Runaway greenhouse effect starts on Mother Earth

From: habshi (habshi_at_anony.net)
Date: 10/11/04 

Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 15:30:26 GMT

        Think positive .How can we use the heating of the planet to cut down on energy use?
How about insulated wide pipes taking heat energy from the tropiocs to the industrial areas?
excerpts

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Monday October 11, 2004
The Guardian

An unexplained and unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere two years running has
raised fears that the world may be on the brink of runaway global warming.
Scientists are baffled why the quantity of the main greenhouse gas has leapt in a two-year period
and are concerned that the Earth's natural systems are no longer able to absorb as much as in the
past
In recent decades CO2 increased on average by 1.5 parts per million (ppm) a year because of the
amount of oil, coal and gas burnt, but has now jumped to more than 2 ppm in 2002 and 2003
When the Pacific warms up during El Niņo - a disruptive weather pattern caused by weakening trade
winds - the amount of carbon dioxide rises dramatically because warm oceans emit CO2 rather than
absorb it.

But scientists are puzzled because over the past two years, when the increases have been 2.08 ppm
and 2.54 ppm respectively, there has been no El Niņo

Positive feedback, on the other hand, which occurs when the output goes back to add force to the
input, can magnify the whole process until it takes on a "runaway" character.

The fear of climate scientists is that just such a positive feedback might occur with global
warming, in which the warming itself precipitates changes in the earth's natural systems, which
themselves cause additional warming, which then causes further changes, and so on, in an unstoppable
acceleration.

This fear is well founded, because records of ancient climates deduced from cores driven deep into
the polar ice show that this has happened in the past: previous episodes of warming at the end of
ice ages have indeed developed a runaway character, with enormous temperature rises of as much as 10
degrees centigrade in 50 years.

In 1958, Dr Keeling and his team found that CO2 was present in the air at a level of 315 parts per
million (ppm), not hugely above the natural "background" level of before the industrial revolution,
estimated at about 280ppm. However, the remorseless growth in fossil-fuel consumption as the global
economy has mushroomed has produced an equally remorseless rise in the CO2 level. It now stands at
376ppm.

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