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Several people have made comments to the recent article Greenhouse Theory Disproved a Century Ago, take a look at what Lord Monckton had to say....it helps understand the process that is used to show CO2's influence on our climate is overstated.

I wondered why Arrhenius had spent the entire Arctic winter of 1895/6, after he had lost his wife, performing 10,000 individual calculations by hand to reach his conclusion that CO2 doubling would raise temperatures globally by 5 [4, 8] K, when he could more simply have used the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation to perform a single calculation.


I researched this question. Sure enough, I discovered that, after Arrhenius had finally come upon the equation, he recalculated using it and, in 1906, ten years after his original paper in English, he wrote a second paper concluding that a doubling of CO2 concentration would raise global temperatures by 1.5-1.6 K. He was, in effect, attempting to calculate the surface forcing from CO2, in the absence of temperature feedbacks.

Even his revised calculation led to a threefold overstatement, for surface forcing from CO2 is now thought to be about 0.5 K. However, the IPCC, following Hansen (1984, 1988), who was in turn following Manabe & Wetherald (1975) makes a guess at the (rather higher) tropopausal forcing and then more than triples it to allow for its mainfestly-exaggerated estimates of temperature feedbacks.

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From Vincent Gray


Dear Folks

Whatever R W Wood may have found, greenhouses operate by trapping air.

When the ground and the plants are heated by the sun's radiation the air next to them becomes heated by conduction. Hot air rises, so it is immediately replaced by cooler air which is heated in its turn. In this way all the air in the greenhouse becomes warmer than the surroundings.

The effect happens also in the free atmosphere. There is a lot more air, so the ground and the plants are cooler. The distribution of the air is ultimately affected by gravity.

Greenhouse gases absorb part of the earth's infra red radiation, so that the upwards radiation coming from the earth is less than the amount received from the earth. Since the air is now warmer than the air would have been without the greenhouse gases it radiates increased infra red in all directions, including towards the earth.

The suggestions that gases cannot radiate infra red, or that they cannot do so towards a cooler absorber are both nonsense. All bodies, solid, gaseous or liquid, radiate with an energy determined by the Stefan Boltzmann equation, in all directions irrespective of where the radiation is received.

Cheers

Vincent Gray