When one gets accustomed to being attacked and ridiculed, something like this comes as a shock.
I have just finished reading an excellent article by Alan Siddons called The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory on American Thinker from way back on 25 February 2010. The article is a little slow in developing, but finishes with a death blow to the usual theory put forth by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming advocates.
Dr. Anderson approaches the subject from quite a different angle than I took, but who cares. I should probably clarify one point: If 1% of the earth's gases acquire thermal energy by radiative means, then by necessity the other 99% must acquire thermal energy by non-radiative means, i.e., by conduction and convection. In fact, CO2 and other such molecules acquire thermal energy that way too. But the IR emitted by 'greenhouse gases' cannot be transferred to radiatively unresponsive gases because -- duh -- they are radiatively unresponsive. AS
I have just finished reading an excellent article by Alan Siddons called
The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory on American Thinker from way back on 25 February 2010. The article is a little slow in developing, but finishes with a death blow to the usual theory put forth by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming advocates. I intend to explain more concisely what Siddons explained and to add comments of my own in this post which make the deathblow much more gory.
First of all, I am going to enlarge the context of the discussion. The primary source of heat for the surface of the Earth is the radiant energy of the sun. The solar wind of the sun, materials dumped into the atmosphere from space, heat from the deep interior of the earth, and the interplay of changes in the Earth's magnetic field and the sun's magnetic field are also contributors of heat, though the sum of these is much less than that from the sun's radiant energy spectrum of ultraviolet (UV), visible, and infra-red (IR) light. The entire catastrophic greenhouse gas hypothesis ignores effects upon the incident IR portion of this spectrum of light from the sun. This is foolish.