The dubious science of the climate crusaders.
by William Happer (from First Things)
William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University.
The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.
I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.
Now the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate atmospheric CO2 as a “pollutant.” According to my Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, to pollute is “to make or render unclean, to defile, to desecrate, to profane.” By breathing are we rendering the air unclean, defiling or desecrating it? Efforts are underway to remedy the old-fashioned, restrictive definition of pollution. The current Wikipedia entry on air pollution, for example, now asserts that pollution includes: “carbon dioxide (CO2)—a colorless, odorless, non-toxic greenhouse gas associated with ocean acidification, emitted from sources such as combustion, cement production, and respiration.”
As far as green plants are concerned, CO2 is not a pollutant, but part of their daily bread—like water, sunlight, nitrogen, and other essential elements. Most green plants evolved at CO2 levels of several thousand ppm, many times higher than now. Plants grow better and have better flowers and fruit at higher levels. Commercial greenhouse operators recognize this when they artificially increase the concentrations inside their greenhouses to over 1000 ppm.
Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom King Edward VIII renounced the British throne, supposedly said, “A woman can’t be too rich or too thin.” But in reality, you can get too much or too little of a good thing. Whether we should be glad or worried about increasing levels of CO2 depends on quantitative numbers, not just qualitative considerations.
How close is the current atmosphere to the upper or lower limit for CO2? Did we have just the right concentration at the preindustrial level of 270 ppm? Reading breathless media reports about CO2 “pollution” and about minimizing our carbon footprints, one might think that the earth cannot have too little CO2, as Simpson thought one couldn’t be too thin—a view which was also overstated, as we have seen from the sad effects of anorexia in so many young women. Various geo-engineering schemes are being discussed for scrubbing CO2 from the air and cleansing the atmosphere of the “pollutant.” There is no lower limit for human beings, but there is for human life. We would be perfectly healthy in a world with little or no atmospheric CO2—except that we would have nothing to eat and a few other minor inconveniences, because most plants stop growing if the levels drop much below 150 ppm. If we want to continue to be fed and clothed by the products of green plants, we can have too little CO2.
The minimum acceptable value for plants is not that much below the 270 ppm preindustrial value. It is possible that this is not enough, that we are better off with our current level, and would be better off with more still. There is evidence that California orange groves are about 30 percent more productive today than they were 150 years ago because of the increase of atmospheric CO2.
Although human beings and many other animals would do well with no CO2 at all in the air, there is an upper limit that we can tolerate. Inhaling air with a concentration of a few percent, similar to the concentration of the air we exhale, hinders the diffusional exchange of CO2 between the blood and gas in the lung. Both the United States Navy (for submariners) and nasa (for astronauts) have performed extensive studies of human tolerance to CO2. As a result of these studies, the Navy recommends an upper limit of about 8000 ppm for cruises of ninety days, and nasa recommends an upper limit of 5000 ppm for missions of one thousand days, both assuming a total pressure of one atmosphere. Higher levels are acceptable for missions of only a few days.
We conclude that atmospheric CO2 levels should be above 150 ppm to avoid harming green plants and below about 5000 ppm to avoid harming people. That is a very wide range, and our atmosphere is much closer to the lower end than to the upper end. The current rate of burning fossil fuels adds about 2 ppm per year to the atmosphere, so that getting from the current level to 1000 ppm would take about 300 years—and 1000 ppm is still less than what most plants would prefer, and much less than either the nasa or the Navy limit for human beings.
Yet there are strident calls for immediately stopping further increases in CO2 levels and reducing the current level. As we have discussed, animals would not even notice a doubling of CO2 and plants would love it. The supposed reason for limiting it is to stop global warming—or, since the predicted warming has failed to be nearly as large as computer models forecast, to stop climate change. Climate change itself has been embarrassingly uneventful, so another rationale for reducing CO2 is now promoted: to stop the hypothetical increase of extreme climate events like hurricanes or tornados. But this does not necessarily follow. The frequency of extreme events has either not changed or has decreased in the 150 years that CO2 levels have increased from 270 to 390 ppm.
Let me turn to some of the problems the non-pollutant CO2 is supposed to cause. More CO2 is supposed to cause flooded cities, parched agriculture, tropical diseases in Alaska, etc., and even an epidemic of kidney stones. It does indeed cause some warming of our planet, and we should thank Providence for that, because without the greenhouse warming of CO2 and its more potent partners, water vapor and clouds, the earth would be too cold to sustain its current abundance of life.
Other things being equal, more CO2 will cause more warming. The question is how much warming, and whether the increased CO2 and the warming it causes will be good or bad for the planet.
The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from about 280 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth has warmed by about 0.8 degree Celsius during that time. Therefore the warming is due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. Roosters crow every morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for Sunday dinner.
There have been many warmings and coolings in the past when the CO2 levels did not change. A well-known example is the medieval warming, about the year 1000, when the Vikings settled Greenland (when it was green) and wine was exported from England. This warm period was followed by the “little ice age” when the Thames would frequently freeze over during the winter. There is no evidence for significant increase of CO2 in the medieval warm period, nor for a significant decrease at the time of the subsequent little ice age. Documented famines with millions of deaths occurred during the little ice age because the cold weather killed the crops. Since the end of the little ice age, the earth has been warming in fits and starts, and humanity’s quality of life has improved accordingly.
A rare case of good correlation between CO2 levels and temperature is provided by ice-core records of the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods of the last million years of so. But these records show that changes in temperature preceded changes in CO2 levels, so that the levels were an effect of temperature changes. This was probably due to outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans and the reverse effect when they cooled.
The most recent continental ice sheets began to melt some twenty thousand years ago. During the “Younger Dryas” some 12,000 years ago, the earth very dramatically cooled and warmed by as much as 10 degrees Celsius in fifty years.
The earth’s climate has always been changing. Our present global warming is not at all unusual by the standards of geological history, and it is probably benefiting the biosphere. Indeed, there is very little correlation between the estimates of CO2 and of the earth’s temperature over the past 550 million years (the “Phanerozoic” period). The message is clear that several factors must influence the earth’s temperature, and that while CO2 is one of these factors, it is seldom the dominant one. The other factors are not well understood. Plausible candidates are spontaneous variations of the complicated fluid flow patterns in the oceans and atmosphere of the earth—perhaps influenced by continental drift, volcanoes, variations of the earth’s orbital parameters (ellipticity, spin-axis orientation, etc.), asteroid and comet impacts, variations in the sun’s output (not only the visible radiation but the amount of ultraviolet light, and the solar wind with its magnetic field), variations in cosmic rays leading to variations in cloud cover, and other causes.
The existence of the little ice age and the medieval warm period were an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment, because they showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuel. The organization charged with producing scientific support for the climate change crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the past 1000 years with the celebrated “hockey stick” temperature record.
The first IPCC report, issued in 1990, showed both the medieval warm period and the little ice age very clearly. In the IPCC’s 2001 report was a graph that purported to show the earth’s mean temperature since the year 1000. A yet more extreme version of the hockey stick graph made the cover of the Fiftieth Anniversary Report of the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization. To the surprise of everyone who knew about the strong evidence for the little ice age and the medieval climate optimum, the graph showed a nearly constant temperature from the year 1000 until about 150 years ago, when the temperature began to rise abruptly like the blade of a hockey stick. The inference was that this was due to the anthropogenic “pollutant” CO2.
This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient facts was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin’s photographs by dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator’s reign. There was no explanation of why both the medieval warm period and the little ice age, very clearly shown in the 1990 report, had simply disappeared eleven years later.
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…. they deserve each other, even.
R.Gates,
I have followed your arguments through this thread and must say that many of them are convincing.
However, the premise that you introduce early on that water vapor necessarily increases with temperature does not seem to hold up with observation, however intuitive.
Ferenc Miskolczi with the resources of NASA behind him found that as other GHG’s go up, water vapor goes down by a similar amount, retaining the atmosphere’s tranmissivity at ~1.87. In fact a graph linked to-day by tallbloke ,
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/shumidity-ssn96.png
shows that rather than temperature, the sunspot number as a proxy shows a much better relationship. Of course, as many suspect that we are in a cooling period, the decline of water vapor is no surprise.
Roger Carr – thank you !
Dave Springer says:
May 23 2011 at 5:38 am
Re my post May 23 at 3:53
I missed whatever point you were trying to make [re:] CO2 mixing in the atmosphere. In general it is well mixed. You get the essentially the same PPM reading high atop Mauna Loa, in the Antarctic, and in your backyard. They all track together. … but longer trend remains the same everywhere.
In a previous post, May 22 at 3:34 pm, I posted some links on CO2 and ‘background’ measurements, the bottom line of which is that the Mauna Loa figure was cherry picked [and all subsequent data fixed to match from the Keeling and Son involvement in the other stations over the decades] and an example of other studies showing completely other picture for the same time scale from the usual ice core data, and, via Beck’s and also from Ferdinand’s page, that it is actually “local” production which shows the true nature of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. There are many current studies of the local cycle of CO2 in various regions which show the same greater variations than the ‘background’ figure commonly touted – which is itself based on a premise that CO2 is “well-mixed” in the atmosphere.
My post you’re responding to is looking at the claim from AGWScience that CO2 is “well-mixed” and “able to stay in the atmosphere for hundreds and even thousands of years, accumulating”. These three reasons, I gave in that post, are the responses I’ve received when asking about this from AGW supporters. They don’t make sense in traditional physics which knows the properties of Carbon Dioxide very well indeed and it does the real atmosphere of the gas Air which is our atmosphere. My questioning showed that the reasons given for this “well-mixed, etc.” come from a combination of misapplied ‘laws’, taken out of context, and absence of actual physical conditions in the real world, wind and weight of molecules etc.
That said, CO2 can pool. There are documented instances of people dying from CO2 poisoning because some underground source released a hellacious amount too fast for turbulence in the atmosphere to mix it. Once mixed it stays mixed.
Which as you show here in your combination, the common AGW misconceptions.
First of all, CO2 is not a poison. It kills by suffocation if in amounts large enough to displace the Oxygen in the atmosphere. In traditional science it is classed as non-toxic because it is non-toxic. Traditional science can tell the difference between non-toxic and toxic, so for example, classes Carbon Monoxide toxic. Just this statement of yours takes your understanding, and those who keep repeating it because they think it is true, away from the real nature of CO2. It is not a poison. It is benign. It is not a poison in any large amounts any more than a pillow used to suffocate suddenly becomes a poison if 50 pillows are used to suffocate. This is an important distinction between properties in the real world. What you are repeating is the deliberate manipulation of science language to demonise Carbon Dioxide by AGWScience creators. Please don’t do it.
Why does Carbon Dioxide pool? It pools because it is heavier than Air. As simple as that. It is 1.5 times heavier than the gas Air which is our atmosphere. And just as stuff lighter than Air rises up in the gas Air, because they are less dense, so stuff heavier than Air sinks, displacing Air. Water Vapour is lighter than Air, it rises in Air, called evaporation, and Water is heavier than Air, when Water Vapour condenses out at higher colder levels of the gas Air which is like an ocean above us, it comes down as rain. Methane is lighter than Air, it is a hazard encountered in mining so known well that it separates out of the Air in the atmosphere of the mine in which it is found, and rises to the top to pool at the ceiling.
It is very well known in real world traditional science that this is what happens in our our atmosphere, the ocean gas Air pressing down on us around a ton a square foot, because traditional science has studied it thoroughly.
Not so very long ago in mining, and perhaps still in parts of the world, before entering a new mine, miners would cover themselves in wet towels and carry a flame on a long pole to set alight any Methane pooling at the ceiling. They were under no AGWScience illusion that the air in the mine was “well-mixed”, their lives depended on knowing the real world properties of gases. Modern methods have done away with the wet towels and naked flame solution to the problem, but the problem is still the same. Methane is lighter than Air, because it is less dense and rises in Air it will pool in large amounts when it comes to a barrier above it.
Carbon Dioxide being heavier than Air is denser, it displaces the lighter molecules of Nitrogen and Oxygen and in large amounts this too can be a hazard. Also in mines, and in breweries, if you make your own beer you should be aware of that, but most often during volcanic activity and venting. The fairly recent large number of deaths in Cameroon from venting CO2 from lake Nyos in Cameroon an example of this. http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Nyos.html
Displacing the lighter Oxygen it first suffocated the people living around the rim of the crater lake, then flowed down hugging the ground to the village of Nyos because it is heavier than Air. This is a well-known hazard around any active volcanoes which can have multiple sources of venting, on Mauna Loa for example, and depressions where Carbon Dioxide can pool on the ground displacing Oxygen. It’s the lack of Oxygen that kills, suffocation.
Here, the movement of Air, wind, eventually dispersed it. It cannot move under its own volition because it is heavier than Air. No more than dust on your desk can get up and thoroughly mix in the atmosphere of your room unless something extra comes in to move it.
Wind may very well disperse Carbon Dioxide that in large amounts that has pooled, as in Cameroon or every day on the volcanoes in Hawaii, but that does not alter the fundamental property of the individual molecule of Carbon Dioxide. It is still, each one, heavier than the gas Air of our atmosphere. Each one, therefore, will automatically, spontaneously, fall through Air to the ground, because each molecule being denser than the Air molecules it is in will displace the lighter molecules of Nitrogen and Oxygen of the ocean of gas which is our atmosphere Air.
This is happening all the time to all the Carbon Dioxide in the Air around us. Turbulence can disperse these molecules, whether in large amounts together or separately, but only if that turbulence is active ‘100% of the time’; when it stops, so does the dispersal. It does not stay “well-mixed” in real life, because it’s not always windy enough to do this anyway. For example, the Carbon Dioxide from a house’s chimney or a bonfire in the garden may well be moved by any wind around, but that more likely will be not very far away from the original source. Most movement of such large amounts of CO2 together will remain local; when the movement of the particular amount of gas Air, which is wind, ceases, the CO2 will revert to default and come to the ground locally. As Air reverts to its default of not being moved.
Just to make that clear, wind is not something moving through Air, like a spoon stirring it up, it is the gas Air on the move. So ‘turbulence’ is not from ‘a something’ stirring up Air and any CO2 in it, but a volume of the gas Air moving en masse causing turbulence in the volumes of Air around it. As a mass, volume, of warmer Air rises a mass of colder Air comes in beneath it creating wind, and any CO2 will be travelling within that.
I live on the slopes of a ‘mountain’, big hill to some.., and we’ve been having very hot days recently. One day last week I was taking the dog for a walk through the hamlet and further up the hill when I heard this really loud roar in the distance which at first sounded like a very large lorry or something, implausible as I focused the sound to the top of the hill, but as it quickly gained in strength getting louder and louder I realised it was the wind coming down the slopes and with a great roar I felt the cold air immediately displace the hotter as it reached us bringing with it ‘April showers’ as it and its coldness dispersed, sunny and warm and rainy at the same time.
I meant to comment on Ernst Beck’s 2007 finding upon analysis of a 150 years of CO2 measurements of great variance from place to place and time to time. this is essentially caused by the same reason that makes Antarctica lag behind Mauna Loa. There are no sources or sinks of CO2 in the Antarctic interior and it takes a while for a rising concentration elsewhere on the planet to make its way to Antarctic interior.
The naturally world is CO2 variations locally as I hope I’ve been able to show why. These examples have been replaced by AGWScience’s meme of “background and well-mixed” without any supporting methods of this being possible – wind being one choice that breaks down on analysis because, further to what I’ve already said and as I mentioned in my earlier post, ‘wind’ does not travel around the Earth as the AGW meme leads one to imagine, (from which you’ve deduced a time-lag to Antarctica).
Winds, volumes of the gas Air on the move, stay in their particular patterns globally when not in local production as I’ve described. They stick to their own hemispheres. There is some mixing at the Equator, but otherwise the big wind patterns do not cross the Equator, but circulate in their own halves.
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/wwwhlpr/global_winds.rxml
http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display_alt.cgi?a=glob_250
http://scienceclarified.com/As-Bi/Atmospheric-Circulation.html
So how does any CO2 production in the Northern hemisphere reach Antarctica?
And, Antarctica has active volcanoes. http://erebus.nmt.edu/index.php/volcanology/49-gas-chemistry
What are they really measuring on Mauna Loa? Do you really think that this is as billed “a pristine site uncontaminated by local CO2 production”? I say it is impossible, really impossible, for any measurements taken at Mauna Loa to be anything other than for all practical purposes 100% local production at one of the world’s major CO2 production regions. You can spot that this is known from reading the methodology behind the measurements – they simply choose what they think it should be while claiming they are actually excluding all the volcanic production. There are articles around which look at the measuring at different stations and showing that volcanic production in the area can’t be excluded. Anyway, since all these measurements began with deliberate cherry-picking of an assumed ‘background level’ from Keeling’s work, and control of other stations’ data came within his influence, I think they’re basically manipulated nonsense, regardless your own local measurements fitting the curve..
..in my opinion. 🙂
R.Gates
I’ve challenged climate boffins to remove the ocean from an ocean/atmosphere coupled general circulation model. So far none have bothered. I’m very confident that absent a global ocean the earth would become a snowball very quickly.
It’s amusing that they calculate the theoretical temperature of an earth with and without an atmosphere but not with and without a global ocean.
Molecule for molecule liquid water is just as much a greenhouse agent as water vapor. The difference is there’s more molecules of water in the topmost meter of the ocean than there are water molecules in the column of air above it. Liquid water is SO opaque to infrared that only a surface layer several micrometers can absorb or emit LWIR. At the same time it has an albedo close to zero and sunlight penetrates to warm it to a depth of 100 meters. The energy from the sun that warms the ocean cannot escape radiatively except on that hair-thin surface layer. For the energy to escape from deeper layers it must travel upwards to the surface by either convection or conduction. Even then studies of the heat budget of the mixed layer (0-100m) find that the lion’s share of energy (approximately 70%) leaving the ocean escapes by way of evaporation with only 20% leaving radiatively. In warm summer months when relative humidity is high and evaporation rate low the mixed layer stores energy until winter comes along with dryer air and it then escapes. This is what drives what’s called “continentality” which is something discovered a couple of hundred years ago and basically states there is a greater difference between summer and winter air temperatures over continental interiors than over the ocean at the same latitude.
Moreover, back-radiation from GHGs does very little in slowing down energy loss from the ocean due to the physics of water. A body of water cannot be warmed by LWIR. Downwelling LWIR is absorbed in the first few micrometers at the surface. All that happens is the evaporation rate increases and the energy is carried away in latent heat of vaporization. Water vapor being lighter than air travels upward by convection until adiabatic cooling drops its temperature below the dewpoint and the latent heat is released upon condensation high above the surface without ever changing the air temperature near the ocean surface.
The GHG effect is only significant over land surfaces.
What will happen absent a global ocean is the first winter in the northern hemisphere will never end and the first winter in the southern hemisphere will never end. Everywhere will experience “continentality”. Without an ocean to moderate winter/summer temperature difference the winter snow will raise planetary albedo to near 90% and ensure not enough insolation is absorbed at the surface to ever melt the snow. One year and the earth is a snowball for at least the many millions of years it would take for CO2 to accumulate enough so that some summer snow melt at the equator could start up and expand into higher latitudes.
Given the only “tipping point” the earth is near right now is tipping out of the Holocene interglacial it is irrational to worry about anthropogenic CO2 because all that does is make plants grow faster, use less water per unit of growth, and lengthen the growing season in higher continental latitudes.
A rising ocean is of course concommitant with global warming but the rate of rise is glacial (pun intended) because it’s almost all thermal expansion. To get any seriously inconvenient sea level rise requires that Greenland and/or Antarctic ice cap melt accelerates drastically. There’s no evidence at all that these ice caps won’t take at least thousands of years to reduce significantly.
Neutralization of the ocean (i.e. lowered alkalinity) due to increased partial pressure of CO2 at the surface is similarly glacial in speed. If the ocean were distilled water it could happen faster but seawater is a highly buffered solution that requires a great deal of acid to neutralize it.
Climate “disruption” over land is a distinct possibility from anthropogenic CO2 but I don’t believe any climate models are robust enough to predict regional climate changes and the empirical evidence so far from the rise of CO2 from 280ppm to 390ppm in the industrial age does not show any statistically significant climate disruption.
So I’m left wondering how it’s possible for any scientest modestly well informed on geological history of the earth, botany, biology, chemistry, and physics to be concerned about anthropogenic CO2 unless they have some sort of hidden agenda where CO2 rise is merely a proxy for what really bothers them. I believe it’s a proxy for human population growth in most cases and they are in fact channeling Paul Ehrlich and his 1960’s book “The Population Bomb”. In point of fact Professor Happer appears to be exactly that kind of informed scientist that finds the CO2 bogeyman to be a ridiculous fantasy concocted not to save the planet from catastrophic climate change but to save it from catastrophic human population growth.
I’m as concerned about population growth as anyone else but I believe science and technology will continue to produce the needed solutions in a timely manner and there’s no need for draconian measures to slow the expansion of industrial civilization in the meantime. In fact I believe those measures would be counter-productive to advances in science and technology because it’s the very expansion of global production (creation of wealth) which provides the funds needed for research and development. Take that away and there will be disposable income available for R&D as a greater fraction of income is needed just to satisfy basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Or another way of putting it is that industry is the goose that lays the golden eggs. It’s madness to kill that goose before you have another goose to replace it. It’s all very well and good to plan for a day when there isn’t enough fossil fuel to sustain industrial growth but throttling down consumption now will only hobble efforts to find a cleaner, cheaper, sustainable replacement.
@Myrrh
I believe it is “well mixed” but I don’t believe it will stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years. Indeed, only about half of anthropogenic emissions remain in the atmosphere for a SINGLE year and this ratio stays the same no matter how much faster anthropogenic CO2 is produced. Take away the artificial production and I believe atmospheric concentration will decline at the same rate it accumulated. It appears that natural sinks and sources are seeking an equilbrium point of 280ppm and anthropogenic production is about twice as fast as natural sinks can pull it back down towards 280ppm. The further out of equilibrium it becomes the harder the sinks work to pull it back which is why that ratio of only 50% of annual anthropogenic emissions being retained in the atmosphere doesn’t change even though anthropenic production has greatly accelerated. If that’s the case then as soon as the artificial production stops the natural sinks will take up the excess CO2 just as fast as it was introduced.
@Myrhh
You’re just demonstrably wrong about gases in the open atmosphere layering. Oxygen and nitrogen have different molecular weights. Do they form layers in the atmosphere because of it? Of course not. Atmospheric gases except under exceptional conditions are well mixed by turbulence in the troposphere. This is empirical fact not theoretic supposition. The earth not a mineshaft. There is no diurnal temperature change in a mineshaft to drive convection and winds. The air in a mineshaft is stagnant and constant in temperature.
I continue to be encouraged at the level of logic and reason of my fellow Americans. There is hope.
If you want to see more go to http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/06/climate-story-telling-angst/
The comments section is so alluring I keep going back to it. It is a gold mine.
mkelly says:
May 23 2011 at 9:09 am
Re Myrrh says:
May 22, 2011 at 5:12 pm
“ferd berple asks: ” Why is not gravity accounted for in the greenhouse theory?”
Because an ideal gas isn’t subject to it? That’s how CO2 [they say, because described by AGW as an ideal gas] stays well-mixed in the atmosphere [an ideal gas is not subject to gravity].”
All gases are subject to gravity that is why they stay as atmosphere and not wonder off into space. Further, all atmospheric gases, except water vapor, and air itself can be considered ideal gases as they are far from their critical temperatures with an error of less than 1%. PV=nRT describes the temperature (0°C) of near surface atmosphere given no increase in atmospheric volume and as far as I know the volume hasn’t changed much in many years.
http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistryglossary/a/stpdefinition.htm
STP corresponds to 273 K (0°Celsius) and 1 atm pressure.
If it hasn’t made it more confusing, what I’ve expanded in square brackets refers to these AGWScience ideas about it.
AGWScience says that Nitrogen and Oxygen, Air, and Carbon Dioxide behave like the
ideal gas, it excludes Water Vapour because it says it is too variable in amount and local and ditto Methane. I wondered if ferd’s question had something to do with this. He was obviously asking about a specific aspect re missing gravity, and I thought it might have a bearing on it.
Now, there is no such thing as an ideal gas, it is an imaginary construct, no real gas behaves that way. Lots of maths jiggling with other formulas has to be done to get an approximation of how a real gas is behaving when using the ideal gas laws to begin calculations. AGWScience however has, through this basic premise of what in our atmosphere acts as ideal gas, encourged very garbled thinking about Air and CO2.
This is given as one of the three reasons I’ve got back of why CO2 is “well-mixed” in the atmosphere and “stays well-mixed, cannot be un-mixed”. Its actual properties, its nature and relationship to other gases, have been completely denied and replaced by these erroneous ideas that it behaves like an ideal gas. Same with Nitrogen and Oxygen which is the Air of our atmosphere, that they have the nature and behaviour of the ideal gas.
You can look up the differences between real gases and the ideal, which is purely imaginary, but basically the ideal gas is a dimensionless point taking up no space and moving randomly in empty space with no effect on another, no interaction, except as a point of collision. No real gas obeys the ideal gas laws.
Real gases have volume, weight, are subject to gravity, etc.
So, from this decision to class the gas Air in our atmosphere an ideal gas, we get the AGWScience reasoning about Carbon Dioxide in it. That ‘like an ideal gas’ Carbon Dioxide zooms around empty space instead of in the real gas Air which has volume etc,; that ‘like an ideal gas’ it rapidly diffuses by collisions to mix thoroughly and can’t then be unmixed instead of being able to displace the real volume and weight molecules of Nitrogen and Oxygen because it too has real weight and volume relative to them; that ‘like an ideal gas’ it therefore has no weight relative to the other molecules, the gas Air, so stays well-mixed in the ideal empty space atmosphere where it can accumulate for hundreds and even thousands of years. Nonsense in the real world of real gases.
There’s no concept of the Air which is our atmosphere as a real gas, with real molecules which have volume and weight and interact with each other. Instead this purely imaginary world where the atmosphere is empty space with molecules diffusing by zooming at great speeds through it bouncing off each other thoroughly mixing up.
As I gave my experience discovering that this was taught by AGWScience, even physics PhD’s think this is a description of the behaviour of gases in our world, and they teach it. So the absolute conviction that Carbon Dioxide would rise up and diffuse rapidly into the air in a room where it had pooled and without any change to the conditions in the room which allowed it to pool in the first place. Because like an ‘ideal gas’ it’s always moving rapidly bouncing into other ideal gas molecules doing the same, but this is impossible in the real world.
I’ve lost some old bookmarks when my computer went into primitive mode, but an example I’ve given before of how seriously this is believed among the scientists in AGW. One such had heard the argument that real gases have weight, volume, etc. and can separate out into layers and decided to test it out for himself. He and his team went to a mine and introduced Methane to prove that, even if it pooled initially at the ceiling, it would rapidly diffuse with the rest of the Air in the mine and become well-mixed. It stayed pooled. His conclusion was that there must have been another source of Methane entering the mine which was constantly adding to the diffusing Methane which he’d introduced and which had pooled at the ceiling, even though, he said, they searched thoroughly and could find no such other source, he still believed it existed somewhere in the mine. He couldn’t bring himself to believe this effect of Methane was really because it had weight relative to Air, and because lighter than Air would rise through it.
That’s how brainwashed even the scientists from the clever manipulation of AGW propaganda.
So now, this PV=nRT you’ve given. I have spent some time, on and off, looking for the actual temperature. All I’ve been able to find is the description of the ideal gas is in conditions of high temperatures and low pressure. Your figures don’t match my imagination here. 0°C isn’t high temperatures, and low pressures I imagined less than on the surface of Earth, higher up, what’s that layer of our atmosphere with very high temps? Don’t recall off-hand. Anyway, that’s what I’d imagined it to mean, where the atmosphere is low pressure and that coupled with high temps making the molecules of gas less dense and less closely packed together.
@ur momisugly Myrrh
It’s people like who get us all branded as “deniers”.
If your inane notion of gravitational layering of gases in the atmosphere were true then we’d all be immolated like the Apollo 1 astronaughts in a cabin filled with pure oxygen. Oxygen, you see, is heavier than nitrogen.
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/molecular-mass-air-d_679.html
Please buy a clue.
@Myrhh
Perhaps you can perform this grade school experiment designed to teach toddlers how gases mix can straighten you out.
http://www.kidsgeo.com/geography-for-kids/0050-mixture-of-gases.php
Dave Springer says:
May 24, 2011 at 10:40 pm
It’s people like who [you] who get us all branded as “deniers”.
If your inane notion of gravitational layering of gases in the atmosphere were true then we’d all be immolated like the Apollo 1 atronaughts in a cabin filled with pure oxygen. Oxygen, you see, is heavier than nitrogen.
Sigh, yes I know that.
The difference between them is very slight, but still exists, and in minute amounts the lighter Nitrogen moves away from the heavier Oxygen, but, under gravity and subject also to their own combined weight the separation is neglibible in our lower atmosphere.
They are the two components of the Gas Air which is 99% of our atmosphere for the purpose of measuring relationship and effects by weight, and their combination the weight against which other gases are measured.
This note is dry Air, excluding Water Vapour which is prevalent in our immediate atmosphere from its continual evaporation from the oceans. Water vapour is much lighter than Air, therefore it spontaneously rises through Air, Carbon Dioxide is heavier, one and a half times heavier than Air, therefore it sinks. If you’re denying that gases separate out and so denying that Carbon Dioxide sinks through the gas Air then you are denying that Water Vapour rises through it, and you’ve just destroyed the Water Cycle…
Carbon Dioxide sinks through the Gas Air by displacing the lighter molecules of Nitrogen and Oxygen. It is doing this all the time when it is not being moved higher by some other actions happening in our atmosphere, the ocean of Gas Air pressing down on us. Carbon Dioxide also readily combines with water to come down in the rain.
Life exists because Water evaporates into the invisible gas Water Vapour and rises and recycles through the Water Cycle, cooling the Earth which would be much hotter without it, and spreading nutrients around, one of which is Carbon Dioxide.
There seems to be a lot of confusion from the use of the word ‘turbulence’ in our immediate atmosphere. It is turbulent relative to other higher levels which are not, it is ‘turbulent’ because this is where weather happens as the Sun heats the Earth and and the volumes of hot Air rise to cool and come down again under volumes of hotter Air. These are the ‘winds’. Wind is not something other than the actual gas Air itself moving from one place to another and this can be very turbulent indeed. It is not always windy. There is not a big wooden spoon stirring all the Air around in continual ‘turbulence’, the ocean of the fluid gas Air above us is not in a washing machine going full blast mixing it all up continuously. Somehow, magically in this, the Doldrums remaining unaffected..
Air is not empty space. It is a fluid ocean full of gas molecules pressing against each other and us. And within that, those molecules heavier than Air will rise and those lighter will sink. And all in combination with the changes in temperatures of Air, hotter Air is less dense and will rise, speeding up the process of evaporation. Wet Air is lighter than dry Air. Etc. etc.
Nitrogen and Oxygen are not ideal gases, they are real. They have weight and volume and interact with other, attraction, combination and subject to gravity.
They cannot ever be described as ideal gases which have no properties. To then create an ‘atmosphere’ as if these real gases act according to ideal laws is simply absurd, and that’s exactly what we end up with, absurdity on every level and in every part of the AGWScience descriptions of our atmosphere.
Please buy a clue.
You can be whatever kind of ‘objector’ to AGW you want. My objection is that by manipulating and misdirecting the real science of properties they have created a through the looking glass world, impossible, not making any sense on any level whatsoever. They have done this consistently, with molecules with photons with processes, sometimes attributing the properties rightly belonging to one to another which does not have them, or by associating out of context ‘laws’ to them which make them ridiculous in our physical reality.
No wonder those taught ‘science’ from AGWScience have such a strange view of our atmosphere as seen by the three reasons given for ‘well-mixed’. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find real information, the corruption of science teaching is become endemic in the ‘western’ education system.
So, work it out for yourself, is it true that real gases behave like ideal gases under standard pressure and temp of 0°C?
What is that saying? That real gas molecules at sea level are vast distances apart and don’t interact with each other except to bounce off each other as they zoom around at very high speeds in the mostly empty space filled with nothing which makes our atmosphere nothing.
So, how does sound travel in this?
“So, work it out for yourself, is it true that real gases behave like ideal gases under standard pressure and temp of 0°C?”
Approximately, yes. The variance is about 1%. Not coincidentally CO2 concentration drops off sharply by 1% moving from troposphere to stratosphere.
You’re beating a dead horse. The lower atmosphere is well mixed for all practical purposes.
“If you’re denying that gases separate out and so denying that Carbon Dioxide sinks through the gas Air then you are denying that Water Vapour rises through it, and you’ve just destroyed the Water Cycle…”
I’m not denying that gases separate by density in stagnant mixtures. The lower atmosphere is never stagnant and the settling process is slow. Water vapor is far lighter than air (18/28) but not appreciably different than how much heavier CO2 is (44/28) so CO2 is basically falls as fast water vapor rises. The key difference between water vapor and CO2 is that water vapor is a condensing gas. As it rises it cools and eventually condenses and then falls quite rapidly in liquid form. CO2 doesn’t condense so the convective uplift created by diurnal surface temperature changes which defeat gravity in carrying CO2 upward don’t get thwarted by condensation. CO2 molecules find their way down by gravity very slowly as they bump their way through an obstacle course of other gases. The end result is that convective uplift in the lower atmosphere dominates to such a large degree in non-condensing gases that gravitational settling is negligible. The same would hold true for water vapor if it weren’t for the fact that it condenses into liquid water which is about 1000 times heavier than air. Even so, convective uplift can become so powerful that hailstones the size of baseballs (or larger) can be carried upward to great altitude.
The lower atmosphere is well mixed and this is empirical fact not theoretical supposition. People who refuse to incorporate empirical fact into their worldviews are the whole problem in the AGW controversy. Instead they build these toy models in their heads, on paper, or lately on computers and then insist these models are infallible such that empirical evidence takes a backseat to model outputs i.e. if reality doesn’t agree with the model there must be some flaw in the empirical observations of reality. Sometimes there are indeed flaws in methods of observation happen and that’s why in the practice of science observations must be repeatable.
CO2 measurements have been repeated millions of times in millions of places. Even I have repeated them by measuring CO2 concentration outdoors near my home and have never found any appreciable deviation from concentration reported by Mauna Loa or any other gold-standard surface stations, aircraft which obtain measurements from ground into the stratosphere, and so forth. What’s not repeatable is historical measurements which showed large deviation from place to place and time to time. Those scale deviations today can only be observed today very close to the surface where biological and chemical sinks and sources wax and wane to such an extent that they are operating faster than atmospheric mixing forces. This is why the gold standard measurements are located in places as far from active sinks and sources as practically possible. Yet still when an average Joe like me takes a sample at a random location like my grass covered backyard in the city or underneath the canopy in a forest the readings are essentially the same as that reported at Mauna Loa. The inescapable conclusion is that CO2, as a rule, is well mixed in the atmosphere but like any rule there are exceptions. Exceptions are said to prove the rule. What they actually prove is that the method of observation is robust. In cases where there are no exceptions one can wonder if the observations are flawed in some way and unable to record observations that are outside the rule.
Anomalously high CO2 measurements concentrated around the time of WWII is almost certainly due to the anomalous uptick in industrial processes which emit copious amounts of CO2 due to the all out effort to produce war materials. Industry also sprang up in places where it didn’t exist before and was shut down after the war ended. Due to the vulnerability of highly concentrated industrial activities to attacks it was good strategy to both spread them around and hide them as much as practical versus increasing the capacity of well known production facilities. It’s a lot easier to destroy one large well known steel plant than it is to destroy ten well separated smaller plants.
I find this a quite reasonable explanation for the WWII era “increase” in atmospheric CO2. It wasn’t really much of an increase globally but more a matter of measurements happening downwind of some large war-related artificial emitter.
Myrrh says:
May 24, 2011 at 12:55 pm
“No real gas obeys the ideal gas laws”
My statement says they may be “considered” ideal gases and will obey the ideal gas law within 1% error.
For a Physicist, this is either deliberately misleading or extremely naive. The fact that CO2 is needed to keep this planet warm enough for life is not disputed. The fact that it is a greenhouse gas is not disputed. The fact that higher CO2 concentrations trap more heat is not disputed. The fact that our civilization has grownup in a period of a more-or-less stable climate is not disputed. The correlation with CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere and temperature over long periods is also confirmed. The fact that our civilization would be drastically altered with an unstable, warmer climate with higher sea-levels is obvious. Sure, it’s not a pollutant in the generally accepted definition of the term, but so what… Not sure what his point was… Yes, let’s pit a lone physicist, using strawman arguments against well established experts in the field of climatology. Can anyone say conspiracy theory?
To Dave Springer,
What you are measuring is natural background. What measuring stations record as monthly averages is natural background. Those flask measurements that are exceptionally high (spikes in time series) are flagged and not included in averages. These spikes could be from momentary anthropogenic sources. For example, some of the early spikes in the Southpole data could be from a C-130 taking off. A site at Grifton, NC was located 7KM Northeast of a 15KW coal burning power plant and large spikes occured when the wind was blowing from that direction. These short lived spikes indicate that the CO2 from such sources does not travel far before it is lost to natural background. I think that cold water clouds are the primary sink and the background concentrations are being controlled by the amount of precipitable water vapor in the atmosphere. The global uniformity in CO2 concentrations might be the result of thunder clouds taking CO2 into the upper atmosphere (jet streams) where the water freezes and releases the CO2. The jet streams should do a good job of mixing and the CO2 has a much greater path length to the surface or water clouds.
Steve says:
“The correlation with CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere and temperature over long periods is also confirmed.”
It is confirmed that rises in CO2 FOLLOW rises in temperature, which blows the CO2=CAGW conjecture out of the water. And the rest of your assumptions are evidence-free. Some of them may be factual. But they are still evidence-free, and once again the scientific method is ignored by a true believer whose mind is made up and closed.
To Steve,
Contrary to your claims, the science is not settled and he is not alone in disputing those claims. As a retired EPA researcher that worked under the mandates of the Clean Air Act for over 20 years, I know the present administration did not follow those mandates in finding CO2 to be a pollutant. Check out Alan Carlin’s website.
Steve says:
May 25, 2011 at 10:03 am
For a Physicist, this is either deliberately misleading or extremely naive. The fact that CO2 is needed to keep this planet warm enough for life is not disputed. The fact that it is a greenhouse gas is not disputed. The fact that higher CO2 concentrations trap more heat is not disputed. The fact that our civilization has grownup in a period of a more-or-less stable climate is not disputed. The correlation with CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere and temperature over long periods is also confirmed. The fact that our civilization would be drastically altered with an unstable, warmer climate with higher sea-levels is obvious. Sure, it’s not a pollutant in the generally accepted definition of the term, but so what… Not sure what his point was… Yes, let’s pit a lone physicist, using strawman arguments against well established experts in the field of climatology. Can anyone say conspiracy theory?
I am not a physicist, but I play one on the internet. 🙂 Steve what you say here is hogwash of the highest order.
Let’s start with “trap more heat”, this is a physical impossibility to trap heat. And CO2 having a specific heat of .84 shows that it gets rid of heat as fast as possible. Air has a Cp of slightly over 1. Water vapor near 3. So if you want to keep warm in your home make sure it has air especially moist air in it and not lots of CO2.
“The fact that our civilization has grownup in a period of a more-or-less stable climate is not disputed.” The temperature from the Holocene Optimum until now has gone down about 6 deg F. How is that more or less stable? It is going down.
“…with higher sea-levels is obvious.” How high? Millimeters? Oh boy. Come on the sea level measurements are available here on WUWT and they show a couple of mm per year. Or tenths of inches. And they appear to be leveling off as of now. Cannot be sure though.
“The fact that CO2 is needed to keep this planet warm enough for life is not disputed.” It is disputed but more imprtant is the magnitude of the what CO2 is able to do. So do the math Steve and show us.
Finally Steve gases dissipate heat and you use products every day that use that dissipating idea. Hair dryer, car radiator, electric baseboard heating, ceiling fans, etc. You have no products in your home that use the idea that CO2 can “trap heat” and make something warmer.
Alan Carlin’s URL. http://www.carlineconomics.com/
Dave Springer says:
May 22, 2011 at 3:33 am
ferd berple says:
May 21, 2011 at 3:52 pm
“Gases only rise in temparature as they are being compressed. Unless the force of gravity at the surface is rising there can be no compressional heating.
That makes no sense to me. As air descends it experiences a both greater force of gravity (slight) as well as an significantly increasing weight of air above it, compressing it into a smaller volume. Thus as you note, this will increase its temperature. The rising air in contrast will experience cooling, and thus limit the amount of energy it has available to radiate to space.
Thus the effect of vertical circulation of air is to paradoxically transfer heat downwards through compression, at the same time it is transferred upwards through convection. This is the warming effect of N2/O2 that gives rise to the unexplained 33 C in warming. It is the repeated compression and decompression of the atmosphere due to vertical circulation that slows the cooling of the planet and is the reason why the temperature of the atmospheres of the other planets vary as pressure and distance from the sun.
This is not accounted for in the GHG theory, which is why we don’t see comparisons of earth with the other planets by advocates of GHG theory. If the GHG theory is right, then it should be observed on the other planets, according to the same physical laws used in the cliamte models. Their atmospheric temperatures should vary according to their composition, but the don’t. They vary according to their pressure.
Dave Springer says:
May 25, 2011 at 7:49 am
The key difference between water vapor and CO2 is that water vapor is a condensing gas. As it reises it cools and eventually condenses and then falls quite rapidly in liquid form. CO2 doesn’t condense so the convective uplift created by diurnal surface temperature changes which defeat gravity in carryong CO2 upward don’t get thwarted by condensation.
Taking with it the Carbon Dioxide that managed to make it that high in the atmosphere..
CO2 immediately combines with any Water around as it does in coming down with the rain. The Carbon Life Cycle and the Water Cycle.
The only gases that can reasonably be consider to be “well-mixed” in our atmosphere are Nitrogen and Oxygen, which in combination is our Gas Air, because they are practically the same weight and size, Nitrogen slightly lighter than Oxygen but slightly bigger, Oxygen slightly heavier than Nitrogen but slightly smaller.
Water Vapour is considered variable in AGW science and excluded, but Carbon Dioxide is also VARIABLE in our atmosphere. It is not well mixed at all. Production is local, from the ground litter decomposing, from the plants and us critters breathing it out, from the warm seas releasing it, and, as it is heavier than Air it does not rise into Air under its own volition, it needs something to move it, and that something will always be first and foremost the local conditions. But, the difference is that Water Vapor travels up spontaneously through Air, Carbon Dioxide doesn’t.
Even if through local weather systems Carbon Dioxide gets higher in our atmosphere, there are no winds to take it from production in the Northern Hemisphere to the Antarctic, for example, whether as molecules of CO2 or as Carbonic Acid in the rain.
Again, you’re comparing levels with Mauna Loa – which is on the world’s largest active volcano and next to constantly erupting volcanoes – which for all intents and purposes can only be measuring local production, which is constantly producing Carbon Dioxide from the constant multi sources of volcanic activity, eruptions, venting, above ground and below in the warm waters, thousands of earthquakes a year as well as the vegetation and the greatly increased plane traffic, day and night; none of this can be excluded there to achieve the claimed mythical uncontaminated pristine fib which they call ‘background’. It’s absurd. That’s why Keeling didn’t even bother to measure it properly ‘to get a trend’, in less than two years he announced he had one! You think that’s scientific? Really? What he had was an abundant local supply and it took him less than 2 years to work out how he could get the measurements he wanted to produce his ‘trend’ to his pre-conceived agenda, which was to prove that man-made CO2 levels were rising and his ‘big contribution’ to this was the idea of a mythical ‘background’ level which he claimed could be measured from anywhere…
He’s tried the Antarctic and it just wasn’t giving him the figures he wanted.. The AIRS data showed that CO2 is lumpy and not well-mixed. And we’ve never been given the full analysis which I bet shows massive differences – all we’ve got is a graph cutting off most of the information.
But, importantly, as well as there being no such thing as this mythical ‘background well-mixed’ CO2, what you’re actually talking about is an average and confusing average with this ‘mythical well-mixed background level’.
If the average rainfall for your grass is 20″ a year, it does not mean that every day you get 20″ of rain.
mkelly says:
May 25, 2011 at 9:29 am
Re my “No real gas obeys the ideal gas laws”
My statement says they may be “considered” ideal gases and will obey the ideal gas law within 1% error.
First of all, the link you put in was not to the ideal gas law, as you billed, I think it’s avocados law.
The Ideal Gas law of your original formula is for gases at low pressures and high temperatures. 0°C of your link is not high temperatures, standard pressure is not low pressures.
The ideal gas formula is for an imaginary gas which has no properties, like ‘average’, it doesn’t exist but has its uses as a maths tool, but unlike average it is based on nothing real in our world.
There are certain things said of such a gas which are intrinsic to it being this imaginary gas, its qualities. Which take up no space, i.e. have no volume. Which do not interact with other molecules except to bounce of them elastically, i.e. no force of attraction and hence no change when combining, as CO2 combines with Water to become Carbonic Acid, for example. Which are far apart from each other with only empty space in between. It is not a description of any real gas molecule, it is not a description of gases in our real physical world, it is not a description of our real physical world.
Where would we find a real gas behaving like the ‘ideal’? High temperatures and low pressures make gases less dense and spread them further apart, but, as they rise in the real world and get into lower than standard pressure they quickly get into colder regions – where rain forms and where the real gas Carbon Dioxide is not at vast distances from Water molecules, but close enough to interact, to combine. It does not act like an ideal gas, it does not have the qualities of an ideal gas, it is not an ideal gas. And nor is any other real gas, and certainly not as AGW claim, the real gases Oxygen and Nitrogen.
From AGWScience promotion of this imaginary ideal gas we get a picture of the atmosphere as EMPTY space, vast distances between molecules and these able to travel at great speeds in this empty space because there is nothing to stop them. The only other thing travelling in it the ‘solar’ radiation, [‘converting to heat’ at the Earth’s surface and radiating back thermal IR.. But ask them to produce concrete evidence that, say, Blue Visible Light is capable of heating water and land and they can’t produce it.], hence there is no Convection in this imaginary ideal gas atmosphere, because there is nothing to convect, because ideal gases do not have volume etc. so the molecules are too far apart to bring in the concept of heat transfer by Convection.
What stops real molecules from travelling at these super speeds in the real world, is volume, weight, size, interactions such as attraction, gravity, real changes in pressures and temperatures, Air as an actually entity in other words. Because they give this claim that Air molecules and CO2 are ideal gases they not only exclude convection in heat transfer, but have no explanation for how sound travels.
All this absurdity begins by AGW science taking this description of an ideal gas and saying that Oxygen and Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide have its qualities. They say they exclude Water Vapour because it is ‘variable’, but they really exclude it because it brings in real life movement in a real life three dimensional world and that spoils the meme.
So, the imaginary ideal AGW atmosphere has only empty space. Air is invisible, I’ve been told, because of all this empty space between molecules. So no concept of Air as an entity, of the weight of this huge volume of the gas Air pressing down on all the other molecules and us, around a ton per square ft. That’s a heavy weight of gas. There is no way that a real molecule of gas like Oxygen can travel through the real gas Air at the speeds that AGWScience says it travels because it has the qualities of an ideal gas.
And no concept of what Wind is. It’s obviously then, since Air is not a volume of gas, which is called wind when some of that volume moves, but empty space, it must be the gods at the four directions blowing the molecules around making it all well-mixed.
Dave Springer – a study done from 1991, on the ‘cusp’ of the change from the build-up to AGW and its full scale propaganda campaign (which began in earnest when the draft IPCC report stating that AGW wasn’t found was changed, 94/95, and Mann and his hockey stick altering the MWP and LIA).
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1938896