Is carbon dioxide our friend or our foe?
Guest essay by Iain Aitken
Here is a dossier of key facts about carbon dioxide (and its role in global warming):
· It is an incombustible, colourless, odourless, tasteless and non-toxic gas
· It is a plant nutrient and, as the ‘fuel’ of photosynthesis and the creation of oxygen, it is absolutely essential to the existence of life on Earth
· Its fertilisation effect has meant that, thanks to our anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions increasing concentrations in the atmosphere, crop yields have improved dramatically to date and will continue to improve in the future
· It is a weak greenhouse gas
· Global warming precedes, and then causes, increases in carbon dioxide emissions
· Most global warming experienced since 1950 can be attributed to natural climate variability, rather than enhanced greenhouse gas warming from anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore the rate of global warming experienced since 1950 has many precedents and is not remotely alarming
Carbon dioxide concentrations today are amongst the lowest found in the entire history of the Earth
· Only 0.04% of our atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which makes it what scientists call a ‘trace gas’; it requires extremely sensitive equipment even to detect it
· There is a very poor correlation between carbon dioxide concentrations and atmospheric temperatures so some thing (or things) other than carbon dioxide must be the key driver (or drivers) of global warming
· Carbon dioxide exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentrations increase and is today almost entirely exhausted as a greenhouse gas
· At low enough concentrations carbon dioxide could cause catastrophic climate change and the extinction of all life on Earth
· Those who would assert that global warming is man-made and dangerous are denying the facts that global warming has been slowing down at precisely the same time that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions have been rising and that no unequivocal causal relationship has ever been established between those emissions and observed global warming.
The world-renowned theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson has said, ‘The possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated… the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage’. Dr William Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University, has said, ‘No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide, thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas… The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science…. We’re really in a carbon dioxide famine now… increased carbon dioxide will be good for mankind.’
So the evidence and science is unequivocal: not only are our carbon dioxide emissions innocuous, they could actually be hugely beneficial for humanity.
There now follows another dossier of key alternative facts about carbon dioxide (and its role in global warming):
· It is a highly toxic atmospheric gas that is a dangerous pollutant of our precious planet
· As a result of the warming associated with our carbon dioxide emissions crop yields will fall across the world causing widespread famines
· It is a powerful greenhouse gas, and, as such, is a major contributor to the current global warming crisis
· Increases in carbon dioxide emissions precede, and then cause, global warming
· Most global warming experienced since 1950 can be attributed to anthropogenic activity, in particular anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. The rate of global warming experienced since 1950 is alarming and unprecedented
· Carbon dioxide concentrations today are at the highest level ever recorded
· As a result of mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions, largely from burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere have already reached a monumental 400ppm
· There is an extraordinarily close correlation between carbon dioxide concentrations and atmospheric temperatures
· Carbon dioxide exerts an increasing warming effect as its concentrations increase
· At high enough concentrations carbon dioxide could cause catastrophic climate change and the extinction of all life on Earth
· Those who would deny that global warming is man-made and dangerous are denying the fact that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are soaring and that such emissions cause enhanced greenhouse gas warming – and the equally unequivocal fact that ten of the hottest years on record have fallen in this century.
Dr Carmen Boening, Climate Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has said, ‘Reaching the 400ppm mark should be a reminder for us that carbon dioxide levels have been shooting up at an alarming rate in the recent past due to human activity.’ The environmental journalist Michael Specter has said, ‘Humanity has nearly suffocated the globe with carbon dioxide.’
So the evidence and science is unequivocal: not only are our carbon dioxide emissions dangerous, they could actually cause the extinction of all life on Earth.
Combining the conclusions from the original facts and the alternative facts, it is clear that carbon dioxide is unequivocally innocuous and dangerous and unequivocally beneficial and catastrophic.
In a court of law I would have no trouble whatsoever in defending both sets of ‘facts’ and am absolutely confident that I would leave the court a free man in either case. By using selective quotes, being selective with the evidence, being selective with the science, being selective with the timeframes, overlaying all those with emotion, rhetoric and value judgements, and then deploying a dollop of dissimulation and a soupcon of sophistry, I have turned a scientifically objective description of carbon dioxide’s role in global warming into political propaganda – both dossiers of key facts about carbon dioxide, although ‘true’, are extremely ‘dodgy dossiers’. My point is that very different narratives can be spun about the role of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere without having to resort to lies – the people who spin these narratives are relying on the belief that the vast majority of the public, politicians and journalists will not realize that they are being spun a story – and even if they did they would probably struggle to understand the scientific differences between the competing stories and so be inclined to ‘just believe the authorities’ who spin the ‘carbon dioxide is our foe’ story.
Not only might the average member of the public find it extremely difficult to determine the ‘truth’ about carbon dioxide (and its role in global warming) when faced with the above presentations of apparently complex and contradictory alternative facts, even highly educated, highly intelligent (and even highly scientifically literate) people are likely to feel confused. We should form our views logically and rationally based on all the facts – but faced with the above sets of apparently impossible to reconcile facts about carbon dioxide this is very, very hard. Consequently many will perhaps set aside the facts and simply fall back on how they feel about carbon dioxide. And since the second story, that ‘carbon dioxide is our foe’, is perhaps the only story most will have been exposed to (especially in Europe, and quintessentially in Britain) it is far more likely to be the one felt to be true. If you associate carbon dioxide with dangerous warming of the planet then you may feel bad about it; if you associate it with the benign greening of the planet then you may feel good about it. How people feel about carbon dioxide can prove far more successful in shaping public opinion than any number of complicated facts, something very well understood by those who want to ‘sell’ the ‘man-made climate change crisis’ idea, who have established a narrative for carbon dioxide and its role in global warming by flooding the media with emotionally powerful negative images, e.g. polar bears on ice floes floating out to sea, dying coral reefs, flooded cities (preferably flooded American cities). This substitution (triumph?) of political narrative and emotion for scientific objectivity and rationality is a fundamental problem that permeates the entire climate change debate.
So is carbon dioxide our friend or our foe? As set out above, in some ways it is (or could be) the one and in some ways it is (or could be) the other. The vast majority of the public not only do not understand these scientific differences, they positively don’t want to have to understand these scientific differences. As Richard Lindzen has said, ‘Most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public authority will generally win since they do not wish to deal with the science.’ Instead they will form their view on the climate change debate almost exclusively on how they feel about it based primarily on the narrative spun in the media (a narrative that is utterly dominated by the propaganda of the climate change alarmists). As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’ This is why endlessly repeated simplistic soundbites like ‘climate change is man-made and dangerous’ and ‘the science is settled’ and ‘97% of scientists agree’ have been so powerful. Is there any real truth in these statements? It doesn’t matter – just keep repeating them. In a 140 characters or fewer Tweeting, knee-jerk reaction, internet-driven world of shortening attention spans where ‘TLDR’ (Too Long; Didn’t Read’) is a typical reaction to any complex issue few will take the very considerable time and very considerable trouble to root out, investigate and understand the scientific arguments of climate change sceptics that climate change is probably predominantly driven by natural ocean-atmosphere oscillations, natural solar variations (irradiation and cosmic ray flux), natural cloud cover variations and the (natural) Milankovitch Effect when all they have to unthinkingly believe is that ‘climate change is man-made and dangerous – and that’s a fact’.
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There is no real evidence that more CO2 in our atmosphere causes warming. Where by CO2 is an LWIR absorber it is also an LWIR radiator so it does not trap heat energy. The non greenhouse gases are acutally better at trapping heat energy because, where by they transfer heat energy between molecules they encounter, they are relatively poor LWIR radiators to space. If more CO2 actually caused warming then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused at least a measureable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but that has not happened. Actually if enough CO2 is added to the atmosphere it will lower the dry lapse rate in the troposphere which is a cooling effect.
A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of the action of heat trapping greenhouse gases. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass reduces cooling by convection. There is no radiative greenhouse effect associated with a real greenhouse. What keeps a real greenhouse warm is a convective greenhouse effect.
So too on Earth. Gravity and the heat capacity of the atmosphere combine to form a convective greenhouse effect in the Earth’s atmsophere. As derived from first principals, the Earth’s convective greenhouse effect causes the Earth’s surface to be roughly, on average, 33 degrees C warmer than it would otherwise be without the atmosphere. 33 degrees C is the amount derived from first principals and 33 degrees C is the amount that has been observed. No additional warming caused by a radiant greenhouse effect has ever been detected. The convective greenhouse effect has been observed on all planets in the solar system with thick atmospheres. An additional radiant greehouse effect has not been observed anywhere in the solar system. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction as is the AGW conjecture which depends upon the existance of a radiant greenhouse effect.
One researcher has found that the initial calculations of the climate sensivity of CO2 is too great by more than a factor of 20 because the initial calculations fail to take in consideration that doubling the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere will cause a slight decrease in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere which is a cooling effect. So instead of a Planck effect climate sensivity of 1.2 degrees C, a better number is .06 degrees C.
Then there is the issue of H2O feedback. According to the AGW conjecture, CO2 warming causes more H2O to enter the atmosphere which causes more warming because H2O is also a so called greenhouse gas with LWIR absorption bands. What the AGW conjecture neglects to include is that besides bering the primary greenhouse gas, H2O is a primary coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere moving heat energy from the Earth’s surface, which is mostly some form of H2O, to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization. According to some energy ballance models, more heat energy is moved by H2O then by both convection and LWIR absorption band radaition combined. The net cooling effects of more H2O is evidenced by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate. So instead of amplifying the warming effect by a factor of 3, a better evauation of the effect of H2O is that it decreases the warming effect of CO2 by a factor of 3 yielding a value of less than .02 degrees C for the climate sensivity of CO2 that is if one believes that a radiant greenhouse effect even exists.
In their first report the IPCC published a wide range of possible values for the climate sensivity of CO2. In their last report the IPCC published the exact same values. So in over two decades of effort, the IPCC has found anything that would allow them to decrease the range of their guestamates one iota. They have apparently not obsreved a radiant greenhouse effect caused by CO2.
Questions to ask Hayhoe, Mann, etc. should always be along the lines of, “and what measurable improvements in the climate will occur if we prevent the increase or lower the amount of CO2?
Why doesn’t the evidence change warmists’ minds? Try this on:
“I grew up in communist Cuba, where I endured about eight years of daily Marxist, Leninist and Castroist propaganda. I was drowned in brainwashing, re¬vi-s¬ion¬ist politics in compulsory, government-run school all day, and my father tried to undo the damage at night with talks and alternate readings”
. * * *
“I absolutely can understand the benefits for those at the top of the elite pyra-mid “selling” failed ideas to those below. I do not understand the appeal to those poor or soon-to-be-poor to support such a false set of beliefs for most of their lives.
” It is a form of enslavement from which some people do not want to be mentally emancipated. No facts or pragmatic arguments make them change their beliefs.”
Rolando Menendez (comment posted in The Daily Signal)
[snip]
Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, then levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slowly increasing arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. On this graph it starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e. 1.1 billion metric tons). It peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, the USA, plummets into the Great Depression, and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 per cent drop. Hard times drove a tougher bargain than all the counsels of Al Gore or the jeremiads of the IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change). Then, in 1933 it began to climb slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.
And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That’s the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, to 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days[*] it’s at 380. There are, to be sure, seasonal variations in CO2, as measured since 1958 by the instruments on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. (Pre-1958 measurements are of air bubbles trapped in glacial ice.) Summer and winter vary steadily by about 5 ppm, reflecting photosynthesis cycles. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 per cent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn’t even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere’s CO2. Thus it is impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels.
[snip – emphasis added]
* Published in 2007.
Are the facts listed above correct? If they are, how can the conclusion be avoided?
Our fossil fuels were once living vegetation that covered the planet. If we burned ALL our fossil fuels, wouldn’t the climate be like it was in the epoch of the dinosaurs, or even before then? The entire earth was a tropical paradise in those days, right?
No. You are forgetting the logarithmic decreasing of the effect of any GHG with increasing amounts. The plants would love it, but I would hate to have to cut my grass every day. And then there are the other factors like Milankovich, the PDO, etc., etc….
Think about that word ‘paradise’ and get back to me 🙂
In any case, the chances of all the plant and animal matter having been turned into fossil fuels, and us finding and being able to extract it all, are so small as to be irrelevant. I’ve no idea how much became fossil fuels or how much of that we could find, and how much of that we could use, but it has to be a tiny amount. We’d be out of the solar system by the time we burned all we could use imo.
People who live on river flood planes, ocean front property, near landslide areas and in hotter regions are most prone to UNPCC and Al Gore’s amygdala hijack sales strategies. Those like myself living on a central high plain, where the weather variance is historically extreme and unpredictable or those living where there are extreme tides as much as 34 feet as in the Bay of Fundy Area are not the least bit concerned.
I sincerely hope that within my lifetime the masses will witness conclusive and indisputable evidence that Al and his Gorons, IPCC, Greenpeace, Sierra club and George Soros’s Open society foundations are all revealed for what they truly are……. and will be put on trial and hanged in the public square for all to see that there are consequences for this dangerous mass deception.
Here’s an interesting article that shows there’s many ways to measure Holocene C02 levels. Some of the measurements are at 360ppm, not too far off today:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/286/5446/1815
more detail: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
Worth reading, and thinking about!
“So is carbon dioxide our friend or our foe? As set out above, in some ways it is (or could be) the one and in some ways it is (or could be) the other. The vast majority of the public not only do not understand these scientific differences, they positively don’t want to have to understand these scientific differences. As Richard Lindzen has said, ‘Most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public authority will generally win since they do not wish to deal with the science.’ Instead they will form their view on the climate change debate almost exclusively on how they feel about it based primarily on the narrative spun in the media (a narrative that is utterly dominated by the propaganda of the climate change alarmists). As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’ This is why endlessly repeated simplistic soundbites like ‘climate change is man-made and dangerous’ and ‘the science is settled’ and ‘97% of scientists agree’ have been so powerful. Is there any real truth in these statements? It doesn’t matter – just keep repeating them.”
Iain wrote: “In a court of law I would have no trouble whatsoever in defending both sets of ‘facts’ and am absolutely confident that I would leave the court a free man in either case. By using selective quotes, being selective with the evidence, being selective with the science, being selective with the timeframes, overlaying all those with emotion, rhetoric and value judgements, and then deploying a dollop of dissimulation and a soupcon of sophistry, I have turned a scientifically objective description of carbon dioxide’s role in global warming into political propaganda – both dossiers of key facts about carbon dioxide, although ‘true’, are extremely ‘dodgy dossiers’. My point is that very different narratives can be spun about the role of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere without having to resort to lies – the people who spin these narratives are relying on the belief that the vast majority of the public, politicians and journalists will not realize that they are being spun a story – and even if they did they would probably struggle to understand the scientific differences between the competing stories and so be inclined to ‘just believe the authorities’ who spin the ‘carbon dioxide is our foe’ story.”
This was – and is still supposed to be – a science blog, not a court of law or a legislature. Those forums work because both sides are guaranteed EQUAL TIME to present their case and the opportunity to cross-examine. Science attempts to discover “the truth” using different traditions: every ethical scientist is supposed to present the whole truth, with all of the caveats. Why would those interested in the science of global warming want to imitate politicians and attorneys. Our legal system is ridiculously expensive and clogged – at least partly because that makes attorneys richer . Congress is gridlocked, because neither party listens to the other or tries to find a compromise position that includes the best from both sides. And our fellow citizens spend most of there time in echo chambers on the Internet. Even our institutions of higher learning have become monopolies of the left that are failing to exposed students to a diversity of ideas and discouraging them from thinking for themselves. None of these things are good, but Iain – an attorney is enriched by this process. The founders – many of whom were amateur scientists and scholars of the Enlightment – were justifiably paranoid of populist rhetoric used to support one particular “narrative”.
Science isn’t about competing narratives, with cherry-picked “facts” and out-of-context quotes from authorities. Nor is it about story tellers who fail to engage questions and challenges – which, of course, spoil the narrative being marketed to readers. Science is about data and its analysis: The data found on WUWT’s reference pages. The data collected by volunteers for the surface stations project, which the scientific establishment was afraid to collect. Inquiry as practiced by Willis. Does are host want the old WUWT focused on science or the new one advocating or policy. Let’s get rid of the lawyers, the policy advocates, the scary stories, the simplified dramatic statements and the absence of doubt; and act like ethical scientists discussing scientific subjects:
CO2 is an incombustible, colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas. Like almost all materials, it is toxic at high enough concentrations. OSHA has set the safe exposure level for an 8-hour day at 5000 ppm, about 5X worst-case scenarios for the atmosphere projected by the IPCC. Some studies report effects at concentrations as low as 1000 ppm. In a controversial 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that CO2 fits Congress’s definition of an air pollutant in the Clean Air Act, a finding that permits its emission to be regulated by the EPA.
Throughout the last 500 million years, when many different kinds of species have lived on the planet (including coral and marine organisms using CaCO3), CO2 ranged between 1000 and 5000 ppm. However, during the last 40 million years, when mammals and then primates evolved, CO2 has been below 1000 ppm. According to ice cores (which cover the last 400,000 years), CO2 has ranged between 180 and 300 ppm. During this period, there has been a strong correlation between higher CO2 and higher temperature, but the EARLIEST part of the temperature rise at the end of ice ages precedes rising CO2 by about a millennium. The higher CO2 concentration during interglacial periods is believed to be caused by outgassing of the oceans, due to the lower solubility of CO2 in warmer water. So CO2 doesn’t cause the end of ice ages, but it can contribute to warming after termination is underway.
Since plants evolved when CO2 was much higher, typical interglacial and current levels of CO2 are far below the optimum level for plant growth. The amount of CO2 during glacial periods is dangerously near the point at which some plants stop growing (150 ppm). Since incorporation of CO2 is often the slow step in photosynthesis and growth and since the enzyme that inefficiently catalyzes this process (RuBisCO) constitutes 50% of soluble leaf protein, doubling CO2 under optimum conditions can double growth. Some greenhouses increase CO2 to 1000 ppm to speed up plant growth.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas – a gas which both emits and absorbs thermal IR. Since the temperature of the troposphere falls with increasing altitude and since emission varies with T^4, rising GHGs slow the rate of radiative cooling to space. The surface of the planet emits an average of about 390 W/m2, but only 240 W/m2 reaches space. The difference, 150 W/m2, is the simplest way to quantify the GHE. (Many people say the GHE is 33 K, the temperature difference between a simple blackbody which emits 240 W/m2 (255 K) and the average temperature of the Earth (288 K), but the Earth would not be 255 K if its atmosphere did not have any GHGs and clouds.) Water vapor is the dominant GHE in the lower troposphere, but CO2 becomes equally important at higher altitudes. According to laboratory measurements and the composition of our atmosphere, a doubling of CO2 will reduce radiative cooling to space by 3.7 W/m2. Conservation of energy demands that temperature rise in response to a slowing of radiative cooling to space. If the Earth behaved like a blackbody, that rise would be about 1 K, but changes created by warming (feedbacks) will amplify or suppress warming. There is no doubt that feedbacks exist and modify seasonal changes in radiative cooling to space. The IPCC reports a 70% confidence interval of 1.5-4.5 K for the warming expected from a doubling of CO2, but observations (EBMs) are consistent with the low end of this range, while the middle and upper range comes from AOGCMs (and depends on how models are parameterized). In 1990, the IPCC reported that the warming anticipated from rising GHGs was comparable to natural climate variability. Since then, the IPCC has relied on models – which generally under-estimate natural variability – to attribute at least 50% of warming since 1950 to rising GHGs.
If assertions were supported by links to respectable sources, this would be a scientific presentation on CO2.
Questions and challenges would be replied to.
CO2 might not be the best gas on earth – but it’s a close runner up to oxygen.
They are the yin and the yang of respiration, animal and plant. Foundational to all earthly metabolism, well, nearly all.
================
[Would that then be “Foundationalmost to all earthly metabolism? .mod]
Rock solid underpunnings.