The scientists guiding our COVID response have been exposed as driven by politics, not science. Dr. Fauci says that attacks on him are attacks on science. We are supposed to believe that persons that cloak themselves with science are infallible and honest. Really? If one of their fellow scientists departs from orthodoxy, scientists sign petitions denouncing him. That happened to Dr. Harvey Risch of Yale because he dared to suggest that hydroxychloroquine might be useful for treating COVID.
Given the COVID example, it is now not so incredible to think that the scientists promoting global warming have ulterior motives. The Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences faculty sign a loyalty oath to global warming. The editor of the academic journal Remote Sensing was forced to resignbecause he published a perfectly legitimate paper critical of climate models. Cancel culture is strong among the global warming scientists. Every effort is made to cancel dissenters. There is no such thing as an early career scientist skeptical concerning global warming. He could never get a job, even if somehow he could get his Ph.D. This is not because the science is solid. It’s because orthodoxy is ruthlessly enforced to protect the career interests of the global warming establishment.
In case you are wondering, the name “global warming” was changed to “climate change” because the globe wasn’t warming. The climate is always changing, so the advocates can claim that normal variation is proof of climate change.
Global warming has been thoroughly exposed as a fraud by many authors including highly qualified atmospheric scientists. Yet global warming is still a canonic belief in influential circles. The president wants to greatly expand the development of wind and solar energy in order to prevent global warming. Even if one accepts the junk science of global warming, according to the tenets of global warming theory, wind and solar are completely ineffective for preventing the imaginary crisis. Straight forward computation shows that wind and solar, exclusive of subsidies, cost 5-10 times more than the natural gas energy they displace. Only gas usage is displaced. The gas generating plants must remain, fully staffed, ready to spring into operation when sun or wind is deficient. Large woke organizations, like universities or big companies, lack morals.
IBM participated in the Nazi Holocaust, providing punched card accounting to keep track of Jews. The elite universities, our science churches, continue their long history of racial and ethnic discrimination. Harvard formerly restricted Jewish enrollment. Now Harvard restricts Asian enrollment while favoring blacks. When the Georgia legislature passed a completely reasonable law to minimize vote cheating, the left, realizing that the law would interfere with vote cheating, denounced the law as racist.
Delta airlines piled on, throwing its support to vote cheating.
President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address predicted the corruption of science that we are now experiencing:
“The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Today the scientific-technological elite makes up crises in order to prime the federal money pump.
Those who lie and make up crises in order to improve their prospects have long been annoyed by independent thinkers on the Internet. Now the Internet monopolies have been recruited to enforce a deadening orthodoxy. Apparently, Google, Apple, Twitter, and others are dominated by shallow thinkers who assume because they are rich, they must be smart.
They had to back off on the orthodoxy that the COVID virus did not originate in a Chinese lab because the opposite became obvious. They still enforce the orthodoxy that the 2020 election was fair, without extensive vote cheating. Anyone suggesting that the crime problem of black youth is not caused by police is denounced as a racist and banned on the Internet.
We live in an age where an elite subscribing to a woke religion mobilizes their power and money to crush anyone contradicting their lies. The Biden administration has thrown open the borders in order to welcome millions of illegal immigrants. The objective is to provide new left-leaning voters and to crush the American working class with low-wage competition.
It is the working class that votes Republican and that is the main obstacle to the complete domination of the country by the neo-Marxist woke elite. The working class, lacking a college “education,” is the last bastion of clear thinking. The establishment media and federal law enforcement agencies have come to resemble their Chinese counterparts. Criminal behavior by their friends is ignored while their enemies are ruthlessly persecuted on trumped-up charges. Compare the repeated fake claims of criminality against President Trump and his family to the pass given to Biden and his son, long on the communist payroll. Large American institutions, for example, Apple or the National Basketball Association, are beholden to the Chinese government.
Employees of these organizations, and many others, are effectively prohibited from criticizing China. Trump’s election was a reaction against the woke elite and his subsequent “defeat” was engineered by the elite using suppression of news favorable to the Republicans and by extensive outright vote cheating. They are using every device from the incitement of race hatred to the welcoming of criminality in order to hold on to power. There is plenty of resistance in the red states and in the nonestablishment media. The woke elite are proceeding cautiously in order not to catalyze the resistance. Their objective is to neutralize the opposition through the use of fear and by marginalizing, if not imprisoning, the leaders of the resistance.
There are many private organizations that are fighting against the looming tyranny. They need and deserve our support. Some of my favorites are the American Thinker, Turning Point, Prager U, the National Association of Scholars, the CO2 Coalition, and the Heritage Foundation. Contributions to these organizations and many others are critical to the survival of our free society.
The libz have been very successful at corrupting science with money, to advance the lib agenda. It certainly doesn't advance science, except if you define junk science as science. And, it certainly doesn't advance a...
Figure b1. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, absorb heat energy and emit it in all directions (including downwards), keeping Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere warm. Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere enhances the effect, making Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere even warmer. Image based on a figure from US EPA. ( larger version)
Greenhouse gases affect Earth’s energy balance and climate
The Sun serves as the primary energy source for Earth’s climate. Some of the incoming sunlight is reflected directly back into space, especially by bright surfaces such as ice and clouds, and the rest is absorbed by the surface and the atmosphere. Much of this absorbed solar energy is re-emitted as heat (longwave or infrared radiation). The atmosphere in turn absorbs and re-radiates heat, some of which escapes to space. Any disturbance to this balance of incoming and outgoing energy will affect the climate. For example, small changes in the output of energy from the Sun will affect this balance directly.
If all heat energy emitted from the surface passed through the atmosphere directly into space, Earth’s average surface temperature would be tens of degrees colder than today. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, act to make the surface much warmer than this because they absorb and emit heat energy in all directions (including downwards), keeping Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere warm [Figure B1]. Without this greenhouse effect, life as we know it could not have evolved on our planet. Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere makes it even more effective at preventing heat from escaping into space. When the energy leaving is less than the energy entering, Earth warms until a new balance is established.
Greenhouse gases emitted by human activities alter Earth’s energy balance and thus its climate. Humans also affect climate by changing the nature of the land surfaces (for example by clearing forests for farming) and through the emission of pollutants that affect the amount and type of particles in the atmosphere.
Scientists have determined that, when all human and natural factors are considered, Earth’s climate balance has been altered towards warming, with the biggest contributor being increases in CO2.
Figure b2. Measurements of atmospheric CO2 since 1958 from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii (black) and from the South Pole (red) show a steady annual increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The measurements are made at remote places like these because they are not greatly influenced by local processes, so therefore they are representative of the background atmosphere. The small up-and-down saw-tooth pattern reflects seasonal changes in the release and uptake of CO2 by plants.Source: Scripps CO2 Program (larger version)
Human activities have added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere
The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased significantly since the Industrial Revolution began. In the case of carbon dioxide, the average concentration measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has risen from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959 (the first full year of data available) to more than 411 ppm in 2019 [Figure B2]. The same rates of increase have since been recorded at numerous other stations worldwide. Since preindustrial times, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased by over 40%, methane has increased by more than 150%, and nitrous oxide has increased by roughly 20%. More than half of the increase in CO2 has occurred since 1970. Increases in all three gases contribute to warming of Earth, with the increase in CO2 playing the largest role. See page B3 to learn about the sources of human emitted greenhouse gases. Learn about the sources of human emitted greenhouse gases.
Figure b3. CO2 variations during the past 1,000 years, obtained from analysis of air trapped in an ice core extracted from Antarctica (red squares), show a sharp rise in atmospheric CO2 starting in the late 19th century. Modern atmospheric measurements from Mauna Loa are superimposed in gray. Source: figure by Eric Wolff, data from Etheridge et al., 1996; MacFarling Meure et al., 2006; Scripps CO2 Program. (larger version)
Scientists have examined greenhouse gases in the context of the past. Analysis of air trapped inside ice that has been accumulating over time in Antarctica shows that the CO2 concentration began to increase significantly in the 19th century [Figure B3], after staying in the range of 260 to 280 ppm for the previous 10,000 years. Ice core records extending back 800,000 years show that during that time, CO2 concentrations remained within the range of 170 to 300 ppm throughout many “ice age” cycles - learn about the ice ages - and no concentration above 300 ppm is seen in ice core records until the past 200 years.
Measurements of the forms (isotopes) of carbon in the modern atmosphere show a clear fingerprint of the addition of “old” carbon (depleted in natural radioactive 14C) coming from the combustion of fossil fuels (as opposed to “newer” carbon coming from living systems). In addition, it is known that human activities (excluding land use changes) currently emit an estimated 10 billion tonnes of carbon each year, mostly by burning fossil fuels, which is more than enough to explain the observed increase in concentration. These and other lines of evidence point conclusively to the fact that the elevated CO2 concentration in our atmosphere is the result of human activities.
Figure b4. Earth’s global average surface temperature has risen, as shown in this plot of combined land and ocean measurements from 1850 to 2019 derived from three independent analyses of the available data sets. The top panel shows annual average values from the three analyses, and the bottom panel shows decadal average values, including the uncertainty range (grey bars) for the maroon (HadCRUT4) dataset. The temperature changes are relative to the global average surface temperature, averaged from 1961−1990. Source: Based on IPCC AR5, data from the HadCRUT4 dataset (black), NOAA Climate.gov; data from UK Met Office Hadley Centre (maroon), US National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies (red), and US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Centers for Environmental Information (orange). (larger version)
Climate records show a warming trend
Estimating global average surface air temperature increase requires careful analysis of millions of measurements from around the world, including from land stations, ships, and satellites. Despite the many complications of synthesising such data, multiple independent teams have concluded separately and unanimously that global average surface air temperature has risen by about 1 °C (1.8 °F) since 1900 [Figure B4]. Although the record shows several pauses and accelerations in the increasing trend, each of the last four decades has been warmer than any other decade in the instrumental record since 1850.
Going further back in time before accurate thermometers were widely available, temperatures can be reconstructed using climate-sensitive indicators “proxies” in materials such as tree rings, ice cores, and marine sediments. Comparisons of the thermometer record with these proxy measurements suggest that the time since the early 1980s has been the warmest 40-year period in at least eight centuries, and that global temperature is rising towards peak temperatures last seen 5,000 to 10,000 years ago in the warmest part of our current interglacial period.
Many other impacts associated with the warming trend have become evident in recent years. Arctic summer sea ice cover has shrunk dramatically. The heat content of the ocean has increased. Global average sea level has risen by approximately 16 cm (6 inches) since 1901, due both to the expansion of warmer ocean water and to the addition of melt waters from glaciers and ice sheets on land. Warming and precipitation changes are altering the geographical ranges of many plant and animal species and the timing of their life cycles. In addition to the effects on climate, some of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere is being taken up by the ocean, changing its chemical composition (causing ocean acidification).
Many complex processes shape our climate
Based just on the physics of the amount of energy that CO2 absorbs and emits, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration from pre-industrial levels (up to about 560 ppm) would by itself cause a global average temperature increase of about 1 °C (1.8 °F). In the overall climate system, however, things are more complex; warming leads to further effects (feedbacks) that either amplify or diminish the initial warming.
The most important feedbacks involve various forms of water. A warmer atmosphere generally contains more water vapour. Water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas, thus causing more warming; its short lifetime in the atmosphere keeps its increase largely in step with warming. Thus, water vapour is treated as an amplifier, and not a driver, of climate change. Higher temperatures in the polar regions melt sea ice and reduce seasonal snow cover, exposing a darker ocean and land surface that can absorb more heat, causing further warming. Another important but uncertain feedback concerns changes in clouds. Warming and increases in water vapour together may cause cloud cover to increase or decrease which can either amplify or dampen temperature change depending on the changes in the horizontal extent, altitude, and properties of clouds. The latest assessment of the science indicates that the overall net global effect of cloud changes is likely to be to amplify warming.
The ocean moderates climate change. The ocean is a huge heat reservoir, but it is difficult to heat its full depth because warm water tends to stay near the surface. The rate at which heat is transferred to the deep ocean is therefore slow; it varies from year to year and from decade to decade, and it helps to determine the pace of warming at the surface. Observations of the sub-surface ocean are limited prior to about 1970, but since then, warming of the upper 700 m (2,300 feet) is readily apparent, and deeper warming is also clearly observed since about 1990.
Surface temperatures and rainfall in most regions vary greatly from the global average because of geographical location, in particular latitude and continental position. Both the average values of temperature, rainfall, and their extremes (which generally have the largest impacts on natural systems and human infrastructure), are also strongly affected by local patterns of winds.
Estimating the effects of feedback processes, the pace of the warming, and regional climate change requires the use of mathematical models of the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice (the cryosphere) built upon established laws of physics and the latest understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes affecting climate, and run on powerful computers. Models vary in their projections of how much additional warming to expect (depending on the type of model and on assumptions used in simulating certain climate processes, particularly cloud formation and ocean mixing), but all such models agree that the overall net effect of feedbacks is to amplify warming.
Human activities are changing the climate
Rigorous analysis of all data and lines of evidence shows that most of the observed global warming over the past 50 years or so cannot be explained by natural causes and instead requires a significant role for the influence of human activities.
In order to discern the human influence on climate, scientists must consider many natural variations that affect temperature, precipitation, and other aspects of climate from local to global scale, on timescales from days to decades and longer. One natural variation is the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), an irregular alternation between warming and cooling (lasting about two to seven years) in the equatorial Pacific Ocean that causes significant year-to-year regional and global shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns. Volcanic eruptions also alter climate, in part increasing the amount of small (aerosol) particles in the stratosphere that reflect or absorb sunlight, leading to a short-term surface cooling lasting typically about two to three years. Over hundreds of thousands of years, slow, recurring variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which alter the distribution of solar energy received by Earth, have been enough to trigger the ice age cycles of the past 800,000 years.
Fingerprinting is a powerful way of studying the causes of climate change. Different influences on climate lead to different patterns seen in climate records. This becomes obvious when scientists probe beyond changes in the average temperature of the planet and look more closely at geographical and temporal patterns of climate change. For example, an increase in the Sun’s energy output will lead to a very different pattern of temperature change (across Earth’s surface and vertically in the atmosphere) compared to that induced by an increase in CO2 concentration. Observed atmospheric temperature changes show a fingerprint much closer to that of a long-term CO2 increase than to that of a fluctuating Sun alone. Scientists routinely test whether purely natural changes in the Sun, volcanic activity, or internal climate variability could plausibly explain the patterns of change they have observed in many different aspects of the climate system. These analyses have shown that the observed climate changes of the past several decades cannot be explained just by natural factors.
Figure b5. The amount and rate of warming expected for the 21st century depends on the total amount of greenhouse gases that humankind emits. Models project the temperature increase for a business-as-usual emissions scenario (in red) and aggressive emission reductions, falling close to zero 50 years from now (in blue). Black is the modelled estimate of past warming. Each solid line represents the average of different model runs using the same emissions scenario, and the shaded areas provide a measure of the spread (one standard deviation) between the temperature changes projected by the different models. All data are relative to a reference period (set to zero) of 1986-2005. Source: Based on IPCC AR5 (larger version)
How will climate change in the future?
Scientists have made major advances in the observations, theory, and modelling of Earth’s climate system, and these advances have enabled them to project future climate change with increasing confidence. Nevertheless, several major issues make it impossible to give precise estimates of how global or regional temperature trends will evolve decade by decade into the future. Firstly, we cannot predict how much CO2 human activities will emit, as this depends on factors such as how the global economy develops and how society’s production and consumption of energy changes in the coming decades. Secondly, with current understanding of the complexities of how climate feedbacks operate, there is a range of possible outcomes, even for a particular scenario of CO2 emissions. Finally, over timescales of a decade or so, natural variability can modulate the effects of an underlying trend in temperature. Taken together, all model projections indicate that Earth will continue to warm considerably more over the next few decades to centuries. If there were no technological or policy changes to reduce emission trends from their current trajectory, then further globally-averaged warming of 2.6 to 4.8 °C (4.7 to 8.6 °F) in addition to that which has already occurred would be expected during the 21st century [Figure B5]. Projecting what those ranges will mean for the climate experienced at any particular location is a challenging scientific problem, but estimates are continuing to improve as regional and local-scale models advance.
As an addendum to my 2020 series of posts on the CO2 global warming hypothesis (here>, rong>here</strong> and here), this post presents a further challenge to the hypothesis central to the belief that humans make a substantial contribution to climate change. The hypothesis is that observed global warming – currently about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the preindustrial era – has been caused primarily by human emissions of CO2and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. SUA
The new challenge to the CO2 hypothesis is set out in a recent research paper by French geologist Pascal Richet. Richet claims, by reexamining previous analyses of an Antarctic ice core, that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane had only a minor effect on the earth’s climate over the past 423,000 years, and that the assumed forcing of climate by CO2 is incompatible with ice-core data. The paper is controversial, however, and the publisher is subjecting it to a post-publication review. Science
The much-analyzed ice core in question was drilled at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica. Past atmospheric CO2levels and surface temperatures are calculated from ice cores by measuring the air composition and the oxygen 18O to 16O isotopic ratio, respectively, in air bubbles trapped by the ice. The Vostok record, which covers the four most recent ice ages or glaciations as well as the current interglacial (Holocene), is depicted in the figure below. The CO2 level is represented by the upper set of graphs (below the insolation data), which shows the substantial drop in CO2 during an ice age; the associated drop in temperature ΔT is represented by the lower set of graphs. Under
It is seen that transitions from glacial to interglacial conditions are relatively sharp, while the ice ages themselves are punctuated by smaller warming and cooling episodes. And, though it’s hardly visible in the figure, the ice-age CO2 level closely mimics changes in temperature, but the CO2concentration lags behind – with CO2 going up or down after the corresponding temperature shift occurs. The lag is about 600 to 800 years. Attack
Most paleoclimatologists believe that CO2 lagged temperature during the ice ages because it takes several hundred years for CO2 to come out of, or get into, the world’s oceans, which is where the bulk of the CO2 on our planet is stored. The oceans can hold much more CO2 (and heat) than the atmosphere. Warm water holds less CO2 than cooler water, so the oceans release CO2 when the temperature rises, but take it in when the earth cools.
Richet noticed that the temperature peaks in the Vostok record are much narrower than the corresponding CO2 peaks. The full widths at half maximum, marked by thick horizontal bars in the figure above, range from about 7,000 to 16,000 years for the initial temperature peak in cycles II, III and IV, but from 14,000 to 23,000 years for the initial CO2 peak; cycle V can’t be analyzed because its start is missing from the data. All other peaks are also narrower for temperature than for CO2.
The author argues that CO2 can’t drive temperature since an effect can’t last for a shorter period of time than its cause. The fact that the peaks are systematically wider for CO2 than for temperature implies that the CO2 level responds to temperature changes, not the other way round. And for most of cycles II, III and IV, CO2 increases correspond to temperature decreases and vice versa.
Richet’s conclusion, if correct, would deal a deathblow to the CO2 global warming hypothesis. The reason has to do with the behavior of the temperature and CO2 level at the commencement and termination of ice ages.
Ice ages are believed to have ended (and begun) because of changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun. After tens of thousands of years of bitter cold, the temperature suddenly took an upward turn. But according to the CO2 hypothesis, the melting of ice sheets and glaciers caused by the slight initial warming could not have continued, unless this temperature rise was amplified by positive feedbacks. These include CO2feedback, triggered by a surge in atmospheric CO2 as it escaped from the oceans.
The problem with this explanation is that it requires a similar chain of events, based on CO2 and other feedbacks, to have enhanced global cooling as the temperature fell at the beginning of an ice age. But, says Richet, “From the dual way in which feedback would work, temperature decreases and increases should be similar for the same concentrations of greenhouse gases, regardless of the residence times of these gases in the atmosphere.” The fact that temperature decreases don’t depend in any noticeable way on CO2 concentration in the figure above demonstrates that the synchronicity required by the feedback mechanism is absent.
All a scam the libz will never admit to, because to do so would necessitate a...
Author:obumazombie 6/23/2021 6:19:11 PM
Reply to: 2693894
Occurred at East Anglia college.
Your motto, if the data doesn't fit the model, change the data.
Its a colossal scam, lib.
You want to use junk science as a basis to export taxpayer money to leftist causes overseas, and for reparations (aka rape a nations) and the funding of other scams that haven't been as successful as your great glow bull warming swindle.
Give you libz an inch, you will empty the treasury.
Or, if the treasury is empty, like it is now mostly because of libz, just go further into debt.
Great thinking, lib, that kind of thinking is the basis for every...
Author:TheCrow 6/24/2021 11:42:02 AM
Reply to: 2693913
"Occurred at East Anglia college."
Why would I support an example of data manipulation? There's no requirement, the evidence is overwhelming. The only questions are:
Is it a natural cycle?
Or is it man-made? If so, then humanity should act to limit the damage, reverse it if possible.
Fossil fuel energy is being replaced by more efficient and often more convenient energy. Why not put America in the lead developing and applying those technologies in the market place? China may be one of the biggest national polluters but they are also radidly developing their technology, manufacturing and marketing- they will 'get there first' if America doesn't push to beat them.
"The evidence of what?" How many times do I have to post links that provide+2/-0
Author:TheCrow 6/25/2021 1:10:05 PM
Reply to: 2694010
How many times do I have to post links that provide data of the increase in temperature? I suspect your mind is made up, no amount of evidence will change it.
“You Asked” is a series where Earth Institute experts tackle reader questions on science and sustainability. Over the past few years, we’ve received a lot of questions about carbon dioxide — how it traps heat, how it can have such a big effect if it only makes up a tiny percentage of the atmosphere, and more. With the help of Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, we answer several of those questions here.
How does carbon dioxide trap heat?
You’ve probably already read that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases act like a blanket or a cap, trapping some of the heat that Earth might have otherwise radiated out into space. That’s the simple answer. But how exactly do certain molecules trap heat? The answer there requires diving into physics and chemistry.
Simplified diagram showing how Earth transforms sunlight into infrared energy. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane absorb the infrared energy, re-emitting some of it back toward Earth and some of it out into space. Credit: A loose necktie on Wikimedia Commons
When sunlight reaches Earth, the surface absorbs some of the light’s energy and reradiates it as infrared waves, which we feel as heat. (Hold your hand over a dark rock on a warm sunny day and you can feel this phenomenon for yourself.) These infrared waves travel up into the atmosphere and will escape back into space if unimpeded.
Oxygen and nitrogen don’t interfere with infrared waves in the atmosphere. That’s because molecules are picky about the range of wavelengths that they interact with, Smerdon explained. For example, oxygen and nitrogen absorb energy that has tightly packed wavelengths of around 200 nanometers or less, whereas infrared energy travels at wider and lazier wavelengths of 700 to 1,000,000 nanometers. Those ranges don’t overlap, so to oxygen and nitrogen, it’s as if the infrared waves don’t even exist; they let the waves (and heat) pass freely through the atmosphere.
A diagram showing the wavelengths of different types of energy. Energy from the Sun reaches Earth as mostly visible light. Earth reradiates that energy as infrared energy, which has a longer, slower wavelength. Whereas oxygen and nitrogen do not respond to infrared waves, greenhouse gases do. Credit: NASA
With CO2 and other greenhouse gases, it’s different. Carbon dioxide, for example, absorbs energy at a variety of wavelengths between 2,000 and 15,000 nanometers — a range that overlaps with that of infrared energy. As CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions. About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect.’
By measuring the wavelengths of infrared radiation that reaches the surface, scientists know that carbon dioxide, ozone, and methane are significantly contributing to rising global temperatures. Credit: Evans 2006 via Skeptical Science
Smerdon says that the reason why some molecules absorb infrared waves and some don’t “depends on their geometry and their composition.” He explained that oxygen and nitrogen molecules are simple — they’re each made up of only two atoms of the same element — which narrows their movements and the variety of wavelengths they can interact with. But greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane are made up of three or more atoms, which gives them a larger variety of ways to stretch and bend and twist. That means they can absorb a wider range of wavelengths — including infrared waves.
How can I see for myself that CO2 absorbs heat?
As an experiment that can be done in the home or the classroom, Smerdon recommends filling one soda bottle with CO2 (perhaps from a soda machine) and filling a second bottle with ambient air. “If you expose them both to a heat lamp, the CO2 bottle will warm up much more than the bottle with just ambient air,” he says. He recommends checking the bottle temperatures with a no-touch infrared thermometer. You’ll also want to make sure that you use the same style of bottle for each, and that both bottles receive the same amount of light from the lamp. Here’s a video of a similar experiment:
A more logistically challenging experiment that Smerdon recommends involves putting an infrared camera and a candle at opposite ends of a closed tube. When the tube is filled with ambient air, the camera picks up the infrared heat from the candle clearly. But once the tube is filled with carbon dioxide, the infrared image of the flame disappears, because the CO2 in the tube absorbs and scatters the heat from the candle in all directions, and therefore blurs out the image of the candle. There are several videos of the experiment online, including this one:
Why does carbon dioxide let heat in, but not out?
Energy enters our atmosphere as visible light, whereas it tries to leave as infrared energy. In other words, “energy coming into our planet from the Sun arrives as one currency, and it leaves in another,” said Smerdon.
CO2 molecules don’t really interact with sunlight’s wavelengths. Only after the Earth absorbs sunlight and reemits the energy as infrared waves can the CO2 and other greenhouse gases absorb the energy.
How can CO2 trap so much heat if it only makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere? Aren’t the molecules spaced too far apart?
Before humans began burning fossil fuels, naturally occurring greenhouse gases helped to make Earth’s climate habitable. Without them, the planet’s average temperature would be below freezing. So we know that even very low, natural levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can make a huge difference in Earth’s climate.
Today, CO2 levels are higher than they have been in at least 3 million years. And although they still account for only 0.04% of the atmosphere, that still adds up to billions upon billions of tons of heat-trapping gas. For example, in 2019 alone, humans dumped 36.44 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, where it will linger for hundreds of years. So there are plenty of CO2 molecules to provide a heat-trapping blanket across the entire atmosphere.
In addition, “trace amounts of a substance can have a large impact on a system,” explains Smerdon. Borrowing an analogy from Penn State meteorology professor David Titley, Smerdon said that “If someone my size drinks two beers, my blood alcohol content will be about 0.04 percent. That is right when the human body starts to feel the effects of alcohol.” Commercial drivers with a blood alcohol content of 0.04% can be convicted for driving under the influence.
“Similarly, it doesn’t take that much cyanide to poison a person,” adds Smerdon. “It has to do with how that specific substance interacts with the larger system and what it does to influence that system.”
In the case of greenhouse gases, the planet’s temperature is a balance between how much energy comes in versus how much energy goes out. Ultimately, any increase in the amount of heat-trapping means that the Earth’s surface gets hotter. (For a more advanced discussion of the thermodynamics involved, check out this NASA page.)
If there’s more water than CO2 in the atmosphere, how do we know that water isn’t to blame for climate change?
Water is indeed a greenhouse gas. It absorbs and re-emits infrared radiation, and thus makes the planet warmer. However, Smerdon says the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is a consequence of warming rather than a driving force, because warmer air holds more water.
“We know this on a seasonal level,” he explains. “It’s generally drier in the winter when our local atmosphere is colder, and it’s more humid in the summer when it’s warmer.”
As carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases heat up the planet, more water evaporates into the atmosphere, which in turn raises the temperature further. However, a hypothetical villain would not be able to exacerbate climate change by trying to pump more water vapor into the atmosphere, says Smerdon. “It would all rain out because temperature determines how much moisture can actually be held by the atmosphere.”
Similarly, it makes no sense to try to remove water vapor from the atmosphere, because natural, temperature-driven evaporation from plants and bodies of water would immediately replace it. To reduce water vapor in the atmosphere, we must lower global temperatures by reducing other greenhouse gases.
If Venus has an atmosphere that’s 95% CO2, shouldn’t it be a lot hotter than Earth?
Thick clouds of sulfuric acid surround Venus and prevent 75% of sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface. Without these clouds, Venus would be even hotter than it already is. Credit: NASA
The concentration of CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere is about 2,400 times higher than that of Earth. Yet the average temperature of Venus is only about 15 times higher. What gives?
Interestingly enough, part of the answer has to do with water vapor. According to Smerdon, scientists think that long ago, Venus experienced a runaway greenhouse effect that boiled away almost all of the planet’s water — and water vapor, remember, is also a heat-trapping gas.
“It doesn’t have water vapor in its atmosphere, which is an important factor,” says Smerdon. “And then the other important factor is Venus has all these crazy sulfuric acid clouds.”
High up in Venus’ atmosphere, he explained, clouds of sulfuric acid block about 75% of incoming sunlight. That means the vast majority of sunlight never gets a chance to reach the planet’s surface, return to the atmosphere as infrared energy, and get trapped by all that CO2 in the atmosphere.
Won’t the plants, ocean, and soil just absorb all the excess CO2?
Eventually … in several thousand years or so.
Plants, the oceans, and soil are natural carbon sinks — they remove some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground, underwater, or in roots and tree trunks. Without human activity, the vast amounts of carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas deposits would have remained stored underground and mostly separate from the rest of the carbon cycle. But by burning these fossil fuels, humans are adding a lot more carbon into the atmosphere and ocean, and the carbon sinks don’t work fast enough to clean up our mess.
It’s like watering your garden with a firehose. Even though plants absorb water, they can only do so at a set rate, and if you keep running the firehose, your yard is going to flood. Currently our atmosphere and ocean are flooded with CO2, and we can see that the carbon sinks can’t keep up because the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans are rising quickly.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (raspberry line) has increased along with human emissions (blue line) since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750. Credit: NOAA Climate.gov
Unfortunately, we don’t have thousands of years to wait for nature to absorb the flood of CO2. By then, billions of people would have suffered and died from the impacts of climate change; there would be mass extinctions, and our beautiful planet would become unrecognizable. We can avoid much of that damage and suffering through a combination of decarbonizing our energy supply, pulling CO2 out the atmosphere, and developing more sustainable ways of thriving.
Editor’s note (March 17, 2021): This post was updated with additional links to Youtube videos with experiments showing the effects of carbon dioxide. Enjoy!
This is not the column I planned to publish this month. I wrote another one several weeks ago in answer to a reader’s question about tourism in Europe. As you might imagine, that column was swiftly rendered out of date, becoming nothing more than a time capsule of life before COVID-19 became a global pandemic.
Like many of you, I have spent recent weeks feeling disoriented and worried. I am also full of gratitude for the health workers and scientists who are fighting this disease on our behalf. Let’s help them by – to the extent possible – following the recommendations of trusted experts such as the World Health Organization.
I am wishing good health to each one of you.
Sara
Dear Sara,
I have a question about a chart and seek an expert’s opinion:
What is the cause of the more-or-less regular rising and falling pattern from the start until quite recently?
– A.W.
Great question. This chart shows the levels of the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide gradually rising and falling during the past 800,000 years, until recent decades when carbon dioxide levels shot up far higher than in the past.
Scientists are still studying the reasons for that natural rise and fall. But one well-understood factor is small changes to Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis. These tiny wobbles, caused by the gravitational tugs of the sun, moon, Saturn, and Jupiter, can slightly alter the amount of sunlight reaching our planet. A small alteration in the amount of energy reaching Earth’s surface can initiate changes to the climate that unfold over thousands of years.
For example, a small amount of additional sunlight reaching the Earth can cause a slight warming of the oceans. That in turn causes the oceans to release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, much like a warm soda will bubble faster than a cold one. Because carbon dioxide traps heat, releasing it to the atmosphere causes the oceans to warm even more, which spurs the oceans to release additional carbon dioxide, and so on in a self-reinforcing cycle.
The same process can also work in reverse. At the beginning of past ice ages, the oceans cooled slightly, increasing their potential to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which led to more cooling. In addition, a 2019 study in the research journal Science Advances found evidence that as glaciers scraped the land, iron dust blown from the soil may have “fertilized” the ocean, boosting the growth of microscopic plants called phytoplankton, which then absorbed additional carbon dioxide.
The present-day sharp rise in carbon dioxide, of course, has a different cause: human beings, who are releasing the gas to the atmosphere when we burn coal, oil, and natural gas.
Has anyone considered changes in the planet or universe as contributing to our climate change? Has the Earth’s orbit changed, i.e., is it closer or farther away from the sun?
– P.T.
The short answer is that yes, scientists have considered such changes – and ruled them out as the causes of the warming measured in the past 70 years or so.
If you’re looking for reading material to pass the time during this era of COVID-19-induced social distancing, you’ll find a fascinating history of these efforts in “The Discovery of Global Warming,” by science historian Spencer Weart. Weart’s book, also available in downloadable PDFs, tells the incredible story of the scientists who, as early as the 1800s, were working to explain the causes of Earth’s periodic ice ages. Their research led to a better understanding of our planet’s climate system and the eventual discovery that people were warming the climate.
As I wrote in the answer to the previous question, tiny changes in Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis can nudge our planet into and out of ice ages. But those small changes are not responsible for present-day warming. As Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explains in a video on this subject, “If we look at Earth’s history, we see that warming after the last ice age peaked about 6,000-8,000 years ago. Since then, the Earth’s temperature has been very slowly, gradually decreasing, on a long slide into the next ice age.” Sometime in the next few thousand years, Hayhoe explains, the Earth would have entered a new ice age – except that it was interrupted by the recent abrupt warming.
What’s more, Hayhoe explains, all of the other possible natural causes of global warming, such as volcanoes and the sun, have been examined and ruled out. Only one explanation remains: By adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, human beings are warming the planet.
– Sara
Wondering how climate change could affect you or your loved ones? Send your questions to sara@yaleclimateconnections.org. Questions may be edited for length and clarity.
Sara Peach is the Senior Editor of Yale Climate Connections. She is an environmental journalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, Environmental Health News, Grist, and...
Author Robert McLachlan Professor in Applied Mathematics, Massey University
Disclosure statement
Robert McLachlan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.
Are we headed for a period with lower Solar activity, i.e. sunspots? How long will it last? What happens to our world when global warming and the end of this period converge?
When climate change comes up in conversation, the question of a possible link with the Sun is often raised.
The Sun is a highly active and complicated body. Its behaviour does change over time and this can affect our climate. But these impacts are much smaller than those caused by our burning of fossil fuels and, crucially, they do not build up over time.
The main change in the Sun is an 11-year Solar cycle of high and low activity, which initially revealed itself in a count of sunspots.
One decade of solar activity in one hour.
Sunspots have been observed continuously since 1609, although their cyclical variation was not noticed until much later. At the peak of the cycle, about 0.1% more Solar energy reaches the Earth, which can increase global average temperatures by 0.05-0.1℃.
It’s smaller than other known sources of temperature variation, such as volcanoes (for example, the large eruption of Mt Pinatubo, in the Philippines in 1991, cooled Earth by up to 0.4℃ for several years) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which causes variations of up to 0.4℃;.
And it’s small compared to human-induced global warming, which has been accumulating at 0.2℃ per decade since 1980.
Although each 11-year Solar cycle is different, and the processes underlying them are not fully understood, overall the cycle has been stable for hundreds of millions of years.
A little ice age
A famous period of low Solar activity, known as the Maunder Minimum, ran from 1645 to 1715. It happened at a similar time as the Little Ice Age in Europe.
But the fall in Solar activity was too small to account for the temperature drop, which has since been attributed to volcanic eruptions.
Solar activity picked up during the 20th century, reaching a peak in the cycle that ran from 1954 to 1964, before falling away to a very weak cycle in 2009-19.
Bear in mind, though, that the climatic difference between a strong and a weak cycle is small.
Forecasting the Solar cycle
Because changes in Solar activity are important to spacecraft and to radio communications, there is a Solar Cycle Prediction Panel who meet to pool the available evidence.
Experts there are currently predicting the next cycle, which will run to 2030, will be similar to the last one. Beyond that, they’re not saying.
If activity picks up again, and its peak happened to coincide with a strong El Niño, we could see a boost in temperatures of 0.3℃ for a year or two. That would be similar to what happened during the El Niño of 2016, which featured record air and sea temperatures, wildfires, rainfall events and bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
The extreme weather events of that year provided a glimpse into the future. They gave examples of what even average years will look like after another decade of steadily worsening global warming.
A journey to the Sun
Solar physics is an active area of research. Apart from its importance to us, the Sun is a playground for the high-energy physics of plasmas governed by powerful magnetic, nuclear and fluid-dynamical forces.
The Solar cycle is driven by a dynamo coupling kinetic, magnetic and electrical energy.
That’s pretty hard to study in the lab, so research proceeds by a combination of observation, mathematical analysis and computer simulation.
Two spacecraft are currently directly observing the Sun: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (which will eventually approach to just 5% of the Earth-Sun distance), and ESA’s Solar Orbiter, which is en route to observe the Sun’s poles.
Hopefully one day we will have a better picture of the processes involved in sunspots and the Solar cycle.
Exploring the 11-year Solar cycle.
How The Conversation is different
Every article you read here is written by university scholars and researchers with deep expertise in their subjects, sharing their knowledge in their own words. We don’t oversimplify complicated issues, but we do explain and clarify. We believe bringing the voices of experts into the public discourse is good for democracy.
Comments
Share: Share us on facebookTweet about us!Share us on LinkedIn