Far too much nonsense has been put out by people in the Georgia media with no credentials whatsoever in the field of infrared transmission. It seems sometimes the more remote a writer’s field of study is, the more a newspaper or magazine values the person’s remarks. It looks like pediatrician Benjamin Spock once again holding forth on nuclear physics, of which he knew nothing. But if there is no set of appropriate credentials, there is nothing to contribute.
So when you see an article or letter submitted by a cellular microbiologist or a coastal ecologist, he has nothing useful to say on global warming– which instead calls for a competent infrared physicist.
All this brings me to a key global warming point: there is nothing that mankind has done, is doing, or can do to influence the earth’s temperature in the slightest. There is certainly no effect from some percentage change in carbon dioxide, no effect of burning fossil fuels. This comes from direct measurements of the atmospheric transmissivity over all wavelengths, with supporting calculations in infrared radiation transport, when concentrations of carbon dioxide and water vapor are varied over a wide range of calculations.
In the early days of the mania on global warming, authors tossed around both molecules equally. But in short order there was no further mention of water vapor, and attention was focused on carbon dioxide alone.
Within narrow bounds, carbon dioxide and water vapor are created in nearly equal amounts in the burning of fossil fuels. But water vapor concentration is overwhelmed by the meteorological “heat engine”— the phenomenon where the sun’s energy is absorbed by the surface layer in large bodies of water (oceans, seas, etc.) That vast absorbed energy can later be released when water vapor condenses to form clouds and leads to subsequent weather phenomenon. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is a widely variable quantity, certainly far less over a desert than over a swamp or a lake. The physical processes are beyond my expertise, but can be discussed by a competent meteorologist– and it should be so discussed.
The point of raising this here is that there is no involvement by mankind whatsoever in the amount and distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere. One must recall that water vapor is just as effective as a greenhouse gas as is carbon dioxide.
Again, there is nothing mankind has done, will or can do to affect any of the factors that bear on global temperature. These are purely natural phenomena, involving the physics of infrared radioactive transport, meteorological subjects, solar emissions (and sunspots) and perhaps long term effects involving the tilt of the earth’s axis.
The author is Raymond E. Hunter of Royston, who has a PhD. In nuclear physics and enjoyed a career at Los Alamos Laboratory working with the famed Dr. Robert Oppenheimer.
This is the first of the author’s two-part series on global warming misinformation.
