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The climate is constantly changing both due to natural factors and the activities of man. For the portion of it that is caused by man, there are endless arguments that take place regarding how much of an impact there is and what should be done to mitigate it.
Unfortunately, it has become a political issue, which often makes it hard to get to the truth of any situation.
Anyone who regularly debates this issue on the side of wanting to do more to minimize the effect humans have on the climate has undoubtedly heard the argument that says we don’t need to worry about greenhouse gas emissions because the atmosphere can hit a point where it is saturated with this gas and it doesn’t cause any further harm.
In almost all cases, the person making the argument will say that the atmosphere is already saturated or that it will be very soon, so there is no need to worry or to stop burning fossil fuels.
Interestingly, this argument is not just one of the oldest, it is actually far older than any debate about climate change at all. Let’s look at the history.
In 1824 Joseph Fourier calculated how much heat the Earth gets from the sun and realized that the Earth should be colder. Much colder.
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About 30 years later, Eunice Foote and John Tyndall figured out why, at least in part. They found that carbon dioxide is able to trap heat in. This was proven by putting different amounts of that gas into a jar and measuring the temperature after it was in sunlight. This was the earliest time when the concept of what are now called greenhouse gasses was discovered.
Another 40 years passed and Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist, pointed out that humans are burning a lot of coal and other fuels, and said that the carbon dioxide could cause the planet to heat up. He didn’t say this as a warning, but just an observation. He ran some calculations that looked at what the global temperature would look like if the amount of CO2 was doubled in the atmosphere and published his results (which were surprisingly accurate for only using this one measurement).
Nobody had a problem with his findings except one person. A rival physicist, Knut Angstrom, who set out to disprove the theory. He eventually said that carbon dioxide was already working to capture a large portion of the infrared radiation that is reflected off the Earth and that other wavelengths would not be captured regardless, so additional CO2 in the atmosphere would have minimal impact.
This was the first time the greenhouse gas atmospheric saturation argument was made, and it is still a popular argument today.
The problem with this argument, however, is that it (along with Arrhenius’s claims) treat CO2 in the atmosphere the same no matter where it is. Today, we understand that the atmosphere is not a fixed area that is the same from the top to the bottom.
Instead, while the atmosphere near the Earth is quite thick, it thins out gradually as it gets further away from the surface of the planet. That is why there is so much less oxygen at the top of a mountain, for example, than there is at sea level.
So, interestingly, when there is extra CO2 near the surface of the planet, it may capture a greater percentage of the infrared radiation, keeping things warmer. The fact that less of that radiation gets up into the upper atmosphere to get captured by any CO2 at that level actually means that the temperatures here drop lower.
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The fact that Arrhenius and Angstrom came up with these theories at all is actually quite impressive given the limited understanding of the atmosphere at the time.
It might go to show that when people oppose each other out of a good old fashion grudge, they often come up with better theories than when everything is driven by political differences.
In the end, however, the argument that the atmosphere is or will soon be saturated by CO2 and is therefore not a problem is wrong, and it is still important to minimize the amount of greenhouse gasses that are produced each year.
If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.