[HN Gopher] How CO2 warms Earth and why CO2 is not 'saturated' i...
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       How CO2 warms Earth and why CO2 is not 'saturated' in Earth's
       atmosphere
        
       Author : sohkamyung
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2024-05-15 12:19 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (climatefeedback.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (climatefeedback.org)
        
       | mike_hearn wrote:
       | It's presented as a fact check of an article on The Daily
       | Sceptic, but in reality that article is reporting on the
       | conclusions of several scientific papers, triggered by this one
       | [1] published by a trio of Polish researchers. That paper goes
       | into more detail on the underlying physics than ClimateFeedback's
       | own explanation does, which isn't really mentioned until the very
       | end. ClimateFeedback really should link directly to the sources
       | of the claims they're arguing with.
       | 
       | After reading the ClimateFeedback article, the comments from
       | climatologists, the Daily Sceptic post and scan reading the
       | Kubicki paper, I can't quite work out what they think they're
       | disagreeing with. All sources agree that CO2 impact is
       | logarithmic, i.e. doubling CO2 concentration doesn't cause a
       | linear increase in temperature. The argument seems to be some
       | sort of semantic dispute over whether a logarithmic function can
       | ever be said to truly saturate or stop growing. That is clearly
       | uninteresting. What matters is the actual curves and the actual
       | impact in reality.
       | 
       | This problem appears explicitly in the paragraph after figure 5:
       | 
       |  _> It is worth noting that although the slope becomes more
       | gradual, the resulting global warming is still predicted to have
       | negative consequences for humans and ecosystems. As explained by
       | the IPCC, "risks and projected adverse impacts and related losses
       | and damages from climate change escalate with every increment of
       | global warming."_
       | 
       | "damages ... escalate with every increment of global warming" is
       | a very unclear statement. They jump from arguing concrete facts
       | about physics to vague statements about damages without any kind
       | of quantities attached.
       | 
       | They also say the claim they're debunking isn't precise enough
       | due to not taking into account altitude, but again, the Kubicki
       | paper they're actually arguing with does acknowledge this fact
       | multiple times [2]. This seems like arguing with a strawman, or
       | worse, that they haven't actually read the thing they're trying
       | to debunk.
       | 
       | Finally, the Kubicki paper is actually making the more general
       | argument that the various factors that affect the climate system
       | (e.g. clouds, wind speeds) aren't well understood enough to make
       | accurate predictions of the CO2-temperature link, and more
       | experiments should be done to establish accurate physical data to
       | feed into the models. The Daily Sceptic also claims that the
       | function mapping CO2 levels to temperature (which is in turn not
       | the same thing as damages) isn't known, and estimates vary
       | drastically.
       | 
       | In the comments the invited climatologists seem to accept that
       | this problem does exist but downplay it, saying only that their
       | "best estimates" have a CI from 2 to 5 degrees. Haigh weighs in
       | and says _The gratuitous statement that these are "little more
       | than guesses" couldn't be further from the truth_ but then also
       | _the wide range results from uncertainties_ which is just a
       | rephrasing. Also if you drop outliers (which the Daily Sceptic
       | isn 't doing but the IPCC does) then you can make your confidence
       | seem arbitrarily high, but when the whole thrust of the article
       | is about how expert climatologists are it doesn't seem fair to
       | exclude some, just because their calculations are further from
       | the mean.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266649682...
       | 
       | [2] "It should be noted that CO2 absorption lines at different
       | altitudes are narrower than CO2 absorption lines under
       | atmospheric pressure", p6 and "it should be noted that unlike the
       | used cuvette, the vertical structure of the atmosphere undergoes
       | changes in both pressure and temperature", p5
        
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       (page generated 2024-05-15 23:02 UTC)