Recycling of Heat in the Atmosphere is Impossible: A Note from Nasif S. Nahle
Introduction
Key diagrams on the Earth’s energy budget depicts an exchange of energy between the surface and the atmosphere and their subsystems considering each system as if they were blackbodies with emissivities and absorptivities of 100% 1, 2.
This kind of analyses shows a strange “multiplication” of the heat transferred from the surface to the atmosphere and from the atmosphere to the surface which is unexplainable from a scientific viewpoint. The authors of those diagrams adduce that such increase of energy in the atmosphere obeys to a “recycling” of the heat coming from the surface by the atmosphere 1, 2, as if the atmosphere-surface were a furnace or a thermos and the heat was a substance.
Such “recycling” of heat by the atmosphere does not occur in the real world for the reasons that I will expose later in this note.
Few authors have avoided plotting such unreal recycling of heat and only show the percentages related to the flow of energy among systems and subsystems of the Earth 3, 4.
We do know that serious science makes a clear distinction between heat and internal energy. However, we will not touch this abnormal definition of heat from those erroneous diagrams1, 2 on the annual Earth’s energy budget.
In addition to the wrong concept of heat that the authors let glimpse in their articles 1, 2, the recycling of heat by the atmosphere does not and cannot occur in the real world. There are many physical factors, already proven experimentally and observationally5, that nullify the ideas of the recycling of heat by the atmosphere.
The principal physical factor that inhibits the recycling of heat in the atmosphere is the degradation of the energy each time it is absorbed and emitted by any system10. This degradation of energy is well described by the second law of thermodynamics6, whose fundamental formulation is as follows:
The energy is always dispersed or diffused from an energy field with lesser available microstates towards an energy field with higher available microstates5.
In other words, the energy is always dispersed or diffused from the system with a higher energy density towards the system with a lower energy density5, 10.
The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that some evaluations 1, 2 on the Earth’s annual energy budget are not considering the laws of basic physics and thermodynamics, that the “recycling” of heat in the atmosphere is unphysical and that the carbon dioxide works like a coolant of the surface, rather than like a warmer. / Continues with Analysis and finishes In Conclusion. Well worth reading.
(The numbers refer to a list of references, many linked.)
