Independent Climate Science
Greenhouse Effect Truth or Fiction History Over a hundred years ago, it had been discovered that there had been ice-ages and, using core samples of marine sediment and arctic and Antarctic snow cores, they were able to determine the temperature and CO2 level changes over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, but the problem that bothered them was why the temperature should suddenly rise from ice-age levels to a much warmer climate so abruptly. I say, abruptly, as that is how it appears when you plot the temperature graph over a period of 100,000 years or more. However, the transition actually lasted about 5,000 years. Two of the main people involved in this study were Svante Arrhenius and Joseph Fourier, though others were involved too. Arrhenius was a very talented chemist and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry In 1905 for his work. He noticed that there was a correlation between the temperature graph and the CO2 graph and, in his enthusiasm to find an answer to the riddle, he assumed the rise in CO2 was the cause of the rise in temperature. This was a rather basic mistake, as correlation between two functions does not indicate cause and effect. He then went on to formulate equations to show how the temperature would rise for a given increase in CO2. Where is the change in temperature when the CO2 concentration changes from C0 to C and is the radiative transfer constant. Because of his high standing in the scientific community, this was all accepted as gospel and is still used today. However, at a later date the graphs were examined in more detail and it was found that, at the end of the last ice-age, the temperature had started to rise about two hundred years before the CO2 started to rise. This meant that Arrhenius had got it back-to-front, and it was the rise in temperature that caused the increase in CO2. Unfortunately, this seems to have been forgotten and the original concept is still accepted in the establishment today. Greenhouse Effect It was thought, and this is what I was taught at school, that the greenhouse glass trapped re-radiated IR rays as it was opaque to the lower frequencies, but was transparent to visible light and the higher frequency IR rays. This trapped heat caused the greenhouse to get warmer. This was dubbed the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, but was just a theory and has never been verified experimentally, but trillions of pounds (or dollars) have been spent trying to reduce CO2 emissions in order to save the world from a fiery end. There is a very simple way that this can be tested. If you build two identical boxes (30 cm cube will be adequate) with one face open, and cover one with a piece of greenhouse glass, and the other with a piece of glass or plastic that is transparent to the whole spectrum of IR as well as visible light, and point both at the sun, if the theory is correct, the one with the greenhouse glass should get much warmer than the other. But what happens is that the one with the fully transparent glass actually gets warmer than the one with the greenhouse glass. This means that the concept is false, as the greenhouse glass actually blocks more incoming heat than outgoing. If CO2 works in the same way, as they postulate, it would mean that CO2 in the atmosphere has a cooling effect by day and helps reduce cooling at night, so is more of a blanket effect and is quite beneficial. So why are we destroying our way of life and our prosperity for nothing?