Century old experiment proves CO2 and IR don't warm atmosphere.

Blogosphere ^ | 6th Dec 2009 | Copied from blog

[KoRn]

lol Very true.

[maryz]

Related thread: Politics and Greenhouse Gases

As for infrared radiation, Gerlich and Tscheuschner agree with earlier studies that water vapor is responsible for most of the IR absorption in the Earth's atmosphere. Thus, any infrared radiation absorbed by carbon dioxide represents only a tiny part of the full IR spectrum and is affected little by raising CO2 concentration.

Gerlich and Tscheuschner state without equivocation that there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effect which explains the relevant physical phenomena. They call the terms greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases "deliberate misnomers" and a "myth beyond physical reality" and conclude:

The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2-greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.

[AndyJackson]

He then set up another pane of glass to filter the IR from the sun before the light reached the greenhouses.

Guys, take it from a physicist. This experiment is a scam. The counter to false information from the GCC crowd is not our own false information, but scientific truth, and reproducing this kind of nonsense just makes FR out to be a bunch of no-nothing kooks.

Trapping of infrared radiation by the sky, clouds, etc. is important to the heat balance of the earth. That has never been questioned except by this imbecile of an "infrared" expert who is no expert on anything.

Infrared light within the biosphere does not come, principally, from the sun, and so "filtering" it out with glass will do nothing. Finding a meaningful representation of the spectrum is somewhat hard, but here is the best I could find:

Please ignore the stuff about indium nitride bandgaps which as to do with solar cell development and is irrelevant to this discussion. This graph plots photons per unit area, per time. The energy in any color band is obtained my multiplying the flux in this graph by the energy of the photons (shown at the top in electron volts), and when the multiplication is done will be seen to peak in the blue. The amount of energy from below the red (infrared) is very small.

Most infrared in the biosphere is the result not of infrared from the sun, but of the reradiation from the earth of visible and ultraviolet light that is absorbed. Once reradiated, the longer infrared which represent heat energy is reflected by the glass in a green house, hence the green house effect. Because the reflection away from the glass above a greenhouse in this experiment does not affect the visible light incident on the green house, the extra sheet of glass has no effect. Indeed, this idiot does not even understand that the greenhouse itself would already reflect incident infrared from the sun before it entered the greenhouse, and so the extra sheet of glass is superfluous.

CO2 doesn't reflect IR.

This idiot does not even understand the concept of "opacity." Diffuse CO2 does not act as a mirror to IR. It acts as an impenitrable fog. It is like looking at a cloud backlit by the sun. The cloud is plenty bright enough reflecting sunlight back to the observer, even though the reflection is not specular, like a mirror.

The "greenhouse" effect is a real effect and CO2, and other greenhouse gases (including methane and clouds), are very important in keeping the earth warm. No one, besides this idiot, has ever questioned that.

The question is whether human generated CO2 will have a significant impact on climate, given all the other sources of variability of climate. It is this hypothesis that skeptics doubt. That CO2 is a "greenhouse" gas has never been questioned by any knowledgeable scientist.

[LeGrande]

I am curious how does this experiment disprove the theory?

It states clearly that the salt window box heated up faster, ergo higher temps. It is clear based on the Stephan-Boltzman law that a doubling of CO2 may increase the temps a degree or so.

The question is the effect of the forcing’s, do they create a runaway catastrophic event? Sane people who know that we have had higher temps and higher CO2 levels in the past know that the forcings become negative. If they didn’t, we would have become a Venus years ago.

[PapaBear3625]

What does that say about Carl Sagan’s “Super Greenhouse(TM)” theory which supposedly explains the 900F surface temperatures on Venus??

Venus' atmosphere is 97% CO2 at a pressure of 93 times earth surface pressure. Earth is 0.038% CO2. Big difference.

[wendy1946]

One of the neat things about our system of numbers is that 100 or 100,000 or 100,000,000 times zero is always zero.....

[plenipotentiary]

Hi Andy. I think you misunderstood. A glass sheet well above both containers stops IR coming in. One container has glass directly over it so no IR can escape. The other has rock salt cover so IR can escape.

The container with the trapped IR does not warm compared to the rock salt covered one.

Therefore IR emitted from earths surface does not effect temperature whether trapped by CO2 (or glass)or not.

That means AGW theory is wrong.

[xcamel]

FReepmail me to get on or off

Ping me if you find one I've missed.

---

A'yup.

[AndyJackson]

You are correct that I did not understand the physical description of the experiment. Even so, the interpretation of the results are bunkum and the article claiming the effect does not exist is even worse.

Look. No serious physicist questions whether "greenhouse gases" trap radiation and contribute to the warming of the earth. This would be a very cold and forbidding planet without them. The debate is not over that but rather it is over whether human generated CO2 is affecting climate. That is a much different question. You cannot start the debate by tossing well established physics out the window, as it were.

[AndyJackson]

Four years later Niels Bohr reported his discovery that the absorption of specific wavelengths of light didn't cause gas atoms/molecules to become hotter. Instead, the absorption of specific wavelengths of light caused the electrons in an atom/molecule to move to a higher energy state. After absorption of light of a specific wavelength an atom couldn't absorb additional radiation of that wavelength without first emitting light of that wavelength.

This guy is one of those customary lunatics, the author, not Bohr, I mean, that you get at any scientific conclave. They are like Shakespearean fools. They know all the words, and spout nonsense. In the words of Wolfgang Pauli, "this isn't even wrong."

Don't post HS like this. It makes Freepers look like lunatics. It makes this place a big soft fat target for anyone who does know a little bit who happens to be on the other side.

The converse of a scientific fraud is not your own scientific fraud. It is careful analysis, data, and being scientifically correct.

[qam1]

Venus is hot because of pressure not CO2

In fact if you go up in Venus' atmosphere to where the atmospheric pressure is equal to earth, even though CO2 is still 95%+ the temperature range is similar to earth ~32-120°F. Actually, because of this there's been talk that Venus would be the best planet to colonize 1st in floating cities. See http://www.universetoday.com/2008/07/16/colonizing-venus-with-floating-cities/

Side note: I don't have time to do the math but Mars has something like 10x the amount by mass/# of molecues of CO2 in it's atmosphere than Earth does, yet it is much colder. The reason is because the pressure is much lower

[AndyJackson]

There is a simple “greenhouse” gas experiment many folks around the world who live in cold places do every day. Walk outside on a clear winter evening and you will freeze your tush off. The reason is that you are radiating infrared at a blackbody temperature of about 330 degrees Kelvin while empty space is radiating back at a temperature of 4 degrees Kelvin. Do the same on a cloudy night. Your radiative heat losses are drastically reduced because the ground is radiating to the clouds which are therefore in radiative equilibrium with the ground (because the clouds in a “grey sky” are opaque to radiation this equilibrium is quickly established). The greenhouse gas effect is why you are warm on cloudy nights and cold on clear nights.

[wendy1946]

Venus is hot because it’s basically a new planet and hasn’t cooled. Same thing explains the 90-bar CO2 atmosphere, the massive thermal imbalance, the total lack of regolith, the upwards ir flux, the random cratering, and basically every other feature of the place.

[plenipotentiary]

Andy. AGW CO2 warming theory rests on IR being absorbed, and reflected back down to Earth. The experiment shows that even allowing no IR to escape there is no material effect on temperature. So what CO2 does with IR doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevent. End of AGW theory.