Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

That sort of behavior is consistent with abusing the legal system so he could say he was suing for defamation without ever having to actually win - for a decade! Dismissing such a case isn't a technicality. As the judge points out, Ball got witnesses lined up in his defense and Mann delayed so long that Ball's witnesses actually died of old age.

Honestly, I hadn't read the dismissals before. But it's laughable to call this dismissed on technicalities. Mann comes across as an abusive, manipulative and extraordinarily untrustworthy person in all of this. A clearer case of abusive litigation is hard to find.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_law_of_thermodynamics

In this case, a wall which only allows transfer of heat via radiation (say, two simple thin transparent walls that only stop particles with vacuum gaps between them) is a diathermal wall.

These arguments aren't anything new, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_law_of_thermal_r...

Climate arguments with laypeople is usually full of things that go against common sense thermodynamic intuition, and then the funny thing is that when you state the common sense thermodynamic intuition, which doesn't fit the narrative, they object to things which are as basic physics as you can get.

I bet that the confidence in climate change takes a nose dive with understanding of physics. It reaches a stable position somewhere of "well we're doing approximations too so without looking into it, maybe their approximations aren't so bad". If you do go looking into it in detail, you're either too invested to go against it, or you go against it and get cancelled / whatever, and then you're faced with a squad of believers who understand nothing but defend it with absolute confidence, with understanding that sounds more like caloric or phlogiston theory than actual modern physics.

There's a funny social gradient from climate modelers which know exactly how far away from the truth these models are, but still do the best that they can, to their managers, press releases, activists, politicians, where the entire thing looks like a game of broken telephone. And the honest people who say "I'm doing the best I can but I know it's not enough" are probably drowning in the shadow of those with dishonest conviction.

EDIT: to also correct a little simplification, you can prevent heat loss to radiation by reflectivity. But that's not the case with CO2 in the atmosphere, the arguments of greenhouse effect is not about reflectivity. Reflectivity would be the albedo of the surface, which is indeed important. But the atmosphere is completely negligible for reflectivity purposes.

You've added an assumption in your question that the entire atmosphere is at the same temperature. This is trivially false; the atmosphere varies greatly in temperature. Some levels of the atmosphere can heat others, and indeed would do so more if those levels are composed of gasses which absorb more energy in the frequencies emitted, like CO2 does in practice.

> the absorption is possible only because the molecules have more degrees of freedom to vibrate.

The gases in the atmosphere are not blackbodies. They absorb different amounts of radiation at different frequencies because of those vibrational modes. If you substitute a gas in the atmosphere that absorbs no infrared with one that absorbs a lot of infrared, the atmosphere overall absorbs more energy and therefore warms.

> Except these models are dumpster fire. You can download some of them from NASA's website and judge the quality of code for yourself. Old fortran code, all the models copy code from each other,

The code quality has absolutely nothing to do with the predictive power of those models. Unless you have found bugs in the code, this is irrelevant.

> many things which aren't constant physically are constant in the code, functions full of tens of "if else" statements whose physical validity is highly in question.

Of course simplifying assumptions have been made. Can you point to an example of a variable made constant that you think is an oversimplification that would change the predictions so drastically as to remove warming from added CO2?

> There are also other glaring counter intuitive things about the narrative. Somehow CO2 effects continue to work slowly over decades, and the system doesn't reach an equilibrium with the current levels of CO2 until decades ahead.

I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here. It seems like you're implying that all thermodynamic changes to a system have to occur instantaneously. We may also not reach equilibrium for a very long time, if (as is very possible!) the warming of the Earth decreases its albedo.

> This is completely against normal thermodynamic intuition. Meta stable states exist, yes, and there are out of equilibrium systems. But usually the reason for systems not reaching the more stable state, is that their fluctuations are too small. In this case, the fluctuations are much much bigger than the supposed stable state change. We're talking about barely a degree change over decades in systems that fluctuate by several degrees daily. It makes no sense to claim their equilibrium will only be reached in decades while their fluctuation exceeds the difference to equilibrium daily.

I'm sorry, but your understanding of thermodynamics is extremely flawed. Metastable states have nothing to do with this. You are also making the basic error of confusing weather with climate here. The temperature increase that is discussed in climate science is an increase in the total energy of the atmosphere. By increasing the ability of the atmosphere to absorb energy, you increase its energy.

You are also arguing against models but have completely failed to address the fact that the atmosphere _is warming_. This is being measured and is no longer a hypothetical.

> ...and if the amount of cattle is kept constant...

My point (unclear) is that this is not a constant, but a variable (in the sense that it is a societal choice). Animal agriculture shifts more of the distribution of atmospheric carbon at any time toward methane, which accelerates warming.

> ...this whole closed loop has already settled into a steady state: At any point in time, the amounts of methane and CO2 in the atmosphere due to cattle are constant.

The premise that the amount of animal agriculture is constant is incorrect. It has been increasing year over year for some time as the human population increases. The theoretical concentration of methane has been increasing over that same time. It's also worth noting that industrial animal agriculture is not a closed loop because it currently relies on mined hydrocarbons for feedstock fertilizer and transport.

The cases were dismissed without evaluating the science because of Mann's behavior. The people he sued wanted to just get on with it and debate the science, but Mann literally filed suit and then never turned up to his own legal proceedings. Hence the judge's displeasure.

Apparently Mann tried to make the same argument you made about not losing the case. He lost all the cases. If the judge dismisses your case that is losing. You don't get to file a lawsuit, never turn up and then when the judge tosses you out, claim you won.