Something i received this morning in an email.. Not saying it is true or not, but food for thought.
I know it is "brain numbing "stuff by a Physic's scientist but at least it
gives perspective to the whole premise of "carbon emissions" and the
preposterous assumption we need a TAX to solve the perceived problem.
The first thing to note is that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and
plays a role in regulating planetary temperature over geological time. The
second thing to note is that the gas is a very ineffective greenhouse gas;
it is present in trace quantities and is overwhelmed by water vapour. Even
the IPCC, a body set up with the express mission of proving the carbon
dioxide hypothesis, acknowledges that the gas cannot cause global warming
without a feedback loop whereby increased heat increases water evaporation,
which in turn increases temperature.
As it is hottest at the equator, the early proponents of AGW said that the
proof of their assertions would be shown by the existence of a 'hot spot' in
the troposphere at the equator. Imagine a doughnut of hot and moist air
stretching right around the earth.
Two decades of diligent searching have failed to find the proof. The
explanation is pretty simple: there is no extra heat (and in any case it
just rains once enough moisture gets into the air).
Carbon dioxide is selective about which wavelengths of infra-red radiation
(which has been re-radiated from earth) it absorbs. It absorbs only a narrow
segment (in two parts, I seem to recall), with most of the IR energy
absorbed by water vapour. Further, it transfers the energy largely by
kinetic means: it has to knock up against another molecule, of nitrogen or
oxygen, to transfer thermal energy (this is probably not 100% true, there is
likely to be a very small radiative component but transfer is almost
entirely kinetic).
You should now do a thought experiment: visualise the physical issues
associated with kinetic energy transfer when the ratio is 4:10,000. There is
no escaping the data here. Once a molecule of the rare gas has been
energised, it has to hit something to transfer the energy, after which it
can absorb some more. Think of four black billiard balls in a jiggling box
with 9996 red ones. How would they go, transferring heat kinetically?
Do another thought experiment: visualise a narrow and vertical tube of air,
at an instant which lines up a single molecule at a time from the surface
all the way to space, a sort of vertical string of beads. There is a large
number of such tubes, and visualise a 'bolt' of re-radiated IR heading
upwards in each one. If it is lucky enough to strike a molecule of carbon
dioxide, some of it will be absorbed, but only in the right wavelength
portion. If it is lucky enough to strike another one, there will be very
little absorption because the energy which makes carbon dioxide resonate has
already been used up in our infinitesimally small tube. Visualise the whole
atmosphere made up of these tubes (you can ignore spherical trigonometry
which actually demands elongated tetrahedrons, as that does not affect the
validity of the thought experiment), and on average every 2500 molecules in
the bead you could encounter carbon dioxide. You (the 'bolt') are much more
likely to encounter water, or indeed just nitrogen or oxygen and therefore
escape to space.
This is the reason why increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide has a
diminishing return. It is just physics, it works that way, no escape - the
absorptive efficiency of carbon dioxide attenuates logarithmically in
proportion to its concentration. This is the reason why the water vapour
feedback mechanism had to be evoked to make climate computer modelling
produce the desired answers, and its absence demolishes the carbon dioxide
hypothesis.
How the world got itself into AGW hysterics, despite the physics, is another
subject entirely. I would be happy to explain that.
