Dr. Spencer is at Huntsville Alabama with John Christy at the satellite and meteorology/climate/weather program,
He was kind enough to respond within the hour to my lament about this essay by Andre Lofthus at American Thinker that caught me off guard because Andre said the basic premise of trapping infrared radiation by carbon dioxide was wrong.
Here’s Andre Golthus:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/global_warming_and_settled_science.html
Here’s Roy, fasten your seat belt:
John:
Arguments like this arise from time to time, even from physicists (with non-radiation backgrounds).
What the author is not mentioning is that the CO2 absorption lines are pressure-broadened, so they affect much wider ranges of IR wavelengths than the absorption lines themselves.
So, there are regions of the IR spectrum where there is much less than 100% IR absorption. If this were not the case, we would not be able to measure air temperature at different depths in the atmosphere with “CO2 channels” on IR “sounding” instruments on Earth-orbiting satellites.
Besides, there is no such thing as 100% absorption by greenhouse (IR-absorbing) gases. And even if there were, increasing the concentration of CO2 would STILL cause warming, because of the temperature layering of the atmosphere (if the downward radiation is being emitted from, say 100 m, rather than from 500 m altitude, it will be a higher level of radiation because of the high temperature). This why surface temperatures on Venus can melt lead….the atmosphere is VERY dense with CO2, and so is virtually 100% opaque…but that doesn’t matter.
The best evidence that increasing CO2 causes less IR radiation to escape to space (and thus more being “trapped” by the atmosphere) is the CO2 retrievals from the AIRS instrument flying on the NASA Aqua satellite. They actually measure the small increase in IR trapping at different IR wavelengths to estimate the CO2 content of the air, as seen in this video:
Again, the above video shows the measured effect that increasing CO2 has on the reduced rate of emission of IR energy to space. The people who do this kind of work know more about the IR spectrum than most other “experts” because they have to match the theory with measurements from space in order to do something useful with those measurements.
I have serious reservations about climate models, but people like this writer of the American Thinker article are barking up the wrong tree. Unfortunately, they sound like experts, and they persuade a lot of people. I then have to spend a lot of my time trying to undo the damage.
-Roy
Thanks, Mary!
Get an answer at the drroyspencer web site. he would answer your question to the best of his ability, which ain’t bad.
I mentioned previously that “This is nothing more than laboratory science writ large.” Dr. Spencer reminds us here why it’s not always a good idea to write laboratory science large! I too forgot about the spectral broadening and altitude related effects, and so must retract some of what I wrote earlier: substitue the wooden boards in my analogy for another coat of paint and adjust my wording accordingly. 😉
I’m still not 100% sold on the “CO2 = Venusian heat” argument, though I hate to argue too strenuously against the likes of either Drs. Sagan OR Spencer. As I mentioned before, if you go up high enough in the atmosphere to reach 1Bar pressure, you will find temperatures at or just above Earth surface normal. There may be other atmospheric effects which explain this, but it seems counter-intuitive to blame GHG warming for the slight increase in temperature at 1Bar altitudes which could otherwise be explained simply by increased insolation due to a smaller orbit around the Sun. The lead-melting temperatures lower in the atmosphere then logically and mathematically follow primarily (though not solely, I do admit) due to increased atmospheric pressure.
No BS or sarcasm intended, this is something I’d love to hear Dr. Spencer’s thoughts on at some point.
I read two books which were very helpful. “The Neglected Sun,” by Fritz Vahrenholt and Sebastian Luning originally published in Germany in 2012, translated and published in English in 2013 and “Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism” by Jim Steel. None of these writers are journalists. I try to avoid so-called science journalists because they usually have a limited understanding or no understanding of their subject and wear their biases like badges. Dictionary.com and acronymfinder.com are helpful, as is unitconversion.org for making sense of the Celsius system of measuring temperature. Climatedepot.com, judithcurry.com, wattsupwiththat.com, and notrickszone.com are all good to read. Some very knowledgeable people publish and comment on these sites, but I usually get the gist of it, although I skip reading interminably long blogs and comments. Drroyspenser.com is also very good. Good luck.
Roy Spencer blogs at his own site.
He is a fine and courteous gentleman and will always help if asked.
He always helps me.
Is there any kind of primer or resource available to help the uninitiated (such as myself) to get a handle on what Dr. Spencer is talking about here?