Big Al Strikes Again (Guest Post)

Smug? Ain’t no smugnosity here!

(trzupr here: Stosh from da Sticks is back, with some more high falutin ideas, thinkin that a doctorate from MIT qualifies him to argue climate science with a Nobel Prize winner. For my sake, indulge his fantasies…)

Excluding Al Franken (and as a general principle, that’s not a bad idea), there are few things in public life more annoying than Al Gore with a smug look on his face.  Typically the degree of condescension in Gore’s voice is inversely proportional to the amount of knowledge in his head, as was the case recently when he was pontificating on the climate-related effects of carbon dioxide while being interviewed by Andrea Mitchell.

In that interview, Gore stated the following:  “A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a — a principle in physics.  It’s not a question of debate. It’s like gravity; it exists”

That statement brings to mind a discovery made much earlier, which, cast in equation form, looks something like this:  (a little knowledge) = (a dangerous thing).   Substitute the equivalent expression “Al Gore” for “a little knowledge” in the equation above, and an even more useful form of that equation is generated.

Thus, while Gore’s quoted statement is technically correct, in the context of the current controversy over global warming, it’s largely irrelevant, and almost totally deceptive, for at least two important reasons.

One of the details our theology school drop-out fails to appreciate is the mathematical nature of the “heat trapping” by CO2 – that effect can be characterized by consideration of a relationship in physics most loyal Threedonians should be able to appreciate – something called Beer’s Law.  Beer’s Law states that the absorption of heat energy is a logarithmic function, not a linear one.

Now don’t panic – all that means is that when one doubles the amount of CO2 in the air, one does NOT double the amount of heat absorbed – that value is actually much less, and after there’s enough CO2 in the atmosphere, that value is essentially unaffected – it’s saturated.

Were I to try to explain this concept to Al himself, I’d do it this way:  Imagine you’ve bought another multi-million dollar mansion in the Nashville suburbs, but that the expensive Marini & Gerardi silk curtains that Tipper ordered haven’t yet arrived.  Like any good Southerner, to block off the light coming through the bedroom windows, you cover them with a page of the “Nashville Tennessean”.  One sheet of newspaper cuts out a lot of the light, and if you put on a second sheet (and so on) the room gets darker.  But after enough sheets of newspaper have been mounted, additional sheets make very little difference, and after 10 sheets or so, adding more pages makes no difference at all.

Heat absorption by CO2 behaves in a very similar fashion – with the concentrations we have in the atmosphere now, adding a few score parts-per-million makes almost no difference on heat absorption, in and of itself.

Which brings us to the second key fact Gore conveniently avoids.  Of the gases responsible for the greenhouse effect, CO2 is a minor player; of that CO2, the vast majority is emitted by natural sources; and of human sources of CO2, the US is not the major culprit (China is).  Even cutting our emissions in half – an economically devastating proposal – would have a negligible effect on greenhouse gas levels.

Again, at the Al Gore level:  if I gave Al a penny, he would be indisputably richer.  But compare that penny to the tens of millions of dollars he makes in his various carbon-credit scams, or the millions he’d lose if John Coleman and his crowd initiated a successful tort action against him for economic damage associated with his goofy schemes, or the tens of thousands of dollars he spends on his electric bill each year, or the hundreds of thousands he makes by sitting on politically-connected boards and such – in that balance sheet, the penny I gave him can be completely ignored with no significant consequences.

In a similar fashion, the effect of the CO2 released by our economic activity is unnoticeable – in and of itself – among the dozens of factors that drive global temperature.  The only way you can get any kind of effect worth worrying about is to postulate that the small effect of the added CO2 can be magnified by the evaporation of more water (and that’s what the modelers at East Anglia and their ilk do for a living).  But as Rich has previously pointed out here, those effects can be either heating or cooling (there’s almost certainly some of both), and the net result is almost certainly too complex to predict with any degree of confidence.

So in other words the effect of added CO2 is less like the mathematical certainty we find in the Law of Gravity Gore cites, and more like what we’d expect from the Law of Unintended Consequences:  results that are numerous, complicated, often in opposition to each other, and ultimately, almost impossible to confidently predict or mathematically model.

But don’t expect that degree of sophistication from Al Gore when it comes to Global Warming.  Al’s motivation for speaking to Andrea Mitchell is not to share with the world his knowledge of climatology – he has none.  It is, I suspect, mostly to block out that little voice in his head that keeps saying to him over and over:  “I can’t believe you lost Tennessee to George W. Bush”.

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