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Asking the wrong question - A fools errand

Howard Cork Hayden
USA
2022
energyadvocate.com/
Since the 1970s, education has switched from showing students where to learn in the literature and real world to telling them what they must think and quote. It is a travesty in North America and Europe that will cost people dearly.

Imagine a large room with perfectly insulating walls. The room contains chairs, tables, books, sheets of paper, pitchers and glasses of water, some flowering plants, and so forth. Now comes the question:

“If we add some heat (say 1 MJ) to the room, how much does the temperature rise?”

“If we add a certain heat flux (say 1 W/m2) all over the surface of the earth, how much would the temperature rise? So many assumptions are involved that the calculated temperature rise can be pretty much anything. Start programming your supercomputer!

Now turn that unanswerable question around and ask an answerable question: “If the temperature of the surface rises by (say) 1ºC, how much more IR does it emit?”