I’ve got a lot of respect for the mythbusters.
They do the kind of experiments that my old physics teacher would have loved. They test myths using established laws of physics and interpret real life events in scientific terms. I think my favourite was when they proved that if there are birds in the back of a truck the weight is not affected by whether the birds are in flight or sitting on the floor.
But last week they got it wrong big time.
It was apparently a “young scientists” special. The emphasis here is on the word “young” – in this case primary school students. In reality a person cannot be a “young scientist” until they are first scientists – and this means at least a bachelors degree. And this explains why the kids they had on that day got it so wrong – they were too young to have had any formal schooling in the critical interpretation of data, and how one forms conclusions.
In this case it was about so-called “climate change” which I will hereafter refer to as anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
The experiment apparently was to test whether carbon dioxide and methane were causing global warming. To do this they gassed up a chamber with methane, another one with carbon dioxide, and another one as the control.
They then shone light into them and monitored the change in temperature. Unsurprisingly, the chambers containing the two greenhouse gases heated up slightly.
From this these “young scientists” drew the conclusion that carbon dioxide and methane were contributing to dangerous global warming.
Unfortunately, they seem not to have understood that the fact that these two gases are greenhouse gases is not in dispute, and that they will absorb infra-red radiation, thereby trapping heat. This is, after all, why they are called “greenhouse gases”. Perhaps in their next episode they will go on to prove that white is white, and that black is black.
No, the debate is not about whether these gases are greenhouse gases, but whether there is enough of them to exert any measurable influence on the climate. As it happens the mythbusters didn’t bother telling us the concentrations of the gases they were using, not exactly a minor oversight, but I’ll say more about that later.
I won’t bother discussing methane, and as it is mostly produced by herbivores, and has little to do with man
No, as we know, the present discussions all involve carbon dioxide. Every “Green” scheme you hear of these days is all about “cutting emissions”.
So, carbon dioxide, how much of it is there now, how does it trap heat, and were the “young scientists” right? Tomorrow, we’ll have a look at it.