A Climate Question: Simple Numbers

Could someone explain in 100 words or less without complex algebraic formulas how the trace gases, approximately 1% of the atmosphere can overtly control the temperatures of the remaining 99% atmospheric constituents?

The best place I opined would be to go to PSI or CCD, Climate Change Dispatch. The contributors and readership are many with the scientific disciplines to answer that and so where better to go!

I am quite sure that many will regard both the question and the logic arrived at below are at best, facile and do not deign an answer but you have to understand how difficult it is to find that answer.

Many might say, ‘that question is simple, pretty well everybody knows the answer.’  NOT!  I will guarantee that 99.9% repeater, of the average persons questioned, cannot come even close to a proper scientific answer.

More so is how my question evolved.  After over a 1,000 hours + of reading and watching videos re AGW I thought I knew something.  Not again. Ditto to those with a university education.  Excerpt from a blog by Dr. Tim Ball (who most assuredly can answer my question):

The IPCC was designed and managed to perpetuate this deception and cynically do it openly. Deception is possible because most know very little about climate, as the Yale Education study showed (Figure 3).

Graded like a school exam, they found over half failed (52%) and 77 percent received D or F.

To add, I found a recent Harvard survey that a substantial number of grads with Sciencedegreesfailed basic math tests.  Well, this is simple.  It’s 2018 and I’ve got high-speed internet.  Once more, not!

The little nerd Zuckerberg is in front of a U.S. congressional grilling as I write.  Lord Acton; Power corrupts………..  Then there is Google, Wiki, PBS, NOAA, NASA, etc. and all of them ideologically list to port.  Paul Driessen below:

Google, Facebook, YouTube and other searches, information and social media sites appear determined to be the arbiters of what information, facts and realities we can access, what our children can learn.

I look at the above within a moral equivalency.  Schoolchildren are being taught the Greenhouse theory, that the Science is Settled, and that any form of the debate will be met with punishment.

We are told that the Earth’s atmosphere is a Greenhouse.  An anthropogenic greenhouse is a non-porous glass structure, four walls and a contiguous roof within which air, gases, cannot escape.  It functions within the simple thermodynamics of heat convection. Not again with our atmosphere!  Hadley cells, Ferrel cells, Polar cells, and advection destroy that inept analogy from Fourier’s 1824 utterance.  It actually is not chaotic as sailors have relied upon consistent wind patterns for centuries.

To continue the analogy we are told that there is a ceiling that retains heat but is it at one meter or one kilometer?  Is it a uniform dispersed (within the atmosphere) set of molecules or a uniform meshed ‘blanket’??  CO2, .04% of the 1% trace gases, the villain, is purported to radiate heat, downwards through kilometers of the atmosphere.  What happened to convection? (Google Judge William Alsup re that; California/climate/oil companies) Multiple non-consensual theories.

Now let’s take last two paragraphs and put numbers into a perspective.   The number, 400 parts per million as with the U.S. approximate 21-trillion-dollar debt is difficult for the average person to grasp.

Many people don’t even understand percentages or decimal numbers but if you presented; 1%, .04% or .8(C) they would probably understand them as very small numbers.  Even then the (written) quantity begs for an association to relate to for understanding.  Mankind started written communications with pictographs and they still work.

The pictograph at the top represents a quantity within the circle of 1,000,000 parts and the dot in the center (barely visible) represents the present quantity of 400 parts of Co2 within our atmosphere.  Increase that to 1000 parts, the totality of estimated trace gases, predominantly water vapor, and the dot will be more readily visible but still minute. Readily understandable.

Anthony Bright-Paul in a PSI article (https://principia-scientific.org/cold-scientific-fact-earth-is-cooling-down/) used generally agreed upon numbers.  The total weight of the atmosphere is approximately 5.3 million gigatonnes. CO2 comprises .003 million GT. Anthropogenic additions are generally agreed to be around 4% of that arriving at a grand total of .000012 million GT.

Please explain how such small quantities can exert so much control over so large a quantity?  I am not a scientist. I am a renovation contractor and understand numbers.  Ideally, more than one of you reading this could work together and achieve a Consensus (LOL) and publish your words.

Don QuixoteA.K.A. Alan L. Stewart  astew2016@outlook.com