Thursday, April 12, 2007

After You've Been Told to Stop Breathing, the Facts...

As usual, Random 10 provides the actualities:

"Carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has exactly one important spectral line in the infrared part of the spectrum. This line is clearly saturated. If you increase the number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere, not much will happen. The amount of infrared radiation, that is, heat, that will be absorbed changes only by a minimal and insignificant amount."

"Since CO2 absorbs all radiation in this band it absorbs and reradiates 8.4% of the total energy within 200 meters of the surface. Adding more CO2 does not increase this effect because it is at its maximum. Using the absorptivity function (Beer's Law) for a gas, CO2 would only begin to lose this impact if CO2 concentration dropped below a few parts per million. It has been above 200 ppm for over a million years according to geophysicists. Thus I claim the heat retention as a percentage of Earth's total radiation by CO2 is constant". (Quoting Lars Kamél, of the Department of Astronomy and Space Physics at the University of Uppsala)

Thank God he provided the simplification:

When you do the math the numbers show there is very little carbon dioxide in the air in the first place, but even increasing CO2 to say 400 parts per million will have no effect because the wavelength of infrared that can be absorbed will have already been absorbed. In other words, you can warm things up by adding more energy but only the sun can do that. Once you mop up the energy the sun spills on the planet each day, having extra paper towels around doesn’t do anything.

This won't stop EPA from regulating CO2, of course, because it's a damn good jobs-program for EPA and it's not likely to prevent AlGore and George Soros from using their private G-5s, anyway.

1 comment:

Headless Blogger said...

Thanks for linking to this discussion. Fascinating information.