Good stuff Cycle
I always enjoy reading your fact filled postings.
Thank you. You'll notice that if you look back at data that hasn't been adjusted all to hell and back by climate zealots, you'll find that through the last 4 glaciation periods and their subsequent interglacials, global temperature never got over ~22 C (71.6 F).
Why? Well, this planet has a little something called the "11-Micron Infrared Atmospheric Window", where upwelling radiation has a nearly unhindered path to space... nothing much there to absorb it except for 0
3 (ozone). As such, when the planet heats up, it comes nearer and nearer to that window, chucking more and more heat out to space unobstructed. That's the upper 'thermostat'.
There is a lower 'thermostat', as well. For instance, CO
2 can cause warming... at a temperature of ~ -81 C. That's its blackbody absorption spectrum. So if global temperature ever got down to ~ -81C, yeah, CO
2 would cause a slight amount of warming (dependent upon its atmospheric concentration)... any temperature above that, and CO
2 is nearly completely transparent to the radiation.
There is very little water vapor over Antarctica (removing it as a factor affecting temperature in that area, thus proportionally amplifying any observed effect from CO
2), yet it cooled (and continues cooling) while CO
2 levels rose... it is the perfect example of the failure of the CAGW crowd's claims... even with an average temperature of ~-55 C, temperature isn't low enough for CO
2 to cause a warming effect, and consequently Antarctica has been cooling since 1999:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/nsidc-reports-that-antarctica-is-cooling-and-sea-ice-is-increasing/https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/12/coldest-antarctic-june-ever-recorded/https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/27/oops-warmists-just-lost-the-antarctic-peninsula-it-is-now-cooling/Any ice loss in Antarctica isn't due to melting from warming (how does ice melt in sub-zero average temperatures?), it's due to the 91 volcanoes discovered beneath the ice shelf, calving, and ice sublimation on the inland ice due to extremely low humidity there. But even NASA admits Antarctica has been adding ice, not losing it. Even in the Antarctic Peninsula (where most alarmists go to get their pictures to 'support' their alarmist blather... you'll note it's outside the Antarctic circle), it's been cooling lately.
Further, any radiation CO
2 does absorb has a longer mean free path length upward than it does downward, simply because the atmosphere is thicker the lower you go.
A CO
2 molecule absorbs some radiation at its absorption spectrum. It re-emits radiation at a random angle. So approximately 50% of the time it'll re-emit that radiation upward, and 50% of the time, it'll re-emit it downward. The downwardly-traveling radiation will experience a higher concentration of CO
2 simply because the air is thicker at lower altitudes, increasing the probability that the radiation will be re-absorbed by another CO
2 molecule, with yet another 50/50 chance it'll be re-emitted upward. So heat at the wavelength which corresponds to the absorption spectrum of CO
2 has a "one step downward, two steps upward" probability.
As such (and as that chart on
this page shows), CO
2 actually causes global cooling, and an increasing concentration would exacerbate that for this reason alone.
Study this chart carefully... note that it's for the Spectral
Cooling Rate, so the positive numbers in the scale represent cooling, whereas the negative numbers represent warming. Note that CO
2 only causes a very slight amount of warming at the tropopause.
Another reason that CO
2 causes global cooling is that as CO
2 is generated, oxygen content is reduced, thus reducing O
2 and O
3 content of the atmosphere, which has a much higher cross-section of absorption at or near the upwelling radiation wavelengths (and a much greater atmospheric concentration than CO
2... ~20.95% oxygen vs. 0.041% CO
2), as you can see from this graphic:
And all that isn't even taking into consideration that ~67% of global atmospheric heat transfer is via convection. Here's a study which takes that into account... and finds CO
2 causes atmospheric
cooling:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.306.3621&rep=rep1&type=pdfAnd wouldn't you know it, in the lower and middle mesosphere, temperatures have fallen by between 5 and 10 degrees C during the past three decades. And the outermost part of the atmosphere, around 350 km high - the so-called thermosphere - has, as would be expected by cooling, contracted. This is why they're now predicting space junk will remain in orbit for as long as 25% longer than previously predicted... less atmospheric drag. They correctly attribute the thermospheric cooling to increased CO
2 atmospheric concentration, but fail to realize that the CO
2 convected upward from the troposphere, carrying heat with it... and the more CO
2 there is, the more that'll happen, cooling the planet.
And for the final nail in the coffin of Catastrophic Anthropogenic CO
2-induced Global Warming... as the effective partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide (which depends on its density in the atmosphere) increases, its total emissivity decreases; this makes carbon dioxide act as a coolant to the atmosphere and thus the planet:
And CO
2 can only emit what it absorbs.. and its absorptivity is exceedingly low (as outlined above):
http://www.biocab.org/ECO2.pdf"The total absorptivity of carbon dioxide at its current concentration in the atmosphere is 0.0017."
In short, CO
2 cannot cause global warming, since reflected or re-emitted heat cannot heat the source of that heat... heat flows from hotter to cooler, after all. As an example, one cannot bathe a perfect blackbody surface in one unit of heat flux, reflect 10% of the emitted heat from that surface back to the surface, and expect the surface to emit 1.1 units of heat. It will always emit a net of 1 unit of heat, for whatever units you want to use. Yet this is exactly what the CAGW proponents expect everyone to believe... that CO
2 is somehow magically "creating" energy.
This is more aptly demonstrated by light... set up a spotlight shining light on a surface. Now set up a mirror diametrically opposed to the spotlight, reflecting the light reflecting off the surface back to the surface. Measure light intensity at the surface with a light meter... you'll find it doesn't increase from that intensity with just the spotlight and no mirror. Now replace the mirror with another spotlight and measure again... you'll find it does increase, for the simple fact that you've added more energy input with the spotlight, but not with the mirror.
Given that the sun has fallen into a quiescent phase (projected to last until at least 2053, unless it falls into a Solar Grand Minimum, which means it'll be quiescent out past 2200), the explanation for the 0.6 C fall in global temperature over the past 3 years, the weakening of the polar vortex, the warming of the Arctic, the sweeping of record cold and snow through more-southerly regions... it's all easily explained.
Especially given that it's happened before... three times in modern recorded human history. Once during the Little Ice Age, once starting around 1922 (low SSN for the end of Solar Cycle 15, most Arctic ice gone and freakishly cold ice storms further south), and once during the 1970s "Impending Ice Age" scare (it started in ~1962 with the most intense Nor'easter ever to hit the east coast (the 'Ash Wednesday Storm'); in 1962 researchers noted that cosmic rays were penetrating deep into the atmosphere to weather balloon altitudes; there were 227 days without sunspots in 1964's transition minima from SC19 to SC20; and in 1966 there were 3 Nor'easters in 6 days)..
"It's The Sun, Stupid."
This solar cycle (Solar Cycle 24) is the weakest in the past century... it was so weak its maximum was dubbed the "MiniMax"... and SC25 is projected to be even weaker. The F10.7 flux is already down to an average of ~68... the magnetic minimum is 64, it can't go any lower than that.
You'll note the transition minima from SC23 to SC24 gave 2008 the fourth highest number of days without sunspots in recorded history at 265 days, and 2009 the fifth highest number of days without sunspots at 262 days. So SC24 started out already weak.
The last solar cycle (SC23) was the end of a Solar Grand Maximum. SC23 peaked ~2003, peaking at F10.7 ~230... F10.7 less than ~100 denotes global cooling. F10.7 is now ~68.
I encourage those interested to study the Ewing-Donn Paradox for an explanation of Arctic warming and the recent cold snaps... this has been known about since 1958, and correctly attributed to global cooling in the past... the politicized nature of climate "science" today dictates that the CAGW retards attempt to attribute everything to global warming. They do so at the expense of their own credibility.
The Stefan-Boltzmann Law of Radiation and the Laws of Thermodynamics would be violated if CAGW were true. So the libtards are yet again 180 degrees out from reality. But they never let science, facts or truth get in the way of their fairy-tale science-denying alarmist blather before... and they seem to be hermetically clue-proof.
