Now Al Gore, the IPCC, and the vast majority of politicians in the US and Europe argue that this is all established science. But I am here to show that not only is this not established science, but that the objective evidence available indicates that it is false.

Shocking isn’t it? You might ask, how can a lifelong Democrat like myself reject my party’s position on global warming and join the camp of the skeptics, virtually all of whom are Republicans or neocons.

So, I’ll tell you how it all started for me.

My involvement in this issue of global warming started in 1986 at a NATO-sponsored meeting on coal combustion that was held in the French Alps. A colleague from MIT, actually solicited my opinion on the subject of global warming.

Now, just being asked for an opinion by someone from MIT is a great honor. I had given a paper at a Combustion Symposium at MIT in which I had used the infrared emissions from CO2 to measure explosion temperatures, so I was familiar with its spectrum, and he knew that I had once been a meteorologist, so he solicited my
opinion.

Shortly thereafter, a colleague from New Zealand, who had worked in our lab while on his sabbatical, wrote to me about the subject, and we proceeded to collaborate on a study of the problem. We confined our attention to item 3 of the Gore-IPCC argument
which dealt with the infrared absorption of atmospheric CO2 and the atmospheric heating that would result. In 1994, I presented our paper at a Symposium in Irvine, California.

Let us look at the atmospheric absorption spectrum of CO2.

This plot shows the approximate spectrum of the infrared heat radiated to free space from the surface of the earth at the earth’s average temperature. It represents the maximum possible heat loss that would balance the heat gained from the sun. Plotted on the graph are the narrow absorption bands of atmospheric CO2 that would represent its “greenhouse effect”. They are at 4.3 and 15 microns. I used the 4.3 micron band for my measurements of gas temperatures. The bands are narrow and confined and at most they can absorb only a few percent of the total energy under this curve.

The situation is further clarified in this next figure, where we show the effect of increasing the concentration of CO2 on atmospheric heating.

The first 20 ppm of CO2 essentially makes the atmosphere almost opaque at those previously shown wave lengths, so that doubling the concentration to 40 ppm increases the heating effect by only 20 % more. Doubling it again to 80 ppm increases the heating effect by only 7 %.