Thursday, August 16, 2012

Political Delusions About Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere


The Warning Signs and Climaterealists sites have a post by Alan Caruba, about a new effort to regulate carbon dioxide gas (CO2) emissions.  The post cites an article by Hans Schreuder, saying in part that CO2 cools the atmosphere.  I submitted the following comment to the Warning Signs site:

Two points:

1) This is part of what I call "The War of the Insane Left" (capitalized so I don't lose focus upon it, because I see it as a fundamental, defining fact of our current, largely political situation, although it involves a suborned, incompetent climate science, and no doubt other sciences as well).

2) CO2 does not cool the atmosphere.  Rather the atmosphere, as a whole, because of its stable (!) temperature distribution -- due to gravity, increasing the pressure and thus the temperature, the farther down one goes in the atmosphere -- can cool the Earth's surface (as the surface rises to higher altitudes, for example, and at night, when the surface cools faster than the atmosphere closest to it); and the Earth's surface does not warm the atmosphere except locally and transiently, which drives the weather but does not affect the stable vertical distribution of temperature in the atmosphere (the decrease in temperature with altitude, throughout the troposphere).

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