File:Atmospheric Transmission.png – Global Warming Art
Water vapor is 30 times more abundant than CO2. It also overlaps most of the CO2 spectra – so in the presence of a significant amount of water vapor, CO2 does not generate a very large part of the greenhouse effect. CO2 is more important at the poles, because there is very little water vapor there.
Methane is a non-player for anything other than endless hysterical propaganda by alarmists.
Also note that at present concentration the CO2 bands are virtually saturated. In other words, increasing the concentration yields negligible additional “forcing”.
Such rationality has no place in ‘climate science’. Where’s the Ouija board?
Not only that, but water vapor employs phase change and convection to carry water aloft, delivering heat to the precise altitude necessary to maintain adequate cloud cover that will both reflect visible light, (increasing albedo), and shunting the excess heat to space via radiation through a much thinner (and much better IR transmitting) atmosphere. And of course, it dramatically amplifies this mechanism to whatever level needed to transmit the heat out of the system via numerous positive feedbacks (real ones), until it does what all +feedback systems do… runs out of energy. Then the system collapses since equilibrium has been achieved again.
Normal people call these clouds. Climatologists ignore these mechanisms because their grid scale is too coarse. And then wonder why their models fail.
I’m beginning to realize that not only does CO2 have negligible impact where there is water vapor (due to active cooling systems), it probably only has minor heating capability at the poles, since any excess heat there is going to be shunted via jet stream modulation to places where there IS water vapor, then shunted to space via the same mechanism. H20 cooling is almost infinitely scalable and simply won’t allow excessive accumulation of heat, it can’t happen in the face of phase change.
The entire +feedback notion that CO2 is a forcing and H2O is a feedback is the root cause of the failure of climatology. As if a photon knows which is which when it gets scattered. It is an absurd notion at its core, and totally unphysical.
Yes, that graph is very powerful. Plus, on the peer reviewed literature that covered long term changes in OLR measured by satellites, there is no change (of raw measured data) in the regions where CO2 absorbs. Only when the authors ran the raw data thru models (a trick) did they show a decrease. I wrote about it here. http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html
I’m surprised the Klimate kooks haven’t already shown up with gnashing of teeth over this.
Why, that little band of absorption may be narrow, but it’s a suckin up heat like a limp wristed Kenyan Commie at Man’s Country sucking up….. well, never mind.
But it’s Evil, dontcha see? And besides, we need to bulldoze all capitalist factories and live on the sunshine! I’m going to send a picture of a butterfly on my IPhone right now!
Jeff Id did a piece on WUWT comparing the heat content of the oceans with the atmosphere…. as I recall about 1000:1 And that’s for the ENTIRE content of the atmosphere, not its .0004 of CO2.
and 99.96% of the atmosphere is co² free.