Manmade Global Warming Hoax

Feedback about the things I write in this column is enlightening. Readers give me credit for being everything from insightful to being a screwball. It is a mixed bag but the one topic that draws the most attention is my stand against 'man made global warming'. I repeatedly get asked, "What qualifies you as an expert about global warming?" The simple answer is, I am not an expert, and never posed as one --but there is more to the story.

There was a time when I believed the hysteria that man was polluting the air with greenhouse gases like CO2, and was therefore responsible for the Earth getting warmer. My belief was so strong that I penned an article about it that you can read at http://www.robfg.com/ . In that article I advocated trees in parking lots, window planter boxes, and even hedges along sidewalks, all to adjust the carbon footprint to neutral for our intrusions upon the landscape with our buildings and asphalt roads and parking lots.
Being utterly fascinated with the subject, I devoured every scrap of information about the CO2 cycle that was available to me. The differences in atmospheric makeup of Venus, Earth, and Mars caught my attention.

Venus: Atmosphere mostly CO2, very hot, and according to the experts, Venus was an example of a run-a-way greenhouse effect.

Mars: Mars has an atmosphere that is almost totally CO2, but Mars is very cold. No greenhouse model is in evidence there, so why not?

The questions concerning our neighboring planets nagged me to the point that nothing would do until I could satisfy my curiosity of why one planet is very hot with a CO2 atmosphere and the other was not.

After pouring over numerous documents and articles, from what I could find out, there is a different model for what is happening on each of the three planets.

Venus: Venus has a thick and heavy atmosphere with a column of CO2 extending from the surface up more than 40 miles. The atmosphere at the surface is so thick and heavy that there is practically no wind. Without wind, there is very little convection to disperse the heat back into the cooler atmosphere. Normally CO2 will release the heat it traps quickly by convection, but on Venus, that is not happening. Since there is no mechanism to elevate the heat to the cooler upper atmosphere, Venus is hot.

Earth: Earth has a homogenous atmosphere of mostly nitrogen, oxygen, moisture, and several trace elements in minute quantities. Unlike Venus with its heavy monolithic atmosphere, Earth's atmosphere is not layered from the heaviest to the lightest, but is instead a mixture of all its gases at any altitude. As the sun warms the lower atmosphere, it rises, and in the process releases heat to the cooler upper atmosphere. Clouds form on these convection currents as moisture contained in the upwelling of warm air condenses in the higher and cooler elevations. Our winds on Earth are a part of the convection process that causes any trapped heat by CO2 to be released very quickly.

Reference: Gary Novak
Independent Scientist: http://nov55.com/ntyg.html

Mars: The convection process is in full swing on mars with its light wispy atmosphere. Although its atmosphere is practically all CO2, the gravity on Mars is insufficient to create the same thick atmosphere found on Venus. Any heat trapped by the CO2 on Mars is quickly dispersed back into space. Mars is cold, not an Ice ball, but cold.

Logically, the deduction has to be made that if CO2 releases its heat quickly to convection currents, then it cannot be responsible for warming the Earth. Something else is at work to cause the rise and fall of Earth's temperature over the ages.

Before I continue with this piece, I want to emphasize that a lot of bad things come from the burning of fossil fuels and I certainly do not want to give the impression that I think otherwise. But those bad things are a pollution problem that science has been working on and making progress at cleaning up. This piece only addresses the CO2 aspect of using fossil fuels and its relationship to global warming.

Earths Greenhouse: Approximately 33 degrees C is attributable to the greenhouse effect on Earth. Without that 33 deg C the Earth would turn into a frozen world. But 33 deg. C is the total for all greenhouse components and necessary for our survival.

According to R. Lindzen, CO2 only accounts for about 5% of the natural 33 deg C greenhouse effect. The total rise in temperature on Earth from all CO2 is only 1.65 deg C. Since humans only account for 3% of that total, humans are responsible for .0495 deg C.

Courtesy of:
Richard S. Lindzen, Proc. Nat. Acad. of Sciences, 94, 8335-8342 (1997) 8 and (in German) Klima 2000 (Heuseler), 2, 3-8 (1998) 5/6

The question becomes, "If CO2 is not causing the Earth's temperature to rise, what is causing it?"

Volcanic ash is known to lower the Earth's temperature by reflecting some of the Suns radiant energy back into space. Several of these instances are a matter of record.

Clouds perform the same job as the volcano ash. They reflect the Sun's radiant energy back into space. The years when the Earth has a lot of cloud cover result in colder years than those years where cloud cover was not so extensive. Clouds act as an umbrella that protects the Earth against the Sun's radiant energy.

So the next question has to be, "Why do some years have more clouds than other years?"

Oddly enough, the Sun has a direct effect on Earth's cloud formation. The Sun goes through cycles of more and less turmoil. During those years of high solar activity, there are a lot of Sunspots. Sunspots are magnetic storms on the Sun that create high velocity solar winds that reach the Earth. These winds actually interfere with the formation of clouds; and as a result, we have fewer clouds to shade us from the Sun's rays. Ocean temperatures increase during those times of high solar activity. As the oceans of the world warm, they release more CO2 into the atmosphere. It is the correlation between the Earth warming and the increase in CO2 that is driving the panic over CO2. But logic dictates that increases in CO2 levels in the atmosphere are a result of Ocean warming rather than the cause of it.

You can monitor the Sun's activity at this website. There you can look at historical values as well as the current information.

http://www.dxlc.com/solar/

Scientists have documented solar activity and the relationship of that activity to global temperature for as long as man has been keeping records of his observation of the Sun.

One more detail about manmade global warming via CO2. I want to point out that man is not creating CO2. Fossil fuels can only release CO2 captured out of the atmosphere previously. We are not increasing the amount of CO2 on this planet. It is the oceans of the world and the oceanic temperature that controls 97% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere. The colder ocean water absorbs while the warmer oceans release CO2. It is not the opposite as stated by Al Gore that CO2 was the cause of global warming. The rise in CO2 is a result of global warming, but not its cause.

Cheers,

-Robert-