Final nail in the carbon-cult coffin


Suppose you've bought a grab-bag of coins advertised to contain all denominations, and you're sorting them out with a sieve that has different-sized holes. After a whole lotta shakin, you see that nothing has come out of the penny slot. You'd then assume that someone had already sieved for pennies, and you'd decide not to waste more time looking for the elusive 1909 SVDB. No matter how much you filter this pile, you won't catch any pennies.



Now suppose you're sorting out the colors of sunlight. This is what you'd expect: an equal intensity of each color.



But if you found that one color was missing, you'd conclude that something between you and the sun was absorbing that color. And if the color was completely black, you'd know that there's no point in further filtering; no matter how much you try to filter out that color, it's already black. Can't get blacker.


A recent article by geophysicist Norm Kalmanovitch points out that the usual description of the greenhouse effect is too broad. Carbon dioxide doesn't just absorb light and emit heat; it is a fairly precise "pigment" that prefers to absorb one particular "color". And the infrared "colors" that emerge from the atmosphere are completely black in the range where CO2 does its absorption.

There is only a single vibration mode of CO2 that resonates within the thermal spectrum radiated by the Earth (and Mars). This bend vibration resonates with a band of energy centred on a wavelength of 14.77 microns (wavenumber 677cm-1) and the width of this band is quite narrow as depicted on the spectra from Earth and Mars.

It only takes a minute amount of CO2 to fully “capture” the energy at the resonant wavelength, and additional CO2 progressively captures energy that is further and further from the peak wavelength. At the 280 ppmv CO2 preindustrial level used as reference [by IPCC], about 95% of the energy bandwidth that could possibly be captured by CO2 had already been captured. There is only 5% of this limited energy available within the confines of this potential “capture” band left to be captured.

So: Even if the carbon cultists were basically right that carbon dioxide were the sole controller of our climate ... which of course they aren't, to put it mildly ... the concentration of CO2 before this century's sharp rise was already processing nearly all the energy it could take. And now we certainly have more CO2 in the atmosphere, but there's no way it can do more "greenhousing" than the pre-industrial level. And no matter how much it rises in the future, it still can't do any more "greenhousing", because it was already maxed out a hundred years ago.


  ¶ 8:49 PM