic and the shapes within the model, which would you pick as the model which looks like reality?  Does the picture below help make the decision?

Earth is illuminated on only one side with the full power of sunshine.  It also rotates.

There is a difference in how my model presents incoming sunshine relative to this picture (from “the top” vs. from “the side”), however, my model is an abstract representation of reality that is meant to nonetheless capture the actual physics of the energy processes involved; it is a “mind object” or “mental object” that captures the actually real properties of the system as they actually exist.  For a scientist thinking intelligently and rationally, rather than irrationally through sense-perception, the abstract reality model validly represents the actual processes involved, and it needs to invent nothing to save the appearances.  Rotation and day and night are implicit in the comprehension of the reality model.

The point is: use your brain, not sense-perception devoid of reason.  What makes more sense: a flat Earth which invents additional heating out of nowhere, or, a spherical Earth which represents the actual system and invents nothing?


24 Responses to The Fraud of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Part 3: In Pictures

  1. mitigatedsceptic says:

    Thank you for all this – I have read all three parts, I can follow it and agree with it.
    The flat earth is, as you say, what we experience in everyday life – the sun rises and sets etc. The idea that we NEED to know that it is spherical arises only when we have to explain a curved horizon or to navigate a ship or aircraft on a great circle route. It really does take an act of imagination to conceive a spherical world. So, just a suggestion, it might help understanding your argument were you to demonstrate the flat surfaced circular world used by Am. Mat. Soc. etc., but partition it into day and night (and the transitions) and show how the system behaves diurnally?

    [Reply: Thanks, and very good sugestion. Yes it might work, to use a flat surface and divide it by two, and have one side with sunshine & heating and the other dark & cooling. But for me, it just still wouldn’t represent enough…you still wouldn’t be forced to think of rotation, the differential calculus of heat flow, and you still might not realize that sunshine is distributed unevenly, although I suppose you could just shade that in. In a spherical model, there is always more opportunity to represent reality and incorporate new ideas into it that correspond with that real reality.

    Your suggestion is indeed an option I looked at when I was developing how to make a reality-based model, but ultimately I went with the spherical one because I could do more with it.]

  2. mitigatedsceptic says:

    Very happy that you think this might be useful. Perhaps you could start with two separate flat surfaces -day and night – to pander to the ‘common sense’ point of view. Then, once your readers have grasped that there is diurnal variation so great as to confound the conventional models, move on to the 3D point of view? I should explain that I am a philosopher of science and so try to avoid ‘reality’ and all the traps its sets – like ‘real reality’`!
    BTW, on a light note, when teaching, I use a billiard table and show pictures of what several 2D observers see from different positions on the cushion when billiard balls collide. One may see only one ball but it changes in size; other may see two balls but their accounts of their movements can never agree. Each observer has just as ‘real’ a view as all the others and all the observations can be ‘verified’ by repeating the experiments – yet each observer falsifies the validity of the observations of all the others – rather lie the wave/particle debate. Thank you again.

    [Reply: Oh very nice on your philosophy of science interests and teaching. I am actually looking for people to read some philosophy material I’ve found from a very interesting source, and see what other people think of it. Would you be interested in reading 30 books?

    I’ll think about your suggestion and if it develops into a good post or a good expose, I may work on it.]

  3. Brian H says:

    The point of your exercise is to imply the inevitable heat flux from the area of maximum insolation to the less/zero insolation areas. I suggest some explicit illustration of those flows. They would suffer from the implicit impression that the sphere was static, but a circle arrow showing rotation might counter that.

    It is crucial to communicate that the planet is on a rotisserie, not a grill!

    [Reply: A rotisserie, not a grill! Wonderful! I hope people will read these comments because that is an excellent analogy. And indeed, this is similar to my discussion in the “Copernicus” paper where we understand that cooking something at 400F on one side does not produce the same result as cooking it on two sides at 100F – and now as you point out, even if the cooking method is a rotisserie!
    Yes maybe I can add some arrows or something to indicate heat flow away from the equator to the poles…great idea, that would go well with what I was planning for my next post. Thanks!]

  4. mitigatedsceptic says:

    Yes, I am intrigued by your ‘interesting source’ but, as i am well past my ‘use-by’ date, moth and rust are taking their toll. I doubt if I could manage more than one at a time. I hope I could read it from the internet?

    [JP: Check your email.]

  5. ChipH says:

    The flat earth model has 239.1 net in, and 238.5 combined out, which would be 0.6 net warming, the rest is hokus pokus and doesn’t leave 0.9 to be ‘absorbed’, but it’s been my experience the Scientocrats are abysmally weak in math in any case, otherwise they wouldn’t become Warmists. They have totally neglected geothermal warming, which has to go somewhere. The earth’s mantle isn’t much of a Dewars flask. Mmmm, speaking of Dewars….

    [Reply: From what I have heard from real meteorologists who actually know what they’re doing, climate scientists were always looked down upon in the field because they were, more or less, failed meteorologists. Now they pretend to be physicists…ugh.
    Yes indeed, the mantle of the Earth is not zero Kelvin, and nor does the subsurface soil even within a few feet from the top ever get much below 0oC. Sure, it might not conduct very fast or emit radiation at the surface very fast, but, there is nonetheless significant temperature held there which prevents the surface system from ever being able to cool as much as it could. In other words, there is basically an infinite heat sink at ~10oC (and much higher) a few feet under the surface.]

  6. Joe's World(progressive evolution) says:


    All current models(and sorry to include yours) do not include ANY motion whatsoever.
    Start with planetary tilting. It is about 1/3 of a degree per day that the same solar energy never repeats to the day before.
    Velocity differences has the effect of hold your hand in the sun for 10 second or 10 minutes which greatly effects absorption and reflection.
    The atmosphere angles of degrees of solar radiation travel changes the intensity of hot and cold.

    Our lack of including motion shows the complexity is 1000 times more than what current models can conceive.

    [Reply: Actually my model does include rotation (motion). Rotation is indicated by the cooling strip, somewhat, but it should be implicitly understood too. That is what the differential calculus is for, for modelling the heat-flow in real time. Also, in my last paper (Appendix B), I showed the Matlab code I wrote for actually tracking the solar input in real-time, and over the year, as the seasons go by and the solar altitude changes, etc. So as you say, yes indeed, we should go to a more realistic and real-time model, as much as we can.]

  7. tjfolkerts says:


    It is not an either-or situation! In fact, you are comparing apples to oranges and then complaining that the apples are not oranges!

    [Reply: That is precisely what I am doing. Except it is more like comparing fiction to reality. So, pick!]

    You present a model that is attempting to show the situation for different parts of the earth at one instant — you have a warm day side and a cool night side; you have rotation drawn in. It is a great start to a model for daily temperature fluctuations (but you would still need to add in several factors like latitude and heat capacity).

    [Reply: Yes this is exactly what it can all do.]

    The “other model” is not actually a model — it is a summary (hence apples and oranges). It summarizes the average energy flows. It looks at long-term, global averages. For instance, these numbers will rarely if ever be exactly correct in my home town. I doubt that the IR up from the North Pole will ever be as high as 396 W/m^2. The tropical oceans will have more than 80 W/m^2 of evaporation on average.

    But finding averages is a very handy thing in science — it helps get the “big picture”. So a satellite flying over the earth could measure the upward IR for different times and in different places and provide estimates for outgoing IR. Global rainfall can give an estimate of the average evaporation energy flow. And these global, annual estimates can be summarized in a table. They can even be summarized on a pretty picture (although that seems to confuse some people into thinking that anyone who finds an average automatically is ignorant of the details of the individual measurements).

    Do you think that any of these numbers are indeed not an accurate summary of averages over the whole earth over a period of 1 year?

    [Reply: Yes, making averages out of real-time non-linear power densities creates numerous problems and they don’t mean much in reality. One problem is the subsequent need to create twice the amount of warming being generated out of the atmosphere out of nowhere as compared to the Sun.]

    Do you truly think that anyone (knowledgeable about the topic) thinks of the Trenberth energy flow summary as a model of what is going on instantaneously, rather than as a long-term, large-area summary?

    [Reply: As a “long-term summary”, it creates meaningless physics. It doesn’t matter what else anyone might think…if they believe in K&T for whatever reason, they’re not doing science anywhere else.]

  8. tjfolkerts says:

    “As a “long-term summary”, it creates meaningless physics. “

    It doesn’t “create” any physics at all! […snip…]

    [Reply: See: 333 W/m^2 of backradiation for additional heating. AKA, fictional physics.]

    If you look at a list of per capita incomes for different countries […snip…]

    [Reply: Averages of per capita income aren’t like the atmosphere, temperature, or non-linear energy balances either…]

    Once again, we can calculate a variety of things.
    * If (not “since” but “if”) 1370 W/m^2 of incoming light was distributed uniformly over a sphere with albedo = 0.3 and emissivity = 1 with no atmosphere, then the temperature would be a uniform -18C.

    [Reply: And this is correct. The temperature of the Earth IS -18C on average. The ground is just the part which is supposed to be warmer because it is where the heat is generated in the first place, at high temperature.]


    Everyone (intelligent) knows this is an overly simplified model that does not correspond to reality. It is simply a starting point for discussion — a gedanken experiment. You seem to be the only one who thinks that this model is how actual climate scientists think about the actual atmosphere. (The mere fact that I am arguing with you shows that lots of people have a more sophisticated understanding than you give them credit for)

    [Reply: The flat Earth model IS how climate scientists think of the atmosphere. They created it…hello. They also use it to talk about IR forcing, the heating from the GHE, etc etc. As a starting point for discussion, starting in fiction, it devolves into absurdity.]

    * If the 1370 W/m^2 of incoming light was distributed IN ANY OTHER WAY (including your models in the top posts!) over a sphere with albedo = 0.3 and emissivity = 1 with no atmosphere, the average temperature will necessarily be LOWER than -18C. This is a mathematical certainty.

    The “uniform insolation” model is “meaningful physics” not because it is an attempt to model the real earth, but rather because it sets a hard upper limit on the average surface temperature of ANY sphere with albedo = 0.3 and emissivity = 1 with no atmosphere — INCLUDING the earth and INCLUDING your model!

    [Reply: There is no problem with the Earth being -18C on average, which is what it is measured to be. That’s the output though, not the input. The uniform insolation model is by definition meaningless since it has nothing to do with reality, since uniform insolation never exists, and uniform insolation can not do the same things that the real non-uniform insolation can do. That’s where the fiction of the GHE is created.]

  9. Bart says:

    To TJFolkerts……….you are using sophistry! Comparing non-linear heating averages to per capita incomes for different countries is not valid. Also, adding things like “Everyone (intelligent)” or “Anyone (knowledgeable about the topic)” are also crafty forms of sophistry. How about we all just stick to the subject matter and avoid clouding the issue with underhanded comments.

    There is no debate that the average global temperature is -18C. As Joe points out, however, just because the average temperature of the earth is -18C, this does not mean that the sun provides only -18C of heat. The GHE claims that this is the case. To explain why places on earth can experience more than -18C, the GHE then claims that the atmosphere bounces the -18C heat energy back and forth and amplifies it until it reaches the temperatures higher than -18C that we experience in some places on earth. This is depicted in the diagram showing 333 W/m^2 of back radiation in the flat earth model. So, as Joe points out, it’s not about the output or the average -18C we experience on earth (this is not in dispute). The error of GHE is in the input depicted because it is clearly much higher than -18C. The diagrams aside, what input energy in deg do you believe climate science is using?

  10. Pigeon says:

    @tjfolkerts take a step back and re-read Joe’s papers and then maybe re-read again. It seems you disagree with him for the sake of disagreeing and he’s simply having to explain everything to you all over again.

    [Reply: Thank you! Man it is so nice to see that there are other actually smart people out there.]

  11. Trenberth claims surface heat is mainly lost by radiation. I do not think so. Having worked in the tropics I can vouch for the fact that convective clouds form quickly and to great heights, even above the tropopause, so great quantities of heat are convected, with the required amount of latent heat due to evapouration. Heat will be radiated from the cloud tops which is where the convecting heat ends up. Trenberth’s graphic above is wrong in this as well as his re-radiated mythical energy.

  12. Max™ says:

    I wonder why this isn’t used as much as the K&T one:

    [Reply: Yes that one is is MUCH more reasonable!]

  13. johnmarshall says:

    Yes the above graphic is better than K&T’s abortion. At least it has no mention of GHG’s which is refreshing

  14. mitigatedsceptic says:

    Sorry to butt in with a daft idea – have they considered earth as a ball of radioactive stuff generating its own heat? Just below our feet is a seething mass convecting heat from the core to the surface. I wonder if those obsessed with greenhouse effects etc. have really thought about that? As you say, they forgot earth is spherical, they forgot water in its several phases and they forgot the sun all of which they now think might be significant – what about the earth as a hot ball?

  15. They think about it only so far as being able to come up with a way to ignore it. Indeed, even in winter the soil remains above freezing just a few feet down to very high lattitude, you have to go way up north to find permafrost. So yes, there is significant thermal support from below, and it has never been publically modelled in terms of an actual heat flow differential equation in order to assess the support it lends to the surface.

    Essentially, the IPCC and AGHE supporters treat the interior of the Earth as being zero Kelvin! I’m not kidding. As zero Kelvin just below the actual surface. They have NO CLUE how to actually model it with a real physical heat flow equation…at least we’ve never seen it.

  16. mitigatedsceptic says:

    ‘I shot an arrow in the air…’
    I can’t believe that ‘they’ could assume such a thing!
    How could advocates of geothermal heating (the vertical kind) ignore that possibility that the earth may contribute a significant heat input to the climate – and that it too may vary over time,
    Has anyone, that you know of, had a shot at measuring this?
    Interesting if geologists could attract some grants away from the climate boys?

  17. No it hasn’t been well researched, but we’ve heard anecdotal reports that deep bore-hole temperatures (km’s deep) change before certain surface temperature changes. But the data is impossible to confirm and yes, it would likely require significant funds to go find it. At the very least, the point is that the soil temperature is above freezing just a few feet down, and this temperature is supported from underneath, rather than from the surface.

    See this time-series movie to see how high the sub-surface temperature is maintined:

  18. mitigatedsceptic says:

    Thank you – clever stuff and very interesting. I wonder how would it look as a constant depth over hundreds of years?
    I have seen mention of volcanoes, more as a source of GGs and very little mention of the mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Ring of Fire etc as source of energy. I wonder how significant these could be compared with the supposed Greenhouse Effect.
    As I understand the argument the AGW has been estimated by providing descriptions of the effects of known sources and that AGW is really a residual of unexplained heat sources. But if the effects of geothermal activities were added; I wonder if would that change the received model at all?

  19. They’re really not doing anything that advanced. They simply took the correlation between CO2 and temperature from the last 100 years and insisted that it is causal from CO2 to temperature, even though the temperature had already started increasing before CO2 was a factor after the little ice age. So they just took a convenient correlation and invented stuff to promote their cause. All geothermal effects are calculated by them to be negligible, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it correctly.

    Another interesting point is that the temperature change of a degree or several of them is within the natural stochastic variability in any case, meaning that it is within the natural statistical noise and so such a level of temperature change does not even require an explanation, and may in fact have no explanation at all, because it is within the chaotic noise level of the chaotic system.

  20. mitigatedsceptic says:

    This really is a horror story!
    You hit the mark ‘may not even need an explanation at all’
    Hypotheses non fingo as Newton put it so succinctly.

  21. johnmarshall says:

    Geothermal heat flow is, on average, 30W/m2. Glaciers tend to melt from below by GTH because ice is a very poor conductor of heat. But this small amount of heat cannot compete with insolation and can be ignored as far as climate is concerned.

    [Reply: Yes but then this is obviously an incorrect way to account for geothermal temperature. It is a very convenient way to ignore the hot ball underneath us. What is 30 W/m2 in terms of the radiation temperature: -121C. By implying that the sub-soil temperature is -121C, climate pseudoscience can ignore it. But it is actually quite difficult to find soil which is much below 0C 5 feet down. This thermal heat energy might not flow quickly, but it is nonetheless there, holding subsurface and surface temperature much higher than the corresponding -121C of the flow rate. It is a convenient thing for alarmists to overlook…just like they do with the Sun and other obvious things. Again, actual physics of heat flow needs to be applied, not this simple arithmetic of alarmism.]

  22. johnmarshall says:

    Geothermal heat gradient is, on average, 35C/Km. You could call this the crustal lapse rate. we need to know this rate to calculate depths at which rocks melt or undergo metamorphism. Wet crust being subducted will melt sooner, ie. at a lower temperature, because water reduces melting point. Silica rich rocks like granite melt at 760C wet. (The different minerals melt at different temperatures but silica, SiO2 melts first.).

  23. Max™ says:

    I was trying to explain why using the Temperature to the fourth power SB law calculation in both directions is incorrect when considering the ground+atmosphere.

    The correct form is a single equation with T^4-T_ambient^4 which gives ~63 W/m^2 for the Trenberth values (289 K and 277.15 K for ground and atmosphere respectively) and I pointed out that the diagram actually balances like this fairly well:

    Unfortunately the input from the sun doesn’t explain the 289 K surface temperature this way.

    I pointed out as you have that you can fix that.

    Swap the 341*24 hour figure for 680*12 hours, you get 320*12 hours reaching the surface and 156*12 hours absorbed in the atmosphere, which then balances nicely with the surface values:

    480 in for 12 hours, 320 to ground, 160 to atmosphere
    240 out for 24 hours, 97+63 ground to atmosphere, 160+80 from the atmosphere to space

    I was told that using T_hot-T_cold form of the equation:
    “Is incorrect.”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    “Gives the same results.”

    I pointed out that no, doing it as T_ground and T_atmosphere separately suggests that the surface receives 333 W/m^2 from the atmosphere, over twice what it gets from the sun, which is thermodynamically impossible, as that would mean the 277.15 K atmosphere transfers heat to the 289 K ground.

    After all this I was again informed that I “just don’t understand the science, my arguments have been considered, and dismissed accordingly”…

    The thread was over on the xkcd forums and asked “is it possible to have a rational debate about global warming”, I have concluded now that no, it is not possible to have a rational debate about mistaken beliefs with the holders of those beliefs.

    [Reply: Great work Max! Yes indeed, that is what I concluded too: we are literally dealing with sick, twisted, degenerate, insane minds when you debate on this issue. There is nothing you can do to introduce rational sanity to the mind of a GHE alarmist/warmist believer, just like in a debate about god with religious believers.]

  24. johnmarshall says:

    Geothermal heat flow is worked out by actual measurement of the heat below the surface not calculating a SB figure which would be wrong given the insolation warming the surface. Geologists ignore the surface for this reason. Yes it is hot below as the temperature gradient shows but the heat flow given is an average and near areas of active volcanism will be much higher.

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