I don’t know whether you’re trying to argue with or against me by saying that the atmosphere doesn’t work as described in a high school textbook. One of my earlier points was that the greenhouse effect doesn’t work as described in textbooks. Just because the explanation given doesn’t work, however, doesn’t mean that there’s another one that does. As far as a detailed knowledge of all the processes involved is concerned, no one knows how the atmosphere works. Scientists who say “There’s a better explanation, but we don’t have to explain it or prove it, just believe us because we say so” are no longer acting as scientists.

The laws of thermodynamics may eventually be replaced by something better, as relativity replaced Newtonian physics (in fact, I hope so, since all that “Can’t win, can’t break even, can’t get out of the game” stuff is rather depressing), but if scientists had come up with something better, it would be a huge advance, and I think they would have mentioned it.

A warm fluid will expand rather than rise if it’s already at the top of a larger body, such as the water warmed by sunlight on the surface of the ocean. However, that doesn’t contradict my earlier point. When fluids are heated from the bottom, the heated portions expand, rise, and are replaced by cooler fluids, such as when air rises above a flame. A fluid heated from the bottom rises because it’s less dense than its surroundings. The top portion of a fluid heated from the top stays on top, because the top portion was already less dense than its surroundings.

Winds and ocean currents are treated as being driven in large part by uneven heating of the earth’s surface; if fluids “Aren’t aware of their surroundings,” that would be big scientific news as well, since a movement in one part of the ocean is typically treated as affecting currents thousands of miles away. If there are more advanced principles that contradict these, then meteorologists are remaining very quiet about them, which would not be scientifically honest either. It’s not a sound scientific approach to say “Because it’s not in a high school textbook, it must be true.”

If an engineer presented you with a plan for a drainage system, and it weighed a lot, was impressively wordy, beautifully drawn and had lots of calculations that you didn’t understand, but when you looked at it in detail, you realized that water had to flow uphill for the system to work, would you hire him? If you explained the reason for your reluctance, he might indeed reply that he knew things you didn’t (that he was trying to rack up as many billable hours as possible), and that your little knowledge was a dangerous thing (because he might not get your money, and the money you’d have to pay to have him to redesign the whole system later), and he’d be right. The knowledge would be dangerous to him, if he wanted to make his living by providing services that were of no real benefit.

I have had more specialized training than the average layman in some areas, and I’ve found that additional study doesn’t support the green scare stories circulated in the media. The Day After Tomorrow scenario, for instance (a shutdown of the North Atlantic ocean circulation), couldn’t be accomplished by shutting down the thermohaline circulation even if such a thing were possible because, according to the oceanography course I took, most of the world’s ocean circulation is caused by wind anyway. That’s a piece of information that I’ve never heard mentioned in popular media or found on the internet, and it’s a case where the popular layman’s explanation of how the ocean works is alarmist and misleading. The movement of water caused by the friction of wind blowing over it is probably simpler for most people to understand than the movement caused by differences in temperature and salinity, and yet the simpler explanation is the one we don’t hear.

The use of the simplest explanation is a scientific principle in itself, known as Occam’s Razor. The fewer extra hypotheses you have to come up with to explain a phenomenon, the better the explanation is supposed to be or, put another way, the best hypothesis is the simplest one that agrees with the available evidence. Global warming hysteria is the opposite of this principle; it’s the most outrageous hypothesis that can be concocted using fabricated or nonexistent evidence. There are a large number of outrageous pseudoscientific, uneconomic, and immoral assumptions that have to be true, for instance, to support the idea that sending carbon credit money to Al Gore is a good thing.

The most concise methods of debunking global warming, however, often get passed over, because they’d bring an end to the argument too quickly. I think there ought to be an internet bulletin board law stating that the less sense something makes, the more discussion it generates.

Ivan, this is where the phrase “a little bit of knowledge is dangerous”. The atmosphere does not work like a high school physic textbook. For example a warmer fluid techically expands rather than rises. The fluid knows little of what surrounds it. If more energy is added, it will vibrate more and those vibrations will take up more room; hence expansion.
Most people use one physical principle and run with it to the nth degree without understanding how it may voilate other physical principles. Take a much wider understanding of physics like the climatologists who research this stuff and then you may come to a similar conclusion as they have.

On the surface, however, Venus has almost no wind, and I can find no mention of any large short-term swings in temperature, unlike planets and moons without atmospheres, where the differences between day and night can be over two hundred degrees Celsius. Our moon’s maximum daytime surface temperature is 123 degrees Celsius, for instance, far hotter than earth’s. We may be warmer than the moon on average, but since our temperature range is less extreme, that makes earth more habitable, not less.

It may be physically possible to have too much of a good thing as far as planetary insulation is concerned, but if carbon dioxide acts as insulation, the concentration at which it would become dangerous lies far beyond the level we can reach by burning fossil fuels. Adding more at this level (assuming that we’re not just maintaining an equilibrium level of CO2 that nature would provide anyway) should make the planet less subject to severe winds and temperature extremes, not less so.

Whether the changes we can make would be significant is another question altogether, of course. Air without carbon dioxide is still an extremely good insulator, provided that it’s not allowed to circulate. That’s why some of the most effective forms of insulation are made up of dead air spaces. Carbon dioxide and water are somewhat better insulators than oxygen and nitrogen (about 20 per cent or so), but they make up only a small fraction of the total air mass.

The basic methods of heat transfer are conduction, convection, and radiation. An insulator can operate by suppressing any combination of these mechanisms. Carbon dioxide, at least at the concentrations we can generate on earth, doesn’t do anything I know of to suppress convection. This means that at the lower levels of the atmosphere, its other potential properties don’t matter; convection overwhelms any other potential insulating properties CO2 might have (the difference doesn’t seem to show up in the higher levels, either; even after convection stops, CO2’s other presumed heating influences don’t seem to kick in because the higher levels haven’t warmed more than the lower ones). CO2’s a poor conductor, so it may be a little less likely to gain heat by collisions with other air molecules, but it’s also a potentially good radiative absorber, so if it’s colder than its surroundings, it can make up the difference by absorbing radiation. If it’s hotter than its surroundings, it can give off more radiation than it receives. What carbon dioxide does best, perhaps, is contradictory things that add up to almost no net change at all.

Carbon has an even greater potential stabilizing effect when one considers that it’s the basis of life. Life, particularly in its more complex forms, is a tremendous consumer of energy. Life finds ways to convert sunlight into growth and movement rather than heat, making its surroundings cooler than they would otherwise be. Human beings, including the ones flying outrageous distances to conferences, are perhaps the ultimate example of this. It’s a pity that they are unwilling to some of the supposedly excess energy that falls on the earth to benefit its poorer citizens.

Physics textbooks contain explanations of how the greenhouse effect doesn’t work, but they don’t explain how it does work. No validation of the presumed mechanism has shown up in experiments (CO2 content in an infrared-irradiated tube can be doubled and halved with no significant change in temperature, for instance) or been derived from first principles of physics. One of the criticisms of the way the “greenhouse effect” is supposed to work is that it violates the second law of thermodynamics. One way of stating this law is that heat will not flow on its own from a colder body (typically, the air higher in the troposphere) to a warmer one (the air near the earth’s surface). A fluid that is capable of convection also will not heat from the top down; warmer air rises, so if there were some sort of reflector/heater high up in the atmosphere, the air it heated typically wouldn’t get down to the surface.

However, there is no reflector up above the earth that works like the idealized walls of a greenhouse. The greenhouse effect is a misnomer. An actual greenhouse doesn’t stay warm because outgoing infrared radiation is trapped by the walls of the greenhouse. An experiment done about 100 years ago found a maximum warming effect of about 1 degree C that could be attributed to reflection and trapping of infrared radiation; the vast majority of the warming effect was caused by a lack of convection, that is, a restriction of air circulation between the insides and outsides of the container, much like what happens when a car’s windows are left closed on a hot day.

However, the atmosphere doesn’t work like a greenhouse even to the extent shown in the experiment! Carbon dioxide doesn’t reflect infrared radiation. It both absorbs and re-emits infrared radiation. Ice crystals can reflect infrared radiation, but they also reflect incoming sunlight. Clouds and increased humidity can make the air cool more slowly than it otherwise would overnight, but unless the clouds dissipate before the sun comes up, they also keep the earth from warming up during the day.

As to whether the climate is getting warmer or colder, the “average” earth temperature is a meaningless term. Some points show apparent warming trends, and some don’t, and people in some places may want warmer weather, while others don’t. There are many ways of calculating an average, and even if everyone agreed on which one were valid, weather is generated by interactions between contrasting air masses; what matters is how much one differs from the other.

According to the authors of The Satanic Gases, most of the warming that is presumed to have occurred over the last hundred years or so happened at night, near the earth’s surface, and in extreme winter cold conditions caused by high pressure systems in Siberia and northern Canada. In other words, it was mostly the very coldest air masses that got warmer.

During most of the earth’s history, life could exist over a wider area of the earth’s surface than today because the higher latitudes were warmer. No one is ever going to be completely happy about the weather (try listening to a farmer sometime, for instance), but a scenario in which the coldest areas warm the most is about the best that we could ask for.

I think it is important to start from where we agree. Here are a few items that I believe we can all agree are accepted scientific facts:
1- Humanity is pumping thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

2 - The laws of physics state that CO2 (in absence of any other mitigating factor) reflects more heat back to the earth. (Methane even more so.)

And perhaps a little less accepted, but less controversial than just a few years ago:
3- The climate is getting warmer over the past several decades.
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Does anyone on blue or red team dispute these?

Thank you,

jmmx

ok, on these points at least I can agree with you

Wouldn’t you have said the same thing about flying once? Or going to the moon? Do you really think that putting billions of tons of gas into the atmosphere can have no effect?

Believe it or not but some of us “pathetic little men” actually believe its possible to harness the sun and wind for renewable energy and stop using dirty old outdated fossil fuels.

And yes, we do think it will make a great difference in our climate as well as in the air we breath.

As my layman’s understanding goes, CO2 may or may not have terrifying effects. What we can be sure of however is that in the next 100 years, the weather really will affect all of us - people, agriculture, economies, the lot. As it always has done.

So maybe we should be using all this attention to focus on adaptation?