Is information like this why AGW skeptics dont believe?

Question

http://www.junkscience.com/jan08/Global_Warming_Not_From_CO2_20080124.pdf

An excellent paper. It explains how the co2 level has already reached its saturation value for the particular wavelength of energy that it absorbs. If you go to page 2, there is an excellent graph that shows how each GHG contributes to the greenhouse effect. If you happen to read all of it (sorry, its 23 pages), you will learn alot about how increasing co2 from this point on will do virtually nothing.

Answer 1

The answer to  your question is "NO".  Most AGW "skeptics" wouldn't take the time to read through a 23 page paper.

If it were really an excellent paper (as you say), it would be submitted to an appropriate peer-reviewed scientific journal.  Instead, it's put out on the junkscience web-site where serious climate scientists and physicists probably won't see it or scrutinize it.

What this paper shows is that a little knowledge can be dangerous.  As a former member of IEEE, I'm pretty sure that this authors listed credentials as a "Senior Member IEEE" is meaningless as far as understanding atmospheric physics or being familiar with the peer-reviewed literature on this topic.

This paper isn't promoting anything new.  It's the same ol' saturation argument that's already been discounted by climate scientists.  These issues were all debated in the first part of the 20th century.  But since lay people don't know that (including this papers author) it continues to rear it's head.

You can read the history of this debate and the many experiments which led to our current understanding of the basic physics here:

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

Edit: Of course there will be non-scientists involved in part of the IPCC reports.  They deal with more than just the science, including the social and political consequences of regional flooding, food shortages, drought, etc.   But the part of the report that deals with the well understood physical science of global warming (Working Group I Report "The Physical Science Basis") was authored by highly respected climate scientists from all over the world.  You can see the list for yourself here:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report...

Answer 2

i am not a physicist so i don't really  know that much about the absorption spectra of gasses but i do know that they never reach 100% as this paper seams to be implying. they slowly approach 100% but can never reach it.

Answer 3

If It passes peer-review and gets published in a journal I'll read it.

Answer 4

Is the paper peer reviewed? If not, why not?

Answer 5

that paper is complete junk - fitting it is from junksciece.com - true to their name

those absorption spectra are likely from lab samples and show the absorption bands of a sample containing pure species at much higher concentration than atmospheric. It is completely misleading and the author either does not know what he is talking about or is intentionally misleading the readers.

Also - this would not account for multiple absorption events from the same photon - characterizing chemical composition of planets and stars comes from this idea - that certain wavelengths will pass through while others will be absorbed and emitted in a random direction - thus wavelengths that are not absorbed will be more intense

edit

i found the wiki graph - and this is an atmospheric absorption spectrum modeled using a computer simulator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Atmos...

but, again - this does not consider multiple absorbtion events occuring after the molecule raleaxes and emits the IR photon which would increase as concentration increases.

Answer 6

I read most of it, and it seemed to me to be the ramblings of a retired engineer.  He's probably got some of the pieces right, but I'm not a scientist - I can't break this stuff down, read all the relevant studies and figure out what he's got right, wrong or missing.  My best option is to trust the thousands of scientists who contributed to the International Panel on Climate Change.  It seems to me more reasonable to think that a vast group of scientists who have worked on these issues their entire lives are correct, rather than to believe that a single retiree in the Midwest cracked the code.  Plus, the idea that no one has thought about heat absorprtion by CO2 at various wavelengths is completely absurd.  I'm not saying one person can't make a difference, I'm just saying I don't think he's the one person.  Plus, it would help if he had some supporting evidence other than the four footnotes to the article.

Answer 7

I don’t dare try to understand to mind of a climate change denier; but, it is articles like this one that must be published on the Internet, because it would never pass peer-review. The “saturation” argument has already been debunked a dozen of times.

If interested, here is an actual peer-review article that questions climate sensitivity as reported by the IPCC:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/20... (subscription needed)

http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCa... (Pre-publication copy)

A response to this peer-reviewed article has already been submitted to the same journal, and another response is currently being written by a Swiss team of scientists. Scientific debates should be carried out in peer-reviewed journals, not in blogs or on point/counterpoint news programs.

Answer 8

Why exactly would anyone believe that an article which has not been peer-reviewed, is linked on JunkScience, and was written by an electrical engineer has disproven what we know about atmospheric CO2 absorption?

http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/home/ind...

I'm rather curious how he explains the fact that Venus, whose atmosphere is 96.5% CO2, has a mean surface temperature of 457°C.

http://filer.case.edu/~sjr16/advanced/ve...

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/solar_system/pla...

If increasing our atmospheric CO2 concentration won't have much effect, then Venus' greenhouse effect should be simlar to that on Earth.  Yet Mercury, which is much closer to the Sun, only has a mean surface temperature of 167°C.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/solar_system/pla...

While the Earth is around 14.5°C.

This simple analysis debunks the engineer's argument.  The temperature is due to a runaway greenhouse effect, as explained by my Case Western link and JS's link:

http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Mar1996/p...

A much better analysis of this saturation argument:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

To answer your question, is poorly analyzed but superficially sound information why AGW skeptics don't believe?  No, but it allows them to maintain disbelief.  Your additional details are a good example of why skeptics don't believe.  Misinformation and paranoia.

FYI 'consensus' is not a synonym for 'unanimity'.

Answer 9

Hi, I read the abstract and browsed the paper, and it's mostly about issues that were put to bed decades ago.

I won't summarize all the arguments here, but the first link is to a very good summary of the 'CO2 saturation' argument, and it has links to more literature on the subject.

And, like other people pointed out, is this a peer-reviewed article?  No, it's just posted as an essay on a climate-deniers website, a site run by someone who's worked as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, Exxon, etc.

I feel bad making what might seem like a personal attack there, but I do think it's important (and legitimate) to realize how much of the climate denier stuff comes from a very few sources that just repeat the same things over and over very loudly.  It's easy to get the impression that there's a whole bunch of scientists with dissenting opinions there, when the case is that there's just a few people publishing deliberately misleading papers and making a lot of noise.

Answer 10

Gosh, it's like you and he never heard of how radiative transfer through inhomogeneous atmospheres work.  Tell you what, you go and do some homework on the difference in mixing ratios of water vapor and CO2 through the troposphere.  Then go and find some published information on where radiative transfer is saturated as a function of altitude for each species.  Then go and dig out how radiative transfer codes deal with these issues.  Once you do, if you can understand what you are reading, you will know more than the guy at JunkScience, and why he is blowing smoke.  

Can you handle the truth?

edit:  regarding Venus, are you really saying CalTech has it wrong?

http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/Outreach/Edu...

Are you really that much smarter than the guys at CalTech?

Wow.  I had no idea.  No wonder you are such a skeptic.

Edit 2:  One last thing, Petschauer has published 4 papers in the literature, the last being in 1978 on BASIC.  Before that, his publications are in magnetic media technology, but film.  The guy does mag tape.  hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

If they trotted out Clarence the Donkey, pinned a title on him, and said he wrote an article on climate physics, would you buy that too?

Answer 11

Peer review is a low standard.  It's like minded people agreeing with each other.  I can't understand why anyone would believe this to be a gold standard.

There's a lot we don't understand about the climate.  In time we may get to understand it better, but now is far too soon.

No one can tell if it will be warmer or colder, if there will be floods or droughts or how many hurricanes will form in the future.

Only after the facts occur do warmers find some link proving that global warming was the cause.

Quite dubious.

Answer 12

He seems to base the majority of his conclusion on his contention that CO2 already absorbs a high percentage of "trapped" infrared radiation.

By that logic the current temperature of Venus couldn't exist:

"It is interesting to note that in the absence of a greenhouse effect, the earth’s mean temperature would have been 255°K, instead of the observed value of 288°K. Greenhouse warming is thus about 33°K.  This is much more pronounced around the planet Venus, whose atmosphere contains over 90% carbon dioxide (CO2), a prominent greenhouse gas. Without a greenhouse effect the mean surface temperature of Venus would have been 227°K, but greenhouse warming raises it to 750°K. This represents warming by 523°K!"

http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Mar1996/p...

It's nice that a retired electrical engineer has found a way to keep his mind busy.  I don't think you'll see this peer-reviewed any time soon.

It's revealing that this is the best that Steve Milloy's Junk Science can provide skeptics with.  Here's more on the publishing source of your "paper":

"Objective viewers long ago realized that Fox News has a political agenda. But, when a pundit promotes this agenda while on the take from corporations that benefit from it, then Fox News has gone one disturbing step further"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Mill...

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2007/11...

"The first significant mention of Mr. Milloy is when he was working for a think tank known as the National Environmental Policy Institute. This think tank was originally funded using money from corporate polluters including Exxon, Bethlehem Steel, and Shell Oil. NEPI’s raison d’être was to encourage public mistrust of scientific studies that hadn’t been funded by the polluters themselves, and according to SourceWatch.org, NEPI activities were very effective."

Part I

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2007/11...

Part II

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2007/11...

At Fox News, a Pundit for Hire

http://www.freepress.net/news/print.php?...

Answer 13

This source talks about CO2 in some detail. Basically I have heard that the absorption bands are not sharp. The absorption does not exist at one wavelength and then just go to zero at a one Angstrom different wavelength. It falls off over some range, and as the concentration of CO2 in the air goes up, a wider and wider wavelength range becomes saturated. Anyway, that is what the scientists say. The ones who are worried about global warming that is.