Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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Low PPM CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere affects IR in the atmosphere much as thin steel plate affects a bullet fired 5,000 yards through air .. it absorbs and scatters despite being a 'mere' PPM.

( Carbon Dioxide Absorbs and Re-emits Infrared Radiation - https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/carbo... )

You want science, testable and repeatable science?

Start with, say, Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (1967)

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...

described as "the most influential studies of all time" ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/prof-john-mitchell-how-a-1967-st... )

There are others: https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-most-influential-climate-cha...

The real world physics of doubling a low CO2 concentration in representative air samples has been performed many a time .. it works as the cited paper says .. trapping more of heat energy radiated upwards by the land and sea that would otherwise diffuse outwards.

1967 is pretty ancient... Nowadays there are databases and there are detailed calculations about the spectrum (line by line). There is HITRAN database. And people did the calculations. And have done so for years... There are pretty precise calculations how much energy is being trapped. And they fit with observations. There is a saturation effect, and it's pretty strong. On each frequency you can only absorb the total amount of energy that is available there. After that adding more CO2 won't make a difference.

People calculated precisely what exactly happens when you double CO2... And the effect it's logarithmic...

First you claim to want science, now you're saying thermodynamics goes stale?

Maybe read the paper and those that followed, especially about the follow on increases in water vapor and methane and where trapped heat energy goes once there's little to no ice left to melt and act as a sink.

The people you are quoting are a known fossil fuel disinformation crew providing a pension plan to fossils like Clauser who have zero peer review papers in any part of the climate or geophysics field despite some sound work in unrelated fields contemporous with 1967.

If you're worried about methane, then maybe you should look at the spectrum of methane. You'll be surprised...

FWiW you appear to basing your take on a reading pushed by Dr. C.A. de Lange of CO2Coalition of an unaccepted paper by William. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer.

Original paper (on arvix, not accepted by any mainstream journal so far): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03098.pdf

C.A. de Lange loves it, claims it as game changing etc: https://co2coalition.org/publications/van-wijngaarden-and-ha...

There are a number of discussions re: the original paper and why it was not accepted, eg:

What is technically wrong with Wijngaarden & Happer's paper claiming to show that CO2's contribution to surface warming is saturated? - https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/25227/what-...

That discussion on Stackexchange has something like 6 upvotes. And if you read it, the comments there are mostly ridiculous. The absorption is logarithmic beyond 8000 ppm, and someone there e.g. whines about that Wijngaarden doesn't explain the climate on Venus (> 90% CO2 atmosphere).

The thing about Venus is also something you'll find if you look for serious papers trying to criticise the paper. Nitpicking about the word logarithmic seems to be the only things that serious critics have found. The other main argument seems to be name calling and Cancel Culture... and that's all what critics so far have produced...

Claiming that things are unaccepted is also some kind of rumour. There are more papers, and if you read them you'll notice that they're of very high quality. Just compare the quality with that of papers of critics...

To me the most compelling argument for Wijngaarden is the incredible low quality of all the writings from people from climate-institutes that tried to find something against him. OMG...

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