CO2 is invisible, but if you could see it, the one part per ten thousand increase in CO2 over the past century is equivalent to packing an extra two people into Madison Square Garden. You can’t see the two people in this picture, because one is at the hot dog stand and the other is in the bathroom.
The other greenhouse gas – H2O – is represented by about 200 to 800 people, and varies tremendously from day to day. Imagine the climate chaos this must be causing inside the tiny intellects of climate alarmists.
Well-when those 2 new guys out of 20.000 are Hitler(non-trinary version)
than you’ll get global warming madison square root to infinity and beyond.
Actually, if truly representing CO2, the two extra people would be working the food concessions helping to feed the enormous crowd.
correct
I don’t know if I’d start at the concession stands but if the duo is as evil as the two murderous molecules I would be looking for someone like these fellows:
Those guys are amateurs, compared to the Communist Assimilation Genocidal Warrior crowd.
…and I don’t think anybody like them is in the Service being conducted.
One would think so but history teaches that somebody like them was almost certainly present:
The Bible doesn’t teach Communism. “Thou shall not steal” upholds and strengthens the concept of private property. “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s stuff” does away with class envy. “Do not murder” is in direct opposition to Communism as it is practiced
… since Communism can’t be launched and upheld without mass murder.
It’s a tragedy that Manning Johnson’s life was cut short while the Communist agents he described lived to undermine the foundations of the country.
The other greenhouse gas – H2O … varies tremendously from day to day.
Plus everything else that affects the climate.
“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling
carbon dioxide”
Reid Bryson
“You can go outside or not go outside and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide” – Me
If you’re new to the forum, look outside, and everything you see was built from the thin wisp of CO2 floating around in the air. Trees, plants, the lumber in your house, and the flour & sugar in that stack of waffles you’re eating came from CO2 in the atmosphere by virtue of photosynthesis.
All the wondrous life in the oceans – plants and animals – depend on an ample supply of CO2 in the oceans. And calcifiers CAN USE BICARBONATE to construct their little houses; they don’t necessarily depend on CARBONATE only! This is an extremely important point…
And coral reefs dissolve because CO2 pours out of the ocean floor naturally; it isn’t coming from your Ford Excursion, so stop feeling guilty
Ah, visualization – it’s good you brought this up.
I recall, some many years ago when the CO2 scam was still young and fresh, spending day after day attempting to visualize 400 ppm particles of anything – but something as minute as a CO2 molecule is tough to see in your mind’s eye. And these molecules are small: https://www.reference.com/science/atomic-radius-co2-molecular-geometry-8824619eb94b3feb#
Hmmm…400 ppm up from 280 ppm and this added margin (400-280=120) of CO2 does what?
Heats up the planet?
Melts the polar ice?
Raises sea-levels?
Renders Phoenix, Arizona uninhabitable?
Boils away the oceans transforming Earth to Venus?
Why that’s extraordinary. On the face of it, I find it utterly preposterous.
But returning to visualization, I’d recommend reducing the fraction 400/1,000,000 to help make things easier to see in the mind’s eye – I mean, expressing things in parts per million is good mostly because millionths are a nice rounded engineering unit and substances of which there is very little of; like highly reactive or poisonous substances are commonly expressed in parts per million or even parts per billion. But for my visualizing exercise of actually trying to see this stuff, let’s reduce the fraction by stages.
First let’s knock off two zeros: 400/1,000,000 = 4/10000. Now divide numerator and denominator by 4: 1/2,500.
And that’s the total CO2 fraction. That’s it. We’re obsessing over this tiny, tiny fraction. Actually it’s kind of hard to even visualize something so tiny.
And it is alleged that M@nnkind tiny, tiny contribution to an already tiny number is melting the Arctic. Really? To my mind, pretty-close-to-nothing + pretty-close-to-nothing = pretty-close-to-nothing. And the overall effect? Pretty-Close-to-Nothing.
gregole … at 6:59 pm
But there’s a new boogieman in town. Methane, according to the IPCC’s AR5 report — Appendix 8.A
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter08_FINAL.pdf
is 85 times more powerful at retaining heat than CO2.
Of course 85 times nearly nothing is still nearly nothing, but it really is a cool statistic.
First, CO2 cannot “retain heat” .. CO2 has very high emissivity, which means it emits the IR it receives, it does not absorb it. Methane, same story.
Except there is 1.7/400 parts of methane per CO2, so 85X is .3673 as much nonexistent heating as CO2!
Be careful in this logic as it’s not a good argument to rest on the the fact that 400 ppm is a tiny, tiny fraction.
The alarmists can counter that 400 ppm of carbon monoxide becomes life threatening after a few hours.
Straw Man fallacy.
This is why they always lose the debate, they have no valid rebuttals.
carbon monoxide … ?
I don’t recall where this came into the conversation.
CO is just an example of something that at a “tiny” concentration that can have a significant detrimental effect.
Ah, “Visualizing Greenhouse Gases” this is not tough; this is simple… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YKUQn4fjfY&feature=youtu.be
That’s all one needs to understand the U.S. Senate. Peel back all the posturing and they are the dumbest people on the planet
Hahahaha! .. thanks Tom! … that is one of the funniest things I think I have ever seen.
Imagine, we are kept warm by a gassious blanket at the top of our atmosphere that is only 1/4 inch thick! … who knew?
OMG … the depth of stupidity is simply immeasurable …
I think what has gotten thicker is the AGW bulsh*t. I’m not a physicist, but I thought there is no CO2 layer ‘way up there at the edge of the atmosphere’ because that’s a physical impossibility; that it is a relatively heavy gas that sinks and stays close to the ground – even diving deep into cold waters.
Did you watch the video? … hahaha … funny stuff!
They tell us that CO2 is a “well mixed gas” throughout our atmosphere, however, actual measurement, including global satellite measurements, dispute that, unless someone can clarify the meaning of “well mixed”. Apparently “well mixed” doesn’t mean as “well” mixed as one might think.
“Did you watch the video?”
Of course. How would I be able to comment on Kerry’s ignorant BS without watching it?
When I was becoming disillusioned about the fake magic of CO2, I learned of the Lake Nyos CO2 event that suddenly killed 1,700 people surrounding the lake. There was a CO2 explosion out of the lake from an underground/under-lake vent. The heavy gas erupted from the lake and didn’t rise. It spread along the ground displacing the oxygen and asphyxiated nearby villagers and livestock .
If there’s a layer of CO2 floating at the edge of the atmosphere, that’s news to me. I reserve the right to be wrong.
I remember reading about that event, interesting. Yes, CO2 has a molecular weight of 44, whereas “air” has an average molecular weight of 29 (from memory), so CO2 is heavier.
We started measuring atmospheric CO2 in the 1800’s. It’s interesting to go back and read about it in textbooks (mainly chemistry) from the late 1800’s. The ground-level CO2 concentration varies *greatly* with time of day, temp, humidity, and so forth. Well mixed, certainly, but not homogenous
Great observation.
Can we take it one step farther?
With CO2 highly concentrated (100%?), in a blanket many yards thick, in the valley next to the lake, was radiation “trapped?”
This is a nearly perfect natural “experiment” that should provide excellent evidence to confirm the “Greenhouse Gas” theory.
CO2 “traps heat”, predicts the GHG theory, and raising the CO2 concentration from 3 to 4 parts per 10,000 is predicted to cause “runaway greenhouse effect.”
So, the theory was put to the test at Lake Nyos.
Wonder what the result was?
Did the valley roast under a massive heat wave?
At low levels in the atmosphere heat transfer, do to the far more rapid speed of the transfer, takes place via conduction and convection – GHG operates like any non GHG molecule.
Thanks, David.
A solid blanket of CO2 several meters thick filling a valley, would seem to be an ideal experimental medium to test the “heat trapping” capabilities of CO2 in the real world.
Similar to Bill Nye, and others’, “experiments” in the lab where they fill a bottle full of CO2 and shine a light on it, and the thermometer goes up.
Those seem to be not realistic, and not useful.
CO2 is claimed to be such a powerful “Greenhouse gas” that adding another 1 molecule per 10,000 floating freely in the atmosphere creates massive climactic changes and wreaks havoc in the earth’s climate and weather.
How can a 20 foot thick cloud of CO2 filling an entire valley NOT “trap heat?!”
Low level wind blows away the heat it traps? At nearly 100% concentration?
But 0.04% concentration of CO2, spread throughout a couple miles thickness of atmosphere is powerful enough to overcome winds and bake the earth?
Something does not make sense.
A solid blanket of CO2 several meters thick filling a valley, would seem to be an ideal experimental medium to test the “heat trapping” capabilities of CO2 in the real world.
But it wouldn’t last long enough to carry out the experiment. The gas overspill from the lake was flowing down the valley and as it did so mixed with the air above, even if it stayed trapped in the valley it would rapidly diffuse into the atmosphere above. In fact the overflow occurred about 9pm I believe, catching the locals in their beds. Many of them died but some passed out and recovered in the morning, by which time the concentration had dropped to safe levels. Since it occurred at night there’d be no chance of testing the greenhouse effect. Given the effects peak levels were probably above 15%.
Nice hair at least.
The one thing that we learned from Professor Kerry in this short video is the answer to a question that Climate Realists have been asking alarmunists for a very long time, which most of them won’t dare answer. The question is, “What is the ideal temperature for the planet?”
Professor Kerry answered this age-old question. He said the ideal temperature for the planet is 57º Fahrenheit. We should all be indebted to the omniscient Professor Kerry for clearing this up.
Yeah, and he’s stumbling-bumbling like an a-hole trying to pronounce it. Take away his expensive suits and posturing and he’s a complete dunce. These people in the Senate typically don’t drive, they do anything for themselves, and they actually couldn’t put air in a bike tire if their lives depended on it
Actually if you looked at the crowd in the IR it is the CO2 and H2O which would be visible and the rest of the gases that would be invisible. Since the earth is radiating in the IR that’s what counts.
Hey Phil, apparently you have no clue what IR bands CO2 re-emits .. I suggest you go study up on that. You are looking incredibly stupid with your comment. You may want to consider a retraction/clarification or others are going to simply discount you as an idiot. Perhaps justifiably so?
Phlop must have learnt his “climate science” from John Kerry ! :-)
Actually I do, at ~667cm-1 very close to the peak of the Earth’s spectral radiance. N2, O2 and Argon are completely transparent in those bands.
Here’s the spectrum in the IR looking up from the Earth’s surface,
notice it’s mostly due to CO2.
https://agwobserver.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/ellingson_1996_fig3.gif?w=300&zoom=2
They tell us that CO2 is a “well mixed gas” throughout our atmosphere, however, actual measurement, including global satellite measurements, dispute that, unless someone can clarify the meaning of “well mixed”. Apparently “well mixed” doesn’t mean as “well” mixed as one might think.
The satellite measurements (OCO-2) show the CO2 concentration to be between ~395ppm and ~405ppm, so the fluctuation is constant to within ±1%, that’s ‘well mixed’ although not quite ‘perfectly mixed’.
Dissolutioned reserves the right to be wrong about this statement:
If there’s a layer of CO2 floating at the edge of the atmosphere, that’s news to me.
because because that’s a physical impossibility; that it is a relatively heavy gas that sinks and stays close to the ground
Convection maintains the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere permanent gases approximately constant preventing the separation of them by their density throughout the homosphere, which extends up to ~100km (this is regarded as being ‘the edge of space’). So on our planet CO2 does not stay ‘close to the ground’ unless your definition of ‘close’ is less than 100km. Even N2 and O2 are segregated above that level, mostly consists of N, O, H2 and He. above there.
Phil., if you have a chance I would like your take on these two commonly-voiced criticisms:
1. CO2 is already saturated with respect to IR uptake; anything above 200 ppm in the atmosphere has greatly diminishing returns in terms of IR uptake; thus 400-500-600 ppm doesn’t absorb much more, incrementally
2. The CO2 re-emits the absorbed IR in all directions – not just downward towards the earth. Thus it has the effect of spreading or blurring low frequency energy throughout the atmosphere, but it ultimately leaves the top of the atmosphere as usual
Yes, CO2 also cools, or causes radiated energy to exit the atmosphere which, if that same LWIR radiation had encountered a non GHG molecule it would not have left the atmosphere.
1. CO2 is already saturated with respect to IR uptake; anything above 200 ppm in the atmosphere has greatly diminishing returns in terms of IR uptake; thus 400-500-600 ppm doesn’t absorb much more, incrementally
The 15 ?m band of CO2 isn’t saturated, only the central portion. The outer wings of the band are unsaturated and increased concentration broadens the width of the absorption lines leading to the logarithmic dependence of the absorption. At some point the effect transitions to a square root dependence.
2. The CO2 re-emits the absorbed IR in all directions – not just downward towards the earth. Thus it has the effect of spreading or blurring low frequency energy throughout the atmosphere, but it ultimately leaves the top of the atmosphere as usual
When CO2 emits it does so in all directions so half goes up and half goes down. As can be seen by satellite the IR leaving the atmosphere in the 15?m band is significantly reduced. In order to balance the incoming radiation outgoing light at other wavelengths must increase, in order to do that the surface temperature must increase.
It’s not quite that simple though because in the lower atmosphere the excited CO2 is more likely to exchange energy with its neighboring molecules than to emit.
CO2 does not re-emit below about 11km.
Below that , it thermalises to the rest of the atmosphere as part of the upward transfer for energy governed by the gravity-thermal gradient.
If more CO2 would cause more warming, why do all alarmist models depend upon positive feedback loops (not found on nature) to get their fantasy warming crisis?
The fact is we really do not know what drives our climate. But because alarmist models blaming CO2 for warming have all failed miserably, we can deduce that CO2 has little if any effect on our current climate changes.
Nice hand waving Phil.
If more CO2 would cause more warming, why do all alarmist models depend upon positive feedback loops (not found on nature) to get their fantasy warming crisis?
If positive feedbacks didn’t exist in nature you’d be dead, the cells of your body depend on them for their existence.
If negative feedbacks in nature didn’t exist, you’d be dead. The cells in your body depend on them for the existence.
But to have a feedback, you need a trigger.
There is zero empirical evidence of atmospheric CO2 causing warming anywhere, anytime, anyhow
Phil, the positive feedbacks that are included in alarmist models do not exist in nature.
Nice hand waving once again, and thanks for straw man, confirming my statement.
Phil, thanks for the hand waving, and straw man that illustrates that my comment is correct.
The positive feedbacks found in alarmist models do not exist in the real world. Alarmists include these fantasy feedbacks in their models because they know that additional CO2 at this time would not change our climate.
20 some years ago warmists answered my water vapor challenge question with “it rains”.
Yep. That’s their answer. It rains.
Meanwhile combustion continues to create more and more water. But here they argue ‘it’s so little additional water compared to what is already there’.
Hmm…. and yet this tiny amount of relatively weak CO2 is going to do something?
This tiny amount of CO2 is responsible for 21 percent of our atmosphere, via plant life, which would be non existent sans that tiny bit of atmosphere.
By the way, the evaporation condensation cycle of water vapor moves vast amounts of heat to the upper atmosphere where, upon releasing said heat via condensation, that heat is released at elevation where GHG molecules can zip some of that energy to space. Water vapor also, even in clear sky conditions,
is cause to preventing a great deal of SWR from reaching the GHL ( green house liquid) oceans.
A vastly more powerful store of energy then any atmospheric gas, with a energy residence time of up to 1000 years.
If global warming or whiskey don’t kill me prematurely I expect to live long enough to see a leftist campaign against CO2 to stop dangerous global cooling.