The science of the "greenhouse effect" is simple, and the warming effect is harmless, at worst.
Would you expect the mainstream media to report that truth?
Of course not.
Wild guess predictions of a coming climate crisis attract readers. And they have been since the 1960s, when coming environmental disaster predictions became popular. The predictions have been 100 percent wrong for the past 60 years, but who cares about that?
Reporting the truth -- the average temperature of our planet is slightly warmer than 300 years ago -- is boring.
And never mind that people living in the late 1600s and early 1700s thought their climate was too cold. We are now told the climate in about 1750 was perfect, and any change from then is a crisis. Complete nonsense. But then the leftist claim of Trump collusion with Russians was complete nonsense too. They kept that fake narrative alive for over four years, and many Democrats still believe it
The primary greenhouse gas, water vapor, and the second most abundant, carbon dioxide, are extremely saturated. Extremely saturated means it would take large increases in the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere to have a significant impact on global temperatures.
For carbon dioxide to have a significant impact on temperatures, it would require burning more coal and oil than are known to exist.
There have been 4.5 billion years of natural climate changes. Periods of glaciation interrupted by brief warm periods, changing sun, changing clouds, changing ocean currents, air circulations, etc.
Climate alarmists would have us believe that natural causes of climate change have either stopped, or are too small to matter. That is nonsense, unsupported by any science. It is an assertion that is never proven or debated. Questions are responded to with with character attacks. And false claims that climate science is settled. As if science is EVER settled.
Physicists in the 1800s concluded that something in the atmosphere caused Earth to be warm, by blocking some of the cooling. In 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall began experiments on the interference with the planet cooling, by what are now called greenhouse gases (GHG), The primary GHG is water vapor in the atmosphere.
The Earth releases heat from the sun, through radiation upwards, into space. It is infrared wavelength radiation (IR).
While carbon dioxide CI2) is a greenhouse gas, as the concentration of CO2 increases, the influence of each molecule decreases. At low concentrations, CO2 is a very effective IR absorber = a very effective greenhouse gas. At higher CO2 concentrations, adding more CO2 does little to increase the greenhouse effect. Because most of the IR that CO2 can absorb, has already been absorbed.
When CO2 is no longer an effective IR absorber, the IR wavelengths it affects are said to be saturated. At very low concentrations, CO2 is a strong GHG; at the present concentration, CO2 is a weak GHG.
A significant portion of the IR emissions from Earth to space do not come from the surface, but from greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. But the only way Earth releases heat to outer space is by infrared radiation.
At equilibrium, the solar radiation absorbed by the earth will be exactly matched by the radiation emitted by the Earth, at about 244 W/m2. An increase in CO2 concentration will decrease the amount of IR emitted (Earth cooling) in the wavelengths that CO2 affects.
The effect of adding some CO2 to the atmosphere becomes smaller and smaller as the concentration increases. It is called a logarithmic effect.
The fear of global warming is based on the ability of water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) to absorb and re-emit infrared energy -- slowing or blocking its path from Earth's surface to space.
The Summary for Policymakers by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not focus on interactions of atmospheric gases. It relies on surface temperatures over the period 1951to 2010. It claims that natural causes of climate change are small compared to the actual measured warming. Which they blame on greenhouse gases.
They never mention that at the current concentrations, adding more greenhouse gases, especially water vapor and CO2, will have a smaller and smaller effect on global temperatures. Changes of unknown factors, such as cloud cover, are likely to be much larger, so are ignored.
What the climate alarmists invented was a water vapor positive feedback theory. As CO2 warmed the planet, the atmosphere should hold more water vapor. They claim that would triple the warming effect of CO2 alone.
Their positive feedback theory falls apart like a cheap suitcase when you consider prior warm periods on our planet. Such as the Eemian Interglacial, the Holocene Climate Optimum, the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, or the very warm period when dinosaurs roamed our planet.
If there really was a positive feedback—where warming from CO2 causes even more marking -- there would be runaway global warming. None of us would be alive today to discuss the science of climate change.
In fact, for at least the last half-billion years, th some kind of negative feedback system has kept the temperature of Earth's surface within a few percentage points of its present 288 K. (Kelvin degrees).
The last 1.8-million years has been the Pleistocene Epoch, a series of 100,000-year glacial periods punctuated with short 10,000-15,000 interglacial periods like the present Holocene interglacial that we are lucky to live in.
The hysterical claim that the climate is going to get worse and worse, because of CO2, ignores the known properties of CO2. The false claim that only strong leftist governments can stop the coming climate crisis is pure nonsense ... unless you realize the primary goal of the fake coming climate change crisis, predicted for 50 years so far, is for leftists to gain political power.
