'Fallacy': Prof. Ian Plimer demolishes the "man-made global warming" scam in one minute

Geologist, Prof. Ian Plimer, demolishes the "man-made global warming" scam, in just over a minute:

"No one has yet shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming, and if they did, they'd also have to show that the natural emissions—and that's 97% of the total—don't drive global warming."

"Then I look back in time through my geological eyes, and look at times in the past when we have very high carbon dioxide contents of the atmosphere, up to hundreds of times higher than now, and we see that we didn't have runaway global warming… But what we did have is six major ice ages, and there is no correlation over geological time between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and temperature."

If you absorb 100% of a particular thermal radiation, while the amount of that radiation keeps being produced at a fairly constant rate, the temperature will quickly escalate and keep rising.

For example, if you were to cover yourself in bed with a perfectly insulated blanket, you would soon be roasting and the temperature would keep going up until you’re dead and stop producing heat.

What’s missing from your explanation is that after CO2 absorbs the heat, it also re-emits it in various ways, so the heat doesn’t just stay there, eventually it escapes into space. If it didn’t we’d roasted and long gone.

As you add more blankets (CO2}, ie, more resistance to heat flowing out, to keep the same amount of heat going out the temperature has to increase. The question is, how much?

For there to be no temperature increase you would need to come up with an energy shedding mechanism from CO2 that doesn’t involve molecular motion, which is what heat is. A possibility is some radiation that is transparent to all the gases in the atmosphere.

So the bottom line question is, exactly how does CO2 shed the thermal energy it absorbs?

Good points. A few comments:

(1) CO2 generally re-emits heat as molecular motion in all directions. In this regard you said, "For there to be no temperature increase you would need to come up with an energy shedding mechanism from CO2 that doesn’t involve molecular motion, which is what heat is. A possibility is some radiation that is transparent to all the gases in the atmosphere."

Many things when heated emit radiation. Why do you think your stove turns red when it heats up? The absorption spectra of pretty much everything in the atmosphere does not match CO2's or anything else's in the atmosphere. Hence within a few hundreds or thousands of meters the heat turns into something that simply radiates out. (Remember, the atmosphere is about 10,000km thick so this is not that far.)

(2) Compared to the depth of the atmosphere, normal CO2 and even a 10x increase in CO2 is still akin to a tight blanket over the surface of the Earth.

(3) Human activity at most contributes 33% to the CO2 level. Now that's using human-caused climate change cultist estimates. Reality is about 5% at most. Seen papers that put it at about 3%.

One good volcano can add up to much more. See https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate. (Some climate change cultist claim volcanos reduce CO2 levels. They're frauds or delusional.)

One big wildfire especially a forest fire adds a LOT more than any human activity. And we have lots of those every year. Looking up the data is left as an exercise for the reader(s). :)

(5) I did not want to get too far into the weeds. Even the above bit is short-circuiting the actual math. But it is still almost completely accurate.

(6) Your good points don't address what really happens when CO2 emissions are increased, namely plants and plankton gobble it up and make O2. That's why CO2 levels are so low (about 0.04% of our atmosphere). IOW, more CO2 just means more plants, and plants are kind of essential for us CARBON BASED life forms.

Oh before someone nitpicks, yes, the absorption spectra of something is generally the same as its emission spectra (but see below). That said, given CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere, most of molecular motion will be re-emitted by well 99.96% of the other things in the atmosphere. That’s more than just a little of it...

(See below part: The whole spectra thing is actually a little more complicated — enough absorption at one frequency can lead to emission at a higher frequency, things can “step down” so absorption at one frequency can lead to emission at other lower frequencies, etc. Some other weird things can happen. But the basic concept generally holds.)

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