The SEC Proposes Rule on Infrared-Absorbing Gas Emissions and Climate Risk

The SEC wants to force publicly traded businesses to predict how climate change might harm their businesses and how they might be a cause of global warming themselves.  They proposed rules for such on Monday, 21 March 2022.

Few companies are themselves expert in predicting the future climate or future weather.  They are being asked to use the available scientific knowledge about future climate and future weather. They also have to use this available scientific knowledge about the role that emissions of infrared-absorbing gases, commonly called greenhouse gases, will have on these future climate and weather conditions.  What is more, they are to be forced to predict how governments in the USA will limit and condition their operations based on fears of climate change.  Still worse, they are to be forced to make predictions of how people and nations around the world will respond to fears of climate change.

All of these requirements are proposed within a framework of censored science and of poor science with a very wide range of predictions, most of which predict much larger effects due to infrared-absorbing gases then have actually been observed.  For instance, temperature increases and the frequency of bad weather events have consistently failed to live up to the predictions of the greenhouse gas climate scare-mongers.  How can a company predict what the effect of global warming and increased bad weather events will be on its operations when the published, rubbish science cannot predict what the relation between infrared-absorbing gas emissions and subsequent warming and nasty weather events will be?  The reality, which the Democrats who have proposed these SEC rules ignore, is that increased infrared-absorbing gases in the atmosphere has a very, very small effect in causing additional warming.  The requirement, however, will be that companies will have to make their predictions based on exaggerated warming and bad weather events in line with the climate scare-mongers.

The climate fright-masters will no doubt also require that companies make these exaggerated effect predictions based on exaggerated negative effects upon their own business.  These predictions will also have to be based on some exaggerated overall effects upon the US economy and on the world economy.  They will also assume that many nations will long continue to raise the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations due to lax regulations limiting their emissions.  Exaggerated individual company effects will justify further exaggerations of the general negative effects upon the US and the world economies.

The effort for a company to perform these predictions honestly would be tremendous.  Honest predictions have nothing to do with the purpose of the proposed SEC regulations, however.  Formulas will be adopted for this purpose, which the publicly traded companies will be forced to adhere to.

So why is this being done?  The reason is that every publicly traded company is to be made to appear to believe in catastrophic man-made global warming and to take it seriously.  This in turn is to rachet up the fear that Americans have of catastrophic man-made global warming.  The self-reporting of company activities that might be affected by bad and warming weather and of company gas emissions will also give the government further information it can twist into a story of future disaster.  That disaster story will then allow even more regulation of businesses, no doubt expanding far beyond those that are publicly traded.

Catastrophic man-made global warming due to adding infrared-absorbing gases to the atmosphere given its present composition is a failed hypothesis.  For Democrats and some Republicans, this is not a reason not to use the fear of it to justify ever-increasing governmental controls over our lives.  Governmental controls are always resisted by the people, unless they are afraid of something.  Catastrophic man-made global warming is another such fear-creating tool.  The claim that businesses generally want to do harm to people has long been such a tool and is still at play in this SEC proposed rule as well.

Do Additional Greenhouse Gases Warm or Cool the Earth?

If the Earth’s atmosphere had no infrared-active gases, commonly and confusingly called greenhouse gases, at all, the Earth would be colder on average.  The Earth’s surface would absorb more of the sun’s insolation, since water vapor would not be present to absorb the incoming energy from the sun and there would be no clouds.  Some of the heat absorbed by the surface would still be transferred to the nitrogen, oxygen, and argon molecules or atoms striking the Earth’s surface.  The remaining energy would be radiated from the surface.  Virtually all the energy radiated from the Earth’s surface would travel at the speed of light through the atmosphere into space and be almost instantaneously lost.  The day to night temperature changes would be much more dramatic than they are now.  The greenhouse gases benefit us greatly by moderating the day to night temperature changes.  At sufficiently low concentrations, each infrared gas with a non-overlapping absorption frequency with respect to other infrared-active gases already present, will slow down the rate of cooling at the surface and in the troposphere.  This allows the surface and the troposphere to be warmer than they would be were the infrared-active gas not present.

This is how the idea of a greenhouse effect comes about.  This paper Is not disputing that infrared active gases allow the Earth’s surface to be warmer than it would be if they were not in the atmosphere.  The question being examined is whether the further addition of an infrared-active gas will warm or cool the Earth’s surface and its lower atmosphere, the troposphere, when its atmospheric concentration is increased.

How does a low concentration of an infrared-active gas significantly slow down the cooling rate of the surface and the troposphere?  Suppose this gas molecule absorbs the longwave thermal radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface in the lower troposphere and enters an excited vibrational state.  If that absorbed energy were simply immediately re-emitted and carried off the previously absorbed energy at the speed of light, the absorption event would have no significant effect on the temperature of the surface.  The key fact here is that the excited molecule has billions of collisions per second with the 2500 times as plentiful non-infrared-active molecules of nitrogen and oxygen and atoms of argon.  That absorbed infrared energy is converted into kinetic energy passed to the molecules that collided with the excited molecule long before the lifetime of the excited molecule for re-emission of the absorbed energy by radiation.  What is the overwhelmingly dominant means of energy transport through the troposphere at this point?  It is the convection transport from warmer to cooler portions of the atmosphere, which is generally upward and to the higher latitude regions of the Earth.  The speed of that transport of energy is about 8 orders of magnitude slower than the speed of light.  So that first act of longwave thermal radiation absorption from the Earth’s surface is of immense importance, but after that initial conversion of infrared radiation from the surface into kinetic energy shared by all the molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen) and atoms (argon mostly) of our troposphere, the role of any further radiation from infrared-active molecules is a faster means of cooling than is the convection cooling mechanism.

Let us examine why this is true.  If the mean free path for absorption of a given wavelength of the longwave thermal radiation from the surface is short enough that there is an absorption event by an infrared molecule in the lower troposphere, subsequent absorptions of any emitted thermal radiation by molecules at that wavelength at higher altitudes will prevent that radiation from escaping into space.  This does slow down the cooling of the lower atmosphere in this very limited context.  This is what the standard view of greenhouse gases focusses on.  The problem is that the alternative to that infrared-active gas emitting thermal radiation to a higher altitude is its being much, much more slowly transported to higher altitude by convection.  Adding more of that infrared-active gas to the atmosphere results in moving energy upward through the troposphere in steps at the speed of light instead of having more of it moving upward in the slow convection currents.  The implication here is that a very low concentration of an infrared gas in the atmosphere will produce a warmer Earth surface and troposphere, but subsequent additions simply speed up the transport of energy to higher altitudes.  Then the added infrared emitting gas molecules in the upper troposphere and the stratosphere radiate thermal energy at a faster rate directly into space.  For an infrared-active molecule, the initial effect of adding it to the atmosphere is likely to be warming effect, but its warming effect rapidly passes through a maximum and then further additions start bringing down the temperature at the surface and in the troposphere.

Let us pause and get a better understanding of how carbon dioxide absorbs longwave radiation from the surface of the Earth.  An infrared-active molecule has an absorption spectrum over a range of wavelengths with absorption probabilities varying with wavelength over orders of magnitude.  The absorption probability at a wavelength is usually given in terms of an effective cross section, as though the size of the molecule were different for the absorption event at each wavelength.  Here, from a figure in Prof. Howard “Cork” Hayden’s The Energy Advocate, February 2020 (Vol.24, No.7) is the absorption spectrum near the main 15 µm (micrometer) absorption line for CO₂:

As Prof. Hayden explains, if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were only 40 ppm by volume (ppmv) or a bit less than one-tenth the present concentration, any radiation at the wavelengths above the red line in the figure at 1 x 10^-22 m² cross-section would be absorbed within a travel distance of 10 meters.  At that same very low concentration of CO₂, the absorption distance for radiation in the weaker absorption peaks above the lowest red line is less than 100 meters.  The troposphere in the U.S. Standard Atmosphere is 11,000 meters in altitude.  All parts of the absorption spectrum above the lower red line for as low a concentration of carbon dioxide as 40 ppmv are already absorbed many times traveling through the troposphere from the surface to the upper troposphere.  At 400 ppmv, carbon dioxide will add absorption events for the first time in the lower cross-section parts of the spectrum, but the additional first time absorptions are decreasing rapidly as more CO₂ is added to the atmosphere, while the rapid transport effects of carbon dioxide are moving more and more energy to space more quickly than convection would at an increasing rate as CO₂ is added.

I am going to develop a simple model for how the infrared-active gases warm the Earth, according to those who believe in catastrophic or even moderate man-made global warming.  This is not a model that I believe is correct.  This is intended as an exercise in determining a very generous upper limit on the size of the greenhouse gas warming claims based on additions of such gases to the atmosphere above those of the present and then showing that those claims are false in the context I have set up above.

I will start with a two layer atmosphere in which radiation from the Earth’s surface, is absorbed entirely in the lower layer L1, which radiates half that energy upward to atmospheric layer L2 where it is absorbed and half back down to the surface where all of it is absorbed.  All of the surface absorbed half from L1 is re-emitted upward and is re-absorbed in L1.  Layer L2 emits half the energy it absorbed from L1 directly to space, where it is permanently lost, and half back to L1 where all of it is absorbed.  Each layer L1 and L2 always emits half of its absorbed radiation energy upward and half downward.  The surface always emits its absorbed energy back to L1, where it is absorbed.  I believe this isotropic emission idea is incorrect, but we are going to do this exercise because it will give us insight and because it is rather a fun task to work out.  Note also that I am entirely ignoring convection as an energy transport mechanism for the sake of this argument.

The results are that space receives a series of emission energy originating with an emission of one unit of energy from the Earth’s surface, Sp, whose sum is

So, all of the unit of energy emitted from the surface is eventually emitted into space.  In fact, the first 5 emissions to space already total 0.7627 of the total energy of 1.  In this crazy model we have assumed all the energy emitted from the surface is absorbed in L1, despite the fact that the atmospheric window actually allows about 70% of all surface radiated longwave energy to pass through the atmosphere unabsorbed and directly into space.  So Sp really equals 0.3 and the first five emissions to space really equal 0.2288.  In this simple model with no thermalization of the absorbing molecule and no significant half-life before it re-emits energy as radiation, sending more than 3/4ths of the surface emitted energy into space takes about the time it would take radiation traveling at the speed of light, 3 x 10⁸ m/s, to travel through the troposphere about 11,000 m high five times.  That time is 3.7 x 10^-5 s.  In comparison, it takes hours for the alternative heat dissipation process of convection currents to raise surface energy to the top of the troposphere where it can be directly emitted to space as radiation.

Of course, the catastrophic man-made global warming argument does not emphasize the speed with which energy is emitted to space by a radiation-centric model.  They emphasize the added time radiation energy spends near the surface because of their isotropic emission model in comparison to the time it would take to go directly from the surface to space if there were no infrared-active molecules.  So what enhancement of radiative energy dwell time are they getting?  With this two atmospheric absorption layer model it would be that the sum of radiation back to the surface from L1, Su, is

This means that the energy dwell time in the lower troposphere has been doubled by this two-layer 100% radiative energy loss model with isotropic emission.  But keeping about 76% of this energy around for about 3.7 x 10^-5 s is not such a big deal.

What if we put three atmospheric absorbing layers into the model?  Then I find that the series of emissions to space from the top layer L3 is

Sp = 1/8 + 1/8 + 7/64 + 3/32 + 41/512 + 35/512 + 239/4096 + 577/16384 + ….

These first eight terms sum to 0.695129, so with eight emissions from L3 to space 69.5% of the unit of energy emitted from the surface has been lost to space.  Consequently, 69.5% of the energy is lost in about 8 (11,000 m) / 3 x 10⁸ m/s or 2.9 x 10^-4 s.

Su = ½ + 3/8 + 5/16 + 17/64 + 29/128 + 99/512 + 169/1024 + 577/4096 + 1731/16384 + …..

The first eight terms of Su sum to 2.01898.  So when Sp is a bit over 2/3 after eight terms and must sum to one, Su is a bit over 2 and seems most likely to sum to about 3.

So, let us make a leap here and assume that with an atmospheric absorption model of n layers with isotropic emission, Su will sum to about n.  [If someone has the time to work this series out to more terms or can find a way to solve it exactly, I would enjoy seeing the result.]

Alright now, let us assume that we have 100 absorption layers in our atmosphere, corresponding to an absorption distance of about 110 m.  Most of the radiation energy emitted from the surface will find its way to space in less time than 100 (11,000) / 3 x 10⁸ = 3.7 x 10^-3 s.  If you have 10,000 atmospheric absorption layers (an absorption distance of about 1.1 m), the time is then 0.37 s.  But the alternative means of removing that energy to space is convection and that takes hours to do the job.

In fact, radiation between the layers only occurs long after an absorption event during which time many, many collisions with other molecules would occur and the absorbing molecule would give up virtually all the energy it had absorbed from radiation from another layer to the 2500 times as plentiful non-greenhouse gas molecules in the air.  It is a comparatively very long time before the infrared-active molecule emits radiation again.  In the meantime, it is only 1/2500 of the molecules moving energy as part of a convection current.  Yet insofar as these infrared-active molecules do emit radiation, they are acting to speed up the emission of surface energy to space.  They are therefore acting to cool the atmosphere from top to bottom of the troposphere compared to the convection energy transport mechanism.

The lesson here is that the very first absorption event of thermal radiation from the surface in the atmosphere is very important because it puts the transfer of that energy into the hands of a much slower convection cooling process than is that of radiation.  However, whatever further thermal radiation events occur in the atmosphere simply speed up the loss rate of energy to space compared to the rate due to convection.  The addition of further infrared-active gases to the atmosphere causes there to be more absorption layers in the model.  If the atmospheric load of infrared absorption gases was so high that the mean free path length for absorption of their emissions was as short as 1 meter, then the time to dissipate most of the energy to space would still be less than a second, while the time it takes for the alternative energy transport by convection is still hours.

Do additional greenhouse gases warm or cool the Earth?  The addition of a gas in just enough concentration that there is absorption by that gas in the lower troposphere once which would not otherwise have occurred at a given wavelength slows the rate of radiative heat loss and may be regarded as effectively warming the Earth.  It does this by converting the cooling mechanism from rapid radiative cooling to that of slow convection cooling.  However, once that threshold concentration is exceeded for a given wavelength, additions of that gas simply cool the atmosphere more quickly than would the alternative of convection currents.  At such an above threshold concentration, that gas can be regarded as cooling the Earth faster compared to the rate it would cool without its addition.

The lapse rate is the temperature gradient with altitude in the troposphere.  At normal levels of humidity, the adiabatic lapse rate is less than the dry lapse rate is.  This tells us that at normal water vapor concentrations, the water vapor concentration is already high enough to produce a cooling effect on the surface and lower troposphere temperatures.  Water vapor does this with the cooling effect at the surface as liquid water becomes water vapor and then the water vapor rises with convection until it reaches an altitude at which it condenses and releases energy.  At the warm surface it cools with evaporation and at the cooler altitudes it warms by condensing.  The evaporation process increases the water molecule’s kinetic energy, including its vibrational modes, and the molecule carries that energy upward by convection and then releases the kinetic energy of evaporation as it condenses to liquid or solid form.   Each water molecule carries more energy per molecule at a given temperature than can a nitrogen or oxygen molecule.  Thus, as they rise with convection, they are transporting more energy upward per molecule than are the dry air molecules in the same convection current.  In addition, the water molecule is radiating energy to the layer of air above it, which is usually cooler and able to absorb that radiated energy if it also has water vapor molecules in it or sometimes if it has carbon dioxide in it. 

Unlike water vapor molecules, a carbon dioxide molecule carries less energy at a given temperature than do the nitrogen and oxygen molecules with which it shares a convection current.  This means an added CO₂ molecule causes a convection current to become a less effective cooling mechanism.  However, it retains the ability to warm the air layer above it throughout the troposphere as it cools its local surroundings by radiation to the layer above it.  In addition, more CO₂ in the upper troposphere and in the stratosphere means more molecules radiating energy directly to space.  There is good evidence that the addition of more hot molecules of CO₂ in the stratosphere has resulted in a measured  cooling of the stratosphere, as would be expected because these hot molecules are effective radiators.  I believe the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already high enough that additions of CO₂ are cooling the troposphere as well or at least counterbalancing the mild warming effect of additional carbon dioxide molecules to a great degree.

Whether I am right or not about this, the claim that a very small warming effect by additional CO₂ will be amplified by a greater warming effect by increased water vapor (a positive feedback) is surely false.  The fact that the wet adiabatic lapse rate is less than the dry adiabatic lapse rate makes it clear that the claim of a positive feedback is wrong.  The IPCC and other alarmists depend upon this false claim of a positive feedback by water vapor to make it appear possible that additional carbon dioxide will cause significant harm.  The reality is that additional carbon dioxide has no net significant effect on temperatures at the Earth’s surface or in the lower troposphere.

Meanwhile, additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere provides plants with the means for easier growth.  With a growing human population, this is very helpful in producing the additional food we need to produce.  This should be a factor in reducing human anxiety for the future.  Of course, I understand that some people just have to have something to worry about.  I suggest you worry, if you must, about another ice age which additional carbon dioxide in our atmosphere cannot prevent.  Or, you might worry about an asteroid  striking the Earth.  But it is even more foolish to worry about problems created by more CO₂ in the atmosphere.

There is NO climate emergency! by Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

There is NO climate emergency!

Climate models predict disaster – but real world evidence shows no such thing

Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris

Speaking at the 13th International Conference on Climate Change, held July 25 in Washington, DC, Dr. Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville said: “There is no climate crisis. Even if all the warming we’ve seen in any observational dataset is due to increasing CO2 (carbon dioxide), which I don’t believe it is, it’s probably too small for any person to feel in their lifetime.”

And yet, that same month, Democrat Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Earl Blumenauer and Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a non-binding resolution that demands a “national, social, industrial and economic mobilization” – to “halt, reverse, mitigate and prepare for the consequences of the climate emergency, and to restore the climate for future generations.” Six Democrat presidential candidates immediately supported the resolution, as a way to spur “sweeping reforms” to stem a “dangerous rise in global temperatures.”

In their view, apparently, asserting a climate emergency makes it a reality and justifies national or even global control and transformation of our energy, social, industrial, economic, legal and social systems.

Thus, in an effort to drum up support for its costly “carbon tax,” the Liberal government of Canada has also declared a climate emergency. So has Britain’s Parliament, to back up a call by opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for “rapid and dramatic action” to protect the environment , following weeks of protests by the Extinction Rebellion climate movement, the Reuters News Agency reported.

The Climate Mobilization group proclaimed that “Over 790 local governments in 17 countries have declared a climate emergency and committed to action to drive down emissions at emergency speed.”

In considering whether this makes any sense, let’s take a page out of Blumenauer’s book and, as he put it, “tell the truth about the nature of this threat.”

The so-called emergency is based on nothing but the over-active imaginations of activists who put too much faith in computer model forecasts, while ignoring historic records and observational data that tell us nothing extraordinary or unprecedented is happening – and demonstrate that the models are wrong.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies asserts that between 1880 and 2017 there has been only slightly more than 1 degree C (1.8 F) rise in the so-called global average temperature, despite a supposed 40% rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database of state-wide extreme weather records, arguably the best of its kind in the world, shows that so far in 2019 only one weather record has been set: the lowest temperature in Illinois history.

In 2018, the only records set were: the largest hailstone in Alabama history; the most rainfall in a 24-hour period in Hawaii; and the most precipitation in one year in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia. Many of these records broke, sometimes barely, records that had stood for many decades. 

In 2017, the only record set was for the fastest wind gust in California. No records were set in 2016. In 2015, only two records: the most precipitation in a year in Arkansas and the largest hailstone in Illinois history. In 2014, only one record: the most rainfall in a 24-hour period in New York.

And so it goes, year after year, as we move into the past with the occasional state record set, as one would expect due to natural climate variability. In the first 18+ years of the 21st century, only two states recorded their maximum temperatures: South Carolina in 2012 and South Dakota in 2006. Contrast that with 1936, when 15 states set their all-time maximum temperature records.

Meanwhile, NOAA’s updated coastal sea level tide gauge data for 2016 show no evidence that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating. Seas are rising no faster than they have for many decades.

NOAA’s hurricane records go back to 1851. The data show that for almost 12 consecutive years – October 24, 2005 (after Wilma) until August 25, 2017 (Harvey) – not one major or moderate (Category 3-5) hurricane made landfall in the continental United States. That is the longest such period in history. In 2018, for the first time ever, not one “violent” (F4-5) tornado touched down in the United States.

To the great frustration of climate alarmists, the real-world instrumental record clearly shows that, not only is no climate emergency underway, but today’s climate is actually quite stable. Aside from the drive for world socialism, the climate scare is based on only one thing: computer model forecasts of what some say could happen someday if we do not restrict our use of fossil fuels to reduce CO2 emissions.

However, the models do not work. That’s because they focus predominantly on greenhouse gases, and because scientists do not understand planetary climate processes well enough to know what mathematical equations to program into the models. Observations demonstrate that the actual rate of warming between 1979 and 2017 is one-third of what the average of 102 different climate models predicted. In fact, that climate model average is now almost one full degree Fahrenheit above what satellites have measured!

It is also important to realize that your own local weather forecasts just one week ahead are accurate only half the time. Let’s drill a bit deeper into this scandal.

For the better part of three decades, governments have financed more than one hundred efforts to model our planet. They continue to do so even though none of the models has been able to recreate (hindcast) the known past, or after a decade of study accurately predict what was to happen just ten years later.

People are led astray, because generally speaking, the public has no clue what mathematical models actually are, how they work, and what they can and cannot do. To provide a simple insight into this complex subject, before we build airplanes or buildings, we make small scale physical models and test them against the stress and performances that will be required of them when they are actually built.

When dealing with systems that are totally beyond our control, we try to describe them with computer programs or mathematical equations that we hope may give answers to questions we have about how the system works today and in the future. We attempt to understand the variables that affect the system’s operation. Then we alter the variables and see how the outcomes are affected. This is called sensitivity testing and is the very best use of mathematical models.

Historically, we were never foolish enough to make economic decisions based on predictions calculated from equations we think might control how nature works. Perhaps the most active area for mathematical modeling is the economy and stock market. No one has ever succeeded in getting it right, and they have far fewer variables than Earth’s climate, which is governed by many powerful natural forces.

Yet, today, in the climate sphere, we are doing just that – and using the models to justify massive changes in our energy and economic systems. While no one knows all the variables affecting climate, there are likely hundreds of them. Here are some important factors for which we have limited understanding:

1) seasonal, annual and decadal changes in solar irradiation; 2) energy flows between the ocean and atmosphere; 3) energy flows between the air and land; 4) balance between Earth’s water, water vapor and ice; 5) the impacts of clouds, both trapping heat below and preventing solar radiation from reaching Earth; 6) understanding the planet’s ice; 7) changes in mass among ice sheets, seal levels and glaciers; 8) our ability to factor in hurricanes and tornadoes; 9) the impact of vegetation on temperature; 10) tectonic movements on ocean bottoms; 11) differential rotation between Earth’s surface and its core; and 12) solar system magnetic field and gravitational interactions.

Despite this vast uncertainty, today’s modelers claim they can forecast our planet’s climate for decades or even a century in the future – by looking primarily or solely at “greenhouse gases.” And they want our leaders to manage our energy, economic, agricultural, transportation and other systems accordingly.

Yes, there is a climate-related emergency. It is the threat to our way of life in the free democratic world – imposed on us by climate alarmists, many of whom do not really care about climate change, people or the environment. It is an assault no less frightening and damaging than the wars that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time. It’s time for people and governments to stand up to the power-hungry alarmists.

Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Advisor with of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute, in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Tom Harris is Executive Director of ICSC and a policy advisor to Heartland.    

Climate lunacy takes center stage in Poland by Paul Driessen

IPCC Poland conference presents fictional climate chaos and fake renewable energy salvation 

The unwritten rule seems to be that each successive climate report and news release must be more scarifying than any predecessors, especially during the run-up to international conferences.

Thus Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report 15 claims governments worldwide must make “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” spend $40 trillion by 2035 on renewable energy, and impose carbon taxes that climb to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2030. Or temperatures could climb another 1 degree F (0.5 C) and bring utter cataclysm to human civilization and our planet.

Not to be outdone, the 1,700-page 2018 US National Climate Assessment wailed that failure to eliminate fossil fuels and roll back American industry and living standards would send global temperatures soaring 15 degrees F by 2100! Chaos and food shortages would ensue; US economic growth would plummet.

The hyperbole continues in Katowice, Poland – where 30,000 activists and bureaucrats (and a few scientists) are meeting to finalize regulations to implement the 2015 Paris climate treaty and compel wealthy nations to give trillions of dollars in “adaptation, mitigation and compensation” money to poor countries that have been “victimized” by climate change, even as the rich nations de-industrialize.

All of this certainly plays well with those who orchestrated these reports and programs, are ideologically opposed to fossil fuels, or get paid to advance climate chaos and renewable energy narratives. However, a very different response among other audiences is increasingly evident around the world.

People look out their windows and realize the “unprecedented climate and weather chaos” isn’t actually happening, is little different from what they and previous generations experienced, and cannot possibly be attributed solely to fossil fuel use. They know the sun and other powerful natural forces have driven frequent climate changes throughout history, and play equally important roles today.

They understand that the scary headlines are the product of “scenarios” conjured up by computer models that blame climate change on greenhouse gases. They see the boy who cried “fifty 20-foot-tall wolves” far too often. They don’t buy the notion that today’s incredibly wealthy, high-tech, energy-rich societies are somehow less able to deal with climate change than those that lived through the Little Ice Age, for example. They typically put climate change at the bottom of any list of pressing concerns.

More and more people understand that fossil fuels provide 80% of US and global energy – and are essential to lifting billions more people out of crushing poverty. They see Asian and African countries building thousands of new coal- and gas-fired electrical generating plants, and making and driving millions of new cars. They know even Germany and Japan are burning more coal, as they realize that wind and solar subsidies and facilities raise energy costs, kill jobs and hurt poor families the most.

People resent being scammed and get angry when they realize their taxes and energy payments often line the pockets of climate activists, scientists, bureaucrats, politicians, and wind, solar and biofuel cronies.

Above all, a growing number see the proposed solutions as far worse than the wildly exaggerated and even fabricated climate disasters. They won’t tolerate having their livelihoods and living standards disrupted or destroyed by carbon taxes, even higher energy prices or fossil fuel bans – especially when the antipathy toward those fuels is combined with plans to terminate nuclear and even hydroelectric power.

In recent weeks, millions of mostly poor, working class and rural French citizens have joined the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement, protesting and even rioting against President Macron’s proposed carbon tax hikes on their driving and living standards. Even a French police union has sided with the protesters. A shaken Macron finally postponed the tax for six months, then scrapped the plan entirely.

The protests are the first serious backlash against international eco-imperialism. They won’t be the last.

In Africa alone, twice as many people as live in the USA still do not have electricity, or have it only rarely and unpredictably. Can you imagine your life without electricity? And yet they are told by the EU, environmentalists, the World Bank and others that they must restrict their ambitions to what is possible with wind, solar and biofuel energy. Would you accept such carbon colonialism? Can actual, real-world climate risks possibly be worse than the horrid poverty, deprivation and disease that afflicts them now?

The World Bank recently said it would kindly give poor countries $200 billion during its FY2021-25 cycle, for “adaptation and resilience” in the face of manmade climate change. But still nothing for fossil fuel or nuclear power. The White House should read it the riot act, especially if US money is involved.

Poor countries don’t need climate cash. They need to develop: energy, infrastructure, factories, jobs, health, living standards. They need to do what rich countries did to become rich – not what (some) rich countries are doing (or at least saying) now that they are rich. Thankfully, many are doing exactly that.

Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity, motor fuels and factory power creates its own prosperity; its own ability to improve roads, hospitals, schools, homes and so on; its own “drop dead money” to tell carbon colonialists to take a hike. “Green” energy is insufficient, unsustainable and ecologically harmful.

With America likely being joined soon by Brazil in rejecting the Paris climate trap, poor nations are on firm ground. Ontario (Canada), Poland. Australia, China, India and other countries have also rejected carbon taxes and coal use restrictions. The Paris deal is fast becoming a climate Potemkin Village.

But what about that National Climate Assessment? Wasn’t that a Trump White House document? It certainly needed some adult supervision, to ride herd on the 1,000 Deep State scientists and bureaucrats who prepared it. However, the White House let them prove how loony climate alarmism has become.

Indeed, as Nick Loris, Roger Pielke, Jr. and other experts have pointed out, the NCA was based on absurd assumptions (eg, vastly increased coal use and no energy technology advances over the next 70 years) and a ridiculous worst-case global temperature increase of 15 degrees F by 2100. That’s twice as high as even the IPCC’s worst-case projections, and far worse than Garbage In-Garbage Out climate models are predicting. It’s more than 15 times the total warming our Earth has experienced since 1820!

The NCA is also based on rampant cherry-picking of data, to wildly inflate climate risks; an almost total failure to factor in the incalculable benefits of fossil fuels; and a refusal to consider the plant-fertilizing benefits of more atmospheric carbon dioxide. It just depicts the CO2 we exhale solely as a dangerous climate-changing pollutant. The NCA also ignored the fact that actual observations show no increases in drought, no increases in the frequency or magnitude of floods, no trends in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. It didn’t mention the 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall.

Just as egregious, the Deep State NCA claimed continued fossil fuel use would hit the United States with $500 billion in annual climate related costs by 2090. That’s more than twice the percentage lost during the Great Depression. It’s 10% of the US economy in 1971. Even with modest economic growth, it’s likely to be a trivial 0.6% of America’s GDP in 2090. The NCA bogeyman is a little stuffed bear.

But based on IPCC and NCA fear mongering, America and the world are supposed to keep their fossil fuels in the ground – including what the US Geological Survey says is the “largest continuous oil and gas resource potential ever assessed!!” Over 46 billion barrels of oil, 280 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids in just part of the Texas-New Mexico Permian Basin.

No one denies that the climate changes, or even that human activities have some effects on climate and weather. But there is no real-world evidence that human CO2 emissions have replaced the sun and other natural forces; that another degree of warming would be cataclysmic; or that humans can control climate changes and weather events by tweaking the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Want some facts and common sense? See what CFACT and Heartland have been saying in Poland, and read books by Dr Roy Spencer, Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and others. They’ll be a breath of fresh air.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of books, studies and articles on energy, climate change, the environment and human rights. 

My Comments:

Dr. Roy Spencer and Anthony Watts are luke-warmers who believe that CO2 causes less warming than the alarmists say it does and that the warming is less than catastrophic.  They both hold the consensus view of thermal radiation, which is seriously in error.  Dr. Roy Spencer engages in discussions with great patience, but some critical physics he just does not understand.  Anthony Watts has called me nasty names because I advocate that the temperature increases caused by additional CO2 in the atmosphere are insignificant and much lower than than what he thinks they will be.  Despite their limitations, however, both of these men have played major roles in opposing the excesses of the global warming alarmists.  So be nice to them.

I am a supporter of and donor to the Heartland Institute and CFACT.

The Climate Alarmists Oppose Air Conditioning

When it is hot outside in the developed nations, we turn on our air conditioners at home, at work, and in our cars.  This includes the alarmists who claim that greenhouse gases are dangerously warming the Earth.  Insofar as the Earth should warm, we would use more air-conditioning to mitigate its troublesome effects.  But no, we are now told that the current generation of refrigerants cannot be used because they are greenhouse gases.  Those who are convinced that the Earth is catastrophically warming want to disarm many by making air-conditioning much more expensive.

Let us examine the background of this story.  The Montreal Protocol, ratified as a global environmental treaty by the U.S. Senate in 1988, restricted the production of refrigerants then in use because they were said to be destroying ozone.  Bill Clinton's Dept. of Energy also required air-conditioners to become 30% more efficient, which required larger and more expensive air-conditioners.  I remember well because I had to replace a home air-conditioning system with a much more expensive one using the new refrigerants that replaced the restricted ones.  I also had problems with the refrigerant in the air-conditioner in my well-used and aged car.  I was not happy with my government for causing me these problems.

Now we come to the present crisis.  The Obama people decided that the Montreal Protocol should be used to force the end of the production of the supposedly ozone-friendly refrigerants developed to replace the less expensive and highly effective refrigerants that preceded the Montreal Protocol.  The new refrigerants developed by Honeywell and Chemours and others will replace refrigerants priced at $6 per pound with refrigerants priced at more than $70 per pound.  Home air-conditioner units may use 15 pounds of refrigerant at a cost of more than $1050 for the new refrigerants.  Honeywell and Chemours and other refrigerant manufacturers are lobbying hard to have the U.S. government force us to replace our current air-conditioners once again and replace them with air-conditioners using their newly developed gold-plated refrigerants.  The reason is the terrifying prospect of catastrophic man-made global warming.

Except, there is no catastrophic man-made global warming.  Carbon dioxide has a trivial effect on the Earth's surface temperatures.  Whatever effect the present generation of refrigerants has is trivial in comparison to the trivial effect of carbon dioxide.  But, never let a potential scare tactic go unused when someone can profit from it.  And what is a government for if not to provide the means to force the People to do as some special interest group wants them to do.  In this case, we are to be forced to make it easy for the producers of the new air-conditioning units and the new refrigerants to make a killing in the air-conditioning market.

Perhaps the added costs of air-conditioning will then reinforce the claim that global warming would be a catastrophe, making many environmentalists very happy.  That would provide them with hopes of an easier path to gaining even more power over the People.  Meanwhile, the Democrats who most further these environmentalist power games will be degrading the lives of Americans and others around the world, most especially the poor who can least afford the new gold-plated air-conditioning systems.  Once again, the Democrats have put the lie on their pretended care for the poor and the less fortunate among us.  There is no statement more terrifying than that of the Democrats saying that they are the party that cares for you.  When they do that, they really mean that they intend to subjugate you.  They are saying they have a place for you on their plantation.  In this case, a hot place with no air-conditioning.

Critique of The Steel Greenhouse by Willis Eschenbach

Willis Eschenbach made a guest post entitled The Steel Greenhouse at Watts Up With That in November 2009 that reduces a critical aspect of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis to a very simple model.  Some critics of catastrophic man-made global warming claim his model is incorrect and others embrace it.  In this post I will solve the same problem he does, but with fewer assumptions and I will not violate the energy density conservation rules of equilibrium electromagnetic fields given by Stefan’s Law in the simple limit of black body cavities and more generally given by electromagnetic field theory as Eschenbach does.  I will follow the mathematics from a non-equilibrium case to the radiative equilibrium case.

In one very important respect, Eschenbach produces a correct result, yet in another very important respect he buys into an error that causes a huge amplification of the effects of infrared-active or greenhouse gases when that concept of thermal radiation is applied to real climate issues.  If you have not read my prior post on thermal radiation physics which I reference below, you are a most unusually astute scientist if you really know and understand what Eschehbach’s widely shared error is.

I have previously discussed the fundamentals of black body thermal radiation and how it applies to real life materials in several postings.  The best single post to read to understand why it is improper to think about black body and thermal radiation generally as most scientists do is:

Solving the Parallel Plate Thermal Radiation Problem Correctly Provesthe Settled Science of Man-Made Global Warming Wrong

The Eschenbach model for his discussion of a fundamental aspect of the greenhouse gas warming effect is to imagine the Earth as a perfectly conducting sphere with black body emission closely surrounded by a perfectly conducting shell which also has surfaces that act as though they are black body absorbers and radiators.  Effectively, his model takes there to be only vacuum between the surface of the inner sphere and the surrounding shell and only vacuum and a T=0 K universe beyond the surrounding shell.  The only means for energy to flow in the system between the inner sphere and the outer shell is by thermal radiation, as it is also beyond the shell.  The very small correction for the different surface areas of the inner sphere and the outer shell will be ignored as Eschenbach did.  The geometric surface area correction is less than one part in a thousand.  This is not meant to be an accurate model of the Earth and its atmosphere.  It is a useful thought experiment.

Eschenbach posits that the inner sphere has its own source of heat which he sets at a thermal power density of 235 W/m² at the surface of the sphere.  Since this is the only source of heat, at equilibrium, the only very slightly larger shell around the sphere must radiate energy into space at a power of 235 W/m².  So far he is right.

He posits that the outer shell is a great conductor, so there is no temperature gradient in the shell between the inner and outer surfaces.  Now he applies standard issue knowledge of thermal radiation and says that if the two sided outer sphere is radiating power on the outside surface at 235 W/m², then it must be doing so also from the inner surface which has the same temperature, because the relationship between the power of radiation and the temperature is given by P = σT⁴, where P is the power per unit area, T is the temperature of the surface in Kelvin, and σ is a constant.  This relationship is the Stefan-Boltzmann law.  If the inner surface were radiating into a vacuum at T = 0K, this would be a correct application of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.  This is not the case for the inner surface, though we will imagine that it is for the outer surface since space has an average temperature relatively close to absolute zero compared to an Earth surface temperature near 288 K.

Eschenbach goes on to observe that since the shell is radiating energy back to the inner sphere at 235 W/m² and the sphere surface already had a supply of power of 235 W/m², the sum of the two powers is now 470 W/m².  Putting a shell around the core sphere has doubled the radiating power of the core sphere.  This is the real greenhouse effect he says.  His solution is based on a flux of photons at 470 W/m² flowing outward from the sphere surface and a flux of photons at 235 W/m² flowing downward from the shell to the sphere surface.

Some people are bothered by the failure here to conserve energy, but not very many, because most people think it is only important to conserve energy at the sphere and at the shell.  Most people seem to examine this and say, well, the 470 W/m² radiating out from the inner sphere surface minus the 235 W/m² radiating into the inner sphere surface from the inner surface of the shell is still 235 W/m² which is supplied by the internal power supply of the core sphere.  QED, energy is conserved.  Never mind the fact that the energy of the photons issuing forth at the rate of 470 W/m² and the energy of the photons from the inside wall of the shell at 235 W/m² must add, not subtract, when we examine the energy density of the volume between the outer shell and the inner core sphere.  I will discuss this somewhat further on in this post, but the reference I gave above will be a much more thorough discussion of this critical issue.

Let us step back from this and talk a moment about black body cavity thermal radiation.  The principal characteristic of a black body cavity is that it is at thermal equilibrium and the energy density inside the cavity is everywhere the same and given by Stefan’s Law.  If the energy density is e, then e = a T⁴, where a is Stefan’s constant.  Within the cavity in equilibrium, there are just as many photons traveling in one direction as in its opposite direction.  If photons traveling in opposite directions had energies that cancelled one another out, then the energy density inside a black body cavity would be zero and would not be given by Stefan’s Law.

If you return to Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics, you will also find that two oppositely directed electromagnetic plane waves will simply pass through one another and reappear as normal plane waves after their very brief interaction.  They most certainly do not sum up to zero energy.

Let us simplify the problem even more by just looking at two facing planes, one of which has a supply of power Q per unit surface area and only radiates that power from the surface facing the other plane which has two sides that can radiate power.  Imagine these to be a small section out of the Eschenbach inner core of a unit area of surface and of a unit area of outer shell.  This simplification of the model with its parameters for thermal radiation is shown below:

The power into the left plane representing a unit surface area of the inner core causes it to radiate power at a rate of P_S, when the power to the sphere is first turned on.  We will assume that the surrounding shell on the right of the drawing was at T=0 K when the power to the inner core was turned on.  Let us either assume that it has a finite heat capacity so that it has to warm up to its equilibrium temperature or we count on the finite speed of light to create a delay.  We are making this assumption so that we are not too quick to leap to false assumptions.  What is the general case before and when equilibrium is reached?  It is obvious that T_O will increase.  What will happen to T_S?

The power transferred from the inner core to the outer shell is P_S. The power radiated from the outer surface of the shell section will be P_O and that surface is in vacuum facing nothing but T = 0 K space.  For simplicity and in order to be strictly correct in applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the space between the powered inner core and the spherical shell is in vacuum.  We have

Q = P_S  = σ T_S⁴ - σ T_O⁴

P_O = σ T_O⁴

At equilibrium, P_S = P_O, so

T_SE⁴ - T_OE⁴ = T_OE⁴, where the added E in the subscripts designates the equilibrium values.

Therefore, T_SE⁴ = 2 T_OE⁴ or T_SE = 1.189 T_OE and

P_S = σ ( 2 T_OE⁴ - T_OE⁴ ) = σ T_OE⁴.

But Q = P_S always, so when the shell was still at T=0 K, Q = P_S = σ T_SI⁴ , where T_SI was the initial temperature of the surface of the sphere when Q was first turned on and all the sphere surface saw as a T=0 K environment.  Consequently,

T_OE = T_SI

At equilibrium, the outward facing surface of the shell radiates energy at the same rate the initial core spherical surface did when it was surrounded by T=0 K.  The shell temperature has become what the initial core sphere surface temperature was.  Very importantly, the inner core surface temperature has increased to be

T_SE = 1.189 T_OE = 1.189 T_SI

Putting the shell around the inner core has sufficiently retarded its rate of cooling that with the same input power to the inner core, its temperature has increased by a factor of 1.189 or the one-quarter root of 2.  The reason for this is that the powered inner core is emitting energy from a surface of unit area 1, while the surrounding shell is retarding its emission with a surface of unit area 1 and emitting a power equal to the initial power emitted from the sphere from its outer surface of unit area 1.  In the similar problem with two planes both of which have two black body surfaces and one of which is supplied with power, the equilibrium condition has both planes at the T_SI temperature.  They create a black body cavity between them and the photon emission from the two facing inner surfaces is P = 0.  There is only P = σ T⁴ emission from the outward facing surfaces of each plane and the interior energy density is given by Stefan’s Law as

e = a T⁴

Let us return to Eschenbach’s post.  His inner sphere had a power of its own of 235 W/m² and the shell radiated 235 W/m² down upon the inner sphere, so he says the inner sphere surface radiates power away from its surface equal to the sum of the internal power and the radiated power from the surrounding shell, which is 470 W/m².  Applying the Stefan - Boltzmann Law:

P_S = 470 W/m² = σ T_SE⁴

T_SE = 301.74 K

In my case,

P_S = σ T_SI⁴ = 235 W/m²

T_SI = 253.73 K

T_SE = 1.189 T_SI = 301.68 K

So, both Eschenbach and my calculations yield the same, higher inner core surface temperature. 

Our important difference is that he supposes the vacuum between the inner core and the surrounding shell has a photon density corresponding to (470 + 235) W/m² = 705 W/m², while my photon density corresponds only to those emitted from the inner core surface and there are no photons emitted from the inner surface of the surrounding shell.  The reasons for this are given at length in my first reference above.  Consequently, the real photon density between the sphere and the shell is actually that corresponding to 235 W/m².  Eschenbach has multiplied the photon density by a factor of 3.

Why is the photon density critical when one more realistically addresses the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis?  One way one calculates the longwave infrared absorption warming attributed to greenhouse gases is with an experimentally measured absorption cross section for each frequency of photon energy for each greenhouse gas molecule such as water vapor and carbon dioxide.  One then multiplies the number of photons of each frequency times the value of the absorption cross section for that frequency to calculate the number of absorption events.  A factor of 3 exaggeration in the number of photons at each frequency is an important exaggeration of the greenhouse gas effect.

It is actually even worse than this when the proponents of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis with a similar misconception set to work.  Let us look once again at the NASA Earth Energy Budget:

NASA has a surface radiation of 117% here and a back radiation of 100%.  This produces a corresponding photon density of 217%.  In reality, the photon density is 117% - 100% = 17%.  Consequently, NASA has amplified the photon density by a factor of 217% / 17% = 12.8.  This is the equivalent of amplifying the greenhouse gas effect by a factor of 12.8.

There are many who believe that the radiative forcing caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 3.7 W/m².  Divide that radiative forcing value by 12.8 to account for the greatly exaggerated effect caused by an exaggeration of the number of photons that carbon dioxide can absorb and one gets a radiative forcing value of only 0.29 W/m².  This alone would make it much harder to experimentally document the warming effect of carbon dioxide and would explain why the global climate models have been exaggerating the effects of carbon dioxide so long and why it has been so hard for them to find that elusive hot spot in the upper troposphere in the tropics they predicted.

It has other important consequences as well.  Suddenly the cooling effects of carbon dioxide that are usually ignored with the claim that they are much smaller than the greenhouse gas warming effect are not so small in comparison.  These cooling effects include:

• The absorption of solar insolation in the atmosphere before it can reach the surface to warm the surface
• Carbon dioxide has a higher heat capacity than do nitrogen and oxygen molecules, so more carbon dioxide increases the heat energy carried upward by convection currents
• Because carbon dioxide radiates thermal energy from a warmer layer of air to a cooler layer of air above it and that energy is transported at the speed of light, albeit for a short distance in the troposphere, this is faster transport of energy than is the convection current that would otherwise transport this energy upward           

Even if each of these three cooling effects is smaller than the reduced greenhouse warming forcing effect for carbon dioxide of 0.29 W/m², the sum of the decrease on the net warming forcing effect may be quite significant.  What is more, these cooling effects probably do not saturate as quickly as the greenhouse warming effect does as one increases the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from current levels.  Consequently, the small warming effect of 400 ppm of carbon dioxide may be reduced by further additions of carbon dioxide, if not now, then maybe as one adds more to 600 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  At this point, we do not know what happens as CO₂ is added in increments at higher concentrations than 400 ppm.

In addition, the diminished effect of carbon dioxide on warming should cause everyone to have more interest in understanding many natural causes or non-man-made causes of climate variability.  We have far too little knowledge of

• Solar irradiance variations
• Solar wind and the weakening solar magnetic field effects
• Cosmic ray seeding of clouds
• Other causes of cloud variations
• The condensation of water in dew and ground fog surface warming
• Precipitation effects on warming/cooling
• Evaporation of water as a function of temperature and humidity around the world
• Better understanding of the greenhouse effect of water vapor
• Ocean currents and cycles
• Effects caused by the weakening of the Earth's magnetic field
• Effects of aerosols
• Effects of dust
• Other effects not listed

Then there are other man-made effects, primarily man’s use of the land.

I believe that these other effects on climate will in some cases prove to be more important for our understanding of the climate and its changes than are the effects of additions to the carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide has a very small effect on the climate, especially so when one is concerned about the effect of additions to the present levels of carbon dioxide.