Re: OT: Climate Change

On Apr 11, 1:38 pm, Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelati...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Apr 11, 4:13 am, Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelati...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ian Bell wrote:
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 0.04% and has been for the
last 50 years or more. The proportion of that 0.04% contributed by human
emissions is very small. The big source/sink of CO2 is the sea. The
temperature of the sea controlls the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Human
emissions are insignificant.

This seems to make basic sense to me ! In other words CO2 levels are merely an
indicator.

It might make basic sense to you, but it is nevertheless wrong. The
current CO2 level ois 0.0383% and it has risen by about 0.006% in the
past fifty years.

Purely according to ice core data which does not tally with direct atmospheric
measurements.

About 0.01% of the 0.0383% represents human
emissions since the industrial revolution, which is a significant (and
rising) proportion.

Given the minor role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas it's a drop in the ocean.http://nov55.com/crunch.html
I haven't looked in detail at the above yet but feel free to comment.

It looks like rubbish. The author doesn't seem to understand how
greenhouse gases work.

The atmosphere is - as he says - more or less transparent to the
visible and near infrared radiation that carries the bulk of the
energy radiated onto the earth by the sun, where it heats the surface
to around 300K.

The earth then loses this heat exclusively by radiation. The spectrum
of the black body radiation emitted by a black body at 300K is centred
much further down in the infrared, where the atmosphere isn't
transparent, so the radiation emitted into space doesn't come from the
surface, but from the top of the atmosphere, which is a whole lot
colder than the surface. This displacement of the radiating surface is
the whole basis of the greenhouse effect, and the author doesn't seem
to have a clue about it.

In the past, CO2 levels have been driven by ocean temperature, but
this time around we've managed to reverse the situation.

That hardly sounds very convincing.

The fluctuations in CO2 level over the past few hundred thousand years
seem to have followed and resulted from temperature changes produced
by changes in ocean currents. Our digging up and burning lots of coal
and oil seems to be driving up the current temperature in the same way
that massive CO2 releases produced by massive vulcanism did in the
remote past.

See if you can find Tony Hallam's "Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities"
ISBN 0-19-280668-8. It is published in paperback by Oxford University
Press - my copy is marked as 8.99 pounds rrp - and is a geologists
account of the various mass extinctions over the last few hundred
million years.

The book discusses a fair number of mechanisms that can drive and
exaggerate climate change. You may find it more convincing.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen


.

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