There’s a whole lot of hot air coming out of New York City this week. [emphasis, links added]
As politicians, celebrities, and academics descend on the Big Apple for Climate Week NYC, expect a lot of bad ideas — and ironically a lot of carbon dioxide emissions — from elites eager to force their political agenda on the masses but unwilling to make the sacrifice themselves.
Starting Sunday, these self-appointed climate crusaders are busily lecturing ordinary Americans about how to live, what to drive, and even what to eat, all while flying in on private jets and being chauffeured around town in SUVs.
As they pontificate from podiums and plush panels about reducing carbon footprints, they conveniently ignore their outsized ones.
Climate Week is rehashing the same tired, failed schemes of the climate movement, branded this year with an “age of urgency,” perhaps in recognition that their ideas still don’t work.
Despite the ramped-up doomsday rhetoric, our environment is thriving — and this is the best time in human history to be alive.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for inflation, start with the devotees of Climate Week: Their anti-fossil-fuel proposals have resulted in higher energy prices, which increase the cost of everything.
Add to that the tax burden of the hundreds of billions spent on renewable-energy subsidies (which have barely moved the needle on our energy landscape) and pressure from the ESG movement, which bullies businesses into adopting climate initiatives or risk de-banking.
Yet for all that investment — and all that cost increase — wind and solar power still represent just 5% of the nation’s energy production.
Despite the Left’s best efforts, wind and solar are largely failed technologies. They work all right when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, but weather conditions are notoriously difficult to predict and rarely track with electricity needs.
No matter how many industrial wind farms and solar panels we build, those systems rely on fossil fuels to keep the lights on.
Imagine for a moment that climate activists achieved their goal and somehow managed to delete every drop of oil and gas and vanish every lump of coal nationwide.
First, of course, it would destroy our society and send us back to the Middle Ages — as Venezuelans found out firsthand when week-long blackouts struck their once-prosperous nation after their oil industry collapsed.
But what would happen to our dangerously warming climate?
Nothing.
According to the same data models climate radicals misuse to claim the sky is falling, a total US ban on fossil fuels would shift global temperatures by a few hundredths of a degree at most.
These models have significantly overestimated warming every time, so even that may be a stretch.
Even if the whole world participated in the disappearance of fossil fuels, the effect would still be minute — less than a tenth of a degree.
It wouldn’t be worth the trillions of dollars spent, the lives and livelihoods lost, and the destruction of our modern way of life.
But we’re not doomed.
Contrary to the Climate Week event snappily titled “Let’s Not Die,” climate-related deaths are down 99% in the last hundred years, according to researcher Bjorn Lomborg, even as the world’s population has quadrupled.
We’re not dying — by the numbers, we’re growing more resilient to climate-related disasters than we are to non-climate-related disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes.
Clearly, the weather isn’t the problem here.
In reality, this is the best time in human history to be alive. Around the world, in the wealthiest urban centers and the most impoverished developing nations, people are living longer, healthier, better lives than ever before.
They have accessible, abundant energy to thank — and not the unreliable, unaffordable energy the climate movement promotes.
Access to affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels dramatically improves life expectancy, infant and child mortality, and economic opportunity, while reducing poverty and disease.
Fossil fuels are the reason we have comfortable homes and access to nutritious foods and life-saving medicines.
They are the reason you can spend your free time reading this article instead of the backbreaking labor of life without them: subsistence farming, walking miles to collect water or firewood, and the likelihood of a short and difficult existence.
Climate Week’s dreams are nothing more than that — fantasies that won’t stop climate change but would ravage our society.
If its organizers really hope to create a brighter future for humanity, they should unapologetically embrace the high-carbon lifestyle and acknowledge its power to transform the human condition.
Read more at NY Post
Jason Isaac wrote:
“Even if the whole world participated in the disappearance of fossil fuels, the effect would still be minute — less than a tenth of a degree.”
If we were to reduce CO2 atmospheric concentration from the current 430 ppm to pre-industrial 280 ppm, it would only result in a reduction of surface temperature of 0.00024538389628901 K. Less than a thousandth of a degree.
Idealized dry gas molar heat capacity lapse rate:
If we take ϒ = 1.404, g = 9.80665 m s-2, R = 8.31446261815324 J mol-1 K-1 and M = 28.9647 g mol-1, then:
dT / dh = -0.4/1.404 * (((28.9647 g mol-1) * 9.80665 m s-2) / 8.31446261815324 J mol-1 K-1) = -9.7330377706482238008458858152373 K km-1
The stated molar isobaric heat capacity for dry air is Cp = 7/2 R
7 / 2 * 8.31446261815324 J mol-1 K-1 = 29.10061916353634 J mol-1 K-1
∴ Molar Heat Capacity / 7 * 2 = Specific Gas Constant
dT / dh = -0.4/1.404 * (((Molar Mass) * 9.80665 m s-2) / Specific Gas Constant) = Specific Lapse Rate
Which gives:
Symbol | Molar Mass | Molar Heat Capacity | Specific Lapse Rate
CO2 | 44.0095 g mol-1 | 36.94 J mol-1 K-1 | 11.683426182319 K km-1
(CO2) 11.683426182319 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.000001 = 0.0000596438906607385 K ppm-1
(CO2) 11.683426182319 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.000430 = 0.0256468729841176 K
(CO2) 11.683426182319 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.000280 = 0.0167002893850068 K
(CO2) 11.683426182319 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.000150 = 0.00894658359911077 K cooling
But wait! We also have to account for the atoms and molecules which that CO2 displaces. We’ll do the calculations for the three most-prevalent atomic or molecular species.
N2 | 28.0134 g mol-1 | 29.12 J mol-1 K-1 | 9.4339738283240 K km-1
(N2) 150 ppm * 0.780761158 = 117.1141737 ppm
(N2) 780761.158 ppm + 117.1141737 ppm = 780878.2721737 ppm
(N2) 9.433973828324 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.780761158 = 37.6017980884478 K
(N2) 9.433973828324 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.7808782721737 = 37.6074383581611 K
(N2) 37.6074383581611 K – 37.6017980884478 K = 0.00564026971329668 K warming
O2 | 31.9988 g mol-1 | 29.38 J mol-1 K-1 | 10.680770320623 K km-1
(O2) 150 ppm * 0.20944121395198 = 31.416182092797 ppm
(O2) 209441.21395198 ppm + 31.416182092797 ppm = 209472.630134073 ppm
(O2) 10.680770320623 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.20944121395198 = 11.4198518271666 K
(O2) 10.680770320623 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.209472630134073 = 11.4215648049407 K
(O2) 11.4215648049407 K – 11.4198518271666 = 0.00171297777410118 K warming
Ar | 39.948 g mol-1 | 20.7862 J mol-1 K-1 | 18.846929895790 K km-1
(Ar) 150 ppm * 0.00934 = 1.401 ppm
(Ar) 934 ppm + 1.401 ppm = 935.401 ppm
(Ar) 18.84692989579 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.00934 = 0.898634810282194 K
(Ar) 18.84692989579 K km-1 * 5.105 km * 0.00935401 = 0.899982762497618 K
(Ar) 0.899982762497618 K – 0.898634810282194 K = 0.00134795221542394 warming
0.00894658359911077 K – 0.00564026971329668 K – 0.00171297777410118 K – 0.0013479522154239 K = 0.00024538389628901 K.
Reducing CO2 from 430 ppm to 280 ppm would decrease the lapse rate (and thus surface temperature) by 0.00024538389628901 K.
Meanwhile, that reduction of atmospheric CO2 concentration means the 150 ppm that was occupied by CO2 is now predominantly occupied by N2 (homonuclear diatomic), O2 (homonuclear diatomic) and Ar (monoatomic).
Monoatomics cannot absorb (nor emit) IR in any case, because they have no vibrational mode quantum states.
Homonuclear diatomics have a net-zero electric dipole which must be perturbed via collision in order for the molecule to absorb (or emit)… except collisions occur exponentially less frequently as altitude increases.
Thus, for a decreased CO2 concentration, each parcel of air in the upper atmosphere has fewer emitters, which reduces the ability of that air to cool via radiative emission to space. This is the reason the upper atmosphere has experienced a long-term and dramatic cooling as CO2 concentration rose, to the point that atmospheric thermal contraction no longer drags on derelict satellites as much, so they stay aloft for a longer period, which exacerbates the space junk problem. We don’t have the mathematics to model this yet, but we know the upper atmosphere cooled by as much as 2K between 1998 and 2023.
Because CO2 is a net atmospheric radiative coolant, not a “greenhouse gas”. In fact, it is the most-prevalent atmospheric radiative coolant above the tropopause, and the second-most (behind water vapor) below the tropopause.
https://i.imgur.com/b87xKMk.png
The image above is from a presentation given by Dr. Maria Z. Hakuba, an atmospheric research scientist at NASA JPL.
https://i.imgur.com/gIjHlCU.png
The image above is adapted from the Clough and Iacono study, Journal Of Geophysical Research, Vol. 100, No. D8, Pages 16,519-16,535, August 20, 1995.
Note that the Clough & Iacono study is for the atmospheric radiative cooling effect, so positive numbers at right are cooling, negative numbers are warming.
An increased CO2 concentration means each parcel is more capable of emitting, so it is more capable of radiatively cooling via emission to space, which sets the starting point of the lapse rate to a lower temperature, which translates down through the lapse rate to an (eventually) cooler surface. We’re just working through the massive thermal capacity of the planet. You will note that upwelling IR has exhibited a long-term increase as CO2 concentration rose (in direct contradiction to the prediction of the climatologists).
So a reduction in CO2 atmospheric concentration will barely affect the lapse rate (0.00024538389628901 K reduction in surface temperature), while it will set the starting point of the lapse rate to a higher temperature, which will translate down through the lapse rate to cause a warmer surface.
The entirety of the CAGW agenda has its foundation in a misuse of the Stefan-Boltzmann (S-B) equation in Energy Balance Climate Models (EBCMs), which I prove using the Kiehl-Trenberth ‘Earth Energy Balance’ graphic, which is a graphical representation of the results of the mathematics in their EBCM. They use the idealized blackbody form of the S-B equation upon real-world graybody objects. In so doing, they’ve flipped thermodynamics on its head. They are as close to diametrically opposite to reality as they can possibly be.
https://i.imgur.com/QErszYW.gif
Subsequent EBCMs go so far off the rails that their claimed 398 W m-2 surface radiant exitance at their claimed 288 K surface temperature is physically impossible, even if one treats the surface as an idealized blackbody (emission to 0 K, emissivity = 1).
Now, that misuse of the S-B equation artificially inflates radiant exitance of all calculated-upon objects (because their use of the idealized blackbody form of the S-B equation calculates for emission to 0 K). The climatologists must carry these incorrect values through their calculation and cancel them on the back end to get their equation to balance, subtracting a wholly-fictive ‘cooler to warmer’ energy flow from the real (but too high because it was calculated for emission to 0 K) ‘warmer to cooler’ energy flow.
Except the S-B equation for graybody objects isn’t meant to be used by subtracting a wholly-fictive ‘cooler to warmer’ energy flow from the real (but too high because it was calculated for emission to 0 K) ‘warmer to cooler’ energy flow, it’s meant to be used by subtracting cooler object energy density from warmer object energy density to arrive at the energy density gradient, which determines radiant exitance of the warmer object.
That wholly-fictive ‘cooler to warmer’ energy flow is otherwise known as “backradiation”. It is only a mathematical artifact due to the misuse of the S-B equation. It doesn’t actually exist.
That wholly-fictive “backradiation” is then claimed to cause the “greenhouse effect (due to backradiation)”, which is used to designate polyatomic molecules as “greenhouse gases (due to the greenhouse effect (due to backradiation))”.
That is then used to claim that certain of those polyatomics will cause CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, due to CO2). That is used to claim that we must reduce CO2 emission, from which springs all of the offshoots of CAGW (net zero, carbon credit trading, carbon capture and sequestration, banning ICE vehicles, degrowth, replacing reliable baseload generation with intermittent renewables, etc.).
Except “backradiation” is physically impossible, it violates 2LoT in the Clausius Statement sense. Energy cannot spontaneously flow up an energy density gradient.
Thus the “greenhouse effect (due to backradiation)” is physically impossible.
Thus “greenhouse gases (due to the greenhouse effect (due to backradiation))” are physically impossible.
Thus the entirety of CAGW collapses.
The maths are laid out in full at the link below, wherein CAGW is disproved via multiple avenues (thermodynamics, dimensional analysis, fundamental physical laws, entropy):
https://www.patriotaction.us/showthread.php?tid=2711
This whole Global Warming/Climate Change Scam is just more ways the Eco-Freaks scam us to donate to them so they can hold more stupid protests and show off their ignorance