Climate Change Debate: A Famous Scientist Becomes a Skeptic

The debate over climate change is often a contentious one, and key players in the discussion only rarely switch sides. But late last month, Lennart Bengtsson, the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world's leading climate research centers, announced he would join the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

GWPF, based in Britain, is a non-profit organization and self-described think tank. Conservative politician Nigel Lawson founded the organization in 2009 in order to counteract what he considered to be an exaggerated concern about global warming. The organization uses aggressive information campaigns to pursue its goals. The lobby group's views markedly differ from those of the UN climate panel, the IPCC, whose reports are the products of the work of hundreds of scientists who classify and analyze vast amounts of climate knowledge accumulated through years of research. The most recent IPCC report states that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are leading to significant global warming, with serious environmental consequences.

Bengtsson was known for maintaining moderate positions even during the most vitriolic debates over global warming during the 1990s. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he discusses why he made the shift to the skeptics' camp.

I’ll tell you a little secret about carbon...CO2 does not conduct heat as well as air.

At night, CO2 and air cool down to ambient temperature...but during daylight, air heats up faster than does CO2.

That’s a fancy way of saying that CO2 is cooler than air during the day.

The more CO2 displaces air in our atmosphere, the less our atmosphere heats up each day.

CO2 *does* have a greenhouse effect (you can see that impact on Mars), but it has *less* of a greenhouse effect than does air.

And that is a dirty little secret...the truth against The Big Lie being told about CO2 emissions.

They cool (compared to air).

O2 is a trace gas. Can someone please explain to me what thermodynamic property it has that makes it such a dominant contributor to greenhouse gases. [Nope. There is any.]

CO2, as I have said often, is a trace gas. Carbon dioxide does not have the atomic structure to "trap" heat; Water vapor on the other hand traps heaps of energy in order to be water vapor. But in that trapping the temperature of the water vapor itself does not increase.

CO2 does not affect temperature; rather temperature affects CO2. I finally found the thermodynamic information regarding CO2.

Atmospheric radiation absorption and emission are dominated by the presence of all three phases of H2O. Like all molecules, CO2 only absorbs and emits specific spectral wavelengths (14.77 microns) that constitute a tiny fraction of solar radiation energy in Earth’s atmosphere. The first 50 ppm of CO2 absorbs about half of this tiny energy, each additional 50 ppm absorbs half of the remaining tiny fraction, so at the current 380 ppm there are almost no absorb-able photons left. CO2 could triple to 1,000 ppm with no additional discernible absorption–emission. This is the Beer-Lambert Law: The intensity of radiation decreases exponentially as it passes through an absorbing medium.

There are no greenhouse gases in physics. CO2 is not a pollutant; it is green plant food.

"...the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show."

"[The IPCC report] does not bring up the large difference between observational results and model simulations"

This needs to be pointed out again and again and again. Why should we listen to the alarmists when they've already been proven wrong?

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