What percent of our Atmosphere is CO2?
“Congressman proves global warming scare is just silly.” Commentary by Dale Coberly.
[from Forbes Breaking News]
House Transportation Committee Holds Hearings
On Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
…..in which Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) gives master class in lying without telling a single lie . . . all in a calm and reasonable voice
He asks the panel:
What percent of our Atmosphere is CO2?
They don’t know. He presses them to guess. They guess 5%, 7%,8%.
He tells them the answer is 0.04%.
They are stunned.
Why that’s just too small to have to worry about!
I just wanted to mention that all this depends on the complete ignorance of the people, the.panelists, and especially the online commenters who believe the congressman has just proved how silly the whole climate change hoax is. He has saved the country from the ignorance of those who want to save us from a meaningless level of carbon dioxide.
He continues in a quiet and reasonable voice,”i just wanted to underline this as we get all giddy about making everything electric. especialy when they are taking out power grids and shutting down dams and barely avoided closing the nuclear plant” “ as a farmer i wouldn’t be happy to be running out and replacing a million dollar piece of equipment because someone wants it to be electric.” “contorted into doing tiny change in CO2.” “if we get below .02 plant life starts to die off”. “why would anyone be changing out all that equipment you’ve been upgrading?” “all this all that”
All of his terrible examples assume no one is going to build the grid, or that the nuke doesn’t need to be closed for reasons having nothing to do with changing to electric vehicles, and no one is going to make you throw away your brand new farm equipment, though you may want to replace it when it is worn out with more efficient electric farm equipment, after the grid brings electricity to your farm (something FDR did in the thirties which the LaMalfa’s at the time calles “socialism”).
0.04% is a pretty small number. Can’t have any importance in the real world. Small numbers are like that. you don’thave to pay attention to them.
0.0003% of potassium cyanide in your body will kill you instantly, but that’s a hundred times less than the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere so you don’t have to worry about it. Rght?
Note that he gives himself away: “if it gets down to .02% plant life will start to die off.” Apparently a small change (0.02% is half of 0.04%) can make a big difference. But no one noticed.
Like lead and mercury, increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere correlates to decreasing levels of cognitive reasoning skills in the affected population.
TB,
:<) (MMLBT) THX
I have no idea what that means …
made me laugh bit time thanks
You are welcome
Coberly:
Nicely said. Additional info.
CO2 in the atmosphere is needed. It is just a matter of how it integrates with the rest of the earth.
The Earth absorbs energy from sunlight. As the surface warms, it also emits energy in the form of infrared radiation (heat) out into space. Water vapor and CO2 act like a cap making it difficult for Earth to get rid of this energy. Without gases like these to absorb the energy, our planet’s average surface temperature would be near zero degrees Fahrenheit.
Ninety-nine percent of the atmosphere is made of oxygen and nitrogen. It can not absorb the infrared radiation the Earth emits. Of the remaining 1 percent, the main molecules that can absorb infrared radiation are CO2 and water vapor. Their atoms are able to vibrate in just the right way to absorb the energy the Earth gives off.
After these gases absorb the energy, they emit half of it back to Earth and half of it into space and trapping some of the heat within the atmosphere. The trapping of heat is what is called the greenhouse effect. Because of the greenhouse effect created by these trace gases, the average temperature of the Earth is around 15˚C, or 59˚F, which allows for life to exist.
Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere. It has “windows” allowing some of the infrared energy to escape without being absorbed. In addition, water vapor is concentrated lower in the atmosphere, whereas CO2 mixes well all the way to about 50 kilometers up. The higher the greenhouse gas, the more effective it is at trapping heat from the Earth’s surface.
The burning of fossil fuels affects the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Pre-industrial revolution the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 288 ppm. It is now about 414 ppm. The more CO2, the warmer it gets.
More and better Info. here:
If CO2 Is Only 0.04% of the Atmosphere, How Does it Drive Global Warming?
Hate this c&p from MS Word. It never translates properly. I pulled this info from the article, which is a good read on the topic. Rewrote much of it to get it on target to Coberly’s post as a backup or foundation.
Run
thanks for contributing the information from the article. it’s a big help…if people can read it.
the same link answers a question from a reader…if dinosaurs could live with an atmosphere with 20 times as much CO2, (0.8%) why should we worry? The arcticle gave a long answer which I suspect the reader would not follow.
The short answer is that we are not dinosaurs. You can easily find places on earth where reptiles live quite well. These tend not to be people-friendly. Even Florida gets most of it’s food from places that are much cooler, not to mention most of its money.
as for water as a greenhouse gas, i am not sure how much the “windows” contribute to the balance. even without CO2 the earth would probably be warm enough for life (forgetting about the poor plants). But just a little bit of CO2 establishes a new balance and saves the plants. Add just a little more CO2 and you have turtle soup.
Run
awww…you make it sound so complicated. how can you expect us to bother our pretty little heads with all those facts and numbers?
Dale:
8th grade science is difficult? 🙂
apparently.
Coberly
You will figure it out.
Coberly,
If it were not for self service politicians, then we would not have any politicians at all. It is sort of the whole purpose for lying to begin with. Given the trajectory of climate chaos, then we should expect ever greater whoppers in the ongoing attempt to deflect from big oil and friends. In the end it will not work out for them because that is what ends really are; the big oops at the end of the road. The ends may not justify the means, but ends are unavoidable nonetheless. Thanks for keeping it real insomuch as one can within in the confines of our limited opportunity for realism.
True
Ron
at the risk of not keeping it real;
just for fun, i worried about being fair to my friends in congress and those who found eigth grade science not to their liking…
i thought that they might not consider percent of cyanide per body weight to be a fair measure of the importance of small numbers. so i looked at the effect of 0.o4% of cyanide in a cup of tea. sure enough it turns out to be not enough to kill you. only about 96 mg. lethal dose of cyanide is about 250 mg. so it would take about three cups of tea with .04% cyanide. although there is one case on record of a man who almost died from a cup of tea that was merely on the same table with some cyanide he was using (for some metalworking or photography project). he was saved by some heroic measures in a hospital.
but there is another dimension that our eigth graders forget about. the earth’s atmosphere is effectively about five miles deep. it would take about a hundred thousand tea cups to make a stack that high. A hundred thousand tea cups stacked on top of each other with 0.04% cyanide would contain enough cyanide to kill about 30,000 men.
i wonder if a stack of air with 0,o4% od CO2 would contain enough CO2 to make a difference? if it covered the whole planet?
Coberly,
What I found most convincing in the science was that long before either big oil or climate change evidence was available what we have now experienced had already been predicted just based on theory surrounding the greenhouse effect. Neil Degrasse Tyson mentioned a late 19th century scientist’s prediction to this effect briefly in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey The World Set Free (S1E12). I had read about it to greater length in a issue of Weekly Reader (circa 1960). As I recall at the time a deep interest in science was socially considered weird.
To watch for free then one must suffer a few ads first, but here you go.
Cosmos A Space-Time Odyssey S01 – Ep12 The World Set Free HD Watch
Ron
Thanks for this. “if we can summon the will to act.”
or, as Tonto said, “what you mean “we”, white man?
i feel bad sitting here doing nothing while the stupid and the evil truly destroy the planet, and possibly the last trace of life in the universe. too bad no one believes in the Devil anymore. That was always his plan.
Coberly,
Yep, ND Tyson is my favorite public intellectual and has been for several years now. He is a more popular public speaker than the political pundits and economists that I have liked over the last half century, but I fear no more influential upon public policy than they were. However, when the climate chaos fat lady sings, then hundreds of millions of citizens will listen and understand to a degree which they would be incapable with regards to politics and economics. The truly self-evident truths are the ones that are literally existential.
i wonder. even in the actual face of disaster people have a gift for making bad decisions. we are more likely to see a mad max solution than a careful de-carbonizing of our economy.
it might take the other Tyson to change people’s minds. (not Tyson foods. Mike.)
Ron
now it’s considered a communist plot. the history of the science goes way back. i read about it in the 50’s, but I recently read a more detailed description and was staggered by the depth of the research way before that. The problem until recently was whether there were enough natural sinks for CO2 that the concentration would not reach dangerous levels.
Of course meanwhile we had more important things to worry about so we not only pumped more CO2 into the air, we destroyed the sinks. And found ways to make money by lying about it.
DC,
Yes indeed sir.
Maybe what empowers silliness like this is that the transition to a new, no carbon energy paradigm for our civilization is going to be a much more difficult and lengthy task than current politics seem capable of dealing with. F there are feasible technical and investment plans to bring on enough no carbon power in timeframes that seem to be commonly thrown about like “by 2035” or 2050, they must be secret. If most of the “plan” is to convert to a much lower level of energy consumption for humanity and accept that what most now think of as material prosperity will need to go lower by a lot, we’ll start running election campaigns on that. Let’s be done with stuff like renewables are even cheaper than traditional fossil fuel except for this list of reasons your electric rate will go up 300% over the next 10 years while we make the switch. Getting an honest to God lower electric bill and a full range electric vehicle that takes 5 minutes and minimal planning to refuel will make these “controversies” totally irrelevant.
Eric
your baic fallacy is that we need to have NO carbon future. A LESS carbon future would work fine. If we had started when we should have, we would hardly notice a change in our “standard of living.” But,, as with Social Security we have lied ourselves into turning an unnoticeable change into a noticeable one. One that is still manageable, but will probably be lied into a very noticeable change…but still one we can live with, and which would eventually turn out to be a better lifestyle than we have today…kind og like getting off cocaine.
The rest of you comment is just a projection of you own fears and fantasies…which, given our no-change brains and lying leadership, will undoubtedly be what we have to live with.
Eric
maybe my language toward you is over harsh above. But we have no idea what electric energy will cost..and if it triples, so what? what would you pay to save the planet..or if that is too grand for you, what would you pay to save yourself from having to live all year in Las Vegas? why do you need a car that you can charge up without thinking about it? exactly what do you need a car for? [that’s a “thinkabout it” question. are we so stupid and lazy we cannot even imagine how we might live quite happily without our current religious devotion to faster, bigger, more expensive?
forgot to include…like medicare for all…if you electric bill goes up, does your gas bill going down compensate? people are like chickens. put just one idea in their heads and they can’t even imagine there might be another idea.
Infrared radiation is a spectrum. Greenhouse gasses absorb and reflect specific frequencies. Many of them overlap. The portion of the spectrum that CO2 reflects back to earth is one that the other greenhouse gasses mostly don’t. Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is like plugging the holes in a sieve, where the sieve is serving as an escape valve for excess heat.
THAT is one of the best summations I’ve ever seen.
JaneE
Very true. Thank youfor adding to this.
It needs to be pointed out that a very low concentration of atmospheric CO2 in the upper atmosphere is quite sufficient to reflect too much infrared light back towards the earth surface (& oceans) to account for global warming, not to mention all the methane produced by oil & gas production and also cattle herds, which does an even better job of causing that odious & well-understood greenhouse effect.
But perhaps the sun is to blame for bombarding us with all that infrared light we never asked for.