A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 3: Photons and the Warming and Cooling of Earth

It is really pretty simple.

What we call light is made of photons, which are massless and appear as either waves or particles, in the crazy dualism of quantum mechanics that we humans can’t really wrap our minds around. As with energy, we don’t know what photons really are. But we can describe what photons do. Subatomic particles emit and absorb photons, and the Sun’s photons that hit Earth are what have made it warm. Otherwise, Earth would be at nearly absolute zero, as nearly the entire universe is. Earth warms in daylight and at night it cools, as photons are absorbed during the day and photons escape to space at night. Incoming sunlight is mainly in the visible spectrum, and what escapes at night is in the less-energetic infrared spectrum, which humans cannot see. The Sun has been slowly brightening over its life and one day it will cook Earth, but that is over a billion years away, when it destroys the ocean on its way to destroying all life on Earth.

A key aspect of photons in quantum mechanics is that each atom or molecule will only absorb photons that have compatible frequencies that correspond to the photon’s energy, and as far as sunlight is concerned, only electrons absorb and emit photons (not nuclei). The rule is the shorter the wavelength the higher the frequency and the greater the energy. The photons captured by electrons hit by daylight eventually are released, with the exception of photons captured by photosynthesis, which is quite a trick in the marvelous chemistry of life. A tiny fraction of incoming sunlight is captured by photosynthetic organisms, which is the basis for all complex life on Earth, including us humans.

Earth’s atmosphere is nearly all comprised of one-and-two atom molecules (nitrogen, oxygen, and argon), and they do not absorb visible light or infrared light, as their energy levels can’t use those photons. A tiny fraction of the atmosphere is comprised of molecules with more atoms (primarily water and carbon dioxide). Those molecules have far more complex bonds than two-atom molecules, and they can absorb infrared photons for a brief time. They are soon released, but when they are, the direction is random and some of the released photons aim back at Earth. That release back to Earth makes Earth’s surface about 60 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it would otherwise be. Since water is usually a liquid on Earth’s surface today, and it freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it is a rather unreliable gas for absorbing infrared radiation, and it only lasts in the atmosphere for about a week while carbon dioxide lasts for a century.

Carbon dioxide is the critical gas for determining Earth’s surface temperature. Earth would have become a big ball of ice if not for carbon dioxide, but that would not have lasted, as oxygenic photosynthesis kept Earth’s water from being blasted into space, and Earth might look something like Mars instead. But carbon dioxide is a common enough substance in the universe and Earth’s volcanism belches out carbon dioxide, which feeds Earth’s carbon cycle.

As I wrote in that recent post, what really drove home the relationship of carbon dioxide and climate to me was studying paleology. Scientists who reconstruct Earth’s past climate do not get oil-company money and have no flagrant conflicts of interest on the matter that I know of, which is one reason why I studied paleology, as it is largely free of corrupting influences. How the dinosaurs went extinct has little political-economic relevance today.

Until our fossil-fuel age, carbon dioxide was introduced to the carbon cycle by volcanism and was removed by deposition and then subduction by plate tectonics. Carbon-dioxide levels have slowly declined since Earth’s earliest days. Life in Earth is slowly being carbon starved, and in a billion years or so, complex life won’t survive the carbon starvation, before the Sun can blast the ocean into space.

I recently wrote a lengthy post on Global Warming. The basics are not disputed by any scientists on Earth:

1. Carbon dioxide and methane trap infrared radiation, and when they are in our atmosphere, they warm it by trapping outbound infrared radiation;

2. Carbon dioxide and methane have been increasing rapidly in Earth’s atmosphere;

3. Human activities are nearly solely responsible for the rising levels of those gases;

4. Earth has been rapidly warming since the late 1800s.

As I see it, there are a few reasons why there is any debate at all on Global Warming. The Swedish scientist Arrhenius calculated, in 1896, how much Earth’s temperature would rise from humanity’s burning of fossil fuels. His calculations are still relevant and are not credibly challenged that I am aware of. The basics have not been disputed for a century. Fred Singer was Brian O’Leary’s mentor early in Brian’s career as a climate scientist. But Singer sold his soul to the hydrocarbon lobby and he infamously altered a report on acid rain to create the illusion of uncertainly over what was causing it. Singer also attacked second-hand smoke’s harm on behalf of Big Tobacco, and his lasting claim to fame was trying to create doubt on Global Warming among the public, when no scientists doubted it. Lively debate is a hallmark of good science, but Singer created an illusion of debate where there wasn’t any, and our corrupt media gave him a platform to inflict his deceptions on an unwitting public. The right wing leapt on Singer’s fraudulent bandwagon, and they almost uniformly deny Global Warming to this day. I have long suffered through right-wing arguments that deny or minimize Global Warming. Those arguments were almost never scientifically literate and instead those right wingers parroted talking points. I receive their stuff to this day, and I even get Flat Earth material from them.

If we leave aside the right wing on this subject, the debate among scientists is how fast Earth will warm and what the effects will be, not whether it will warm. On the warming, the numbers are still around Arrhenius’s calculations. There are definitely uncertainties, such as how big the effect of the thawing permafrost will be, what might happen if the Gulf Stream collapses (it could affect the thermohaline circulation, which would have catastrophic climatic effects), the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland could melt faster or slower than currently predicted, and other effects. But no credible climate scientist will deny those basics listed above.

And nobody is credibly denying that our burning of hydrocarbon fuels is solely responsible for the 50% increase in carbon-dioxide levels since the 1800s. That is likely the most dramatic rise in Earth’s history. That magnitude of change normally takes millions of years, and humans have done it in little over a century.

One of the ironies of the comments to a my “race of the catastrophes” post, which dismissed environmental concerns, to emphasize the emergency in Gaza, Syria, and the region, is that Global Warming is literally making the Middle East uninhabitable (1, 2, 3). Who is going to “win” in the Middle East, if it becomes uninhabitable? What we see today, among various vying groups, is like fighting over the best seats on the Titanic.

Part of the right wing’s ire is because of the “solutions” proposed by the likes of Bill Gates. His “philanthropy” seems almost entirely fraudulent, which is standard for the billionaire “philanthropists.” But that is no reason to throw aside over a century of scientific findings which have never been credibly disputed. I know what the permanent solution is, and the answer to all of our major problems, but a worthy discussion of it does not really exist on Earth today, which is the most surreal aspect to me. I am trying to mount that discussion.