The truth about CO2 and climate change

[Old Rocks]

Berkeley Earth

Dr. Muller severly disappointed the deniars when he did this study.

 

[Old Rocks]

Just because CO2's effect is logarithmic, doesn't mean there's no effect. CO2 has gone up 30-40% since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, depending on whose numbers you use. On a logarithmic scale that's approximately 11-15%. I think you need to show that that isn't significant. I've proven that CO2 absorbs energy and that the increase is non-trivial. I think it's your turn to prove something.

So prove your point!

It's your turn. I feel I've shown CO2 can have an effect. So far you haven't proven anything. You keep talking about some guy proving your point, but we haven't seen the goods. Either tell us what his proof is or give us a cite.

water vapor has more of a radiation blocking effect than CO2. Do you fools want to ban water next?

Now you are one dumb corksmoker there, old boy. The CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the atmosphere, which causes the uptake of more water vapor in the atmosphere, which creates more warming.

 

[Redfish]

Just because CO2's effect is logarithmic, doesn't mean there's no effect. CO2 has gone up 30-40% since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, depending on whose numbers you use. On a logarithmic scale that's approximately 11-15%. I think you need to show that that isn't significant. I've proven that CO2 absorbs energy and that the increase is non-trivial. I think it's your turn to prove something.

So prove your point!

It's your turn. I feel I've shown CO2 can have an effect. So far you haven't proven anything. You keep talking about some guy proving your point, but we haven't seen the goods. Either tell us what his proof is or give us a cite.

water vapor has more of a radiation blocking effect than CO2. Do you fools want to ban water next?

Now you are one dumb corksmoker there, old boy. The CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the atmosphere, which causes the uptake of more water vapor in the atmosphere, which creates more warming.

tell me dingleberry, what % of the atmosphere is CO2? do you have any idea?

same question for H2O,

then tell me that your hypothesis is logical. Hint, its not.

 

[Redfish]

Just because CO2's effect is logarithmic, doesn't mean there's no effect. CO2 has gone up 30-40% since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, depending on whose numbers you use. On a logarithmic scale that's approximately 11-15%. I think you need to show that that isn't significant. I've proven that CO2 absorbs energy and that the increase is non-trivial. I think it's your turn to prove something.

So prove your point!

It's your turn. I feel I've shown CO2 can have an effect. So far you haven't proven anything. You keep talking about some guy proving your point, but we haven't seen the goods. Either tell us what his proof is or give us a cite.

water vapor has more of a radiation blocking effect than CO2. Do you fools want to ban water next?

Now you are one dumb corksmoker there, old boy. The CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the atmosphere, which causes the uptake of more water vapor in the atmosphere, which creates more warming.

But just for drill, lets assume that you are correct, exactly what do you want the human beings living on planet earth to do? give us a specific list, not bullshit like "care about the planet" "stop using fossil fuels" What specifically do you and your prophet algore want humanity to do?

 

[Old Rocks]

No hint, you are one dumb fucker. The anthropogenic CO2 in our atmosphere is over 40% of the present level of 400+ ppm. And the increase in water vapor from that increase is about 4%. You can find it in scientific literature, I don't have time to babysit another failed intellect.

 

[mamooth]

Gore Rule invoked. Whoever brings up Gore first reveals themselves to be a brainless cult pissdrinker, and thus forfeits the thread for their side.

 

[Redfish]

No hint, you are one dumb fucker. The anthropogenic CO2 in our atmosphere is over 40% of the present level of 400+ ppm. And the increase in water vapor from that increase is about 4%. You can find it in scientific literature, I don't have time to babysit another failed intellect.

CO2 is .039% of the atmosphere. thats less than 1/2 of one percent. CO2 is not destroying our planet. all plant life is dependent on CO2 for survival.

Man is not causing the climate to heat up or cool down.

Relax, the sky is not falling, the oceans are not going to boil.

why not focus on a real problem, like pollution or over population, or ebola, or starving people in india?

you libs have this obsession with AGW that is wasting time and money that could be spent on some real problems.

I guess the defective liberal gene is real and active.

 

[Redfish]

Gore Rule invoked. Whoever brings up Gore first reveals themselves to be a brainless cult pissdrinker, and thus forfeits the thread for their side.

he is your prophet, its not nice to deny your prophet.

 

[Saigon]

Redfish -

Isn't it amazing that even when you can see what side the facts and science are on - you still want to stay standing somewhere else?

There aren't many topics where people so knowingly CHOOSE to be wrong.

 

[konradv]

CO2 is .039% of the atmosphere. thats less than 1/2 of one percent. CO2 is not destroying our planet. all plant life is dependent on CO2 for survival.
Man is not causing the climate to heat up or cool down.

Absolute CO2 percentage isn't what's important. It's the increase that's the problem, ~40% since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The earth would be much cooler without CO2, even considering its low absolute concentration.

The goal isn't the complete elimination of CO2, but finding ways to limit its emission before catastrophic warming can take place. Of course we need CO2. No one's denying that. If you want claim that humans aren't causing the earth to heat up, you'll have to explain what happens to the heat energy the added 40% absorbs.

 

[jc456]

Just because CO2's effect is logarithmic, doesn't mean there's no effect. CO2 has gone up 30-40% since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, depending on whose numbers you use. On a logarithmic scale that's approximately 11-15%. I think you need to show that that isn't significant. I've proven that CO2 absorbs energy and that the increase is non-trivial. I think it's your turn to prove something.

So prove your point!

It's your turn. I feel I've shown CO2 can have an effect. So far you haven't proven anything. You keep talking about some guy proving your point, but we haven't seen the goods. Either tell us what his proof is or give us a cite.

hahahaahahahaha sure you do. You pull an end around and think yo somehow satisfied the question. nope. You don't get off not providing anything. Provide the link s0n. You said you had it, so provide it! Cat got your fingers?

 

[jc456]

CO2 is .039% of the atmosphere. thats less than 1/2 of one percent. CO2 is not destroying our planet. all plant life is dependent on CO2 for survival.
Man is not causing the climate to heat up or cool down.

Absolute CO2 percentage isn't what's important. It's the increase that's the problem, ~40% since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The earth would be much cooler without CO2, even considering its low absolute concentration.

The goal isn't the complete elimination of CO2, but finding ways to limit its emission before catastrophic warming can take place. Of course we need CO2. No one's denying that. If you want claim that humans aren't causing the earth to heat up, you'll have to explain what happens to the heat energy the added 40% absorbs.

to which you have zero evidence will ever happen. did you hear me ZERO EVIDENCE s0n. You FAIL.......

 

[jc456]

As always the AGW cult is wrong even when it comes to their own religion..

The only time they say such things is like now when there has been no significant warming for the past 15 years..

However the AGW cult still believes the computer models over actual observations..

Please provide the dataset with source code that proves CO2 drives climate..

Roy Spencer? Really? Bahahahahahaha.

So can you post the datasets with source code that proves CO2 controls climate?

Do you have any real science to back up your stance other than the A typical AGW cult religious mentality?

AGW is the accepted paradigm according to 97% of climate scientists. You are among neither the 97% that agree, nor the 3% that disagree since you aren't even a scientist. Yet your claim, by your own admission, is in the denialist camp. As such, it is for you to provide a scientific refutation of AGW. It is not for me to provide data in support of the 97% since it is widely published and available to anyone who cares to read it, including you. And it is certainly not for me to provide documentation to support your view. That is your problem, not mine. I didn't post the graph above, and am not under any obligation to support it. That falls to the person who did post it. Got anything like that?

Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Congratulations, asshole. What your response tells us is that you don't subscribe to the scientific method. And that puts your posts squarely outside of the purview of these conversations, since we are talking about science, not skullduggery.

Cheers,

oh contrare. I swear by the science. I say the sciece says that adding 120 PPM of CO2 to the atmosphere does nothing to temperatures. Prove me wrong!!!!!! I have the experiment in 1901 Herr Koch, give me one from your argument. Oh that's right, you can't. yet, you just want us all to believe in ghosts and gobblins

 

[jc456]

Thats rich, you guys post graphs covering 20 or 30 years and claim they prove a trend for a planet that is billions of years old----------thats the irony, idiot.

You're ignoring the time element. You can't compare things that happened over tens of thousands to millions of years with what's happened over the last 200.

OMG, amazingly ignorant. The climate of our planet has been changing for millions of years and will be changing millions of years from now. The actions of humans have never had anything to do with it.

You're logic impaired, aren't you? You can't compare the present to the past, if underlying conditions have changed, like humans emitting more CO2 in DAYS than all the volcanoes on earth do in a normal year.

first of all your claim about humans and CO2 has been disproven several times.
second, CO2 is not a pollutant, read the OP
third, the sun causes climate change, both short term and long term.
fourth, the acts of humans did not cause the hot and cold trends over the last few millions of years, but you claim that a 50 year trend is significant?

the logic challenged one is you, my little friend.

Asshole, provide a link to your claims or stand branded a liar. Show who and how the claims about humans and CO2 have been disproven several times. I mean, we only have all the records of the coal are petroleum burned for the last century.

dude Herr Koch proved in 1901 that adding additional CO2 does nothing to the IR lightwaves. Why is that so hard for you? See your problem is you have nothing to support your claim. You waddle on here and there about science, yet you have no scientific evidence. You have failed models and manipulated data and you think that quantifies it for you!! haahahahaaahhaha FAIL s0n!!!!!!

 

[jc456]

Berkeley Earth

Dr. Muller severly disappointed the deniars when he did this study.

I trust no data from Berkeley Earth. It's all adjusted..............

 

[jc456]

Just because CO2's effect is logarithmic, doesn't mean there's no effect. CO2 has gone up 30-40% since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, depending on whose numbers you use. On a logarithmic scale that's approximately 11-15%. I think you need to show that that isn't significant. I've proven that CO2 absorbs energy and that the increase is non-trivial. I think it's your turn to prove something.

So prove your point!

It's your turn. I feel I've shown CO2 can have an effect. So far you haven't proven anything. You keep talking about some guy proving your point, but we haven't seen the goods. Either tell us what his proof is or give us a cite.

water vapor has more of a radiation blocking effect than CO2. Do you fools want to ban water next?

Now you are one dumb corksmoker there, old boy. The CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature of the atmosphere, which causes the uptake of more water vapor in the atmosphere, which creates more warming.

No proof.....FAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[orogenicman]

Roy Spencer? Really? Bahahahahahaha.

So can you post the datasets with source code that proves CO2 controls climate?

Do you have any real science to back up your stance other than the A typical AGW cult religious mentality?

AGW is the accepted paradigm according to 97% of climate scientists. You are among neither the 97% that agree, nor the 3% that disagree since you aren't even a scientist. Yet your claim, by your own admission, is in the denialist camp. As such, it is for you to provide a scientific refutation of AGW. It is not for me to provide data in support of the 97% since it is widely published and available to anyone who cares to read it, including you. And it is certainly not for me to provide documentation to support your view. That is your problem, not mine. I didn't post the graph above, and am not under any obligation to support it. That falls to the person who did post it. Got anything like that?

Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Congratulations, asshole. What your response tells us is that you don't subscribe to the scientific method. And that puts your posts squarely outside of the purview of these conversations, since we are talking about science, not skullduggery.

Cheers,

oh contrare. I swear by the science. I say the sciece says that adding 120 PPM of CO2 to the atmosphere does nothing to temperatures. Prove me wrong!!!!!! I have the experiment in 1901 Herr Koch, give me one from your argument. Oh that's right, you can't. yet, you just want us all to believe in ghosts and gobblins

RealClimate A Saturated Gassy Argument

Some people have been arguing that simple physics shows there is already so much CO2 in the air that its effect on infrared radiation is "saturated"— meaning that adding more gas can make scarcely any difference in how much radiation gets through the atmosphere, since all the radiation is already blocked. And besides, isn’t water vapor already blocking all the infrared rays that CO2 ever would?

The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. In 1900, shortly after Svante Arrhenius published his pathbreaking argument that our use of fossil fuels will eventually warm the planet, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, containing somewhat less gas in total then would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. That’s not much, since the concentration in air is only a few hundred parts per million. Herr Koch did his experiments in a 30cm long tube, though 250cm would have been closer to the right length to use to represent the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Herr Koch reported that when he cut the amount of gas in the tube by one-third, the amount of radiation that got through scarcely changed. The American meteorological community was alerted to Ångström’s result in a commentary appearing in the June, 1901 issue of Monthly Weather Review, which used the result to caution "geologists" against adhering to Arrhenius’ wild ideas.

Still more persuasive to scientists of the day was the fact that water vapor, which is far more abundant in the air than carbon dioxide, also intercepts infrared radiation. In the infrared spectrum, the main bands where each gas blocked radiation overlapped one another. How could adding CO2 affect radiation in bands of the spectrum that H2O (not to mention CO2 itself) already made opaque? As these ideas spread, even scientists who had been enthusiastic about Arrhenius’s work decided it was in error. Work on the question stagnated. If there was ever an “establishment” view about the greenhouse effect, it was confidence that the CO2 emitted by humans could not affect anything so grand as the Earth’s climate.

Nobody was interested in thinking about the matter deeply enough to notice the flaw in the argument. The scientists were looking at warming from ground level, so to speak, asking about the radiation that reaches and leaves the surface of the Earth. Like Ångström, they tended to treat the atmosphere overhead as a unit, as if it were a single sheet of glass. (Thus the “greenhouse” analogy.) But this is not how global warming actually works.

What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule may radiate the energy back out again in a random direction. Or it may transfer the energy into velocity in collisions with other air molecules, so that the layer of air where it sits gets warmer. The layer of air radiates some of the energy it has absorbed back toward the ground, and some upwards to higher layers. As you go higher, the atmosphere gets thinner and colder. Eventually the energy reaches a layer so thin that radiation can escape into space.

What happens if we add more carbon dioxide? In the layers so high and thin that much of the heat radiation from lower down slips through, adding more greenhouse gas molecules means the layer will absorb more of the rays. So the place from which most of the heat energy finally leaves the Earth will shift to higher layers. Those are colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well. The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates (which is in fact our current situation). As the higher levels radiate some of the excess downwards, all the lower levels down to the surface warm up. The imbalance must continue until the high levels get hot enough to radiate as much energy back out as the planet is receiving.

Any saturation at lower levels would not change this, since it is the layers from which radiation does escape that determine the planet’s heat balance. The basic logic was neatly explained by John Tyndall back in 1862: "As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial [infrared] rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface."

Even a simple explanation can be hard to grasp in all its implications, and scientists only worked those out piecewise. First they had to understand that it was worth the trouble to think about carbon dioxide at all. Didn’t the fact that water vapor thoroughly blocks infrared radiation mean that any changes in CO2 are meaningless? Again, the scientists of the day got caught in the trap of thinking of the atmosphere as a single slab. Although they knew that the higher you went, the drier the air got, they only considered the total water vapor in the column.

The breakthroughs that finally set the field back on the right track came from research during the 1940s. Military officers lavishly funded research on the high layers of the air where their bombers operated, layers traversed by the infrared radiation they might use to detect enemies. Theoretical analysis of absorption leaped forward, with results confirmed by laboratory studies using techniques orders of magnitude better than Ångström could deploy. The resulting developments stimulated new and clearer thinking about atmospheric radiation.

Among other things, the new studies showed that in the frigid and rarified upper atmosphere where the crucial infrared absorption takes place, the nature of the absorption is different from what scientists had assumed from the old sea-level measurements. Take a single molecule of CO2 or H2O. It will absorb light only in a set of specific wavelengths, which show up as thin dark lines in a spectrum. In a gas at sea-level temperature and pressure, the countless molecules colliding with one another at different velocities each absorb at slightly different wavelengths, so the lines are broadened and overlap to a considerable extent. Even at sea level pressure, the absorption is concentrated into discrete spikes, but the gaps between the spikes are fairly narrow and the "valleys" between the spikes are not terribly deep. (see Part II) None of this was known a century ago. With the primitive infrared instruments available in the early 20th century, scientists saw the absorption smeared out into wide bands. And they had no theory to suggest anything different.
Measurements done for the US Air Force drew scientists’ attention to the details of the absorption, and especially at high altitudes. At low pressure the spikes become much more sharply defined, like a picket fence. There are gaps between the H2O lines where radiation can get through unless blocked by CO2 lines. Moreover, researchers had become acutely aware of how very dry the air gets at upper altitudes — indeed the stratosphere has scarcely any water vapor at all. By contrast, CO2 is well mixed all through the atmosphere, so as you look higher it becomes relatively more significant. The main points could have been understood already in the 1930s if scientists had looked at the greenhouse effect closely (in fact one physicist, E.O. Hulbert, did make a pretty good calculation, but the matter was of so little interest that nobody noticed.)

As we have seen, in the higher layers where radiation starts to slip through easily, adding some greenhouse gas must warm the Earth regardless of how the absorption works. The changes in the H2O and CO2 absorption lines with pressure and temperature only shift the layers where the main action takes place. You do need to take it all into account to make an exact calculation of the warming. In the 1950s, after good infrared data and digital computers became available, the physicist Gilbert Plass took time off from what seemed like more important research to work through lengthy calculations of the radiation balance, layer by layer in the atmosphere and point by point in the spectrum. He announced that adding CO2 really could cause a degree or so of global warming. Plass’s calculations were too primitive to account for many important effects. (Heat energy moves up not only by radiation but by convection, some radiation is blocked not by gas but by clouds, etc.) But for the few scientists who paid attention, it was now clear that the question was worth studying. Decades more would pass before scientists began to give the public a clear explanation of what was really going on in these calculations, drawing attention to the high, cold layers of the atmosphere. Even today, many popularizers try to explain the greenhouse effect as if the atmosphere were a single sheet of glass.

To so summarize:

So, if a skeptical friend hits you with the "saturation argument" against global warming, here’s all you need to say: (a) You’d still get an increase in greenhouse warming even if the atmosphere were saturated, because it’s the absorption in the thin upper atmosphere (which is unsaturated) that counts (b) It’s not even true that the atmosphere is actually saturated with respect to absorption by CO2, (c) Water vapor doesn’t overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there’s little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, and at the low pressures there water vapor absorption is like a leaky sieve, which would let a lot more radiation through were it not for CO2, and (d) These issues were satisfactorily addressed by physicists 50 years ago, and the necessary physics is included in all climate models.
Then you can heave a sigh, and wonder how much different the world would be today if these arguments were understood in the 1920′s, as they could well have been if anybody had thought it important enough to think through.

And finally, if you actually swore by science, you would have made an effort to keep up to date by reading current periodicals or at a minimum, taken a friggin class above the elementary school level post-WWI.

 

[jc456]

So can you post the datasets with source code that proves CO2 controls climate?

Do you have any real science to back up your stance other than the A typical AGW cult religious mentality?

AGW is the accepted paradigm according to 97% of climate scientists. You are among neither the 97% that agree, nor the 3% that disagree since you aren't even a scientist. Yet your claim, by your own admission, is in the denialist camp. As such, it is for you to provide a scientific refutation of AGW. It is not for me to provide data in support of the 97% since it is widely published and available to anyone who cares to read it, including you. And it is certainly not for me to provide documentation to support your view. That is your problem, not mine. I didn't post the graph above, and am not under any obligation to support it. That falls to the person who did post it. Got anything like that?

Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Congratulations, asshole. What your response tells us is that you don't subscribe to the scientific method. And that puts your posts squarely outside of the purview of these conversations, since we are talking about science, not skullduggery.

Cheers,

oh contrare. I swear by the science. I say the sciece says that adding 120 PPM of CO2 to the atmosphere does nothing to temperatures. Prove me wrong!!!!!! I have the experiment in 1901 Herr Koch, give me one from your argument. Oh that's right, you can't. yet, you just want us all to believe in ghosts and gobblins

RealClimate A Saturated Gassy Argument

Some people have been arguing that simple physics shows there is already so much CO2 in the air that its effect on infrared radiation is "saturated"— meaning that adding more gas can make scarcely any difference in how much radiation gets through the atmosphere, since all the radiation is already blocked. And besides, isn’t water vapor already blocking all the infrared rays that CO2 ever would?

The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. In 1900, shortly after Svante Arrhenius published his pathbreaking argument that our use of fossil fuels will eventually warm the planet, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, containing somewhat less gas in total then would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. That’s not much, since the concentration in air is only a few hundred parts per million. Herr Koch did his experiments in a 30cm long tube, though 250cm would have been closer to the right length to use to represent the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Herr Koch reported that when he cut the amount of gas in the tube by one-third, the amount of radiation that got through scarcely changed. The American meteorological community was alerted to Ångström’s result in a commentary appearing in the June, 1901 issue of Monthly Weather Review, which used the result to caution "geologists" against adhering to Arrhenius’ wild ideas.

Still more persuasive to scientists of the day was the fact that water vapor, which is far more abundant in the air than carbon dioxide, also intercepts infrared radiation. In the infrared spectrum, the main bands where each gas blocked radiation overlapped one another. How could adding CO2 affect radiation in bands of the spectrum that H2O (not to mention CO2 itself) already made opaque? As these ideas spread, even scientists who had been enthusiastic about Arrhenius’s work decided it was in error. Work on the question stagnated. If there was ever an “establishment” view about the greenhouse effect, it was confidence that the CO2 emitted by humans could not affect anything so grand as the Earth’s climate.

Nobody was interested in thinking about the matter deeply enough to notice the flaw in the argument. The scientists were looking at warming from ground level, so to speak, asking about the radiation that reaches and leaves the surface of the Earth. Like Ångström, they tended to treat the atmosphere overhead as a unit, as if it were a single sheet of glass. (Thus the “greenhouse” analogy.) But this is not how global warming actually works.

What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule may radiate the energy back out again in a random direction. Or it may transfer the energy into velocity in collisions with other air molecules, so that the layer of air where it sits gets warmer. The layer of air radiates some of the energy it has absorbed back toward the ground, and some upwards to higher layers. As you go higher, the atmosphere gets thinner and colder. Eventually the energy reaches a layer so thin that radiation can escape into space.

What happens if we add more carbon dioxide? In the layers so high and thin that much of the heat radiation from lower down slips through, adding more greenhouse gas molecules means the layer will absorb more of the rays. So the place from which most of the heat energy finally leaves the Earth will shift to higher layers. Those are colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well. The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates (which is in fact our current situation). As the higher levels radiate some of the excess downwards, all the lower levels down to the surface warm up. The imbalance must continue until the high levels get hot enough to radiate as much energy back out as the planet is receiving.

Any saturation at lower levels would not change this, since it is the layers from which radiation does escape that determine the planet’s heat balance. The basic logic was neatly explained by John Tyndall back in 1862: "As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial [infrared] rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface."

Even a simple explanation can be hard to grasp in all its implications, and scientists only worked those out piecewise. First they had to understand that it was worth the trouble to think about carbon dioxide at all. Didn’t the fact that water vapor thoroughly blocks infrared radiation mean that any changes in CO2 are meaningless? Again, the scientists of the day got caught in the trap of thinking of the atmosphere as a single slab. Although they knew that the higher you went, the drier the air got, they only considered the total water vapor in the column.

The breakthroughs that finally set the field back on the right track came from research during the 1940s. Military officers lavishly funded research on the high layers of the air where their bombers operated, layers traversed by the infrared radiation they might use to detect enemies. Theoretical analysis of absorption leaped forward, with results confirmed by laboratory studies using techniques orders of magnitude better than Ångström could deploy. The resulting developments stimulated new and clearer thinking about atmospheric radiation.

Among other things, the new studies showed that in the frigid and rarified upper atmosphere where the crucial infrared absorption takes place, the nature of the absorption is different from what scientists had assumed from the old sea-level measurements. Take a single molecule of CO2 or H2O. It will absorb light only in a set of specific wavelengths, which show up as thin dark lines in a spectrum. In a gas at sea-level temperature and pressure, the countless molecules colliding with one another at different velocities each absorb at slightly different wavelengths, so the lines are broadened and overlap to a considerable extent. Even at sea level pressure, the absorption is concentrated into discrete spikes, but the gaps between the spikes are fairly narrow and the "valleys" between the spikes are not terribly deep. (see Part II) None of this was known a century ago. With the primitive infrared instruments available in the early 20th century, scientists saw the absorption smeared out into wide bands. And they had no theory to suggest anything different.
Measurements done for the US Air Force drew scientists’ attention to the details of the absorption, and especially at high altitudes. At low pressure the spikes become much more sharply defined, like a picket fence. There are gaps between the H2O lines where radiation can get through unless blocked by CO2 lines. Moreover, researchers had become acutely aware of how very dry the air gets at upper altitudes — indeed the stratosphere has scarcely any water vapor at all. By contrast, CO2 is well mixed all through the atmosphere, so as you look higher it becomes relatively more significant. The main points could have been understood already in the 1930s if scientists had looked at the greenhouse effect closely (in fact one physicist, E.O. Hulbert, did make a pretty good calculation, but the matter was of so little interest that nobody noticed.)

As we have seen, in the higher layers where radiation starts to slip through easily, adding some greenhouse gas must warm the Earth regardless of how the absorption works. The changes in the H2O and CO2 absorption lines with pressure and temperature only shift the layers where the main action takes place. You do need to take it all into account to make an exact calculation of the warming. In the 1950s, after good infrared data and digital computers became available, the physicist Gilbert Plass took time off from what seemed like more important research to work through lengthy calculations of the radiation balance, layer by layer in the atmosphere and point by point in the spectrum. He announced that adding CO2 really could cause a degree or so of global warming. Plass’s calculations were too primitive to account for many important effects. (Heat energy moves up not only by radiation but by convection, some radiation is blocked not by gas but by clouds, etc.) But for the few scientists who paid attention, it was now clear that the question was worth studying. Decades more would pass before scientists began to give the public a clear explanation of what was really going on in these calculations, drawing attention to the high, cold layers of the atmosphere. Even today, many popularizers try to explain the greenhouse effect as if the atmosphere were a single sheet of glass.

To so summarize:

So, if a skeptical friend hits you with the "saturation argument" against global warming, here’s all you need to say: (a) You’d still get an increase in greenhouse warming even if the atmosphere were saturated, because it’s the absorption in the thin upper atmosphere (which is unsaturated) that counts (b) It’s not even true that the atmosphere is actually saturated with respect to absorption by CO2, (c) Water vapor doesn’t overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there’s little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, and at the low pressures there water vapor absorption is like a leaky sieve, which would let a lot more radiation through were it not for CO2, and (d) These issues were satisfactorily addressed by physicists 50 years ago, and the necessary physics is included in all climate models.
Then you can heave a sigh, and wonder how much different the world would be today if these arguments were understood in the 1920′s, as they could well have been if anybody had thought it important enough to think through.

And finally, if you actually swore by science, you would have made an effort to keep up to date by reading current periodicals or at a minimum, taken a friggin class above the elementary school level post-WWI.

and yet from the same document:
"
The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. In 1900, shortly after Svante Arrhenius published his pathbreaking argument that our use of fossil fuels will eventually warm the planet, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, containing somewhat less gas in total then would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. That’s not much, since the concentration in air is only a few hundred parts per million. Herr Koch did his experiments in a 30cm long tube, though 250cm would have been closer to the right length to use to represent the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Herr Koch reported that when he cut the amount of gas in the tube by one-third, the amount of radiation that got through scarcely changed. The American meteorological community was alerted to Ångström’s result in a commentary appearing in the June, 1901 issue of Monthly Weather Review, which used the result to caution "geologists" against adhering to Arrhenius’ wild ideas.
"

 

[orogenicman]

AGW is the accepted paradigm according to 97% of climate scientists. You are among neither the 97% that agree, nor the 3% that disagree since you aren't even a scientist. Yet your claim, by your own admission, is in the denialist camp. As such, it is for you to provide a scientific refutation of AGW. It is not for me to provide data in support of the 97% since it is widely published and available to anyone who cares to read it, including you. And it is certainly not for me to provide documentation to support your view. That is your problem, not mine. I didn't post the graph above, and am not under any obligation to support it. That falls to the person who did post it. Got anything like that?

Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Congratulations, asshole. What your response tells us is that you don't subscribe to the scientific method. And that puts your posts squarely outside of the purview of these conversations, since we are talking about science, not skullduggery.

Cheers,

oh contrare. I swear by the science. I say the sciece says that adding 120 PPM of CO2 to the atmosphere does nothing to temperatures. Prove me wrong!!!!!! I have the experiment in 1901 Herr Koch, give me one from your argument. Oh that's right, you can't. yet, you just want us all to believe in ghosts and gobblins

RealClimate A Saturated Gassy Argument

Some people have been arguing that simple physics shows there is already so much CO2 in the air that its effect on infrared radiation is "saturated"— meaning that adding more gas can make scarcely any difference in how much radiation gets through the atmosphere, since all the radiation is already blocked. And besides, isn’t water vapor already blocking all the infrared rays that CO2 ever would?

The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. In 1900, shortly after Svante Arrhenius published his pathbreaking argument that our use of fossil fuels will eventually warm the planet, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, containing somewhat less gas in total then would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. That’s not much, since the concentration in air is only a few hundred parts per million. Herr Koch did his experiments in a 30cm long tube, though 250cm would have been closer to the right length to use to represent the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Herr Koch reported that when he cut the amount of gas in the tube by one-third, the amount of radiation that got through scarcely changed. The American meteorological community was alerted to Ångström’s result in a commentary appearing in the June, 1901 issue of Monthly Weather Review, which used the result to caution "geologists" against adhering to Arrhenius’ wild ideas.

Still more persuasive to scientists of the day was the fact that water vapor, which is far more abundant in the air than carbon dioxide, also intercepts infrared radiation. In the infrared spectrum, the main bands where each gas blocked radiation overlapped one another. How could adding CO2 affect radiation in bands of the spectrum that H2O (not to mention CO2 itself) already made opaque? As these ideas spread, even scientists who had been enthusiastic about Arrhenius’s work decided it was in error. Work on the question stagnated. If there was ever an “establishment” view about the greenhouse effect, it was confidence that the CO2 emitted by humans could not affect anything so grand as the Earth’s climate.

Nobody was interested in thinking about the matter deeply enough to notice the flaw in the argument. The scientists were looking at warming from ground level, so to speak, asking about the radiation that reaches and leaves the surface of the Earth. Like Ångström, they tended to treat the atmosphere overhead as a unit, as if it were a single sheet of glass. (Thus the “greenhouse” analogy.) But this is not how global warming actually works.

What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule may radiate the energy back out again in a random direction. Or it may transfer the energy into velocity in collisions with other air molecules, so that the layer of air where it sits gets warmer. The layer of air radiates some of the energy it has absorbed back toward the ground, and some upwards to higher layers. As you go higher, the atmosphere gets thinner and colder. Eventually the energy reaches a layer so thin that radiation can escape into space.

What happens if we add more carbon dioxide? In the layers so high and thin that much of the heat radiation from lower down slips through, adding more greenhouse gas molecules means the layer will absorb more of the rays. So the place from which most of the heat energy finally leaves the Earth will shift to higher layers. Those are colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well. The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates (which is in fact our current situation). As the higher levels radiate some of the excess downwards, all the lower levels down to the surface warm up. The imbalance must continue until the high levels get hot enough to radiate as much energy back out as the planet is receiving.

Any saturation at lower levels would not change this, since it is the layers from which radiation does escape that determine the planet’s heat balance. The basic logic was neatly explained by John Tyndall back in 1862: "As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial [infrared] rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface."

Even a simple explanation can be hard to grasp in all its implications, and scientists only worked those out piecewise. First they had to understand that it was worth the trouble to think about carbon dioxide at all. Didn’t the fact that water vapor thoroughly blocks infrared radiation mean that any changes in CO2 are meaningless? Again, the scientists of the day got caught in the trap of thinking of the atmosphere as a single slab. Although they knew that the higher you went, the drier the air got, they only considered the total water vapor in the column.

The breakthroughs that finally set the field back on the right track came from research during the 1940s. Military officers lavishly funded research on the high layers of the air where their bombers operated, layers traversed by the infrared radiation they might use to detect enemies. Theoretical analysis of absorption leaped forward, with results confirmed by laboratory studies using techniques orders of magnitude better than Ångström could deploy. The resulting developments stimulated new and clearer thinking about atmospheric radiation.

Among other things, the new studies showed that in the frigid and rarified upper atmosphere where the crucial infrared absorption takes place, the nature of the absorption is different from what scientists had assumed from the old sea-level measurements. Take a single molecule of CO2 or H2O. It will absorb light only in a set of specific wavelengths, which show up as thin dark lines in a spectrum. In a gas at sea-level temperature and pressure, the countless molecules colliding with one another at different velocities each absorb at slightly different wavelengths, so the lines are broadened and overlap to a considerable extent. Even at sea level pressure, the absorption is concentrated into discrete spikes, but the gaps between the spikes are fairly narrow and the "valleys" between the spikes are not terribly deep. (see Part II) None of this was known a century ago. With the primitive infrared instruments available in the early 20th century, scientists saw the absorption smeared out into wide bands. And they had no theory to suggest anything different.
Measurements done for the US Air Force drew scientists’ attention to the details of the absorption, and especially at high altitudes. At low pressure the spikes become much more sharply defined, like a picket fence. There are gaps between the H2O lines where radiation can get through unless blocked by CO2 lines. Moreover, researchers had become acutely aware of how very dry the air gets at upper altitudes — indeed the stratosphere has scarcely any water vapor at all. By contrast, CO2 is well mixed all through the atmosphere, so as you look higher it becomes relatively more significant. The main points could have been understood already in the 1930s if scientists had looked at the greenhouse effect closely (in fact one physicist, E.O. Hulbert, did make a pretty good calculation, but the matter was of so little interest that nobody noticed.)

As we have seen, in the higher layers where radiation starts to slip through easily, adding some greenhouse gas must warm the Earth regardless of how the absorption works. The changes in the H2O and CO2 absorption lines with pressure and temperature only shift the layers where the main action takes place. You do need to take it all into account to make an exact calculation of the warming. In the 1950s, after good infrared data and digital computers became available, the physicist Gilbert Plass took time off from what seemed like more important research to work through lengthy calculations of the radiation balance, layer by layer in the atmosphere and point by point in the spectrum. He announced that adding CO2 really could cause a degree or so of global warming. Plass’s calculations were too primitive to account for many important effects. (Heat energy moves up not only by radiation but by convection, some radiation is blocked not by gas but by clouds, etc.) But for the few scientists who paid attention, it was now clear that the question was worth studying. Decades more would pass before scientists began to give the public a clear explanation of what was really going on in these calculations, drawing attention to the high, cold layers of the atmosphere. Even today, many popularizers try to explain the greenhouse effect as if the atmosphere were a single sheet of glass.

To so summarize:

So, if a skeptical friend hits you with the "saturation argument" against global warming, here’s all you need to say: (a) You’d still get an increase in greenhouse warming even if the atmosphere were saturated, because it’s the absorption in the thin upper atmosphere (which is unsaturated) that counts (b) It’s not even true that the atmosphere is actually saturated with respect to absorption by CO2, (c) Water vapor doesn’t overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there’s little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, and at the low pressures there water vapor absorption is like a leaky sieve, which would let a lot more radiation through were it not for CO2, and (d) These issues were satisfactorily addressed by physicists 50 years ago, and the necessary physics is included in all climate models.
Then you can heave a sigh, and wonder how much different the world would be today if these arguments were understood in the 1920′s, as they could well have been if anybody had thought it important enough to think through.

And finally, if you actually swore by science, you would have made an effort to keep up to date by reading current periodicals or at a minimum, taken a friggin class above the elementary school level post-WWI.

and yet from the same document:
"
The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. In 1900, shortly after Svante Arrhenius published his pathbreaking argument that our use of fossil fuels will eventually warm the planet, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, containing somewhat less gas in total then would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. That’s not much, since the concentration in air is only a few hundred parts per million. Herr Koch did his experiments in a 30cm long tube, though 250cm would have been closer to the right length to use to represent the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Herr Koch reported that when he cut the amount of gas in the tube by one-third, the amount of radiation that got through scarcely changed. The American meteorological community was alerted to Ångström’s result in a commentary appearing in the June, 1901 issue of Monthly Weather Review, which used the result to caution "geologists" against adhering to Arrhenius’ wild ideas.
"

Dufus, read what comes after. Jeez.

 

[jc456]

Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Congratulations, asshole. What your response tells us is that you don't subscribe to the scientific method. And that puts your posts squarely outside of the purview of these conversations, since we are talking about science, not skullduggery.

Cheers,

oh contrare. I swear by the science. I say the sciece says that adding 120 PPM of CO2 to the atmosphere does nothing to temperatures. Prove me wrong!!!!!! I have the experiment in 1901 Herr Koch, give me one from your argument. Oh that's right, you can't. yet, you just want us all to believe in ghosts and gobblins

RealClimate A Saturated Gassy Argument

Some people have been arguing that simple physics shows there is already so much CO2 in the air that its effect on infrared radiation is "saturated"— meaning that adding more gas can make scarcely any difference in how much radiation gets through the atmosphere, since all the radiation is already blocked. And besides, isn’t water vapor already blocking all the infrared rays that CO2 ever would?

The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. In 1900, shortly after Svante Arrhenius published his pathbreaking argument that our use of fossil fuels will eventually warm the planet, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, containing somewhat less gas in total then would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. That’s not much, since the concentration in air is only a few hundred parts per million. Herr Koch did his experiments in a 30cm long tube, though 250cm would have been closer to the right length to use to represent the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Herr Koch reported that when he cut the amount of gas in the tube by one-third, the amount of radiation that got through scarcely changed. The American meteorological community was alerted to Ångström’s result in a commentary appearing in the June, 1901 issue of Monthly Weather Review, which used the result to caution "geologists" against adhering to Arrhenius’ wild ideas.

Still more persuasive to scientists of the day was the fact that water vapor, which is far more abundant in the air than carbon dioxide, also intercepts infrared radiation. In the infrared spectrum, the main bands where each gas blocked radiation overlapped one another. How could adding CO2 affect radiation in bands of the spectrum that H2O (not to mention CO2 itself) already made opaque? As these ideas spread, even scientists who had been enthusiastic about Arrhenius’s work decided it was in error. Work on the question stagnated. If there was ever an “establishment” view about the greenhouse effect, it was confidence that the CO2 emitted by humans could not affect anything so grand as the Earth’s climate.

Nobody was interested in thinking about the matter deeply enough to notice the flaw in the argument. The scientists were looking at warming from ground level, so to speak, asking about the radiation that reaches and leaves the surface of the Earth. Like Ångström, they tended to treat the atmosphere overhead as a unit, as if it were a single sheet of glass. (Thus the “greenhouse” analogy.) But this is not how global warming actually works.

What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule may radiate the energy back out again in a random direction. Or it may transfer the energy into velocity in collisions with other air molecules, so that the layer of air where it sits gets warmer. The layer of air radiates some of the energy it has absorbed back toward the ground, and some upwards to higher layers. As you go higher, the atmosphere gets thinner and colder. Eventually the energy reaches a layer so thin that radiation can escape into space.

What happens if we add more carbon dioxide? In the layers so high and thin that much of the heat radiation from lower down slips through, adding more greenhouse gas molecules means the layer will absorb more of the rays. So the place from which most of the heat energy finally leaves the Earth will shift to higher layers. Those are colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well. The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates (which is in fact our current situation). As the higher levels radiate some of the excess downwards, all the lower levels down to the surface warm up. The imbalance must continue until the high levels get hot enough to radiate as much energy back out as the planet is receiving.

Any saturation at lower levels would not change this, since it is the layers from which radiation does escape that determine the planet’s heat balance. The basic logic was neatly explained by John Tyndall back in 1862: "As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial [infrared] rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface."

Even a simple explanation can be hard to grasp in all its implications, and scientists only worked those out piecewise. First they had to understand that it was worth the trouble to think about carbon dioxide at all. Didn’t the fact that water vapor thoroughly blocks infrared radiation mean that any changes in CO2 are meaningless? Again, the scientists of the day got caught in the trap of thinking of the atmosphere as a single slab. Although they knew that the higher you went, the drier the air got, they only considered the total water vapor in the column.

The breakthroughs that finally set the field back on the right track came from research during the 1940s. Military officers lavishly funded research on the high layers of the air where their bombers operated, layers traversed by the infrared radiation they might use to detect enemies. Theoretical analysis of absorption leaped forward, with results confirmed by laboratory studies using techniques orders of magnitude better than Ångström could deploy. The resulting developments stimulated new and clearer thinking about atmospheric radiation.

Among other things, the new studies showed that in the frigid and rarified upper atmosphere where the crucial infrared absorption takes place, the nature of the absorption is different from what scientists had assumed from the old sea-level measurements. Take a single molecule of CO2 or H2O. It will absorb light only in a set of specific wavelengths, which show up as thin dark lines in a spectrum. In a gas at sea-level temperature and pressure, the countless molecules colliding with one another at different velocities each absorb at slightly different wavelengths, so the lines are broadened and overlap to a considerable extent. Even at sea level pressure, the absorption is concentrated into discrete spikes, but the gaps between the spikes are fairly narrow and the "valleys" between the spikes are not terribly deep. (see Part II) None of this was known a century ago. With the primitive infrared instruments available in the early 20th century, scientists saw the absorption smeared out into wide bands. And they had no theory to suggest anything different.
Measurements done for the US Air Force drew scientists’ attention to the details of the absorption, and especially at high altitudes. At low pressure the spikes become much more sharply defined, like a picket fence. There are gaps between the H2O lines where radiation can get through unless blocked by CO2 lines. Moreover, researchers had become acutely aware of how very dry the air gets at upper altitudes — indeed the stratosphere has scarcely any water vapor at all. By contrast, CO2 is well mixed all through the atmosphere, so as you look higher it becomes relatively more significant. The main points could have been understood already in the 1930s if scientists had looked at the greenhouse effect closely (in fact one physicist, E.O. Hulbert, did make a pretty good calculation, but the matter was of so little interest that nobody noticed.)

As we have seen, in the higher layers where radiation starts to slip through easily, adding some greenhouse gas must warm the Earth regardless of how the absorption works. The changes in the H2O and CO2 absorption lines with pressure and temperature only shift the layers where the main action takes place. You do need to take it all into account to make an exact calculation of the warming. In the 1950s, after good infrared data and digital computers became available, the physicist Gilbert Plass took time off from what seemed like more important research to work through lengthy calculations of the radiation balance, layer by layer in the atmosphere and point by point in the spectrum. He announced that adding CO2 really could cause a degree or so of global warming. Plass’s calculations were too primitive to account for many important effects. (Heat energy moves up not only by radiation but by convection, some radiation is blocked not by gas but by clouds, etc.) But for the few scientists who paid attention, it was now clear that the question was worth studying. Decades more would pass before scientists began to give the public a clear explanation of what was really going on in these calculations, drawing attention to the high, cold layers of the atmosphere. Even today, many popularizers try to explain the greenhouse effect as if the atmosphere were a single sheet of glass.

To so summarize:

So, if a skeptical friend hits you with the "saturation argument" against global warming, here’s all you need to say: (a) You’d still get an increase in greenhouse warming even if the atmosphere were saturated, because it’s the absorption in the thin upper atmosphere (which is unsaturated) that counts (b) It’s not even true that the atmosphere is actually saturated with respect to absorption by CO2, (c) Water vapor doesn’t overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there’s little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, and at the low pressures there water vapor absorption is like a leaky sieve, which would let a lot more radiation through were it not for CO2, and (d) These issues were satisfactorily addressed by physicists 50 years ago, and the necessary physics is included in all climate models.
Then you can heave a sigh, and wonder how much different the world would be today if these arguments were understood in the 1920′s, as they could well have been if anybody had thought it important enough to think through.

And finally, if you actually swore by science, you would have made an effort to keep up to date by reading current periodicals or at a minimum, taken a friggin class above the elementary school level post-WWI.

and yet from the same document:
"
The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. In 1900, shortly after Svante Arrhenius published his pathbreaking argument that our use of fossil fuels will eventually warm the planet, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, containing somewhat less gas in total then would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. That’s not much, since the concentration in air is only a few hundred parts per million. Herr Koch did his experiments in a 30cm long tube, though 250cm would have been closer to the right length to use to represent the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Herr Koch reported that when he cut the amount of gas in the tube by one-third, the amount of radiation that got through scarcely changed. The American meteorological community was alerted to Ångström’s result in a commentary appearing in the June, 1901 issue of Monthly Weather Review, which used the result to caution "geologists" against adhering to Arrhenius’ wild ideas.
"

Dufus, read what comes after. Jeez.

So I'm glad you agree, that for the most part, the entire debate is over. The fact is that saturation happens and proved in that document as you and I point out. So what's the problem?