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GREENHOUSE TEAPOTBy Martin Knox27/06/17Philosopher Bertrand Russell ridiculed the existence of God by positing a teapot in space between Jupiter and Earth. It has not been falsified nor can it be. Below I liken the Greenhouse Effect to such a teapot.Some people believe there is a teapot (Greenhouse Effect) that causes atmospheric warming. Their belief is bolstered by hot Venus and glasshouses that warm up. ‘Tea’ (radiation) raining down is supposed to cause temperatures to rise and ice caps to melt. The teapot uses ‘teabags’ (carbon dioxide and methane) made from the waste products from fossil fuels used in industry (from fossil fuels used in cars and from the hydrocarbon combustion waste coproduct water vapour, is seldom mentioned). Their conclusion is that we must stop producing teabags. Believers do not acknowledge that the ‘tea’ (global warming) could come from something else.The greenhouse theory is that the displacement of other gases in the air by carbon dioxide in the air lets in at least as much ultraviolet and retains infrared that would have reradiated into space. Is the theory predicated on CO2 molecules having emission and absorption characteristics that have directional bias? More important: has a greenhouse effect ever been measured? Is a greenhouse effect large enough to be significant? The CO2 concentration in 2013 was 0.04%, or 400 parts per million by volume (ppm) and increasing at about 1.4 ppm each year. Instead, ‘tea’ could be resulting from one or more of these processes:1.???????natural changes in the Earth and Sun that cause ‘tea’;2.???????non-anthropomorphic ‘tea’ from bushfires and volcanoes, resulting in entropy gain on Earth.?Entropy is?the quantity of low grade thermal energy that is unusable;3.???????liberation by combustion of the enthalpy of an increasing quantity of fossil fuels which ends up as ‘tea’ without requiring a teapot, especially since the industrial revolution. Enthalpy is the amount of energy in a system capable of doing mechanical work.4.???????enhanced ‘tea’ falls on Earth due to inefficient renewable energy technologies because more solar energy replaces the energy extracted from turbines and panels than is added by the efficient fossil fuel technologies they would displace.My calculations indicate that the above processes could produce the amounts of global warming reported and explain localised effects that would account for ‘climate change’ by atmospheric warming.When ‘tea’ is melting ice and causing sea level rise, this is not evidence that a ‘teapot’ exists. This is a?post hoc?fallacy:?‘Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.’ Existence of a teapot is not evidenced by tea. Similarly, when there is an increase in?the increased number of tea bags and an increase in the amount of tea, it does not mean there must be a teapot. This is another?post hoc?fallacy:?existence of a teapot is not evidenced by tea bags.The enhanced tea bags may result from:5.????????enhanced agriculture, biodecomposition, biodegradation and cows’ digestive processes;6.???????dissolution of ‘teabag’ carbon dioxide from the oceans as a result of ‘tea’.In view of the above alternative explanations for the ‘tea’, a teapot may not exist. It is not possible to dismiss the possibility of a teapot. The case for it would be improved had its hypothesised tea-producing effect ever been measured and reported accessibly. I have heard of it only as a supposition elaborated by qualitative theories. In some instances, the relationships have been acknowledged by the theorists who have confounded them. The absence of experimental data is preeminent in the websites I have perused.?Is it possible that a teapot could send its ‘tea’ to stay on Earth in daytime without much going out into space, even at night, having an effect like an electric blanket? Classical modelling of radiant transfer processes by Stefan Boltzmann has energy absorbed equal to energy emitted. I have not been able to find a method of calculating a Greenhouse Effect based on measurements in controlled experiments.You may want to dismiss my lack of success in finding this evidence as incomplete or indicative of incompetence at desk research. Although I have not been employed as a climate scientist, I am a chemical engineer and during a career spanning 50 years I have studied thermodynamic processes, including radiant heat transfer, worked as an energy supply engineer, applied complex numerical simulators to problems, analysed climate reports and data as a high school science teacher, written educational materials on climate science for Education Queensland, been a blogger on climate topics, witnessed the proposal of a greenhouse effect teapot and the apotheosis of renewable energy technologies. My fruitless search for the ‘teapot’ has been mostly online — my research skills have been acknowledged by employers.I am not at all convinced by the predictions of climate models because overfitting occurs when there are too few degrees of freedom. The ‘degrees of freedom’ is the number of observations minus the number of explanatory variables. If the number of variables is the same as, or greater than the number of observations, there are not enough observations and predictions are not sufficiently deterministic to have any confidence in them. The Earth’s climate has very many variables to be included in a realistic model. I would like to hear from any modeller who has explained more global climate observation averages than variables he/she has tweaked. If a teapot is causing the tea heating Venus, then the teabags it uses are 2500 times more concentrated, the sulphuric acid clouds on Venus are absent on Earth and the tea there is so much stronger, over 400oC, that the planet’s thermodynamic balance does not substantiate that a teapot there would have processes able to be scaled down to conditions on Earth with any reliability. ?There is nothing about Venus that is evidence for a teapot in the Earth’s atmosphere.A greenhouse effect is a theory that lacks the respectability of being validated by empirical science.Glasshouses warm up in daytime and cool down at night. They have heaters. Is there a greenhouse somewhere that is getting warmer and warmer, as it is supposed Earth is?Karl Popper’s philosophy of science is that anyone can put up a hypothesis without evidence, like a ‘teapot’. In his view, it is scientists’ role to try and falsify it. A dearth of evidence for the Greenhouse Effect does not falsify it, but you should be doubtful because I have presented several sound alternative explanations. My explanations, which are 6 hypotheses that explain the ‘tea’ and increased presence of ‘tea bags’, are respectable and demonstrably testable. If the ‘teapot’ has other evidence for it, let’s hear it. If you cannot provide such evidence and the ‘teapot’ story has captured your imagination, then think again. Faith is not a sufficient reason to abandon technologies that are serving the public well.Bertrand Russell used his teapot analogy to illustrate the idea that the burden of proof lies on the person making the unfalsifiable claim rather than shifting the burden of proof to others. This is more demanding than Popper’s position. Because a Greenhouse Effect teapot cannot be falsified, then the onus is on scientists to ‘prove’ that it exists and does not require me to prove that it does not. When I apply Popper’s more relaxed condition, am able to dismiss the teapot as whimsy until I obtain evidence to the contrary. It is logical for me to adopt a sceptical position.The energy we consume warms up the Earth: energy does not disappear. It all ends up in the environment as entropy, or thermal pollution that is at too low a temperature to be re-used. It stays in the environment, only slowly being radiated away into space and replaced by energy from the Sun.?The amounts are enough, I have calculated, to account for all of the warming reported. I can show you my numbers. ?The amount of warming by greenhouse gases is relatively uncertain and I know of no incontrovertible evidence that they cause any warming at all. It is logical to reduce entropy production to decrease atmospheric warming. This should be pursued by insisting on the most efficient energy supply technologies to convert fossil fuel and renewable potential energy with least wasting of energy due to production technology inefficiency. Coal fired base load technology has been relatively efficient. ?Renewable energy has so far been relatively inefficient, see hypothesis #4, and would increase global warming. Redirection of electricity production to efficient and away from inefficient technologies is not occurring as it should. The redirection of electricity production to the least efficient technologies has raised the cost to electricity consumers. Falling electricity demand will mitigate the increase in entropy production, so might be less ‘tea’ but not less than there would have been without the ‘teapot’ and without the ‘teabag’ scare. The hysteria has impose costs on ordinary consumers that are unwarranted.?The concern about ‘tea bag’ production should be put aside until there is more evidence of a ‘teapot’. It could take evidence that does not exist anywhere, as far as I know, to change my mind.Fallacy: Argumentum ad ignorantiam?(Argument from ignorance)Source: WikipediaArgumentum ad ignorantiam means "argument from ignorance." The fallacy occurs when it's argued that something must be true, simply because it hasn't been proved false. Or, equivalently, when it is argued that something must be false because it hasn't been proved true.(Note that this isn't the same as?assuming?something is false until it has been proved true. In law, for example, you're generally assumed innocent until proven guilty.)Here are a couple of examples:"Of course the Bible is true. Nobody can prove otherwise.""Of course telepathy and other psychic phenomena do not exist. Nobody has shown any proof that they are real."In scientific investigation, if it is known that an event would produce certain evidence of its having occurred, the absence of such evidence can validly be used to infer that the event didn't occur. It does not prove it with certainty, however.For example:"A flood as described in the Bible would require an enormous volume of water to be present on the earth. The earth doesn't have a tenth as much water, even if we count that which is frozen into ice at the poles. Therefore no such flood occurred."It is, of course, possible that some unknown process occurred to remove the water. Good science would then demand a plausible testable theory to explain how it vanished.Of course, the history of science is full of logically valid bad predictions. In 1893, the Royal Academy of Science were convinced by Sir Robert Ball that communication with the planet Mars was a physical impossibility, because it would require a flag as large as Ireland, which it would be impossible to wave.?[Fortean Times?Number 82.]See also?Shifting the Burden of Proof. ................
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