Comp Earth Physics reply to Karolina Hagegård

In response to : @KarolinaHa on CoSy ComputationalEarthPhysics 20200320

Thank you for bringing this over here to cosy.com/Science/ComputationalEarthPhysics.html . I haven't used the Disqus widget in a long time , and it seems to me to have degraded . Thus I'm posting this as a page at

I'm afraid everything I've ever done is a bit hard to follow 😞 .

Responding to questions like this is very useful . ( And boy this page needs a cleanup ).

The Planck function , ie: thermal radiation function has just 1 parameter , temperature , and it produces a family of power spectra . Here's a graph of the Planck power spectra for the ~ 5800K of the Sun and the ~ 300K of the Earth :

The color relative to those spectra is just the product of aε weights at each wavelength times the Planck power at that wavelength . Then those values are summed across , and as you say , the equilibrium temperature is where the areas of the 2 weighted curves are equal . If a = ε = k , a constant , it just scales the 2 curves the same . So the equilibrium temperature remains constant . The flow are less but the balance doesn't change . So , yes to your 1st paragraph .

That's what I've tried to indicate in this image .

I think it would be much clearer if I used an actual , or at least more natural looking spectrum like the measured ToA spectrum in addition to those hypothetical step functions .

And yes to your second paragraph . It's the correlation of the object's aε weights with the thermal spectra which shifts the equilibrium up or down . Ie: the ratio of the dot products .

Third paragraph : Right ! ( summing across all frequencies ) .

4th : No , the 3 percent cannot be explained by color . In fact , I think it's rather clear that the 0.7 short % long wave ratio , while uselessly crude when measured spectra are available , is in the ball park . In CoSy :

0.7 0.25 2_f ^f |>| 0.91 R0 278.6 _f *f |>| 254.83

The point of my Heartland talk is that the same calculation for Venus , whose surface is ~ 2.25 the gray body temperature in its orbit , is quantitatively absurd .

Only later did I appreciate the obvious cause of the ` lapse gradient was the non-optional trade-off of gravitational potential energy with kinetic keeping total energy constant . See my opening comments at http://cosy.com/#PlanetaryPhysics , and the box :

Particles moving "up" in a gravitational field slow down , ie: cool ;
Those moving down speed up , ie: heat .
Newton's Law of Gravity which explains how much faster satellites go in lower orbit also explains how much faster molecules go at the bottoms of atmospheres and thus quantitatively explains the temperature profiles of all planets whatever their atmosphere including the ~ 33c warmer the bottom of our atmosphere is than our radiative balance with the Sun .

The GHG paradigm , excluding the Law of Gravity in violation even of conservation of energy , being false , has thus never presented a testable equation quantifying their asserted spectral "trapping" nor an experimental demonstration of it .

All these equations can be worked out , and I think have been by various people , but not brought together into one computable whole .

I'm past doing solo acts , so while I'd do all I could to support someone implementing the quantitative relationships in CoSy , CoSy itself is my overriding priority . ( and the main use there is the everyday business of life , mainly diary and accounts . )