You will recall that in our newsletter at the beginning of this year,
http://breadonthewater.co.za/summer-2020/
I had asked to pray for rain. I must tell you: just after publishing that newsletter [in the beginning of February], we had a week’s holiday at a resort near to the Kruger Park, where my mother-in-law has a time share week. As we went to pick her up in Roodepoort and indeed, all the way to Malelane, I was stunned by the downpour. Many times, I had to slow down the car to a snail’s pace because of the poor visibility due to the rain. The amount of water coming down on us was truly very big. I said: Is it not amazing, what the prayer of 300 people can do….! It also reminded me of a movie that I watched many, many years ago. It was called “Jacob’s Ladder”. Pity I cannot find it on the internet. It was a black and white movie, so it probably lies somewhere forgotten in a corner. In one of the scenes – where it was clear that the people had also been experiencing drought time, and had asked God for help – the congregation spontaneously thanked God with a beautiful song, after it had rained… Needless to say, that as we drove along, some of the words and even the tune of the song came back to me: ‘Didn’t it rain, children? Rain, all night long!! Didn’t -heh!!-didn’t heh!! – didn’t it rain all night long???” Yesterday, somebody phoned in at a radio program reporting that due to the rain in Kimberley, the town looked like Durban. Isn’t that wonderful? I had thought to myself: God is here, God is good!
This morning, watching the news, I was horrified by the reports of the death toll from all over the world due to the corona virus. In New York and many other places, they were short of everything that is needed to help the victims of the disease. Apparently, their biggest need is health care workers….. I felt that helplessness that Gideon must have felt when facing the might of the enemy. Namely, the big problem here is that there is no real cure for Covid 19. Health care workers are risking their own life, and indeed, would you be willing to do it, if you were asked to step in? It was also reported that many doctors have died as a result of the virus. And, even now, the reality is that all assistance anyone can give to the victims is limited. Many spend their last hours on earth in the hospitals without any family or friends nearby. For a moment I felt hopeless and depressed. But then I remembered: the “I have nothing [to give, to help]” is exactly the point where we must turn to Him (Luke 11:6)? God is here. God is good. We can pray! Are you with me?
Can we all pray and ask God that a cure will be found soon?
Blessings,
Henry Pool
www.breadonthewater.co.za
Annette Pool
www.heartforchildren.co.za
+27 83 629-7690
Henry, I read your comments at WUWT, thought I would comment here since the WUWT site is already overloaded with comments.
I think you misunderstand the action of GHG in the atmosphere. GHG’s absorb at certain wavelengths which means they absorb some surface emissions which would otherwise escape to space. The concentration in PPM does not give a good indication as to how strong this absorption is because it depends on how potent an absorber the molecule in question is. For this reason spectroscopists talk in terms of absorbance. 1 absorbance is an amount of material that will absorb 90% of the incident light at the wavelength of interest. If we use 2* the amount of material (either double the concentration or double the path length) the first half absorbs 90% and the second half absorbs 90% of what remains ie 99% in total and the absorbance will be 2 abs. Thus absorbance is proportional to the total amount of material which for Earth’s atmosphere means absorbance is proportional to concentration.
So what is the total absorbance of atmospheric CO2 over the distance from surface to space at the line center? At 400 ppm its about 3000 abs. That’s about as transparent at the line center as a brick. so CO2 is saturated and further increase in concentration has no further impact? Yes but No, CO2 is saturated but further increase does have an impact and that impact is logarithmic as I hope to explain below.
Any gas that absorbs at certain wavelengths must also emit at those wavelengths and the emissivity must exactly equal the absorptivity. It is easy to show that otherwise net heat could be transferred from a colder body to a warmer body. However whereas absorbance depends only on absorptivity emission depends both on emissivity AND on temperature and this is where it gets interesting.
Right throughout the atmospheric column CO2 is absorbing 14.7 micron radiation and also emitting 14.7 micron radiation. For any 1abs layer (1/3000 of the total atmosphere) 90% of the 14.7 micron radiation incident on that layer is absorbed but the gas emits at a level given by its temperature. The surface emission is all absorbed in the first 10 meters or less. Thereafter the level of 14.7 micron radiation is simply dependent on the temperature at that altitude. It is only the last 1 abs layer that can emit to space which for our atmosphere is at the tropopause or lower stratosphere. But the surface is significantly warmer than the topopause thus the 14.7 micron emission from the surface is greater than the 14.7 micron emission from the tropopause and thus the 14.7 micron radiation escaping to space is reduced so Earth loses less energy.
OK but why does increasing CO2 have any further impact? Simple, the absorption lines are not boxcars but rather profiles very close to gaussians and gaussians have a very interesting property. Convolving a gaussian with itself creates new gaussian with a larger standard deviation. In spectroscopic terms, convolving a gaussian with itself is effectively what happens when one doubles the concentration of a GHG which is saturated at the line center. Thus as the concentration increases the apparent line width increases in a logarithmic fashion (same amount of widening for each doubling). Thus the GHG absorbs over an increasing range of wavelengths as the concentration increases so the difference between surface emission and tropopause emission applies over a greater range of wavelengths – each doubling giving about he same increase in range of wavelengths.
CO2 currently reduces Earth’s energy loss to space by about 30 watts/sqM and we are around 10-11 doublings beyond saturation (depending on exactly what abs you consider saturation) so doubling CO2 will increase the energy retained by around 3 watts/sqM which would translate to around 1C of warming (both sides of the debate roughly agree on this number). However 1C of warming by the time we get to 560 ppm CO2 is not an issue. The warmists claim massive +ve feedback from other GHG’s especially water vapour and that is a FAR more contentious issue (and one I very seriously question).
I hope this makes sense. You have my email address from this post. Please don’t publish it but feel free to contact me if you desire further discussion.