stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (Cubist @ June 13 2013,16:32) | | Quote (OgreMkV @ June 13 2013,08:00) |
Getting rid of pollution, environmental damage caused by oil spills and strip mining, stopping deaths in coal mines, ending US reliance on countries that hate us (which apparently is all of them), etc.
What if we do all this work and the temperature isn't actually warming? It'd be a damn shame to stop all that other stuff too. |
Well, sure. Because pollution and etc is what America was built on. The denialism is even more annoying, because it all gets back to the absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide. CO2 interacts very little with photons in the visible portion of the spectrum, and very strongly with photons in the IR portion of the spectrum. This means that whatever energy is carried to Earth by visible-wavelength photons, that energy gets absorbed by whatever solid objects those photons hit. Those objects heat up, and radiate energy away in the form of IR-wavelength photons. And IR-wavelength photons, unlike visible-wavelength photons, get absorbed by CO2 molecules.
Given all the above, how can CO2 not have the practical effect of trapping energy in the atmosphere? How can a higher level of CO2 in the atmosphere not lead, inevitably, to higher global temperature? How can human activity inject megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere without causing global temperature to rise?
Is the absorption spectrum of CO2 a mystery? Is that spectrum something we're totally wrong about? Is it wrong to say that when a sunlight-warmed object radiates heat, that object has converted the input of full-spectrum solar EM radiation into the output of IR-spectrum EM radiation?
Is there any real reason (as opposed to denialist-funded talking points) to doubt that yes, AGW genuinely is a real thing that will have serious consequences? |
That's all a bunch of professor bullshit cause you don't live in The Real World and Algore sucks and CO2 is plant food and you watch MSNBC and you're a faggot and you want the UN to take my Freedoms.
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