In fusion/fission the heavy elements were formed in stars from lighter elements under intense heat and pressure not unlike fossil fuels. The stars gave up energy to transform matter and when we produce fusion/fission we are simply releasing this same energy produced millions and millions of years ago in some far off star. Thus we can begin to see energy is energy, it is not created or destroyed only transformed.
The mass of a nucleus is less than the sum of it constituent nucleons. For the same number of free protons and neutrons as exist in a nucleus, the total mass of the individual nucleons is greater than that of the nucleus. The difference in mass between the products and sum is known as the mass defect. It is quite literally the physical manifestation of Einstein's mass-energy equation:
E2 = p2c2 + m2c4
The binding energy is the amount of energy required to break the nucleus into protons and neutrons again; the larger the binding energy, the more difficult it is. It can be considered a remnant of the Color Force (what used to be known as the Strong Force before quarks and gluons were discovered... the force which binds quarks via gluons inside a nucleon), extending outside the nucleon into inter-nucleon space. It is otherwise known as the Residual Strong Force, the Nuclear Force or the Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction.
Thus, stars do not "give up energy to transform matter", they transform energy from one form to another (remember, matter is merely another form of energy). A star trades gravitational potential energy (pressure) for nuclear binding energy, which generates higher atomic-weight atoms (via nuclear transmutation), neutrinos and photons (which generate heat).
As one goes up the Periodic Table, one finds that the nuclear binding energy comes closer and closer to the actual mass of the nucleons as one gets closer to iron.
Fe (iron) being at the bottom of the Segre Chart's Valley of Stability (the nuclear binding energy exactly equals the nucleon mass), no energy can be derived by either fissioning or fusing iron. Either one will require an energy input, and will thus result in nuclei with nucleons which are more tightly bound (less mass per nucleon).
The binding energy is associated with fusion and fission. Elements atomically lighter than Fe will release energy via fusion, while elements atomically heavier than Fe will release energy via fission.
Further, there is no evidence that CO2 causes global warming (remember, an efficient IR absorber is also an efficient IR emitter), and physics tells us that it causes cooling:
1} How increasing CO2 leads to an increased negative greenhouse effect in Antarctica
2} Cooling of Atmosphere Due to CO2 Emission
3}
Note that CO2 causes cooling throughout the entire depth of the atmosphere, except for a very slight amount of warming at the tropopause.
4} https://principia-scientific.org/the-four-known-scientific-ways-carbon-dioxide-cools-earth-s-climate/
The warmists have it exactly backward.
They have reversed cause and effect. I notice they tend to do this quite frequently. I sometimes wonder if they do so intentionally as means of advancing their political agenda.
They are arguing that photons which correspond to a black-body temperature of ~-80 C (193.15 K) are causing the atmosphere at an average temperature of ~14.85 C (288 K) to heat up. This violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
The warmists have constructed a very complex fantasy about how CO2 causes global warming... so complex that they probably never thought anyone would catch on to the very-well-hidden violation of 2Lot (2nd Law of Thermodynamics).
Let’s do a gedanken experiment:
—————
CO2’s ~15 micron absorption spectrum corresponds to a blackbody temperature of ~-80 C, which makes that an extremely low-energy (long wavelength) regime. It also happens to be a relatively energy-sparse region of the blackbody curve, given that there's not a lot of matter radiating at ~-80 C.
So which do you think is more likely:
1} That CO2 is absorbing extremely low-energy photons, increasing its vibrational quantum state (and thus its collisional radiationless transition probability... because remember, for collisional radiationless transition to have a very high probability, the molecule must be highly excited... as you can see from the UMLT monoatomic oxygen in this study...
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2006JA011736
...such that it’s transferring its vibrational quantum state energy to the translational kinetic energy of other molecules...
or...
2} Other molecules with a much higher-energy (shorter wavelength) absorption spectrum absorbing photons of a higher energy level than that which CO2 can absorb, becoming vibrationally excited then transferring that energy to and via collision with CO2, which then undergoes emission relaxation by emitting a 15 micron photon (as outlined in the study I cited prior:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2006JA011736
{HINT: #2 is the correct answer.}
In arguing for their position, the warmists are essentially arguing that energy is flowing from a lower-energy to a higher-energy regime... I think you can see the problem in that, yes? It's a very sneaky and round-about way of violating 2Lot. Energy cannot flow from a lower-energy regime to a higher-energy regime.
There are four forms of energy associated with atoms
and molecules:
1} Electron quantum state (quantized potential energy)
2} Vibrational state (quantized kinetic energy)
3} Rotational state (quantized kinetic energy)
4} Translational energy (unquantized kinetic energy, the only energy which we can measure as temperature)
The time-independent Schrodinger equation treats translational kinetic energy separately from electron quantum state, vibrational quantum state and rotational quantum state because translational energy is the only energy which is not quantized.
Remember back when they claimed that CO2 would cause stratospheric warming? That was because they were claiming that CO2 was absorbing a photon, increasing its vibrational quantum state, then transferring that vibrational (kinetic) energy to other molecular constituents of the atmosphere in the form of translational energy (the only form of molecular energy which we can measure as temperature). Since that sort of energy transfer has a probability distribution which depends upon molecular abundance, pressure and excitation level, it generally only happens at certain altitudes. The warmists were claiming it happened in the stratosphere, but empirical observation proved them wrong.
When no stratospheric warming was empirically observed (indeed, the stratosphere cooled), they then switched to claiming that CO2 would cause the stratosphere to cool (to come into line with empirical observation), but it would cause the troposphere to warm... by the very same collisional radiationless transition mechanism... but they forgot that the wide absorption spectrum of water in the troposphere precludes there being many sufficiently energetic photons in the troposphere to sufficiently excite CO2’s vibrational quantum state to make the collisional radiationless transition probability very high. And they forgot that energy cannot flow from a lower-energy to a higher-energy regime... that violates 2LoT.
In reality, the reverse happens throughout the atmosphere (the process shown in the UMLT (upper mesosphere, lower thermosphere) in the above-cited study)... other molecular constituents absorb higher-energy photons, become vibrationally excited and transfer that energy to CO2 via collisional radiationless transition, whereupon CO2 undergoes emission relaxation by emitting a 15 micron photon.
We know that CO2 is not undergoing collisional radiationless transition and thereby increasing the translational kinetic energy of other molecules because the emission spectrum for CO2 is sharply defined, not a quasi-continua:
"Molecular fly-by collisions take little time, something like 10-13 s. Optical transition of collisional complexes of molecules generate spectral "lines" that are very broad - roughly five orders of magnitude broader than the most familiar "ordinary" spectral lines. The resulting spectral "lines" usually strongly overlap so that collision-induced spectral bands typically appear as continua (as opposed to the bands of often discernible lines of ordinary molecules)."
Given that the mean free path length for the IR emitted by CO2 increases with increasing altitude, the net vector for that emitted IR is upward.
That’s why CO2 has been shown to cause cooling throughout the atmosphere, except for a very slight amount of warming at the tropopause:
You’ll further hear warmists talking about increasing CO2 atmospheric concentration causing a widening of the ‘shoulders’ of the purported absorption band of CO2... but take a look at the image above.
You are looking downward on those 'shoulders', and you can see that CO2 causes cooling... so a widening of those 'shoulders' as CO2 atmospheric concentration increases means it’ll cause cooling at a wider band of frequencies. And as CO2 atmospheric concentration increases, you’ll see the center of that rainbow of colors labeled ‘CO2’ go toward even more extreme cooling.
This utterly destroys the entire underlying basis for CAGW. It cannot continue to exist as a reasonable hypothesis. It has been nullified.
Thus dies CAGW… in reality, CO2 causes global cooling (see studies referenced above), and more of it will cause more global cooling.
So CO2 acts as a negative feedback to the completely natural warming the planet had recently experienced. That forcing has ended, the planet is now cooling (in fact, at the fastest rate in recorded history), and as CO2 atmospheric concentration continues to increase, it will exacerbate the cooling.
That's why the planet never went into runaway warming back when CO2 levels were as much as 20 times higher than today, and in fact when CO2 concentration was that high, an ice age started. That ice age lasted until the CO2 had sufficiently rock-weathered out of the atmosphere to allow warming.
People have been lied to in order to further a political agenda. For some people, acknowledging that reality is far more painful than continuing to believe the lie of Catastrophic CO2-induced Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).