Think tank: Do-gooder Gore has it all wrong

Tony Allwright

Halfway through the climate change conference in Copenhagen, and still nobody seems to be willing to address the Climategate science fraud scandal that is crumbling the foundations of the global warming narrative.
In their new book Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner also challenge that narrative. They suggest that warming isn’t caused by human-generated carbon dioxide, to the predictable outrage of numerous “global warm-mongers”.
The contribution of carbon dioxide (CO2) to (alleged) global warming has become such an accepted piece of conventional wisdom that few seem to question it any more. “The science is settled,” we are admonished. We must curtail our CO2 emissions — or else. So cars are taxed according to their emissions; carbon levies and taxes are imposed; carbon-trading schemes are created; green ministers spend taxpayers’ money to “offset” CO2 emitted jetting around the world; the British government plans legislation to force people to reduce their carbon footprints; and we should all turn vegetarian.
Yet science, unlike some scientists, screams out that man’s CO2 cannot possibly cause global warming. Consider the molecular physics — it’s not that difficult.
Carbon dioxide forms only 0.04% of our atmosphere, so its molecules are widely dispersed. The space between them is almost 200 times their diameter. As altitude increases, air density decreases, which scatters them still further.
CO2 molecules warm our atmosphere by giving off heat when they vibrate. What makes them vibrate is electromagnetic radiation in the infrared range, which reflects off the Earth’s surface. However, spectrometry shows that only 8% of the infrared spectrum can actually do this. Moreover, the radiation excites CO2 molecules only if they collide. Thus, CO2 can cause global warming only to the extent that just 8% of infrared rays can hit tiny, widely distributed targets. You don’t have to be a physicist to see that this can be a pretty long shot. But it gets longer.
Of that 0.04% of CO2 in the air, 97% comes overwhelmingly from the oceans, but also volcanoes, rotting plant matter, burning forests and, interestingly, gases that animals emit (hence that call to vegetarianism). Human activity contributes only 3% of the 0.04%, or 12 parts per million. This pushes the spacing between these CO2 molecules to some 600 times their diameter, and wider still at higher altitudes.
So, for man-made global warming to occur, 8% of infrared rays must bull’s-eye onto the few man-made, widely dispersed, minute CO2 molecules. To turn this into a practical analogy: suppose I start machine-gunning pinhead targets two millimetres across. I will find it very difficult to hit many of these pinheads if they happen to be scattered one to 1.5 metres apart. All the more so if all but 8% of my bullets are duds.
But that is, essentially, Al Gore’s hypothesis — that those infrared “bullets” are colliding with tiny, yet vastly spaced man-made CO2 molecules so consistently that they warm the earth. James Peden, a renowned atmospheric physicist, has written an excellent layman’s guide to the science (visit tinyurl.com/2zmvhl) that Gore would do well to study.
If the human CO2 global-warming hypothesis collapses at the first scrutiny of the science, as I maintain it does, and before we get into the contradictory observed evidence, how on earth can Gore become an Oscar-winning Nobel peace laureate multimillionaire simply by giving the same “inconvenient [un]truth” lecture over and over for an appearance fee believed to be $180,000 (€122,000)?
Perhaps it’s because that’s where the money is. In 2007, the US Senate committee on environment and public works observed that, over a decade, funding of $50 billion had gone to global-warming proponents, as against just $19m on the case for denial. Nevertheless, the warm-mongers in Copenhagen will eventually learn that they cannot alter the laws of physics.
What will the cost to the world be in wasted wealth and effort? Small and broke, Ireland is supposed to cough up €12 billion to meet spurious emission targets, but the biggest cost will be to the world’s poorest, in suppressed development opportunities. These are the very people the global warm-mongers like to pretend they are saving.
Tony Allwright is an engineering and industrial safety consultant who blogs at www.tallrite.com/blog.htm