Reading some of the climate blogs lately (don't shoot me, this is relevant), I'm amazed at the number of people, even those with some technical background, who believe that the weight of the atmosphere alone creates a steady power transfer to the earth's surface that maintains temperatures higher than possible without an atmosphere -- so it's not the radiative absorption of "greenhouse gases" that does this. They calculate the potential energy of the atmosphere in the earth's gravitational field as evidence.
When you point out to them that this potential energy is fundamentally unchanging and therefore there can be no ongoing power transfer from this, they follow up with the idea that the adiabatic compression of downdrafts does this. And then you can't get them to see that this would be canceled by the adiabatic expansion of the required corresponding updrafts...
Sorry, but this rotating "gravitational generator" wheel reminded me of this.
Curt