Ice, Ice, Everywhere and Ne'er A Drop Did Melt

Well, actually it did, and this is another example of the usefulness of willful stupidity.  Doug Cotton, yes bunnies, the peer reviewed Doug Cotton, making silly over at Roy's, and given how silly Roy has become, that is indeed very silly indeed.

Roy is trying to ignore him, but to slightly paraphrase a comment from the NY Times blogs The Dougs constitute our major problem: how do we improve our understanding of the world, maintain constructive relationships with the rest of the world, and move forward into a better future when a substantial segment of our population (who vote!) are guided by absurd beliefs. The Roys  are not evil, simply shortsighted. They don't understand that this dog will hunt only until it gets hungry; then it will turn around in a rage and bite us all.

 Eli, of course, dipped an ear in, but that lead to some thinking.  Let Doug state his ansatz (which, btw, you can find many other places on the web, not just from Doug

So, can we find an example of EM radiation not being converted to thermal energy when we might expect it to be?

A microwave oven can warm items with water molecules in them, including liquid water. This does not violate the SLoT simply because energy is added using electricity. But it can only melt ice by conduction from adjacent water molecules that it has already warmed, not by direct action on the ice.

However, the process is nothing remotely like the normal natural absorption of sunlight which also warms water and melts ice.

Not all photons striking water or ice molecules automatically convert EM energy to thermal energy as happens with solar radiation. If they did (as some people imply they do because they assume there is two-way heat flow which results in an apparent net one way flow) then why does far less energy flow into ice in a microwave oven than into water?

There is a stronger version of this

So what happens, Roy, to the fairly high intensity, but low frequency microwave radiation which strikes the ice cubes in a microwave oven but does not melt them?
If not much is reflected off water, why would much be reflected off ice? We know ice melts in front of an electric radiator. So the difference is in the frequency distribution as Claes and I have been saying.

It is neither reflected much nor absorbed at all. Yet, being a solid, not much would be transmitted, especially when we know the same microwaves had an effect on water.
So it must be scattered in the way I describe in my paper, and the absorptivity of ice for such low frequency radiation must be zero, because the ice does not melt. The reasons are in my paper, and this is why IPCC models are wrong in assuming absorptivity > 0 for backradiation.

WHich is more intense? Radiation in a microwave oven or backradiation from above the poles? Both types of radiation have lower frequencies than the radiation emitted by the ice itself.

If high intensity LW radiation in a microwave oven cannot melt ice, what chance does low intensity LW backradiation have of melting (or warming) all the ice and snow-covered areas of the globe? How then can backradiation affect sea levels?

The simple answer, of course, is that the absorption coefficient of solids varies with wavelength.  The figure on the right, from RefractiveIndex. Info (a great site for looking up refractive indicies of materials, highly recommended) shows the extinction coefficient of hexagonal ice.  The absorbance is quite high throughout the thermal IR (say from about 6 to 100 microns.  At the peak of the CO₂ bending vibration, about 14 microns the extinction coefficient is 0.28 cm^-1 which is equivalent to an absorption coefficient of 2500 cm^-1.  That's really high. An absorption coefficient of 1 cm^-1 means that 90% of the light would be absorbed in 1 cm, so the IR from backradiation is pretty much absorbed on the surface of the ice and someone should to tell Doug (right, good luck).

But yeah, microwave ovens don't heat ice very well, most of what you see is the absorption of the thin water layer on the top (getting rid of which 100% is a huge bear).   The question is why, and the answer can be found in a really impressive paper by Warren and Brandt published in JGR 113 D 14220 (2008) which has indicies of refraction, real and imaginary parts, for ice across the ENTIRE spectrum, and yes, water ice has a minimum in the absorption right where most kitchen microwaves work, 122 mm.