Mr. Foyt, I’m sorry your memory is short these days. I’ll paste my previous reply to your nonsense about the Ksp and soda can below, but the quick summary is that your example of soda cans, Ksp and CO2 is great for liquids. Thankfully though, we live in an atmosphere that is a gas where the chemistry/physics is different, longer explanation below (from the previous rebuttal against your misunderstandings of the chemistry/physics).
More importantly, ice cores, sediment cores, tree rings and the other data sources are actually very, very good guesses. We can correlate them precisely using known temperatures during the past 100 or so years. They are still guesses (like virtually all of science), but guesses backed by exabytes of data (like virtually all of science). Just like it’s a guess that next week the temperature in Tampa will be higher than the temperature in Ushuaia, also backed by lots of data.
I hope you’re just trolling us scientists with your Chemistry 101 examples, but just in case, here’s the Ksp lesson from last month:
Mr. Foyt, thank you for finally showing that the emperor has no clothes. I was really hoping for some research showing that global warming is the cause of rising CO2. Instead you seem to be confused by the difference between CO2’s properties as a gas, liquid and solid, while interacting with a gas (atmosphere), liquid (ocean/lakes) and solid (I’ll leave other planetary bodies out of this discussion). The Ksp of CO2 in water plays no real role in the atmospheric interaction of CO2 and the photons from the earth and sun, I’ll explain below.
But first, I do like that you included the can of coke though, it’s always a great way of explaining some fundamental physics and chemistry. Unfortunately according to both Henry’s Law which you allude to, and the ideal gas law which plays a greater role when a can is opened, don’t bolster your argument regarding atmospheric CO2.
First off, both a cold can of coke and a warm can of coke release CO2 when opened. I’m assuming by cold we mean refrigerated (not super cooled to near 0K). And by hot I’m assuming warmed in the sun or left by a heater (not superheated to a plasma or something). When you open either can, and release the pressure, via the ideal gas law and Henry’s Law we know that some of the CO2 that dissolved in the liquid immediately boils out due to the reduced pressure (same way blood boils in space despite the very low temperatures). So I’m not sure where you have done experiments showing a cold can of coke will absorb CO2 in normal conditions. In fact to get the liquid coke to absorb CO2, the canning facility has to inject it under rather high pressure which causes the temperature to rise significantly. Anyhow, enough of the coke can, it really has nothing to do with your statement about global warming causing an increase in CO2 (even if we include the oceans, the analogy is so misconstrued as to be dysfunctional).
So, in the atmosphere, CO2 is in it’s gaseous form and with photons, not liquids where Ksp plays a role. So we have to abandon that red herring and instead focus on radiative transfer. Here we just look at CO2 as a molecule, and the earth and sun as sources of radiation (not the bad kind at the really short end of the spectrum to the right, but the longer ones more towards the middle part of the spectrum we call infrared).
It turns out that by looking at the blackbody curves of the sun (roughly 5780K) and the earth (roughly 255K), and using Wien’s Displacement Law, Stefan Boltzman Law along with Planck Function (I include these for the geeks and the curious who want to look them up), we can figure out how those CO2 molecules are effectively transparent at 5780K, but act like a barrier at 255K. So that radiation (aka heat) from the sun makes it through to the surface, but the radiation from earth, is absorbed by the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere (and yes, even more so by other molecules including H2O, the most effective). Because of the physics behind electrons getting excited, the CO2 molecule increases it’s vibration/energy. As explained in other comments, increasing the energy of a molecule is the definition of increased temperature. This radiative transfer process where CO2 is transparent to incoming radiation, but absorbs outgoing radiation is the same process that allows a small glass building in the back yard to be transparent to the incoming radiation from the sun, but opaque to the outgoing radiation from the ground, and we call it a greenhouse.
So as you can see, it is not the Ksp of CO2 in water, or the can of coke, but how the CO2 in the atmosphere and black body radiative transfer physics that demonstrates irrefutably that an increase in CO2 raises the temperature of an gas. Now we can debate if that raised temperature is good or bad, but you cannot debate the physics, and nobody does, at least on this planet with our current knowledge of Newtonian physics.
Now in reality this is a good thing, it is this physics that makes life as we know it possible on the surface of the earth. This radiative transfer has made the planet warm enough to live on. And thankfully because CO2 is a trace gas and doesn’t absorb too much of that earthly radiation, we’re not in a Venus situation where CO2 is the primary gas in the atmosphere and spacecraft melt/die in minutes because it’s really hot, like damn hot.
So, in the end, blackbody physics and CO2 is not the same as aqueous physics and CO2. So Ksp not so relevant, Mie and Rayleigh Scattering very relevant.