The most recent climate stupidity suggests that American factories report their greenhouse gas emissions.  As we learned from our country’s first cap-and-trade rule in California, reporting led to required reduction of clean-burning natural gas.  Most factories in California have closed because of that rule.  It required a 75-percent reduction of natural gas — the factories’ only heat source — over five years.

Combustion of natural gas (methane) produces CO2 and H2O, the two building blocks of photosynthesis and organic life on this planet.  It is harmless and most likely beneficial to the environment.

At our gas-physics Weights and Measures facility in California, we tested carbon dioxide.  It cools about the same as dry air: 20 degrees in less than 4 minutes.  It cannot possibly retain heat from day to day (global warming).  We also tested our humid atmosphere, including the trace gases therein.  That cools about 1 degree every 32 minutes or 20 degrees in roughly 11 hours.  These tests prove that no gas — not carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane, nor even humid air — retains heat from day to day.

The scientific reality is, there is no such thing as a greenhouse gas.

So what is the source of the false greenhouse theory?  More importantly, why is it wrong?

After Al Gore arranged $22 billion annually for universities to study global warming, professors dredged up the old greenhouse theory to justify regulating carbon dioxide.  John Tyndall’s experiment and thirty-six-page paper, written in 1861, is the much referenced scientific study behind the greenhouse theory and global warming.

No new significant science has been added to the greenhouse theory since the paper was written.  Advocates even use some of Tyndall’s exact words from the paper.

John Tyndall spent two years building a large device that used a galvanometer indicator to measure gas temperature.  The galvanometer did not quantify temperature; it measured only the movement of a gauge with gradation marks from 0 to 100.  His use of an indicator with no calibrated temperature numbers led to his false conclusion, as you will read below.

On page three of his study, Tyndall described his measuring chamber as polished brass with rock-salt lenses at each end.  The subject gas would be trapped inside the brass chamber, and he produced heat that passed through both rock-salt lenses to a sensing device.  Sensing at the end of the chamber was a thermopile, which detects heat emanating through air.  It then sent a variable current to the galvanometer indicator.

Tyndall should have simply used a bi-metal temperature gauge, which had been invented about sixty years prior.  It seems that since the galvanometer and the thermopile devices were new inventions, he wanted to use them.

Tyndall noted that the galvanometer’s needle wagged like a compass.  This was likely caused by the thermopile, which is affected by open-atmosphere interference.  He made his first attempt to mitigate this by saying, “I therefore sought to replace the Berlin coil with a less magnetic one.”  So the galvanometer that he had purchased was degraded to be less sensitive and less accurate.

We never would have given our Weights and Measures approval for John Tyndall’s device due to this and several other reasons.

The inaccuracy resulted in Tyndall listing air as absorbing “0” temperature.  This proves the inaccuracy.  Dry air absorbs about 22 degrees on average each day.  For example, Death Valley has very dry air, and it absorbs an extreme amount of heat.  

Then Tyndall lists in increasing temperatures carbonic oxide, carbonic acid, nitrous oxide, and olefiant gas.  Olefiant gas is ethylene, which is the largest molecule in the group.  These are called compound molecules because they are two or more connected atoms, like CO2.  Air is a mixture of unconnected atoms, mostly oxygen and nitrogen.  When Tyndall’s galvanometer registered 1 on a scale of 100 for air and 70.3 for another gas (on pages 7–9), Tyndall concluded that the latter gas absorbed 70.3 times more temperature than air.

At this point, he ended his testing of relative temperature absorption to surmise what is now the greenhouse theory: since air absorbs almost no temperature, it is, in Tyndall’s words, “transparent to the rays of the sun,” which penetrate the air to warm the Earth’s surface.  Some temperature that is absorbed by Earth is radiated back up, and such small amount of temperature is absorbed by larger compound-molecule gases (greenhouse gases in today’s jargon). 

This sounds good.  However, the inaccuracy of Tyndall’s instrument and measuring air at near zero temperature led to his false conclusion about a so-called greenhouse effect.

The temperature he was measuring was obviously extremely low and below the accuracy range of his instrument.  Consider that the temperature of a single candle-type flame under a copper chamber filled with water, then through the copper wall, then through a rock-salt lens, into a brass chamber that would have leaked temperature, then through another rock-salt lens, then through open atmosphere, could have been below one degree Fahrenheit for all we know.  All the temperatures would have been within one degree of each other, not 70 times greater.

Throughout the final pages of his paper, Tyndall discussed these so-called enormous differences — when, in fact, they were likely so small that accurately measured results would disprove his greenhouse theory.

Our experiments proved this to be true.  The cooling time of dry air and carbon dioxide are very nearly the same.  There is little difference in heat absorption between small-molecule gases and large-molecule gases.

It is water vapor that retains the vast amount of heat, not the size of the molecule.  Large-molecule (compound) gases retain heat for minutes, not days.  There is no such thing as a greenhouse gas or any gas, including vaporous air, that retains heat from day to day (global warming).  Greenhouse gases are a scientific myth.

The author owned a Weights and Measures gas-physics test facility.  A condensed version of the author’s paper “Three Proofs Carbon Dioxide Causes No Warming in the Atmosphere — No Gas Causes Warming” is in his book The Ladder Out of Poverty (ch. 11). 

Image Wouter van Reeven via the European Space Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.