Evaporative cooling. Reality versus climate models

Another error made by climate consensus is they treat all earth's warming the same, whether the origin of warming is solar or back-radiation. But is it not at all the same.

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Evaporative cooling. Reality versus climate models

The sun directly warms earth's atmosphere, ground and water surfaces. We can demonstrate it experimentally. For some reason, climate scientists have a very hard time measuring warming from back-radiation! It's especially difficult to measure back-radiation warming earth's water surface, oceans etc. No studies show back-radiation warming earth's water surface. Yet they assume warming from this back-radiation is greater than warming from sunlight!

This is partly because back-radiation (infrared) can only penetrate mere micrometres (µm) into water before it is absorbed. Note: 1 metre = 1 million µm. Sunlight can penetrate up to 100 metres before it is all absorbed, and most sunlight is absorbed within 10 metres. As such the sun's energy can warm earth's oceans. This warmth can be kept to affect our climates.

In contrast, back-radiation only warms a very thin, microscopic, skin layer on top of oceans (thermal skin layer, TSL). Sunlight warms oceans deeply; back-radiation does not. Most of the back-radiation warming is pretty quickly lost.

Heat is lost from water surface in 2 ways: called evaporative cooling and black body radiation. About 50:50.

Evaporative cooling.

Energy can be used by water in 2 ways:

1. It can warm water - to raise the temperature.
2. It can break chemical bonds which otherwise keep water as a liquid. These are the so-called hydrogen bonds keeping liquid water in chains of about 6 molecules:
   (H₂O)₆ (liquid) + LHV --> 6 H₂O (vapour)
   In this second case the water temperature does not increase when it absorbs the LHV energy. Instead, LHV changes the state of water from liquid to vapour. The water vapour then evaporates. This kind of energy is called latent heat of vaporisation (LHV).

Once evaporated, water vapour joins the water vapour cycle of about 9 days. It takes about 8 days for the water vapour to ascend the atmosphere, and about 1 day for it to make clouds and turn to precipitate. It then comes back down to earth as rain, hail, sleet, or snow.

Water vapour, WV, ascends slowly (because it is lighter than normal air). After 8 days WV reaches the upper troposphere. There it condenses, and releases LHV it absorbed previously. LHV then radiates out to space (but some comes back down to earth: because atmospheric radiation by gases is omnidirectional). This kind of surface cooling system is called "evaporative cooling". It is responsible for about half the heat lost by the surface. The other half is lost as black body radiation.

Let's get back to the problem of measuring the effect of back-radiation warming the surface. Climate models assume sunlight and back-radiation are equivalent. That the same energy amount, has the same warming effect - no matter the frequency of radiation. As we just saw, this assumption is nonsense. Climate scientists don't have experiments measuring backradiation from carbon dioxide warming the surface. Oceans cover 71% of the earth. It's agreed (by skeptics and warmists) that over 90% of climate warming works through ocean warming.

Infrared penetration into water against radiation frequency. Wong & Minnett, 2018. The main carbon dioxide absorption band is for 15µm / 666 cm^-1. This shows a penetration into water no further than ~ 4µm. Note: 0.005 cm = 50 µm.
The penetration depth obtained from I(–z) = I₀ exp(–a(–z)) (equation (1)) with R_img obtained from Bertie and Lan (1996)

This is a huge flaw in consensus climate science.

Citation

1. Elizabeth W. Wong & Peter J. Minnett, 2018. The Response of the Ocean Thermal Skin Layer to Variations in Incident Infrared Radiation
   Full | pdf
2. Elizabeth W. Wong ; Peter J. Minnett; 2016. Retrieval of the Ocean Skin Temperature Profiles From Measurements of Infrared Hyperspectral Radiometers—Part II: Field Data Analysis
3. Bertie, J. E., & Lan, Z. (1996). Infrared intensities of liquids XX: The intensity of the OH stretching band of liquid water revisited, and the best current values of the optical constants of H₂O(I) at 25°C between 15,000 and 1 cm⁻¹. Applied Spectroscopy, 50(8), 1047–1057.

Why Culture War?

The modern left are hard to make sense of. At first the left seem to be a bunch of victims. From a Nietschean perspective, one might conclude they seek religious rebirth. So they can wreck the revenge of the slaves once again, to turn the table on their masters (the capitalists)! It's not at all like that. The unifying thread in leftism is the culture war. When the old Soviet Empire died, beginning 1989, the left finally understood that the socialist economy fails because it creates inefficiencies all over the place. They came to believe they can never win an economic argument because Capitalism is intrinsically, effecient at allocating resources by markets. In place of arguing for a socialist economy the left initiated various culture wars. Such as: climate, trans rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, anti-racism, feminism? [note the question mark]. I'm making it sound like a conspiracy which it isn't. The seeds for cultural Marxism were sown in the 1930s when Antonio Gramsci began writing his Prison Notebooks. Gramsci's work was translated from Italian. It became hot intellectual property in the 1970s among the New Left; as they sought their own brand to distinguish themselves from the Leninist and Trotskyist politics of the, then current, far left.

Feminism kind of stands out here as a non-left concern. By the 1970s feminism had become a career and lifestyle concern for hetero women. Almost all women. Conservative women may not have been calling themselves Feminist but they adopted many of the formal demands of the feminist movement. Feminism always grated against Marxism too. Especially radical feminism but also middle class feminism. It seems to me that feminist thinkers, more so than gay, environmentalist, or anti-racist thinkers, were adept at challenging Marxism. In contrast trans rights offer leftists a blank slate to wage a culture war with. Almost a new kind of secret weapon! The constituency (of trans people) may be tiny, but lefties can make up whatever they want, provided it rhetorically "advances trans rights". Today's apparent conflict between women and trans people (men) is best seen as a chess move in the culture war.

By 1980s other Marxisms such Andre Gorz's Existentialism/Critical Theory fusion began to arrive too. All pointing to cultural politics. All these other concerns: women's equality, anti-racism, environmentalism, gay rights were to trump economics. The title of his book gives it away: "Farewell to the Working Class - An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism". All strands in Marxism were moving to culture to argue for change. By the late 1980s, Marxist economics was almost dead. So rather than see this as something planned one must understand it as leftists occupying the ground at Universities and adjusting anti-capitalism to mean something new: a new culture rather than a new economy. It morths into a culture war because with such flimsy politics, one must constantly go on the offensive to rally one's troops into an anti-capitalist army. As Hegel (or his anti-mirror: Marx) might have said: modern left politics became a culture war because that was the only niche an opposition could occupy.