CO2 has covalent bonds, but the bonds weren’t my point, rather the spatial arrangements of the components and the bonding determines, in this case, the relative degree of assymetry between two otherwise similar molecules.

The pattern is clear, if unintended: Take issue with some point incidental or extraneous to your adversary’s reasoning to monopolize his time and eventually enhance your self-image.

http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0006675

Example of Climate Science classic using Beer’s law with invalid ‘e = C(1-a)’ relation for Gas emissivity to absoptivity. This is valid for solids in Kirchoff’s equations, not gases.
Hottel has e=a=9*10^-4 at STP for CO2.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/162/ibmrd1602L.pdf

Note k = 0.7 is the value for absorptivity refered to in text but the formulae include another k without specification in the text.
While more sophisticated than most CS treatments the approach has a number of problems.
Note also that they are integrating across wavenumbers a successive altitudes without worrying about varying emissivities. They make an accomodation for difference in Pressure but, I gather, assume Temperature constant.

I was not attempting pseudo-scientific language, I was attempting to frame my question as clearly as I could, to get an answer.

What you can do with me is provide answers.
I post questions here because I get answers and any misinformation is quickly corrected.

I started off with the simple question of how does CO2 cause global warming

My search of the net turned up only a cartoon showing the Sun warming the surface which emitted IR that bounced of CO2 in the Sky and back to the surface.

This was not good enough, so I started hunting web forums.

Peterd or anyone else feel free to correct any of my misconceptions here.
I appreciate it and I have no ego to be bruised.

This is where I am so far with my question.

The Sun does indeed heat the surface which cools by convection and does emit IR.
IR does not bounce of CO2, but is absorbed by CO2 (and other GHGs) and the heat is passed on by convection and re-emission of IR.

Now the reason for my question.

I have read that heat returning from colder layers of the atmosphere to the warmer surface has a problem with the 2nd law of Thermodynamics (and yes I had to look it up), so I am not at the stage of the surface being heated by the re-radiated IR yet.

You do realize these are very different applications, the latter is signal attenuation for Astronomy. There Beer’s Law is fine, I have no problem. The signal is indeed passing through the entire atmosphere.

However, if your coefficient of absorptivity for CO2 in the former case is derived from this value, you have a problem. In fact the very problem I suspected. You have not been careful to establish the instantaneous cross-sectional area of CO2 at any given point.

I will proceed with your sources, peterd, but things don’t look good for you.

By “is an aproximation avoiding integrations of two dimensions,” I meant ’simplification to avoid a double integral’.

I have never seen a derivation using Beer’s Law that approaches a legitimate attempt at accuracy. The absorption coefficient when so calculated may range from 0.6 to 0.8, but this value is arrived at with an ‘optical depth’ corresponding to the entire atmosphere. I suspect therefore, your absurd values for CO2 at 15u relies on such an attempt.

Whether, in each case, this is incompetence or deliberate deception I care not.

And this is also the case with the IPCC transfer equations.

I am happy to evaluate the spectroscopic issues with you, as you seem to feel this is your ‘wheelhouse’ but the remainder is beginning to bore me (look a little further into the troposphere/stratosphere predictions of AGW).

Why do I have no respect for Mann or Hansen? Because instead of owning up to their mistakes and thanking those who found them for pointing them out, they continue making the same mistakes and insist the science is settled. They’re not out to disprove the theory, in order to test it, they’re out to support a pre-conceived notion. Why, I don’t know.

I’m not going to argue whether Vincent Grey made any strange claims or not, most scientists do at one time or another, I’m sure. Einstein was considered a crackpot at one point too. Same goes for Tim Ball. Again the statement was about credentials. They’re climate scientists, they know the science, I don’t. You seem to think that because someone is retired that they are no longer relevant. Or is it just because they don’t agree with you?

Dr William Grey (might be Gray, not sure) is one of the guys people go to for hurricane predictions here in the US. While he’s been frequently wrong, as have just about all of the predictors, he doesn’t buy into the AGW hypothesis. And with increasing evidence that CO2 doesn’t drive hurricane formation or intensity, he’s being proved correct.

While I am not a spectrographic technician, Spectroscopy was the first (and most trivial) physics course I took at college (having two years in secondary school I bypassed a year of mechanics).

I will endeavor to track down your sources, we clearly do not agree. Indeed, I believe we find each other’s terminology foreign.

Optical depth, e.g., a simplification following Beer’s Law, is an aproximation avoiding integrations of two dimensions, leading to much shoddy work. I hope your sources do not prove so. I need some time to do this.

Your assumption of an abundance of CO2 everywhere of 380ppm or that H20’s upper limit is saturation I find naive.

But at least here, we can talk, re: your last paragraphs on authority, we cannot.

“non-physical inanities like ‘radiation balance’, ‘Earth’s Radiation Budget’, ‘optical depth’”: It’s obvious you don’t have a clue, Gary. I have failed to convince you about the common use of the terms “radiation balance” and “Earth’s Radiation Budget”. They are stock-in-trade of atmospheric scientists, and their book, but you don’t read those, do you Gary? As for “optical depth”, actually, I cannot recall using the term, but since you’ve raised the issue, I’ll reply. Far from being “unphysical”, optical depth is a precise concept in physics. It is defined as the product of line strength times number density times column length. See, for example, formula (9.2) in “Spectrophysics” by A. Thorne, U. Litzen and S. Johansson. Likewise, the terms “optically thick” or “thin” have meanings relative to this definition. They are part of the stock-in-trade of spectroscopists, but as you’re obviously not a spectroscopist, Gary, I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You can huff and puff all you like, but you won’t blow any houses down.
“The fact that the MSU data of RSS and UAH agree that the low latitude tropopause is not warming”
Isn’t the tropopause the region that separates the troposphere from the stratosphere? And if the troposphere is warming (as RSS and UAH show, for the MSU T2 channel), while the stratosphere is cooling, doesn’t that mean that somewhere in between the temporal temperature trend has to be stationary? Oh, but of course, that’s why you deny the stratosphere is warming and claim Aqua supports it. But wait, didn’t you just cite UAH and RSS to support your first claim about the tropopause? What do they say about the stratosphere? Why, if we look at the MSU (T4 channel) data from both UAH and RSS, as summarized by IPCC (in the FAR; see Fig. 3.18), we see that they report stratospheric cooling. This is the accepted result. As IPCC say, “…both [RSS & UAH] data sets support the conclusions that the stratosphere has undergone strong cooling since 1979.” So, are Christy/Spencer and Mears/Wentz saying something different from what they said for the work cited by IPCC? If so, what and where? Why are they right about the tropopause but wrong about the stratosphere? Pray tell, Gary.
“That shows that the absorption by CO2 in the region 14-17 microns is practically complete (absorptance ~1)” and “Yes, the centre of the 15-micron CO2 band is close to being saturated at ambient temperatures, pressures, and concentrations, but this does not mean that extra absorption (by added CO2) cannot happen”.
My final words are not directed not at you, Gary, but at the intelligent reader who can put all this stuff about water vapour and carbon dioxide absorption aside for long enough to read and understand the following.
“In fact, most of the enhanced greenhouse effect occurs not because of changed absorption of radiation from the surface (although some change does occur in the wings of the carbon dioxide band where absorption is weaker) but because as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, the average height (around 6 km) from which carbon dioxide emits radiation to space also increases. Since atmospheric temperature in the lower atmosphere falls with altitude, if nothing changes other than the amount of carbon dioxide, the amount of radiation to space is reduced. For atmospheric carbon dioxide this reduction can be accurately calculated; for doubled atmospheric concentration it is about 4 W.m^-2. To restore the Earth’s energy balance the temperature throughout the lower atmosphere has to increase – hence the enhanced greenhouse effect.” (J. Houghton, Spectrochim. Acta, v.51, p.1391 (1995)
These are the words if a distinguished atmospheric physicist and knight of the realm. His scientific achievements are likely to exceed by far any of the posters here (I do not exclude myself from this group).
Cheers.

Good point. The AGW theory fails at every point in their heuristics–the fidelity of their teaching illustrations with reality– and experimental results.

Your addition is of equal importance to all of the satellite atmospheric observations.

Should we know who you are? Possibly an Erhlich protege?

Sigh. What a selection! The echo chamber effect at work. You might show up at an AGU meeting and see whose work is actually discussed, though.

Way to not address the issue. Please explain why these men are not highly credentialed climate scientists. Whether or not you or I have met them is irrelevant, nor what we may think of them personally. I have more respect for them personally than I ever will for Mann or Hansen.

Sigh. What a selection! The echo chamber effect at work. You might show up at an AGU meeting and see whose work is actually discussed, though.

I have met more than half your list. I will go so far as to say that Reid Bryson is a very nice fellow.

You people are not doing Kristen any favors by encouraging her in thinking that she is thinking clearly. She has a great deal of promise and should get as far as possible from this topic for a good long while and maybe revisit it once she’s in grad school.

I was beginning to think I’d failed to tweak your elevated nose out of joint.

I’m happy you’ve read climate scientist’s treatments of physics but would refer you to “Thermal Physics”, Kittle & Kroemer, especially chapter 4, on the application of Planck’s Law, the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, and Kirchoff’s black-body equations. This is a standard for undergraduate study of Thermodynamics.

These three analyses were developed for application to plane-solid cavity measurements at constant temperature. While we allow their use in calculation of solar TSI they are known to be an approximation only.

Neither the earth’s surface nor its atmosphere may be described as black bodies at constant temperature and calculations using the preceding equations are meaningless, a common practice of your ‘Atmospheric Scientists’.

And for emissivities, absorptivities, etc., which must therefore be established experimentally, please refer to Hottel, 1942. I believe you will find your reading of Andrews graphs require further investigation as to his source, examination of the scales of the graphs, etc.! “5-6 orders of magnitude greater”, is obviously impossible. You are confused.

Spectrographic spectral peaks may beguile you but the absorptivity of these molecules possessing spatial assymetries is related to the angular distance carved out in their component displacements. That is why the polar covalent H20 absorbs over a much wider spectrum (indeed 15u is at the edge of of one of its near infrared continua) and at higher absorptivity.

That being said, the vibrational activity of these molecules in the the near infrared is a small portion of the entire eletromagnetic spectrum and all gases will emit in the far infrared and/or lower frequencies.

Infact, the abundance of water vapor ranges from 100 to 10,000 times that of CO2 in the troposphere between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn where 85% of solar energy is taken in, primarily by the oceans. The oceans have 2000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere. Heat transfers are there dominated by evaporation at the surface, cooling the ocean, and by condensation in the high troposphere, liberating heat to regions above.

The fact that the MSU data of RSS and UAH agree that the low latitude tropopause is not warming, and the Aqua satelliite data that the stratosphere is not cooling leave the onus on you, or bigger boys, to show why AGW should not be abandonded, dropped like the bad habit its become.

In the process it would behoove you to develop your theories without non-physical inanities like ‘radiation balance’, ‘Earth’s Radiation Budget’, ‘optical depth’, etc., they only confuse you:

“That shows that the absorption by CO2 in the region 14-17 microns is practically complete (absorptance ~1)”

“Yes, the centre of the 15-micron CO2 band is close to being saturated at ambient temperatures, pressures, and concentrations, but this does not mean that extra absorption (by added CO2) cannot happen”

Re: Der Spiegel, of course we knew what you meant, but your umbrage at such a slight is histrionic and your implacable criticism of someone you suppose your inferior (I do not admit this until demonstrated) is small and petty.

Oh TD, TD- what are we going to do with you? With your pseudo-scientific language, you probably think you are a scientist. Did you finish high school? The vast majority of atmospheric molecules “at the surface”, namely nitrogen (~78%), oxygen (~20%) and argon (~1%)- someone may like to produce more precise numbers- are not active emitters in the infrared. They are infrared *inactive* and cannot absorb or emit in the IR (except for oxygen, which has weak “forbidden” bands in the near IR). These molecules are “warmed” by COLLISIONS with other molecules, during which energy may be lost from collisionally (or even radiatively) excited molecules. The collision is the predominant process by which energy is exchanged between atoms and molecules in thermal equilibrium. When we turn to purely radiative processes, it is certainly the case that molecules at lower temperatures can “warm” (as you so quaintly put it- a real spectroscopist- which you’re obviously not- would say “excite”) a molecule at higher temperature. A higher temperature simply means a larger fraction of the atoms or molecules are in excited states at any instant. Not all of them are in excited states, however, at any instant, and those atoms or molecules that remain in the ground state can absorb radiation (of the correct frequency).
Your question is meaningless at another level. It is just not the case that a “cold” molecule of CO2 at the top of the atmosphere can emit a photon downwards that gets all the way to the ground to be “met” by a “warm” molecule at the surface temperature. The original CO2 molecule’s photon would have been “lost” through reabsorption, multiple collisions and absorption/emission processes, which take place, hundreds or thousands of times a second (have you ever calculated gas-kinetic collision frequencies?).