CO2 is not pollution
Extracts from an article on this, below. This is just a heads-up that the paper is about to be published. Pre-print version here, title: Fermi Resonance and the Quantum Mechanical Basis of Global Warming.
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The reason why CO2 is so good at trapping heat [Talkshop comment – according to some theorists] essentially boils down to the way the three-atom molecule vibrates as it absorbs infrared radiation from the Sun, asserts The Conversation (via Science Alert).
“It is remarkable,” Harvard University planetary scientist Robin Wordsworth and colleagues write in their new preprint, “that an apparently accidental quantum resonance in an otherwise ordinary three-atom molecule has had such a large impact on our planet’s climate over geologic time, and will also help determine its future warming due to human activity.”
When hit with incoming rays of light at certain wavelengths, CO2 molecules don’t just jiggle about as one fixed unit as you might expect. Rather, CO2 molecules – which are made up of one carbon atom flanked by two oxygens – bend and stretch in certain ways.
As you can see in the diagram [here], the two oxygen atoms can stretch outward and the central carbon atom may or may not follow, or the carbon atom can swivel around the main axis of the molecule, bending it.
A chance alignment in two of these vibrational patterns creates a type of quantum hum in CO2 molecules called Fermi resonance, which can make the molecules vibrate more.
In turn, this broadens the range of radiation that gets absorbed by CO2, as Wordsworth explained in an interview with New Scientist’s Alex Wilkins. “It’s this broadening which is really critical to understanding why carbon dioxide is an important greenhouse gas,” he said.
. . .
However, their calculations don’t include any overlap of CO2 with other heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as methane or the radiative effects of clouds, which reflect sunlight as well, so they might need some further tweaking.
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Looks like a load of old donkey droppings to me…
Somebody’s getting desperate!
On the other hand, the capability of the H2O molecule …
(Once tought in primary school …)
Paper: ‘There are of course many things that our analysis misses out. Many spectroscopic details, including anharmonic interactions, line mixing, and additional weak bands have been neglected, as have overlap with other gaseous absorbers and the radiative effects of clouds.’
Indeed.
Manmade CO2 may have added one molecule to ten thousand. If that molecule warmed to ten thousand degrees that might warm the ten thousand by one degree.
Water is abundant and water changes state. When we try to cool warmer or hotter places or things, we often use substances that change state, that way much more energy can be adsorbed in one place and easily transported to another place and radiated out. Water, Freon, ammonia, the climate uses water in its changing states. Climate uses water in immediate self correcting actions with evaporation and condensation of water or ice, climate also uses water and ice in longer term self correction that sequesters ice in cold places during the warmest times with most IR out and then later uses the spreading of the ice on land and pushing into the oceans to cause cooling many years later, sometimes hundred, sometimes thousands of years later. This is a longer term dynamic energy balance.
As climate gets colder, spreading ice and ice pushed into oceans cause more and more cooling as the ice spreads and thaws and reflects more and forms sea ice, even as IR out and ice volumes are depleting. When the volume and weight of the spreading ice is depleted, the ice retreats, warming increases, sea ice is removed, then the alternating warmer and colder cycle repeats.
Warmest times are times with most IR out. Coldest times are times with least IR out. History and data has not correlated with the greenhouse warming with less IR out being associated with a warmer climate. The most cooling from ice thawing is in the coldest time with most ice extent, the least cooling from ice thawing is in the warmest time with least ice extent. In coldest times ice is spread into warmer regions, in coldest times the ice is restricted to colder regions. Climate theory must use ice properly.
It sounds overly sexualized, if you ask me. All this jiggling, stretching, bending, swiveling…
perhaps this suggests that this carbon/oxygen molecule is the ‘staff of life’
okay then Mr. Wordsworth, how does all this movement cause ice ages? or does some magic ray from space stop the CO2 from bouncing and jiggling? or maybe the sun lowers its output for 100,000 years (more or less)?
Your proposition sounds less than scientific. More like magic. Or something.
Inquiring minds would like to know.
Can someone quantify this “huge” impact as posited in the title of the “scientific” magical article ?
I use ice core records to understand alternating warmer and colder climate periods. Temperature and ice accumulations have a positive correlation, temperature and ice extent have a negative correlation, ice volume has a correlation that is out of phase with temperature and ice extent. Ice volume is at a maximum when temperature is dropping the fastest and when ice extent is advancing the fastest. Ice volume is at a minimum when temperature is rising the fastest and ice extent is decreasing the fastest. When temperature is at a maximum, ice volumes are growing the fastest and ice extent is at a minimum. When temperature is at a minimum, ice extent is at a maximum, but ice volumes are still depleting. Warming after the end of a little or major ice age is rapid because the ice depleted and thinned ice sheets and glaciers can retreat fast because there is not much ice in the extended ice because it has not been sustained by evaporation and snowfall from lower and frozen oceans.
If changes in temperature caused changes in ice extent there would be much lag, noticeable out of phase. Since changes in temperatures are caused by changes in ice extent, the correlations between ice extent and temperature are in lockstep phase.
Our analysis elucidates the dependence of carbon dioxide’s effectiveness as a greenhouse gas on the Fermi resonance between the symmetric stretch mode ν1 and bending mode ν2.
Still leaves all the old questions of a trace gas supposedly having outsize effects. How *effective* can a 0.01% increase in its occupation of the atmosphere be? Check the numbers for changes in cloud cover.
“When hit with incoming rays of light at certain wavelengths, CO2 molecules don’t just jiggle about as one fixed unit as you might expect. Rather, CO2 molecules – which are made up of one carbon atom flanked by two oxygens – bend and stretch in certain ways.”
Same for a lot of us folks. Especially in July at the beach.
Looks like a classic case of “if you can’t dazzle them with science, baffle them with bullshit” to me!
Condolences to Rog. RiP Val, tallbloke ´s mum.
Molecules in the atmosphere bigger than N2, O2, (for example CO2, CH4, O3, H2O, SO2, dust, etc.) reduce insolation of Earth’s surface. It may be some magical dance within the molecules that blocks the free path of the incoming energy. Who knows? Fact is, it’s measurable and just common sense. Bigger atmospheric molecules shade us from the full intensity of the Sun’s radiation. Do you need a qualification in climate science to not understand this? More CO2 in the atmosphere (replacing O2) will result in cooling at the surface. OK, I’m wrong (not) give me the empirical science that proves otherwise.
Say what you like, but CO2 inhibits the radiation of IR, but ‘WV’ (water vapor) is a greater inhibiter than this.
Kind regards, Ray Dart (AKA suricat).
@Chaswarnertoo
Thank you.
Geologic data (550 million years of it) tell us there is no correlation (r < 0.3) between atmospheric CO2 and global average surface temperature (GAST). While there may well be a correlation over shorter term ice age/interglacial cycles during ice epochs within ice eras, glacial and polar ice are unheard of during Earth’s typical climate (when not in an ice epoch of an ice era). The correlation observed during glacial cycles is entirely due to the impact ocean temperature has on ocean absorption/emission of CO2. That atmospheric CO2 during those periods becomes a proxy for temperature change, not a cause of it. This is particularly evident in the fact that the evidence shows ocean temperature changes BEFORE CO2 changes over an average of about roughly 800 years.
I should add that just seven ice eras have existed during the past 3.5 billion years (including the current ongoing ice era that began ~ 60 million years ago). Year-round polar ice only occurs during the coldest periods of ice epochs within ice eras. All seven ice eras combined amount to just 10% of the past 3.5 billion years, meaning Earth’s typical climate is much warmer than at present (a GAST of about 72.5 deg F vs. current ~59 deg F).
It’s all abut perspective. If you just look at the post 1980 data, or you just superficially (not noticing which changed first) look at the ice age/interglacial changes in sea ice, you’ll get a false picture of the real impact of atmospheric CO2. BTW, mean atmospheric CO2 over the past 550 million years is 2147 ppm; median is 1673 ppm… due to the influence of greater warm ocean outgassing of CO2.
an apparently accidental quantum resonance in an otherwise ordinary three-atom molecule
The wonder gas CO2 is nothing if not versatile 🤔
Just to point out some large and factual mistakes in statements above, as regards ice accumulation, certainly as concerns that in the warmest place we get a serious ice sheet, Greenland. THis, for me, has the closest relationship with the ocean moisture fuelled ice sheets of the late glacial phase of each ice age. Which seem to exist as far South as 40deg North, well outside the poles, so the oceans can deliver lot of snow where there are oceans to feed them, and reclaim them later. It seems to me high accumulation is caused more by extreme (cold) land temperatures rather than much colder oceans
To be clear…..
The highest rate of accumulation of ice in Greenland was when its was warming during the Holocene optimum, it doesn’t spread because its sits in a mountain basin. More ice was accumulated during the warmest part of the Holocene than during the entire glacial phase before it. Now, cooling from the warmest temperature and highest deposition rates, Greenland is net losing ice, but will almost certainly return to the slow accumulation rate more akin to the Antarctic ice desert as we slip furter and gently down the neo glacial decline. THis is well documented so self evident. Why claim other things happen when we all know they have not? Or have I got something wrong here?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0r9bhstmimoyilk/Greenland%20Ice%20sheet.jpeg?dl=0
“Just to point out some large and factual mistakes in statements above”
It would be helpful if you made reference to whose “statements above” about what.
Re Brian Catt’s comment about sea ice down to 40°N, it reminds us the Titanic went down at about 41°N amid a field of icebergs.
https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanics-captain-warned-of-huge-filed-of-icebergs.html
In Europe that’s the same latitude as Rome for example.
Can CO2 wiggle its way out of this?
New Study Finds Global Cities Have Warmed Due To Rising Solar Surface Forcing Since 1986
Thus, the positive radiative imbalance from the declining trend in albedo explains urban warming far better than an enhanced greenhouse effect from a clear-sky-only CO2 radiative forcing.
https://notrickszone.com/2024/02/12/new-study-finds-global-cities-have-warmed-due-to-rising-solar-surface-forcing-since-1986/
Radiative forcing due to carbon dioxide decomposed into its component vibrational bands†
Keith P. Shine, Georgina E. Perry
First published: 17 May 2023
The important role of Fermi Resonance in approximately doubling the radiative forcing due to CO2 has been highlighted; this is because these resonances broaden the spectral range of CO2‘s radiative influence away from wavelength regions where the CO2 infrared intensity is high and where its forcing is largely saturated at contemporary concentrations.
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.4485
Why did historical temperature increases precede CO2 increases by decades or centuries if all this ‘forcing’ was going on?
“Bob”. I refer to the statements regarding ice accumulation rates and directions with temperature, which evidentially goes through reversals around the point Greenland is at now. Colder and it returns towards glacial phase rates of slow accumulation, warmer rises to high(est?) Holocene rates of accumulation then flips again under Eemian temperatures some 4 deg higher, etc., when it pretty much disappeared.
As the image showed rather well.
To be even clearer, THre is no empirical evidence of CO2 as a significant cause of temperature change, thelag is bit of a give away.
ALSO I have done the empirical numbers on natural net feedback with SST change. In measured reality it’s about 1 deg SST change for every c. 7.4W/m^2 perturbation to the whole Earth radiative system balance, inc. water vapour positive GHE. Not a lot of people know that, or they ignore the evidence of the measurements.
It IS of interest, as regards calibrating the reality of “Henry’s Law effect”, that we can quantify the rate of this effect from the measurements, give or take. The natural empirical change we see in CO2 concentration (yeah, yeah. lagging the temperature, only an idiot would claim the opposite given the repeated observations), is that you get 100ppm change for about 12 deg C change at the polar regions and 5 deg at the equator. So thats a middling 7deg or so for 100ppm which is
a Henry’s Law effect of c.14ppm per deg. (There is more surface per deg of latitude closer to the Equator, polar area per deg latitude is small, etc.)
14ppm is nowhere near the 140ppm we observe since 1850. So if we get, say, 20ppm or so naturally from the Henry’s Law effect of 1.5 deg SST warming since 1850, and about half/70ppm of the isotopically measured CO2 increase is human caused (i.e. 70ppm net is us, 70ppm god, and 20ppm of the God ppm is Henry God’s), then where is the other 50ppm coming from, and WHY is the Mauna Loa rise almost straight line and clearly uncorrelated with the variations on 13 month rolling average temperature. It’s a mystery…..
Just sayin’. Hope that’s clearer. Need to find another envelope now………
Brian, yes, thank you for clarifying.
Regarding your observation that “14 ppm is nowhere near the 140 ppm we observe since 1850”, it is remarkably consistent with Tom Segalstad’s 1992 finding of residency time (5.4 years) for fossil fuel CO2 emissions in the atmosphere (based on C13/C12 mass balance). This is identical to the 1967 finding of Münnich & Roether (based on bomb C14).
Based on an atmospheric residency time of ~5 years and an estimated 5-year average fossil fuel emissions (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) of 5.15 ppm, the estimated total five-year accumulation of CO2 from all fossil fuel emissions is approximately 15.45 ppm.
Since residency time is estimated to be approximately five years, there is no appreciable contribution from any fossil fuel emissions prior to five years ago (2019) as all prior emissions have been substantially reabsorbed by Earth’s biosphere (principally, cold ocean absorption and plant growth).
In second last paragraph of last message, “the estimated total five-year accumulation of CO2” is better conveyed by “the estimated five-year net accumulaion of CO2”.
I just revisited this thread.
Chaswarnertoo says: February 17, 2024 at 6:01 pm
“Condolences to Rog. RiP Val, tallbloke ´s mum.”
My sincere condolences also TB!
Sincere regards Ray Dart (AKA suricat).