Re: CO2 Greenhouse gas (Ryan Price, Times, July 27).
Ryan Price disputes the importance of CO2 in regulating Earth’s temperature. For readers who want to know the truth, based on the science endorsed by 150,000 scientists publishing in the field and every scientific institute on the planet, two videos:
• Richard Alley – 4.6 Billion Years of Earth’s Climate History: The Role of CO2, National Academy of Sciences. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujkcTZZlikg
• Dan Britt – Orbits and Ice Ages: The History of Climate. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM
Want more?
Tutorials from Oxford professor Myles Allen: www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/2018/0410.html
Think you know it all?
Have a squint at Oxford professor Ray Pierrehumbert’s book on Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/Principles-Planetary-Climate-Raymond-Pierrehumbert/dp/0521865565
The climate is immensely complex, but the science is, in principle, straightforward. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere means Earth retains more energy from the Sun, because the height heat is radiated to space rises, where it is cooler, therefore the rate is lower, and Earth heats up until a stable state is reached.
Most heat (93 per cent) goes into the oceans, which continue warming. This ‘signal’ is far clearer than the surface signal, which is hard to separate from the natural variation we call weather.
Incidentally, Penn State professor Richard Alley thinks we’re going to see 2C regardless of what we do, so good luck adapting to that – we can’t even adapt to the 1.1C we’ve caused already.
Dennis Horne
Howick
