Newark Advertiser reader letters: Industry adds to global warming

Mr Southgate’s letter of November 21 (A Need To Understand Past) seems to argue that since the “warm periods’” of the past that he cites cannot have been due to “anthropogenic CO2” — i.e. carbon dioxide arising from industrial society — the current Earth warming is probably due to another “warm period”rather than that which he says has been “branded the dubious culprit”, i.e. “manmade carbon dioxide”.

Visiting the internet locates many articles about global warming . One on the website of the Columbia Climate School is headed “How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming?”

It says: “When sunlight reaches Earth, the surface absorbs some of the light’s energy and reradiates it as infrared waves … These infrared waves travel up into the atmosphere and will escape back into space if unimpeded. …[but] CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions.”

About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect’.

“Today, CO2 levels are higher than they have been in at least 3 million years … in 2019 alone, humans dumped 36.44 billion tonnes of CO2 , where it will linger for hundreds of years … to provide a heat-trapping blanket across the entire atmosphere.”

Mr Southgate asks, “Who in their right mind would think that all those natural cause elements immediately stopped 150 years ago?”

Nobody. But the evidence is that current CO2 levels add another element of warming. — Michael Bassey, Coddington.