Summary and conclusions

The great public debate concerning global warming has culminated around two main questions, viz.:

 

Rise of CO₂ due to natural causes?

With respect to the first question, many scientists believe that the increase in CO₂ concentration is caused by burning of fossil fuel and by other chemical processes, whereas other scientists think that the increased CO₂-content is due to a higher ocean temperature, resulting in a decreasing CO₂ solubility.

 

Calculations of the CO₂-equilibria and solubility in the ocean revealed that for raising the CO₂ concentration from 320ppm to 380ppm, as observed during the last 40 years, the temperature of the ocean had to increase at least 27°C over that period of time, whereas the observed increase in temperature amounted to less than 0.5°C. So we have to conclude that the increasing CO₂ content is not caused by thermal desorption from the ocean. Because further no sources of sufficiently large capacity are known we must suppose, that the increasing CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere is indeed mainly due to human activities.

 

Global warming the result of the increasing CO₂-content?

With respect to the second question we performed some calculations with a model, into which steady state is assumed, meaning that if energy is radiated from some spot in the atmosphere it is at once replenished from elsewhere by conduction, convection and/or radiation, keeping the temperature constant. The radiated energy itself is described by a model based on Lambert-Beer's law, the equation of Stefan-Boltzmann and the radiation law of Max Planck.