A while ago on the Green Building Forum,
in the context of asserting that current theories of anthropogenic
global warming are wrong,
Tony wrote:
Finally any model that shows consistently rising temperatures or
exponentionally rising temperatures must be ignoring Stefan’s Law which says
that heat is lost in proportion to the fourth power of the absolute temperature,
setting up a very strong force to stop or at least reduce any increases.
I think that's not right and I gave a quick response in the next post on that
thread giving a “meta” reason why I thought so: that it's ridiculous to think
that climate scientists aren't perfectly well aware of this law.
Another quick near-meta argument I could have given is that feedback
resulting from the supposed steep effects of Stefan's Law were not enough to
prevent global temperatures dropping by around 6 °C during the last glacial
maximum.
However, there's a physical reason, too, and the details are interesting enough
that it seemed worth writing up my understanding of the situation.
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