The ocean has:
- specific heat of ~4J / g / K
- a mass of ~1.4 x 10 ^ 24 g
- a much lower viscosity than rock and soil, so it can convect on meaningful timescales
As such, it completely and utterly dominates short-term thermal storage on Earth's surface, and damps short-term fluctuations.
100%, no argument, you're right there. "Continental" desert climates far from the ocean are evidence of this.
But the atmosphere doesn't need thermal mass to warm the surface, it needs only finite optical depth at IR wavelengths, non-zero emissivity, and a nonzero kinematic viscosity.
Its thermal mass is insignificant compared to the ocean, just as your blanket's thermal mass is incomparably less than yours.
So your blanket, like the atmosphere, quickly heats up and starts conducting and radiating your own IR back at you.
A greater thermal mass would delay this, and make it LESS efficient at retaining heat over 24hrs.
Idk man, you're still talking about a change in a GAS that currently makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere. It just seems ridiculous to think that has any appreciable impact on warmth. It seems to me, given the dramatic impact of moisture & water vapor on temps, combined with the effect that greater amounts of CO2 has on plants, CO2 could legitimately cause temps to be lower because plants with pores that don't have to open as much to breathe will lose less water to evaporation...?
I think to whatever degree there are problems it all tends to really center around the lack of permaculture in terms of farming practices, the increasing loss of topsoil, & what all of that does to moisture retention. And then the lack of stable moisture levels leads to greater temp swings & potentially increases the likelihood of fires & other issues. But CO2 just seems to have nothing to do with any of it. It's like they just paid someone to come up with some mildly plausible thing to justify communist policies based on the fact that CO2 lasers exist & to apply the idea in a way that really makes no sense ouside of the gas mixture in a laser tube. And the idea that the atmosphere can actually be managed based on controlling a gas of such tiny % is like peak hubris. It seems far more ridculous than trying to manage an economy & we know how well that works.
I think desertification & micro managment & killing more than we grow are really the major problems, & those are the only things that really put us at odds with the environment or the atmosphere or anything else. The environment created us. If we just figure out what makes more things grow & do more of that, then we are on the right track. And I think more CO2 means more plants, & more plants mean more animals, & more animals & plants together create more stable water cycles, & all of that means more food, which means better lives for all of us.
That's exactly what the Rockefellers did, according to Ivor Cummins (who in my opinion usually has a good basis for what he says)
His story is that the Rockefellers came up with climate & pandemics as things that would justify a world government with no scientists in the room
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