Carbon Dioxide: Utterly Useless in ‘Trapping Heat’ or ‘Delaying Cooling’

Ask a climate academic which, if ANY, gas has great power to ‘trap heat’ and you will be told ‘carbon dioxide, you idiot!’ This is fake news, junk science. Ask an applied scientist the same question and you will be told, ‘no gas can trap heat – it’s physically impossible!’

‘But, but….there is 160 years of climate science (e.g. Fourier, Tyndall, etc) to say it is so!’ comes the retort from the climate clowns and their revisionism of history.

This typifies the delusion, the utter lack of joined up thinking among the corrupt and ill-informed in academia who live in reality-lite ivory towers. Do you remember that famous line from Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman? “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

Those trained in the ‘hard’ sciences know the score.  It is why Nobel Prize winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever and others decry man-made global warming. They have disdain for those in the ‘soft’ earth sciences who shy away from the traditional methods of scientific inquiry: weighing the empirical evidence, testing hypotheses, using real materials, actual measurements. Government academics would rather play on their GIGO toy computer models instead because here the answers are tweaked to fit the questions.

Harold Lewis, arguably one of America’s greatest physicists, famously derided man-made climate change as “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist,” and that the science Establishment has “accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.” Lewis added that academics “would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst.”

So let’s see why Lewis and the growing mass of scientists who ‘deny’ climate academia say this:

First off, let us be clear on the scale of the issue: in the totality of atmospheric gases carbon dioxide comprises a really tiny 0.04 percent (that’s like adding a glass of water to an already full Olympic size swimming pool!).

‘But, but, just a small dose of arsenic will kill you –  proof that even small amounts of some substances can be overwhelmingly powerful!’ say the doomsayers.

Yes, indeed. That’s the point. If CO2 was the gas equivalent to arsenic – or any other such deadly poison – it’s going to be a hugely useful product, not for poisoning, but for insulating; if it ‘traps’ heat as powerfully as per the claims of government ‘experts.’

The chemical industry equivalent of Elon Musk would surely be pioneering this ‘gas of all the gases’ as the next Big Thing in powerful insulators…. if the ‘experts’ from academia were correct.

But reality bursts that bubble –  if we let it.  Quite plainly, there are not ANY ‘heat trapping’ gas products taking such advantage of carbon dioxide. The truth is the world has suffered over 30 years of a Big Lie. ‘CO2 is dangerous [poisonous]’ they say. But in horticulture tons of CO2 get routinely pumped into greenhouses every day (creating indoor air levels many times higher than in the atmosphere). All because carbon dioxide is nature’s primary plant food.

By the way, those higher indoor concentrations do not raise temperature, but they do hugely boost crop yields.

Then we have that key claim in the greenhouse gas ‘theory’ –  that CO2 keeps our planet ‘33 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be.’  The academics tells us that ‘back radiation’ is how carbon dioxide gets heat ‘trapped’ (or delayed from leaving the atmosphere).

But let’s allow an applied scientist, Joseph E Postma (earning a living as a rocket scientist) to give us the perspective from the real world:

Just because the atmosphere, a cool gas, creates an absorption spectrum as the IR light from the surface passes through it, does not mean that the cool atmospheric gas is heating the warmer surface. How would it heat the warmer surface, we say. Well, they say with “backradiation”.

Let’s look more closely: There are two ways to increase an object’s temperature in thermodynamics (and there is no other method outside of thermodynamics): via work, and heat. Backradiation does no work since work is a mechanical process like friction or like an adiabatic change, and so, backradiation would therefore have to function as heat if it were to cause the warmer surface to become warmer still; backradiation can not function as heat since heat can only flow from hot to cold, and cannot reverse and flow from cold to hot. Heat flow is irreversible and thermodynamics textbooks go on at great length about that.

As to the alternative sophistical argument which tries to avoid and skirt around the fact about heat flow, i.e., that backradiation “slows heat flow from the surface, thus leading to it to become warmer”, well, this is simple sophistry. Heat flow is not a conserved quantity and indeed goes to zero, tends to zero, automatically seeks zero, as thermal equilibrium is approached and achieved. The conserved quantity is energy, and energy is not always heat, but heat is always energy. Remember that: energy is not always heat, but heat is always energy. Look at this diagram:

The two source curves are energy, but only their difference is heat, which means that neither of the source curves are fully heat. Either source curve is fully energy, but neither source curve is fully heat; only their difference is heat, and this difference goes to zero as the heat flow from the warmer one to the cooler one warms the cooler one to bring it to thermal equilibrium with the warmer one.

Remember the basic radiant heat flow equation:

Q = P2 – P1

where P is the power from two different objects, and Q is the heat flow. Q goes to zero to achieve thermal equilibrium, and so is not a conserved quantity, but both of the P’s still fully exist and are still emitting their full value.

Therefore, the warmer one is not emitting less energy, and therefore “having to increase in temperature”. The warmer one is always still emitting its energy, it is simply that its energy doesn’t transfer as heat to the cooler one once the cooler one warms to equilibrium. The value of the heat flow is not the conserved quantity.

Perhaps you can distill that.

But look…thermodynamics is the most poorly widely understood field of physics. Either these people are so bad at science and physics that they just can’t help but to create sophistry with their attempt to do science, like a bull in a China shop…it just ain’t gonna work out, or they’re actually really evil despicable people that are happy to have people believing in flat Earth physics and inversions of thermodynamic theory, etc etc.

Read more by Joseph E Postma at climateofsophistry.com

 

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