Is Global Warming caused by Carbon Dioxide increasing?
I didn’t ask is technology causing global warming . That’s a more complex question.
This Video called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” gives some credible arguments suggesting that sun spots and cosmic rays both caused by the sun have a far greater affect on the earths temperature.
There is a good page at BraveNewClimate.com that debunks some of this
The biggest surprise to me was that CO2 makes up less than 1 percent of the earths atmosphere.
I’d like to know how the sun’s activity is measured because they have data going back hundreds of years.
So one fair conclusion to draw is that many people take for gospel that Global warming is caused by CO2 and one might ask “What good does it do to prove that is false?” Not a lot really. But it’s nice to know the truth. It’s also possible that if I was more vocal about this that I’d be helping the anti-nukers to delay the growth of Nuclear Energy.
Some points made in the video as fact
1. That CO2 is only about .54 % of the atmosphere (it’s more like .038 %)
2. That Margaret Thatcher offered scientists money to prove that CO2 was causing Global warming.
3. At a relatively low period of industrialization in the first few decades of the 1900′s we had a far greater increase in CO2
4. There is evidence that CO2 increase is caused by Global warming and that there is a time lag and that Al Gore’s theory did not dig deep enough to see the patterns. (Gore did get some of it wrong but what’s important is his call to action – after all CO2 is an enabler for temperature change so what came first before humans were causing it is not so relevant)
Questions unanswered and a couple of strange and unlikely facts. The ocean has a memory and temperatures are very slow to respond to influences as much as 300 years.
Also what about Ozone and if we’re not worried about CO2 then is there something we should be worried about?
Sorry, but CO2 is only 0.038% of Earth’s atmosphere, not 0.38%, which is off by a factor of 10, or 1 order of magnitude.
The best reason for rejecting carbon hysteria is the Stalinist methods used by the carbon doom establishment which has ensconced itself within the UN’s IPCC, the UEA CRUD, NASA GISS, NOAA, and so on. If people who are supposed to be scholars suddenly start behaving like Stalinists or Maoists, then you should know that something is badly wrong.
Thanks for pointing this out. I will correct that decimal position. I am not convinced it’s unjustified hysteria but I will acknowledge that there are extremist reactions. But a surprising number of people I respect that have worked with the figures for teaching and educating at both a scholarly level and also the public believe global warming or perhaps a better expression climate change is affected by pollution.
There are two or three scientific facts missing from these denials.
There is also the historical fact that Thatcher herself, although very charming and unusually intelligent for a politician, is personally responsible IMHO for the decline of the British nuclear industry. After she privatized the CEGB, it appears to me that the buyers either did not appreciate that they needed the skills of the nuclear engineers, or that the permitted profits from nuclear were unattractive. Anyway, British Energy, which apparently owned most of the nukes, is now part of the successor to Electricite de France. The scientists needed to give Margaret Thatcher the ability to understand science. No amount of money can do that.
It is astonishing how little milk you need to put in a pint of water to affect its transparency considerably. It is equally astonishing how little carbon dioxide is available for capture and conversion to wood by a tree seedling, or consider the amount of grass you need to mow in a year, if you have a lawn. Most of its weight is carbon compounds, which your fertiliser does not supply. So do not scorn the 0.038%.
More scientifically, and no less august an authority than Lord Kelvin computed it, the total tonnage of oxygen in the atmosphere is believed to be of photosynthetic origin. That gives us the tonnage of carbon sequestered underground and in living organisms. We know that a significant amount of the fossil carbon has been used up. We know that the transparency of CO2 to various energy levels of infrared radiation is higher for those coming in than for those emitted from the Earth’s biosphere. So a small increase even in that tiny proportion of CO2, can be significant.
Kelvin did not have any knowledge of radioactivity, so he did not know as we do that the duration of the Carboniferous Era was about 64 million years, during which the Earth’s seas and air cooled about ten degrees.
If we have consumed one percent of the fossil carbon, we have undone 640 thousand years of prehistoric carbon sequestration.