Will More CO2 Warm the Atmosphere?

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:

The determined saturation mass ms based on the plotted graph is 0.57kg/m2 for a temperature of 78.6°C, and 0.66kg/m2 for a temperature of 109.5°C. It should be noted that in the Earth’s atmosphere, for the currently assumed concentration of CO2 – 400ppm, the amount of carbon dioxide per 1 m2 of horizontal surface is mz > 6kg/m2. Extending the horizontal axis of the graph from Fig. 7 to this value, we obtain the image shown in Fig. 9, which suggests that there is currently a multiple exceedance of the saturation mass for carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Which means that we can burn all of the Earth’s coal, oil and natural gas without impacting global temperatures.

The authors conducted an experiment of their own devising that involved radiation from the Moon:

This time, the radiation used, before passing through the inserted cuvettes, first passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. It turned out that the absorption of this radiation in carbon dioxide in the cuvette (the same cuvette as in the first part of the experiment) was practically negligible. It can be clearly concluded that additional carbon dioxide does not absorb thermal radiation that has been emitted from the heated surface of the Moon and has passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. This raises the question of whether, in the case of thermal radiation from the Earth’s surface, passing through the atmosphere in the opposite direction, a saturation process will also occur and whether this radiation will be absorbed by carbon dioxide in the cuvette.

It has long been noted that in ice core data, there is a relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature. The problem, from the warmists’ point of view, is that the warming comes first, and the additional CO2 later:

In the study (Humlum et al., 2013), the authors demonstrated that peaks of cyclic changes in air and water temperature globally precede peaks of cyclic changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration (Fig. 12). This finding supports the hypothesis that, as a result of saturation processes, emitted CO2 does not directly cause an increase in global temperature. Instead, it suggests that an increase in temperature likely leads to the release of carbon dioxide from the oceans.

That is reflected in this chart:

From the authors Conclusions:

The presented material shows that despite the fact that the majority of publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to the anthropogenic increase in CO2 and its impact on Earth’s climate, the shown facts raise serious doubts about this influence. …

This unequivocally suggests that the officially presented impact of anthropogenic CO2 increase on Earth’s climate is merely a hypothesis rather than a substantiated fact. Resolving these dilemmas requires further experimental work to verify the results of theoretical studies at every possible stage. To answer the question of whether the additionally emitted CO2 in the atmosphere is indeed a greenhouse gas, it would be necessary, among other things, to conduct additional research for a radiation source with a temperature similar to Earth’s surface temperature and measure the absorption of thermal radiation in a mixture of CO2 and air at different temperatures and pressures, as is the case in Earth’s atmosphere at various altitudes. It would also be beneficial to conduct field studies using an appropriate balloon, as suggested in (Kubicki et al., 2020b). By measuring the absorption of Earth’s thermal radiation in atmospheric CO2 under atmospheric pressure in a cuvette placed in the basket of a balloon in the upper layers of the troposphere, we could obtain results that would decisively settle many controversial issues.

But the global warming grifters don’t want to carry out experiments that could decisively refute their theory. Rather, they want to shift trillions of dollars from one set of industries to another set of industries, based not on scientific fact but rather on a tenuous hypothesis that pretty clearly seems to be wrong.

The authors conclude with an observation that should not be controversial:

In science, especially in the natural sciences, we should strive to present a true picture of reality, primarily through empirical knowledge.