QuoteThomas, your report is full of assumptions, and necessarily so. If you wish to argue from a factual standpoint, I humbly suggest you get hold of a high-temperature Optris P-160, and point it at some hot alumina.
I assume very little in fact. The numbers come from the assumptions and numbers the Lugano testers put in.
the real answer depends on
(1)
emissivity at Optris HT pass-band. That from the Optris documentation - no assumption) is 7-13um.
You don't need to know much about alumina to put that at close to 1.
(2) total emissivity of alumina at 1400C
I assumed 0.5, which is the total emissivity "book value". But if you look at it actually the real value can't be very different from this, and there is no uncertainty here from the Optris instrument.
For the temperature calculation the only uncertainty is (1).
If the temperature is correct then the reactor tube is obviously not at 1400C to a visual inspection - so Rossi would have to either have made the same mistake himself, and so think it glowed orange at 1400C, or be complicit in letting the testers make a mistake which gravely over-estimated COP.
However, I think you are absolutely right to be careful about assumptions and uncertainties and hope you apply this methodology to all the apparent positive results related to Rossi or replications, also to remember the possibility of plain mistakes which can't be detected from a limited write-up leading to apparent positive results.
You get just as many mistakes leading to apparent negative results but they are self-correcting. An LENR researcher with a COP of 0.5 would know they had some error and redo calculations or experiment.