Good News on Climate Front

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Nov 21.

There is excellent news on the climate front, though you won’t hear about it at COP26.  It comes from the International Conference on Climate Change, and specifically a paper written by W.A. van Wijngaarden, Professor of Physics at York University, and W. Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

The paper was entitled “Relative Potency of Greenhouse Molecules” and was published in the January 2021 edition of Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics.  The crucial conclusions are that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will have little impact on the greenhouse effect of the earth’s atmosphere, and that methane has essentially no impact on the greenhouse effect.

The authors developed a computer model of the atmosphere’s spectral absorption curve using over 300,000 spectral absorption lines from the far to near infra-red region of the spectrum.  What is crucial is that their model matches with uncanny accuracy the atmospheric spectral absorption curve as measured by satellites, and under widely differing conditions, Sahara desert, Mediterranean, and Antarctic.  The close conformity of the model to actual measurement demonstrates the model’s robustness, and it can be used with confidence to predict what would happen in wildly different scenarios.

The model shows that CO2 accounts for about 25 percent of the greenhouse effect.  If there were no CO2 in the atmosphere, the earth would be a colder place.  On the other hand, doubling the amount of CO2 from that present would result in only a tiny increase in greenhouse effect, due to spectral saturation.

Anyone who has calibrated an atomic absorption spectrophotometer knows that above a certain concentration, spectral absorption departs from linearity.  In the cases of CO2 and water vapor, saturation suppresses the full greenhouse effect by up to four orders of magnitude.  This explains why doubling CO2 concentration has so little impact on the greenhouse effect.

The modelling also shows that methane and nitrous oxide have essentially no greenhouse effect because water vapor absorbs in the same regions as these molecules do. Doubling the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has no detectable impact on the atmospheric greenhouse effect.  Trace gases such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFC’s) have no impact on the earth’s atmospheric greenhouse effect because they are in such low concentrations and absorb in frequencies already dominated by water vapor.

The upshot is that the world needn’t spend trillions or even billions trying to mitigate the greenhouse effect of CO2.  The earth’s atmosphere is robust and won’t go wildly out of kilter by small increases in CO2.  It also shows that good science is possible even in this age of cancel culture and conformance to progressive orthodoxy. (It’s a wonder to me that the paper got published at all.)

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