Chemistry Expert: Carbon Dioxide Can’t Cause Global Warming
Scarcely a day goes by without us being warned of coastal inundation by rising seas due to global warming.
Well, I have gone many days without hearing such a warning and I live quite close to the ocean. But, of course, global warming is taking place and as a result, sea levels are rising worldwide.
Why on earth do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.
Because CO2 is responsible and an examination of the thermodynamics shows it is happening.
Carbon dioxide, we are told, traps heat that has been irradiated by the oceans
CO2 absorbs a portion of the IR spectrum no matter where it comes from. It then reradiates that energy in those same narrow bands. Those bands are unique; they are not absorbed by water vapor or any other atmospheric gases.
and this warms the oceans and melts the polar ice caps.
It warms the whole planet. It's the greenhouse effect which is extremely close to being universally accepted among those with a science education.
While this seems a plausible proposition at first glance, when one actually examines it closely a major flaw emerges.
It's more than plausible. And I bet we
will see a few major flaws somewhere before we're done here.
In a nutshell, water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and air doesn’t contain much. In fact, on a volume/volume basis, the ratio of heat capacities is about 3300 to 1. This means that to heat 1 litre of water by 1˚C it would take 3300 litres of air that was 2˚C hotter, or 1 litre of air that was about 3300˚C hotter!
That Dr Imisides is one sharp cookie! However, he has already made a small misstep. The discussion here was about the oceans being heated by CO2 in the atmosphere, not about the ocean's being heated by conduction from the air. If this shift was intentional, it would be the deliberate introduction of a straw man argument. If it wasn't, it doesn't make Dr Imisides or our poster Daveman look real crispy.
There are three ways in which heat is transferred: radiation, conduction and convection. The oceans and the atmosphere above them exchange thermal energy using all three methods. Radiative transfer is the mode most obviously affected by the presence of CO2. Conduction and convection are dependent on the temperature differential between air and water, the RH of the air (as that will significantly impact its specific heat capacity) and, for convection, wind speed as well as surface roughness. The temperature of the air will be affected by the presence of CO2 so it has an indirect impact on these two as well.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you ran a cold bath and then tried to heat it by putting a dozen heaters in the room, does anyone believe that the water would ever get hot?
The problem gets even stickier when you consider the size of the ocean. Basically, there is too much water and not enough air.
The ocean contains a colossal 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water! To heat it, even by a small amount, takes a staggering amount of energy.
That's true. So the seemingly miniscule amount of heating it has undergone from global warming represent a staggering amount of actual energy absorbed.
To heat it by a mere 1˚C, for example, an astonishing 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy are required.
That's why we should be very impressed when we see data like these:
This indicator describes trends in the amount of heat stored in the world’s oceans.
www.epa.gov
Let’s put this amount of energy in perspective. If we all turned off all our appliances and went and lived in caves, and then devoted every coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, wind and solar power plant to just heating the ocean, it would take a breathtaking 32,000 years to heat the ocean by just this 1˚C!
In short, our influence on our climate, even if we really tried, is miniscule!
It amazes me that someone allegedly having a doctorate in some branch of science could publish an argument this inane. Last year, humans generated ~3.2 trillion watt-years of electrical energy. The solar energy absorbed (not just impinging, but absorbed) by the Earth's land, sea and air amounted to 122 quadrillion watt-years (3,850,000 Exajoules) of energy. The world's oceans are not being measurably heated by the direct thermal results of human actions but by our emissions trapping a small fraction of the more than 38 THOUSAND times as energetic sunlight absorbed by the planet.
So it makes sense to ask the question – if the ocean were to be heated by ‘greenhouse warming’ of the atmosphere, how hot would the air have to get? If the entire ocean is heated by 1˚C, how much would the air have to be heated by to contain enough heat to do the job?
The Earth's oceans, since 1901, including water down to 2,300 feet have warmed by 0.83C. You will note in Dr Imisides' comments here, he never states how long a period he is proposing to accomplish that warming. In reality, of course, it has been over a century and a half.
Well, unfortunately for every ton of water there is only a kilogram of air. Taking into account the relative heat capacities and absolute masses, we arrive at the astonishing figure of 4,000˚C.
That is, if we wanted to heat the entire ocean by 1˚C, and wanted to do it by heating the air above it, we’d have to heat the air to about 4,000˚C hotter than the water.
If you would like to read an article about how the oceans are being warmed by greenhouse gas emissions, here is an article written by several scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I guarantee you that these people are better informed about this topic than either Dr Imisides or poster Daveman (or me).
Ocean Warming - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
And another problem is that air sits on top of water – how would hot air heat deep into the ocean? Even if the surface warmed, the warm water would just sit on top of the cold water.
Jiminy Christmas, I could be wrong, but I think they call it "mixing".
Thus, if the ocean were being heated by ‘greenhouse heating’ of the air, we would see a system with enormous thermal lag – for the ocean to be only slightly warmer, the land would have to be substantially warmer, and the air much, much warmer (to create the temperature gradient that would facilitate the transfer of heat from the air to the water).
We do see a large thermal lag. And one of the major consequences of that lag is that even were we to zero out GHG emissions this instant, the oceans would continue to warm for decades.
Therefore any measurable warmth in the ocean would be accompanied by a huge and obvious anomaly in the air temperatures, and we would not have to bother looking at ocean temperatures at all.
This man is not making sense. We do see an obvious thermal anomaly in the air and we do see a large difference between the warming of the air and that of the oceans and we never expected to see anything else.
So if the air doesn’t contain enough energy to heat the oceans or melt the ice caps, what does?
Courtesy of the greenhouse effect, basic thermodynamics and 150 years, the sun does.
The earth is tilted on its axis, and this gives us our seasons.
Sharp as a TACK this guy!
When the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, we have more direct sunlight and more of it (longer days).
If anyone finds this a trifle confusing, the good Doctor is an Aussie.
When it is tilted away from the sun, we have less direct sunlight and less of it (shorter days).
The direct result of this is that in summer it is hot and in winter it is cold. In winter we run the heaters in our cars, and in summer the air conditioners. In winter the polar caps freeze over and in summer 60-70% of them melt (about ten million square kilometres). In summer the water is warmer and winter it is cooler (ask any surfer).
All of these changes are directly determined by the amount of sunlight that we get. When the clouds clear and bathe us in sunlight, we don’t take off our jumper because of ‘greenhouse heating’ of the atmosphere, but because of the direct heat caused by the sunlight on our body. The sun’s influence is direct, obvious, and instantaneous.
We're looking at about 1.5C warming from AGW over a period of many decades. That this doesn't push everyone in Australia to pull off their "jumpers" is meaningless twaddle. I really didn't know it was possible to get a doctorate in industrial chemistry while remaining as fundamentally ignorant in basic physics as this fellow. There was some background info on the man in the actual article he wrote (and on which Daveman's article was based). It says this: "
Dr. Mark Imisides is an industrial chemist with extensive experience in the chemical industry, encompassing manufacturing, laboratory management, analysis, waste management, dangerous goods and household chemistry. He currently has a media profile in The West Australian newspaper and on Today Tonight. For a sample of his work visit www.drchemical.com.au" See:
Chemistry Expert: Carbon Dioxide can’t cause Global Warming | Principia Scientific Intl. and among other things see why you should not trust articles at Principia Scientific.
So, manufacturing, laboratory management, analysis, waste management, dangerous goods and household chemistry. I see nothing there that would relate to the greenhouse effect, atmospheric physics, ocean physics or thermodynamics. And, it shows.
If the enormous influence of the sun on our climate is so obvious, then, by what act of madness do we look at a variation of a fraction of a percent in any of these variables, and not look to the sun as the cause?
Perhaps because TSI has been going down while temperatures of the land, air and seas have been going up. Jesus, this guy's a ******* idiot.
Why on earth (pun intended) do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.
A genuine, four-star, Grade A idiot
Article's from a couple of years ago. He makes a point I haven't ever seen discussed:
The atmosphere just can't hold enough heat to warm up the oceans.
Can anyone knowledgeable of thermodynamics point out any flaws in his reasoning?
Yes.