Retorts

Greenhouse Humbug

The article quot;Science and the Greenhouse Effectquot;| [Viewpoint, July] would have been more appropriately named quot;Scientific Ignorance and the Greenhouse Effectquot;. Let those authors get back to some fundamentals of 6th-Form physics and consider the planetary balances of energy and of carbon.

From the energy balance, we see how the maximum increase in the Greenhouse Effect would be achieved when and if all the infrared that escapes out into space were absorbed into the atmosphere  --  and in that hypothetical (and impossible) event, the Greenhouse Effect would increase by 4.7 units (per 100 units of incoming solar radiation) or 5.4%. In that impossible scenario, global temperatures would increase by less than two degrees, and that's the hypothetical limit. There can be no runaway greenhouse, such as the alarmists enjoy scaring us with.

Again, that impossible increase in greenhouse energy, is only one-sixth of the non-radiative energy in the balance -- the convective and latent heat. If necessary, nature would change the non-radiative items, to counteract any such greenhouse increase.

A further nail in this coffin of ignorance: if we consider the infrared spectrum and the quot;radiation windowsquot;, we see that virtually all of the infrared escaping into space at present is going out through the radiation windows -- at which wavelengths, the normal greenhouse gases do not absorb. Moreover, we learn that there has always been sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb all the infrared that lies within the two narrow wavelength bands at which CO2 absorbs. So, no matter how much the CO2 levels increase, the infrared absorption cannot increase above 100%.

There are several other factors that put the kybosh on the scare of global warming -- perhaps the most important is the new appreciation that the quot;solar constantquot; is not constant, and that most of the long-term global temperature variations over the years can be attributed to variations in the solar irradiance.

Finally your four authors speak in near-reverent tones of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to whose membership they owe their standing. So too do similar people in every other Western country rely on the support of such international colleagues, while the real internationally-accepted leaders in meteorology and climatology won't have a bar of it all.

But the thinking public is starting to get wise. An editorial [March 16, 1995] in Nature, that has generally supported IPCC, now says -- quot;IPCC, for all its many virtues, also reflects the weakness and vested interests of its sponsorsquot;. Obviously in an attempt to ease the criticism of the popular fallacy, they quot;seek the creation of a more-efficient monitoring and assessment procedurequot;.

To my mind, that's likely to be a waste of time too.

Peter Toynbee, Wellington