The Oil Drum

You'll be interested to know that the latest IPCC report looks at *8* different ways of modelling historic temperature, and they all come up with the same conclusion as the Mann 'hockey stick', ie an abrupt and sustained background rise in temperature, only explainable by invoking anthropogenic forcings.

As far as we know, solar radiation has been quite constant for a long period of time-- we have accurate measurements back to 1938. The estimate now is it accounts for less than 20% of temperature change.

Cosmic rays we don't know. $10m is being spent on that bit of research.

The impression I got from the IPPC study was that they recognize the normal cycles of warming and cooling over the last millenia or so, but that the addition of higher GWG levels from human use (not in dispute as far as I can see)over the last 150 years is not only adding to what may indeed been a "normal" warming cycle, but may also be destablizing weather cycles worldwide. And it is this destablization (consisting of "tipping points"?)that is what is so dangerous because of their ability to swing worldwide weather patterns into "chaotic" instabilities that permanantly alter global weather patterns for the worse. (Slowing/stopping the Atlantic convection currents, for example.) Am I wrong in this?

I've sure been hearing a lot of "the worst(take your pick-wildfires, heatwave, hurricanes, typhoons, snow storm, icestorm)in local history" in the news these days, both in the US and from around the world. My worry about mankind adapting is, that it would be extremely difficult to adapt to such chaotic and destablized weather.

Where I live, we've been in drought (our average yearly rainfall was 45 inches) for the last 6 years. And in the last 6 months we've had the hottest summer, warmest December, longest January coldsnap and worst icestorm since records have been kept.

If this keeps up, it's going to make it mighty hard to plan my peak oil edible landscape and garden. And that may be the biggest problem from global warming worldwide, rather than just increasing "warmth".

Linda

One of the startling aspects to the some of the more recent pronouncements by the NAS (or atleast by the President of the NAS)are the constraints placed by isotopic carbon (and other stable isotopes). The ratio of C12/C13 in "new carbon" is much much different from the C12/C13 of "old carbon" associated with fossil fuels (fossil fuels are very, very rich in C12 compared to C13). According to the NAS, this ratio has been changing substantially and is the "smoking gun" of fossil fuels increasing atmospheric CO2 levels.

According to the conference I attended this summer, that range is constrained to a minimum of about 65% and a maximum of about 90% with a mean of somewhere around 75% of the increase in CO2 originating with combustion of fossil fuels. I have seen suggested that it's "the oceans" causing this but other isotopes of dissolved gases would be showing up also. They aren't.

But the problem in suggesting that these physical processes of GHGs in the atmosphere are not significant or have little effect is the same as telling me that the NDIR analyzers we use to fine tune combustion operations or the FDIR monitors that we use work in ways that are inconsistent with and different from the physics of GHGs. It requires a special pleading of physics, one that I don't think physics yields up.

The whole debate about global warming shows that you should always look at the numbers first. Saying that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing the Earth to heat rapidly is just false. First of all the most important GHG is water vapor and not CO2. Water warms the Earth when it's vapor, but it can cool it when forming clouds (clouds are little droplets forming around aerosols and that means that coal alongside CO2 emissions, emits a lot of ashes and aerosols that help form clouds and thus block the sun. Natural gas is "clean" and emits mostly CO2, causing warming effects ONLY ).
Secondly the total world natural emissions from various sources (forest fires, volcanoes, oceans etc.) are much greater than human caused emissions. There are about 1900 GT of CO2 in the atmosphere and a one year cycle is equal to 210 GT. Burning fossil fuels ads 6 GT of carbon dioxide each year, being less than 3% of the total emissions of CO2 and less than 0.3% of the total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. About one third of those 6GT stays in the atmosphere, the rest is sequestered naturally. CO2 is "responsible" for 9% of the GH effect. So anthropogenic CO2 emissions are strengthening the GH effect by 0,09% each year. This is still a LOT if you take into account that the process will be, at best, constant (0.09% for 100 years gives 9.5% rise! and the natural sequestration will probably slow down).
So YES, we are causing climate change, but many people, like Gore aren't telling the whole truth. It's not only CO2 and not only humans and most of all, not only fossil fuels!.
Another inconvenient truth is the fact that a trivial phenomenon called breathing is responsible for the biggest part of anthropogenic GHG emissions. An average person "emits" 300 kg of CO2/a. That multiplied by 6.5 billion people gives you about 2GT of CO2 per year! That's almost one third of what we are producing with all of our cars, jet planes, coal fire power plants etc. Up to late 40s humans were producing more carbon dioxide by breathing than fossil fuels burning. What about agriculture? What about 3 billions cows, pigs and chickens? Don't they breath as well? I was not able to find any data about the amount of CO2 "produced" by livestock, but if you just simply multiply the human "emissions" of 300 kg by the factor of 7 (cattle body mass is more or less 7 times higher than human body) and the number of cattle - 1.3 bln, you will get 2.7GT of CO2. That's just cottle! That means that if you sum up just the exhaled CO2 from humans and life stock you will get more CO2 than fossil fuels create. Livestock and agriculture also produce a lot of methane (over 20 times stronger GHG than CO2) and other strong greenhouse gases. Instead of pumping CO2 into oceans, how about cutting our meat consumption by a factor of 2?
By studying different aspects of PO I learned to dig really deep to find the right data. I see that a lot of you don't check the facts about global warming and you just BELIVE it.

My three cents.