The Sun Causes Earth Temperatures to Rise and Fall

 We are a little over a month away from the UN's big confab on climate change known as COP 30, or the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Brevity is not the UN's strong suit. Prior to that event, you will hear all sorts of drivel claiming that the "world will end in 10 years unless we do something now!"  Naturally, that something is always to stop using fossil fuels.

The use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas necessarily produces carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).  Thus, burning fossil fuels is a very grave sin according to the climate alarmists.  But, "very important people" such as Leonardo DiCaprio and John Kerry will fly to Brazil in their private jets to lend a hand to the COP 30 proceedings, thus adding yet more CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere.  While there, they will dine on sumptuous meals while back home, we can barely afford hamburger.

Note, that I do not begrudge these people their private planes.  I would own one of I had a need for it.  The problem is not that these people fly all over in private jets, but that they do so while lecturing the rest of us who use automobiles to get to work every day that we should give up our cars and drive horses and buggies or just walk.

Anticipating the onslaught of climate alarmism, Douglas J. Cotton has a post at the American Thinker entitled Why climate models fail. They fail, in that they cannot replicate past climates, because their premises are flawed. Cotton is not, as you may have guessed, a climate "scientist" but instead views the climate problem through a physicist lens understands a field called thermodynamics.

Mainstream climatology models are fundamentally flawed because they ignore a now established physical reality: gravity — not radiative forcing — governs the temperature gradient in the troposphere. This gradient arises from gravity’s direct influence on individual air molecules, slowing those with upward velocity components and accelerating those moving downward. The result is a vertical stratification of molecular kinetic energy — what we measure as temperature.

To visualize this, consider a sealed vertical cylinder, initially devoid of air. Introduce air molecules through a central aperture. Those that ascend lose kinetic energy (cool), while those that descend gain it (warm). This produces a stable temperature gradient — an equilibrium state of maximum entropy — where the sum of kinetic and gravitational potential energy remains constant with altitude. There are no unbalanced energy potentials; the system is in what we physicists call thermodynamic equilibrium (not to be confused with thermal equilibrium).

Thus, what drives the surface temperature of the earth is not a gas that represents 0,04% of the atmosphere, but the Sun itself. Try as we might, there is nothing we can do to change the Sun.