The Cooling Effect of Carbon Dioxide

 Well, this is interesting.  Tom Anderson has put the global warming and CO2 issues in perspective for us, using actual...you know...physics.  His piece can be found at the American Thinker today entitled Button Upu Your Overcoat. The greenhouse effect, while true for greenhouses, has always been suspect when applied on a planetary basis. Looking at CO2 from a physics perspective, it is not a warming agent, but actually a coolant; one of a number of negative feedback mechanism that prevent our planet from running away in any direction.

The idea that carbon dioxide (CO2) drives global warming or “climate change” now enjoys unquestioned authority and near universal approval. As burgeoning public policy, nationally and in some states, it is seeping into what once were private matters of choice (e.g., light bulbs, kitchen cooktops). Many scientists, primarily physicists, consider the belief pure supposition, however, and colossally off track.

...snip...

Evidence is that CO2 is overall a coolant. First, it radiates incoming solar energy and outgoing terrestrial heat away to space. This is visible as cooling in satellite images not only of Earth but also of Mars and Venus, climate change’s orbiting poster child.

It is an “infrared radiation active” gas, absorbing and emitting radiant energy from the sun -- but not the entire spectrum. Like any molecule, it absorbs only “spectral bands” (beams) of solar energy (sunlight) that “resonate” with its “quantum number,” a measure of the energetic space between its nucleus and electron rings as developed by Max Planck and Albert Einstein in the early 20th Century.

And this:

NASA scientists advised against using fossil fuels to warm the planet in 1971 because they were “atmospheric coolants” with a potential, alarmists claimed, for triggering an ice age. They are still coolants.

Also, while aerosols from combustion cool in direct proportion to their increase, CO2’s warmer (but still tardy) emission bands would quickly “saturate,” damping off any temperature increase. All later studies and the IPCC agree on this, and it means no “runaway warming.”

All of this has been known to the IPCC and climate scientists since at least the 1970s, when global cooling was the scare, but probably well before then. Whether it is global cooling, or global warming or just climate change, the big bad bogeyman has always been fossil fuels. Why is that? Because, this has always been about forcing the West, particularly the United States to give up fossil fuels to weaken it. It seems to be working.