Hey Scott,What you said about water vapour:'... but water...

Hey Scott,

What you said about water vapour:

'... but water vapour, with or with fishy pieces and fried calamari from the explosion, holds heat energy for a relatively short time.'

This is very, very, wrong.

Water has a very high specific heat. I've mentioned it before, but notice how long it takes to boil water on the stove, and notice how long it takes for it to cool down. Water has the highest specific heat of all substances. The molecule itself is incredibly able to resist heating and equally able to retain it after heating. The single bonds of hydrogen to the electronegative oxygen molecule are incredibly suited for this.

H2O has the kingly ability to resist heating and cooling in the atmosphere. The other gases are barely pawns in this game.

I noticed another poster attached a chart of specific heat of common substances, although I scrolled through quickly and haven't had a chance to read through the thread, but you should take a look at it.

The resistance to heating and corresponding resistance to cooling of H2O, and its ubiquity in the atmosphere, is the reason it does the heavy lifting in insulating against temperature change. Relatively speaking, CO2 is useless. And we're talking about an extra 140 molecules per million anthro CO2 since the industrial revolution.

The other gases you mentioned, methane, nitrous, are irrelevant in this discussion. CO2 is the main 'pollutant', the target for net-zero.

Also, I took a quick look at the attachment you posted re ocean acidification. Firstly, the ocean is basic, not acidic. The website quotes a reduction of pH from like 8.2 to 8.04 (or something like that) over the record. Even if you blame all of that change in pH on CO2 (and you can't, due to myriad other factors), there is a long, long way to go before 'ocean acidification.

Keep in mind that the pH scale is a base 10 logarithm. Let's say, for ease of explanation, that CO2 has reduced ocean pH by 0.2. This means that, to reduce it by a further 0.2, there needs to be 10x extra free hydrogen put into the system. The next 0.2 would require 100x more free H+. The following 0.2 would require 1000x more free H+. The next 0.2 drop would take 10000x more free H+. After all that, we're still somewhere ~ ph 7.2, ie, still very much alkaline.

If you look at the pH tolerance of marine organisms, you'll see that they handle a pH change of 1 full unit, no qualms. Coastal organisms routinely experience these kind of changes.

Q