Is this right? Material to go against alarmist from a skeptic!?

Question

1. There is no scientifically valid mechanism for CO2 causing global warming.

Carbon dioxide absorbs all radiation available to it in about ten meters. More CO2 only shortens the distance, which is not an increase in temperature. In other words, the first 20% of the CO2 in the air does most of what CO2 does, and it doesn't do much. (Heinz Hug)

2. Oceans regulate the amount of CO2 in the air through absorption equilibrium.

Equilibrium is rapid and total as indicated by many sources of evidence. One, the graph for CO2 in the air is an extremely precise line. If nothing were regulating, it would vary wildly. Two, if equilibrium were not established, oceans would be absorbing or losing CO2 at a high rate, yet no significant change occurs.

3. Water vapor would swamp any effects by CO2, if greenhouse gasses were really creating global warming.

Water vapor has three times as much bandwidth for absorption peaks, and there are about 33 times as many water vapor molecules in the atmosphere as CO2 molecules, which means 100 times as much of a supposed greenhouse effect. And water vaporizes and precipitates so rapidly that it would be creating billions of times as much change in temperature as CO2, if the same logic were applied to it. Water Vapor

4. The public is being misled through propaganda to assume CO2 is like a sheet of plastic holding in heat.

CO2 can only absorb 8% of radiation frequencies available (No one disputes this.), and only about 1% of the heat leaves the earth as radiation—the other 99% being conduction, convection and evaporation. NASA says its 41%, not 1%, but there is no agreement, and night vision equipment shows there is very little infrared radiation given off by normal temperature matter.

5. The IPCC is a bunch of political hacks who railroad the process.

It's not what science consists of. They start at the end point which they want and then try to rationalize it through computer models which override the real science and evidence.

There is a shortage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for plant growth, because alkaline oceans absorb it and only release a small amount. The atmosphere is only 0.04% CO2.

When an ice age begins, global Warming occurs exactly as it is doing now. Heated oceans cause increased evaporation followed by precipitation. Eventually, increased snowfall will reflect away solar energy and trigger a cool-down.

The sun's energy goes through the atmosphere and strikes the earth's surface.

claimed heat due to atmosphere --- 33°C

95-99% due to various things --- 31.4°C

1-5% due to infrared radiation from earth's surface --- 1.65°C

8% of infrared bandwidth available to CO2 --- 0.13°C

3% of CO2 produced by humans --- 0.0039°C

5% of absorption "unsaturated" for global warming --- 0.0002°C

claimed global warming --- 0.6°C

Explanations — Crunching the Numbers

It's actually 220x10-12 °C

This means carbon dioxide cannot trap radiant energy near the surface of the earth. To get around this, an obfuscated mechanism is contrived for heat leaving the atmosphere. But it is a miniscule effect in the stratosphere, with little influence over the lower atmosphere.

http://nov55.com/gbwm.html

I'm not even sure my self but it seems pretty right to me

Answer 1

Well researched.

You might also want to look up the results of the Ocean Genome project, which seeks to catalogue the DNA of all ocean borne life.  They discovered several bacteria species that support your #2 point.

The scientists in the project were "shocked and stunned" to see how these bacteria, which live near the surface in trillions of numbers, actually regulate CO2 and many atmospheric and oceanic poisons at an alarming rate.  Based on their findings, they credit these bacteria as solely responsible for the formation of our breathable atmosphere and its ongoing regulation.  THESE organisms control the climate, and they do so in far greater numbers and contribution than we could ever hope.

The same scientists were excited about the prospects of using these bacteria to regulate and control man-made pollutants, such as finding ways of using them into toxic runoff areas, garbage dumps, smoke stacks, etc.  A program on Discovery Channel even featured some of these promising experiments.

The big problem is, that reality shows human beings how unimportant we actually are... and how the planet and nature doesn't "need" us to save it (which is the harsh reality).

Answer 2

You are obviously not a 'believer' and should therefore be condemned as a heretic and crucified for your lack of faith!

This is not far from what things will be like in the near future, if these lunatics continue to gain momentum.

I did have a quick look at your link and found it to be quite interesting, and so far much more reliable than most.

So far the only point which seems to be overlooked by both sides is that even 'IF' CO2 were to be a contributor to climate change, it would have to have some magical properties that is completely unknown to science.

I could be a bit picky about some of the wording and reference to certain things like "When an ice age begins" probably should read either 'ends' or 'begins to end' in place of the word 'begins', and a few other minor things, but this is pedantic and should not distract from the points that are being made.

Thanks for the link.

I shall do some more scrutiny.

In the meantime, keep fighting for what you know is right.

You obviously have not become one of the 'Sheeple'!

Answer 3

Adam C wrote

"We have seen temperature changes at this magnitude five times in the past. On each occasion, there was massive extinctions (betrween 60 and 90% of all species died out)."

Oh please. The current rate of warming and magnitude has been seen many times without "massive extinctions". The magnitude of warming seen during such massive extinctions was several degrees larger than the 0.75°C we have seen in the past 100 years.

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Edit:

Keith P wrote

"Only a small fraction of outgoing longwave (infrared) is captured by all greenhouse gases -- most of the outgoing longwave escapes. "

Actually, nearly 100% of outgoing IR radiation is absorbed by greenhouse gases.

Answer 4

Green house gases are CO and methane. But nice study on CO2.

Answer 5

I usually don't like blog type info but as you used the link you have I don't feel at all bad

http://moonflake.wordpress.com/2006/11/1...

This was near the top of a google search on one "Gary Novak" who operates the site http://nov55.com the home page reveals some with some very strange ideas indeed.

If you feel you can just discount NASA data but quote this loon you would qualify as the epitome of a denier.

James W. Early

"A narrowly focused education that does not interact with other disciplines to give a more balanced view of global and system processes can and will lead to judgement errors that produce inaccurate conclusions such as AGW."

While your statement might apply to the above Mr Novak who seems to have spent the last 30 years growing mushrooms (perhaps magic ones) It might pay to do some more research as climate scientists do interact with a wide range of other scientists were do you think ice core records come from Glaciologist's, Solar records come from Solar physicists and tree ring data is collected by Paleoclimatologist's

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/treering....

The work of oceanographers and biologists and geologists is also used this is not a narrow field on it own but a wide range of different disciplines working together.

Answer 6

Let me add to this comment as one questioner seemed offended by it and the answer also relates to the current question. A narrowly focused education that does not interact with other disciplines to give a more balanced view of global and system processes can and will lead to judgement errors that produce inaccurate conclusions such as AGW. So it is several factors interacting that the climatologists are only seeing an after the fact side effect and blaming what they see on this minor item while missing completely the major causal effect of the sun.

Because all the major warming of the last 200 years took place before 1940 and the Co2 increase took place after 1940 as the world was dropping off into the cool period that lasted from the mid 40s through the late 70s with a short heat spike in the early 60s all with higher Co2 levels just as historical and core data shows. Co2 always follows warm periods and is not a cause of the heating but a side effect of the heating. As long as the AGW faithful continue to reject real science in favor of a religious voodoo science then skeptics will continue to be puzzled and amused by the strange responses given that do not hold up to even light scrutiny of people with broad based education’s in real life disciplines.

Global warming is a con game for economic and political power by a group of politicians around the world. It has not happened, will not happen and cannot happen and anybody with even an average high school education should know better or our schools are in worse shape than I thought they were. The sea level rise happened 11,000 years ago when the ice age ended and the mile high glaciers melted. Global warming or climate change as they now call it is on about the same level of truth as the Nigerian email scam or those emails supposedly from your bank wanting you to reenter your security information so they can clean you out. So be careful if you accept the AGW scam you are prime meat for any of the rash of identity theft email scams out there.

Answer 7

The statements are a little inaccurate:

1.  Not 100% of radiation can ever be absorbed by a gas.  It would be more accurate to say 99% of radiaton of the resonant frequencies of CO2 is absorbed in 10m.

2.  The CO2 content of the atmosphere is measurably rising although the oceans are slowing the rate of rise.  

3.  Atmospheric physics might be complicated, but the AGW advocates have yet to explain the mechanism by which CO2 can cause significant warming.  This in itself does not disprove CO2 as a cause of significant warming, but this theory should be considered somewhat speculative.

4.  The properties of CO2 are misrepresented from time to time.  

5.  The IPCC does seem to be a highly political organisation.  The organisation would not even exist if enough people weren't alarmed by AGW.

6.  Not withstanding that the warming effect of CO2 get overstated from time to time.  It's probably not a good thing to change the contents of the atmosphere.

Answer 8

First, thanks for steering the discussion to science topics. I will address only the first point because others have adequately commented on the other topics.  

Heinz Hug gives a low resolution spectrum of CO2 but makes errors in his analysis.  His finding that a globar at 1500 K radiates more than a gas at 300 K is unremarkable.  A CO2 molecule absorbs infrared radiation and then either emits isotropically at the same frequency or transfers the energy to translational motion via collisions.  The net result is that an absorbing gas at 300 K will behave like a black body at 300 K.  The flux from a hot source is indeed reduced to the the flux of a black body in a relatively short distance, but the flux thereafter will remain the same as long as the temperature is constant.  Radiation diffuses via multiple absorption/emission events toward the top of the atmosphere until finally the density of absorbing gas is low enough that the radiation can escape to space (with a black body profile in the absorption band determined by the temperature of the last absorbing layer).  It's not my function to write a textbook on molecular spectroscopy here.  For a more detailed description, please read the texts about the theory of radiative transfer in planetary and stellar atmospheres by Dr. Tatum.

http://astrowww.phys.uvic.ca/~tatum/

In the future, please ask one question per topic.  

Answer 9

Yes but water vapor does cause change.

Answer 10

C O2 is a very heavy gas so 90% of it is within 30 ft. of the surface. U can use it to smother out fires .

There is very little CO2 in the oceans as CO2 doesn't like salt . Take a carbonated drink and put in a tea spoon of salt and the CO2 will rush out.

Need to give the real credit to plants . They take in CO2 and give us back O2 ,but the plants keep the C for its food. When the plant dies it washes down to the delta where it deteriorates into oil & gas. It is not just the trees but every plant that lives from photosynthesis. The environmentalist say the level is 380 ppm. Oxygen is 20.9% of our atmosphere and to put CO2 on this same scale it is .000,389% which is nothing. When it increases to the point that oxygen shows a drop we have trouble.  

Answer 11

1. Hug is nuts. More CO2 means more absorbtion. Only a small fraction of outgoing longwave (infrared) is captured by all greenhouse gases -- most of the outgoing longwave escapes. That means a small increase in greenhouse gas levels is enough to seriously affect warming. That's why a cloudy night is obviously and significantly warmer than a clear night. I don't know where Hug gets the 20-feet figure, but there is no support for it.

2. CO2 does readily pass between ocean and air, but it does not "reach equilibrium". Rather, the amount of dissolved CO2 in oceans is strongly dependent on the temperature of the water (cold water holds more). This is analgous to the way water easily passes between oceans and air (in both directions), although the amount of water in the air is strongly dependent on air temperature (cold air holds less). Also, the amount of CO2 in the air DOES vary strongly with the seasons, as plant growth in the northern summer depletes global CO2 levels. This is further evidence against the equilibrium hypothesis.

3. Water vapor cannot force global climate change, because it stays in the air for too short a time. Do a thought experiment: wave your magic wand and make the whole atmosphere 100% relative humidity. What happens then? The world gets 2 weeks of rain, and then we'd be back to where we are now. Now wave your magic wand and make the whole atmosphere 0% relative humidity. What happens then? The world gets 2 weeks of no rain, until evaporation from the oceans brings us back to where we are now. In both cases, we change the weather, but not the climate.

It's true that water vapor is a larger component of the overall greenhouse effect than CO2, but water vapor in the air is strongly dependent on air temperature. So what happens is that when a long-lived greenhouse gas (like CO2) increases, the increased temperature allows more water vapor into the air, which further enhances the warming from CO2. Water vapor acts as a "positive feedback" in the climate system. Blaming water vapor for climate change instead of CO2 is like blaming the bullet for the murder instead of the man that pulled the trigger.

4. This whole "point" is nuts. What cools the earth as a whole is infrared radiation leaving the top of the atmosphere (TOA). Period. Nothing else. Now, what cools the SURFACE of the earth is a combination of radiation, convection, and evaporation. But that energy stays in the climate system, heating something else, until it eventually leaves the TOA via infrared radiation. Infrared leaving the TOA is the spigot that controls the water level in the basin. If you change that, it doesn't matter which way the water swirls as it leaves the drain.

5. IPCC doesn't do original research at all. They just report on the original research done by others. This is just a ridiculous "conspiracy" argument put forward by the tinfoil-hat crowd, without a shred of evidence to support it. By contrast, many of the anti-global warming groups have been funded by Big Oil.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?t*t...

The rest of your question is so incomprehensible, I can only imagine it was devised to fool  gullible people without a scientific background.

Answer 12

Several others have already sufficiently addressed the misleading points of this article.  

Why would you even consider an article on the web at someone (clearly with no relevant science training or experience) personal blog more credible than an article by actual climate scientists from NASA, NOAA, or major Universities?

NASA Global Warming Q&A:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/G...

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Global Warming FAQs

http://www.ucar.edu/news/features/climat...



Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale Global Warming FAQ

http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~sherwood/...



NOAA Global Warming FAQ

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/glob...

Trenberth, K. E., 2008: An update on human-induced climate change: global warming: coming, ready or not.

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/tr...

Do you consider the people behind these articles less competent (or honest) in this field than someone who studied mushrooms in college?

Answer 13

Honestly Michael, is this the sort of stuff that makes you disbelieve global warming? It makes no sense to me that people would believe this sort of claptrap rather than science.

Virtually all of the points are wrong or misleading:

1. "Carbon dioxide absorbs all radiation available to it in about ten meters." Can you give us something published in the scientific literature which shows this? The only thing I've seen is the report from a very small and unpublished experiment.  It's an extrapolation that has little basis.

2."Oceans regulate the amount of CO2 in the air through absorption equilibrium."  Well they do buffer the amount of CO2, but they certainly aren't holding things in equilibrium, are they? Otherwise the amount of CO2 wouldn't keep going up and up.  Also, as the oceans warm CO2 becomes less soluble, so they work less well as buffers.  Additionally the pH of the oceans is changing from this buffering, with possibly dire consequences to shell-building organisms.

3. "Water vapor would swamp any effects by CO2, if greenhouse gasses were really creating global warming."  No one disputes that water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas (at least right now) but what do you mean by "swamp?" The change in CO2 causes a relatively small change to the radiative equilibrium of the Earth, which will shift the equilibrium temperature slightly. It only takes a few parts in a hundred to make a big difference to the climate, so carbon dioxide's relatively small contribution matters.  It also matters because the mean temperature of the planet sets the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere through the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, so as the temperature goes up the amount of water vapor goes up, compounding the effect of CO2.

4."only about 1% of the heat leaves the earth as radiation—the other 99% being conduction, convection and evaporation"  This is complete nonsense.  The equilibrium temperature of the Earth is ultimately dependent upon incoming radiation (from the sun) and outgoing radiation (IR emitted from the surface and atmosphere).  Once you get away from the atmosphere, space is a vacuum--so conduction, convection, and evaporation DO NOT TAKE PLACE.

5."The IPCC is a bunch of political hacks who railroad the process." The IPCC consists of dedicated scientists who voluntarily spend time away from their families because they consider what they're doing is important.  They're not in it to make money, they do it because they realize the importance of their work to man's future on Earth.

I don't understand the list of temperature attributions you give (and you don't either apparently), They look to me to be completely made up, and your link doesn't explain them either.

Answer 14

1. "There is no scientifically valid mechanism for CO2... etc" is followed by the explanation of a scientifically valid mechanism!!

How much warming CO2 can induce is a different issue but the fact that it does cause warming in the first place is confirmed in your copyu and paste: "absorbs all radiation available to it".

The 'how much' part is still being debating but this is simply a question of how hot will it get, not whether it will get hot - that is settled.

Your point 1 is quoting the models in favour of AGW.

2. "Oceans regulate the amount of CO2 in the air through absorption" True. However, the fact that CO2 has almost doubled in the past 300 years shows that:

a) The equilibrium has been disrupted and;

b) Maintenance of the equilibrium is NOT rapid and total (if it was total, there would have been no increase).

Mankind has pumped enough CO2 into the air since the industrial revolution that CO2 concentrations should be 500ppm by now. The fact that they are only 380ppm is primarily from ocean absorption hence the oceans are helping but definitely not 'total and rapid'.

"the graph for CO2...would vary wildly". Why? This isn't saidyou need to give a reason why atmospheric CO2 levels would vary wildly in the absence of ocean absorption before using it as justification.

"if equilibrium were not established, oceans would be absorbing or losing CO2 at a high rate": This actually makes no sense. There are many equilibria with high transfer rates (yet net result remaining stable).

"yet no significant change occurs" - sorry, significant change has occured:

"Evidence indicates that emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities have already led to a reduction in the pH of seawater of 0.1 units. This pH is lower than has been experienced for hundreds of millennia at a rate of change probably 100 times greater than at any time"

http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?id=...

3. Water vapour is a significant greenhouse gas and is an important part of global warming models. Just because it is a strong greenhouse gas doesn't mean that CO2 doesn't also contribute. Water vapour is in equilibrium (one of those rapid exchange equilibria!) and there is nothing directly adding or subtracting it from the atmosphere. That small (relative) amount of CO2 doesn't go away and adds a small heating effect. That small heating effect encourages more water vapour in the air causing more warming.

In this way, CO2's impact is reinforced and leveraged by water vapour leading to further warming and further water vapour.

All of this is well known and one of the principle concerns of AGW.

Your point 3 is quoting the models in favour of AGW.

4. The first sentence is the propaganda. The rest is science, true enough. But this is like point 1: The main fact is that CO2 DOES absorb radiation (hence heat), the rest is all about how much.

In other words, global warming is happening due to CO2 increases but exactly how much it will warm is still being calculated - exactly the position of the so-called "alarmists"!

Your point 4 is quoting the models in favour of AGW.

5. "The IPCC is a bunch of political hacks... etc". This is simple personal opinion without substantiation. Actually, it's tantamount to libel but we'll let that pass. This is the same as me saying "Chelsea are c**p". That may be. They may not be. It's just my opinion.

"The atmosphere is only 0.04% CO2" - y-e-s... and AGW scientists know this. What's the point? An eyeball only constitutes .04% of the mass of the human body - does this mean eyes are unimportant or that you can halve or double the number of eyes without an impact?

"When an ice age begins, global Warming occurs exactly as it is doing now" - Nope! AGW is all about speed - the rate of change. Planetary temperatures during the onset of a normal glaciated period change at rates far, far slower than current temperature changes.

We have seen temperature changes at this magnitude five times in the past. On each occasion, there was massive extinctions (betrween 60 and 90% of all species died out).

As for the calculations - I could follow the mathematics, but not the logic: What, for example, is meant by "95-99% due to various things --- 31.4°C": 'Various things'?? A very scientific explanation right there!

Or "claimed heat due to atmosphere --- 33°C" (so, basically, global warming!); are you saying that the atmosphere is 33°C? If so, we have already seen massive global warming!

Short answer, nope, shouldn't affect anyone's opinion: It's a mish-mash of partly understood science, sloppy logic and personal opinion. However, there is some science in there and thus some hope that further study will lead to further understanding and thus more relevant discourse.