Powerline 4/26/2024
There is no doubt about the fact that various gases have a “greenhouse” effect. They trap radiation leaving the Earth’s surface, thus warming the atmosphere. The chief greenhouse gas, by a wide margin, is water vapor. Carbon dioxide and methane are two more minor greenhouse gases. We owe these substances everything: without the greenhouse effect, there would be no life on Earth. The fact that some gases absorb radiation that bounces back from the Earth, having begun at the Sun, makes the planet that we know possible.
Liberals claim hysterically, but without empirical evidence, that because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, increasing amounts of it in the atmosphere must inevitably make our planet warmer. That is a debatable claim for many reasons, including the fact that any greenhouse gas will reach a point of saturation, beyond which adding more of that gas will not have any perceptible effect on the climate.
Have we already reached the saturation point with regard to CO2? A recently published paper by Jan Kubicki, Krzysztof Kopczyński and Jarosław Młyńczak argues that we have already reached that point, and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will have no, or virtually no, warming effect.
This is by no means a new concept (see original for links):
The phenomenon of saturation was already noted by Ångström (1900), who, based on experiments and analysis, challenged Svante Arrhenius’ hypothesis that continued use of fossil fuels would warm the planet (Arrhenius 1896). In 1972, Schack (1972), based on his considerations, demonstrated that for a concentration of 0.03% of carbon dioxide in the air, the absorption process in the troposphere is saturated.
Taking into account the saturation process, Dieter Schildknecht also proved in his work (Schildknecht 2020) that, contrary to the IPCC reports, the impact of anthropogenic CO2 increase on the Earth’s climate is very small.
The paper describes efforts that have been made to determine the saturation point of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Those experiments supply strong evidence that CO2’s saturation point has already been reached:
More:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/04/will-more-co2-warm-the-atmosphere.php
