Ice That Took 1,600 Years to Form in Peru’s Andes Melted in Only 25

Yes, it's a morality play, human sin, this time via CO2.

And it's a trilogy -- transgression, retribution, and redemption. The transgression is the CO2 from human sin. The retribution is over heating the planet, as in glaciers melting. And the redemption? Sure, sacrifice, this time, a carbon tax to reverse much of the industrial revolution.

So, it's the old methods of fiction, e.g., morality plays, going back at least 1000 years. The NYT is good at writing morality plays.

Of course, one of the NYT people on this bandwagon is their Tom Friedman. On a talk show, he explained his view of the problem of CO2: He said that it absorbs light from the sun and, thus, heats the atmosphere.

Okay, let's check: Let's exhale, look at the little cloud of air with the extra CO2, and see if we can see any sunlight absorbed? Or, let's get some CO2 from some other sources and see if it looks darker because of the light it absorbs instead of transmits. Nope, we don't see anything. So, right, CO2 doesn't absorb sunlight.

So, what does CO2 absorb? It absorbs in three narrow frequency bands out in the infrared, one band for each of bending, twisting, and stretching of the molecule.

So, how, then, is CO2 a 'green house' gas? Because light from the sun is absorbed by the surface of the earth which, then, radiates roughly as a Planck 'black body' and, thus, radiates mostly in the infrared, and CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs some of the infrared, in those three narrow bands, instead of just letting it continue to radiate outward and be absorbed by water vapor, methane, or something else or just escape into space.

But there is CO2 in the atmosphere even without the human 'sin' of the industrial revolution, and it's not clear that more CO2 in the atmosphere will absorb more in those three narrow bands than now -- that is, it may be that all the infrared that CO2 can absorb is being absorbed now.

Someday, maybe, we will have news sources better informed than the NYT and, then, using expository techniques 1000 years closer to the present, from the 20th century and maybe even the 21st century.

From an article like this, I would cancel my subscription to the NYT but I can't: I've never subscribed to the NYT, rarely read it on-line, and have never read it on-line since their 'pay-wall'. They used to call me and ask me to subscribe, but I told them that my kitty cats prefer kitty litter or the bushes in the back yard and that I don't have any dead fish to wrap.

The NYT may be on the way out of business. I don't really want to see that and would hope that, instead, they would move forward 1000 years or so into at least the 20th century, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that.