All of this detailed discussion of CO2 warming effects is a nice exercise, but the warming that is predicted in the upper atmosphere has completely failed to occur. The concept that a trace gas would drive the climate to any measurable degree borders on laughable. A crude approximation for the mean surface temperature of the earth is ~14 deg C (287K). By the Stefan Boltzmann Law, this temperature equates to an outgoing energy flux of ~386 w/m2. However, only ~235 w/m2 actually leaves the top of the atmosphere. If the concept is 'laughable', as you put it, you need to explain this discrepancy.
If you use the real thermodynamic alpha for CO2 and not the falsified, augmented value the IPCC created, we are talking thousandths or at most a hundredth of a degree warming with doubling of CO2. Could you explain further?
Furthermore, water vapor is a negative forcing factor.No it's not. What you might mean is that any feedback (possibly more wv) from an increase in CO2 could be negative. However, there is no proof that it is negative. It's more likely that feedback is zero or only slightly positive.
What makes discussion of CO2 warming effects an academic discussion is that historically temperature rises always come before CO2 rises and, more telling, temperature can plunge while CO2 is still high, and then CO2 drops. This shows categorically and factually that CO2 cannot and has not driven the climate. And, there is no rational reason to think it would now.It might surprise you to know that many of us have already looked at these arguments and, while they are certainly worthy of consideration, have realised that issues are a little more complicated than you describe - particularly with reference to the much longer timescales.
OK, sorry for taking so long to respond, but I thought it would be useful to point you to the relevant papers.
1) The simple fact that the troposphere has failed to heat up, as the alarmist models say it must, says clearly that the heating of the atmosphere by CO2 is laughable. I do not have to explain the discrepancy to make the point as the fact is that the idea fails in fact, not theory. BUT, there are a number of ways that it fails.
Regarding this failed heating see: "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate" © 2008, Science and Environmental Policy Project / S. Fred Singer, Page 7
a) The models use an infinte atmosphere when the real atmosphere is finite - a fatal flaw. See: "Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres" by Ferenc M. Miskolczi
b) The idea of backradiation basically defies physics as a cooler region cannot heat a hotter region. And radiation is not thermal energy and does not mean temperature.
See: "On the Phenomenon of Atmospheric Backradiation" by © Heinz Thieme
Deutsche Version siehe:
freenet-homepage.de/climate/gegenstrahlung.htmc) The calculation of CO2's ability to warm the atmosphere has been corrupted to augment its effect in order to create the needed warming - an IPCC corruption. The "radiative forcing coefficient" was unilaterally changed to 5.35 from the real 0.423 W/m^2. The IPCC, as a piece of misdirection, showed awe at how constant this factor was historically while actually quiietly altering it with a 12-fold increase. That is purposeful fraud.
See: "HEAT STORED BY GREENHOUSE GASES" by Nasif Nahle
2) Water vapor makes air less dense and such air is usually also warm, making it even less dense and warm, humid air rises carrying thermal energy with it to altitude where it condenses, losing energy to the high air, and precipitating. We called it the water cycle in grade school and it is quite simple. I will not elaborate. But, this cycle escapes the alarmist's world - they apparently cannot understand it (or do not want to).
I know you want to sound as if it has all been considered and discounted, but the water cycle is a huge planetary heat engine and it undeniably is a huge negative warming factor and is a huge leveling factor that is missing from all climate models. The models will not be useful until they include all such leveling factors and not just pieces that are designed to tip. The models are self-fulfilling prophecies of the programmers. They fail miserably. Any report of the future based on any modeling of the future is bound to be useless.
Only humid air in a no-circulating gas vessel will be a positive factor. Just as the alarmists want to pretend the atmosphere does not circulate, to be real we must admit that it does.
See: "Global Warming and Nature's Thermostat" by Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.
www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htmOr: "Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System - a closer look at the numbers"
Again, it is laughable to think that a trace gas can drive our climate. It does contribute to the roughly 30 degrees that our atmosphere gains by being there, but the first 20 ppm has the most effect and it tapers off to a plateau according to Beers Law. If you do the math and calculate CO2's contribution (being 90% spent) and our contribution to the CO2 (3-4%), we are now talking about hundredths to one tenth of a degree (and I am being generous). If the Kyoto Treaty was fully realized and we decreased CO2 by 0.035%, we would not warm by 0.000012 deg. It hits laughable again.
And, since temperature has been found to rise before CO2, and I am not surprised you know about this, it is ludicrous to assume all natural factors are gone and we drive the climate. I am surprised that you pretend that it is more complicated (without explaining) when the facts say that it is simple. There is a clear, nearly linear, relationship between the temperature of the oceans and the atmospheric CO2.
See: "Oceans are the main regulators of carbon dioxide" by L Endersbee
If CO2 was driving the climate, CO2 would rise, air T would rise, and then the oceans would warm. Instead, we see the oceans cool, the atmosphere cools almost in sync with the oceans, and then, lo and behold, the CO2 drops. It's called Henry's Law of gas solubility and it is indeed simple.
The alarmist camp would like to pretend that CO2 was historically low and we have raised it, and support their position by discounting essentially all direct chemical measurement over the last 180 years, but they cannot change the facts that CO2 was high (450 ppm) in the 1940s, even hit 550 a few times and dropped with a 5-8 year lag when the climate began to cool. High CO2 times in the 1800s were also detected by direct measurements and ice cores show that CO2 ranged to 600-700 ppm and even hit 2400 occasionally. It only became politically correct to ignore (arbitrarily discount) ALL high measurements, whether they followed a noticeable trend or not, as erroneous ("variable") after 1985 when AGW became a political agenda and a hot funding item.
See: "180 YEARS OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 GAS ANALYSIS BY CHEMICAL METHODS" by Ernst-Georg Beck
People like to denigrate his work, because they ignore all direct measurements, but they always attack the man when they cannot attack the facts. His work is good.
The IPCC also bases their world on the idea that CO2 has a half-life of 200+ years to claim that our emissions are accumulating, even from the 1800s, but it is quite clear that the real half-life is 5.4 years, a much faster turnover, evidenced clearly by the seasonal changes seen in the Mauna Loa CO2 data.
See: "Carbon cycle modelling and the residence time of natural and anthropogenic atmospheric CO2: on the construction of the "Greenhouse Effect Global Warming" dogma." by Tom V. Segalstad
I love the idiotic idea that CO2 will acidify the oceans and dissolve the coral reefs. As a marine biologist , I know that coral reefs love CO2 and warmth, they deal well with any supposed changes in pH - life will find a way. The oceans are a huge buffer system, more complex than many know, which would take a huge acid insult, which CO2 doubling is not, to overwhelm. pH is only a problem in distilled water on a lab bench.
See: "Atmospheric Global Warming and CO2: a critical review, 2nd revised edition" by
Jaworowski, Segalstad and Histal
As a chemist, I know that CO2 is part of an equilibrium of CO2 - H2CO3 - HCO3-1 - CO3-2 - CaCO3(s) and, as an equilibrium, Le Chatelier's Principle says that when you add to one side of an equilibrium, it must shift towards the other side. Here. it will lead to more CaCO3 precipitation. In addition, warming waters also makes CACO3 less soluble, not more. And the two H+ released by this system is a product and cannot in any way hinder this effect - it is part of the equilibrium. Only an outside addition of H+ can change this. CO2 is harmless, it is food. pH is irrelevant. This is ignoring, of course, that ocean life has been around for 600 million years and for most of this time CO2 was 5-10 times higher than now and the Cliffs of Dover were built. No problem.
The silliness is that below 200 ppm plants starve for CO2 - we should be trying to stay away from being even marginally close to this crisis, true crisis, point. Horticulturists regularly give indoor plants 1000 ppm to make them more lush and grow faster. They also are more efficient in using water and nutrients. High CO2 is all good for us and the plants.
Furthermore, photosynthesis is an alkalizing process and raises the ocean pH - it can reach 10-11 during a sunny day in an estuary or bay, dangerously high for some organisms.
The bottom line is that I pursued and researched all of the claims I could find of the alarmist camp and eventually began to wonder why none, not one, of their claims ever proved true. First, I realized, finally, that a key reason that the claims failed was that we are cooling and the claims must be wrong as there always had to be another real answer, as it was not warming. Duh! I also realized that the alarmists were systematically trimming data, falsifying it outright, and misrepresenting data or observations and blaming it on warming, even when half the time was due to human mismanagement of resources or the environment.
Look up the science related to DDT and you will find that there was no real science saying that DDT was bad for anything but insects. The bald eagle population grew by 25% while DDT was in peak use. The Audobon Society reported significant increases in quite a number of bird populations. The decision to ban DDT was unilateral (and undefended) by the head of the EPA as it was his way to give the environmental movement a huge boost in power. As a result, the environmentalists have killed roughly 500 million people by fostering malaria since the ban. They saw DDT as bad as it allowed people to live in 3rd world countries - "better dead than procreating wildly."
See: "100 things you should know about DDT" by J. Gordon Edwards and Steven Milloy
So, the reason why I find these discussions amusing is that there are so many flaws and the discussion is so extensive over an effective and real non-issue.
With all due respect,
Capt. C Higley, PhD