"I think sometimes they are wet, and sometimes dry".
Especially when a boat goes by.

The frequency of photon frequencies frequently changes
As a regatta sails across the waves.

But still the sea warms in the shallows
And the deeps have their own thermostat.

ACK "I can assure you the lower part of my hand experiences warmth as opposed to the upper part which is decidedly cooler."

The temperature difference between your hand and the ground is small. The temperature difference between your hand and space is great. Your hand is cooling. Your hand cools at a slower rate against the smaller temperature difference than it does against the larger one.

You can continue to believe what your hand is telling you.

ssat. Sorry but the upper part of my hand is not exposed to space but to that bit of the atmosphere nust above my hand and that has a temperature almost exactly the same as the atmosphere just beneath my hand.
Everything in contact with the atmosphere emits and accepts IR radiation. My hand emits radiation and recieves it. The upper part loses heat but gains little - it feels cool. The lower part also emits radiation at the same rate but recieves radiation from.the ground so that it feels warmer.

When I experienced heat emitted by vertical rock walls at night in deserts this was also real, just like a low powered electric fire. I see no difference between the effects (except in magnitude) of IR from the rock walls and those from the hot wire in an electric fire. Both do work.

ACK "both do work"
No, your are observing the energy leaving to space. The work was done when it arrived from the sun and was absorbed. You can't count it twice. It is a spent force.

ssat. But it hasn't left for space it has been absorbed by my hand.

Where can I read about photons that possess no energy and therefore can do no work?

Care to explain the difference between infrared photons emitted by the Sun, by the cooling Earth surface and by an electric fire? To do work, energy dissipates increasing entropy. The Sun, Earth's surface and an electric fire all are warmer than their surroundings, all emit IR photons (thus dissipating part of their energy) which, in my book, means that all can do work. Where do you think I am mistaken?

If you place yourself outside the atmosphere then you can bask in Earthshine drawn by the temperature difference between Earth's 255DegK and the 2.3 DegK of space. You are no longer part of the system you were observing and now your observation will be that Earthshine does do work.

ssat.
So no answers to my 8.28am questions then?
I'll keep to my primitive beliefs that both electric fires and heat radiating Earth surfaces can do work.

ssat. BTW I believe earthshine is REFLECTED sunlight, not IR emissions from the Earth.

Posts crossed. The energy arriving from the sun then departing to space maintains an equilibrium temperature on the planet. Processes on the planet are driven by the energy flowing through it. A wall, warmed by the sun during the day is part of that process. At night it gives off its heat and will continue in that diurnal cycle. The wall has not created any energy. If you put your hand close to the wall at night you can observe energy being lost to space but it can do no further work on the system by first passing into your hand and its destiny remains the same.

ssat. I do wonder if you are confusing the entire Earth system (where I would agree that virtually the only energy in the system comes from the sun but seem to differ from you in believing this energy can be used over and over so long as the laws of thermodynamics are not violated) with what can happen within part of the whole system.

Let me use the analogy of some types of geothermal systems. These use superheated steam to drive turbines and extract some of the contained energy, the expelled superheated water/depleted steam mix then drives other turbines, with the hot water used directly or to vaporize a lower boiling point liquid. Finally the warm water passes through a heat exhanger and the new, now heated, water can be used for space heating (buildings or greenhouses). In each case energy (mechanical converted to electricity, or as useable heat) is extracted. When passing from one energy extractive system to another the energy within the fluid can do further work if placed in an appropriate new environment where there is sufficient energy gradient.

In the case of the Earth's surface, this becomes heated during the day but at night the surface is in a different environment in which it is now in contact with a colder atmosphere such that part of its energy moves down the new energy gradient In doing so it can do work, like warm.my hand or provide enough latent energy to allow water films to freeze.

ACK. I am not confusing anything. This thread is about The Great Delusion. About AGW. Energy in the system drives life and enables you to put your hand where you like and in that sense, it does do work but the energy from the sun is the only energy supplying that system.

Life is a by-product of CO2 + sunshine (BTW containing infra-red) but perhaps for analysis of TGD it would be easier to leave it out of the equation as it appears in none of the relevant ones.

I think you are. Neither are you answering the questions I ask about your belief that there are different types of IR photon than can and cannot do work. You made the statement that escaping IR photons can do no work and go on to deny it is occurring when it can directly be experienced by the human hand. Your stance is absolute tosh. A diversion into life does not help.
One last attempt: point an old fashioned plate or film camera with IR sensitive film at the cooling Earth surface at night. Parts of the film exposed to IR photons will suffer chemical change, which means they are doing work. You dispute this?

If escaping IR radiation can cause change, i.e. do work, a central plank of your AGW argument seems to fail.

Radical Rodent
Isn't the sky blue because of scattering of light, blue light is scattered more because of the shorter wavelength. When the sun is low on the horizon the light you see has been subjected to the scattering in the upper atmosphere giving red skies in the morning or evening depending on the weather conditions at the time. One of the processes is Rayleigh scattering which if I recall correctly involves vibrating molecules in a gas, the other part involves dust particles smaller than the wavelength of light and in fact lends some truth to Red sky at night etc.

Ravishing Rattie. My question, poorly phrased perhaps, is if the oceans can only be heated by non intrared radiation (infrared radiation only heating up the uppermost millimetre of the ocean causing evaporation and cooling) how can greenhouse gases (that only emit IR) cause any additional ocean heating?

I thought the standard explanation for blue skies involves differential Rayleigh scattering of different wavelengths rather than absorption. Goodness my 1950s O-level physics is being put to the test, first by ssat, now by your wonderful self.

Ssat

Your Nov 25th 6.12pm post is impressive. I agree with every item on your fact list, but would doubt some of your conclusions.

First gravity. For a given planet and atmosphere gravity determines the pressure gradient, but not the energy budget. When a mass of air rises it gains gravitational potential energy, but another mass must fall. The net potential energy does not change. When you warm an atmosphere it expands and gains net potential energy. Unfortunately, when you do the numbers, this effect is very small compared with energy changes from other sources. I'm sorry, but your jump from "gravity causes the pressure gradient" to "gravity causes the greenhouse effect" has no basis in physics.

Congratulations, you have reinvented Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. There are negative feedbacks which prevent an increasing greenhouse effect producing runaway warming. Here are two of them.

Increase CO2 concentration and you decrease outward radiation in the 13 micrometre to 17 micrometre band. The retained energy increases temperature. This increases outward radiation across the rest of the black body band from 2 micrometres to 20 micrometres. Once the net outward radiation reaches its original intensity the temperature stabilises.

When you increase CO2 concentration you increase the radiating altitude as you described. Think of the radiating altitude as the surface of a sphere. Increasing the radiating altitude increases the surface area of the sphere. More radiating surface increases the outward radiation and limits further warming.

ACK. I will say again, energy in the system is outgoing energy, it is the flow which cools the system. It does no more work on the system because it is cooling. The sun provides the heating and does the work. That work is the driver of the energy through the system toward the sink. Of course you can detect the cooling flow: it exists until annihilation at the sink of space. At no time can any energy in the cooling flow add to energy in the system: even when you wave your hand about.

ACK

Ocean heat comes almost entirely from shortwave radiation during the day. This is absorbed by the top 200 metres and then mixed to greater depths by turbulence.

The effect of shortwave radiation is rather more subtle It warms the surface film. A small amout of that heat mixes or diffuses downward, but most warms or evaporates that surface film. The warm surface film and the warm atmosphere boundary layer immediately above it acts as a warm thermal barrier, reducing the effective temperature gradient between the ocean and the atmosphere.This reduces the rate of heat transfer from ocean to atmosphere, so the ocean loses less heat and ends up warmer.

Thus the net result of increased CO2 is increased DWR, reduced ocean heat heat loss and increased ocean temperatures.

Absolutely amazing ssat!!!
"At no time can any energy in the cooling flow add to energy in the system." You are referring to the whole earth system here. Radiation of IR to my hand is only part of this much bigger system where work is done so long as overall entroppy is in reased. If you deny this then the question arises - why is this cooling system any different from any other? Like the progressively cooling geothermal water I already discussed, work is being done at all parts of the system.

Again my basic questions regarding different types of IR photon go unanswered.

EM since you state that you agree with almost everything ssat wrote, you could join in too.

Radical Rodent

The heat from hydrothermal vents, Mid Atlantic Ridge, etc sounds big on a human scale, but is

a) very small on a planetary scale, when compared with the climate energy budget,

b) relatively constant, so it is not a factor in the current warming trend

ACK will confirm that the net geothermal outflow is 0.091W/m^2. The imbalance driving the current warming is 0.7W/m^2
and the energy coming from the Sun averages 1366W/m^2. Geothermal energy is about 1/10,000 of the energy driving the climate system.

RR. Are you also agreeing with ssat that IR radiation from cooling surfaces can do no work. I wish someone would explain to me why this is so.
While you're at it perhaps you can explain that little toy where IR radiation from a light bulb passes through a vaccum to cause a vane to rotate - surely using ssat's argument the energy put into the system has all been used up by the light, its spent and cannot be counted twice - utter bull excrement).

Entropic man. But that's not the entire energy expenditure. Care to estimate the energy expended in moving crustal plates over the mantle, the convective movements of the entire mantle and between parts of it, and the shearing that occurs bewen the mantle and the core and between parts of the core. Some of these movements induce the Earth's magnetosphere which is strong enough to deflect much of the Sun's influx.

Are you absolutely sure that energy expended within the Earth is small relative to the Sun's influx. I'm not convinced I know this as a proven fact.

ACK,s sat

I agreed with ssat's fact list from yesterday, but he he drew some mistaken conclusions.

I have been following your discussion with ssat with some bemusement, mainly with the concept of doing work.

I remember the definition that "Energy is the capacity for doing work."

In the context of a climate system, energy drives temperature changes, convection, ice melt, evaporation, etc. I would regard all these as "work" in the sense used by physicists. These all take place as incoming energy moves around the system.

Eventually a bit of the energy is stored, such as latent heat in melted ice, but it almost all ends up as heat radiating as longwave radiation outward into space. I see no way in which this is doing work, unless you regard warming the interplanetary medium as work. From a terrestrial viewpoint it's work here is done.

ACK

Dammit, I hate spell checkers.

In my 1230pm post, when discussing warming of the surface film I was, of course, describing the effect of LONGWAVE radiation.