Anyone Watch Cosmos?

[bombadil.360]

having no dog in this fight, all I'd like to say is that any idiot can have a doctorate degree, even I have one, not in science, but still

heck, even Abbas has a doctorate that he earned with a thesis where he challenges the holocaust lol...

the academia has its agendas too.

 

[RetroGrow]

"Scientists" can be bought and paid for too. Does anyone really believe that climate deniers are not being bought and paid for by big oil/coal?

 

[gekolite]

I liked the Venus space lander that they kept refrigerated after landing , long enough to photo and conduct surface analysis before it shut down from the extreme heat, caused by high co2 levels in the atmosphere , holding the solar heat in.

 

[dddaver]

I'm pretty sure that was Russian. I liked that innovative idea too.

 

[igrowone]

^^^ that was a pretty cool probe(pun intended)
it did do some close up pics of the landing surface i think? Venus's atmosphere has limited visibility
suppose another probe is landed with better imaging and what does it see?
half melted SUV's all over the place

 

[trichrider]

From the Wikipedia page on the petition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition

"According to Robinson, the petition has over 31,000 signatories. Over 9,000 report to have a Ph.D.,[1][2][3] mostly in engineering.[5] The NIPCC (2009) Report lists 31,478 degreed signatories, including 9,029 with Ph.D.s.[6] The list has been criticized for its lack of verification, with pranksters successfully submitting Charles Darwin, members of the Spice Girls and characters from Star Wars, and getting them briefly included on the list.[7]"

Engineers ARE NOT EXPERTS in climate science. Individually, they could very well know absolutely nothing about the intricacies of how the planets climate works.

Here is another critique of your petition, which to a normal thinking person will make a whole lotta sense....

From an article on Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/the-30000-global-warming_b_243092.html

The 30,000 Global Warming Petition Is Easily-Debunked Propaganda

To say that the oft-touted "30,000 Global Warming Petition" project stinks would be the understatement of the year.

I thought it would be timely to once again break down this flawed piece of global warming denier propaganda after it was mentioned last night in Daily Show host Jon Stewart's interview with US Energy Secretary of Energy, Dr. Stephen Chu.

.1% of Signers Have a Background in Climatology

The Petition Project website offers a breakdown of the areas of expertise of those who have signed the petition.

In the realm of climate science it breaks it breaks down as such:
Atmospheric Science (113)

Climatology (39)
Meteorology (341)
Astronomy (59)
Astrophysics (26)

So only .1% of the individuals on the list of 30,000 signatures have a scientific background in Climatology. To be fair, we can add in those who claim to have a background in Atmospheric Science, which brings the total percentage of signatories with a background in climate change science to a whopping .5%.

The page does not break out the names of those who do claim to be experts in Climatology and Atmospheric Science, which makes even that .5% questionable [see my section on "unverifiable mess" below].

This makes an already questionable list seem completely insignificant given the nature of scientific endeavor.
When I think I'm having chest pains I don't go to the dermatologist, I go to a cardiologist because it would be absurd to go to skin doctor for a heart problem. It would be equally absurd to look to a scientist with a background in medicine (of which there are 3,046 on the petition) for an expert opinion on the science of climate change. With science broken down into very narrow specialties a scientific expert in one specialty does not make that person an automatic authority in all things science.

In this way the logic of the 30,000 petition is completely flawed, which isn't surprising given its questionable beginnings.

The Petition's Sordid Beginnings

The petition first emerged in April 1998 and was organized by Art Robinson of the self-proclaimed "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" (OISM) [their headquarters are the Photo Inset].
Along with the Exxon-backed George C. Marshall Institute, Robinson's group co-published the infamous "Oregon Petition" claiming to have collected 17,000 signatories to a document arguing against the realities of global warming.

The petition and the documents included were all made to look like official papers from the prestigious National Academy of Science. They weren't, and this attempt to mislead has been well-documented.

Along with the petition there was a cover letter from Dr. Fred Seitz (who has since died), a notorious climate change denier (and big tobacco scientist) who over 30 years ago was the president of the National Academy of Science.

Also attached to the petition was an apparent "research paper" titled Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. The paper was made to mimic what a research paper would look like in the National Academy's prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy journal. The authors of the paper were Robinson, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon (both oil-backed scientists) and Robinson's son Zachary. With the signature of a former NAS president and a research paper that appeared to be published in one of the most prestigious science journals in the world, many scientists were duped into signing a petition based on a false impression.

The petition was so misleading that the National Academy issued a news release stating: "The petition project was a deliberate attempt to mislead scientists and to rally them in an attempt to undermine support for the Kyoto Protocol. The petition was not based on a review of the science of global climate change, nor were its signers experts in the field of climate science."

An Unverifiable Mess

Time and time again, I have had emails from researchers who have taken random samples of names from the list and Google searched them for more information. I urge others to do the same. What you'll quickly find is either no information, very little information or information substantiating the fact that the vast majority of signers are completely unqualified in the area of climate change science.


For example:


"Munawwar M. Akhtar" - no info other than the fact that he is a signatory on the petition.


"Fred A. Allehoff" - no info other than the fact that he is a signatory on the petition.


"Ernest J. Andberg" - no info other than the fact that he is a signatory on the petition.


"Joseph J. Arx" - no info other than the fact that he is a signatory on the petition.


"Adolph L. Amundson" - a paper by Amundson on the "London Tunnel Water Treatment System Acid Mine Drainage." [PDF]


"Henry W. Apfelbach" - an Orthopedic Surgeon


"Joe R. Arechavaleta" - runs an Architect and Engineering
company.


And this is only names I picked in the "A's." I could go on, but you get my point. The list is very difficult to verify as a third-party, but this hasn't stopped the Petition from bouncing around the internet and showing up in mainstream media.


Given all this it seems to me that anyone touting this as proof that "global warming is a hoax" completely misunderstands the process of scientific endeavor or has completely exhausted any real argument that rightfully brings into to doubt the reality of climate change.


Or, then again, they could just be in it for the money.


.

your team made up the rules...

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was created by a group of scientists concerned about flaws in the organization and procedures of another organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), so it is necessary and appropriate that those flaws be presented here.

Though often described by scientists and media as an independent scientific organization, the IPCC is in fact an arm of the United Nations. Dr. Steven J. Allen reminded us of the true nature of the United Nations in a recent article for the Capital Research Center:
“The United Nations [is] a famously corrupt body in which most votes are controlled by kleptocracies and outright dictatorships. Most of the member-states, as they’re called, are rated as either “not free” or “partly free” by Freedom House, and both Communist China and Putinist Russia have veto power. And any settlement of the Global Warming issue by the UN would entail massive transfers of wealth from the citizens of wealthy countries to the politicians and bureaucrats of the poorer countries. Other than that, one supposes, the IPCC is entirely trustworthy on the issue. (Well, aside from the fact that the IPCC’s climate models predicting Global Warming have already failed.)”*

• History
• Procedural Problems
• False Consensus

History
The IPCC was created in 1988 largely due to the efforts of Maurice Strong, a billionaire and self-confessed socialist, as part of a larger campaign to justify giving the United Nations the authority to tax businesses in developed countries and redistribute trillions of dollars a year to developing nations. Strong had previously succeeded in bringing about the creation of the UN Environment Programme in 1972 and served as its first executive director. The IPCC is a joint project of that entity and the World Meteorological Organization.

(Strong was subsequently implicated in corruption surrounding the UN’s Oil-for-Food-Program and has resigned from his UN positions. According to John Izzard writing for the Australian publication Quadrant Online, <1> “Following his exposure for bribery and corruption in the UN’s Oil-for-Food scandal Maurice Strong was stripped of many of his 53 international awards and honours he had collected during his lifetime working in dual role of arch conservationist and ruthless businessman.”<1>)
..................
Strong and his allies at the UN gave the IPCC a very narrow brief by defining climate change in the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Article 1.2, as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.” IPCC’s mandate is not to study climate change “in the round,” or to look at natural as well as man-made influences on climate. It is to specifically find and report a human impact on climate, and thereby make a scientific case for the adoption of national and international policies that would supposedly reduce that impact.
............................
The IPCC is also designed to put political leaders and bureaucrats rather than scientists in control of the research project. It is a membership organization composed of governments, not scientists. The governments that created the IPCC fund it, staff it, select the scientists who get to participate, and revise and rewrite the reports after the scientists have concluded their work. Obviously, this is not how a real scientific organization operates.

The IPCC’s first report, released in 1990, admitted that observed climate change was probably due to natural rather than human causes. However, every report since then has claimed with rising certainty that there is a “discernable human impact” on the climate and that steps must be taken to avoid a global climate crisis. There is ample evidence that this level of alarmism and asserted confidence is fueled by political considerations rather than actual science.

For example, in 1996, Dr. Frederick Seitz, one of the world’s most prominent and respected physicists, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: <2>“In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

Numerous authors (see here, here, and here)<3> have observed a growing disconnect between the “Summaries for Policymakers,” which are designed to be read and used by political leaders and the media, and the reports themselves. The former systematically remove the expressions of scientific uncertainty and alternative explanations of climate phenomena that were abundantly present in the first three reports, with the obvious intention of misrepresenting the science and fueling unnecessary alarm. By the fourth and fifth assessment reports, even the underlying reports were being purged of ideas and evidence that contradicted the IPCC’s political agenda.
In 2009, a hacker or whistle blower made available on the Internet a collection of email exchanges among leading authors and contributors to the IPCC reports. The ensuing scandal, called Climategate, <4> exposed efforts by IPCC authors to withhold data from independent scholars and attempt to prevent peer-reviewed journals from publishing research that undermined or questioned their own work. In 2011 <5> the hacker or whistle blower released a second batch of emails that made even more clear that the IPCC process was broken.
This sordid history has led to calls for the IPCC to be dismantled <6> and for its Fifth Assessment to be its last. <7> This would be good news, though long over-due. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was created to take the IPCC’s place by giving honest scientists an alternative outlet for their work and citizens of the world a genuinely independent source of research on this issue.

 

[trichrider]

Obama Attacks ‘Climate Deniers’ For Wasting Time Debating ‘Fact’

2:57 PM 05/09/2014

President Obama took time in his Friday speech at a California Wal-Mart to bash “climate deniers” for obstructing him by debating the science behind man-made global warming.

“So unfortunately, inside of Washington we’ve still got some climate deniers who shout loud, but they’re wasting everybody’s time on a settled debate,” Obama said, doubling down on remarks made during his State of the Union Address this year by adding that, “Climate change is a fact.”

“Here in California, you’ve seen these effects firsthand,” Obama told the audience at a Mountain View Wal-Mart. “You know what’s happening. And increasingly, more and more Americans do — including, by the way, many Republicans outside of Washington.”

Obama’s speech to announce more executive orders to promote solar energy development and energy efficiency subsidies comes just days after the White House released the third National Climate Assessment (NCA).

The NCA claimed that global warming was already happening and had caused the U.S. to warm about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895. The report also claimed that temperatures could increase another 4 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels could rise 4 feet in the coming decades if no action is taken.

“Hundreds of scientists, experts and businesses, not-for-profits, local communities all contributed over the course of four years,” Obama said. “What they found was unequivocally that climate change is not some far-off problem in the future. It’s happening now. It’s causing hardship now.”

Obama stressed that storms, floods and droughts — like the one California is currently experiencing — have been made more severe by rising global temperatures, a talking point the administration has been pushing hard in the last year.

The NCA also warned that global warming was making weather more extreme, saying that risks “associated with extreme events like hurricanes are increasing.” But this contradicts data from governmental sources and independent researchers.


The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that there “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century” and current data shows “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century. … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”

The IPCC also noted “there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale” adding “that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends.”

“Actually: US hurricane landfalls have decreased by 25% since 1900,” said Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., a climate scientist with the University of Colorado.

Pielke has presented extensive evidence that weather has not gotten more extreme because of global warming.

“It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Dr. Pielke told the Senate last summer. “It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”

“Hurricanes have not increased in the U.S. in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900,” Pielke added. “The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970.”


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/09/o...for-wasting-time-debating-fact/#ixzz33sPDljBc

 

[trichrider]

on sea level rise...

to raise the sea level by 1 inch would take:

(by conservative estimate)

8,863,065,600,000,000 gallons of water.

eight quadrillion 863 trillion 65 billion 600 million gallons of water...

as ice melts it's volume decreases...when it melts:

Antarctica records unofficial coldest temperature ever
A reading of 135.8 degrees below zero was measured in Antarctica, using remote sensing from satellites.

It's so cold that scientists say it hurts to breathe
USA's all-time low temperature was 80 degrees below zero in Alaska
This has little to do with global warming because it is one spot in one place.

There's cold, and then there's Antarctica cold. ... How does a frosty reading of 135.8 degrees below zero sound?

Based on remote satellite measurements, scientists recently recorded that temperature at a desolate ice plateau in East Antarctica. It was the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, though it may not get that recognition in the official record book.

A NASA satellite measured that temperature in August 2010; on July 31 of this year, another bone-chilling temperature of -135.3 degrees was recorded.

"I've never been in conditions that cold, and I hope I never am," said ice scientist Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "I am told that every breath is painful, and you have to be extremely careful not to freeze part of your throat or lungs when inhaling."

The -135.8-degree reading is "50 degrees colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska or Siberia or certainly North Dakota," he said.

....

First Quarter
January is the second warmest month of the year in Antarctica, according to data gathered at the American Amundsen-Scott station from 1957 to 1988. The average high temperature in Antarctica in January is -18 degrees F, while the average low temperature in January is similar, at about -21 degrees F. The temperature decreases dramatically into February and then March. February&#039;s average high temperature is about -41 degrees F and the average low is about -45 degrees F. The average high in March is -65 degrees F and the average low is about -70 degrees F.

Second Quarter
The average high and low temperatures stay more steady during the second quarter of the year in Antarctica. The average high temperatures in April and May in Antarctica are both about -70 degrees F, while the average low temperatures for the months are around -78 degrees F. The average high temperature in June is around -72 degrees F and the average low temperature is about -78 degrees.

Third Quarter
According to the collected data, the coldest quarter of the year in Antarctica is the third quarter. July features an average high temperature of -76 degrees and an average low temperature of about -81 degrees F. This makes the average low temperature in July the coldest of the year. The average high and low temperatures in August and September are nearly identical, with the average high in both months being close to -75 degrees F and the average low in both months being near -80 degrees F.

Fourth Quarter
While the weather in North America tends to get colder during the fourth quarter of the year, the temperature increases in Antarctica during this part of the year. The average high temperature in October is about -60 degrees and the average low for the month is about -65 degrees. The average high temperature in November increases to -36 and then -16 in December. The average low for November is -40 degrees F and -20 degrees F for December.

Yearly Averages

The average high temperature for the year in Antarctica is about -49 degrees F, while the average low temperature for the continent is about -56 degrees F.

it'll take a minnit...

Inferring the anthropogenic contribution to local temperature extremes

1. Dáithí A. Stonea,1,
2. Christopher J. Paciorekb,
3. Prabhata,
4. Pardeep Palla, and
5. Michael Wehnera

Author Affiliations

• aComputational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720; and
• bDepartment of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

1. ExtractFree
2. Full Text
3. Authors & Info
4. Figures
5. Metrics
6. Related Content
7. Author Response
8. Related Articles
9. PDF

In PNAS, Hansen et al. (1) document an observed planet-wide increase in the frequency of extremely hot months and a decrease in the frequency of extremely cold months, consistent with earlier studies (2). This analysis is achieved through aggregation of gridded monthly temperature measurements from all over the planet. Such aggregation is advantageous in achieving statistical sampling power; however, it sacrifices regional specificity. In that light, we find the conclusion of Hansen et al. (1) that “the extreme summer climate anomalies in Texas in 2011, in Moscow in 2010, and in France in 2003 almost certainly would not have occurred in the absence of global warming” to be unsubstantiated by their analysis.
Observations show different areas of the planet warming at different rates, in line with projections from computer models (3). This effect is noticeable in the frequency distributions shown by Hansen et al. (1), in which the spread of the aggregated values increases in recent decades. Hansen et al. also include maps that show the local data feeding their global analysis. Noticeably, Moscow and Texas stand out as areas exhibiting little anomalously warm activity during recent years, barring the single summers of 2010 and 2011, respectively. In contrast, France does appear to be experiencing anomalously warm summers recently.
To quantify local changes in high temperature extremes, we apply extreme value theory methods to the same GISTEMP (Goddard Institute for Space Studies surface temperature analysis) data used by Hansen et al. (1) for the summer months of 1950–2009 (June-July-August in the north and December-January-February in the south) by fitting a time-varying extreme value distribution to the tails of the local frequency distributions (4). A field significance test of our analyses confirms the assertion by Hansen et al. (1) that changes in extreme summer temperatures are globally significant at the P < 0.002 level. Fig. 1 shows z-scores (estimated changes divided by their standard errors) for the differences between the expected 60-y maximum summer mean temperature in the 2009 and 1950 climate states. Results are consistent with Hansen et al. (1). There is no indication of increasingly hot summers near Moscow, and Texas exhibits larger but spatially incoherent changes. On the other hand, France does show large positive changes. Changes near Texas and Moscow are increased if the 2010 and 2011 years are included, but that uses the observation of an event’s occurrence as evidence of its cause; the results for France are insensitive to the inclusion of 2003.

View larger version:

• In this page
• In a new window

• Download as PowerPoint Slide

Fig. 1. The z-scores (estimated changes divided by their SEs) for the differences between the expected 60-y maximum summer mean temperature in the 2009 and 1950 era climate states in France (Left), Texas (Center), and regions surrounding Moscow (Right).



This analysis is far from definitive, lacking, for example, a physically based counterfactual world. We feel that more defensible analyses than presented by either Hansen et al. (1) or us in this letter are necessary to claim causal evidence between individual regional extreme events and anthropogenic changes to the climate system (5).

 

[Wiggs Dannyboy]

your team made up the rules...

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was created by a group of scientists concerned about flaws in the organization and procedures of another organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), so it is necessary and appropriate that those flaws be presented here.

Though often described by scientists and media as an independent scientific organization, the IPCC is in fact an arm of the United Nations. Dr. Steven J. Allen reminded us of the true nature of the United Nations in a recent article for the Capital Research Center:
“The United Nations [is] a famously corrupt body in which most votes are controlled by kleptocracies and outright dictatorships. Most of the member-states, as they’re called, are rated as either “not free” or “partly free” by Freedom House, and both Communist China and Putinist Russia have veto power. And any settlement of the Global Warming issue by the UN would entail massive transfers of wealth from the citizens of wealthy countries to the politicians and bureaucrats of the poorer countries. Other than that, one supposes, the IPCC is entirely trustworthy on the issue. (Well, aside from the fact that the IPCC’s climate models predicting Global Warming have already failed.)”*

• History
• Procedural Problems
• False Consensus

History
The IPCC was created in 1988 largely due to the efforts of Maurice Strong, a billionaire and self-confessed socialist, as part of a larger campaign to justify giving the United Nations the authority to tax businesses in developed countries and redistribute trillions of dollars a year to developing nations. Strong had previously succeeded in bringing about the creation of the UN Environment Programme in 1972 and served as its first executive director. The IPCC is a joint project of that entity and the World Meteorological Organization.

(Strong was subsequently implicated in corruption surrounding the UN’s Oil-for-Food-Program and has resigned from his UN positions. According to John Izzard writing for the Australian publication Quadrant Online, <1> “Following his exposure for bribery and corruption in the UN’s Oil-for-Food scandal Maurice Strong was stripped of many of his 53 international awards and honours he had collected during his lifetime working in dual role of arch conservationist and ruthless businessman.”<1>)
..................
Strong and his allies at the UN gave the IPCC a very narrow brief by defining climate change in the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Article 1.2, as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.” IPCC’s mandate is not to study climate change “in the round,” or to look at natural as well as man-made influences on climate. It is to specifically find and report a human impact on climate, and thereby make a scientific case for the adoption of national and international policies that would supposedly reduce that impact.
............................
The IPCC is also designed to put political leaders and bureaucrats rather than scientists in control of the research project. It is a membership organization composed of governments, not scientists. The governments that created the IPCC fund it, staff it, select the scientists who get to participate, and revise and rewrite the reports after the scientists have concluded their work. Obviously, this is not how a real scientific organization operates.

The IPCC’s first report, released in 1990, admitted that observed climate change was probably due to natural rather than human causes. However, every report since then has claimed with rising certainty that there is a “discernable human impact” on the climate and that steps must be taken to avoid a global climate crisis. There is ample evidence that this level of alarmism and asserted confidence is fueled by political considerations rather than actual science.

For example, in 1996, Dr. Frederick Seitz, one of the world’s most prominent and respected physicists, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: <2>“In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

Numerous authors (see here, here, and here)<3> have observed a growing disconnect between the “Summaries for Policymakers,” which are designed to be read and used by political leaders and the media, and the reports themselves. The former systematically remove the expressions of scientific uncertainty and alternative explanations of climate phenomena that were abundantly present in the first three reports, with the obvious intention of misrepresenting the science and fueling unnecessary alarm. By the fourth and fifth assessment reports, even the underlying reports were being purged of ideas and evidence that contradicted the IPCC’s political agenda.
In 2009, a hacker or whistle blower made available on the Internet a collection of email exchanges among leading authors and contributors to the IPCC reports. The ensuing scandal, called Climategate, <4> exposed efforts by IPCC authors to withhold data from independent scholars and attempt to prevent peer-reviewed journals from publishing research that undermined or questioned their own work. In 2011 <5> the hacker or whistle blower released a second batch of emails that made even more clear that the IPCC process was broken.
This sordid history has led to calls for the IPCC to be dismantled <6> and for its Fifth Assessment to be its last. <7> This would be good news, though long over-due. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was created to take the IPCC’s place by giving honest scientists an alternative outlet for their work and citizens of the world a genuinely independent source of research on this issue.

Yadda, yadda, yadda......more BS...and I'm not even going to take a minute of my time to respond.

You're either somebody who profits in spreading BS, or you have some kinda flaw in your brain that allows you to believe such crap. Either way, I consider it to be verbal pollution in the Toker's Den and really wish it would be banned or at least forced to be contained in it's own "Conspiracy Theories" subforum.

 

[trichrider]

I wish you luck dannyboy...

 

[RetroGrow]

I wish you luck dannyboy...

If you think you can bludgeon us with reams of meaningless BS, you are mistaken. Science & common sense tells us that the environment is being degraded at unprecedented levels, which degradation is continually increasing as "emerging" countries are burning coal at increasing rates. For every "cut & paste" BS article you post, I can post a rebuttal.

 

[RetroGrow]

Accelerated Global Warming and Atmospheric CO2 Emissions


An assessment of the likely increase of CO2 in the atmosphere due to climate change and if the Amazon Rainforest ceases to be a CO2 sink.

The C02 content of the atmosphere is usually expressed in parts per million (ppm) by weight and the use of fossil fuels is expressed as so many tons of carbon burned per year. At present the burning of fossil fuels releases 7 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year in the form of carbon dioxide gas, C02.

C02 weighs 44 / 12 times the weight of carbon. This is derived from the atomic weights
of carbon, 12, and oxygen, 16. The molecular weight (MW) of C02 is 12 + (2 x 16) = 44 and the MW of carbon is 12. So C02 is 44/12 = 3.67 times heavier than carbon per molecule.

Therefore burning one billion tons of carbon produces 3.67 billion tons of C02.

(A) and so burning 7 billion tons of carbon will produce 26.7 billion tons of C02

The weight of the Earth's atmosphere can be calculated as follows. Atmospheric pressure at sea level is on average 14.5 pounds per square inch = 10 tons per square metre. This pressure is due to the weight of atmosphere above an area at sea level of one square metre.

The radius of the Earth "r" is 5,925 km and so the surface area of the Earth (land and ocean) is 4 x "pie" x "r" squared = 4 x 3.142 x 5925 x 5925 = 441 million square kilometres = 441,000 billion square metres.

Therefore the weight of the Earth's atmosphere is 441,000 billion x 10 = 4.41 million billion tons.

Now 26.7 billion (the weight in tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere each year, see (A) above), divided by 4.41 million billion gives the fraction 6 /one million which means that the CO2 emitted to the atmosphere each year from burning fossil fuels is equal to 6 parts per million (ppm) of the atmosphere by weight. (6 millionths)

It can be seen therefore that burning 7 billion tons of carbon from fossil fuels is now dumping 6 ppm per year of C02 into the atmosphere.

(B) Pro-rata, burning one billion tons of carbon from fossil fuels dumps 6 / 7 = 0.85 ppm of CO2 into the atmosphere.

As explained in the above Article 1, the Amazon rainforest is probably absorbing 2 billion tons of carbon per year. Removing this amount of carbon reduces the C02 content of the atmosphere by 2 x 0.85 = 1.7 ppm. per year.

So the Amazon rain forest is absorbing 1.7 ppm of the 6 ppm of the total C02 being emitted by fossil fuel burning.

The current understanding is that at the present level of concentration of C02 in the atmosphere C02 is being absorbed by natural processes, of which the Amazon rainforest is a major component, at the rate of 3 ppm, i.e. one half of 6 ppm rate at which CO2 is being dumped into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. If C02 emissions are rising this will mean that year on year the C02 content of the atmosphere will rise by at least one half the previous year's rate of emission.

Therefore at present C02 is increasing by 3 ppm each year (i.e. 6 - 3 = 3 ppm). If the level of fossil fuel burning rises by say only 25% (a much bigger rise is predicted) and if natural processes do not increase their rate of absorption then the rate of increase will become 3 + 25% of 6 = 4.5 ppm per year and if by 2050 we loose the absorption by the Amazon rainforest the rate of increase becomes 4.5 + 1.7 = 6.2 ppm per year, twice the current level. At this rate C02 levels would increase by 50 x 6 = 300 ppm during the 50 years from 2050 to the end of the century.

The increase in C02 at today's rate over the 50 years from now to 2050 gives a further increase of 50 x 3 = 150 ppm.

So the C02 content of the atmosphere by 2050 and 2100 could be as follows:

Today's level in say year 2,000

Increase at today's rate up to 2050 = 50 years x 3 ppm

Increase from 2050 to 2100 assuming 25% growth
in fossil fuel use and the Amazon rainforest
ceasing to be a C02 sink = 50 years x 6 ppm


Therefore total C02 in the atmosphere at 2100


= 350 ppm

= 150 ppm



= 300 ppm



= 800 ppm

This total does not include C02 from Amazon rainforest fires, however no doubt other forests will expand elsewhere in the world as their conditions become more favourable so release of carbon by forest fires in the Amazon rainforest will be offset by new trees elsewhere but there will be a time lag. Also non-tropical forests only absorb CO2 during the spring and summer growing season whereas tropical forests grow all the year round and tropical forests grow at a faster rate and so absorb more CO2 than temperate forests.

If 10 years' growth of the Amazon rainforest were released in one year's fires this would add an additional 10 x 1.7 = 17 ppm C02 into the atmosphere in that year.

If the Amazon rainforest becomes savannah then 90% of the carbon currently locked up in bio-mass would be released. Can we estimate how much carbon this represents?

Assume trees at 20 metre spacing, therefore 5 x 5 = 25 trees per hectare. (100m x 100m)
Assume 10 tons of carbon per tree, therefore 25 x 10 = 250 tons of carbon per hectare.

1 square km = 100 hectares. Therefore weight of carbon = 25,000 tons / sq. km.

The total area of the Amazon rainforest = 4,000,000 sq. kms. approx.

Therefore weight of carbon in trees = 25,000 x 4,000,000 = 100 billion tons

If 90% of this carbon returns to the atmosphere as CO2 this would increase atmospheric CO2 by 0.9 x 100 x 0.85 (see (B) above) = 76 ppm.

The increases in atmospheric CO2 levels described above are significant increases when compared to historic levels (280 ppm in 1850 and 170ppm.in the recent geological past) and also the rate of change is accelerating. We are entering unknown territory. However we can project what might happen on the basis of what we do know and the possibilities are awesome. These possibilities will be described in future articles to be published soon.

http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2_now/journal/articles/2_global_warming.htm

 

[RetroGrow]

400 PPM: Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Reaches Prehistoric Levels:

On May 2, after nightfall shut down photosynthesis for the day in Hawaii, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere touched 400 parts-per-million there for the first time in at least 800,000 years. Near the summit of volcanic Mauna Loa—where a member of the Keeling family has kept watch since 1958—sensors measured this record through sunrise the following day. Levels have continued to dance near that benchmark in recent days, registering above 400 ppm for the first time in eons after midnight on May 7. When the measurements started the daily average could be as low as 315 ppm, already up from a pre-industrial average of around 280 ppm.
This measurement is just the hourly average of CO2 levels high in the Hawaiian sky, but this family’s figures carry more weight than those made at other stations in the world as they have faithfully kept the longest record of atmospheric CO2. Arctic weather stations also hit the hourly 400 ppm mark last spring and this one. Regardless, the hourly levels at Mauna Loa will soon drop as spring kicks in across the northern hemisphere, trees budding forth an army of leaves hungrily sucking CO2 out of the sky.
It may be next year before the monthly average level reaches 400 ppm—and yet longer still until the annual average reaches that number.

But there is no question that the world continues to inexorably climb toward higher levels of greenhouse gas concentrations. Barring economic recessions, the world may be lucky to stop at 450, 500 or even beyond. Last year, humanity spewed some 36 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, up from 35 billion the year before.

In the coming year, Scientific American will run an occasional series, “400 ppm,” to examine what this invisible line in the sky means for the global climate, the planet and all the living things on it, including human civilization. Some scientists argue we passed the safe level for greenhouse gas concentrations long ago, pointing to the accelerating impacts, from extreme weather to the meltdown of Arctic sea ice. Others argue that we have yet more room to burn fossil fuels, clear forests and the like—but not much—before catastrophic climate change becomes inescapable. And the international community of nations has agreed that 450 ppm—linked to a rise of 2 degrees Celsius in global average temperatures—should not be exceeded. We are not on track to avoid that limit, whether you prefer the economic analysis of experts like the International Energy Agency or the steady monitoring of mechanical sensors.

The last time CO2 levels at Mauna Loa were this high, Homo sapiens did not live there. In fact, the last time CO2 levels are thought to have been this high was more than 2.5 million years ago, an era known as the Pliocene, when the Canadian Arctic boasted forests instead of icy wastes. The land bridge connecting North America and South America had recently formed. The globe’s temperature averaged about 3 degrees C warmer, and sea level lapped coasts 5 meters or more higher.
The world will change again due to human activity and associated emissions of CO2, perhaps causing another set of coral reef extinctions like those found during the Pliocene, among other impacts. When Charles D. Keeling first started his measurements, CO2 made up some 317 ppm of the air we breathe and climate change was already a concern thanks to the work of John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius and Guy Callendar. Every year since 1958 the sawtoothed line depicting Keeling’s measurements—readings kept up by his son Ralph—has climbed up, capturing the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations as well as the world’s breath.
What can be done? In the short term, more potent but shorter-lasting greenhouse gas emissions could be curbed or a concerted effort to develop CO2 capture and storage technology could be undertaken. Whether we do that or not, given CO2′s long lifetime in the atmosphere, the world will continue to warm to some extent; at least as much as the 0.8 degree C of warming to date is likely thanks to the CO2 already in the atmosphere.

At present pace, the world could reach 450 ppm in a few short decades. The record notches up another 2 ppm per year at present pace. Human civilization developed and flourished in a geologic era that never saw CO2 concentrations above 300 ppm. We are in novel territory again and we show no signs of slowing to get our bearings, let alone stopping.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...in-the-atmosphere-reaches-prehistoric-levels/

 

[RetroGrow]

The ocean's acid test:

The most pressing example of climate change’s impact is not monster hurricanes, retreating glaciers or water wars. It’s the humble swimming sea snail.

The tiny pteropod has difficulty growing a shell in a warmer planet’s acidified ocean waters. Given the snails' role at the base of the cold-water food chain, its struggle threatens the entire polar ecosystem, through salmon to seals and whales.
The problem is one of many associated with ocean acidification. That change is well underway - a consequence of warming that has already happened and fossil-fuel emissions that have long since been dumped into the atmosphere.

In absorbing those emissions the oceans have buffered humanity from the worst effects of climate change. But in doing so ocean chemistry has changed, acidifying to levels not seen in 800,000 years.

The result, according to a new report issued today by Oceana, is that today’s ocean chemistry is already hostile for many creatures fundamental to the marine food web. The world’s oceans – for so long a neat and invisible sink for humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions – are about to extract a price for all that waste.

The effects are not local: Entire ecosystems threaten to literally crumble away as critters relying on calcium carbonate for a home – from corals to mollusks to the sea snail – have a harder time manufacturing their shells. Corals shelter millions of species worldwide, while sea snails account for upwards of 45 percent of the diet of pink salmon.

To avoid the most serious problems associated with acidification, Oceana and other scientists warn, society must hold atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at 350 parts-per-million, roughly 25 percent higher than the pre-industrial mark.

The rub is that the globe has already passed 385 ppm. And many economists and climatologists figure the peak will lie somewhere north of 570 ppm before society figures out how to curb emissions.

“Climate change has been happening for a long time,” said Jackie Savitz, Oceana’s senior director of pollution campaigns and co-author of the report, Acid Test: Can we save our oceans from CO2? The oceans “are so big, so vast, and everyone thought they were untouchable. But the fact is we’ve been touching them all along.”
What alarms scientists most is the rate of change: The transformation has happened over 250 years, faster than anything in the historical record. And if emissions remain unchecked, Oceana warned, the oceans in 40 years will be more acidic than anything experienced in the past 20 million years.

Over the next several centuries the pH changes may be larger than any inferred from the geologic record of the past 300 million years, with the exception of a few rare extreme events, scientists predict.

The process is fairly simple. For eons prior to the Industrial Revolution, oceans were at equilibrium with the atmosphere, absorbing as much carbon dioxide as they released.

As humanity started burning fuel, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels started to rise, and the oceans responded, taking in more and more carbon each year and increasing acidity by nearly 30 percent.

The oceans so far have absorbed some 30 percent of the carbon dioxide that humans have added to the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and nearly 80 percent of the heat generated by those gases, according to Oceana.

Today the world’s oceans absorb some 30 million metric tons of extra carbon dioxide every day, according to scientists – roughly twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted each day by the United States.

The ocean has a number of natural buffers to help with change – ocean sediments and deep water represent two enormous potential reservoirs – but they all work on vastly slower time scales, said Richard Zeebe, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“It’s very difficult to find a nice analogue in the past that’s going to show what we’re going to experience over the next 200 to 300 years,” he said. “It’s pretty much outrageous what we’ve done.”

“We are overwhelming the system,” he added. “The system is not quick enough to react. It takes thousands of years to do this.”
Scientists are already seeing harm as the oceans acidify. Reefs are struggling in many parts of the world, shell growth rates are slowing, life phases – particularly reproductive maturity – are being thrown out of whack.

Even the healthiest reefs in the most optimum conditions today face a daily struggle to grow faster than reef dwellers and the ocean can erode them, and the effects grow more dire as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise.Colorful coral

Somewhere between 450 ppm and 500 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide, for instance, lies a tipping point where, scientists suspect, reefs become “rapidly eroding rubble banks.” Much beyond that, Oceana reported, “reefs as we know them would be extremely rare.” Current projections show that by the end of this century no adequate conditions for coral will remain in the world’s oceans.

But the chemistry is complex and the variables myriad. Atmospheric carbon dioxide alone does not determine acidity.

“We cannot look into the past and say atmospheric carbon dioxide was highest in the Cretaceous (65 to 145 million years ago), therefore this is what the ocean is going to look like,” Zeebe said. “Time scale is key. Rate of change is key.”

A frequently touted example of rapid change in the geologic record is the so-called Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. About 55 million years ago the Earth abruptly warmed 6°C, the oceans acidified, atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns shifted and a large number of bottom-dwellers died off.

That change happened over perhaps 10,000 years – not even close to today’s pace.

“This is hard for many people to understand,” Zeebe said. “You need to separate the different time scales.”
Oceana maintains that holding atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 ppm would prevent the most dire problems but still represents a concentration above the safe threshold for today’s ocean life.

But for many scientists, that mark is history; in fact current industrial emissions exceed even the highest scenario – 850 ppm by century’s end – mapped by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider.

There’s no question 350 ppm represents the safest level, Schneider said. But society will be lucky to peak at 450 ppm, he said, with a more likely crest north of 550 ppm before emissions stabilize.

“We’re going to have an overshoot,” he said. “The only question is how bad is that overshoot going to be.”

“Our objective has to be to prevent a ‘much worse,’ rather than pretend we can roll the clock back to an impossibility.”

The question then becomes how much acidification can reefs handle before they start to crumble. Unfortunately as scientists learn more, the threshold keeps dropping.

“We’re pretty sure that 560 is too high and we’re almost certain that 700 is too high, but we just plain don’t know much about whether 350 or 450 would be OK,” said Joanie Kleypas, a marine scientist studying coral at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Marine scientists have gradually concluded that world carbon dioxide levels will eventually peak at some higher-than-desired threshold no matter what happens, Kleypas said, and hold hope that some technology or solution will bring concentrations back down to the threshold level or lower.

There are hazards with this approach, or course, notably the increased likelihood of passing dangerous tipping points in climate, ocean circulation or general ecological response.

That's why Oceana’s Savitz believes the line must be held at 350 ppm. It is a realistic goal, she said. “The good news is it’s from lack of trying. We really haven’t done the obvious things or picked the low-hanging fruit.”

Conservation, for instance, can erase big chunks of projected emissions.

The Oceana report outlines five approaches that together would help drop atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to 350 ppm and preserve coral, including stopping deforestation and overfishing, promoting energy efficiency and low-carbon fuels, and regulating carbon releases.

“The better job we do at limiting ourselves, the less (harm) we’ll see,” Savitz said. “But we’re going to see some impacts. We’re not going to get out of this unscathed.”
http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/acid-test/the-oceans-acid-test

 

[RetroGrow]

We Just Dumped 38.2 Billion Pounds of CO2 Into the Atmosphere:

Over the weekend, scientists from the Global Carbon Project released a report that showed global greenhouse gas emissions grew 3% in 2011. That was enough to shatter the previous global record. Again. And that's the thing about following along with the whole sordid global climate change saga; you keep on seeing this sentence, or depressing iterations of it:

"Global emissions of carbon dioxide were at a record high in ____ and are likely to take a similar jump in ____, scientists reported Sunday — the latest indication that efforts to limit such emissions are failing."

Now that specific quote is from the weekend edition of the New York Times, and the years in question are 2011, and 2012, respectively. But the way things are going, on our current emissions trajectory, we might as well save that graf and republish it once a year going forward. Because the story about our emissions habits is barely changing–we're perpetually emitting more and more planet-warming gases than we were before, with no end in sight.

And the problem is, telling this story over and over moves no one—it's a tidbit, an 'oh, shit,' a mildly depressing but mostly unmoving anecdote. So how about we reframe this thing, come at it from another angle or three? With the same data, let's grab three bite-sized brain-blowers that might have more staying power than "Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hit Record High. Again." Again and again and again.

Like:

1. Last year, the world pumped 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

That's a billion pounds more than 2010. That's what 'new record emissions' actually looks like. Imagine it, for a second. 38.6 billion pounds. Imagine 38.6 billon pounds of anything. You can't. It's pretty much incomprehensible, and that's what we added to the atmosphere last year alone.

2. The world is now spewing out 2 million pounds of carbon dioxide every second.

That's right, every second. By the time you're done reading this sentence, that's another 10 million pounds of CO2 or so trapped up in the atmosphere, wrapping round us and humming like a haywire electric blanket we can't turn off.
3. Scientists are pretty sure there's no way we're going to keep warming below 3.6 degrees F this century.

It's right there in the report. And imagine that. A world that's perpetually 4 degrees warmer. That we can feel; our skin knows the difference between 51 and 55, 86 and 90. Because we're spewing out CO2 at this rate, and because global climate negotiations are worthless, bloated affairs that haven't resulted in any serious progress in over 10 years. Because the various nation-states that send representatives can't agree on anything except that they shouldn't have to stop burning fossil fuels. It's the deepest and perhaps most historic stalemate, year after year.

Sure, we tinker. Emissions are slowly falling in the U.S., because cleaner-burning natural gas is now cheaper than coal, and we're replacing our power plants accordingly. But we're shipping that excess coal over to Asia, where they're burning more of the stuff than ever, and the net emissions tick ever-upward.

So maybe these additional bullet points can help contextualize the new 'record' some. Because it's pretty much impossible to actually conceptualize the net impact of industrial society on our atmosphere; especially when CO2 is an invisible and pervasive and mundane gas. It's an elusive image, one that's too distorted and wide in scope for easy and thorough comprehension. Regardless, we're still breaking the records—whether or not we can picture what they look like or not.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/we-just-dumped-382-billion-pounds-of-co2-into-the-atmosphere

 

[RetroGrow]

Ocean Acidification:

Global warming is increasing ocean tempera-
tures and raising sea levels. New scientific
research shows that
our oceans are beginning
to face yet another threat due to global warm-
ing-related emissions – their basic chemistry is
changing because of the uptake of carbon
dioxide released by human activities
.
When carbon dioxide is absorbed by the
oceans it reacts with seawater to form carbonic
acid. Ocean acidification, as the phenomenon
is called, over time will create major negative
impacts on corals and other marine life, with
anticipated adverse consequences for fishing,
tourism, and related economies.
Ocean acidification and climate change are
both effects of excessive carbon dumping into
the atmosphere. While climate change encom-
passes the varied impacts resulting from the
greenhouse effect, ocean acidification is a
straightforward chemical response to carbon
dioxide emissions, and is measured and predict-
ed with a high degree of certainty.
Over the past 200 years the oceans have
absorbed 525 billion tons of carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere, or nearly half of the fossil fuel carbon emissions over this period. This natural
process of absorption has benefited humankind
by significantly reducing the greenhouse gas
levels in the atmosphere and thus minimizing
some impacts of global warming. However, the
ocean’s daily uptake of 22 million tons of
carbon dioxide is starting to take its toll on the
chemistry of seawater.

Not going to post the whole article, but follow the link for more pictures and evidence and explanation for the climatically challenged:

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/PDF/feel2899/feel2899.pdf

 

[dddaver]

Does anybody actually read those huge walls of text? Back at the ranch...IMHO DeGrasse is an ass.

 

[RetroGrow]

Talking Trash on Emissions:

While attending the recent AGU conference, some of us were struck by a statistic presented by Professor Richard Alley: On average, a person's contribution of carbon dioxide waste to the atmosphere is forty times greater than their production of solid trash to landfills when measured as mass.

It can be difficult to grasp the huge quantities of CO2 that we emit. It’s an invisible gas with no odour and we are not used to thinking about amounts of gas in terms of mass. But we do have a good sense of how much solid waste we throw out, since we all have to lug our garbage to the curb. If we had to do the same with our greenhouse gases, instead of one can a week, we would have to haul forty.

Every time we see a garbage truck, let’s imagine forty others following it, all taking our carbon dioxide to a dump site. When we hear of municipal politicians struggling to find new landfill sites, imagine the problems we would have finding forty subterranean landfill sites if we ever tried to dispose of our CO2 in the subsurface instead of dumping it freely into the air.

Talking Trash on Emissions
Posted on 7 January 2014 by jg, Andy Skuce

While attending the recent AGU conference, some of us were struck by a statistic presented by Professor Richard Alley: On average, a person's contribution of carbon dioxide waste to the atmosphere is forty times greater than their production of solid trash to landfills when measured as mass.

It can be difficult to grasp the huge quantities of CO2 that we emit. It’s an invisible gas with no odour and we are not used to thinking about amounts of gas in terms of mass. But we do have a good sense of how much solid waste we throw out, since we all have to lug our garbage to the curb. If we had to do the same with our greenhouse gases, instead of one can a week, we would have to haul forty.

Every time we see a garbage truck, let’s imagine forty others following it, all taking our carbon dioxide to a dump site. When we hear of municipal politicians struggling to find new landfill sites, imagine the problems we would have finding forty subterranean landfill sites if we ever tried to dispose of our CO2 in the subsurface instead of dumping it freely into the air.

The EPA estimates that American households and businesses generate, on average, 4.4 pounds (2kg) of waste per person per day, of which 35% is recycled and composted and 12% is combusted. This leaves approximately 1.1kg per person per day of waste that goes to landfills. For a couple, that would be a 15kg (34lb) can of garbage per week. The average American produces about 17 metric tons of CO2 per year, which works out to 46kg each per day. Consumption of goods and energy are both linked to GDP, so it’s likely that a roughly similar CO2/garbage ratio applies everywhere, but let’s round it down to forty. (People who produce relatively little garbage probably also have relatively small carbon footprints.)

SkS authors discussed various ideas to illustrate our impressive CO2-to-trash ratio and we settled on the shot-put image to convey the weight and significance of our CO2 emissions. Imagine tossing a chunk of iron or shoe-box sized rock. For each one you toss, another forty dissolve in the air and disappear. Or do they?

About 45% of the CO2 we put in the air stays there, with 30% going into the biosphere (plants, animals and soil) and the remaining 24% is absorbed into the oceans, (Canadell et al 2007). Of course, the CO2 that goes into the ocean is changing the chemistry of the seawater, with severe consequences for ocean ecology.

Most of the CO2 in the air will stay there essentially forever, trapping heat and changing the climate for many millennia to come. According to David Archer in The Long Thaw, the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels will have an ultimate heating contribution millions of times larger than the energy released from burning it. (Archer claims the number is 40 million, David Appell argues that it is more like—a still impressive—3.5 million times.)

Unprecedented climates will be experienced soonest by those countries nearest the equator that have become adapted to historically stable tropical conditions (Mora et al, 2013). These typically poorer countries have fewer financial resources to draw upon to adapt to a changing climate. They are also countries that have done less than average to contribute to the problem, either in terms of greenhouse gas emissions or, for that matter, as garbage (e.g., see this UNEP report, page 37). Greenhouse gases have mainly come from wealthy people living in temperate climates, but the consequences of dumping of them into the atmosphere will be felt first by the poor in the tropics and later by all our descendants everywhere.

The website Carbon Visuals has some excellent info-graphics that help visualize the huge quantities of our emissions. They offer a free poster for download (pdf, 10MB).

http://www.skepticalscience.com/behind_the_Lines_CO2_shotput.html

 

[RetroGrow]

How many pounds of carbon dioxide
are added to the atmosphere
by burning one gallon of gas?

A gallon of gasoline weighs 6.2 pounds, consisting mostly of carbon, plus a small amount of hydrogen and a few impurities. Through combustion each carbon atom combines with two atoms of heavier oxygen atoms, resulting in 19.8 pounds of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

How much prehistoric plant matter did it take to make that gallon of gas? About 196,000 pounds, or as much as is found in one-acre of wheat. Americans burn up about 131 billion gallons of gas every year, or the equivalent of 25 quadrillion pounds of prehistoric biomass. Since 1751, our species has used the equivalent from all types of fossil fuels of about 13,300 years of biomass production by all plants on earth.

The stability of the climate is threatened by greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide released from fossil fuels and deforestation. The ecosystem naturally recycles an estimated 225 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year from processes like respiration, decay, and fires. Most of the carbon is removed from the atmosphere by forests and by microorganisms in the oceans. Human activity has tipped the balance by adding 5.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the air each year from fossil fuel use. Deforestation contributes another 2.2 billion tons of carbon a year to the atmosphere while simultaneously reducing the total amount of forests available to remove carbon. Although the amount of carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere seems small by comparison to the amount recycled by nature every year, we are nevertheless greatly increasing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Excluding water vapor, the atmosphere consists of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 0.9% argon. Other traces gasses, mostly carbon dioxide, make up an additional .039% of the atmosphere, up from 0.028% prior to industrialization.

Two-atom molecules like nitrogen and oxygen vibrate at high frequencies, so they do not absorb much of the heat that normally reflects of the earth and bounces back into space. But 3-atom molecules like carbon dioxide, water vapor, nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide all absorb heat and reflect it back down on the earth, trapping heat in like a window, hence the term "greenhouse effect". Carbon dioxide and other trace gasses may be a very small part of the atmosphere, but they keep the earth's surface about 59 degrees warmer than it would be without these gasses, so even a small increase in the amount of greenhouse gasses can have a big effect on the climate.

While it is virtually certain that altering the atmosphere will alter the earth's climate and weather patterns, it is difficult to predict how it will change. Global warming is the most likely scenario, and already we have melted about 40% of the arctic ice cap in less than 30 years. Global warming could flood coastal cities, increase the frequency of hurricanes and other weather-related disasters and transform crucial croplands into deserts. Paradoxically, global warming also increases atmospheric humidity, which can increase precipitation and potentially trigger an ice age. Rather than wait to find out what happens, we would likely be wise to alter human behaviors to stop the buildup of greenhouse gasses.

Sea levels rose by about five inches during the last century, but this may have been the result of an ongoing warming trend since the end of the last ice age. The ocean absorbs additional heat each year, causing the water to expand and sea levels to rise. Actual sea level measurements can be misleading, since land masses like Scandinavia, northern Canada and Greenland that were once compressed under the weight of glacial ice are actually rising, making it appear that sea levels are dropping. On the other hand, the Nile Delta, eastern China, Bangladesh, and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. are all subsiding-that is sinking- due to ground water removal and other factors. In these places the sea level appears to have risen more than five inches. Measurements taken with the aid of satellites have helped to more accurately determine worldwide sea levels.

Half of the world's population lives in coastal areas. In the Netherlands where much of the country is already below sea level, it will cost an estimated $10 billion dollars to raise the dikes high enough to keep out the rising sea. In the U.S., Massachusetts alone is expected to lose 250 square miles of land during this century. In impoverished countries like Bangladesh were 120 million people live in delta regions, rising sea levels will wipe out their fertile lands or contaminate the aquifers with salt water, causing a mass exodus from the land, but with no place to go. Some low-lying islands in the Pacific have already disappeared to rising sea levels. The island nation of Tuvalu, with a population of 10,000 people, is also expected to disappear in the coming decades. A similar fate awaits a chain of islands called the Maldives in the Indian Ocean where the highest point is 8 feet above sea level. The approximately 250,000 people there are very aware of the problem of global warming, but powerless to do anything about it.

http://www.greenuniversity.net/Green_Economics/carbondioxide.htm

 

[RetroGrow]

Diffusion of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide of our Oceans:

With everything that has been in the news over the last decade about climate change (and the horrendous overall consequences of a heightened temperature), most of us know (cannot possibly avoid knowing) that this is a hot topic that will rage on for years to come. Hopefully, we can find a long-term solution. In the mean time, we’re still trying to understand how we can modify our lifestyles to slow down this process, which brings us to one avenue that might sound a little strange to some of you; Some scientists suggest that global CO2 levels could be lowered, thus cooling the planet, if we were to pump all of the excess CO2 into the world’s vast oceans. Why haven’t we done this yet? In short, because it could cause lots of problems to the delicate ecosystems of Earth, putting the planet as a whole at risk for just a fleeting solution.

There are two main carbon sinks (essentially, things that absorb more carbon than they release) in the world, one of them is water and the other is the forests. Trees in forests convert CO2 into breathable oxygen (through photosynthesis), which is a little bit concerning when one considers the epic deforestation that is taking place on a global scale. More specifically, in the Amazon rain forest, which is known as the “Lungs of the Earth.” Ultimately, this deforestation has lead to an increase in global CO2 levels.

Fortunately, to balance this out, CO2 is dissolved into the oceans (though it is interesting to note that about 93% of the worlds CO2 is actually contained within the oceans.) Now, this isn’t such a bad thing (all the carbon being absorbed by the ocean) as there are a lot of sea animals that actually use carbon dioxide, oxygen, and calcium to create shells and corals (by forming calcium carbonate), so in that sense, it is actually an essential part of the oceans ecosystem. However, before we jump the gun and start mass pumping CO2 into the oceans, there are some side effects that are a bit problematic–otherwise, we’d already be doing it on a mass scale.

As we’ve mentioned, calcium carbonate is one of the ways that CO2 is taken out of the ocean, and that is because it becomes apart of shells, corals and other marine life. When any of these die, they end up on the ocean floor. So over millions and millions of years, the dead marine life moves with the tectonic plates. Under heat and pressure, this calcium carbonate ends up becoming rocks (such as limestone), so we end up with a lot of CO2 eventually ending up in stone. So to sum: CO2 ends up in the oceans (which is already where most of it is contained), some gets formed into shells and corals which end up as stone or fuel (organic matter over millions of years), and by using this organic matter we’re pumping it back into the atmosphere. As such, it seems quite reasonable that we should just be able to pump it back into the oceans to help keep this cycle continuing for millions of years more. However, we’ve found that an increase in CO2 levels in the ocean increases the pH levels. For anyone that has ever had a tropical fish in a tank, they well understand how important it is to keep the correct pH levels.

So what is all the fuss about? So far we’ve looked at how the planet combats CO2 levels in the ocean which has been a natural cycle for the last… Very long time! But in the past 200 years, due to human intervention, it’s not looking so good for the oceans. Ever since we started burning fossil fuels and making concrete in such a large scale, the oceans have been paying the toll. In reality, this is why climate change isn’t as noticeable as some might believe–we look at the oceans as being this big blue vast unchanging body of water but it couldn’t be much further from the truth.

Over the last 200 years, since the start of the industrial age, research indicates that (due to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere) these has been a decrease in pH of 0.1 units. Now that doesn’t sound like much at all, but let’s put that into perspective: it’s an increase of 30% in the amount of hydrogen ions in the world’s ocean’s. Because we’re increasing, year by year, the amount of CO2 that we’re producing, current estimates suggest that by the year 2100 it will have increased up to 0.5 units which is a 300% increase in the amount of hydrogen ions in the ocean.

As you can imagine, this is a drastic change in the pH levels of the oceans, and given enough time, it is something that could potentially stabilize its self naturally; however, the cold hard truth is that we don’t have a few million years to wait for the natural cycle to fix itself. This leads us to another question. Can we do anything about it? Can we stop the increase in CO2 from impacting the oceans?

Sadly, no. As with anything that happens on the Earth on a global scale, we have to consider how much there is that we need to change. There is a LOT of water in the oceans, and changing them is a slow process. There are potential chemicals that we could dump into the ocean to combat the CO2 and hydrogen ions, but they would do far more damage to the ecosystem short term. And really, all of the chemicals would be nothing but a tiny little drop in the entire ocean, best we let natural cycles do what they do. What we can (and really to need do) is control the only thing we can–the amount of CO2 that we’re pumping into the atmosphere. That is the only control that we have.

This drastic shift inpH is going to become a very big problem over the next few decades to the biology of the oceans, and studies suggest that it is likely to effect the southern oceans more-so. The report put out by The Royal Society (See further reading) suggests that it is going to be the cold water coral reefs that are going to be impacted the worst. Eventually, it may become more difficult for the various kinds of plankton in the southern ocean, and as they’re at the very bottom of the food chain, everything else in the ocean is going to be affected.

So to conclude, CO2 diffusion into the oceans is a natural part of the carbon cycle, and the oceans are supposed to contain upwards of 90% of the worlds CO2. BUT due to the burning of fossil fuels and mass global deforestation, we have dramatically upset the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. To combat this, and help curb global warming, the oceans take in the CO2…but because of the imbalance that human impact has had, the oceans are silently taking the brunt of it.

We know that CO2 diffuses better into cold water (it’s one of the reasons we serve soft drinks cold). With global warming melting the polar ice caps and releasing vast amounts of cold water into the oceans, we can say that the process is accelerating. Couple this with the fact that we’re pumping out more and more CO2 at an increasing rate, and the oceans are in trouble. Options-wise, there isn’t much to pick from and we, as a global society, are really struggling with the ONLY variable that we have at our disposal–our own actions.

Just to leave everyone with one final thought (and I mean this question quite earnestly), are we going to let the 21st century go down in history as the century that we lost the Great Barrier Reef?
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/diffusion-of-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-of-our-oceans/