How in the world did CO2 get tied to global warming in the first place????

Question

With absolutely no empirical data or scientific reasoning, somebody said that CO2 causes global warming.... Now, they are raising money, scavenging taxpayer money and promising millions to fanatical scientists to prove it.... This is the absolutely weirdest phenomena that I have ever heard of.

Like scientology with L. Ron Hubbard who said, "If you want to be rich, invent your own religion." Which he very well did but this is just as fanatical as that religion!!!

What gives?

Answer 1

Wow. You really shouldn't take such an arrogant tone until you actually have some iota of an idea of what you're talking about (even then-probably not a good idea).

Scientists discovered in the early 19th century that the planet was about 33 degrees centigrade hotter than basic radiative calculations indicated. They naturally reasoned that this extra energy was coming from the atmosphere.

Further research showed that certain gases (most notably water vapor and carbon dioxide), present in trace amounts in the atmosphere, were transparent to shortwave energy from the sun, but opaque to the long wave energy radiated from Earth's surface. This led to the discovery of what we know as the greenhouse effect.

Scientists later discovered that the burning of fossil fuels throughout the mid 19th and early 20th century had raised the levels of carbon dioxide (and other "greenhouse gases") in the atmosphere by a considerable amount (then by about 10-15%, now by nearly 30%). This led one or two scientists to postulate that the newly discovered warming trend that had started in the mid 19th century might be a result of human activites.

Of course, this brief overview barely scratches the surface of the history of global warming theory. For more information (trust me, you need it), I suggest reading the excellent "The Discovery Of Global Warming" by physicist and science historian Spencer Weart.

One last note though. It's true that carbon dioxide makes up a measly 0.038% of the atmosphere by mass. However, this trace gas is responsible for 9-36% of the overall greenhouse effect (the range is due to spectral overlaps with the other absorbers). Most of the other gases you mention, such as nitrogen and oxygen, do not act as greenhouse gases, and so have no part in determining the planet's temperature.

(I probably wasted *way* too much time and effort answering this question. )

Answer 2

It is "inconvenient" to mention that water vapor is responsible for much more of the greenhouse effect than CO2.  Since man isn't responsible for the water vapor in the atmosphere, the alarmists had to pick something else.  What better way to implement their socialist agenda than to blame man for a looming environmental disaster?  The Chicken Littles have brought us global warming, global cooling, ozone hole, and mass starvation due to overpopulation, and that is in just the last 30 years.  None have ever panned out and global warming won't now either.

Saying that scientists have been researching AGW since the mid-1800s is asinine at best, intellectually dishonest at worst.  Scientists have flip-flopped between global warming and cooling at least 4 times in that time period.  Try as alarmists might, they can't ignore the global cooling fears in the 70s.  No scientists believed that?  So, we are to believe that the media just made it up.  Uhhh, yeah, riiiiight.

Answer 3

U.S. Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Gas, 2001

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebr...

Here's a small excerpt from the history of the last 100+ years of the science, which (if you can follow the amterial at this link)seems to disprove your "no empirical data or scientific reasoning" claim":

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.h...

"Around 1938 an English engineer, Guy Stewart Callendar, took up the old idea. An expert on steam technology, Callendar apparently took up meteorology as a hobby to fill his spare time.(14) Many people, looking at weather stories from the past, had been saying that a warming trend was underway. When Callendar compiled measurements of temperatures from the 19th century on, he found they were right. He went on to dig up and evaluate old measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. He concluded that over the past hundred years the concentration of the gas had increased by about 10%. This rise, Callendar asserted , could explain the observed warming. For he understood (perhaps from Hulburt's calculation) that even if the CO2 in the atmosphere did already absorb all the heat radiation passing through, adding more gas would change the height in the atmosphere where the absorption took place. That, he calculated, would make for warming."

"The early experiments that sent radiation through gases in a tube, measuring bands of the spectrum at sea-level pressure and temperature, had been misleading. The bands seen at sea level were actually made up of overlapping spectral lines, which in the primitive early instruments had been smeared out into broad bands. Improved physics theory and precise laboratory measurements in the 1940s and after encouraged a new way of looking at the absorption. Scientists were especially struck to find that at low pressure and temperature, each band resolved into a cluster of sharply defined lines, like a picket fence, with gaps between the lines where radiation would get through.(24) The most important CO2 absorption lines did not lie exactly on top of water vapor lines. Instead of two overlapping bands, there were two sets of narrow lines with spaces for radiation to slip through. So even if water vapor in the lower layers of the atmosphere did entirely block any radiation that could have been absorbed by CO2, that would not keep the gas from making a difference in the rarified and frigid upper layers. Those layers held very little water vapor anyway. And scientists were coming to see that you couldn't just calculate absorption for radiation passing through the atmosphere as a whole, you had to understand what happened in each layer — which was far harder to calculate."

"By 1956, such computations could be carried out thanks to the increasing power of digital computers. The physicist Gilbert N. Plass took up the challenge of calculating the transmission of radiation through the atmosphere, nailing down the likelihood that adding more CO2 would increase the interference with infrared radiation.(26) Going beyond this qualitative result, Plass announced that human activity would raise the average global temperature "at the rate of 1.1 degree C per century."

"Fortunately, scientists could now track the movements of carbon with a new tool — the radioactive isotope carbon-14. This isotope is created by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere and then decays over millennia. The carbon in ancient coal and oil is so old that it entirely lacks the radioactive isotope."

"With painstaking series of measurements in the pristine air of Antarctica and high atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, he nailed down precisely a stable baseline level of CO2 in the atmosphere. In 1960, with only two full years of Antarctic data in hand, Keeling reported that this baseline level had risen. The rate of the rise was approximately what would be expected if the oceans were not swallowing up most industrial emissions.(39*)"

"New carbon-14 measurements were giving scientists solid data to chew on. They began to work out just how carbon moves through its many forms in the air, ocean, minerals, soils, and living creatures. They plugged their data into simple models, with boxes representing each reservoir of carbon (ocean surface waters, plants, etc.), and arrows showing the exchanges of CO2 among the reservoirs. The final goal of most researchers was to figure out how much of the CO2 produced from fossil fuels was sinking into the oceans, or perhaps was being absorbed by vegetation (see above)."

"The veteran climate expert Helmut Landsberg stressed in a 1970 review that little was known about how humans might change the climate. At worst, he thought, the rise of CO2 at the current rate might bring a 2°C temperature rise over the next 400 years, which "can hardly be called cataclysmic."(43) Meanwhile Hubert H. Lamb, the outstanding compiler of old climate data, wrote that the effects of CO2 were "doubtful... there are many uncertainties." The CO2 theory, he pointed out, failed to account for the numerous large shifts that he had uncovered in records of climate from medieval times to the present. Many agreed with Lamb that a "rather sharp decline" of global temperature since the 1940s put the whole matter in question.(44)"

"Research on changes in the atmosphere's CO2 had been, almost by definition, identical to research on the greenhouse effect. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, calculations found that other gases emitted by human activities also have a strong greenhouse effect — sometimes molecule for molecule tens or hundreds of times greater than CO2. Global climate change could not be properly studied without taking into account methane, emitted by both natural and artificial sources, and various other industrial gases."

"National economic statistics yielded reliable figures for how much CO2 humanity put into the air each year from burning fossil fuels. The measurements of the annual increase by Keeling and others showed that less than half of the new carbon could be found in the atmosphere. Where was the rest? Oceanographers calculated how much of the gas the oceans took up, while other scientists calculated how much the biosphere took up or emitted. The numbers didn't add up — some of the carbon was "missing." Plainly, scientists did not understand important parts of the carbon cycle. Looking at large-scale climate changes, such as between ice ages and warm periods, they turned up a variety of interactions with climate involving plant life and ocean chemistry. The papers addressing these topics became increasingly complex."

"An especially convincing finding came from holes arduously drilled into the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps...  Group after group cut samples from cores of ice in hopes of measuring the level. For two decades, every attempt failed to give consistent and plausible results. Finally reliable methods were developed. The trick was to clean an ice sample scrupulously, crush it in a vacuum, and quickly measure what came out. In 1980, a team published findings that were definite, unexpected, and momentous."

"In the depths of the last ice age, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere had been as much as 50% lower than in our own warmer times... Pushing forward, by 1985 a French-Soviet drilling team at Vostok Station in central Antarctica had produced an ice core two kilometers long that carried a 150,000-year record, a complete ice age cycle of warmth, cold and warmth. They found that the level of atmospheric CO2 had gone up and down in remarkably close step with temperature.(48)"

"The Vostok core, an ice driller declared, "turned the tide in the greenhouse gas controversy."(49) At the least it nailed down what one expert called an "emerging consensus that CO2 is an important component in the system of climatic feedbacks." More generally, he added, it showed that further progress would "require treating climate and the carbon cycle as parts of the same global system rather than as separate entities."(50) The rise and fall of temperature was tied up in a complex way with interlocking global cycles involving not just the mineral geochemistry of CO2 in air and sea water, but also methane emissions, the growth and decay of forests and bogs, changes of the plankton population in the oceans, and still more features of the planet's biosphere."

"Lines of thinking converged to emphasize the importance of the greenhouse effect. For decades geologists had been puzzled by a calculation that astrophysicists insisted was undeniable: the Sun had been dimmer when the Earth was young. Billions of years ago the oceans would have been permanently frozen, if not for high CO2 levels. Astrophysical theory showed that as the Sun had consumed its nuclear fuel it had gradually grown brighter, yet somehow the Earth's temperature had remained neither too cold nor too hot to sustain life. The best guess was that CO2 acted as a thermostat for the planet. Volcanoes presumably put the gas into the atmosphere at a fairly constant rate. But chemical processes run faster at higher temperatures, so on a warmer Earth the weathering of rocks would take up CO2 faster. As the rocks erode, rivers carry the soil into the seas, where the carbon eventually winds up in compounds deposited on the seabed. Thus a rough self-sustaining balance is maintained among the forces of volcanic emissions, greenhouse warming, weathering, and ocean uptake.(51) To be sure, the system might take thousands if not millions of years to stabilize after some great disturbance."

...continued:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.h...

Answer 4

Tried and proven? No...No it hasn't been proven. Not even close. And over the past 100 years? Real exploration into the topic of AGW didn't start until roughly 25 years ago.

As for the figure of CO2 being 9-36% of the greenhouse effect, that is just plain ridiculous. At that rate I should be pumping it into my walls-it sounds like a fantastic insulator. Methane is better than CO2.

Renowned climatologist Roger Pielke, Sr. has used IPCC’s estimates of climate forcing to calculate the contribution of CO2 to recent climate change. Pielke makes very conservative (worst-case) assumptions in considering the impacts of greenhouse gases, black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and solar radiation. This analysis ignores land use changes, which have been demonstrated to affect climate in a significant way, and cosmic rays, which affect cloud cover and thus can lead to significant climate changes. Pielke’s estimate is that CO2 is responsible for 28% (at most) of the human-caused changes. If natural variations do occur (and it’s very hard to argue that they do not) then this value decreases. But even if one assumes that the entire 0.6 deg C increase since 1900 is due to human effects, Pielke’s estimate would suggest a CO2 contribution of only 0.17 deg C.  

http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.c...

The troposhere cooling? But the greenhouse theories dictate that if the CO2 rise is indeed the cause of the warming then the troposhere should be warming at a higher rate than ground temperatures.

http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basi...

Greenhouse effect science settled? I don't think so.

Answer 5

Because of all the Carbon dioxide in the ozone layer causes the earth to heat up.

Dont u take science classes?

Answer 6

There is absolutely no way that global warming is caused by CO2. In fact the only scientists pushing this are those who are making a living doing so. If every person in North America planted 2 trees the level of CO2 would go down. Then you would have these same leach scientists trying to make money off that saying some dreamed up problem. And of course the press would run with it. Then once more people would prove that they really are sheep.

Answer 7

C02 is a part of global warming. Not a very big part, but a part nonetheless.

However, I agree that it is pretty crazy to say humans have caused global warming through carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide itself isn't even the most powerful greenhouse gas, and we haven't even caused most of the carbon dioxide.

Answer 8

Observations were made, various hypothesis were presented, those hypothesis that best fit the observable data became theories, those theories were tested and scientists tried to disprove them over many years, the strongest theory that best fit all the observable data was left standing.  Thus we have the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which has been tried and proven over the past 100 years.

You really should read up a little more before thinking you know something about that you clearly don't.

Answer 9

What you really need to do is look at the motives of the main proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming. What do they want us to do to stop it? What do they do to anyone who disagrees with them or thinks that more research is needed?

The short answer is they want us to cut our economy, in the US, by about 70%, so our CO2 emissions are 50% of what they were in 1990. And they fire anyone they can who disagrees, those they can't fire simply find no more funding comes their way.

You can't plant trees as a means of carbon sequestration, they now 'suddenly' find that trees are a source of a greenhouse gas even worse than CO2 - methane. Funny how we never noticed that in the last few thousand years of living around trees and studying them.

You can't switch to nuclear, solar or wind power because all of them require carbon inputs to build them. Same with the new Compressed Air Transport, a car they're going to build in India that actually runs on nothing but compressed air. Since it doesn't pollute, it should be very 'green', right? Nope. Carbon needed to make it, poor people will start driving it who have no car now, terrible disaster for the world.

There is no solution they will accept other than the end of the civilization we've managed to build over the last few millenia. They said so themselves at the Earth Summit in Brazil, 1992. The head of the summit, Maurice Strong phrased it as a hypothetical but he said, "So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"

They won't even admit that the air and water are cleaner now, that they achieved every aim of the original green movement. Or did they? Maybe all along the real goal was to end our way of life, but no doubt only the 'unwashed masses' will have no electricity and fuel and will shiver in the dark. The enlightened elites will have more than they need.

Every chart they have shows that CO2 goes up after temp, yet they say it's the other way around. The temp has been far colder than now, during an ice age 450 million years ago, yet CO2 levels were 10 times higher. Wait! I thought CO2 meant higher temp? What happened during that ice age?

To quote C.S. Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Answer 10

It is hard to see why someone with your scientific acumen would get blown away.  Perhaps you aren't seeing the one key piece of the puzzle?

But I agree with you, if they would stop funding all climate-related research in the U.S., that money could be used for a week of the Iraq War.

Answer 11

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. that fact is not debatable.

so unless the laws of physics don't apply. more greenhouse gasses cause warming.

edit

"You have 78% nitrogen about 21 % oxygen.93 % Argon" those are not greenhouse gasses so they have effectively no effect on temperature.