Climate Letter #2007

Jasper Kirkby is a particle physicist who heads the CLOUD experiment at CERN.  He should know as much as anyone about the greenhouse warming effect expressed by carbon dioxide while acting independently in the atmosphere, without adding any contribution from various feedback effects.  Here is how he is quoted in a story published in Quanta magazine last February, concerning the discovery of certain physical processes that have unexpected feedback effects that add to warming of temperatures in the Arctic: “The results could also help scientists understand how much the planet will warm on average when carbon dioxide levels double compared with pre-industrial levels. For decades, estimates have put this number, called the equilibrium climate sensitivity, between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, a range of uncertainty that has remained stubbornly wide for decades. If Earth were no more complicated than a billiard ball flying through space, calculating this number would be easy: just under 1 degree C, Kirkby said. But that calculation doesn’t account for amplifying feedback loops from natural systems that introduce tremendous uncertainty into climate models.”

Almost everything that is written about the primary cause of future global warming places the blame on a combination of the energy burden created by rising CO2 levels—almost entirely due to human activity—and a certain group of feedback effects that are produced by natural systems when surface temperatures grow warmer. The feedback effects cause additional warming which turns out to be considerably greater than that of carbon dioxide alone in most projections of “climate sensitivity.” Future projections of global warming also include a number of independent “forcings” from temperature-changing factors unrelated to carbon dioxide and its associated feedbacks. (Periodic changes in solar energy input is a simple example.) Some of these factors are positive, some negative, and the net effect is not necessarily trivial. In any case the final impact of these forcings should never be lumped together with sensitivity numbers when sensitivity is defined in the usual way—by its having a direct linkage to carbon dioxide.. If the net effects are strongly warming, which is how they are trending in many research studies, and are added to sensitivity numbers, the inevitable result makes CO2 look still more powerful, beyond results due to the original set of closely-linked feedback effects.

There is no question that CO2 is the most powerful of the well-mixed greenhouse gases with respect to energy-trapping capability, which is further enforced by high molecular density in the atmosphere. Methane is about 220 times less dense than CO2 but also 86 times more effective at trapping energy per airborne molecule. These numbers should be viewed by keeping in mind the well-established fact that all greenhouse gas molecules lose their trapping power per molecule when their atmospheric density increases. The actual rate of loss is about 50% per molecule for each double in density. Think of this as if molecules get in the way of each other as they become more crowded, while the number of photons (of proper wavelength) that are flying by tends to remain the same. In baseball terms, when two outfielders are running for the same fly ball only one of them can catch it. On the other hand, the more players there are scattered around the outfield the greater the chance that any one fly ball will be caught before it hits the ground. Yet, as always, the more players there are in the field the less chance there is for any one of them to be the one who does make the catch of that ball.

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If by some chance CO2 molecules in the atmosphere were to remain unchanged from now on while methane kept growing, the latter could theoretically catch up in number after doubling seven and one-half times from today’s total.  The energy-trapping strength of the two gases, per molecule, would then be tied to the same base, no longer favoring methane by 86 to one. If you divide 220 by 86 the number you get is 0.39.  By implication, this means methane would end up with just 39% of the heat-trapping strength of CO2 per molecule.  If every double in CO2 is known to produce a bit less than +1C in global warming this means NH4 would produce a bit less than +0.4C for each and every double. Those 7 1/2 doubles just referred to would have thus added a total of 3C to the planet before catching up with CO2.  Not likely that this will happen, but it has never been easy to halt an amplification growth of methane in the atmosphere when the planet is actively warming.  To see why this is so, take a good look at a new study prepared by a group of four scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, entitled, Atmospheric methane underestimated in future climate projectionshttps://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac1814/pdf

Carl

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