More on the Greenhouse Effect and Radiative Forcing

Hans Schreuder at Icecap has some interesting comments about the global warming hoax:

Based on UN IPCC dogma and according to this Australian website for children, the greenhouse effect is "caused by gases in our atmosphere (especially water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane). They trap energy from the sun's light and reflect it back to Earth, so we just keep on getting warmer."

As Alan Siddons points out: "You might as well believe that your image in a mirror can burn your face". It is palpably absurd, and yet it is an accurate depiction of the theory that the IPCC has foisted on the public - a theory that IPCC critics won't even attack because, presumably, they believe it too.

Moreover, the actual trapping of heat cannot raise an object's temperature in the first place. It only slows down heat loss. For instance, a polar bear is a living thermos bottle. Its internal body temperature is much the same as ours. But its surrounding fat and fur are such that - and this is remarkable - a polar bear is virtually invisible to a thermal camera. Just like coffee in a thermos, you can't tell how hot the inside of a polar bear is by looking at it from the outside. But neither does coffee in a thermos get hotter because its heat is trapped. It just retains its temperature for a longer time. Otherwise, both the polar bear and the thermos would self-ignite.

In short, the earth absorbs enough energy from the sun to reach a certain temperature. Since it radiates the same amount, its temperature obviously isn't raised by carbon dioxide absorbing some infrared - for CO2 simply releases that energy at the same pace, as satellites attest. But even if CO2 did trap thermal energy, as insulation does (creating an emission discrepancy that would be quite observable to satellites), the earth's temperature could go no higher than what it began with. To repeat, coffee doesn't get hotter in a thermos."

That must be why the global warming zealots are so worried about polar bears. The poor animals must be self-igniting. I have heard rumors of spontaneous human combustion, but spontaneous polar bear combustion?

They're based on figures obtained directly from the Dutch Met Office, whereby the mass of our entire atmosphere is given as 5,300,000 gigatons and the total carbon dioxide in it as 3,000 gigatons.

5,300,000 gigatonnes of atmosphere require 0.24 x 1,010^10 kcal of heat to warm 1.0°C. 3,000 gigatonnes of CO2 would requite a warming to 5,300,000/3,000 x .24/.34 = 1247°C to have enough heat to transfer to the atmosphere for each 1°C rise in temperature.

Did you read that? Every single molecule of CO2 would need to be over a thousand degrees Centigrade to warm the rest of the atmosphere by one degree!! Yet by the magic of radiative forcing this will take place, according to the alarmists and based on the UN IPCC pseudo-scientific dogma.

Damn those CO2 molecules are hot! And each molecule is a virtual island, surrounded by a sea of nitrogen and oxygen. How do they get so hot when most of the air is a mere 25°C or so?