Alarmists can't prove carbon traps heat
The following letter to the editor appeared in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News:
Alarmists can't prove carbon traps heat
No one has demonstrated, either theoretically or empirically, that a moderate increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere can cause harmful warming of that gaseous envelope through the "greenhouse" heat-trapping mechanism.
According to atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, expert in ion-molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere, founding member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, whom I believe fully understands these matters, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a relatively inefficient absorber of long-wave back radiation (a.k.a. infrared (IR) or black body radiation) from the earth's surface. It absorbs such radiation in only three narrow bands of frequencies, corresponding to wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers. According to Peden, CO2 absorption of back radiation by all three bands combined does not exceed, at most, about 8 percent of the whole IR spectrum (and likely less than that), meaning that 92 percent or more of the "heat" passes through the atmosphere without being absorbed by CO2.
Moreover, if the entire atmosphere consisted of pure CO2, it would still be able to absorb no more than 8 percent of the heat radiating from the earth. Stated another way, the amount of CO2 now in the earth's atmosphere is capable of absorbing very little more back-radiated heat than is now available to it, so that adding more CO2 would result in very little additional atmospheric warming, if any.
However, there remains water vapor, the predominant atmospheric greenhouse gas by far (the one that global warming alarmists prefer to ignore), to prevent too much of our sun's gift of heat from escaping back into space where it would do us no good.
Leonard C. Johnson, Moscow