Wood Romances

On Facebook I recently came across a character by the name of Joseph Postma. I had come across some of his ideas on YouTube in the past and had quite a laugh at some of the nonsense that he puts in his videos, but recently Postma started participating in a group that I participate in, so I've interacted with him personally. For those of you unfamiliar with him, his ideas should best be understood as coming from the lunatic fringe of contrarian thinking. In fact, I'm seriously tempted to think that he doesn't actually believe what he says, but he's basically seeing how absurd he can be and still get people to believe him. To be sure, he has not yet convinced even the most radical of people blogging on some of the most popular contrarian sites. I mean, WUWT has posted criticisms of his views, Willis Eschenbach has publicly disagreed with him, and Roy Spencer has devoted at least one post  to responding to his claims. Even David Burton has taken issue with Postma. In othe...

Occasionally I hear people claim that the greenhouse effect isn't real because it would contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The idea behind this is that the atmosphere is cooler than the Earth's surface, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics says that heat always goes from hot to cold. Therefore, the Earth's atmosphere can't heat the Earth's surface. Therefore, the greenhouse effect can't exist in a universe in which the 2nd law of thermodynamics is operable. There was a "paper" published in Energy & Environment back in 2017 that made this claim[1], which concludes: The various stated definitions of the greenhouse effect have been subjected to the rigorous scrutiny and application of the fundamental laws of physics and thermodynamics. They were found to be unreal, and unless some new definition can be put forward that satisfies and complies with those laws, it can only be concluded that the concept of a ‘greenhouse gas’ or a ‘greenhouse effect’ h...