Supporting the Open Evaluation of NOAA Scientists' Scientific Claims of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming

I am one of the scientists who has signed the following letter to Representative Lamar Smith, Chairman of the Science, Space and Technology Committee of Congress.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency of the federal government, has refused to share the scientific data which NOAA scientists have used to adjust the surface temperature records of the Earth.  This is a clear violation of federal law and it is a clear thumbing of the noise by NOAA of representative government.  Rep. Lamar Smith is simply trying to perform due diligence in evaluating data and scientific methods being used to justify drastic governmental regulations.  There is very substantial evidence that much of the surface temperature record has been fudged to support the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  NOAA is unwilling to submit its scientific claims to critical and rational scientific evaluation.

The letter in support of exposing this NOAA data and scientific methodology to open examination was signed by 300 scientists and follows:

January 8, 2016

Chairman Lamar Smith

Committee on Science, Space and Technology

House of Representatives

Congress of the United States

Dear Chairman Smith,

We, the undersigned, scientists, engineers, economists and others, who have looked carefully into the effects of carbon dioxide released by human activities, wish to record our support for the efforts of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology to ensure that OMB and NOAA guidelines for Peer Review for Influential Scientific Information and Highly Influential Scientific Assessment are followed by federal agencies.

We remind you that controversy previously arose over EPA’s apparent failure to comply with these guidelines in connection with its Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, which was the subject of a report by the EPA Office of the Inspector General in 2011, see http://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents/20110926-11-p-0702.pdf and contemporary discussion http://climateaudit.org/2011/10/04/epa-the-endangerment-finding-was-not-a-highly-influential-scientific-assessment/.  In that case, EPA had not complied with peer review requirements for a “highly influential scientific assessment” and argued that the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding was not a “highly influential” scientific assessment.  If it wasn’t, then it’s hard to imagine what would be.

In our opinion, NOAA ought to have observed the OMB (and its own) guidelines for peer review of “influential scientific information” and “highly influential scientific assessments” in respect to  Karl et al 2015 and its associated data.  But NOAA seems not to have done this.

We urge you to focus on these important compliance issues. For your consideration we attach a draft letter which directly connects these issues to your committee’s prior request for documents.

Sincerely,

List of signatories 

More context for this letter is provided in this Daily Caller article.

One Person, One Vote?

The Supreme Court just heard a case on Tuesday, Evenwel v. Abbott, over whether state legislative districts must equalize the number of voters or the number of people.  The particular state in this case is Texas, where districts are apportioned by number of people and where the number of voters per district then differs greatly in some cases.

One person, one vote sounds nice -- until you give it some thought.  Of course children are persons, but we exclude them from voting.  Non-citizens are also not supposed to vote, though many do in some districts, especially those controlled by the Democratic Party.  Many people though eligible to become voters do not register to vote.  Many people who are registered to vote skip many or some elections.  There simply is no sense in which one person gets one vote and one share of representation.  There is no feasible way to achieve any such outcome in the future.

The Constitution originally handled the problem this way:

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and Excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Consequently, districts for the House of Representatives were equalized for the total number of people, excluding untaxed Indians and two-fifths of slaves.  The free Persons included non-citizens.  The idea at the time was that those men eligible to vote would represent all men with insufficient property to vote, children, women, non-citizens, those bound to service for a term of years, and all slaves.

The 14th Amendment changed the apportionment for the House Districts by only excluding Indians not taxed.  It went on to punish states that denied the right to vote to male citizens of 21 years of age or older by reducing the House representation in proportion to their numbers in ratio to the total number of male citizens 21 years of age and older.  The idea was still clearly that male citizens of 21 years or older would represent all women and all non-citizens.

But how should the House Districts properly be set up?  By extension, how should state legislative districts be set up?  Is it reasonable to assume that those who vote are trying and able to represent the good of those who cannot or will not vote when they cast their vote?  These are substantive questions.  It is not unreasonable for fairly reasonable people to disagree on the answers.

At the time the 14th Amendment was written, it was considered that House Districts should be apportioned in accordance with the number of voters or eligible voters.  That idea was shot down immediately when Representative James Blaine, Republican of Maine, examined the census data and found that since the ratio of men to women was much higher in Western states than in the Eastern states, the Eastern states would lose massive representation if it were based on the number of voters or eligible voters.  Women could not vote, but they were valuable for inflating the numbers of persons for representation, much as slaves had been in the South in the past.

It is now easy for all citizens of age to vote.  Despite this, in many areas very low fractions of the citizens chose to vote.  They are either not sufficiently interested or they are so infused with a sense of futility that they see no point in voting.  Should uninterested people or those so infused with a sense of doom and futility be given representation that they will not use? 

In most cases, such uninterested or futility-bound voters especially occupy highly Democrat districts.  So many Progressive Elitist Democrats believe such non-participating voters or potential voters should be represented because they, the Progressive Elitists, will cast their votes in the interest of the apathetic or doomed-in-futility persons.  Yet these same Progressive Elitists have long claimed to be doing this, especially to minimize economic inequality.  Nonetheless, the Congressional Districts with the worst economic inequality are almost exclusively Democratic and have been for decades.  Clearly, the Progressive Elitist voters, who do vote in high percentages, either do not actually vote to reduce economic inequality or they do so with a complete misunderstanding of the consequences of their votes.  They are clearly horrible at representing the interests of the less educated and less inclined to vote people in their districts.

In general, people who vote either vote their own interest or they vote for the interests of others without actually understanding their interests.  Let us be realists and recognize the facts and human nature.  People barely able to motivate themselves to vote rarely have any understanding of the legitimate role of government, the important political issues of the time, the principles of the candidates, and the manner in which new laws and regulations will affect our futures.  In the era of
Big Government these issues are often much more complex than they were in the past in America.

We should also note that it is clear that people are not good at representing the interests of children.  We see this in the miserable public education system we have, in the huge national debt, in the terrible future liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, and the complete disregard for the effect of compounded economic growth rates on the standard of living of Americans 30 or 40 years from now.  Few voters weigh the future enough to look to future outcomes.  Consequently, they are nearly worthless as representatives of the interests of today's children.

House districts, both federal and state, should simply be apportioned on the basis of the number of voters in the last several elections, assuming they do not exceed the number of eligible voters as they do in some Democrat districts.  This apportions representation according to the numbers of citizens of age to vote who actually have an interest in government.  Yes, many of them will not understand the issues and the consequences of their votes either, but this is the one form in which One Person, One Vote is actually achievable in the form of One Voter, One Vote.

Adding to the weight on political outcomes of those districts with higher voter turn-out is likely to raise the quality of the People's Voice about as high as one can accomplish by any means except an improved education system or other educational efforts.  If the reward in political outcomes is greater for those who already care enough to vote, perhaps they will make a greater effort in the future to think about their votes.  These more thoughtful voters then may even realize a bit greater responsibility not to do harm to others, including those others who do not care to vote.  But realistically, one will be giving a greater voting weight to those who are voting for the interests of those they know best, themselves and perhaps their immediate family and friends.  That is not a bad thing.  Most great wrongs are done when people vote or act for others they do not even know, or when they pretend to do so.

How might one determine the number of voters for these district apportionment purposes?  How about the last four elections in the previous decade with re-apportionment occurring once a decade?  It would be nice if one could just make this the last four elections, but the re-districting effort and battles would be too much.  As for why four elections, the fluctuations in voter turn-out are great, especially the differences between Presidential elections and those when voting on the President does not occur.  The last four elections will include two presidential and two non-presidential elections.  It will include elections when no vote was up in the state for Senator in Congress.  It is a good number to average out, though it may slightly lag overall population shifts.  I would gladly live with that population shift lag for the many benefits of One Voter, One Vote, One Share of Representation.

As for state legislative districts, a variety of formulas are fairly reasonable and determining what formula to use should be left up to the states.  Only very unreasonable state decisions should be corrected by the Supreme Court.  Among the unreasonable apportionments would be those that count non-citizens.  Perhaps counting citizen children should also be considered unreasonable, though I am less adamant about this than about the non-citizen count.

Which brings up the need to also tackle the problem of ineligible voters casting ballots as another aspect of the voter representation problem.

On Prohibiting Guns to Those on the No Fly List

The No Fly List is an often incompetently compiled list which does not follow the judicial procedures that are a necessary protection of individual rights.  It denies individuals the right to travel by air with the false claim that one does not have a right to travel by air.  It is claimed that travel is just a privilege which government can revoke at its whim.

This is not true.  The right to travel is a very fundamental right.  Just as no one has the obligation to provide us with happiness, no one is obliged to enable our travel.  But, no one is justified in preventing our traveling with the use of force or the threat of force so long as we do so without hurting anyone else.  Before one's right to travel can be abridged, there must be a judicial determination that one has a history of initiating the use of force or that one has plans to do so. 

The right to bear arms is an explicitly guaranteed right in our Bill of Rights.  The Second Amendment to the Constitution specifically recognizes this right to own arms.  Obama's call to prevent the sale of arms and the possession of arms to those on the No Fly List is highly irrational.  I am sure it seems to make sense to many Americans, but it does not.

Only those who have established felony histories can be denied their Second Amendment right to bear arms.  This means those who are deprived of their gun rights have been first evaluated by our judiciary as a reasonable threat to others should they be allowed to own a gun.  But note what Obama is doing to undermine this basic right guaranteed in our Bill of Rights:  He is denying this right on the basis of a list made in denial of a travel right without a proper judicial review of those denied this right.  In his own terms, he is using the revocation of what he calls a privilege to justify the revocation of an individual right protected in our Bill of Rights.  The downgrade of our travel rights is being used as a basis to downgrade a right protected in our Constitution.

Even in the Articles of Confederation, the right to travel from one state to another was recognized.  Many court cases decided under the Constitution have also recognized this right to travel.  Yet since 9/11, this right has been denied, especially in air travel.  Now we see once again how the violation of one right is used to justify the violation of another individual right.

Obama Nonsense on Islam and Its Claim to Freedom of Religion

In his speech Sunday night, Obama claimed that those who use violence as a means to advance Islam are practicing a perverted form of Islam.  Since Islam is essentially a religion that obligates its believers to emulate Mohammad's life practices and Mohammad used violence and terror to advance his religion, it is nonsense to claim that people who believe they are using violence and terror to advance Islam are practicing a perverted form of Islam.  In the context of Islam, they are not radical, however radical they are as human beings.

Yes, most people who think of themselves as Muslims are not themselves violent in their practice of the religion.  Many are good people.  Nonetheless, those of us who are not practicing Islam have often observed that far too few Muslims are openly critical of those who use violence or terror to advance the religion.  Well, there is a very logical reason why Muslims do not offer such criticism as much as good people should.  They cannot criticize the present-day advocates of violence against non-Muslims without making an implied criticism of Mohammad himself for using violence and terror to spread his religion.  They must be silent.  Their silence is in some part due to fear, but it is also due to the fundamental beliefs of the religion itself.  Many of those Muslims who do not themselves use force to make others observe Islam make "charitable" contributions to organizations that advocate or actually use force for that purpose.

Contrary to Obama's claim that we owe Muslims all of the rights we usually allow people under the freedom of religion, we do not owe this religious freedom to any religion that advocates the use of force to make others practice that religion.  Freedom of religion, as with all freedom of conscience, has to have a foundation in the prohibition of the use of force against others as a means to practice the religion.   Given that prohibition of force, we can and should allow others their freedom of conscience, even as we claim the exercise of our own freedom of conscience.

Given that Islam is in essence the emulation of Mohammad, we can very reasonably ask if Mohammad were alive today, would we allow him to enter the United States?  I would not allow him in.  He is much too dangerous, too violent, and too committed to terrorism.  Neither would I allow those who followed his commands to commit violence against non-believers to enter the U.S.  In doing so, I would not be in violation of anyone's legitimate claim of freedom of religion.  I would be protecting most Americans from violence.

An Ignorant Petition to Further Impoverish the Poor

With the international conference on Man-Induced Global Warming coming up soon in Paris, there is a petition circulating to support government efforts to suppress the use of inexpensive and reliable fossil fuels.  Here is the petition with my comments in blue added to it:

World leaders are coming together this year for climate talks in Paris. Their decisions affect all of us.  Darned, pesky nuisances these interfering world leaders are.  With most of the nations of the world having weak economies and too little respect for individual rights, these leaders are looking for ways to divert our attention from the many ways they get in our way, by getting in our way in the name of a scare based on a failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.

Climate change is dramatically changing the world we love. It’s putting our homes, our land and our food at risk. For nearly a billion people in poverty, more extreme weather and more disasters mean more hunger.  Climate has always changed.  Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.  But, the world climate has actually been relatively stable for the last 10,000 years and there is no evidence that that has yet changed.  Man minimizes the consequences of climate change by using such resources as fossil fuels to make his home comfortable, manufacture products, and travel about to do productive work and transport his production to markets where people live better because of those products.  These private sector activities help us all to cope with the ancient vagaries of weather and climate.

Make 2015 the year leaders put the world’s most vulnerable people first in the battle against climate change.  So let them have the least expensive energy for transportation, light, and heat.  They will only become more vulnerable with skyrocketing energy prices, such as those advocated by Obama, his chief science advisor Holdren, and his Secr. of Energy.

If governments and big businesses are serious about fighting poverty, we need heads of state to make decisions in Paris that show support for the people whose lives and livelihoods are most at risk. These leaders have the power to start taking bold action on emissions, and to start to fix the damage that’s already been done.  Only there is no evidence that any damage has been done.  Rising CO2 concentrations do seem to be making plants grow better, which is only bad to these people because they think there are too many people on Earth and some of these Progressive Elitists want to see many of the poor die, because they believe man is the enemy of nature.  Their war to save nature is their war against man.

Millions of people across the world are already doing incredible things to protect the world we love. The fight against climate change won’t end this year but together we can win some important battles.  People in the most advanced societies that use the most fossil fuels are the ones who do the most to protect the world we love.

Show our governments and big business that they’ve got to take urgent action to tackle climate change, and stand with those hit first and worst by extreme weather and disasters.  Yes, tell them to leave private companies alone, so they can concentration on delivering inexpensive energy which is available when people need it.

 Make 2015 the year leaders stand with those hardest hit by climate change.  Yes, convince these leaders to stop meddling with our energy.

World leaders are playing mercilessly on the ignorance of the people with their tireless media, education, and political campaigns to convince them that any weather change is a fundamental threat to their existence and well-being caused by those bad human beings.  What I see are bad politicians, bad educators, and misleading and wrongheaded media.

Helium-Pressurized Homebrew Beer at AME Featured in C&EN Article

Our own Anderson Materials Evaluation (AME) chemist Dr. Kevin Wepasnick guided a Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) investigation of the properties of a helium-pressurized beer in an article entitled Helium Beer, From Prank to Tank in its 2 November 2015 issue written by Craig Bettenhausen.  C&EN is a publication of the American Chemical Society.  Kevin brewed a 5-gallon batch of a cream stout beer for C&EN over a two-week fermentation period at Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc. with writers from C&EN visiting our laboratory at the start and the end of the process.  He used a kegging process, but instead of pressurizing the keg with carbon dioxide, he pressurized it with helium.  The experiment was set up to test the claims that drinking a helium-pressurized beer would cause the drinker to speak with a high-pitched voice, as demonstrated in some on-line videos.

Scientifically, issues are to be expected.  Foremost is the difference between a polar molecule with excellent solvent properties such as carbon dioxide and the inert gas helium.  Carbon dioxide has a solubility in water of 1.7 g/kg, while helium has a solubility of merely 0.0015 g/kg in water!  It would be a challenge to dissolve enough helium in a beer to turn a drinker's voice squeaky!  Kevin pressurized the keg at 50 psi in a chilled keg, which is a much higher pressure than is used with carbon dioxide, and he held it at this pressure for five days.

The resulting beer had an excellent head of very fine bubbles, which it maintained as the visiting three writers from C&EN and the scientists of Anderson Materials Evaluation, Lorrie, Kevin, and Charles, sampled the beer at our laboratory.  Because the beer had little carbonic acid in it, it was a mellow beer.  The alcohol by volume was measured to be 6.2%, so it had a kick.  Yet, the beer was definitely flat and no one developed a high-pitched voice.  The Internet videos claiming such a result are fabricated!  Can you imagine that?

Well, yes, thinking as a scientist, the more than a thousand times lower solubility of inert helium in water compared to the highly polar carbon dioxide molecule, told us those videos were faked prior to doing the experiment.  Nonetheless, the experiment was fun for all, which is more the natural state of science than is the gloom and doom associated with much environmental science of our times.

NASA Finally Agrees that Antarctic Ice has Long been Increasing

A NASA paper published in the Journal of Glaciology found that Antarctic ice has long been increasing in agreement with many other studies, but in disagreement with the UN IPCC report of 2013.  Its main conclusions are:

• The Antarctic ice sheet had net gains in ice of 112 billion tons per year from 1992 to 2001.
• Antarctic ice from 2003 to 2008 had a net gain of 82 billion tons per year.
• Extra snowfall in East Antarctica began about 10,000 years ago as the Earth warmed after the last Ice Age and this snowfall thickened the East Antarctic and the interior regions of the West Antarctic by 1.7 cm/year.  This accumulation over vast expanses more than offsets the melting of ice on the West Antarctic peninsula which gets so much publicity.
• The increased ice in Antarctica is now acting to reduce sea levels by 0.23 mm/year.

One of the more interesting observations on this data is that the global warming due to the end of the last Ice Age caused more snowfall in Antarctica, which serves to counterbalance the rise in sea level due to the thermal expansion of water in a warmer world.  This is one of many ways in which the Earth moderates climate changes.

The findings of this study were the result of more accurate measurements of the small thickening of the ice in most of Antarctica from satellite measurements, with the exception of the ice core investigations by others that indicated the increase in snowfall beginning 10,000 years ago.  It would not be surprising if the application of these satellite analysis methods to Greenland were to find that previous claims of large ice losses there were also wrong.  It is easy to observe large glaciers calving into the ocean while missing the slow increases of ice thickness over much larger areas.

Obama NOAA Refused to Provide Research Documents to House Science Committee

Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Science Committee subpoenaed NOAA for research documents related to their adjustments of the temperature record.  These adjustments were recently used to remove all evidence of the pause in surface temperatures from 1998 to 2013 and replace that pause with a temperature surge.  NOAA refused to hand the documents on the adjustments over, in direct violation of law. Smith's committee wants to know why.

According to Rep. Smith: 

The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made.

As a recent editorial in Investors Business Daily says:

Taxpayers pay for this research, which is being used to justify massive new federal spending and regulation. They deserve to know what NOAA and other federal agencies are doing — and whether they're being honest or serving an unspoken extreme political agenda.

Indeed, it is way past time that the Obama administration should be stopped from exaggerating claims of catastrophic man-made global warming simply by manipulating the data to systematically lower past temperatures and to raise recent temperatures.  NOAA and NASA GISS have both long been engaged in this fraud and have not been held responsible for their corruption of science and their lawless activities.  These activities have then fed the data mill that the Obama EPA has used to claim that CO2 is a terrible pollutant.  It is no such thing.  It is in fact absolutely necessary for life on Earth by virtue of the need of plants for it and our need of plants.  It is the use of CO2 by plants that produces the oxygen in the atmosphere that animals, including man, require.  Yet the Obama EPA has the gall to call this life-essential molecule a pollutant based on the fudging of data by NOAA and NASA GISS!

Impeaching the Crooked Obama IRS Head

Thanks primarily to government e-mails and information obtained by Judicial Watch, House Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced a resolution this week to impeach the IRS commissioner for "high crimes and misdemeanors."  IRS Commissioner Koskinen has obstructed justice while protecting the criminal actions of Lois Lerner, whom the Obama Justice Department has just refused to prosecute even as the investigation into her and other IRS managers' activities is still underway.  

Representative Chaffetz has based his call for impeachment of the IRS Commissioner on these points:


• He failed to comply with a subpoena resulting in destruction of key evidence. Commissioner Koskinen failed to locate and preserve IRS records in accordance with a congressional subpoena and an internal preservation order. The IRS erased 422 backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 of Lois Lerner's emails - key pieces of evidence that were destroyed on Koskinen's watch.

• He failed to testify truthfully and provided false and misleading information. Commissioner Koskinen testified the IRS turned over all emails relevant to the congressional investigation, including all of Ms. Lerner's emails. When the agency determined Ms. Lerner's emails were missing, Commissioner Koskinen testified the emails were unrecoverable. These statements were false.

• He failed to notify Congress that key evidence was missing. The IRS knew Lois Lerner's emails were missing in February 2014. In fact, they were not missing; the IRS destroyed the emails on March 4, 2014. The IRS did not notify Congress the emails were missing until June 2014 - four months later, and well after the White House and the Treasury Department were notified. 

Meanwhile, Obama claims that there is not a smidgen of evidence of wrong-doing in his IRS or his Department of Justice.

Can 400 ppm CO2 Provide the Heating Required by the AGW Hypothesis?

This is a thought experiment.  The idea is to make a simple test of the plausibility or even possibility of the claim of the catastrophic man-made or anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis that the increase from about 300 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last 120 years or so has caused a surface temperature increase of 1°C or 1K.

Now I know that this is a concept very much ignored by the advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming, but I am going to assume that the Law of Conservation of Energy, which they have not explicitly refuted, still holds.  I have a high level of confidence in this law of physics.

Let us start out with the simplifying assumption that every air molecule has the same heat capacity at constant pressure.  This means that the same amount of heat is required to raise the temperature of each kind of molecule by 1K.  We will discuss the correction for this below.  I will also make the simplifying assumption that the carbon dioxide molecules are heated fully to the necessary temperature and then dumped into the air whose temperature is raised by 1 K upon reaching equilibrium.  The limitations on this assumption will also be examined later.

If the addition of 100 molecules of CO₂ to the prior 300 molecules/ 1 million air molecules has caused all air molecules near the surface of the Earth to have a 1K temperature increase, then given Conservation of Energy, each of the CO₂ molecules has to gain an additional temperature of T_a which is transferred by collisions to all the other gas molecules until they are all at an equilibrium temperature 1K higher than the air had previously been.  T_a is given by:

1,000,000 (1K) = 400 T_a

T_a = 2500 K,

because of the proportional relationship of heat, a form of energy, to the temperature of the gas molecules.

Now let us allow for the fact that the heat capacities per mole at constant pressure of the molecules in air are not equal.  We want the values per mole because that gives them for equal numbers of molecules, while the per gram values of heat capacity do not.  We have for each gas heat capacity values of:

N₂, 29.12 J/K mol.

O₂, 29.38 J/K mol.

Ar, 20.79 J/K mol.

H₂O, 28.03 J/K mol.

CO₂, 36.94 J/K mol.

Air, 29.07 J/K mol.

We discover now that a 1 K increase in the temperature of a molecule of CO₂ gives it more additional energy than the average air molecule needs to raise its temperature by 1K.  So, the temperature per CO₂ molecule that we calculated above will not need to be quite so large.  The required temperature T_a will only be:

T_a = (2500 K) / (36.94 / 29.07)

T_a = 1967 K

Now, recall that this is only the additional temperature of each CO₂ molecule required to cause a 1K temperature increase spread evenly over every air molecule in equilibrium at the Earth’s surface.

The same infra-red absorbing properties claimed to give CO₂ molecules this amazing power, would also be acting in an atmosphere with a mere 100 ppm of CO₂.  In fact, each additional 100 ppm of CO2 has a diminishing effect on heating other gases according to the proposed mechanism for such heating.  The mean free path length for each infra-red absorption event by a molecule of CO₂ becomes exponentially shorter and shorter as more CO₂ molecules are added.  The size of the effect for additional molecules becomes less and less.  Consequently, the first 100 ppm of CO₂ molecules would heat the air by more than 1K given that 400 ppm of CO₂ molecules heat it by 1K upon the increase in concentration from 300 ppm to 400 ppm.  Note that this means that the first 100 ppm of molecules of CO₂ would have to achieve a temperature more than four times 1976 K or 7868 K.

The further increase in the temperature upon going from 100 ppm to 200 ppm would also be greater than that for going from 300 ppm to 400 ppm, as would be the temperature increase on going from 200 ppm to 300 ppm.  Each concentration increase of 100 ppm would cause a smaller temperature increase than the previous one did.  But upon arriving at 200 ppm concentration of carbon dioxide, there are half as many molecules of it as one has upon arriving at 400 ppm of CO₂, so each molecule has to be twice as hot.  Upon arriving at 300 ppm from 200 ppm, each molecule has to be 4/3rds as hot as it did at 400 ppm.

So let us put together the effect that the wonder molecule of CO₂ has had on heating the Earth's surface temperature to date, we calculate the additional minimal temperature each CO₂ molecule must have to be to be consistent with the catastrophic AGW claim:

0 to 100 ppm:   T_a > 4(1976 K) = 7868 K

100 to 200 ppm:  T_a > 2(1976 K) = 3952 K

200 to 300 ppm:  T_a > (4/3)(1976 K) = 2635 K

300 to 400 ppm:  T_a = 1976 K

We can now calculate the cumulative effect of  CO₂ molecules given that we have very conservative lower limit values for the heating of the atmosphere provided by CO₂ molecules above.  The heating due to the miracle molecule at lower concentrations has not gone away.  The energy being dumped into the atmosphere is still there, though it is now shared by a larger number of CO₂ molecules.  Let T_t be the cumulative necessary temperature of our present 400 ppm of carbon dioxide to provide this total base of energy.  Invoking Energy Conservation once again, we must conservatively have:

400 T_t > 100 (7868 K) + 200 (3952 K) + 300 (2635 K) + 400 (1976 K)

T_t > 7895 K

Consequently, the temperature required per CO₂ molecule to be transferred to all air molecules by collisions to establish an equilibrium temperature based on the claims of the advocates of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is substantially greater than 7895 K.

This required temperature per CO₂ molecule is then substantially greater than 7895 K or 7622°C.  The sun is the source of this energy and its surface temperature is only 5778K or 5505°C.  A cooler body cannot heat another body to a temperature greater than its own temperature.  The highest temperature anything could be raised to on Earth by solar radiation is further diminished by the distance of the Earth from the sun and the fact that radiation emitted by the Earth is mostly directed at temperatures in space of about 4K.

There is, of course, another problem.  The carbon dioxide molecules would cease to be molecules long before they could reach these hypothetical temperatures.  The very collisions that spread the heat from the infra-red active molecules to nitrogen and oxygen molecules would be so energetic that carbon dioxide molecules upon collision would be ionized and destroyed.  The unfortunate molecules struck so violently would be ionized.  You cannot imagine how bad the ozone problem would be as a result of the ionization of the oxygen molecules in the air!

If the claimed CO₂ heating effect were even a small fraction of what is being claimed, then there might be a large fraction of carbon dioxide, water, and methane molecules flying about in the air at velocities much greater than those of the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution.  However, that distribution is a fairly accurate description of actual air molecule velocity distributions and it has been tested for many decades. So why do we see no substantial such violation of the Maxwell-Boltzmann equation for the velocity of gas molecules?

It might be due to a combination of a minimal temperature increase in the molecule for each absorption event and a rapid collision rate preventing the accumulation of energy from more than one such absorption event in the molecule.  Almost every time a carbon dioxide molecule absorbs an infra-red photon emitted by the Earth's surface, that molecule might commonly have several collisions with other air molecules, losing that absorbed energy.  There is very good reason to believe this is the case that the energy gained by one absorption event is quickly lost in large part by collisions with other molecules.  Only occasionally does the absorbed infra-red energy get re-emitted as an infra-red photon before it has a collision.  So most infra-red active gas molecules are in equilibrium or nearly so with the other gases in the air surrounding them.  In other words, the number of absorption events is actually rather small for a given molecule and it does not build up very great amounts of energy to transfer to the non-infra-red active gas molecules of the air.

The primary infra-red wavelength emitted by the surface of the Earth which is absorbed by carbon dioxide molecules is the 15 micron wavelength.  This is the equivalent of a photon with an energy of 0.0827 eV or 1.325 x 10^-20 J.   Recall that the heat capacity of carbon dioxide at constant pressure is 36.94 J/K mol.  There are 6.023 x 10²³ (Avogadro's Number) carbon dioxide molecules in a mole, so we can divide the heat capacity per mole by Avogadro's number to find the heat capacity of a single molecule of carbon dioxide.  The heat capacity of a single molecule is then 6.135 x 10^-23 J/K.  The absorption of one 15 micron infra-red photon by one carbon dioxide atom would then raise its temperature by

(1.325 x 10^-20 J) / (6.135 x 10^-23 J/K) = 216.0 K

So while the frequency of collisions with other molecules may prevent the accumulation of energy in the carbon dioxide molecule at multiples of the single absorption event energy increase, even a single energy absorption event does raise the velocity of a carbon dioxide molecule a great deal.  The scale of the claimed catastrophic AGW effect requires each carbon dioxide molecule to transfer the heat equivalent of at least a 7895 K molecule to the air around it.  This is 36.55 absorptions of a 15 micron photon per molecule to be transferred by collisions.  Somewhat more absorption events are required to accommodate the lower probability that the energy will be given up in the emission of another photon.

The Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution curve is well-known for an ideal gas and it has been well confirmed by experiment.  The number of higher velocity carbon dioxide molecules due to the absorption of infra-red radiation emitted from the Earth's surface and their time duration in the excited state should be a measurable parameter that can be used to test the claims of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.  If the advocates of that hypothesis, foremost being the U.S. government, were serious about determining its validity, these measurements would have been performed.  What is more, those measurements would be known and discussed as a function of altitude.  The fact that little attention has been devoted to such issues is a warning flag that the U.S. government and other advocates of this hypothesis are not serious about wanting it to be tested.

So, we have performed a simple thought experiment based on what we are told is the central fact of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis and found that the hypothesis does not require an impossible effect from this point of view, however a hoot it at first appeared by the first part of the argument above.  However, the basic parameters that would define the effect should have long since been measured to define the basic physics.  Discussions of the mean free path of infra-red radiation in the atmosphere at various altitudes should be common.  It should be common knowledge what fraction of the carbon dioxide molecules are in an excited state at any given moment.

I have made several other arguments that do explain why the physics behind catastrophic AGW is wrong.  It is in fact very wrong, but one has to develop other arguments than the one above to show that to be the case using readily available data.  It is a shame that the data discussed above is not readily available.

Substantial re-writes were made on 18 and 19 October 2015 of this post.  A serious error due to an unreliable energy converter on-line existed in the 18 October version and is corrected in the 19 October version.