Response to
Charles Zeller replied to comment from Bob Armstrong on
A New Kind of Crime Against Humanity?: The Fossil Fuel Industry's Disinformation Campaign On Climate Change
It's refreshing to have a rational discussion of this most basic physics .
The e notation for powers of 10 has been common in computer languages since the days of Fortran nigh on 50 years ago .
My equation assumes a flat spectrum , that is a neutral gray ball . Thus absorptivity = emissivity = k
for all wavelengths and absorptivity from the sun's approximately 6000k
black body spectrum is the same as emissivity from our ball at
approximately 1/21 that temperature . Thus the k drops out .
This assumption is neutral , not only in the sense that a null hypothesis
should be neutral in not presupposing some particular spectrum , it
separates out average reflectivity , albedo , from spectrum leaving the
pure correlation between the spectra of sources , sinks , and sphere as
the factor raising or lowering the equilibrium temperature from the
simple unweighted sum of impinging energy .
What most appalls me about the lack of scientific approach to
these "climate science" debates is no one seems to actually know
how to calculate the temperature of a simple radiantly heated colored
ball . I find it inconceivable that anybody could have graduated from a
physics program 60 years ago without learning how do the calculation .
Yet in 2010 , with the welfare of the world in the balance , I see This
one crude , most extreme , in fact impossible , example used as the
field's null hypothesis . Explicitly : that without an
atmosphere the earth would have a uniform spectrum exhibiting 0.7
absorptivity with respect to the sun's approximately 6000k spectrum ,
yet 1.0 emissivity with respect to earth's approximately 300k spectrum
.
Something is seriously wrong when , tho the actual measured spectrum of
the earth , and of course that of the sun , are available , no one does
the actual computation . While I go into more detail , with a few lines
of executed Array Programming Language , on my website , I don't have
the time to mess with the actual full spectra of interest , So I'm
offering a meager prize of $300 to any student who gathers and confirms
the relevant spectra , and works with me to implement the couple of
additional lines of APL needed , and calculates precise equilibrium
temperatures for various spectra . The "model" will immediately be able
to handle any spectral image of the globe .