7 thoughts on “The End Of The Line For USA?”

  1. Rand – I don’t mean to hijack a thread… Well, actually, I do. You’re certainly within your rights to delete this, but…

    You might have an interest in creating a new thread for this. I’ve had a blindingly amazing insight, and I’d like to share it with technically oriented people.

    Over at Watts Up With That, there was a discussion about the greenhouse effect which focused on a thought experiment of the temperature of a planet with an atmosphere devoid of IR radiating, so-called “greenhouse gasses”. I suddenly realized that there was something terribly wrong about the whole hypothesized mechanism.

    A spherically distributed atmosphere cannot exist without a thermal gradient. In a steady state condition, the temperature profile must have a Laplacian of zero. And, as we all know here, setting the Laplacian to zero gives you a 1/r style result just like it does for the gravitational potential. What that means is that, there is always a temperature gradient, and heat must continually flow into the atmosphere from the conducting interface with the surface. And, that heat must build, and build, and build until it finds an outlet. One such outlet is IR radiation from… “greenhouse gasses”.

    “Greenhouse gasses” do not heat the surface. They prevent it from heating continuously until emissions beyond the IR are stimulated, or until the atmosphere boils off, whichever comes first, by providing a radiative heat sink for the atmosphere.

    In the steady state, the result is exactly the same as the standard greenhouse effect, with radiation from the surface balancing with the IR gas radiation so that incoming flux = outgoing flux. But, the mechanism is diametrically opposed. Yet, the cooling hypothesis must be the correct interpretation, because heat must continually flow into the atmosphere.

    This hypothesis also solves another conundrum: if the atmosphere-less Earth would be at -18C without an atmosphere, and the major greenhouse gas is water vapor, then how did the water un-freeze to heat the Earth?

    I go over all the points in my posts at the link, starting with this one. I’d like to get feedback from your astute readers.

    1. The coefficient of the 1/r term can be zero or have arbitrary sign. For example, if the Earth and space were both at the same temperature, let’s say, room temperature, there’d be no long term temperature gradient whether or not the atmosphere was transparent to any degree.

      “Greenhouse gasses” do not heat the surface. They prevent it from heating continuously until emissions beyond the IR are stimulated, or until the atmosphere boils off, whichever comes first, by providing a radiative heat sink for the atmosphere.

      The absence of these GHG would “prevent” the surface from heating to IR-level emissions, much less beyond IR levels. That is, deep space is a better radiative heat sink than carbon dioxide a mile up.

      1. “The coefficient of the 1/r term can be zero or have arbitrary sign.”

        It has to match the boundary condition at the surface, so it has to be non-zero.

        “The absence of these GHG would “prevent” the surface from heating to IR-level emissions, much less beyond IR levels.”

        There’s always a gradient. Therefore, there’s always heat flow into the atmosphere.

  2. “For example, if the Earth and space were both at the same temperature, let’s say, room temperature, there’d be no long term temperature gradient whether or not the atmosphere was transparent to any degree.”

    I’d agree with this. But, they’re not, so there is.

  3. So, let’s see. A company was founded to launch the shuttle. The shuttle doesn’t fly anymore. Follow-on programs are either too far down the road (Orion/SLS) or too lean in operations (Dragon) to support a company of that size. The fact that it’s shutting down should be QED. The fact that it’s not QED is a sign of the times we’re in.

    1. The fact that there isn’t a line of entrepreneurs forming to buy the company and maintain that skilled workforce to do something else is a sign of how overburdened the space industry is by government regulation.

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