What Do We Think About Climate Change

Thomas,

When you say: "...scientific conclusion that resent increases in atmospheric CO2 are the product of human activities" that's only your statement, not a truth.

If you'd said: "...scientific conclusion that recent increases in atmospheric CO2 are partly the product of human activities", then I would agree.


We have been discussing CO2 sources till boringness, Jim and I posting quite a bit of info on the matter, but you and others seem not to be available even to take the time to read it. On my side I'm not available anymore to keep on being into that circular trap. I just will post here whatever I find of new and interesting information on climate variability, from a 'cool' point of view, but I will not enter anymore tiring and useless discussions. You guys take the information or not, that's up to you. What I hope is to at least not be insulted in the process.

Cheers.

 

Thomas,

I'd like to add to your proposal that the debate about CO2 is still not even the most basic question we have to answer. That most basic of questions is whether there has been anything at all unusual about 20th century warming. To help answer this question, we have to look at climatic history. If when we do, we conclude that 20th century warming WAS NOT in any way anomalous, then we have to remand the whole debate to the null hypothesis, which is that 20th century warming was simply a result of and wholly within the previous limits of natural variation.

If the answer to the above question is 'Yes, there WAS something anomalous going on', THEN we can begin to look around for causes, with CO2 as a possible warming agent and whether or not it is anthropogenic.

Jimbo

 

The Catlin Artic Survey:
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/

They are progressing at 3.8 km a day. To cover the remanent 814 km to the North pole at that pace, they will need another 214 days....

Cheers.

 

Climate change, Is.

Antarctica was once the tropics. Central Aus was once an inland sea.
All of the planet has been changing since creation. It will continue to do so.
The difference now is only mans ability to mointor that change and to transmit the changes in real time through technology.

Stop worrying. Continue living.

Paul

 

Careful. You can be despised for making sense.

 

Jimbo, if I understand you correctly you are saying that the increase in atmospheric CO2 that has been observed comes from the oceans? I understand where you might have came up with this idea, because it is well known that the level of gas that water can absorb is inversely dependent on temperature. We observe this effect if we let a soft drink warm up, the CO2 bubbles out. BUT, there is a range of absorption from none up to the saturation point for which this is not true and water is an absorber, or sink. You might want to google "ocean CO2 levels" because quite a few people are claiming that the oceans are a CO2 sink that is just now becoming saturated. When saturation does occur, then as the ocean temperature continues to rise it most certainly will become a source of atmospheric CO2 instead of the sink it currently is. That point will be another tripping point, in the positive feedback direction.

Of course the ocean will be mostly dead by then as well. When that happens, we had better practice living without much oxygen and other such luxuries.

BillyDoc

 

Billy,

The better case can be made for the oceans being a current net source, rather than a sink. That they are a current source means that in the past they were absorbing CO2 that they are now releasing. Oceanic acidification is a non-issue as well since carbonate reactions prevent this ever occurring. If the nascent CO2 is not from the ocean then where did it come from? AGW proponents claim that anthropogenic emissions, mostly from fossil fuels, must be the source. But as I've repeatedly pointed out, this is a testable hypothesis. The test everyone agrees is probative is the isotopic mass balance. This test is definitive since ancient (fossil) carbon has a markedly different isotopic 'fingerprint' than recent carbon, hence recent CO2. Whenever this rest is done, it reveals that only a small fraction of the current atmospheric CO2 is from ancient sources. No one has been able to use the isotopic mass balance to attribute more than a few percent of the current atmosphere to fossils fuels. So the observed science again disagrees with the AGW hypothesis. The AGW via CO2 hypothesis fails yet another test.

Why should we place any confidence in a hypothesis that fails every test that is applied to it?

Jimbo

 

I think that's going to be a hard case to make, Jimbo. And your claim that oceanic acidification is a non-issue is a little off too.

This is what I just found with a very quick search. Note that stuff published in journals like Nature is peer reviewed and about as prestigious as it gets. Here we go:

Nature 425, 365 (25 September 2003) | doi:10.1038/425365a
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6956/abs/425365a.html

Oceanography: Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH

Ken Caldeira1 & Michael E. Wickett2

Most carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels will eventually be absorbed by the ocean1, with potentially adverse consequences for marine biota2, 3, 4. Here we quantify the changes in ocean pH that may result from this continued release of CO2 and compare these with pH changes estimated from geological and historical records. We find that oceanic absorption of CO2 from fossil fuels may result in larger pH changes over the next several centuries than any inferred from the geological record of the past 300 million years, with the possible exception of those resulting from rare, extreme events such as bolide impacts or catastrophic methane hydrate degassing.

Policy statement of the Royal Society;
http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?id=3249

Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide

30 Jun 2005

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted to the atmosphere by human activities is being absorbed by the oceans, making them more acidic (lowering the pH the measure of acidity).

Evidence indicates that emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities over the past 200 years have already led to a reduction in the average pH of surface seawater of 0.1 units and could fall by 0.5 units by the year 2100. This pH is probably lower than has been experienced for hundreds of millennia and, critically, at a rate of change probably 100 times greater than at any time over this period.

The report outlines our best understanding of the impacts of these chemical changes on the oceans. The impacts will be greater for some regions and ecosystems, and will be most severe for coral reefs and the Southern Ocean. The impacts of ocean acidification on other marine organisms and ecosystems are much less certain. We recommend a major international research effort be launched into this relatively new area of research.

We recommend that action needs to be taken now to reduce global emissions of CO2 from human activities to the atmosphere to avoid the risk of irreversible damage from ocean acidification.

Note that pH is a logarithmic scale, so 0.1 units is about 30%.

January 1, 2009

Ocean Acidification Hits Great Barrier Reef
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ocean-acidification-hits-great-barrier-reef

Coral growth has been sluggish since 1990 due to an increase in both sea temperature and acidity as a result of global warming

By David Biello

The largest coral reef system in the world—and the biggest sign of life on Earth, visible from space—is not growing like it used to. A sampling of 328 massive Porites coral (large structures resembling brains that are formed by tiny polyps) from across the 133,000-square-mile (344,000-square-kilometer) reef reveals that growth of these colonies has slowed by roughly 13 percent since 1990.

The most likely reason is climate change caused by increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to a new paper published today in Science.

The burning of fossil fuels over the past century or so has driven atmospheric CO2 levels from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 387 ppm—and growing. More than 25 percent of this extra CO2 is absorbed by the world's oceans and reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid. A rising carbonic acid level means a more acidic ocean.

And a more acidic ocean is bad news for coral and other sea creatures, which form their shells from calcium carbonate they extract from seawater. The more acidic the water, the more difficult it is to build the shells in the first place—as well as keeping them from dissolving.

I'll stop here, if you want more the google search I suggested above will get you over 5 million hits to get started on. The bottom line is simple: CO2 is being absorbed in the oceans as evidenced by an increase in acidity, and ocean acidity is disrupting the bottom of the food chain. When the ocean becomes saturated, as it must at the current input rate, that sink will go away, we will have a dead or nearly dead ocean, and global warming will accelerate.

Jim, I picked sources from Nature, The Royal Society, and Science as reported in Scientific American. Please don't insult us with some counter literature from . . . less prestigious sources. There is plenty of yelling and screaming going on, we already know that.

BillyDoc

 

Billy,

Your sources are just 'hunky dory'. You seem to place a lot of importance on this. I would guess you don't need (or probably want) to know about the major fiasco that very journal (Nature) suffered WRT MBH-98 a few years back and the major errors their very cursory 'peer review' failed to catch in that document and the retractions and 'errata' they were forced to print, to great embarrassment.

Moving on to the technical points. First note that all of the documents you posted contain many qualifier phrases, such as "probably", "our best understanding", "most likely reason", "much less certain". These were lifted directly. So please don't try to take a dogmatic or condescending tone about this as all the above are not proclamations from on high but rather the opinion of the scientist who wrote the article. There are equally qualified and eminent scientists who disagree with these assertions, and they have considerable weight of evidence to support their objections.

First, the writer of the first paragraph seems to take for granted that nascent CO2 is the result of anthropogenic emissions. Meanwhile, the best available direct test of this idea, the isotopic mass balance, does not support this idea AT ALL. In fact it shows that only a small percentage of atmospheric CO2 is from fossil fuels. If you can find a study that can attribute even 20% of atmospheric CO2 to anthropogenic emissions, please cite or publish it to this thread. I've searched and can't find one. TTT published one HE THOUGHT made such a claim, but on closer inspection this was not the case. The IPCC only backs up 21% in print (though this is based SOLELY on computer modeling, NOT on any mass balance data) so I don't know where this scientists gets off automatically attributing all atmospheric CO2 rise to human activity when there is no science behind this assertion. The same can be said for the idea that, to quote "human activities over the past 200 years ...." when anthropogenic CO2 basically has a ~60 year history. This is obviously done to obfuscate and confuse the public; it can't be for consumption by scientists; they know better. Do you want to revisit the year-by-year anthropogenic emissions records? Those records do not support this assertion.

This stuff all reads like standard AGW boiler plate. I could pick it apart further, but why bother. Here's the alternate explanatory hypothesis, which withstands when tested, unlike the assertions above, which do not.

The warming oceans are releasing CO2 which is causing atmospheric CO2 to increase. This increase began before significant anthropogenic emissions began, which as I've pointed out,is only about 60 years ago. Unless you believe that even relatively small emissions are important (the threshold of significance problem again), then we only have a ~60 year look-back period.

Trouble is, CO2 was rising 100 and 150 and more years ago. Why then? It CAN'T be due to anthropogenic emissions unless you accept a much lower threshold of significance, one that crosses well into natural variation due to other terrestrial incidental sources. Even accepting such a threshold is problematic for other reasons I won't get into right here, the above is quite enough hurdle to climb over.

On the acidification issue, the AGW crowd has got oceanic chemistry so tragically wrong, it's a wonder they can find their own butholes to go poop in the morning

But seriously, I don't think any of these guys are stupid; this just illustrates how agenda-driven pseudo-science can warp the scientific process of discovery, just as happened in the past with other politically charged issues.

Basically, CO2 just precipitates harmlessly out of sea water with no harmful effects whatsoever. The full reaction is posted in the attachment. You can test this hypothesis yourself and you will find that it works. The IPCC models the oceans as distilled water and so they can't come to the right conclusions about the fate of dissolved CO2. This is all part of the Tom Segalstad ppt posted earlier. Be sure to watch the Youtube demonstration of the principle at work in an experiment you can try at home.

View attachment Inorganic Carbon Cycle.doc

View attachment CO2 sea reactions.doc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjxUwDTkd4g


Jimbo

 

Segalstad wrote this caption for the video, which I thought was a quite succinct explanation:

This video shows that a candle floating on water, burning in the air inside a glass, converts the oxygen in the air to CO2. The water rises in the glass because the CO2, which replaced the oxygen, is quickly dissolved in the water. The water contains calcium ions Ca++, because we initially dissolved calcium hydroxide Ca(OH)2 in the water. The CO2 produced during oxygen burning reacts with the calcium ions to produce solid calcium carbonate CaCO3, which is easily visible as a whitening of the water when we switch on a flashlight. This little kitchen experiment demonstrates the inorganic carbon cycle in nature. The oceans take out our anthropogenic CO2 gas by quickly dissolving it as bicarbonate HCO3-, which in turn forms solid calcium carbonate either organically in calcareous organisms or precipitates inorganically. The CaCO3 is precipitating and not dissolving during this process, because buffering in the ocean maintains a stable pH around 8. We also see that CO2 reacts very fast with the water, contrary to the claim by the IPCC that it takes 50 - 200 years for this to happen. Try this for yourself in your kitchen!

 

The Human Factor: Understanding the Sources of Rising Carbon Dioxide
01.13.09

Every time we get into our car, turn the key and drive somewhere, we burn gasoline, a fossil fuel derived from crude oil. The burning of the organic materials in fossil fuels produces energy and releases carbon dioxide and other compounds into Earth's atmosphere. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide trap heat in our atmosphere, warming it and disturbing Earth's climate.

Scientists agree that human activities have been the primary source for the observed rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the beginning of the fossil fuel era in the 1860s. Eighty-five percent of all human-produced carbon dioxide emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, natural gas and oil, including gasoline. The remainder results from the clearing of forests and other land use, as well as some industrial processes such as cement manufacturing. The use of fossil fuels has grown rapidly, especially since the end of World War II and continues to increase exponentially. In fact, more than half of all fossil fuels ever used by humans have been consumed in just the last 20 years.

Human activities add a worldwide average of almost 1.4 metric tons of carbon per person per year to the atmosphere. Before industrialization, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million. By 1958, the concentration of carbon dioxide had increased to around 315 parts per million, and by 2007, it had risen to about 383 parts per million. These increases were due almost entirely to human activity.

While we are able to accurately measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, much about the processes that govern its atmospheric concentration remains a mystery. Scientists still do not know precisely where all the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere comes from and where it goes. They want to learn more about the magnitudes and distributions of carbon dioxide's sources and the places it is absorbed (sinks). This knowledge will help improve critical forecasts of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases as fossil fuel use and other human activities continue. Such information is crucial to understanding the impact of human activities on climate and for evaluating options for mitigating or adapting to climate change.

Scientists soon expect to get some answers to these and other compelling carbon questions, thanks to the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a new Earth-orbiting NASA satellite set to launch in early 2009. The new mission will allow scientists to record, for the first time, detailed daily measurements of carbon dioxide, making more than 100,000 measurements around the world each day. The new data will provide valuable new insights into where this important greenhouse gas is coming from and where it is being stored.

Before humans began emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the atmospheric uptake and loss of carbon dioxide was approximately in balance. "Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remained pretty stable during the pre-industrial period," said Gregg Marland of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. "Carbon dioxide generated by human activity amounts to only about four percent of yearly atmospheric uptake or loss of carbon dioxide, but the result is that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been growing, on average, by four-tenths of one percent each year for the last 40 years. Though this may not seem like much of an influence, humans have essentially tipped the balance of the global cycling of carbon. Our emissions add significant weight to one side of the balance between carbon being added to the atmosphere and carbon being removed from the atmosphere.

"Plant life and geochemical processes on land and in the ocean 'inhale' large amounts of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and then 'exhale' most of it back into the atmosphere," Marland continued. "Humans, however, have altered the carbon cycle over the last couple of centuries, through the burning of fossil fuels that enable us to live more productively. Now that humans are acknowledging the environmental effects of our dependence on fossil fuels and other carbon dioxide-emitting activities, our goal is to analyze the sources and sinks of this carbon dioxide and to find better ways to manage it."

Current estimates of human-produced carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere are based on inventories and estimates of where fossil fuels are burned and where other carbon dioxide-producing human activities are occurring. However, the availability and precision of this information is not uniform around the world, not even from within developed countries like the United States.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory's highly sensitive instrument will measure the distribution of carbon dioxide, sampling information around the globe from its space-based orbit. Though the instrument will not directly measure the carbon dioxide emissions from every individual smokestack, tailpipe or forest fire, scientists will incorporate the observatory's global measurements of varying carbon dioxide concentrations into computer-based models. The models will infer where and when the sources are emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

"The Orbiting Carbon Observatory data differ from that of other missions like the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite by having a relatively small measurement 'footprint,'" said Kevin Gurney, associate director of the Climate Change Research Center at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. "Rather than getting an average amount of carbon dioxide over a large physical area like a state or country, the mission will capture measurements over scales as small as a medium-sized city. This allows it to more accurately distinguish movements of carbon dioxide from natural sources versus from fossil fuel-based activities."

"Essentially, if you visualize a column of air that stretches from Earth's surface to the top of the atmosphere, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will identify how much of that vertical column is carbon dioxide, with an understanding that most is emitted at the surface," said Marland. "Simply, it will act like a plane observing the smoke from forest fires down below, with the task of assessing where the fires are and how big they are. Compare that aerial capability with sending a lot of people into the forest looking for fires. In this vein, the observatory will use its vantage point from space to peer down and capture a picture of where the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide are, rather than our cobbling data together from multiple sources with less frequency, reliability and detail."

Gurney believes the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will also complement a NASA/U.S. Department of Energy jointly-funded project he is currently leading called Vulcan.

"Vulcan estimates the movement of carbon dioxide through the combustion of fossil fuels at very small scales. Vulcan and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory together will act like partners in closing the carbon budget, with Vulcan estimating movements in the atmosphere from the bottom-up and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory estimating sources from the top-down," he said. "By tackling the problem from both perspectives, we'll stand to achieve an independent, mutually-compatible view of the carbon cycle. And the insight gained by combining these top-down and bottom-up approaches might take on special significance in the near future as our policymakers consider options for regulating carbon dioxide across the entire globe."

For more information on this topic, see: http://www.nasa.gov/oco and http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov .



Unfortunately the satellite was lost on launch.
Didn't have any hand in that did ya jimbo?

 

That's nice Jim. Most of us do make mistakes, admit them and learn from them. Was that your point?

Jim, if you were to read some real scientific papers you would find out that they always have qualifiers, because real science is always a dynamic process that is never complete. Only in religion do you find the dogmatism you seem to favor.

Well, Jim, it is sort of obvious, but apparently you should be publishing in Nature instead because you could correct all this misunderstanding. Here's an idea, why don't you write up your arguments and send them a letter. They do publish letters, you know.

Of course you can pick it apart, and yell, and assert anything you want to. But it's absolutely meaningless without a coherent logical structure backed with real evidence from real sources. This issue of sources is important, because the reputation of the source is often all that you or I have to go on without the bother of replicating the study. Have you noticed, by the way, that the "papers" you usually present do not follow science reporting practices? Real scientific papers start with an Abstract, which is a very condensed version of what the paper is about. Then they proceed to the Introduction, which explains the background of the study and can be basically anything the author wants it to be. Then the Methods section, which is one of the most important parts because it describes exactly what was done to a depth that allows replication. Then a Results section, which gives the results, obviously, without interpretation. Then a Conclusion section, which like the Introduction can be whatever the writer wants. The beauty of this format is that any reader that knows what is going on in the field has a clear basis from which to evaluate the study from a reading of the Methods and Results sections alone. Hopefully the conclusion the reader comes to from these matches the author's Introduction and Conclusion section, but not always. When it doesn't, believe me when I tell you that the author usually hears about it.

But your position seems to be that you don't need to back any of your assertions up with reputable sources that follow this format because it is so obvious that even YOU have it figured out. Even though 97% of actual climatologists disagree to the point they publish in journals like Nature and Science (the two most prestigious science journals in the world, by the way) as if the scientific consensus was complete (which it is, actually) and they can simply "take for granted" as you say this fact when it comes to issues like CO2 being absorbed in the ocean.

I think it's great you can be so positive about all of this Jim. I find my world is a lot more uncertain, and trying to figure out something this complicated akin to juggling live cats. I think it is for the scientists trying to figure it out as well, which is why you do find all of those caveats. So please take pity on a dumb Old Phart like me and just stick to the logic and the evidence, with evidence being real evidence from reputable sources, please.

I suppose we agree that if the CO2 isn't coming from the oceans, and it's not, then the answer to the question of where it is coming from becomes rather obvious. And the fact of increasing ocean acidity (despite your bad chemistry links without sources) does indeed argue that the oceans are currently a sink, not a source.

BillyDoc

 

Human Carbon Emissions Using Up Oceans' Absorption Capacity

WASHINGTON, DC, July 15, 2004 (ENS) - Humans have used up about one-third of the potential of the world's oceans to absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide generated by human activities such as burning coal for electricity and gasoline for transportation.

The first comprehensive study of the ocean storage of carbon dioxide derived from human activities - anthropogenic CO2 - determined that the oceans have taken up some 118 billion metric tons of this carbon dioxide between 1800 and 1994.

The international team of scientists who completed the survey said this total is approximately one-third of the oceans' long-term potential.

The research team, which included scientists from the United States, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Japan, Spain, and Germany, based the study on a 10 year survey of global ocean carbon distributions in the 1990s.

The global survey combined measurements of carbon dioxide and other ocean factors such as temperature, salinity, oxygen, nutrients and chlorofluorocarbon tracers in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

These findings, plus a companion paper on the impacts of anthropogenic CO2 on the chemistry of the oceans and the potential response of certain marine species to the changes in CO2 levels, will be published in the July 16 issue of the journal "Science."

"If the ocean had not removed 118 billion metric tons of anthropogenic carbon between 1800 and 1994, the CO2 level in the atmosphere would be about 55 parts per million greater than currently observed," said Christopher Sabine, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and the lead author of one of the papers.

The studies are critical to research of global warming, which the vast majority of scientists believe is occurring because greenhouse gases, including CO2, are released into the atmosphere primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.

Today's CO2 levels are reaching 380 parts per million in the atmosphere. By contrast, analysis of ice cores determined that for the 800,000 years before the industrial revolution began in the 1800s, atmospheric CO2 concentrations remained between 200 and 280 parts per million.

Sabine explained that because the ocean mixes slowly, the anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere is generally confined to the upper layers of the ocean.

"About half of the anthropogenic CO2 taken up over the last 200 years can be found in the upper 10 percent of the ocean," he said. "The ocean has removed 48 percent of the CO2 we have released to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and cement manufacturing."

There are two large reservoirs that are capable of taking significant amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere: the ocean and land plants.

Studies over the last decade have indicated that the land plants are taking up CO2 at rates comparable to the oceans, but scientists have determined that over a 200 year time frame, land plants have released more of the gas to the atmosphere than they have taken up.

This means the ocean has been the only reservoir to consistently remove anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere.

The uptake of anthropogenic CO2 by the oceans changes their chemistry and potentially can have significant impacts on the biological systems in the upper oceans, according to the scientific team.

Their research showed that a substantial amount of the calcium carbonate shells produced in surface waters dissolves in the upper ocean.

This in turn reduces the ability of many species of marine organisms to produce protective calcium carbonate shells and could impact marine food webs.

Recent studies have shown that calcification rates can drop by as much as 25 to 45 percent at CO2 levels equivalent to atmospheric concentrations of 700 to 800 parts per million.

Today's levels are 380 parts per million, but scientists say that level could double by the end of the century if fossil fuel consumption continues as projected.

"This research presents the first complete synthesis of modern global ocean inorganic carbon measurements," said James Yoder, director of the National Science Foundation's ocean sciences division.

This new global data set of ocean-carbon system observations, cosponsored in the United States by NOAA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, is unprecedented with more than 72,000 carbon measurements, 10 times more observations than the previous global survey in the 1970s and 10 times more accurate, Yoder said.

The data are drawn from three major research programs - the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study, and NOAA's Ocean-Atmosphere Carbon Exchange Study.

 

I will reiterate that i am not an environmentalist, 'warmer', or any other label you may care to use. I have for many years now made a conscious effort to purge my mind of beliefs.

**

<<<Jim, if you were to read some real scientific papers you would find out that they always have qualifiers, because real science is always a dynamic process that is never complete. Only in religion do you find the dogmatism you seem to favor.>>>>

Classic!

**

It is important to remember that almost all earth systems obey chaos theory laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory .
As such even small inputs can result in large changes.

As someone remarked earlier the earth has always changed and that is natural. That is completely true. However when conditions change so abruptly as to outpace our and the life we depend on's capacity for adaptation , we encounter much hardship. By introducing a very rapid increase in CO2 into the atmosphere we are creating an experiment which could very likely result in a sequence of difficult to survive rates of change in climatic conditions.

Seems a bit foolhardy to me , especially considering we will be needing alternatives to fossil fuels at some point anyways. Why delay? We can only gain by commencing the changeover now. Seeing as all our present wars (a situation which will be soon be massively magnified as the full consequences of peak oil get felt) are over oil, that gives yet another good reason.

**

On no other planet does there exist an unstable atmospheric gaseous composition. Despite being unstable this has been maintained at remarkably constant ratios by the complex interplay of elements in the biosphere.
Detailed analysys does reveal however that despite recovering from external disruptions (meteorite impact, anomalous sequence of volcanism, fossil fuel burning) the immediate repercussions are very rapid rates of change leading to widespread extinctions and regression of biosphere complexity.

**

Now suddenly there is the most numerous large mammal on earth which has acquired the never before seen ability to return to the atmosphere almost all the carbon deposits which have accrued over millions of years due to the slight net carbon sink effect of the biosphere.

Jimbo may be unhappy to analyze this report on CO2 attributable to man; http://www.icsu-scope.org/downloadpubs/scope13/chapter03.html

Of course we'll hear some kind of denial of the obvious shortly. Humans have no effect? Hmmm , wonder how many seconds it would take in a closed car with exhaust routed to the inside to reconsider that stance......

**

It is highly worthwhile noting that the sun, when looking at the overall trend , rather than the fine grain detail of chaotic cyclical fluctuations, is getting progressively warmer.
http://www.nineplanets.org/sol.html<<<Since the formation of the solar system the Sun's output has increased by about 40%. >>>>
This increase is NOT reflected in long term earth average temperatures which indicates again that the biosphere keeps conditions within a range which is conducive to the further proliferation of life despite changes in solar output not because of it in the long run. Furthermore there has been no appreciable increase in solar output in the last fifty years or so.
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Climate_Change_Attribution.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution

****

If Volcanoes attribute so much CO2 as you say then i'm sure you can produce a graph with a spike in CO2 coinciding neatly with Mount St Helens or Krakatoa.

*******

It is very rare to find people with beliefs which are incongruous to their manner of living.
I notice one proponent of "man has negligible effect on climate" designs motorsailors with diesel motors.....
I'm fairly confident that Jimbo leads a typical heavily fossil fuel dependent way of life (?)....

****************

Even if it were true that we have negligible effect on climate , then what? Does that mean we can just keep on growing, consuming and burning ever more fossil fuels ad infinitum? ???

Regardless of the answer to that, we are at, or just about at, peak oil so this issue will get resolved for us very shortly as we scramble to find practical alternatives.

Seeing as it is inevitable that we will need to change to different energy solutions , why not start now? The sooner we start the more time we will have to develop and choose intelligent solutions.

 

Hi Guys,
since I posted on this topic, I have now had the time to read most if not all of the posts.

There is a lot of great information and opinion on climate change and energy etc.

The only one we as a society need to focus on is energy.

We are running out of fossil fuels. That is a given.

I believe IMHO, that is what we should be focusing all our scientific efforts on. Producing clean energy. Lots of it.

As I stated in my post previously, climate change is a natural evolution for this or any other planet, big deal. Learn to live with that truth. Man may have had an influence on, or accelerated that change, true.
But with a bio mass of 6.2 billion humans of course things will change in some way.

At 55 years of age and having lived in a very small area for all those years, I am very aware of the climatic changes which have taken place.
During my lifetime the biggest change is population numbers.

All people want the best life style they can attain. In our modern society, that requires energy. Nothing else.

For all you whingers, if you are that worried, encourage the scientific community to concentrate it's efforts on the energy problem. Not worry about change which is, but concentrate on change whic can be achieved.

The ultimate result, may be that mankind from this tiny planet might colonise some of the millions of planets in existance.

Which would ultimately take the pressure off our earth.

Remember Einstien, only had a theory. It is not a proven fact.

Paul