I was sitting here this morning and from memory just realized that I forgot the best part of Chris Colose’s post ‘Even Princeton Makes Mistakes”. I was going to add this at the end and just tired myself right out – or bored myself to death. Here’s the best quote I’ve read in a long time from the pseudoscience of climate (my bold):
Personally, I have little interest in the legality of making CO2 a “pollutant” or not. I’m quite sure different people here have their own perspective on this, but to me whether we call it a “pollutant” or a “banana” doesn’t change its physical properties: CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas, and it is important in impeding how efficiently our planet loses radiative heat to space. We don’t often think of CO2 as a “pollutant” on Venus, yet it still allows the planet to support temperatures well above the melting point of lead or tin.
Now, just what the HELL do they teach Atmospheric Science students in school? I’m just an Aeronautical Engineer so perhaps someone will have to help me figure this idiocy out. Venus does have a more reflective atmosphere but it is also closer to the sun than the Earth. For the thinking mind, it is difficult to ignore that the atmosphere is a ridiculous 90 times more dense. The Russians landed probes on Venus without using parachutes at the end of the decent because the atmosphere is so thick. The point is that if you replaced Venus’s atmosphere with one of Earth’s composition, you would still have plenty of heat at the surface -even if you took the CO2, Water and Methane out. In fact, if you just used Nitrogen alone at the same mass you would get a ton of heat just by the insulating properties of a gas. Is there a single gas in the known universe which wouldn’t cause a hot Venus surface? Better yet, one wonders if Chris would still blame any trace amounts of CO2?
Perhaps Chris shouldn’t be lecturing to Princeton Physicists.