The Idiocy of Joe Biden’s Climate Plan

As in so many other issues, progressives have been lying to us for decades about the causes of global warming, aka climate change. Now, the Biden Administration is asserting we must spend trillions of dollars to save the planet from burning up. If the Democrats are actually able to pass Biden’s climate plan into law, we will all be much, much poorer. Not only that but as will be shown below, we will gain nothing of real value from impoverishing ourselves. Climate change is not an existential threat.

Bjørn Lomborg’s Criticisms

There are at least two major ways to criticize Biden’s climate plan. The first, championed by Bjørn Lomborg, accepts the conclusion that man is causing global warming with carbon dioxide emissions. He believes, however, that adapting to global warming, rather than stopping it, is much more conducive to the welfare of human beings. He argues global warming is not an existential threat, even though it does pose a problem to which we need to adapt. He explains his opposition to conventional climate change alarmism in the video below.

One can fortify Lomborg’s argument that global warming is not an existential threat by looking at the history of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Let us go back about 540 million years to the Cambrian explosion of life. During the Cambrian period of the Paleozoic era, most phyla of plant and animal life came into existence. From marine sediments and glacier ice cores, scientists have been able to derive average global temperatures and CO₂ concentrations. Their observations are shown in the plots below.

From this plot you can see that approximately 540 million years ago, carbon dioxide in the air peaked at almost 7,000 parts per million! Given current hysteria over the paltry 400 ppm we presently have, these kinds of enormous CO₂ concentrations should have caused tremendous atmospheric heating and been extremely detrimental to life at the time. Yet, instead the Earth experienced the greatest explosion in life forms in all its history.

As you can see in the plots, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations generally decreased from the Cambrian period to the present. Why? It was because plants were steadily taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and using it in photosynthesis to make their food. In the process, the oxygen in the molecule was split off and emitted into the atmosphere, while the carbon became part of the plants. When the plants died, they took the carbon into the ground with them to eventually form fossil fuels. If this process is not reversed, plants would eventually destroy themselves by exhausting their CO₂ food.  Biologists have shown plant life begins to suffer greatly once CO₂ levels fall below 500 ppm, the situation we suffer today.

Yet, seeing is believing. Take a gander at the following video showing time-lapse photography of the growth of two cowpea plants. One is in a chamber with ambient CO₂ (450 ppm) and one in a chamber with elevated CO₂ (1270 ppm).

Should the CO₂ levels ever fall below 150 ppm, massive die-offs of plant life could be expected. As a NoTricksZone post by Pierre Gosselin put it:  “Do we really want to live on the brink of extinction?” Better to subsidize the burning of fossil fuels to replenish our atmospheric CO₂!

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Does Not Cause the Observed Global Warming

Yet a second way to attack Biden’s climate plan is to show that CO₂ can not possibly (other than in a minuscule way) be the explanation for the observed global warming. Progressives always react to this argument by claiming scientists are always on their side. Nothing could be further from the truth, as I have tried to show in the following posts:

• Anti-AGW Global Warming Scholarly References
• What Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming?

The reasons why carbon dioxide is not a cause of global warming (other than in a miniscule way) are listed below. These facts about atmospheric CO₂ interact to reduce the absorption of heat radiation.

1. Carbon Dioxide is an atmospheric trace gas:

Do the arithmetic. At 400 ppm concentration, the fraction of the atmosphere that is carbon dioxide is 0.0004. And it is not even the strongest greenhouse gas: Water vapor is. This leads to a second point.

2. Carbon Dioxide has only three absorption lines for heat radiation:

Molecules are the largest physical entities that show quantum mechanical behavior. This means their internal energy states are quantized. They can only absorb electromagnetic photons if the photon’s energy is equal to the transition between a ground state and an excited state.

There are only three such transitions for CO₂ in the heat radiation of the Earth’s blackbody spectrum, as is shown in the plot to the left. Two of those lines are in the tail of the distribution, and consequently are exposed to relatively few photons with the right energies. Once a photon is absorbed to excite the molecule to an excited state, a similar photon can not be absorbed again until a photon is emitted to drop the excited state into the ground state. This leads to a third important fact about atmospheric carbon dioxide.

3. Infrared excited states have lifetimes longer or comparable to the time it takes for a photon to travel from the surface of the Earth to the top of the atmosphere:

By the top of the atmosphere, I mean the top of the troposphere. This is the lowest level of the atmosphere within which carbon dioxide and weather live. The half-life of an infrared excited state is very long compared to the amount of time it takes for a non-interacting photon to reach the top of the troposphere, where it would most likely be lost to space. Depending on the mode of decay (collisions with other molecules or spontaneous emission), the half-life can be anywhere from 1 μsec to about half a second. Taking the thickness of the troposphere to be 20 km (its thickest extent at the equator), the shortest photon flight time to the top of the troposphere is around 6.67×10^-5 seconds. As long as the CO₂ molecule is excited, it can not delay any other photons at the same wavelength as caused its excited state; they will all stream past the excited molecule without hindrance. This leads to a fourth fact about atmospheric carbon dioxide.

4. Most atmospheric carbon dioxide molecules are totally saturated with infrared photons for most of the time:

The combined results of carbon dioxide being a trace gas, and the fact there is only a very limited fraction of the atmosphere’s infrared black body spectrum the molecule can absorb, and the fact the infrared excited states are generally long compared to the photon’s time of flight to the top of the atmosphere lead to this conclusion: For most of the time most infrared molecules are totally saturated with infrared photons for most of the time. This means that at any given time, the vast majority of infrared photons just roar past the saturated carbon dioxide molecules to be lost to space. However, if we emit more CO₂ into the atmosphere, we should linearly add to the infrared photons trapped by CO₂, right? Wrong!

5. As CO₂ is added to the atmosphere, it has less and less effect on increasing atmospheric temperatures.

Remember there is only a very small fraction of infrared photons that CO₂ molecules can absorb. This is because the molecule has only three infrared absorption lines with two being in the tail of the atmosphere’s infrared blackbody spectrum. As unsaturated CO₂ gobbles up photons at the wavelengths it can, it depletes the population of available photons flying by. This depletion is made even more severe as more CO₂ is added to the atmosphere from whatever source, whether from the oceans or by mankind. As a result, each additional increment of newly added CO₂ will heat the atmosphere less and less, as shown in the plot below.

So if atmospheric carbon dioxide is not causing global warming, what is? The sad answer is that we do not really know. However, we do have a name for it: The Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycles. These are very long-period cycles of warming and cooling that last between one and two thousand years. The last half-cycle of cooling, the Little Ice Age, started around 1300 AD and ended around 1850. That puts us approximately 170 years into the warming phase, which should continue to warm the Earth until sometime between 2300 and 2400 AD. The previous warming cycle was the Medieval Warm Period, and it lasted roughly between 950 to 1300 AD. Since they predate the Industrial Revolution, they can not be caused by humankind’s CO₂ emissions.

From all of these facts about atmospheric carbon dioxide, we must conclude that everything Joe Biden wants to do about global warming is wasted effort and wasted misallocation of scarce capital. In fact, what Biden is doing is downright harmful to the economy. The harm is caused by denying needed fossil fuels to society and by denying corporations the use of much-needed capital for investments.

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