Thursday, April 3, 2014

Miniscule Effect on Global Warming from Carbon Dioxide

An article in USA Today quotes a UN report as saying that climate change is affecting all parts of the globe, and the gap between the latest science on climatic change and government action to cut greenhouse emissions remains large.
The first part of the claim is entirely correct. Climate change does affect all parts of the globe. It is a natural event, somewhat similar to the change of seasons, but less periodic and less predictable.
However, the second part of the statement implying that greenhouse emissions have a significant effect on climate change is a far outreach. No connection has been shown to exist between climate change and carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuel.
A little review on greenhouse gases will make this readily apparent.
The Earth's atmosphere is composed of a gaseous mixture, of which each component has an insulating property to the passage of heat. That fortunately leads to a stabilization of Earth's temperatures. For example, without the greenhouse gases nighttime temperatures on Earth would likely be 100°F below zero, similar to that on Mars.
Each of the greenhouse gases has a different capacity to resist the passage of heat. That is some gases are better heat insulators than others.
The greenhouse effect of any gas can be calculated using a modification of Beer's Law. The greenhouse effect is a linear function of the heat resistance coefficient (1 / Thermal conductivity) times the length of the path through which the heat will travel times the concentration of the gas in the mixture. Thermal conductivities of various gases are available from the Air Liquide Gas Encyclopedia (http://encyclopedia.airliquide.com/encyclopedia.asp). The length of path will be the thickness of the atmosphere, which will be the same for any gas considered. The concentration of the gas will be that percentage relating to the whole atmosphere.
Although this is not significant in our calculations, the units of measurement for gas thermal conductivities are mW/ m.K, which is milliwatts divided by meters divided by degrees Kelvin.
The Greenhouse gas formula is then: G = 1/Thermal Conductivity x 1 x Gas Concentration.
For nitrogen: G = 1/24.01 x 0.78; G = 0.042 x  0.78; G = 0.033
For oxygen: G =  1/24.35 x 0.21; G= 0.041 x 0.21; G = 0.0086
For argon: G = 1/16.48 x 0.01; G = 0.061 x 0.01; G = 0.0006
For carbon Dioxide: G = 1/14.67 X 0.0004; G = 0.068 x 0.0004; G = 0.00003.
If we divide the various Gs by that for carbon dioxide, we obtain a better perspective of the numbers as follows:
nitrogen - 1100
oxygen - 287
argon - 20
carbon dioxide - 1
in other words, the global warming affect of nitrogen is 1100 times greater than for carbon dioxide.
If we add them all up to obtain total global warming, the global warming contribution for other gases is 1407 times that for carbon dioxide.
Does it make any sense to try to limit carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, when we already have a a built-in global warming of other gases more than 1400 times what we could do with carbon dioxide?

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