An empirical determination of the heating of the Earth by the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect

Climate change is an important societal issue. Large effort in society is spent on addressing it. For adequate measures, it is important that the phenomenon of climate change is well understood, especially the effect of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In this work, a theoretical fully analytical study is presented of the so-called greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. The effect of this gas in the atmosphere itself was already determined as being of little importance based on empirical analysis. In the current work, the effect is studied both phenomenologically and analytically. In a first attempt of energy transfer by radiation only, it is solved by ideal-gas-law equations and the atmosphere is divided into an infinite number of layers each absorbing and reemitting infrared radiation (surpassing the classical Beer-Lambert analysis of absorption). The result is that the exact structure of the atmosphere is irrelevant for the analysis; we might as well keep the two-box model for any analytical approach. However, the results are unsatisfactory in that they cannot explain the profile of the atmosphere. In a new approach, the atmosphere is solved by taking both radiative as well as thermodynamic processes into account. The model fully fits the empirical data and an analytical equation is given for the atmospheric behavior. Upper limits are found for the greenhouse effect ranging from zero to a couple of mK per ppm CO2. It is shown that it cannot explain the observed correlation of carbon dioxide and surface temperature. This correlation, however, is readily explained by Henry’s Law (outgassing of oceans), with other phenomena insignificant. Finally, while the greenhouse effect can thus, in a rudimentary way, explain the behavior of the atmosphere of Earth, it fails describing other atmospheres such as that of Mars. Moreover, looking at three cities in Spain, it is found that radiation balances only cannot explain the temperature of these cities. Finally, three data sets with different time scales (60 years, 600 thousand years, and 650 million years) show markedly different behavior, something that is inexplicable in the framework of the greenhouse theory.

Scientists and the general public alike encounter scientific terms such as climate change, global warming, greenhouse effect, and carbon dioxide a few times every day in newspapers, radio broadcasts, and television news, as well as in conversation. This is perhaps the first time in the history of science that a scientific issue has gotten so much attention from the public. As a scientist, I am pleased about the public's interest in science. Unfortunately, I have found that this great interest in climatology is largely the result of a proliferation of confusing stories in the media that are based on misinterpreted information about the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. Many people bring up several misunderstood issues when I discuss the present warming trend. Even some policy makers and government officials seem to be confused.

We study the interactions between the geochemical cycles of carbon and long-term changes in climate. Climate change is studied with a simple, zonally averaged energy balance climate model that includes the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide explicitly. The geochemical model balances the rate of consumption of carbon dioxide in silicate weathering against its release by volcanic and metamorphic processes. The silicate weathering rate is expressed locally as a function of temperature, carbon dioxide partial pressure, and runoff. The global weathering rate is calculated by integrating these quantities over the land area as a function of latitude. Carbon dioxide feedback stabilizes the climate system against a reduction in solar luminosity and may contribute to the preservation of equable climate on the early Earth, when solar luminosity was low. The system responds to reduced land area by increasing carbon dioxide partial pressure and warming the globe. Our model makes it possible to study the response of the system to changing latitudinal distribution of the continents. A concentration of land area at high latitudes leads to high carbon dioxide partial pressures and high global average temperature because weathering of high-latitude continents is slow. Conversely, concentration of the continents at low latitudes yields a cold globe and ice at low latitudes, a situation that appears to be representative of the late Precambrian glacial episode. This model is stable against ice albedo catastrophe even when the ice line occurs at low latitudes. In this it differs from energy balance models that lack the coupling to the geochemical cycle of carbon.

Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe is a short rnonograph on the so‐called carbon dioxide greenhouse effect. The author challenges the established view that the present CO2 increase would, in the long term, lead to a global ground temperature increase. S. B. Idso, from four sets of observations, has deduced that the temperature response to an increased received energy at the ground should be less than or equal to 0.113 K (W/m2). If this result is combined with the 2.28 W/m2 of increased radiation expected from CO2 doubling, he finds a temperature increase of 0.26 K, which cannot be distinguished form the natural temperature fluctuation. This conclusion is in disagreement with virtually all the current mathematical models that predict a ground temperature response of an order of magnitude or more higher.

The Earth warms both when fossil fuel carbon is oxidized to carbon dioxide and when greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide inhibits longwave radiation from escaping to space. Various important time scales and ratios comparing these two climate forcings have not previously been quantified. For example, the global and time‐integrated radiative forcing from burning a fossil fuel exceeds the heat released upon combustion within 2 months. Over the long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere, the cumulative CO2‐radiative forcing exceeds the amount of energy released upon combustion by a factor >100,000. For a new power plant, the radiative forcing from the accumulation of released CO2 exceeds the direct thermal emissions in less than half a year. Furthermore, we show that the energy released from the combustion of fossil fuels is now about 1.71% of the radiative forcing from CO2 that has accumulated in the atmosphere as a consequence of historical fossil fuel combustion.

Although water vapour is the largest and essential greenhouse gas inclusive of ozone in the stratosphere, the mitigation of anthropogenic six greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons have been established as legally binding commitments in The Kyoto Protocol. Important greenhouse gases attributed to ruminant livestock are methane and nitrous oxide. When the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide is set to 1, the impact of the greenhouse effect of methane and nitrous oxide is 21-fold and 310-fold higher than carbon dioxide respectively

Upcoming hydrogen economy is on rise on political agenda due to growing need of hydrogen. Natural occurrence of hydrogen cannot satisfy the present need of hydrogen. It produces a wide gap between current hydrogen requirement and amount of hydrogen present in earth. To counter this problem, hydrogen is produced commercially in industries through various methods. Among all these methods, SMR (Steam Methane Reforming) process is considered most feasible for being economically cheap as compared to other methods. Being economical does not necessarily mean being eco-friendly. Industrialist does not switch on alternative methods and continue using SMR process which is producing a devastating impact on atmosphere by increasing the amount of CO2 (carbon dioxide). Greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide makes it one of the primary sources of increasing global warming in earth's atmosphere. Apart of other uses, Hydrogen can also be used as eco-friendly energy source as compared to fossil fuel used as energy source. In this paper, the procedure of production of hydrogen through SMR process is reviewed in detail and its pros and cons are discussed.

Historically, studies of the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide (CO2) have dealt primarily with temperature and only secondarily with precipitation. In the latest report on this topic1, however, the subject of streamflow is broached with an analysis2 which suggests that watersheds in the western United States will suffer 40–75% reductions in streamflow for a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 content, leading to a 2 °C rise in air temperature and a 10% drop in precipitation. A shortcoming of that study is that it does not include the direct antitranspirant effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment that would accompany any CO2-induced climatic change, whereby increasing CO2 content of the air tends to induce partial stomatal closure, so reducing plant transpiration and thereby conserving soil moisture and increasing runoff to streams. Inclusion of this latter effect in a simple model of watershed runoff applied to 12 drainage basins in Arizona indicates that 40–60% increases in streamflow may well be the more likely consequences of a CO2 concentration doubling, even in the face of adverse changes in temperature and precipitation.

Upcoming hydrogen economy is on rise on political agenda due to growing need of hydrogen. Natural occurrence of hydrogen cannot satisfy the present need of hydrogen. It produces a wide gap between current hydrogen requirement and amount of hydrogen present in earth. To counter this problem, hydrogen is produced commercially in industries through various methods. Among all these methods, SMR (Steam Methane Reforming) process is considered most feasible for being economically cheap as compared to other methods. Being economical does not necessarily mean being eco-friendly. Industrialist does not switch on alternative methods and continue using SMR process which is producing a devastating impact on atmosphere by increasing the amount of CO2 (carbon dioxide). Greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide makes it one of the primary sources of increasing global warming in earth's atmosphere. Apart of other uses, Hydrogen can also be used as eco-friendly energy source as compared to fossil fuel used as energy source. In this paper, the procedure of production of hydrogen through SMR process is reviewed in detail and its pros and cons are discussed.

John Gribbin (ed) 1986 Oxford: Basil Blackwell xv + 336 pp price £22.50 (£7.95 paperback) ISBN 0 631 14288 6 Hdbk, 0 631 14289 4 Pbk This book is the sixth in the New Scientist Guides series and it contains 46 stimulating articles on climatic changes and related topics that have appeared in New Scientist since 1959. It is organised in seven parts under the headings: 'Gaia', 'The changing climate', 'Cause for concern', 'The human impact: (i) ozone, (ii) acid rain, (iii) the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect', and 'Economics, politics and climate'.

The sun is the star at the center of the solar system and is the primary energy source for life on earth. Greenhouse gases in an atmosphere like Carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), Nitrous oxide (N2O), Water vapour (H2O), and Ozone (O3) help to maintain balanced temperature on earth through a phenomenon called as greenhouse effect. This ensures survival of life on the planet earth. Without greenhouse effect the average temperature of the earth would be very cold at -18�C, water would not exist in liquid form, and as a result the earth would have been incapable to support life. Human use of fossil fuels is the main source of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which now far exceed pre-industrial levels over the past 650,000 years. Due to this there is an increase in the global temperature leading to climate change. The term climate change can be comprehensively understood as �a statistically significant variations in the earth s average weather, including changes in temperature, wind patterns and rainfall, especially the increase in the temperature of its atmosphere that is caused by the increase of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone etc. in the atmosphere due to the anthropogenic activities such as generation of energy from fossil fuels (for electricity, industry, transportation etc.), deforestation, agriculture, land use change etc.� Climate change has become the most predominant issue of the 21st century as it has deeper global impacts on the earth threatening the very existence of life on it. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the frontline greenhouse gas that contributes a large i.e., around 60% to climate change. The main human source of carbon dioxide is the use of fossil fuels (coal, petroleum and natural gas) in different human sectors. The present paper attempts to profile the carbon dioxide in the context of climate change.

‘History of climate change’ traces the history of climate change and the evidence that supports it. The science of climate change started in 1856 with experiments by Eunice Newton Foote demonstrating the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. The essential science of climate change was there in the late 1950s, but it was not taken seriously until the late 1980s. Why was there a delay between the science of global warming being accepted in the late 1950s and the realization by those outside the scientific community of the true threat of global warming at the beginning of the 21st century? The key reasons for this delay were the lack of increase in global temperatures and the lack of global environmental awareness. What is the importance of the rise of the global environmental social movement and the new wave of protest and optimism of the last few years?

<p>While the long-standing quest to constrain equilibrium climate sensitivity has resulted in intense scrutiny of the processes controlling idealized greenhouse warming, the processes controlling idealized greenhouse cooling have received less attention. Here, differences in the climate response to increased and decreased carbon dioxide concentrations are assessed in state-of-the-art fully coupled climate model experiments. One hundred and fifty years after an imposed instantaneous forcing change, surface global warming from a carbon dioxide doubling (abrupt-2xCO2, 2.43 K) is larger than the surface global cooling from a carbon dioxide halving (abrupt-0p5xCO2, 1.97 K). Both forcing and feedback differences explain these climate response differences. Multiple approaches show the radiative forcing for a carbon dioxide doubling is ~10% larger than for a carbon dioxide halving. In addition, radiative feedbacks are less negative in the doubling experiments than in the halving experiments. Specifically, less negative tropical shortwave cloud feedbacks and more positive subtropical cloud feedbacks lead to more greenhouse 2xCO2 warming than 0.5xCO2 greenhouse cooling. Motivated to directly isolate the influence of cloud feedbacks on these experiments, additional abrupt-2xCO2 and abrupt-0p5xCO2 experiments with disabled cloud-climate feedbacks were run. Comparison of these “cloud-locked” simulations with the original “cloud active” simulations shows cloud feedbacks help explain the nonlinear global surface temperature response to greenhouse warming and greenhouse cooling. Overall, these results demonstrate that both radiative forcing and radiative feedbacks are needed to explain differences in the surface climate response to increased and decreased carbon dioxide concentrations.</p>

The greenhouse effect refers to the trapping of heat by certain gases in the atmosphere. Although these gases occur in only trace amounts, they block significant amounts of heat from escaping out into space, thus keeping the Earth warm enough for us to survive. Without greenhouse gases, the average surface temperature of the earth would be about -18 degrees Centigrade. However humen have been adding greenhouse gases in excessive amounts to the atmosphere ever since the Industrial Revolution, which is enhancing the greenhouse effect. This increase in greenhouse gases has the potential to cause catastrophic problems for Earth and its inhabitants. The greenhouse effect causes trouble by raising the temperature of the planet. The actual rise is not very much, but the Earth's ecosystem is very fragile and small, changes can have large effects. Almost 100% of the observed temperature increase over the last 50 years has been due to the increase of greenhouse gas concentrations like water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane and ozone. Carbon dioxide is the biggest reason for the greenhouses effect that leads to global warming.

Dédiée aux sciences de l'atmosphère, au climat et à d'autres domaines connexes, tels que l'océanographie ou la glaciologie, La Météorologie, révisée par des pairs et publiée en français, s'adresse aux professionnels de la météo et du climat, aux enseignants, aux étudiants, aux amateurs et aux utilisateurs. La Météorologie a succédé en 1925 à l'Annuaire de la Société météorologique de France (1852-1924) qui avait lui-même succédé à l'Annuaire météorologique de la France (1849-1851).