[Coign]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

A return to thread topic

The usual prologue: I believe in global warming, I understand the theory of greenhouse gas and why it's plausible man has had a factor in this increase.

Here is an article with math and science and everything trying to explain why CO2 gas cannot be the reason for Global Warming. And if the only way that man is causing Global Warming is by putting CO2 into the air, then we cannot be the reason for Global Warming. Thus why do we have to hamstring our economies fighting CO2 emissions?

http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html

Here is the summary of the article if you don't want to read the very large and sometime mathamatical discussion.

This whole picture we have drawn ( with Peter Morgan's help ) illustrates both how little CO2 there is in the atmosphere, and how relatively little of the radiation it is capable of absorbing and "heating" the atmosphere. We know that most of the other IR radiation bands slips through and doesn't get to do any heating at all. (We've all seen the nice IR photographs taken from the space station.) But some scientists such as Dr. Heinz Hug who specialize in study of this stuff claims that all of the heat in these particular spectra are indeed absorbed in a relatively short distance, so adding more CO2 to the atmosphere can't affect anything at any rate. Other scientists, such as Dr. Roy W. Spencer at NASA - and one of the leading experts in the field of climate science - doesn't completely agree

We've decided to be exceptionally generous to all concerned in the debate and look at the worst-case scenario, where we'll say that all of the available heat in the CO2 absorption spectrum is actually captured. We know that man is responsible for about 3 % of it, so with the simplest of math, we have .03 x .08 = .0024. And remember that 8% figure was actually larger than reality, since the two side peaks don't have much energy to capture.

Man-made CO2 doesn't appear physically capable of absorbing much more than
two-thousandths of the radiated heat (IR) passing upward through the atmosphere.

And, if all of the available heat in that spectrum is indeed being captured by the current CO2 levels before leaving the atmosphere, then adding more CO2 to the atmosphere won't matter a bit.

In short, the laws of physics don't seem to allow CO2 it's currently assumed place as a significant "greenhouse gas" based on present concentrations. The other "greenhouse gases" such as methane, nitrous oxide, tetrafluoromethane, hexafluoroethane, sulfur hexafluoride, trifluoromethane, 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane, and 1,1-difluoroethane exist only in extraordinarily smaller amounts and aren't even up for serious discussion by any segment of the scientific community. And, since the other components of the atmosphere (oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor) aren't materially affected by human activity, the "greenhouse effect" is essentially a totally natural phenomenon, unaffected by human activity. We could repeat the spectral analysis and calculations for Oxygen, or O2 ( The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere remains exactly the same at all heights up to about 85 km, and is about 20.9% by volume ) and Nitrogen (N2) which is the whopper at 78.1% - but we won't. We'll leave that as your homework problem now that you know how to do it. Just look up the atomic absorption spectra for both, and do the math. You'll discover that Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't even "greenhouse gases", so that leaves the principal greenhouse gas... you guessed it.... Water Vapor. Curiously enough, the UN IPCC reports don't even mention water vapor, since it is technically not a "gas" in the atmosphere. Dr. Roy W. Spencer has one of the best comments we've read on this subject:


"Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas -- water vapor -- into the atmosphere every day, and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming is not manmade, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds."