Why CO2 warming only happens near the Surface

[SSDD]

Why are you arguing water instead of CO2?.

Because unlike CO2...water actually can slow down the escape of IR into space.

 

[westwall]

You must either believe that CO2 can warm further or you must believe that CO2 is saturated and has no further effect.

Why don't you read my posts?

I told you that CO2 continues to add warming influence as it increases, and how it does it.

You said 'further warming' so I asked if that meant you believed CO2 had caused some warming.

I asked you what you meant by saturated, because only a small proportion of CO2 is in the excited mode at room temperature. Explain how saturated means no further effect.

No, Ian, you have presented yet another model, one that is devoid of actual empirical data from what I can see of it. However, I did find this part of the essay interesting.

"The LTE conditions with the energy equipartition law give immediately the answer : “These rates are exactly equal .” This means that for every collision where a vibrationally excited CO2* transfers energy to N2 , there is a collision where N2⁺ transfers the same energy to CO2 and excites it vibrationally . There is no net energy transfer from CO2 to N2 through the vibration-translation interaction .

As we have seen that CO2 cannot transfer energy to N2 through the translation-translation process either , there is no net energy transfer (e.g “heating”) from CO2 to N2 what proves our statement ."

 

[Billy_Bob]

Either the warming is at the surface or it is mid troposphere as indicated by the AGW hypothesis. Which is it Ian?

CO2 warms the atmosphere during the first 10 metres. No more surface (edit- CO2 specific) energy is left to capture after that. I have been talking about a surface radiation bottleneck since I got here eight years ago. There is a much smaller bottleneck at the precipitating cloudtops where latent heat is released because an extra bolus of 15 micron IR is included in that release.

So CO2 is not warming the oceans 800m deep?

Empirical evidence shows that LWIR cant even break the skin of the water at 10um.. IF it could our oceans would have boiled away long ago...

 

[Billy_Bob]

SO what happened with the AGW hypothesis that water vapor has a redundant feedback loop mid troposphere? You know, the one that says there must be a hot spot? Here is why it does not appear.

Why are you arguing water instead of CO2?

I was one of the first here to point out the flaws of hotspot. Or the bizarre coefficient of evaporation used in the climate models, or how they only consider the energy transferred in convection not the mass that carries it. Etc.

I don't mind discussing the numerous flaws in the IPCC explanations.

Personally I don't see why climate science bundles the different effects so tightly. The uncertainties involved with each pathway vary tremendously. The A in CAGW comes from CO2, and is reasonably simple and certain. The C in CAGW comes from water vapour feedbacks which are neither simple or certain.

Remember learning about significant figures in grade school math? Uncertainties are worse, they multiply. The IPCC confidence levels are massively exaggerated.

I focus on water vapor because it can hold heat unlike CO2 which can not. And that were talking 400 pieces in a 1,000,000,000 piece puzzle that is dominated by 400,000 to 600,000ppm water vapor on average.

 

[IanC]

Why are you arguing water instead of CO2?.

Because unlike CO2...water actually can slow down the escape of IR into space.

The big missing notch is due to CO2. Why are you saying it doesn't slow the escape of IR to space?

 

[westwall]

Why are you arguing water instead of CO2?.

Because unlike CO2...water actually can slow down the escape of IR into space.

The big missing notch is due to CO2. Why are you saying it doesn't slow the escape of IR to space?

So what? There is no mechanism for the CO2 to add energy into the system.

 

[IanC]

Huh. I

SO what happened with the AGW hypothesis that water vapor has a redundant feedback loop mid troposphere? You know, the one that says there must be a hot spot? Here is why it does not appear.

Why are you arguing water instead of CO2?

I was one of the first here to point out the flaws of hotspot. Or the bizarre coefficient of evaporation used in the climate models, or how they only consider the energy transferred in convection not the mass that carries it. Etc.

I don't mind discussing the numerous flaws in the IPCC explanations.

Personally I don't see why climate science bundles the different effects so tightly. The uncertainties involved with each pathway vary tremendously. The A in CAGW comes from CO2, and is reasonably simple and certain. The C in CAGW comes from water vapour feedbacks which are neither simple or certain.

Remember learning about significant figures in grade school math? Uncertainties are worse, they multiply. The IPCC confidence levels are massively exaggerated.

I focus on water vapor because it can hold heat unlike CO2 which can not. And that were talking 400 pieces in a 1,000,000,000 piece puzzle that is dominated by 400,000 to 600,000ppm water vapor on average.

Huh. I did not know that the air was 40-60% water vapour. Do you have a link to document that?

Because I think you are spewing your usual nonsense.

 

[IanC]

Why are you arguing water instead of CO2?.

Because unlike CO2...water actually can slow down the escape of IR into space.

The big missing notch is due to CO2. Why are you saying it doesn't slow the escape of IR to space?

So what? There is no mechanism for the CO2 to add energy into the system.

What? You want me to repeat myself yet again? I have given the mechanism dozens of times.

 

[IanC]

You must either believe that CO2 can warm further or you must believe that CO2 is saturated and has no further effect.

Why don't you read my posts?

I told you that CO2 continues to add warming influence as it increases, and how it does it.

You said 'further warming' so I asked if that meant you believed CO2 had caused some warming.

I asked you what you meant by saturated, because only a small proportion of CO2 is in the excited mode at room temperature. Explain how saturated means no further effect.

No, Ian, you have presented yet another model, one that is devoid of actual empirical data from what I can see of it. However, I did find this part of the essay interesting.

"The LTE conditions with the energy equipartition law give immediately the answer : “These rates are exactly equal .” This means that for every collision where a vibrationally excited CO2* transfers energy to N2 , there is a collision where N2⁺ transfers the same energy to CO2 and excites it vibrationally . There is no net energy transfer from CO2 to N2 through the vibration-translation interaction .

As we have seen that CO2 cannot transfer energy to N2 through the translation-translation process either , there is no net energy transfer (e.g “heating”) from CO2 to N2 what proves our statement ."

Did you read the whole article?

 

[IanC]

Either the warming is at the surface or it is mid troposphere as indicated by the AGW hypothesis. Which is it Ian?

CO2 warms the atmosphere during the first 10 metres. No more surface (edit- CO2 specific) energy is left to capture after that. I have been talking about a surface radiation bottleneck since I got here eight years ago. There is a much smaller bottleneck at the precipitating cloudtops where latent heat is released because an extra bolus of 15 micron IR is included in that release.

So CO2 is not warming the oceans 800m deep?

Empirical evidence shows that LWIR cant even break the skin of the water at 10um.. IF it could our oceans would have boiled away long ago...

More nonsense. Show that you understand emissivity first. Then where the 10 micron IR was coming from in such a large quantity that it would 'boil away the oceans'.

 

[westwall]

You must either believe that CO2 can warm further or you must believe that CO2 is saturated and has no further effect.

Why don't you read my posts?

I told you that CO2 continues to add warming influence as it increases, and how it does it.

You said 'further warming' so I asked if that meant you believed CO2 had caused some warming.

I asked you what you meant by saturated, because only a small proportion of CO2 is in the excited mode at room temperature. Explain how saturated means no further effect.

No, Ian, you have presented yet another model, one that is devoid of actual empirical data from what I can see of it. However, I did find this part of the essay interesting.

"The LTE conditions with the energy equipartition law give immediately the answer : “These rates are exactly equal .” This means that for every collision where a vibrationally excited CO2* transfers energy to N2 , there is a collision where N2⁺ transfers the same energy to CO2 and excites it vibrationally . There is no net energy transfer from CO2 to N2 through the vibration-translation interaction .

As we have seen that CO2 cannot transfer energy to N2 through the translation-translation process either , there is no net energy transfer (e.g “heating”) from CO2 to N2 what proves our statement ."

Did you read the whole article?

I did. What do you think is the most compelling part?

 

[Billy_Bob]

Either the warming is at the surface or it is mid troposphere as indicated by the AGW hypothesis. Which is it Ian?

CO2 warms the atmosphere during the first 10 metres. No more surface (edit- CO2 specific) energy is left to capture after that. I have been talking about a surface radiation bottleneck since I got here eight years ago. There is a much smaller bottleneck at the precipitating cloudtops where latent heat is released because an extra bolus of 15 micron IR is included in that release.

So CO2 is not warming the oceans 800m deep?

Empirical evidence shows that LWIR cant even break the skin of the water at 10um.. IF it could our oceans would have boiled away long ago...

More nonsense. Show that you understand emissivity first. Then where the 10 micron IR was coming from in such a large quantity that it would 'boil away the oceans'.

Sea water can not absorb CO2 emitted LWIR beyond the skin layer which is less than 10 microns thick. IF it could absorb it, the oceans would warm massively and that would be the end of life on earth.

 

[Billy_Bob]

Either the warming is at the surface or it is mid troposphere as indicated by the AGW hypothesis. Which is it Ian?

CO2 warms the atmosphere during the first 10 metres. No more surface (edit- CO2 specific) energy is left to capture after that. I have been talking about a surface radiation bottleneck since I got here eight years ago. There is a much smaller bottleneck at the precipitating cloudtops where latent heat is released because an extra bolus of 15 micron IR is included in that release.

So CO2 is not warming the oceans 800m deep?

Empirical evidence shows that LWIR cant even break the skin of the water at 10um.. IF it could our oceans would have boiled away long ago...

More nonsense. Show that you understand emissivity first. Then where the 10 micron IR was coming from in such a large quantity that it would 'boil away the oceans'.

US- CRN data collection sites say your hypothesis is wrong.. You know that empirical observed evidence thing..

 

[Billy_Bob]

Huh. I

SO what happened with the AGW hypothesis that water vapor has a redundant feedback loop mid troposphere? You know, the one that says there must be a hot spot? Here is why it does not appear.

Why are you arguing water instead of CO2?

I was one of the first here to point out the flaws of hotspot. Or the bizarre coefficient of evaporation used in the climate models, or how they only consider the energy transferred in convection not the mass that carries it. Etc.

I don't mind discussing the numerous flaws in the IPCC explanations.

Personally I don't see why climate science bundles the different effects so tightly. The uncertainties involved with each pathway vary tremendously. The A in CAGW comes from CO2, and is reasonably simple and certain. The C in CAGW comes from water vapour feedbacks which are neither simple or certain.

Remember learning about significant figures in grade school math? Uncertainties are worse, they multiply. The IPCC confidence levels are massively exaggerated.

I focus on water vapor because it can hold heat unlike CO2 which can not. And that were talking 400 pieces in a 1,000,000,000 piece puzzle that is dominated by 400,000 to 600,000ppm water vapor on average.

Huh. I did not know that the air was 40-60% water vapour. Do you have a link to document that?

Because I think you are spewing your usual nonsense.

Average humidity in the atmosphere is 44.56% of its mass. Now do tell how LWIR reacts to such an overwhelming negative force..

 

[SSDD]

US- CRN data collection sites say your hypothesis is wrong.. You know that empirical observed evidence thing..

Ian isn't about what is real...or what is observed...ian is about the flawed mind experiment...he is about could be...and might be...ian is about the magic and no amount of observed, measured evidence will ever convince him that his personal explanation for the non existent, unobservable, unmeasurable, untestable effect CO2 has on the climate is wrong.

 

[IanC]

Either the warming is at the surface or it is mid troposphere as indicated by the AGW hypothesis. Which is it Ian?

CO2 warms the atmosphere during the first 10 metres. No more surface (edit- CO2 specific) energy is left to capture after that. I have been talking about a surface radiation bottleneck since I got here eight years ago. There is a much smaller bottleneck at the precipitating cloudtops where latent heat is released because an extra bolus of 15 micron IR is included in that release.

So CO2 is not warming the oceans 800m deep?

Empirical evidence shows that LWIR cant even break the skin of the water at 10um.. IF it could our oceans would have boiled away long ago...

More nonsense. Show that you understand emissivity first. Then where the 10 micron IR was coming from in such a large quantity that it would 'boil away the oceans'.

Sea water can not absorb CO2 emitted LWIR beyond the skin layer which is less than 10 microns thick. IF it could absorb it, the oceans would warm massively and that would be the end of life on earth.

I don't think you guys understand any of the basics here. Or follow the consequences through to the end.

Emissivity means, roughly speaking, how much radiation is absorbed and how much radiation passes through.

Water is a strong absorber of IR, therefore it is also a good emitter of IR. Any incoming IR is immediately absorbed, none passes through. The mean free is very short, the extinction depth is only slightly longer. Let's call it a millimetre. All the IR energy is absorbed in the first millimetre.

Water is a medium absorber of visible light. Let's say the extinction depth is 100 metres. All the VL energy is absorbed in the first 100 metres.

Water is a poor absorber of UV. But all the UV energy is absorbed by, say, 1000 metres.

What would happen if some biological process added something that changed the extinction depth to half the original? The upper ocean would warm because the same energy would go into a smaller volume.

The ocean and the atmosphere are different. Any radiation going into the ocean is eventually absorbed. In the atmosphere, surface radiation that is weakly absorbed only adds a fraction of the energy and the rest escapes to space. Any radiation not absorbed quickly in the dense lower atmosphere becomes more and more likely to escape.

 

[westwall]

CO2 warms the atmosphere during the first 10 metres. No more surface (edit- CO2 specific) energy is left to capture after that. I have been talking about a surface radiation bottleneck since I got here eight years ago. There is a much smaller bottleneck at the precipitating cloudtops where latent heat is released because an extra bolus of 15 micron IR is included in that release.

So CO2 is not warming the oceans 800m deep?

Empirical evidence shows that LWIR cant even break the skin of the water at 10um.. IF it could our oceans would have boiled away long ago...

More nonsense. Show that you understand emissivity first. Then where the 10 micron IR was coming from in such a large quantity that it would 'boil away the oceans'.

Sea water can not absorb CO2 emitted LWIR beyond the skin layer which is less than 10 microns thick. IF it could absorb it, the oceans would warm massively and that would be the end of life on earth.

I don't think you guys understand any of the basics here. Or follow the consequences through to the end.

Emissivity means, roughly speaking, how much radiation is absorbed and how much radiation passes through.

Water is a strong absorber of IR, therefore it is also a good emitter of IR. Any incoming IR is immediately absorbed, none passes through. The mean free is very short, the extinction depth is only slightly longer. Let's call it a millimetre. All the IR energy is absorbed in the first millimetre.

Water is a medium absorber of visible light. Let's say the extinction depth is 100 metres. All the VL energy is absorbed in the first 100 metres.

Water is a poor absorber of UV. But all the UV energy is absorbed by, say, 1000 metres.

What would happen if some biological process added something that changed the extinction depth to half the original? The upper ocean would warm because the same energy would go into a smaller volume.

The ocean and the atmosphere are different. Any radiation going into the ocean is eventually absorbed. In the atmosphere, surface radiation that is weakly absorbed only adds a fraction of the energy and the rest escapes to space. Any radiation not absorbed quickly in the dense lower atmosphere becomes more and more likely to escape.

No, Ian, I think it is you who don't understand the basics. A greenhouse can only work if the system is closed. The Earth is provably not a closed system. If it were, the planet would have already been turned into a desert wasteland when the CO2 levels were at the 7000 ppm level. Based on the computer models that you place so much faith in, had the world actually worked like the models claim, there would be no life as we know it on this planet. Period.

That is the reality. The claim that CO2 has this enormous impact on global temps is false. It has always been false.

 

[IanC]

You must either believe that CO2 can warm further or you must believe that CO2 is saturated and has no further effect.

Why don't you read my posts?

I told you that CO2 continues to add warming influence as it increases, and how it does it.

You said 'further warming' so I asked if that meant you believed CO2 had caused some warming.

I asked you what you meant by saturated, because only a small proportion of CO2 is in the excited mode at room temperature. Explain how saturated means no further effect.

No, Ian, you have presented yet another model, one that is devoid of actual empirical data from what I can see of it. However, I did find this part of the essay interesting.

"The LTE conditions with the energy equipartition law give immediately the answer : “These rates are exactly equal .” This means that for every collision where a vibrationally excited CO2* transfers energy to N2 , there is a collision where N2⁺ transfers the same energy to CO2 and excites it vibrationally . There is no net energy transfer from CO2 to N2 through the vibration-translation interaction .

As we have seen that CO2 cannot transfer energy to N2 through the translation-translation process either , there is no net energy transfer (e.g “heating”) from CO2 to N2 what proves our statement ."

Did you read the whole article?

I did. What do you think is the most compelling part?

I don't think there is a compelling part, but then I knew about LTE and the Equipartition Theorum from before. I thought it would be informative for those who hadn't been exposed to the idea.

The article only covered one type of molecule, and one band of radiation. The zone where heating from the surface takes place is only the first 10 metres of atmosphere. The zone of cooling starts much higher up, and continues until there is no more kinetic energy to convert. In between is just passive diffusion of energy.

There are other molecules, other wavelengths, that follow the same type of pathway. Most with much longer mean free paths, some with no extinction heights at all.

 

[IanC]

Earth is provably not a closed system. If it were, the planet would have already been turned into a desert wasteland when the CO2 levels were at the 7000 ppm level. Based on the computer models that you place so much faith in, had the world actually worked like the models claim, there would be no life as we know it on this planet. Period.

That is the reality. The claim that CO2 has this enormous impact on global temps is false. It has always been false

Okay, let's look at your scenario. 7000 ppm is a little over five doublings of CO2, about 5C of surface temperature increase. But what about the upper cooling? Right now raising the escape height puts it into a cooler level of the upper troposphere. Once it gets into the stratosphere the temperature starts to go up again, which would then increase the cooling side. Ever wonder about that sharp upward line in the middle of the 15 micron IR band? It is CO2's most favoured type of radiation. The escape height for that particular wavelength is already up in the stratosphere where it is warmer.

I don't think 5C of warming would turn the world into a desert, probably the opposite in many areas.

I have never said CO2 has an enormous impact. But it does have an impact, a warming influence.

 

[westwall]

Earth is provably not a closed system. If it were, the planet would have already been turned into a desert wasteland when the CO2 levels were at the 7000 ppm level. Based on the computer models that you place so much faith in, had the world actually worked like the models claim, there would be no life as we know it on this planet. Period.

That is the reality. The claim that CO2 has this enormous impact on global temps is false. It has always been false

Okay, let's look at your scenario. 7000 ppm is a little over five doublings of CO2, about 5C of surface temperature increase. But what about the upper cooling? Right now raising the escape height puts it into a cooler level of the upper troposphere. Once it gets into the stratosphere the temperature starts to go up again, which would then increase the cooling side. Ever wonder about that sharp upward line in the middle of the 15 micron IR band? It is CO2's most favoured type of radiation. The escape height for that particular wavelength is already up in the stratosphere where it is warmer.

I don't think 5C of warming would turn the world into a desert, probably the opposite in many areas.

I have never said CO2 has an enormous impact. But it does have an impact, a warming influence.

The paleo record is very clear. There have been periods of warmth and cold regardless of what the CO2 content of the atmosphere was. We KNOW this.

We believe (but don't know) that in the absence of a dense atmosphere that CO2 will form an exoatmosphere and "trap" warmth close to the surface of otherwise barren worlds. But is that because of its greenhouse gas properties, or because of its density?

We KNOW that water vapor retains heat.

We KNOW that CO2 does not.

Most of what we know about the properties of CO2 tell us it has no effect on warming.