Carbon dioxide is NOT CAPABLE of making the necessary physical trapping of heat energy in quantities sufficient to make a measurable difference in heat retention in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has approximately the same capability of retaining heat energy as water vapor, and there is anywhere from 30 to 100 times as much water vapor in the atmosphere at any given time, as there is of carbon dioxide.
Water vapor also has two attributes that carbon dioxide cannot match. Within the range of earth’s atmospheric pressures and temperatures, water vapor may condense, forming liquid water, or as temperatures decline further, the liquid water may become ice, a mineral substance with a crystalline structure. While changing from one of these phases to another, either an enormous amount of heat energy is taken up, or released. Under normal earth atmospheric temperature and pressure, carbon dioxide can do neither of these phase changes, as it normally exists only as a gas. Under extreme pressure, carbon dioxide CAN become a liquid, but upon release, it reverts to the gas phase. If cooled sufficiently, carbon dioxide forms a solid, which is known as “Dry Ice”, but that temperature is VASTLY much colder than almost any point on the surface of the earth, and the “Dry Ice” evaporates directly from the solid to a gas, a phase change called sublimation.
There is really a lot more to the physical properties of water in all its states, than I have mentioned here, including the fact that the molecule of water vapor is much LIGHTER than the vast quantity of the mixture of gases that make up the atmosphere, primarily nitrogen, some 78%, and oxygen, some 21%, and rises VERY high into the stratosphere, forming the high thin clouds we call cirrus, which are primarily very tiny ice crystals. Carbon dioxide, being about 40% greater molecular weight than either nitrogen or oxygen, tends to stay much lower in the atmosphere. There is a reason why there is a “tree line” on mountains, that is because the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere at that altitude is TOO LOW to support large tree growth. Small twisted plants can grow, but only very, very slowly.
Carbon dioxide CANNOT do even a small part of heat energy transfer that water vapor is capable of.
You should expand what you wrote into an article. Maybe send it to Editor@Americanthinker.com
The AGW people will counter that the greenhouse effects of water vapor are temperature dependent, whereas those of CO2 remain the same no matter what the temperature is. So CO2 becomes the more important of the two.
The current PPM of CO2 is 410; at the end of the Ice Age it was 180. During the Jurassic Period it is said to have been 1800 PPM. During the Cambrian Period CO2 was 7000 PPM. I’m wondering if the AGW crew fears that only dinosaurs and fish will inherit the Earth if we keep burning coal.
I checked to see what the average temp of the Earth is estimated to have been during the Cambrian Period of high CO2; 72 F compared to today’s 54 F. Interestingly the article claimed that temperature extremes weren’t as large as today. They said there wasn’t ice at the poles so perhaps there weren’t any extremely hot regions as well.
A science that can go from predicting a coming Ice Age to hysteria over Man-caused Global Warming during my lifetime is one I regard with suspicion. Climate science reminds me of economics- there’s a myriad of factors at work, not all of them are well understood or even known, and those who claim to predict the future are pretending to greater knowledge than they actually possess.