Solving climate crisis will require a total transformation of global energy

Oh! So, our little hero, CO2, keeps the Earth's surface from being "covered in ice" and becoming "33 degrees Celsius cooler" (i.e., a factor of 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit less)...?

But, but, but -- the big, bug-eyed alarm from the militant Green-faction has consistently been that -- because of the villain, CO2, we're in danger of horrendous 'global warming', that is causing the polar caps to melt, and all the major coastal cities in the world to become submerged beneath centimeters of sea water, very, very, very, uh, SOON! . Well -- Which is it...?! These 'experts' over there in the hyperliberal, 'woke' Left need to get their story straight.

Hint: let's devote our focus and effort on getting rid of the cubic-miles (or equivalent kilometers) of TRASH out of the Earth's oceans before we worry about coastal cities drowning in the anticipated monstrous rising sea levels....

 

Because the sun was unusually inactive for many decades before that, in the LIA, and then returned to more normal levels of activity for several decades in the 19th century, and was then unusually active for several decades in the 20th century up until several years ago.

But that "conclusion" is not actually supported by fact and logic.

If you refuse to know that it is the sun.

Because they are based on false assumptions.

And ignore the fact that water vapor is already saturating absorption in those bands.

<William Connolley's Wikipedia pseudoscience snipped>

Wikipedia is completely in thrall to anti-fossil-fuel hysteria, and all its climate-related articles are ruthlessly edited, censored, and falsified by William Connolley to remove facts that disprove the anti-CO2 narrative.

The effect at the top of the atmosphere cannot propagate back down to the surface because there is so much water vapor in the way.

Classic fake science.

<more pseudoscience snipped>

 

The fact that there is a hypothetical threshold effect where a small amount of CO2 (a much lower concentration than has ever actually existed in the atmosphere) causes a runaway positive feedback loop that melts frozen oceans does not mean each additional increment of CO2 has the same average effect. Lighting one match can start a forest fire, but that doesn't mean adding another match to the fire will double its size.

I don't think those are unreasonable at all. Look at what near-unanimous dishonesty has accomplished in economics.

 

I can't make any sense out of your logic. There is no contradiction in that trace gases are preventing the Earth's surface from being frozen
and at the same time a large enough increase in those trace gases could cause the polar ice caps to melt and submerge many coastal
cities. Also, this isn't going to happen within this century and the scientific community has never said that it would happen soon. What could
happen soon is that we may pass a threshold within a few decades that will destabilize West Antarctica and cause perhaps a couple of
meters of sea level rise from West Antarctica that will occur over many hundreds of years. Greenland could also be destabilized before
the end of this century. These are predictions that come from mainstream climate scientists.

 

You are taking a position that increasing the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide above pre-industrial levels won't cause any significant warming
at the Earth's surface. This has been contradicted by radiation transfer theory and models for many decades. There are thousands of absorption lines
for atmospheric carbon dioxide and that number increases as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases. Atmospheric carbon dioxide can transfer
kinetic energy through collisions with nitrogen and oxygen, thus warming the atmosphere. Atmospheric carbon dioxide can also transfer energy directly
to water vapor through emission of photons, so atmospheric carbon dioxide doesn't have to directly emit photons that are absorbed by the Earth's surface in order
to warm the Earth's surface. Atmospheric carbon dioxide can increase the energy of water vapor and water vapor can increase the energy of the Earth's surface.

The report below shows calculated radiative forcings of trace gases. Figure 2a shows an approximately logarithmic dependence for radiative forcing vs.
CO2 concentration. Those radiative forcings are referenced against a 389 ppm baseline for CO2. There is no flattening of the radiative forcing when
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increase; no indication of a saturation effect. The curves become more linear when atmospheric ppm values
are very low such as with nitrous oxide. This is well established science that virtually all climate scientists accept.

Radiative forcing of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide: A significant revision of the methane radiative forcing - Etminan - 2016 - Geophysical Research Letters - Wiley Online Library

The RF calculations use the Oslo line-by-line (OLBL) code which was described in Myhre et al. [2006]. OLBL has contributed, as a benchmark model, to several radiation code intercomparisons including Forster et al. [2005, 2011], Myhre et al. [2009], and Randles et al. [2013].




Figure 2
Comparison of OLBL radiative forcing with the new simple expressions for (a) CO2, (b) CH4, and (c) N2O. The forcings are relative to 389 ppm for CO2, 1800 ppb for CH4, and 323 ppb for N2O; the effect of overlapping gases is included using these same mixing ratios. (d) Illustration of the effect of the overlap on forcings for OLBL (symbols) and simple expressions (lines); the difference between the forcing for the highest and lowest concentrations of the overlapping gas is plotted: N2O overlap (525 minus 200 ppb), CH4 overlap (3500 minus 340 ppb), and CO2 overlap (2000 minus 180 ppm). The effect of CH4 and CO2 overlaps of N2O are almost the same for these choices of mixing ratio, so that these lines are almost coincident on the plot.


Figure 3a compares the RF derived from old and updated expressions for 1750–2011; for the new expressions, the shaded area shows the radiative uncertainty discussed in section 3.4. It shows that for CO2 the RF using the old and new expressions differs by only about 1%. As anticipated from the results in section 3, this difference is larger for the other two gases; in 2011 it is about 2% for N2O forcing and 25% for CH4 forcing.




Figure 3
Radiative forcing of CO2, N2O, and CH4 concentration change: (a) from 1755 to 2011 and (b) from 2000 to 2300 (using RCP8.5 concentrations from Meinshausen et al. [2011]) relative to preindustrial value (280 ppm of CO2, 275 ppb of N2O, and 750 ppb of CH4) using old and new simplified expressions. Shading for the new expressions indicates the estimated radiative uncertainty in the forcing (see section 3.4).

 

The radiative forcing calculations by radiation transfer code shown above includes a simulation of the entire atmosphere including water vapor,
clouds, and albedo. A large number of simulations were done for various configurations of clouds and solar zenith angle.

 

Mike, you and I are roughly the same age... so it's likely that you (like me and other Boomers) got a fairly good education. Remember Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" from back in 2006? Refresher: https://scienceline.org/2008/12/ask-rettner-sea-level-rise-al-gore-an-inconvenient-truth/ . According to liberal Democrat Al Gore and others who pontificated about how disastrous "global warming" was, we should have already seen sea levels rise about 20 feet by now! It was all nonsense -- and I think you are right -- we aren't going to see much of any rise in the sea levels during the rest of this entire century.

What I've objected to is the absolute HYSTERIA that we've seen erupting everywhere liberal-radicals congregate, telling us that it is the evil monster CARBON DIOXIDE that's to blame for nearly everything that's wrong with the planet. And, that, too, is nonsense.

"By the end of this century"...? I sincerely hope that by New Year's Day, January 2100, mankind will have ceased using oil for anything but lubrication, and that we won't be burning natural gas, coal, or anything else. Our ultimate goal should be hydrogen fusion, because, as I'll bet you know, it is the 'ultimate energy source', producing unlimited amounts of energy with no (NO) pollution at all! That is where we will eventually put all our R&D money, and that is going to be our only energy resource as long as we have oceans with the two molecules that are necessary for the process. You and I will be dead long before this happens, but let's hope that the relentless 'dumbing down' in our schools doesn't drag the whole process out any longer than 2100....

 

Al Gore was misleading his audience in that documentary. It could have been out of ignorance or he could have been exaggerating.
"His narration tells the audience that, due to global warming, melting ice could release enough water to cause at 20-foot rise in sea level “in the near future.”

Sea levels could rise 20 feet in several hundred years or by 1000 years. Once enough carbon dioxide is dissolved into the oceans and enters the atmosphere,
a tipping point could be reached whereby the meltdown of Greenland and parts of Antarctica are unstoppable. Some scientists say we are already there, but
that is a minority opinion.

 

This physics forum discusses why adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will cause the Earth's surface to continue to warm.

Atmospheric absorbance of CO2 and impact of increaseing concentration | Physics Forums

If the transmittance of IR to space is already zero in CO2 bands, how can adding more CO2 change anything?

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert in Infrared radiation and planetary temperature (2011):
Source https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...d-impact-of-increaseing-concentration.979447/

The path to the present understanding of the effect of carbon dioxide on climate was not without its missteps. Notably, in 1900 Knut Ångström (son of Anders Ångström, whose name graces a unit of length widely used among spectroscopists) argued in opposition to his fellow Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius that increasing CO2 could not affect Earth’s climate. Ångström claimed that IR absorption by CO2 was saturated in the sense that, for those wavelengths CO2 could absorb at all, the CO2 already present in Earth’s atmosphere was absorbing essentially all of the IR. With regard to Earth like atmospheres, Ångström was doubly wrong. First, modern spectroscopy shows that CO2 is nowhere near being saturated. Ångström’s laboratory experiments were simply too inaccurate to show the additional absorption in the wings of the 667-cm−1 CO2 feature that follows upon increasing CO2. But even if CO2 were saturated in Ångström’s sense —as indeed it is on Venus— his argument would nonetheless be fallacious. The Venusian atmosphere as a whole may be saturated with regard to IR absorption, but the radiation only escapes from the thin upper portions of the atmosphere that are not saturated. Hot as Venus is, it would become still hotter if one added CO2 to its atmosphere. A related saturation fallacy, also popularized by Ångström, is that CO2 could have no influence on radiation balance because water vapor already absorbs all the IR that CO2 would absorb. Earth’s very moist, near-surface tropical atmosphere is nearly saturated in that sense, but the flaw in Ångström’s argument is that radiation in the portion of the spectrum affected by CO2 escapes to space from the cold, dry upper portions of the atmosphere, not from the warm, moist lower portions. Also, as displayed in the inset to figure 2, the individual water-vapor and CO2 spectral lines interleave but do not totally overlap. That structure limits the competition between CO2 and water vapor.

Gilbert N. Plass in Carbon Dioxide and the Climate (1956):
Source https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...d-impact-of-increaseing-concentration.979447/

The fact that water vapor absorbs to some extent in the same spectral interval as carbon dioxide is the basis for the usual objection to the carbon dioxide theory. According to this argument the water vapor absorption is so large that there would be virtually no change in the outgoing radiation if the carbon dioxide concentration should change. However, this conclusion was based on early, very approximate treatments of the very complex problem of the calculation of the infrared flux in the atmosphere. Recent and more accurate calculations that take into account the detailed structure of the spectra of these two gases show that they are relatively independent of one another in their influence on the infrared absorption. There are two main reasons for this result: (1) there is no correlation between the frequencies of the spectral lines for carbon dioxide and water vapor and so the lines do not often overlap because of nearly coincident positions for the spectral lines; (2) the fractional concentration of water vapor falls off very rapidly with height whereas carbon dioxide is nearly uniformly distributed. Because of this last fact, even if the water vapor absorption were larger than that of carbon dioxide in a certain spectral interval at the surface of the Earth, at only a short distance above the ground the carbon dioxide absorption would be considerably larger than that of the water vapor. Careful estimates show that the temperature changes given above for carbon dioxide would not be reduced by more than 20 per cent because of water vapor absorption. One further objection has been raised to the carbon dioxide theory: the atmosphere is completely opaque at the center of the carbon dioxide band and therefore there is no change in the absorption as the carbon dioxide amount varies. This is entirely true for a spectral interval about one micron wide on either side of the center of the carbon dioxide band. However, the argument neglects the hundreds of spectral lines from carbon dioxide that are outside this interval of complete absorption. The change in absorption for a given variation in carbon dioxide amount is greatest for a spectral interval that is only partially opaque; the temperature variation at the surface of the Earth is determined by the change in absorption of such intervals.

 

Except, of course, for the view of the Chairman of the Racah Center for Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and IBM Einstein Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study:

Climate debate at the Cambridge Union - a 10 minute summary of the main problems with the standard alarmist polemic

". . . In fact, there is no single piece of evidence that proves that a given amount of CO2 increase should cause a large increase in temperature. You may say, “just a second, we saw Al Gore’s movie, in which he presented a clear correlation between CO2 and temperature from Antarctic ice cores”. Well, what he didn’t tell you is that one generally sees in the ice cores that CO2 lags the temperature by typically a few hundred years, not vice versa! The simple truth is that Al Gore simply showed us how the amount of CO2 dissolved as carbonic acid in the oceans changes with temperature. As a matter of fact, over geological time scales, there were huge variations in the CO2 (a factor of 10) and they have no correlation whatsoever with the temperature. 450 million years ago there was 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere but more extensive glaciations. . . . "

 

Simulations are based on assumptions. In this case, on known-false ones.

But not for realistic assumptions.

 

Correct.

But not by the results of empirical experiments in which CO2 is added to typical sea-level air.

But the absorption of IR radiation in samples of atmospheric air does not.

But not significantly, probably not even measurably.

Assuming there is no water vapor in the air.

But not against actual samples of surface atmospheric air.

That is an incorrect description of the data, which are just for different concentrations of CO2, and not based on adding CO2 to actual atmospheric air, whose IR absorption is saturated.

It just doesn't describe the actual surface atmosphere.

<yawn> "Calculations." "Model." "Code." But no actual measurements of the effect of adding CO2 to actual surface atmospheric air.

All of which assumes there is no H2O in the air.

As above: lots of pseudoscientific bluster, but no attempt to account for the effect of water vapor's IR absorption, and no actual measurements of the effect of adding CO2 to actual surface atmospheric air.

Fail.

 

Not everyone agrees.

Abstract
We present detailed line-by-line radiation transfer calculations, which were performed under different atmospheric conditions for the most important greenhouse gases water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone. Particularly cloud effects, surface temperature variations, and humidity changes as well as molecular lineshape effects are investigated to examine their specific influence on some basic climatologic parameters like the radiative forcing, the long wave absorptivity, and back-radiation as a function of an increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. These calculations are used to assess the CO2 global warming by means of an advanced two-layer climate model and to disclose some larger discrepancies in calculating the climate sensitivity. Including solar and cloud effects as well as all relevant feedback processes our simulations give an equilibrium climate sensitivity of = 0.7°C (temperature increase at doubled CO2) and a solar sensitivity of = 0.17°C (at 0.1% increase of the total solar irradiance). Then CO2 contributes 40% and the Sun 60% to global warming over the last century.

Radiation Transfer Calculations and Assessment of ... - Hindawi
https://www.hindawi.com › journals › ijas

by H Harde · Cited by 18 — We present detailed line-by-line radiation transfer calculations, ... warming as well as the impact of solar variations on the climate (Harde-2014 [16.

 

And it is antiscientific propaganda.

Of which Pierrehumbert is about to take a few.

No, he was objectively correct, and Pierrehumbert is wrong.

No it doesn't. It only shows that in the laboratory, spectroscopy can distinguish narrow spectral features that the conditions of the actual atmosphere smudge out.

No, Pierrehumbert is simply lying. The additional absorption is too small to affect the measurement of IR transmittance in actual surface atmospheric air.

No, Pierrehumbert's argument is.

Which are effectively irrelevant to surface temperature.

Or any other gas.

That is a fact, not a fallacy. Pierrehumbert is lying again.

That is a flaw in Pierrehumbert's argument, not Angstrom's, because the conditions at the final emission altitude do not significantly affect the surface. Adding CO2 just changes the emission altitude and temperature, not the surface temperature.

So the overlap is 99% rather than 100%. So what?

So now we get Plass's stupid garbage, too?

Which is known to be true, as CO2 was an order of magnitude more abundant in the atmosphere in the distant past, yet the earth still maintained stable temperatures both above and below current levels for millions of years.

No, it was based on actual measurements of IR transmittance in actual samples of atmospheric air with and without various amounts of added CO2.

In the lab. Not in the actual atmosphere, whose conditions smudge the spectral lines.

Obviously there is no "correlation." Why would there be? That is nothing but irrelevant pseudoscientific gibberish because actual absorption in the atmosphere is not confined to narrow laboratory spectral lines.

Also irrelevant, because the effect on climate is at the earth's surface, not the emission altitude or the atmosphere above where water vapor condenses out.

By "short distance" he means several km, which is where water vapor becomes scarcer than CO2.

Estimates. Not measurements.

Which are, however, irrelevant because they account for so little energy, and their absorption is already saturated by water vapor and other gases.

And measurement of IR absorption by actual samples of surface atmospheric air with varying amounts of CO2 added and removed show that its effect on actual IR absorption is derisory.

 

This article was published in a journal that no one reads and is garbage. The climate model has 2 layers: the ground is one layer and the atmosphere is treated as a single layer. Climate models need more layers. The oceans are neglected in the climate model. How can CO2 and the sun account for 100% of the warming over the last century when other greenhouse gases like methane nitrous oxide, and halocarbons have increased and must account for some of that warming? Hermann Harde's results arecontradicted by many other studies.

"In this contribution we will also retrace the main steps of the IPCC’s preferred accounting system and compare this with our own advanced two-layer climate model (2LCM), which is especially appropriate to calculate the influence of increasing CO2 concentrations on global warming as well as the impact of solar variations on the climate (Harde-2014 [16]). This model describes the atmosphere and the ground as two layers acting simultaneously as absorbers and Planck radiators, and it includes additional heat transfer between these layers due to convection and evaporation."

 

Every climate scientist knows that atmospheric CO2 lags the surface temperature change by many hundreds of years when one looks at the transition
between glacial and interglacial periods. That was predicted before it was corroborated by ice core data.

Just by reading the quoted part of the article, I am able to determine that it is propaganda. The graphs shown in Al Gore's movie do show a strong correlation
of Earth's surface temperature and greenhouse gas concentrations (carbon dioxide and methane). There are other examples besides the 400,000 year period
that indicate the importance of changing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the Earth's climate. One has to consider the fact that sun was cooler in the
past and also the positions of the continents have changed as well. I don't doubt that the person who wrote this is fully aware of the truth and is just trying to
fool the ignorant.

5. Why does CO2 lag temperature? – Climate Change Action Team


(climatecat.eu)



Figure 3: Vostok ice core records for carbon dioxide concentration and temperature change. Figure adopted from skepticalscience.com.

The study shows that the initial stages of increasing temperatures after the last ice age were triggered by the Milanković cycles. This initiated a reaction chain, leading to the heating of the oceans, which then released CO2. With the increasing greenhouse effect, temperatures started to increase and the emission of CO2 from the oceans into the atmosphere accumulated. The time lag between CO2 and temperature is caused by a temporal offset between the oceans heating up and the constant release of oceanic CO2. Through this accumulating effect, CO2 became the primary driver of temperature during the glacial-interglacial warming. The increasing CO2 levels then become both, the cause and effect of further warming. This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation.

 

Also everywhere else in the ice core record, as the correlation between CO2 and past temperature is much better than between CO2 and future temperature. This proves that temperature affects CO2 much more than CO2 affects temperature, so CO2 cannot be a significant driver of temperature.

By people who were willing to know the fact that temperature affects CO2 much more than vice versa.

No; you realized you had no credible facts or logic to offer, and decided you had better try a Poisoning the Well fallacy.

But they trail temperature, not lead it.

No, vice versa.

Without reading further, I know with 100% certainty that this will be propaganda, not science:

As an irrelevant by-product of the heating that was occurring anyway.

No, the increase in the greenhouse effect was derisory.

Because heating causes release of CO2, not vice versa.

No, that's just a bald falsehood contrary to established fact.

No, only the effect.

As long as you pretend the strong positive ice-albedo feedback does not exist.

 

A doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, 280 ppm to 560 ppm, only increases the downward longwave radiation by about 3.7 watts per square meter.
That is a very small number relative to amount of downward flux that initially existed during the pre-industrial era (a little over 1%). However, this small amount of
additional downward flux is amplified by the water vapor positive feedback as well as a decreased planetary albedo feedback.

The results below are calculated from line-by-line radiation transfer code. The carbon dioxide absorption band is centered around a wavenumber
of 667/cm and one can see that the band widens as the CO2 concentration increases from 280 ppm to 560 ppm. The peripheral areas of the absorption band
account for virtually all of the enhanced greenhouse effect. The altitude is at 16.9 km where there is no water vapor and carbon dioxide is thin enough
to radiate energy out to space. As more carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, more energy is radiated out to space at a lower temperature.
This creates a radiation imbalance at the top of the atmosphere. The Earth's surface must warm to restore the radiation imbalance.

I borrowed this graph from thescienceofdoom.com.
CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? – Part Eight – Saturation | The Science of Doom

"You might find that the series Visualizing Atmospheric Radiation is a help.

I wrote it sometime after this series, with the aid of a line-by-line model (in MATLAB) to calculate all kinds of interesting results.

Results include demonstrating how “saturation” is something that is so wavelength dependent – see Visualizing Atmospheric Radiation – Part Seven – CO2 increases, which includes graphs like this one:"

 

I simply said not everyone agrees. Not sure calling the paper "garbage" is an actual contribution to the discussion.

 

Propaganda? Hmmm. Must be pretty high grade if he presented it at Cambridge.

 

And only at high altitude, not at the surface. The increased downward LWR is all absorbed by water vapor and other GHGs long before it reaches the ground.

No, there is no credible empirical basis for that claim. The water vapor feedback is derisory, maybe even negative. It is simply assumed to be absurdly large because that assumption is necessary to make climate models sensitive enough to CO2.

There is no credible empirical basis for that claim, either.

But from a greater altitude. That is crucial.

No, the radiation balance is unaffected. All that changes is the equilibrium altitude and temperature of the average final IR emission to outer space.

False, as proved above. The effect is confined to altitudes above where water vapor all condenses out. The earth's surface is essentially unaffected.

 

https://scitechdaily.com/fusion-bre...usion-ignition-at-national-ignition-facility/

https://interestingengineering.com/a-major-breakthrough-in-fusion-reactor-development

 

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of coal has been greatly exaggerated.

IEA: Global Coal Power Generation to Reach a New High in 2022
Andy May
By Andy May It’s official, the IEA believes that coal-powered electricity generation will rise 9% in 2021 to an all-time high, once the final numbers are in. For the details…

 

Throughout the 'Third World' especially, they'll be burning coal like mad -- and we gullible dumb-asses here in 'the West' will continue to be subjected to even more endless guilt-trips about it and told by the radical, fringe-Left that WE should have to pay 'carbon taxes' because of the dreaded presence of (shudder!) Carbon Dioxide... which makes up a whopping total of 0.04% of the Earth's atmosphere!

We can all dance this dance, over and over, until we finally decide to focus all our efforts and R&D money on hydrogen fusion. Everything else is a mere time-wasting, money-wasting distraction compared to that!

 

No, it is certainly not high grade. The Cambridge Union is a debating and free speech society in Cambridge.

Cambridge Union - Wikipedia
"The Cambridge Union receives no formal funding from the University and raises funds for event expenses and building maintenance through membership fees and sponsorship."