The Science of Global Warming Free Dating, Singles and Personals

The Science of Global Warming Posted: 8/19/2008 9:26:57 AM
It is a shame that this forum does not allow for a graphical explanation of the characteristics of CO2 to explain the problem with the "green house gas" label that biases so many people's understanding of the physics. Gases are, for the most part, transparent. Due to their molecular structure, at specific "colors" of light, the gasses are not transparent. This is the basis for many instruments' abilities to identify gasses. CO2 has some specific bands at which it absorbs colors in the infrared range that we would feel as radiated heat. Still, for the vast majority of the infrared light range, CO2 is transparent. One basic physical property of anything that absorbes light is that it also radiates that light just as easily. Its not a one way street. When dealing with absorbtion in the infrared range, instruments are challenged because everything around them and their internal parts are radiating infrared light depending on the temperature and its "color". Technologies a couple of hundred years ago or even a hundred years ago were not up to this challenge. It was in this time frame that the "green house gas" concept was born. The label's origin had more to do with plant biology and their association with green houses than physics. It's not only misleading, it implies an effect that is opposite to the physics. For the second lesson concerning the physics of a green house itself. It is the glass that is responsible for a green house's heat, not any gas that is inside. The gasses that are inside a green house actually help cool the plants, not warm them. The glass REFLECTS a wide spectrum of infrared light keeping the contents of the green house warm. Gasses that are in the green house are warmed by contact by the plants and through convection carry heat to the glass and transfer it. There the glass transfers heat to the outside air but this process is slow. CO2, being able to absorbe some colors of infrared light actually warms more quickly increasing the heat loss through the rest of the convection process. In effect, CO2 has an opposite, although slight, effect from warming! Expanding the green house model to the planet, the closest thing we have to glass is clouds. They do reflect infrared light but they are not "sealed" like glass. Gasses such as CO2 mix freely. The CO2, being an absorber of some colors of infrared light will warm slightly faster than other atmospheric gasses and mix with the atmosphere carrying this heat up beyond the clouds. This is where the radiation effect of CO2 comes into play. It can now radiate its heat to the cold of space. In effect, the CO2 has a slight cooling effect on the planet, not a warming effect! So how much CO2 is in the atmosphere? Not much and it has been declining ever since life began on this ball of scum covered magma. The processes where CO2 is captured is easily observed in coral reefs but think in terms of a billion years of this process. The process results in limestone now very common in the top layers of our magam scum environment. The chemical formula is CaCo3 due to CO2 being combined in its molecule. In another post, I mentioned the majority of former CO2 in the atmosphere was now trapped in coral reefs. What I meant was the same process of coral reefs has trapped this CO2 in the form of limestone. Most of earth's CO2 (90%+) is now part of this limestone (calcite). So how many of the climatologists are experts in the chemistry of geology and the ancient marine biology that made it? I would even question their ability to conceptualize a billion years. In many science classes, we were taught that there were three main gasses in the atmosphere. Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon Dioxide. The reality is the Argon is more common now the CO2 but probably not by a long shot in the ancient past. The reason we have so much "fossil fuel" is that with the abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere many millions of years ago, life on the scum exploded in wild abandon. It has been declining along with the CO2 that life depends on. Extinction events are simply points in time that have more effect on evolution than abundance. Why didn't the atmosphere incinerate all this life since it was so rich in CO2? The answer is that CO2 does not warm the atmosphere. The infrared absorption "fingerprint" of CO2 takes very little gas to exhibit itself. Within tens of feet, at atmospheric densities, the entire absorption of infrared light that CO2 will absorb is complete. With its free mixing with the atmosphere and radiation of these same bands of infrared light into space, there may actually be a global warming of earth in the past billion years due to the REDUCTION in atmospheric CO2 by life itself in that period. Is this relative short term global warming real? Most likely true but its ain't got squat to do with CO2. We are living on floating scum on a ball of magma that drifts around. We have a lot of water that does all sorts of things in a whole bunch of cycles both long and short. The physical property of water loosing density as it freezes causes a whole array of wonderful things like floating sea ice. We have salts that disolve in the water changing its freezing temperature and density in even more wonderful ways. These properties result in engines powering massive ocean currents that thrive on ice stored temperature differences depleting them and then waiting for their recharge (ice age) to start again. We are but tiny specks in this vast complex system. If anyone wishes to argue real physics instead of anecdotal observations, I welcome it. I have yet to see anthing from the AGW religion that is not based on anecdotal observations, although often elaborate, to prove their theory. What is most disturbing is the political power grabs that have resulted and their environmental and human destruction from the politics itself. Cite whatever papers that have been voted by back room bureaucrats as proof all you want. The truth is in the physics, not the politics. You can choose to be one of the herd of "believers" or "denialists" or you can choose to understand the physics for yourself. Why so many choose the former is depressing but I will keep trying.

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