BY DAVID NORTH
White Rock
Standing In For Busier People
In his March 13 letter, https://losalamosreporter.com/2026/03/13/the-war-on-our-middle-class-our-countys-climate-action-plan-is-topic-of-townhall-meeting-set-for-march-19/, David Reagor explains “When the concentration of Carbon Dioxide reaches current values absorption in the infrared spectrum has saturated, and additional Carbon Dioxide has little energy to absorb.”
While Mr. Reagor makes some salient points in his letter, the above statement is misleading at best*. While the rate of temperature rise declines as more CO2 is added, the effect does not become trivial. This is best understood by considering his next sentence.
“As the concentration increases past current values only a small linewidth effect remains, and the change is (sic) total heat budget will only be parts per thousand.”
First, the small linewidth argument is counter to current science. It was dealt with over a decade ago (see “The greenhouse effect and carbon dioxide” Wenyi Zhong and Joanna D. Haigh, Imperial College London) who established that the continued temperature increase is due to a fairly broad spectral absorption by Carbon Dioxide. This was somewhat unexpected and largely unexplained until very recently (see “Fermi Resonance and the Quantum Mechanical Basis of Global Warming”, R. Wordsworth et al 2024 Planet. Sci. J. 5 67).
Claiming something is only “parts per thousand” means exactly nothing in this context, but does make additional absorption sound trivial. Consider, though, that our current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is less than half of one part per hundred thousand (less than a thousandth of one part per thousand) and it becomes clear that those pesky parts per thousand can add up to trouble.
What we’re left with is one unquantified fact (global temperature rise is slightly less from each CO2 molecule added) and one question to which none of us know the answer:
When you’re playing chicken with billions of lives, when do you finally step on the brake?
To put that in perspective, nobody knows exactly where the collision is, but it is certainly not far down the road we’re on. And we know the other guy (in this case, physics) isn’t going to stop.
* It’s also wrong. If the absorption has saturated, by definition there should be not “little energy” available, but none. This is perhaps just an unfortunate choice of words, but it could also be construed as designed to mislead. Sorry, I couldn’t resist pointing that out.