Beyond CO₂: Unraveling the Roles of Energy, Water Vapor, and Convection in Earth’s Atmosphere
1 hour ago Andy May
WUWT editors’ note:
Watts Up With That? is committed to fostering open discourse on climate science and related topics. While we respect the authors’ perspective and their dedication to exploring climate dynamics, we find aspects of the CO₂ thermalization theory presented in this article to be inconsistent with well-established experimental and empirical evidence. As Richard Feynman famously stated, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
Extensive laboratory spectroscopy and direct atmospheric observations confirm that CO₂ plays a role in radiative heat transfer, and while water vapor is indeed the dominant greenhouse gas, the claim that CO₂’s effects are negligible does not align with measured data. That said, scientific inquiry thrives on scrutiny and debate, and we encourage readers to critically evaluate all perspectives in light of experimental validation and real-world measurements. Anthony has written primer on Carbon Dioxide Saturation in the Atmosphere also worth reading, as it describes how the logarithmic effect of CO₂ versus temperature will continue to lessen its impact even as atmospheric CO₂ concentrations increase.
By Andy May & Tom Shula
Fundamentally the entire man-made CO2 global warming concept, boils down to the interaction of energy and matter in Earth’s atmosphere. The only reason that CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) are special is that they absorb most of the radiation emitted by Earth’s surface. Water vapor absorbs across almost the entire emission spectrum and is, by far, the most significant absorber. The cloud-free atmosphere is mostly transparent to sunlight, so Earth’s surface absorbs most of the sunlight that makes it through the clouds. In response to this stimulation, it emits infrared radiation (IR).
Because the humid lower atmosphere is nearly opaque to most surface emitted radiation that is outside the atmospheric windows, surface emissions are absorbed by GHGs very close to the surface. According to Heinz Hug, at sea level, with a CO2 concentration of 357 PPM and 2.6% water vapor, 99.94% of all surface radiation in the main CO2 frequency band at about 15 μm is normally absorbed in the lower 10 meters of the atmosphere (Hug, 2012). Even at the edges of the deep CO2 frequency band (see figure 1, as well as figures 4 & 5 here) where any increase in the CO2 effect would be observed, 99.9% of the surface radiation is absorbed in the first 690 meters (Hug, 2000).
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/03/09/beyond-co%e2%82%82-unraveling-the-roles-of-energy-water-vapor-and-convection-in-earths-atmosphere/
