Candace

Talmadge

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January 16, 2009

Real Science: Man-Made CO² Can’t Cause Global Warming; It Doesn’t Have the Mojo

Despite all scare-mongering to the contrary, carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is not the cause of global warming.

To be an agent of greenhouse heating, carbon dioxide (or any) atmospheric gas would have to be capable of absorbing in significant quantities both the sun’s radiation spectrum (the ultimate source of natural heating on Earth) and of absorbing heat radiating back from the Earth (the greenhouse effect).

There is a process to measure a gas’s absorption ability called atomic absorption spectrometry. Suspicious of the entire global warming hysteria, atmospheric physicist James A. Peden put carbon dioxide through just such an analysis. Based on where and how much of the sun’s total radiation output, which consists of light and other wavelengths not visible to human eyes, Peden estimates that carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere takes in no more than 8 percent of the sun’s total radiation.

It’s the same percentage for heat radiated back from Earth. “Man-made CO2 doesn’t appear physically capable of absorbing much more than two-thousandths of the radiated heat passing upward through the atmosphere,” Peden writes. “And, if all the available heat in the atmosphere is indeed being captured by the current CO2 levels before leaving the atmosphere, then adding more CO2 to the atmosphere won’t matter a bit.”

Holy cow! Hard scientific analysis finds carbon dioxide not guilty as charged because this gas simply does not have the molecular mojo to play the role of atmospheric heater. The real culprit is water vapor, which Peden estimates is responsible for 95 percent of all greenhouse heating in the atmosphere.

In politics, citing carbon dioxide, whether from natural or human-made sources, for causing global warming is the equivalent of blaming the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Peden is hardly the only skeptical scientist. In December 2007, 100 scientists signed an open letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. That letter had some harsh words about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying that its conclusions about carbon dioxide’s role in climate change are “quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions.”

Last March, 500 scientists attending the 2008 International Climate Conference in New York City signed the Manhattan Declaration, saying, in part, “that there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.”

The Manhattan Declaration also notes that “current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.”

Amen to that. Can we finally get real about climate change? There is a lot of political pressure to spend enormous sums of money on a CO2 cap-and-trade system that won’t solve any problems but will add significant burdens to a world economy already on the ropes.

And no. Peden is not in the pay of polluters or the oil industry. He is editor of the Middlebury Community Network of Middlebury, Vermont, and has worked as an atmospheric physicist at the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and at Extranuclear Laboratories in Blawnox, Penn., studying ion molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere.

Peden’s spectrometer analysis cuts through all the unexamined assumptions and downright lies about the role of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. The only question here is why we are not hearing a whole lot more in the media about legitimate scientific objections to the greenhouse gases theory of global warming.

Perhaps, having been bamboozled by the Bush Administration over Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, these same ace reporters and editors simply cannot bear to acknowledge being hoodwinked about carbon dioxide, too.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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