The Lonely Carbon Dioxide Molecule

My human has expressed his views on the carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere to me and I encouraged him to write his views in my blog.- love Mimi

John- After having my mind changed on global warming by the solar scientist (who's name escapes me {Sam Solanki???}) on Sky At Night, I started to ponder at great length on the lonely CO2 molecule floating around in the atmosphere, thinking about the molecule and visualising how the "greenhouse effect" might work. I knew from my chemistry studies that gas molecules fly around in random directions bouncing off other gas molecules as they do so (like Brownian motion).

The lonely CO2 molecule can indeed absorb a photon of infra red radiation and then spit it out. It does this by C=O bond stretches. The infra red photon hits the CO2, the C=O bond stretches, then spits the IR photon out again. However, as the molecule is tumbling in Brownian motion style and, In addition the photon of infra red can be spat out in any randomised direction according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle then the photon of infra red is just as likely to be spat out into space as back to the earths surface to warm it. Therefore, the "greenhouse gas" acts as a sort of short term insulation- the IR "heat photon" does find its way back out into space after a while. This, I believe has the effect of keeping the Earths temperature relatively constant from day to night and being a relatively short term effect and as the heat is not actually "trapped" in the atmosphere, then a runaway greenhouse as predicted by the doom mongers is simply not possible. Without this effect of our atmosphere regulating temperature then the day to night temperature of the Earth would vary as much as it does on the surface of the Moon.

CO2 does not act as a "greenhouse" in the atmosphere in this sense, for this would impy there is a thin layer high in the atmosphere trapping heat in, much like the glass in a horticultural greenhouse and this is not the case CO2 is distributed through the atmosphere. Therefore as the atmosphere has a limit, then the amount of "greenhouse warming" also has a limit. I thought of this idea some years ago (2005) and this year I was delighted to discover a Hungarian atmospheric physicist called Ferenc M. Miskolczi came to the same conclusion and proved it mathematically. He discovered a mistake in the original "greenhouse" equations calculated in the 1920's- an assumption was made of an infinite atmosphere, and when he recalculated the equations he found that a runaway was not possible without an infinite atmosphere. You can read about his work in more detail here, about the saturated greenhouse effect that our planet exists in and included is a link to the original paper.

So, there we have it. Intuitive thinking agrees with the mathematical proof that the "greenhouse effect", while keeping the planet comfortable for life (and cats of course!) cannot runaway and cause a global catastrophe as the radical environmentalists predict. The doom and gloom theory is comprehensively broken. When are the IPCC and Al Gore going to admit "sorry chaps, we made a mistake".