Everybody knows Physics, everybody without exception. We learn Physics from the day we are born, and we go on learning Physics every day thereafter – not in a classroom, mind, but in the University of Life.
Heat is defined as the transfer of kinetic energy. Yesterday my wife brought her oil-filled radiator into our breakfast room. Quite idly, I stretched my right hand out to touch it, little realising it had been on for half an hour.
Wow! I experienced an immediate transfer of kinetic energy. I guess most husbands have also had the experience of being handed a hot plate by their partners right out of the oven. The experience of the transfer of kinetic energy can be alarmingly immediate and painful.
There are thousands of ways we experience the transfer or kinetic energy by contact, which the Physicist calls Conduction. I well remember as a young man walking on the hot sands of the Riviera without sandals. It was like walking on hot coals. I had to rush into the sea to cool my feet.
Likewise you may on occasion at school had to have a cold bath, or had to dive into the middle of a lake where the water was so cold that it took your breath away. Here there is a transfer of kinetic energy, but in reverse. I am sure that everyone can think of many examples of the transfer of kinetic energy by Conduction. A housewife may have touched a hot iron, or a kid may have touched a hot stove. Whatever, the result is immediate.
If one puts water in a kettle and brings it to the boil one very soon learns that the steam at the spout is scalding, yet the same steam just 2 feet up is only warm. So everyone learns about Convection in the kitchen. We all learn from a very simple thing that hot air rises and as it rises up it cools. The steam fans out visibly.
So we also learn about Radiation, if we have a bonfire in the garden. If we stand very close to a big bonfire we feel the heat, but 5 feet away it is tolerable, 25 feet away we hardly experience a thing, and if we stand in a crowd on November 5th, bonfire night, we may be kept so far away that we experience no heat at all. Here we have been given a lesson in the inverse square law, without ever having heard of it. So Radiation is slow and diminishes with distance effectively, although theoretically it may continue.
What we soon learn is that Conduction is immediate and can be painful. What we learn about Convection from watching the smoke from a bonfire or the steam from a kettle is that what is very hot at source rises up and cools. From this is derived a universal law. If we are to produce heat from a bonfire we need combustion or what the Physicist calls ‘work done’ and he codifies this as the 1st law of Thermodynamics. Since what is hot as a gas or a liquid rises up (never down) this is codified as the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. All heat by itself flows from hot to cold and never vice-versa.
Now you see what I mean ‚Äì everybody, just everybody, knows what some friends of mine call ‘kitchen physics’. I don’t care what they call it, as the Laws of Thermodynamics are universal and immutable.
It is not seldom that my wife will ask me around 6P.M. to switch our electric oven on. What happens? An electric current is sent through the element, which causes a resistance, which produces heat. The air inside the restricted space heats up and the temperature rises. After about 20 minutes the oven is sufficiently hot for my wife to put in some delicious pies from frozen, from the Queen’s own butcher in the North of Scotland, which we have got in the habit of using. Once cooked, we switch off the oven. What happens? Does the oven continue to get hotter and hotter? Of course not!
Thermal energy will flow from the oven into the kitchen, until all the surfaces and the oven are in equilibrium according to the Zeroth Law of thermodynamics.
Precisely the same happens with a Greenhouse or Conservatory. I have a south-facing conservatory. When the sun shines even on a frosty morning the air inside will heat up quite reasonably, as it is a confined space, not unlike the oven. The temperature of the air inside will only rise or be maintained while the Sun is generating heat. Is the heat then trapped? Of course not! Once the Sun sets and ceases to generate the heat, the temperature will subside, seeking equilibrium with the surrounds. If the temperature in my garden falls to minus 10ºC, so also will the temperature in my Conservatory fall to the same degree, seeking equilibrium.
Earth’s atmosphere is not a confined space, so the idea that a trace gas could create a physical barrier, preventing the escape of warmed air is simply not tenable. The Greenhouse Effect is a palpable lie.
Once a person has a firm grasp of these immutable laws he or she will understand for ever that what is hot by itself will always cool down, and if someone tries to persuade them of the opposite, they know that he is a blackguard and a liar.
The Warmists try to persuade us that the Earth is getting hotter and hotter, because heat is ‘trapped’. Now, reader, just digest what I have written above. Whether from Conduction, from Convection or from Radiation it is utterly impossible to trap a transfer of kinetic energy. Heat can never be trapped, although a hot substance may be trapped temporarily. We can trap hot coffee in a thermos flask for a few hours. We can trap hot air in our living rooms by turning up the central heating and closing the doors and windows tight, but once the heating is off the heat just fades away ‚Äì it never gets hotter. Only witch doctors will tell you otherwise.
If the Sun went out, which God forbid, do you imagine that the Planet Earth would remain warm? Never! It would sink pretty quickly to Absolute Zero on the Kelvin scale, which is miles colder than anything like the freezing point on Centigrade. Then Warmist quacks may exhale all the Carbon Dioxide they want, but this Carbon Dioxide will not produce one iota of heat. Carbon Dioxide by itself cannot generate heat and those mountebanks know it well.
That is why there is Solar Global Warming, over which mankind has no control, but man-made Global Warming, or AGW, is the most elaborate and wicked hoax ever perpetrated on mankind.
