400 Parts Per Million - (an animated CO2 demo)

[Woodsman]

Hey, everybody!

So.., I found myself pondering how to cut through the extreme mud and fog of the climate debate, and while evaluating the argument, realized that everybody was generally looking in the wrong direction.

That is, we have billions of dollars being spent on measuring global temperatures and casting plots on computer models and such, -which is fine-, it's good to know what the planet is up to. But with that research, as has been quite clear over the last couple of decades, it is almost impossible to establish correlation (or no correlation) with certainty.

You end up in a state of combat where each side of the debate throws their favored papers at each other and tries to out-authority the other. "97 percent of scientists, blah, blah, blah")

So I thought, "Can't we just sidestep that whole argument?"

I've never seen is a serious study of the fundamental question.

"Can CO2 at the concentrations extant in the atmosphere actually do what the alarmists claim?"


None of the lab experiments I've seen perform the experiment properly. They all use waaaaaaay too much CO2. -Plopping alkaseltzer tablets into the CO2 jar, (ignoring the fact that just the chemical reaction itself releases heat, or that the bubbles catch more light than clear water). -Or opening gas tank taps for far too long, thus only ever proving that, yes, CO2 is a green house gas. But so what? It doesn't reflect nature! I don't even know how you would go about controlling for such small quantities of gas. Can such small measures even be done with high school science lab or kitchen equipment?

But how do you explain this?

I decided to make an animated gif.

This is it:

 

[Aeneas]

Yes, it is a good visual representation, Woodsman.

There is also the point that CO2 is food for the plant life. I heard recently from a well connected forester, that forests in Europe have grown significantly more per hectare in the last 50 years. In other words, the trees are able to put on more mass as there is more food. This increase is apparently not insignificant and we are talking of more than 10% increase. As far as I remember then there also was an article on Sott a few years back, stating that the same phenomenon has been observed in the Amazon rainforests.

So Nature is to a certain extent self regulating with inbuilt buffer mechanisms.This is of course messy for climate scientists with a political agenda, who wish to prouve a point via models. And models can show any scenario that you wish to convey is going to happen, it all depends on the input to the model and a tweaking of the chosen variables. GIGO principle applies. When it is ideologically driven then it just doesn't reflect Nature very well.

 

[Woodsman]

Hmph.

I didn't visualize this correctly. It needs to take volume into account.

 

[Woodsman]

Well... frig.

This is what 400 ppm looks like when distributed in a cube, as seen from a single side (below):

Stack up a few miles of that, and you'd probably get something reasonably murky to any infra red light rays.

Do the climate alarmists actually have something real to chew on with this whole CO2 thing?

What am I missing here?

 

[monotonic]

300ppm to 354ppm is a 1/6 increase. Whether this is significant depends on the system in which it occurs. The fact is that a given system can be very sensitive to small changes in certain parameters, and eyeballing it can only get you so far. Then again, it may be just what it looks like.

So the question we're left with is, who understands the system correctly, and what is their view on global warming? Simple veracity tests, fact-checking and money trailing can shed a lot of light on that question without necessarily having to understand the science very well. I think your presentation is a great way to get people to think with a more open mind on this topic, and if it were phrased into a question, a climate scientist should be able to answer it coherently, without paramoralisms, deflections, name-dropping or doctored graphs.

 

[Joe]

The best argument I've heard against AGW is the evidence that the planet has periodically warmed and cooled throughout history, long before there could have been any AGW.

 

[griffin]

The best argument I've heard against AGW is the evidence that the planet has periodically warmed and cooled throughout history, long before there could have been any AGW.

A convincing study I recall seeing somewhere compared ice core CO2 with tree ring climate data series and observed that the climate warming occurred before the CO2 increased, which established that the increase in CO2 did not cause the warming.

We're also living through an historic, live demonstration that an increase in CO2 is not causing the climate to warm. CO2 has increased from about 350ppm to 400ppm over the last 20 years, but there has been no corresponding increase in temperature as was predicted by global warming models.

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is and always has been an intellectual fraud and a political scam.