What happens with CO2 from fossil fuels (Howard Cork Hayden)

What happens with carbon dioxide from fossil fuels?

Howard Cork Hayden Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Connecticut September 3, 2017 I like the motto of NASA engineers: In God we trust.

All others bring data.

CO2 is an odorless, colorless gas, not to be confused with fly ash, dust, SO2, unburnt hydrocarbons, or other pollutants. Nor is it to be confused (as is universally done by the media and the MIT Technology Review from which the picture below was taken.) with condensed water vapor (clouds) emerging from “smoke stacks.”

The “forcing” (heating effect) of CO2 is generally agreed to be F = 5.35 (W/m2) * ln(C/C0), where the values of C are before and after. (The world’s leading expert on this --- Will Happer from Princeton --- says this is an overestimate based of some incorrect physics, but we will ignore this issue.) The logarithmic dependence is the reason for defining a climate sensitivity as the increase in temperature due to a doubling of CO2 concentration (for which F = 3.71 W/m2).

If you use that value of F in the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody radiation equation, you find that the temperature of the earth should rise by 1.1 ºC. Page 1

Climate models --- did I say modelS? We are always told with arrogant confidence that “the science is settled.” Why then are there well over 100 climate models that mutually disagree?

Here are the predictions (a.k.a. projections), as compared with real data from both satellites and weather balloons. The adjectives used by the UN InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to describe how confident they are that humans are the cause of climate change have grown from not-even-tentative in the First Assessment Report (FAR) in 1990 to downright arrogant from the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) in 2013, while the gap between facts and models has steadily increased.

As to uncertainties, FAR set the sensitivity at 1.5 ºC to 4.5 ºC. Twenty-three years and billions of dollars of research money later, AR5 set the sensitivity at 1.5 ºC to 4.5 ºC. You will notice two things from these figures. First, all of that research with supercomputers reduced the uncertainty not a whit. Second, the range of sensitivity does not include the 1.1 ºC you get from Stefan-Boltzmann. The reason is that the models, one and all, introduce positive feedbacks, even though it is clear that the earth is controlled by negative feedbacks. (The temperature range through the last half-billion years has been about 10 degrees out of 300, or about 3%.)

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As to the notion of “tipping points”, we need to recognize that after something is tipped over, it does not stand up again. CO2 has, during the last half-billion years at times been ten times as high as now. If it were to lead to a tipping point, we would not be here talking about it.

I am reminded of the space program. In the first 25 attempts to get a rocket into space, there were 23 failures and two successes.

In the first 25 shuttle missions, there were 24 successes and one failure. The press claimed that NASA was going to hell in a hand basket.

For nine years, we have had no Cat-3 or higher landfalling hurricanes in the US. Then along came Harvey. It was stalled by a high-pressure area to the west, so it dumped most of its water in one small location, the Houston area. Oh My! It’s CLIMATE CHANGE! Here is the hurricane record:

One more item. We are indeed putting lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but compared to what?

Here for your perusal is Figure 6.1 from AR5.

The upshot is that combustion of fossil fuels is responsible for 4% of the annual flux of CO2 to the atmosphere.

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Final note: For the last half-million years, there have been 100,000-year glacial periods interrupted by brief (10,000-15,000-year) interglacial such as the one we’re in now. In all cases, the temperature changes have preceded CO2 changes, and CO2 has never been able to ward off descent into glacial cycles.

Cheers, Cork ________________________ Howard "Cork" Hayden corkhayden@comcast.net NEW! Energy: A Textbook, $25 at www.energyadvocate.com and www.valeslake.com P.O. Box 7609 Pueblo West, CO 81007 Consensus is the enemy of science Page 4