The obsession with climate change extends all the way from continually imagining worse weather when statistically there’s no sign of it to finding ingenious ways to explain data trends that aren’t happening. And now from Quanta magazine we hear that “Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect/ Carbon dioxide’s powerful heat-trapping effect has been traced to a quirk of its quantum structure. The finding may explain climate change better than any computer model.” Which wouldn’t be much of an achievement even if it were true. But in any case carbon dioxide doesn’t have a “powerful heat-trapping effect”; the whole warming scare depends on its minor heat-trapping effect increasing the amount of water vapour in the air which then does the heavy lifting. So you’re explaining a non-thing with a trendy thing.
The piece even claims that:
“In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere – the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ central conclusion: that every time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere doubles, Earth’s temperature will rise between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius.”
But if it were true, and climate models can’t “verify” anything except that they will do what their programmers tell them to, after all this time, effort and settled science, ECS is somewhere between 2 and 5 which isn’t exactly much to show for more than a century of study. If people thought my height was between three and eight feet but couldn’t be more specific you wouldn’t buy a tape measure from them, now would you?
In any case, as we showed repeatedly in our series on “#ECS in the real world” last fall and this spring, what data measurements verify is that ECS is almost certainly under two no matter what programmers told their computers to parrot back to them. If so, and even without any saturation effect that causes ECS to decline past a certain fairly low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, there’s actually no economic case for mitigation efforts of any sort because the impact is so small even if not on balance positive.
But these are mere facts. And we have a model here. As the Quanta piece also claims:
“this spring, a team led by Robin Wordsworth of Harvard University figured out why the CO2 molecule is so good at trapping heat in the first place. The researchers identified a strange quirk of the molecule’s quantum structure that explains why it’s such a powerful greenhouse gas – and why pumping more carbon into the sky drives climate change.”
But, again, CO2 is not “good at trapping heat”. Apart from the point made above, and the fact that gases such as methane are much better at it, there’s also the small matter that almost every part of the spectrum in which carbon dioxide absorbs heat, water vapour does too, and more effectively because it’s actually good at trapping heat, leaving almost nothing for the CO2 to feed on except in one very narrow band.
There is a serious monomania here. The piece ends:
“This January, NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory reported that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from its preindustrial level of 280 parts per million to a record high 419.3 parts per million as of 2023, triggering an estimated 1 degree Celsius of warming so far.”
If correct, it means absolutely all the warming since “preindustrial” times, a term generally meaning since 1850 when the industrial revolution had been underway in the United States for three decades and in Britain for more than seven, was due to CO2. None to methane, solar activity, changes in clouds, complex ocean currents or anything else. And how do they know? Why, because they made a computer model that blamed it all on CO2 because they told it to, and then said look, the computer verified our hypothesis.
What it comes down to is that somebody found a very clever computer model of how CO2 could have done something if it were in fact doing it which it’s not. The author quotes an Oxford physicist not involved in the work that:
“It’s a really nice paper. It’s a good answer to all those people who say that global warming is just something that comes out of impenetrable computer models.”
No it’s not. It’s another example of that phenomenon. The only place global warming can come out of is a warming planet, and the only way to confirm it is with data.
I am not a scientist, I am a retired sales manager...which of course means that I lived in a world in which I had to persuade real people to give me money for products which were manufactured in the real world by actual people unlike most "scientists" who put their finger into the hot wind blowing out of politicians mouths to determine what trendy nonsense is getting funded at the time, then write papers to be peer reviewed in trendy scientific journals so they can attach themselves to a tit on the giant sow that is government and thus maintain a cushy seat in the faculty lounge! However, even a plebe like me could see plainly that this CO2 worry was nonsensical for so many reasons that I will not waste my aging finger power preaching to the choir save one, plants grow in a CO2 rich environment, more CO2 = more and faster growing plants (I sold CO2 to marijuana growers amongst other gases and customers), these plants gobble up CO2 and emit oxygen, that fact alone told me that there was nothing to worry about, a major source of industrial CO2 is ethanol plants...which were born out of the childish notion that you could eliminate gasoline by turning our food into motor fuel, sadly ethanol plants and the growing of corn are energy intensive and distilling releases all of the carbon in the corn as CO2 and delivers moonshine, they then capture and purify the CO2 and sell it to people like me who transport it in diesel powered trucks to the sites where our customers use it in their processes, by using I mean they release the CO2 back into the atmosphere! Utter nonsense!
Most people don't realise that the primary greenhouse gas is water vapour, which accounts for about 90 percnt of the greenhouse effect. If you want a dramatic demonstration of this, spend 24 hours in a very dry desert. During the day it can be scorching hot but a few hours after sunset it can be below freezing. Contrast this with a warm humid cloudy climate and the temperature will hardly dip at all after sunset. And they tell us that CO2 has caused a warming of 1 deg C in 150 years. That's just a rounding error.
Even in secondary (high school) science education lessons, we collected data. Then reached conclusions based on that data. Did the same at undergraduate degree level, and again in postgraduate studies.....what changed?
well said
I asked in the cafeteria at work to about 10 people. How much CO2 there is in the atmosphere? Many did not have a clue, others ventured a guess 20% or 15%, The closest one, was a man that is aware of what is happening said 1.86%. I told my wife previously, it was 0.04%, and she did not want to believe me, I had to pull out of the shelf one my books of engineering tables and show it to her. Not even the internet would be enough for her. The alarmist don not 0.04% they usually say 400PPM (parts per million) which doesn't sound that little. Roughly is 78% Nitrogen 21% Oxygen 1% other gases in which CO2 is part of it.
I will try a little number experiment, and please tell me if my assumptions or math is wrong.
The average mass of the earth atmosphere is about 5 quadrillion (5×10e15) tonnes (from the internet)
The amount of CO2 in the above atmosphere is 0.04% X (5×10e15) tonnes//100= 2x10e12tonnes
World's emissions of carbon dioxide will exceed 40 billion tons in 2023, including nearly 37 billion tons from fossil fuels
So we emit 37 x 10e8 tonnes of CO2 in 2023
What percentage of CO2 is this number? 37x10e9/(2x 10e12) X 100= 1.85%
Conclusion: In the year 2023 we pump a record emission of 37 billion tons of CO2 this is only 1.85% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. I do think that trees and oceans can absorb this extra amount. without accumulating year after year.
Comments are welcome
Quantum Schmantum.So many gases and different factors affect the climate as highlighted above.What a coincidence too,that the Little Ice Age happens to end very roughly when the modern Industrial Age begins.So how do the alarmists account for the 1930's being measurably hotter than the present day?By changing(tampering)with the empirical data.Thankfully the previous data was archived,and they can't change that.To David's comments above,most people get their climate news from the woke media.If they did even a bit of research,many or most of them would come away with a different point of view regarding climate change.That's what I did many years ago.
"saturation effect that causes ECS to decline"
Not true
The guesses of the ECS of CO2 range from +0.7 degrees C. to about +5.5 degrees C. for CO2 x 2. The +0.7 is for CO2 alone with no feedbacks. Almost all scientists agree that CO2 lab spectroscopy measurement number is a fair proxy for CO2 in the atmosphere excluding all feedbacks. ... Then the wild guessing starts for feedbacks, ranging from zero to about 8x amplification of CO2 warming alone. No one is willing to say "We don't know". There are some inaccurate measurements of global average absolute humidity increasing with warming from 1980 to 2000 ... but not increasing in the period from 2000 to 2020. So we are stalled at "No one knows" what the water vapor positive feedback is. Not to mention several negative feedbacks that keep Earth from overheating.
"We don't know" is boring.
More fun to panic about the climate.
So well put Richard, it's a pity we can't get this info out to MSM and get it headlined, but as you have said, then it will boring and paper sales will plunge.
Can't have that can we!