Link to post.
A writer named Jonas responded with the following. I found it so interesting that I am posting it here where it will have a better chance of being read than as a comment to a post.
I confess that I am not a scientist, and didn't even sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night. But I do have an engineering background, once had a business card that said so, and have a great deal of respect for the various laws that govern our universe and am a skeptic on anything that is defined as a "model" or any "formula" that uses numbers that are "estimated." Color me biased but I cleaned up too many messes caused by "estimates" and "models."
Please feel free to comment.
1. Storage heaters are a better analogy than 'greenhouse' to describe such gases (Heat-Absorption-Retention-Emission) thus 'HARE' is more apposite term.
2. Only 'molecular gases' such as CO2, CH4, H2O (water vapour)have HARE capability (non-molecular ones such as oxygen and nitrogen reflect heat).
3. HARE gases only absorb heat in/from the infrared wavelength. THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT AND SALIENT POINT.
4 Infrared heat/energy in the atmosphere comes from the Sun; the sum total of the energy emitted from the Earth's surface is miniscule compared to that beamed down by Sun; heat from the surface of the Earth will keep on rising until it is expended (oscillated away); the only contribution surface heat can make to the levels of HARE gases is if there is if there are any such gases given off by/in that heat.
5. HARE gases absorb [infrared] energy at differing efficiencies:carbon dioxide has a 8.5 per cent efficiency whereas water vapour's is 37.5 per cent (more than four times that of CO2).
6. Carbon dioxide presently exists in the atmosphere at a concentration of 387ppm; water vapour's is some 20,000ppm, more 50 times that of CO2.
7. The Greenhouse/HARE contribution of CO2 amount to less that half of one per cent of that of water vapour's; expressed as a 12" ruler, CO2 is about 1/16th of an inch whereas water vapour is 11 7/8".
8. Thus it won't make any noticeable difference to temperature of the atmosphere if the level of CO2 was halved, doubled or even trebled.
Confirmation of CO2's irrelevance in determining global temperatures is borne out by the fact than since 1998 - during which time the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by some 18ppm - temperatures have not only declined by 1 degree C but that since 2006 the rate of this cooling has been accelerating.
Anyone wanting more info/ confirmation/sources of data on the CO2 'marlarky' do please contact me.
September 20, 2008 2:05 PM
The post offerred information that claimed that water vapor is problem, not cardon dixiode.
ReplyDeleteYour comment is deleted due to being off subject.
Plus, if Jonas is correct, the aamount of carbon is meaningless.
Prove him wrong.
Got this off the NOAA website:
ReplyDeleteHuman activity has been increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (mostly carbon dioxide from combustion of coal, oil, and gas; plus a few other trace gases). There is no scientific debate on this point. Pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide (prior to the start of the Industrial Revolution) were about 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv), and current levels are greater than 380 ppmv and increasing at a rate of 1.9 ppm yr-1 since 2000. The global concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere today far exceeds the natural range over the last 650,000 years of 180 to 300 ppmv. According to the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES), by the end of the 21st century, we could expect to see carbon dioxide concentrations of anywhere from 490 to 1260 ppm (75-350% above the pre-industrial concentration).
and from the Wikipedia on Greenhouse gases:
Water vapor is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas and accounts for the largest percentage of the greenhouse effect, between 36% and 66%.[23] Water vapor concentrations fluctuate regionally, but human activity does not directly affect water vapor concentrations except at local scales (for example, near irrigated fields).
The Clausius-Clapeyron relation establishes that warmer air can hold more water vapor per unit volume. Current state-of-the-art climate models predict that increasing water vapor concentrations in warmer air will amplify the greenhouse effect created by anthropogenic greenhouse gases while maintaining nearly constant relative humidity. Thus water vapor acts as a positive feedback to the forcing provided by greenhouse gases such as CO2.[24]
From the reference at 24:
Using the climate change experiments generated for the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this study examines some aspects of the changes in the hydrological cycle that are robust across the models. These responses include the decrease in convective mass fluxes, the increase in horizontal moisture transport, the associated enhancement of the pattern of evaporation minus precipitation and its temporal variance, and the decrease in the horizontal sensible heat transport in the extratropics.
A surprising finding is that a robust decrease in extratropical sensible heat transport is found only in the equilibrium climate response, as estimated in slab ocean responses to the doubling
of CO2, and not in transient climate change scenarios. All of these robust responses are consequences of the increase in lower-tropospheric water vapor.