“Carbon Pollution” Claptrap – The “So-called “Greenhouse Gas Effect” of CO2 Does NOT Exist At All!’

– “Carbon Pollution” Claptrap:

“So-called “greenhouse gas effect” of CO2 does not exist at all!’
– Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser

Carbon Pollution” Claptrap

Carbon (as in wood, coal, oil, natural gas) is an energy source — not a pollutant

By Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser

When will the governments (and their all too numerous “useful idiots” of the media) state the unadulterated truth to the people?

Carbon (like in wood, coal, oil, natural gas) is an energy source—not a “pollutant”

Presumably, any government has the right to levy a tax on anything they want. In that sense, a tax on “carbon” or any energy source would be no different than a tax on food or clothing; it’s all coming out of your pocket. However, the right to levy taxes does not give government a right to call “carbon” (by their interpretation really meaning “carbon dioxide”) as a form of “pollution.”

NO, carbon dioxide is NOT pollution, none whatsoever!

YES, carbon dioxide is a VITAL constituent of the atmosphere!

Carbon Tax

Whether Canada’s recently elected Prime Minister or any of the country’s provincial premiers think that a “carbon tax” is a good thing or not is all irrelevant. Governments always have the option to place levies and taxes on anything they choose. Whether the people they claim to represent and work for will find such charges acceptable or not can be gauged on the outcome of the next general election.

One thing that I cannot excuse, however, is for any government that claims to live by common standards of communication and honesty, to fail in providing facts and truthful information to its citizenry. And, quite frankly, IMHO, the previous government of this great country of Canada had seven years’ time to set the record straight but missed the opportunity. They had all the resources necessary to educate the citizenry to respect the country’s reliance on natural resources and feel good about our “carbon.”

You do not – have the right to tell us lies, neither about “carbon pollution” nor anything else!

Yes, dear government, you have the right to tax the hell out of us poor schmucks but you do not – I repeat, you do not – have the right to tell us lies, neither about “carbon pollution” nor anything else!

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But Lies Abound-With no End in Sight

But lies abound, you can find them almost daily in the news, for example, when (presumably well-meaning) journalists or politicians talk about carbon dioxide (CO2) as “pollution.” The visuals that frequently go along with such news reports are equally false when they show steam rising from cooling towers.

For sure, if you take a high contrast picture of a cloud of steam rising from such a structure against a bright sun-lit background, it will appear very dark in comparison. Just like when it’s dark on even the sunniest day and high in the atmosphere a cloud moves in to block the sunshine. However, neither steam nor CO2 are forms of pollution. From the cooling towers only steam is emanating that eventually may turn into rain. In contrast, so-called “smoke stacks” do emit CO2 (an invisible gas) but true smoke (fine particulates in the air) has largely been removed by modern electrostatic precipitation and scrubbing technologies.

I can never figure out whether the reporters or their photographers are that stupid or simply don’t care about understanding such things. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a vital constituent of our atmosphere. At a concentration of 0.04% not only does it have room to grow, it helps the plants grow better and faster and does not have any significant effects on the earth’s weather and climate.

But all that knowledge does not prevent governments to dream up a need for a carbon tax either directly or indirectly via some cap and trade mechanism. Of course, any such new tax, so we are given to believe, will help to “save the climate.”

However, the climate does not care about CO2. It’s mainly controlled by the radiation from the sun and the water cycle on Earth.

The Sun’s Radiation

The earth receives electromagnetic (EM) waves from everywhere in the stellar space, most of the energy comes from the sun, more exactly its surface. And that is of vital consequence for all life on earth. If the sun were to cool down, the earth would rapidly turn into a ball of ice. It happened before, repeatedly, when large parts of the continents were covered by solid ice-one mile high!

While the sun’s interior is thought to be millions of degrees hot, its surface is comparatively cool, a mere 6,000 °C (10,000 °F) or so. As a result, it emits a large amount of radiation over a wide spectrum of EM wavelengths. The shorter the wavelength of that radiation, the higher is the energy of the EM energy. Really short-wavelength “gamma-ray” type radiation also arrives on the earth from other sources in space. That very energetic radiation penetrates far into soil and can even be detected in underground mines or deep inside Cheop’s pyramid.

Most of the sun’s radiation is less energetic, ranging from short wavelength ultraviolet rays to much longer wavelengths on the other side of the (for our eyes) visible spectrum. The latter is only a small fraction of the whole electromagnetic wave (EMW) range stretching over many orders of magnitude, ranging from low energy AM radio waves to high energy gamma rays, as you can glean from the figure below.

Range of the electromagnetic spectrum covering 18 orders of magnitude; source: Wikipedia.

As you can see, the EMW spectrum covers many orders of magnitude. Theoretically it is open-ended on both sides but practically the earth gets most of the sun’s EMW energy in the range of only within one order of that energy range. You can clearly see that from the next graph which the solar radiation spectrum as a function of the wavelength. Nearly all the visible light, ultraviolet and infrared radiation energy from the sun is found within that small range.

In that graph the yellow area shows the solar spectrum and the red areas the various energy absorption bands of the oxygen (O2 and O3), water (H2O), and carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules in the earth’s atmosphere. Clearly, CO2 is not only a minor constituent of the atmosphere (at 0.04%) but also a negligible absorber of the whole range of EMW energy received on the earth’s surface. What about the “greenhouse gas effect” ascribed to that trace gas CO2?

The Greenhouse Gas Effect

That so-called “greenhouse gas effect” of CO2 does not exist at all! While the earth’s surface does radiate low(er)-energy (i.e., infrared) EMW back towards the universe and CO2 molecules in the atmosphere absorb such infrared EMW of a particular, narrow energy-band, it gets soon irradiated out further. At most, the CO2 can delay that radiation for a short time but it cannot alter the ratio between incoming and outgoing energy fluxes.

There is even extraterrestrial “experimental” proof for that: planet Mars has an atmosphere that consists of 95% CO2 (versus 0.04% on earth). By the “CO2-greenhouse gas effect wisdom,” the night-side surface temperature of Mars should be similar to that of the day-side (approximately PLUS 30 °C). In fact though, the surface temperature on the night-side is well below MINUS 100 °C, just like on the Moon which has no atmosphere at all.

In other words: a CO2-rich atmosphere or none at all makes hardly any difference!

If that doesn’t convince you, perhaps you are interested in some swampland in the Everglades or “crater-view real estate” on the Moon—serious inquiries only, please.
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Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser is a professional scientist with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Technical University, Munich, Germany. He has worked as a research scientist and project chief at Environment Canada‘s Canada Centre for Inland Waters for over 30 years and is currently Director of Research at TerraBase Inc. He is author of nearly 300 publications in scientific journals, government and agency reports, books, computer programs, trade magazines, and newspaper articles.

Dr. Kaiser has been president of the International Association for Great Lakes Research, a peer reviewer of numerous scientific papers for several journals, Editor-in-Chief of the Water Quality Research Journal of Canada for nearly a decade, and an adjunct professor. He has contributed to a variety of scientific projects and reports and has made many presentations at national and international conferences.

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