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Infrared Radiation Blocked by Carbon Dioxide

By: AndrewHyman (Diary)  |  July 15th, 2012 at 01:31 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Here’s an interesting Youtube video that shows carbon dioxide blocking infrared radiation:

It’s a pretty nifty little experiment. Certainly, if we put too much CO2 into the atmosphere, the Earth will get much warmer. This video does not help us figure out how much is too much, but it does kind of compel us to try and answer that question.

COMMENTS

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  • rbdwiggins

    Known Fact™ Alert: “Certainly, if we put too much CO2 into the atmosphere, the Earth will get much warmer.”

    Regarding the compelling nature of the question:

    “…how much is too much, but it does kind of compel us to try to answer that question.”

    A more pressing and legitimate question in response:

    How do we feed a population of more than six billion people when the encroaching glacier period engulfs the Earth and the planet’s agricultural regions retreat ahead of the advancing ice sheet?

    • ohiohistorian

      This is no discovery. Any decent physicist or IR chemist knows that this is true. The real question is, so what?

      The CO2 that man puts into the cycle is 5-10% of total even today. In one day, a volcano can put a year’s worth of anthropogenic CO2 into the air.

      Water vapor is not in the models, but the quantity of it multiplied by the factor when temperature is changing over 0.5 degree is more than CO2, but is not predictable, so it is not included in the models.

      • rbdwiggins

        It’s a Known Fact,™ and as such, its premise should be rejected by any credible physicist.

  • AndrewHyman

    I agree that human-caused increases of atmospheric CO2 may have powerful effects, even powerful enough to prevent an ice age. Which is great. But there are strong indications that we have already reversed the cooling trend that was leading to the next ice age.

    Earth’s albedo is the amount of incoming solar energy that is reflected back into space and not absorbed by the planet. ?The long term trend from albedo is that of cooling, but during the past decade satellite measurements of albedo show little to no trend.

    When Yellowstone blows up, it will cover 80% of the US with a white, fine dust that reflects the sun?s light back into space. ?But that’s probably thousands of years away, and by then we will hopefully have the technology to easily compensate. But in the mean time, it would be nice if we keep the albedo stable, wouldn’t it? If CO2 has caused the albedo from increasing, what do you think more CO2 will do?

    • AndrewHyman

      Last sentence should say: “If added CO2 has caused the albedo to stop increasing, what do you think more CO2 will do?”

      • rbdwiggins

        …except to plant life, certain organisms and the life sustaining process of photosynthesis.

        Missing from the “public debate” regarding Atmospheric CO2 is one very inconvenient fact:

        According to Newton’s Second Law Of Thermodynamics, the planetary mechanism required to support the Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming due to an increase in Atmospheric CO2 can never exist.

        Unlike the closed system used in the CO2 experiment above where the variables are controlled, the Earth’s climate is a dynamic system in which the variables are nearly infinite and constantly changing.

        • Viet71

          But Isaac Newton died about 200 years before the Second Law of Thermodynamics was formulated.

          Otherwise, agree with your comment.

          • rbdwiggins

            I had a brain fart…

            I attribute that to old age.

  • gekster

    Instead of putting 100% carbon dioxide in the tube,
    put in the real world amount of 0.0387% by volume.
    See what happens then.
    Heck, put in 0.5% and see what happens.
    Do you have a hockey stick graph also.
    Exagerated experiments is just what the left has been using to scare us about global warming.

    Instead of a candle, use a reliable, steady source for the infrared heat.
    Put the realistic amount of carbon dioxide in the tube, 0.0387%,
    take a timed measurement, slowly put in more carbon dioxide,
    in 0.001% increments, another timed measurement = to the first,
    and repeat the process for at least 100 measurements.
    Do that and then come back with the results, and you just might have a winable arguement.

    • AndrewHyman

      Gekster, how many parts per million of carbon dioxide would we have to add into the atmosphere for you to become a global warming protester?

      • gekster

        I never will.

      • gekster

        10,000 years ago where I am sitting in Michigan was under 2 miles of ice.
        The question, what happpened to it?

        • AndrewHyman

          I would be willing to wager a considerable sum that what happened to the glaciers in Michigan is that they melted. Everyone agrees that there have been periods of warming and cooling in the past. Those natural fluctuations were caused by things other than human-caused CO2 increases. And it also may well be that CO2 fluctuations during prior millennia were lagging indictators rather than leading indicators of climate change. But none of that precludes rapid temperature increases in the future, due to unprecedented human-caused increases of atmospheric CO2.

          Gekster does raise a good objection regarding table-top experiments. None of the table-top experiments that I’ve found on the Internet measure the percentage of CO2 in the container that is subjected to infrared radiation. And that’s really pathetic.

      • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8

        that CO2 concentrations are a lagging indicator of warming, I am going to guess there are other factors at work here we don’t understand.

        Besides, we cannot economically and politically do dip squat about it anyway because nations who want growth are not going to stop using fossil fuels.

        So if there is going to be warming, and the jury is still out on that, then we best learn how to mitigate it and live with it.

      • Melody Warbington (rwm52)

        it won’t matter because we’ll all be toast.

        And I have to wonder how much wasteful spending has to happen for you to become a supporter of a less intrusive government?

        • AndrewHyman

          Not to worry, there’s no way I would vote against the GOP ticket for president and vice-president, even if Romney picks Gekster for vice-president. I have had enough of the imperial judiciary, and Obama would make that problem immeasurably worse.

  • Viet71

    FWIW, I do (B.S. in electrical engineering); and what turns me off principally by the global warming proponents is the faked science and the lack of good science on climate and weather.

    So carbon dioxide reflects infra red energy back to earth. What does it do with solar radiation? I’m not asking for an answer, though if you have one I’d like to read and study it. The point of my question is that the hard physics of climate and weather is based on a an incredible array of feedback loops, the complete analysis of which overtaxes any modern computer.

    • satchman3

      it’s mostly in the visible range (say 0.3-0.7 microns) but solar radiation is certainly significant in the infrared. (usually considered 1-1000 microns)

      CO2 absorbs infrared radiation – it doesn’t reflect it. It also re-emits the radiation but atmospheric CO2 is too cold to reradiate very much energy.

      H2O is also an absorber of IR and H2O is present in the atmosphere in much higher concentrations than CO2. H2O on a hot humid day could be 40,000 ppm for instance.

      I would expect that the CO2 effect would be swamped by the H2O effect but I’m not certain. I’d also like to see some solid analysis on the change in atmospheric absorptance (or equivalently, its optical thickness) due to man-made CO2 emissions.

      There’s a free program from NIST called Radcal that I think could do these calculations but I’ve never seen it done.

      • Viet71

        n/t

        • AndrewHyman

          About five percent of solar UV reaches the Earth’s surface. The rest is absorbed by our atmosphere, primarily by ozone (which is a very slight part of the atmosphere compared to carbon dioxide).

          I do have a BS in physics, but climate science is outside my area of expertise. So I try to listen skeptically to what the experts say.

          Penn State geoscientist Richard Alley has compared climate predictions to the actual climate of the future: ?It could be a little better, a little worse, or a lot worse. ?If this were a video game, I would push the button and see what happens ? it would be very exciting.?

          Since it’s not a video game, I would prefer that we not push the button.

          • Viet71

            Always like hearing from a physicist.

        • satchman3

          UV is not so important from a thermal point of view. There isn’t so much energy in the UV. It’s not so great for your skin of course.

          That video is not very scientific. A candle flame radiates a somewhat broadband spectrum. Soot particles in the flame are broadband radiators. The bulk of the flame radiation is from CO2 and H2O – combustion products from hydrocarbon combustion.

          Gases absorb and emit radiation at specific wavelengths so using CO2 as an absorber to absorb CO2 radiation is going to be very effective – the absorption spectra matches up with the emission spectra so you would expect strong attenuation of the CO2 radiation from the flame. However you would expect the H2O emission from the water vapor and the broadband emission from the soot particles (they make the flame look yellow vs the blue flame you might see in a well-ventilated natural gas flame) to largely pass through the CO2 absorption bands.

          That means that the camera being used has some wavelength selectivity. Not really surprising but the camera is biasing the result and making the attenuation look a lot stronger than it would if you used a heat flux sensor instead. If you looked at the overall attenuation of IR radiant energy I suspect it would not be so dramatic. This is a little technical but I think the work shown in the video doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.

          • Viet71

            About physics.

          • demsaresatanic

            Quantum entanglement is, after all, much like democrat economics.

          • satchman3

            We mostly know about driving trains around. I only know enough physics to understand heat transfer mechanisms in fossil-fired furnaces and boilers.

            AGW does interest me a lot because what I read seems to be limited in understanding of heat transfer through thermal radiation. Maybe I’m not reading the right materials. Ultimately I think the problem is very difficult with lots of secondary effects (like green plants consuming CO2 and seawater absorbing CO2) that models will have minimal predictive capabilities.

            I find the temperature data to be the only thing I would trust. CO2 is certainly a greenhouse gas but making the leap that it will cause runaway warming is quite a leap. If temperature data were to show that manmade CO2 is causing significant temperature excursions then I would have to agree with drastic measures to reduce CO2 emissions but not until then for me.

  • http://stevemaley.com Steve Maley

    Q: What’s the most important greenhouse gas?
    A: Water vapor.

    I don’t think the point examined in the video is in dispute.

    The real question is is the atmosphere understood well enough, and are the computer simulations robust enough, to make accurate predictions.

    I will tell you this about computer simulations: you can have a model that matches history so well it will bring tears to your eyes. Problem is the match is not unique, so a forecast may not have any validity.

    I suspect that there are significant climate mechanisms that have yet to be described and accounted for in climate models.

    • Viet71

      Photosynthesis was for quite some time thought to be well understood.

      Last year, scientists discovered how photosynthesis follows the rules of quantum mechanics.

      That’s child’s play.

      Take the climate. A thermodynamic system consisting of connections and feedback loops. Makes my EE 323 course (solid state AC circuits) look really simple. Makes any computer look primitive.

      • JSobieski

        the feedback loops become trickier, the complexity grows exponentially and the ability to build models worth spit drop precipitously.

        My annectdotal observations suggest that a lot of global warming “science” is either pushed by pseudo-environmental scientists (people getting undergrad degrees in these fields don’t take the same math, physics, and chemistry as engineers or traditional science majors) or physicists speaking beyond the bounds of their expertise.

        The statement above may not be scientifically validated, but its as least as valid an observation as man made global warming itself.

        • Viet71

          CS majors do this and get paid big bucks for it.

          Feedback loops are easy to program. The problem is, for example, what is the relationship between temperature and mosquito velocity in Connecticut or the rate of X weed growth in New Hampshire? Or TV use in Alabama? And how does one affect the other?

          • rbdwiggins

            A few words about science and global climate modeling:

            A statistical analysis, no matter how sophisticated it is, heavily relies on underlying models and if the latter are plainly wrong then the analysis leads to nothing. One cannot detect and attribute something that does not exist for reason of principle like the CO2 greenhouse effect. There are so many unsolved and unsolvable problems in non-linearity and the climatologists believe to beat them all by working with crude approximations leading to unphysical results that have been corrected afterwards by mystic methods, flux control in the past, obscure ensemble averages over different climate institutes today, by excluding accidental global cooling results by hand [154], continuing the greenhouse inspired global climatologic tradition of physically meaningless averages and physically meaningless applications of mathematical statistics.

            In conclusion, the derivation of statements on the CO2 induced anthropogenic global warming out of the computer simulations lies outside any science.

            (emphasis in the original)

            Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner (2009)
            International Journal of Modern Physics, B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275-364.

            Electronic Link

          • AndrewHyman

            I agree that climate models are very uncertain. But there are some certainties in this thing. For example, it is certain that carbon dioxide does block infrared energy from escaping the earth into space. It is certain that humans have increased atmospheric CO2 considerably during the last century. And it is certain that the risk of global warming would be greatly alleviated if we stabilize atmosspheric CO2.

          • gekster

            that you’ve bought into the leftist ideaology.
            Man can no more control the climate than he can control the waves of the ocean.

          • Common_Cents

            obama “faces the challenge with profound humility!!! ” BUT his election was the moment the oceans slowed in rising and the planet began to heal!

          • gekster

            But then Andrew has nothing to worry about. ;)

          • JSobieski

            For the standpoint of infrared energy, it matters where the CO2 is and in what densities.

            Of course the focus on CO2 is misplaced since other gasses have greater greenhouse impact and just as great (if not greater) impact on radiation from the sun.

            People don’t get sunburns on cloudy days. CO2 is not the only gas that can block solar radiation, and the manmade component to CO2 increases is almost de minimis.

          • JSobieski

            http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1330204/pg1

            But if he is right, your concerns are trivial.

          • AndrewHyman

            Unlike the fearful guy at Godlike Productions, I do not believe that solar radiation is leaking through a failing magnetosphere causing plant blights and animal mass deaths. ?There’s virtually no evidence for it, and expert opinion completely rejects it. Compare one guy at Godlike Productions with the unanimous opinion of the national science academies of all major industrialized nations, who sat that human contribuutions to the greenhouse gasses are warming the earth. They could all be wrong of course; I know that mass hysteria is not limited to dumbasses who never graduated high school. But look at the facts.

            Since the early 20th century, Earth’s average surface temperature has gone up by 1.4 ?F. ?About two-thirds of that warming occurred since 1980. Scientists say that the odds are greater than 90% that the present warming is mostly caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases produced by humans. ?So my position is: let’s immediately switch from electricity production that emits greenhouse gasses, over to nuclear and technologies like that. Stop the Russian Roulette.

          • gekster

            10,000 years ago the northern hemisphere was covered in ice.
            It melted because the earth wrmed up on it’s own.
            Not many humans, no coal fired plants, no SUV’s.
            It did it because the earth has had warm periods, and cold periods.
            It is just a coincedence that at this time in history the earth might be warming a bit, and we are actually smart enough to record it this time, does not mean man has anything to do with it.
            The increase in CO2 levels have been shown to go up after the warming period, not a cause of it, except in the minds of a few, who the majority are left wing.

          • JSobieski

            Not doing more to stop global cooling could be Russian roulette. As a person who studied physics (and took corresponding classes in math and logic), you know that the differences between correlation and causation are not trivial–and your comment could very well be 100% correlation.

            if we were having this conversation in 1980, you would be telling me that we were playing Russian roulette with global cooling.

            Now it is 2012 and you tell me we are playing Russina roulette with global warming.

            At a minimum, you must as an objective observer (and enough of a contrarian to vote R and generally be supportive of Huckabee) that it is disturbing to see how both political and “scientific” organizations try so hard to discredit those scientists who disagree that man is contributing in a material way to global warming. Whether it is the falsification of data, or the back door politics to discredit the “deniers”—this is not a political atmosphere that can be characterized as pursuit of the truth.

            If society gives in to the argument of “even if there is only a slim chance, we can’t risk it” when the scientific envirobment surrounding the debate is as politicized as it is, we will end up behaving like chickens without heads.

            You want to emphasize for nuclear power and use natural gas for vehicles? I won’t argue with you. However, I will not submit to the political blackmail that makes up the current debate on global warming.

            You are giving a loaded gun to lunatics.

          • AndrewHyman

            You make interesting comments, and I will take them seriously. Thanks.

          • rbdwiggins

            you ignored the link provided to Viet71, and it is also a certainty you are a true believer.

            It is a certainty you didn’t bother to follow the link, nor bother to read the paper before commenting on certainties, and it is also a certainty that a credible physicist would not have made these statements:

            “…it is certain that carbon dioxide does block infrared energy from escaping the earth into space. It is certain that humans have increased atmospheric CO2 considerably during the last century. And it is certain that the risk of global warming would be greatly alleviated if we stabilize atmosspheric CO2.”

          • AndrewHyman

            I didn’t look at the link provided to Viet71 because it was provided to Viet71. But now I’ve looked at it. Several responses were written to that 2007 article, criticizing it. Subsequently, Gerlich and Tscheuschner wrote a rebuttal to their critics, in 2010. A global warming skeptic named Robert Kernodle provides links to all those articles here, and Kernodle also discusses the matter further here. I haven’t studied it all yet, but will do so. Thanks.

          • rbdwiggins

            The link supplied to Viet71 is for the January 2009 Version 4 of the paper. It supercedes the 2007 publication. Electronic Link.

            The December 2010 Reply systematically deconstructs “Comment… by Halpern et al.” Electronic Link.

          • AndrewHyman

            I have now looked over the 2009 version of the article by Gerlich. I think he’s mostly correct, but don’t think that his argument completely refutes the notion of global warming due to human contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere.

            To understand Gerlich’s article, one must realize that the atmospheric “greenhouse effect” is a misnomer. The atmospheric “greenhouse effect” is the process by which carbon dioxide absorbs outgoing infrared radiation from the Earth and then emits some of that radiation back to the Earth. Gerlich is cirrsct that that atmospheric process is nothing like the process that keeps a real greenhouse warm; in a real greenhouse, the Sun heats the floor and the tables of a greenhouse, which in turn warms the air, and the warm air is trapped in the greenhouse by the walls and ceiling. In other words, carbon dioxide plays no role in heating a real greenhouse.

            The primary argument that Gerlich makes is therefore correct. He is correct to say that people are foolish and wrong when they assert that there is any process in the atmosphere similar to what happens in a real greenhouse. But that primary argument by Gerlich does not directly address whether (and to what extent) atmospheric carbon dioxide traps infrared energy in the atmosphere. Most of Gerlich’s article is simply an attack on an unfortunate misnomer, though Gerlich does supplement that attack with various subsidiary attacks (e.g. Gerlich attacks the notion that the average temperature of the Earth’s surface is a valid or useful concept, which again does not directly address the extent to which atmospheric CO2 traps outgoing infrared radiation).

            I am sure beyond all doubts that many people who warn of global warming due to CO2 are complete assholes. However, there are many serious climate scientists who are also warning us, and in a serious, polite, respectful way. So I’m still inclined to support risk-avoidance by going gung-ho with nuclear and other technologies that will eliminate this global warming risk, even if the risk is less than 25%.

            A key point here is this: if there were no CO2 in our atmosphere, would the Earth be a lot cooler? Every reputable source that I’ve seen says yes. According to NASA, within 50 years the typical temperature on Earth would drop by 35 degrees celsius without the warming provided by atmospheric carbon dioxide. ?This statistic alone shows me that changing the amount of this trace gas by 25% or 50% or 100% could have dire effects. If NASA is wrong, then please tell me about scientists who think that removal of CO2 from the atmosphere would not noticeably change the surface temperature.

          • rbdwiggins

            Atmospheric CO2 is statistically irrelevant except to plant life, certain organisms and the life sustaining process of photosynthesis.

            “… a decrease in the concentration of carbonic acid by half or a doubling would be equivalent to changes of temperature of -1.5° C or +1.6° C respectively.” – Arrhenius (1906)

            You query:

            “…if there were no CO2 in our atmosphere, would the Earth be a lot cooler?”

            Of greater relevance: The surface of the planet would be barren. Devoid of plant life as we know it, and absent the life sustaining oxygen they produce.

          • AndrewHyman

            Rbdwiggins, you mention the Nobel Prize winning physicist and chemist from Sweden,?Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927). As you’re probably aware, Arrhenius used the term “carbonic acid” synonymously with “carbon dioxide”. ?As you mention, Arrhenius wrote in?1906?as follows (from the German): ?I calculate in a similar way, that a decrease in the concentration of carbonic acid [CO2] by half or a doubling would be equivalent to changes of temperature of -1.5 C or +1.6 C respectively.? (Svante Arrhenius, 1906, Die vermutliche Ursache der Klimaschwankungen, Meddelanden från K. Vetenskapsakademiens Nobelinstitut, Vol 1 No 2, page 110).

            In 1908, Arrhenius revised his calculation, to 4 degrees per doubling. ?See?Das Werden der Welten, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, Leipzig, page 48 (1908): “On the other hand, if there would be a doubling of carbon dioxide content of the air, temperature at the earth’s surface rises 4, a fourfold increase [raises] it by 8 (degrees).” (This is my rough translation which you can check.)

            Arrhenius was in the right ballpark in both 1906 and 1908. ?Both his 1906 estimate of 1.6 degrees from doubling CO2, and his revised 1908 estimate of 4.0 degrees from doubling CO2, seem to be fairly accurate.

            The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 390 ppm over the last century and a half. That’s about a 40% increase. ?Since the early 20th century, Earth?s average surface temperature has gone up by 1.4 ?F. ?About two-thirds of that warming occurred since 1980. ?

            I favor stabilizing CO2 in the atmosphere as a prudent precaution, or we run the risk that Arrhenius described, or worse.

          • JSobieski

            It is one thing to understand how certain chemicals interact with each other in a control and compartmentalized environment. It is another thing altogether to build atmospheric models for long term decision makeing when the average weather forecast 3 days out is basically a coin flip.

            Chemistry is 80% rules and 20% exceptions. Biology has even fewer rules and more exceptions. In contrast, physics is pretty much 99% rules unless you are moving close to the speed of light or traveling near a black hole.

            Call it chaos theory, call if the butterfly effect, call it the known unknowns, or just toss up your hands—–the impact is the same.

            I remember reading the rantings of a Harvard law professor who explained that cumpulsory licensing for artistic works such as songs would be easy to implement, and that the only trick was getting the prices correct!!!

            Essentially he was saying “if one knows the rules” and you can guess my retort.

  • Common_Cents

    There was a big push on global warming, that’s also where the funding was. How much influence does raising funding have on the projects scientists pursue, and the pull to sway the outcome?

    There is significant bias built in there. There is enough evidence on both sides of the coin to try and make a case, so how do you remove the funding bias?

    • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8

      they are going to be influenced by politics.

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