Loose Thinking
“If all other things remain equal, it’s clear that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will warm the planet,” she told the committee.
This is Professor Judith Curry speaking to a committee in the House of Representatives in the USA.
Curry certainly has the credentials. She is a professor and chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She also runs a side business as a private weather forecaster. But she doesn’t deny the basic principles of climate change.
“If all other things remain equal, it’s clear that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will warm the planet,” she told the committee.
Sorry, Professor Judith, it is not at all clear, not by any means.
If all what other things remain equal?
In the topography of the Earth and Oceans nothing could be more unequal and uneven. And as for the atmosphere it is a constant flux of varying barometric pressures, of clouds and clear skies, of winds, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, of dry savannahs and impenetrable swamps. Nowhere on the earth or in the atmosphere is there anything that is remotely equal. Inequality rules both the day and the night.
So let us now take the second part of her statement above: it’s clear that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will warm the planet,” she told the committee.
Really? What? Like some giant toaster in the sky?
No peer-reviewed scientific study of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has ever been published to show this trace gas can generate heat. So what could you possibly mean?
Of course, we all know those laboratory experiments from the year dot performed in test tubes which show correctly that CO2 absorbs infrared – it also emits just the same amount of infrared that it absorbs. So it is not actually doing any heating, is it? It is not heating the atmosphere and it is not heating the ground by that felonious “back radiation,” so beloved by an (influential) clique of government-funded climatologists.
No, this same CO2 does not generate heat, does it? Or am I mistaken? Sure it warms up, and likewise it cools down. It is a gas that reflects the surrounding temperature.
So you aver that this same CO2 warms the Planet. What? All of the Planet? Night and Day? The Earth, the Oceans and their depths, the crust of the earth, the mantle, and the four levels of the atmosphere?
Of course, you were kidding. You did not mean that. But then what exactly did you mean?
Ah!!!
Did you mean that CO2 acts somewhat like water vapour, that chief of the “greenhouse gases”? Did you really mean that like water vapour there is an insulating effect? Did you mean that it inhibits (or delays) heat loss? If that is what you meant – then why not say so?
Well, I grant you, there is something in that. We all know that after a hot day if the skies are clear the temperature will drop abruptly as in dry desert areas. And we also know that where it is humid the heat of the day will barely escape until dawn, as say in Jakarta.
But the question that I would put to Dr. Judith Curry is this: Why is the day time temperature of the Earth not as hot as the moon? If it were, then we would all fry to death by day and freeze to death by night?
If we consider this question and acknowledge that the incoming infrared from the Sun far exceeds the outgoing infrared from the Earth, what conclusion must we come to?
Yes, the only conclusion that is possible and that is logical is that Greenhouse Gases cool the Earth, that is to say they have a net cooling effect.
This is best explained by independent climate researcher Hans Schreuder in his paper ‘Greenhouse Gases cool the Earth.’
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