FYI, CO2 is just noise, compared with other greenhouse gasses. But I guess asking people to reduce their water vapor just does not have political appeal.




"Carbon dioxide doesn't affect global warming

Saturday, October 7, 2000


In reading Dispatch Science Reporter David Lore's recent article "Evidence keeps mounting that Earth is warming up,'' it is difficult not to retort: So, what else is new?

I learned about global warming 50 years ago reading geology as one of my subjects in natural sciences at Cambridge University.

The "news'' at that time was that the ice sheets had been retreating since the early 1900s, and Earth warming had started about the middle to late 1600s.

This followed a 300- to 400-year cooling period, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, which came after the much hotter Medieval Warm Period, running roughly A.D. 900 to 1300, depending on the source. During that warm period, the Vikings had two settlements on the west coast of Greenland -- try that today -- which vanished with onset of the Little Ice Age.

And, the further point in the article that climatologist James Hansen gets so excited about is the contribution of carbon dioxide. What has carbon dioxide to do with all this?

Almost nothing, from what I have seen, looking at the numbers for the last 30 years, which raises major questions both about both the feasibility and the pointless cost to society of trying to control such emissions.

It is well-known and fully recognized, if one checks the relevant Web sites, that the two principal thermal-absorbing and thermal-emitting compounds in the atmosphere are water and carbon dioxide.

However -- and this point is continually missed -- the ratio of water to carbon dioxide is something like 30-to-1 as an average value. At the top limit, it is closer to 100-to-1.

This means that the carbon dioxide is simply "noise'' in the water concentration, and anything carbon dioxide could do, water has already done.

So, if the carbon dioxide is increasing, is it the carbon dioxide driving up the temperature or is the rising temperature driving up the carbon dioxide?

One can easily run the numbers by using the standard psychrometric chart as used by the friendly neighborhood air-conditioning man. This is a graph of the ratio of water to air in the atmosphere plotted against temperature, for different levels of relative humidity.

If one calculates the ratio of carbon dioxide to dry air and plots it on the same graph, one would see it is just above zero. In other words, at such a small relative concentration, how can carbon dioxide have any significant influence on the atmosphere? If anyone has an answer, I'm listening.

Robert H. Essenhigh
Professor of energy conservation
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Ohio State University"