You think that’s bad. Here’s what Kerry says causes global warming:
“This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this. Try and picture a very thin layer of gases – a quarter-inch, half an inch, somewhere in that vicinity – that’s how thick it is. It’s in our atmosphere. It’s way up there at the edge of the atmosphere. And for millions of years – literally millions of years – we know that layer has acted like a thermal blanket for the planet – trapping the sun’s heat and warming the surface of the Earth to the ideal, life-sustaining temperature.
“But in modern times, as human beings have emitted gases into the air that come from all the things we do, that blanket has grown thicker and it traps more and more heat beneath it, raising the temperature of the planet. It’s called the greenhouse effect because it works exactly like a greenhouse in which you grow a lot of the fruit that you eat.”
Somehow I get the impression that he doesn’t have any friggin’ ideer what he talking about.
In fact saying that CO2 “works exactly like a greenhouse” is dead, dead wrong. It does not even act “like a blanket”. So much ignorance is such a small a small space is astonishing, probably the greatest achievement in the junior senator for (Teddy’s) life whole career.
Let’s get our facts straight:
1.) Sunlight warms the surface.
2.) The surface warms the air directly by convection, contact between the surface and the air.
3.) The surface radiates energy out to space by “black body” radiation, mostly at infrared. Some of this infrared energy is absorbed (and converted to heat) by “greenhouse” gases.
A greenhouse acts by preventing air (wind) from carrying off heat by convection. The air that the surface has warmed stays there and does not mix with colder air thousands of feet in the up, via turbulence.
A blanket prevents the flow of heat across its interface. Glass (greenhouses) and gases (even “greenhouse” gases) don’t do that. Blankets are poor thermal conductors. It’s the difference between cooking a marshmallow with a wooden stick or an aluminium rod. Wood and blankets are thermal insulators, aluminum and glass are conductors.
A so-called greenhouse gas absorbs *some tiny fraction* of the surface infrared (see #3 above) and converts *some fraction* of that to heat, thereby warming the air it is mixed into. Mostly it does not interact with most infrared wavelengths.