3)
Wrong Causation, [CO2] follows T
Questioned by Ball (2014) Is climate change going to be less extreme than you previously thought? “The Revenge of Gaia was over the top, but we were all so taken in by the perfect correlation between temperature and CO2 in the icecore analyses. You could draw a straight line relating temperature and CO2, and it was such a temptation for everyone to say, “Well, with CO2 rising we can say in such and such a year it will be this hot. It was a mistake we all made.” James Lovelock We all know that correlation is not causation 33 and we need to define and test a mechanism of causation to prove cause. No study about climate change has been specifically designed to study cause, rather the contrary if you consider the IPCC mission. Cause is always assumed, expected to be obvious, never tested and if you wonder, then you are a denier! It awfully looks like religious belief and blaspheme crime. And that is very very poor science. In fact, it’s not science at all. If we just assumed cause, what if it’s wrong? Then we spent billions of dollars for doing research to try to solve the wrong problem. We achieved nothing. We should begin to force attention and apply the real scientific method to the search for causes of climate change. It seems climate change believers think that the only proven fact, namely that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiations (IRR) 34, is enough to prove that what they call “greenhouse effect” will irreversibly change climate. But CO2 is a rather marginal component (0.04%) of a set of various Infrared Absorption Gases (IRAGs), H2O being by far a more important one and furthermore radiative exchanges being just one rather minor of the many physical phenomenons acting on temperature and just to name some, e.g. atmospheric pressure, convection, advection, evaporation, condensation, cloud formation, oceanic currents, winds and global circulation and so many more! If pressed about the causal mechanism you may hear hand-waving with references to Fourier, Arrhenius, Tyndall, et al., and the fact that “everybody knows that” carbon dioxide absorbs IRR and that a glass panel will let visible light in but not IRR out (see footnote 402, p. 347). So the IRR absorbed by carbon dioxide supposedly gets “stuck” in atmosphere, staying there until doomsday making atmosphere hotter than it should be. Even though there’s no glass panels in the sky letting visible light in but not letting IRR out and that the atmosphere has nothing to do with a «greenhouse» nor any of the physical mechanisms at play have because it is by blocking convection that the greenhouse heats. And that, somehow, will make earth’s surface hotter, even though nobody can come up with the mechanism of heat transfer from atmosphere to earth’s surface that would make earth’s surface hotter than it should be. It is however unfortunate for the AGW supporters that the physics of heat transfer that we will revisit later does not support this at all. Let’s put it that way: it is not because the temperature of the thermometer rose that the patient is ill, but because the patient is ill that the temperature rose. In that case the dilatation of mercury is the underlying physical phenomenon. It is not because CO2 increased that the temperature rose, but because the temperature rose that CO2 increased. In that case the increased degassing of the oceans and soils due to lesser solubility of CO2 in warmer waters is the underlying physical phenomenon. This can be anticipated from the temperature dependency of Henry’s law (1803) and was already reported by Takahashi (1961). Henry’s law shows that the partial pressure in the liquid (in a bottle for instance where the partial pressure in the air is at equilibrium equal to the in the liquid) is heavily temperature dependent as seen above, for sea water it is like T 12.5 or according to Takahashi (1961) or Takahashi et al. (2009) like exp(-0.0433 T). When the temperature of a system changes, the Henry constant also changes. The temperature dependence of equilibrium constants can generally be described with the van't Hoff equation (van’t Hoff, 1884), which also applies to Henry's law constants: d ln H (−Δ sol H σ,s) = (20) 1 R d( ) T where Δsol Hσ,s is the enthalpy of dissolution. Note that the letter H σ,s in Δsol Hσ,s refers to enthalpy of dissolution of the solute σ in the solvent s at temperature T and is not related to the letter H for Henry's law constants H=1/kH. Integrating
33 http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations 34 The correct statement should be: carbon dioxide absorbs only over some limited part of the thermal infrared spectrum near 15µm and 4.3 µm. As the blackbody radiation at terrestrial temperatures is negligible at 4.3 µm we are left with the small CO 2 band 18 THz to 22.5 THz (or 16.6 µm to 13.3 µm) while the effective thermal infrared band is 1 THz to 65 THz all of which is made extremely opaque by the water vapor (except between 22 and 35 THz).
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