no...ricter... that is what I have been telling you guys, NASA states co2 is a thermostat for a reason...it warms and cools. Co2's warming impact falls off logarithimically. (see the graph below) while the earth's cooling responses do not seem to drop off logarithmically. particularly probably the water vapor response. And I believe I have read that as you add more co2 to the atmosphere it also starts blocking more of the suns energy coming in. So eventually you hit the point where co2 starts acting more as a shield than as a blanket. its a very complex system and science does not have it wired yet... which is why I equivocate.
Clean Energy Fuels has been building nat gas fuel stations up and down the west coast, but they need a player like XOM to get in on the build out to make it work coast to coast. I lost my ass in CLNE waiting for that to happen. You are right that between big oil lobbyists and lazy republicans the nuke plants can't get going. Crazy old school environmentalists and cowardly democrats play their part as well in holding things up. The problem is fixable and they won't do it. None of them, all parties, all guilty of talking shit and doing nothing of substance. What's that tell you about the government that you guys love so much?
I wouldn't want to even guess without thinking about it a long time. I am not even sure my analysis is correct, I just assumed that if somehow by magic we could create a moon with a CO2 atmosphere that the concentration profile with altitude would be a nearly a horizontal line because of such a low gravitational field. With regard to the Earth, I am not even sure that during daytime the effect of CO2 on our Earth is net cooling it might be very slightly net warming because the concentration of CO2 at low altitudes is higher. The point is that on Earth any net cooling or warming during the day due to CO2 is going to be small compared to all the major cooling and warming mechanisms going on. At night, there is no question that the greenhouse effect plays an important role. But our hypothetical moon atmosphere is very different. It has only one component. There I think unlimited cooling during the day if we kept adding CO2 to the atmosphere is impossible. For one thing the CO2 is going to condense and covert to the solid phase at some point on the dark side and become microcrystalline particles. I think it is far more important to recognize that CO2's greenhouse effect on Earth is only going to be significant at night when there is no scattering or absorption cooling at higher altitudes. On the other hand, we don't need to do a complicated experiment to know the non-condensing greenhouse gases have a weaker effect compared to that of clouds in a night sky. We only need to spend two nights in the desert. One night with a clear cloudless sky; the other with an uncharacteristically overcast sky. I wish I could correctly model the Earth, Sun and Moon and accurately predict future Earth temperature what would happen in each scenario. If I could, I'd invite you to join me in Stockholm and we'd share a bottle of Champagne. One of the interesting, to me, things I learned from thinking about your pesky questions, is how important high altitude scattering is as a shielding mechanism. Jem has been harping on this for a long time, but I just assumed that in the case of CO2 it probably wasn't as important as the greenhouse contribution. Now I'm not so sure that during the day there isn't a net cooling effect from CO2 (not at night of course). The problem is I don't know exactly the relative scattering contribution of the various gases --if I wasn't so lazy, I'd look that up. They are all going to scatter. There is mostly nitrogen, so that's got to be a big contributor. Probably blue light, right. The sky is blue, there is way more nitrogen, so that's why I suppose we say blue scatters more than yellow or red which will be scattered by lessor, and larger atmospheric components. (I'm guessing obviously, but the wavelengths scattered are determined by molecular size.. N2 is smaller than CO2.) It is pretty evident from looking at that solar spectrum graph I posted that scattering plays a big role in cutting down the amount of shorter wavelength solar emr reaching the Earth. It is a much bigger role than I had realized.
It does have an affect on visible emr, however. It scatters visible light, somewhere in the longer visible I would guess. At higher altitudes, scattering is an important shielding mechanism. CO2 participates. Also though CO2 isn't a good IR absorber, what absorbing it does at higher altitudes also is net shielding. These are "cooling" mechanisms that CO2 participates in. It's something Jem has been harping on a long time.
I had a feeling you'd get into the gravity bit at some point, to try to derail the thought experiment. Look, if we kept adding CO2 to the Moon (and it stuck) eventually we'd have Venus.
where is venus relative to the sun? What would be the "daytime" temperature on Venus without CO2? Does it have any other gasses than CO2 near its surface that would be much better absorbers of IR than CO2? What would be the "nighttime" temperature without CO2 (Or other gases if they are present)?
Mercury is much closer to the sun yet it's cooler on the day side than Venus. Daytime surfaces on Venus would be colder than Mercury without its CO2 atmosphere.
But more wavelengths come in at higher frequencies than are reradiated from the earth and it's atmosphere because as they interact with earth and atmosphere they tend toward becoming lower frequencies which are then intercepted by the CO2. So CO2 acts to warm the earth on balance. Because it is relatively transparent to all but long wavelengths. Look pie, you can pretend to be a climate scientist, but you're not. James Hansen would make look like a fool in a debate about it. There is no question at all that cigarettes kill and that man is causing rapid global warming. None.
The several things about Venus that set it apart and make it very hot are its day length, its high geothermal activity, its blanketing of sulfuroxides including sulfuric acid, and its small axial tilt of only a few degrees. All of these things, together with its location close to the sun, are going to make for a very hot planet. Its mean temperature is similar to the high temperature on mercury .It is popular to attribute its high temperature to a runaway greenhouse effect, but I think these other factors are probably more important. You won't be able to get Venus just by covering the moon with a dense layer of CO2.