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Does CO2 really drive global warming?
May 2001 Chemical Innovation, May 2001, Vol. 31, No. 5, pp 44—46 ^ | May 2001 | Robert H. Essenhigh, E. G. Bailey Professor of Energy Conversion, Ohio State University

Posted on 04/04/2007 5:41:57 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum

Does CO2 really drive global warming?

I don’t believe that it does.

To the contrary, if you apply the IFF test—if-and-only-if or necessary-and-sufficient—the outcome would appear to be exactly the reverse. Rather than the rising levels of carbon dioxide driving up the temperature, the logical conclusion is that it is the rising temperature that is driving up the CO2 level. Of course, this raises a raft of questions, but they are all answerable. What is particularly critical is distinguishing between the observed phenomenon, or the “what”, from the governing mechanism, or the “why”. Confusion between these two would appear to be the source of much of the noise in the global warming debate.

In applying the IFF test, we can start with the clear correlation between the global CO2 profile and the corresponding temperature signature. There is now in the literature the report of a 400,000-year sequence clearly showing, as a phenomenon, that they go up—and down—together (1). The correlation is clear and accepted. But the causation, the mechanism, is something else: Which is driving which?

Logically, there are four possible explanations, but only two need serious consideration, unless they both fail.

Both appear at first to be possible, but both then generate crucial origin and supplementary questions. For Case 1, the origin question is: What is the independent source of CO2 that drives the CO2 level both up and down, and which in turn, somehow, is presumed to drive the temperature up and down? For Case 2, it is: What drives the temperature, and if this then drives the CO2, where does the CO2 come from? For Case 2, the questions are answerable; but for Case 1, they are not.

Consider Case 2. This directly introduces global warming behavior. Is global warming, as a separate and independent phenomenon, in progress? The answer, as I heard it in geology class 50 years ago, was “yes”, and I have seen nothing since then to contradict that position. To the contrary, as further support, there is now documentation (that was only fragmentary 50 years ago) of an 850,000-year global-temperature sequence, showing that the temperature is oscillating with a period of 100,000 years, and with an amplitude that has risen, in that time, from about 5 °F at the start to about 10 °F “today” (meaning the latest 100,000-year period) (2). We are currently in a rise that started 25,000 years ago and, reasonably, can be expected to peak “very shortly”.

On the shorter timescales of 1000 years and 100 years, further temperature oscillations can be seen, but of much smaller amplitude, down to 1 and 0.5 °F in those two cases. Nevertheless, the overall trend is clearly up, even through the Little Ice Age (~1350–1900) following the Medieval Warm Period. So the global warming phenomenon is here, with a very long history, and we are in it. But what is the driver?

Arctic Ocean model
The postulated driver, or mechanism, developed some 30 years ago to account for the “million-year” temperature oscillations, is best known as the “Arctic Ocean” model (2). According to this model, the temperature variations are driven by an oscillating ice cap in the northern polar regions. The crucial element in the conceptual formulation of this mechanism was the realization that such a massive ice cap could not have developed, and then continued to expand through that development, unless there was a major source of moisture close by to supply, maintain, and extend the cap. The only possible moisture source was then identified as the Arctic Ocean, which, therefore, had to be open—not frozen over—during the development of the ice ages. It then closed again, interrupting the moisture supply by freezing over.

So the model we now have is that if the Arctic Ocean is frozen over, as is the case today, the existing ice cap is not being replenished and must shrink, as it is doing today. As it does so, the Earth can absorb more of the Sun’s radiation and therefore will heat up—global warming—as it is doing today, so long as the Arctic Ocean is closed. When it is warm enough for the ocean to open, which oceanographic (and media) reports say is evidently happening right now, then the ice cap can begin to re-form.

As it expands, the ice increasingly reflects the incoming (shorter-wave) radiation from the sun, so that the atmosphere cools at first. But then, the expanding ice cap reduces the radiative (longer-wave) loss from the Earth, acting as an insulator, so that the Earth below cools more slowly and can keep the ocean open as the ice cap expands. This generates “out-of-sync” oscillations between atmosphere and Earth. The Arctic Ocean “trip” behavior at the temperature extremes, allowing essentially discontinuous change in direction of the temperature, is identified as a bifurcation system with potential for analysis as such. The suggested trip times for the change are interesting: They were originally estimated at about 500 years, then reduced to 50 years and, most recently, down to 5 years (2). So, if the ocean is opening right now, we could possibly start to see the temperature reversal under way in about 10 years.

What we have here is a sufficient mechanistic explanation for the dominant temperature fluctuations and, particularly, for the current global warming rise—without the need for CO2 as a driver. Given that pattern, the observed CO2 variations then follow, as a driven outcome, mainly as the result of change in the dynamic equilibrium between the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and its solution in the sea. The numbers are instructive. In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data on the carbon balance showed ~90 gigatons (Gt) of carbon in annual quasi-equilibrium exchange between sea and atmosphere, and an additional 60-Gt exchange between vegetation and atmosphere, giving a total of ~150 Gt (3). This interpretation of the sea as the major source is also in line with the famous Mauna Loa CO2 profile for the past 40 years, which shows the consistent season-dependent variation of 5–6 ppm, up and down, throughout the year—when the average global rise is only 1 ppm/year.

In the literature, this oscillation is attributed to seasonal growing behavior on the “mainland” (4), which is mostly China, >2000 mi away, but no such profile with that amplitude is known to have been reported at any mainland location. Also, the amplitude would have to fall because of turbulent diffusive exchange during transport over the 2000 mi from the mainland to Hawaii, but again there is lack of evidence for such behavior. The fluctuation can, however, be explained simply from study of solution equilibria of CO2 in water as due to emission of CO2 from and return to the sea around Hawaii governed by a ±10 °F seasonal variation in the sea temperature.

Impact of industrialization
The next matter is the impact of fossil fuel combustion. Returning to the IPCC data and putting a rational variation as noise of ~5 Gt on those numbers, this float is on the order of the additional—almost trivial (<5%)—annual contribution of 5–6 Gt from combustion of fossil fuels. This means that fossil fuel combustion cannot be expected to have any significant influence on the system unless, to introduce the next point of focus, the radiative balance is at some extreme or bifurcation point that can be tripped by “small” concentration changes in the radiation-absorbing–emitting gases in the atmosphere. Can that include CO2?

This now starts to address the necessity or “only-if” elements of the problem. The question focuses on whether CO2 in the atmosphere can be a dominant, or “only-if” radiative-balance gas, and the answer to that is rather clearly “no”. The detailed support for that statement takes the argument into some largely esoteric areas of radiative behavior, including the analytical solution of the Schuster–Schwarzschild Integral Equation of Transfer that governs radiative exchange (5–7), but the outcome is clear.

The central point is that the major absorbing gas in the atmosphere is water, not CO2, and although CO2 is the only other significant atmospheric absorbing gas, it is still only a minor contributor because of its relatively low concentration. The radiative absorption “cross sections” for water and CO2 are so similar that their relative influence depends primarily on their relative concentrations. Indeed, although water actually absorbs more strongly, for many engineering calculations the concentrations of the two gases are added, and the mixture is treated as a single gas.

In the atmosphere, the molar concentration of CO2 is in the range of 350–400 ppm. Water, on the other hand, has a very large variation but, using the “60/60” (60% relative humidity [RH] at 60 °F) value as an average, then from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers standard psychrometric chart, the weight ratio of water to (dry) air is ~0.0065, or roughly 10,500 ppm. Compared with CO2, this puts water, on average, at 25–30 times the (molar) concentration of the CO2, but it can range from a 1:1 ratio to >100:1.

Even closer focus on water is given by solution of the Schuster–Schwarzschild equation applied to the U.S. Standard Atmosphere profiles for the variation of temperature, pressure, and air density with elevation (8). The results show that the average absorption coefficient obtained for the atmosphere closely corresponds to that for the 5.6–7.6-µm water radiation band, when water is in the concentration range 60–80% RH—on target for atmospheric conditions. The absorption coefficient is 1–2 orders of magnitude higher than the coefficient values for the CO2 bands at a concentration of 400 ppm. This would seem to eliminate CO2 and thus provide closure to that argument.

This overall position can be summarized by saying that water accounts, on average, for >95% of the radiative absorption. And, because of the variation in the absorption due to water variation, anything future increases in CO2 might do, water will already have done. The common objection to this argument is that the wide fluctuations in water concentration make an averaging (for some reason) impermissible. Yet such averaging is applied without objection to global temperatures, when the actual temperature variation across the Earth from poles to equator is roughly –100 to +100 °F, and a change on the average of ±1 °F is considered major and significant. If this averaging procedure can be applied to the atmospheric temperature, it can be applied to the atmospheric water content; and if it is denied for water, it must, likewise, be denied for temperature—in that case we don’t have an identified problem!

What the evidence shows
So what we have on the best current evidence is that

The outcome is that the conclusions of advocates of the CO2-driver theory are evidently back to front: It’s the temperature that is driving the CO2. If there are flaws in these propositions, I’m listening; but if there are objections, let’s have them with the numbers.

References

  1. Sigman, M.; Boyle, E. A. Nature 2000, 407, 859–869.
  2. Calder, N. The Weather Machine; Viking Press: New York, 1974.

  3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change; Houghton, J. T., Meira Filho, L. G., Callender, B. A., Harris, N., Kattenberg, A., Maskell, K., Eds.; Cam bridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
  4. Hileman, B. Chem. Eng. News 1992, 70 (17), 7–19.
  5. Schuster, A. Astrophysics J. 1905, 21, 1–22.

  6. Schwarzschild, K. Gesell. Wiss. Gottingen; Nachr. Math.–Phys. Klasse 1906, 41.
  7. Schwarzschild, K. Berliner Ber. Math. Phys. Klasse 1914, 1183.
  8. Essenhigh, R. H. On Radiative Transfer in Solids. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Thermophysics Specialist Conference, New Orleans, April 17–20, 1967; Paper 67-287; American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics: Reston, VA, 1967.


Robert H. Essenhigh is the E. G. Bailey Professor of Energy Conversion in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ohio State University, 206 W. 18th Ave., Columbus, OH 43210; 614-292-0403; essenhigh.1@osu.edu.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Government
KEYWORDS: absorption; arcticocean; carbondioxide; climatechange; co2; globalwarming; h2o; icecap; skeptics; watervapor
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To: Excellence
My first thought is that choosing that time span as a reference point is rather arbitrary. What says this particular reference point is “normal” and everything outside of it is “too” hot or cold?

We are not really concerned with actual temperatures so much as the trend.

According to Dr. Michael Mann's hallowed "Hockey Stick" data, Global-warming advocates insist that the earth's temperature is about to head toward infinity.

By the way, the "Hockey Stick" data has been proven fraudulent because the statistical methods employed were invalid (Global-warming zealots will deny this, of course).

81 posted on 04/05/2007 10:45:39 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Islam is a religion of peace, and Muslims reserve the right to kill anyone who says otherwise.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum
Thanks for posting that, and the link to the newer paper.

I'll take a look.

82 posted on 04/05/2007 12:17:54 PM PDT by M. Dodge Thomas
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To: DaveLoneRanger; texianyankee; JayB; ElkGroveDan; markman46; palmer; Bahbah; Paradox; FOG724; ...
DOOMAGE!

Global Warming PING!

You have been pinged because of your interest in environmentalism, alarmist wackos, mainstream media doomsday hype, and other issues pertaining to global warming.

Freep-mail DaveLoneRanger to get on or off: Add me / Remove me

Please ping me to all note-worthy threads on global warming.

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83 posted on 04/05/2007 1:18:36 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (Will I be suspended again for this remark?)
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To: Thomas Pained
and annual change has never been more than about 1ppm

And how do you know this since the resolution is 100's to 1000's of years in the older cores?

84 posted on 04/05/2007 2:18:59 PM PDT by palmer
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To: Thomas Pained
I keep watching RealClimate for the "Whoops, we made a huge mistake" posting, but its not going to happen

Postings have happened already, see my shpud.com/myths.html for some links. I have links to realclimate as well, showing their poor grasp of science like "tipping point".

85 posted on 04/05/2007 2:24:41 PM PDT by palmer
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To: M. Dodge Thomas; cogitator; DaveLoneRanger; neverdem

1992 is the original date of publication of this paper??? I see. Well, I suppose I should have looked more closely at this refuted oldage before I pinged, but I had to put the Global Warming ping somewhere...


86 posted on 04/05/2007 2:26:36 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (Will I be suspended again for this remark?)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

No one every accused Al Bore or those lefty Supreme Court lawyers of being intelligent.


87 posted on 04/05/2007 2:28:04 PM PDT by hgro
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To: M. Dodge Thomas
I just read this...and if they really believe in this forcing hypothesis then why don't they test it. Oh wait...we have...with our satellite and weather balloon data.

From the article:

To be sure there are still some lingering uncertainties. Some recent data indicates that tropical upper tropopsheric water vapour does not quite keep up with constant relative humidity (Minschwaner and Dessler, 2004) (though they still found that the feedback was positive). Moist convection schemes in models are constantly being refined, and it's possible that newer schemes will change things . However, given the Pinatubo results, the models are probably getting the broader picture reasonably correct.

First off ...what is relative humidity telling you? What you really need is the specific humidity if you really are concerned about the equilibrium temperature. Second...the sentence on the computer model is really telling isn't it. Their projections are wrong...so they tweak them some more. Just like the IPCC has been downgrading all of their projections to fit their data. Given enough time they will see that the sky was not falling after all.

Water...unlike CO2 and the other supposed greenhouse gases absorbs across the entire spectrum of the infrared. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for some.

88 posted on 04/05/2007 2:50:20 PM PDT by I got the rope
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

I guess I’ll have to take a look at this soon.


89 posted on 04/05/2007 3:19:03 PM PDT by cogitator
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To: I got the rope
if they really believe in this forcing hypothesis then why don't they test it.

As regards water vapor as a forcer, it has been tested, by the Pinatubo data, as the article notes "the models are probably getting the broader picture reasonably correct".

IMO, the way this is heading is pretty clear: 5 years or a decade from now the more scientifically literate skeptics here will be saying 'Well, in the mid 00s, we still had reason to be skeptical, and after all things didn't turn out to be as dire as suggested by the more pessimistic models."

90 posted on 04/05/2007 3:21:28 PM PDT by M. Dodge Thomas
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Comment #91 Removed by Moderator

To: M. Dodge Thomas

BTW, I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that there is a lot of questionable use of “science” as inputs into public policy decisions. Residential asbestos and increasingly residential radon abatement efforts are expensive public health initiatives undertaken on the basis of IMO very questionable assumptions about the relevance of data collected in industrial settings to the lives of ordinary citizens. And a lot of relevant information gets disregarded – on both sides of the ideological spectrum – as a result of a combination of ignorance and ideological bias, for example IMO exaggerated concerns about the health effects of DU ammunition on parts of the left, or the decades of denials of the link between smoking and cancer on parts of the right, are examples.


92 posted on 04/05/2007 5:39:34 PM PDT by M. Dodge Thomas
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks
1992 is the original date of publication of this paper???

Link to Dr. Essenhigh's 2006 peer-reviewed paper expanding upon the 1992 paper. He sent it to me in response to an email I sent him.

From Dr. Essenhigh's email:

"On the matter of more, this is the Attachment, just published last year in another ACS journal, Energy and Fuels, that as a chemist you are probably familiar with. As you will see, this is more analytical, but it comes up with essentially the same result regarding the (radiative) dominance of water over CO2, and the conclusion that anthopogenic CO2 is unlikely to be possible to have significant impact on global warming. You will see one change between this and the original article which is setting the (average) water/CO2 absorption/emission properties to about 75-80% for water and 15-20% for CO2 compared with the (original) estimate of about 95%/5%. The change was taking into account the very much faster drop in water with altitude compared with CO2, but it still sets water as the dominant gas."

93 posted on 04/05/2007 6:01:49 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Islam is a religion of peace, and Muslims reserve the right to kill anyone who says otherwise.)
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To: M. Dodge Thomas

I have a better explanation. Pinatubo displaced millions of tons of ash, SO2 and SO3 into the atmosphere in the percent levels. This caused cloud formation. This caused the cooling.

If the greenhouse hypothesis is correct we should see higher concentrations of CO2 and higher temperatures as we travel upwards. That is not the case. So the global warming/greenhouse hypothesis due to CO2 is incorrect.


94 posted on 04/05/2007 6:21:15 PM PDT by I got the rope
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To: M. Dodge Thomas
BTW, I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that there is a lot of questionable use of “science” as inputs into public policy decisions.

Especially when we are told that the "consensus" of scientists (the majority of whom specialize in areas of knowledge that have absolutely nothing to do with physics or engineering, much less climatology) is that anthropogenic global warming is real, the debate is over, and now we must implement global taxes and a global bureaucracy to address it.

It is well-known that the general circulation models cannot accurately predict what the weather will be like next year or ten years from now. People like you say that this is because weather and climate are different, then in the next breath you use current weather event anecdotes to "prove" that global warming is occurring.

Furthermore, the general circulation models do not model feedback mechanisms very well, and just about all the models drift to higher or lower temperatures over time. You say the ones that drift upward "prove" that global temperatures are about to go to infinity and anyone who doubts the computer models is a Luddite.

Computer models are a wonderful research tool, but to take the results of a research tool and use them to dictate global economic policy is criminal.

And the "anything not peer-reviewed is bunk" bullshit really pisses me off. The second article I linked to by Dr. Essenhigh appeared an a peer-reviewed journal a year ago, and you never even heard of it, all the while passing yourself off as some kind of expert. You said his original paper had been thoroughly discredited and he had never published another word on the matter. You are either a liar, or a pretentious, dilettante poser.

Peer-reviewed articles are unavailable to the general public. Individuals cannot afford to subscribe to every journal that might publish something relevant. The evidence is that there are a lot of peer-reviewed articles debunking anthropogenic global warming that nobody ever hears about because the agenda is to ignore them.

95 posted on 04/06/2007 5:48:06 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Islam is a religion of peace, and Muslims reserve the right to kill anyone who says otherwise.)
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To: Bosco

I’m with you. All you need to do is see one picture of the sun flaring, and you realize that it can raise temps.

Why the general public doesn’t get this is beyond comprehension.

Possibly it’s due to the natural phenomenon that what scares you is what you pay attention to.

The MSM / Al (bloated by his own natural gas) play that fiddle to perfection.


96 posted on 04/06/2007 5:51:21 AM PDT by patriotspride
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To: E. Pluribus Unum
You will see one change between this and the original article which is setting the (average) water/CO2 absorption/emission properties to about 75-80% for water and 15-20% for CO2 compared with the (original) estimate of about 95%/5%.

In which of the links does he make this statement? I'm not seeing it, and in the last letter to the editor I wrote, I used the 95/5 ratio. If that's wrong, I really need to know. If we are going to successfully argue this, we need to work with the latest information so the people on the wrong (left) can't come back and say the people on the right (us) are lying. Thank you.

97 posted on 04/06/2007 7:48:39 AM PDT by Excellence (Vote Dhimmocrat; Submit for Peace! (Bacon bits make great confetti.))
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To: Excellence
In which of the links does he make this statement?

This link.

I posted it two comments down from the letter quote. I hadn't realized the article was an attachment. I thought one of those links in his email went to it.

98 posted on 04/06/2007 9:20:06 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Islam is a religion of peace, and Muslims reserve the right to kill anyone who says otherwise.)
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To: DaveLoneRanger
I saw that story “Arctic sea ice narrowly missed record low” today. Since when is a nonevent news??

Since people started ranting about how the Arctic is meeeeellllltiiiiiinnnnnnng.

99 posted on 04/06/2007 10:30:43 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (Will I be suspended again for this remark?)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

TREMENDOUS!

Time for me to run to Good Friday services, but I will spend a lot of time checking these sources from the good professor.

Of course, the alarmists will state “he’s been refuted”...

He hasn’t been, though... and solar scientists have been making it more and more clear that the SUN, not CO2, is responsible for the warming trend of the earth.

Eventually the UN may catch on... but they’re still in the throes of believing socialism is the best form of government, too... they’re a bit slow... as is algore.


100 posted on 04/06/2007 10:31:51 AM PDT by AFPhys ((.Praying for President Bush, our troops, their families, and all my American neighbors..))
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