<IPCC Summary and Fossil FuelThe Oil DrumDrumBeat: February 13, 2007>

262 comments on Global Warming - a review and a Conference Conclusion

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Nick Rouse on February 14, 2007 - 7:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I learned to dig really deep to find the right data.

No, you merely skimmed a lot of contrarian blogs and swallowed the lot. The tale about water vapour has been dredged up and rebutted so many times that you clearly have not even began to read the literature if you do not address these rebuttals. See for example here

If you cannot even see the difference between exhalation of carbon dioxide by animals that must have absorbed by plants in equal amounts mostly weeks or months ahead and thus contributing no net carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and the burning of fossil fuel and releasing into the air carbon that had been locked in the ground to remain there with a mean life time of about 100 years, not only have you not read the literature, you do not have the scientific reasoning power you would hope for in a 16 year old school science student.

The arrogance that it takes for someone with so little scientific reading or ability to imagine that they can spot mistakes that have not been spotted by over 2000 of the planet's most talented and learned climatologists in over three years of detailed study building on decades of experience, checked and double checked line by line by each other, is quite bewildering.

There have been examples where the scientific consensus has been wrong and those that have first opposed this consensus have been scorned but I cannot think of a single example of where such a consensus has been overthrown by someone who did not understand fully and deeply the work of those that formed that consensus

You are not about to be the first exception to that rule.

The only true part of post is the problem of ruminants converting carbon dioxide to methane and that is included in the report and, although not negligible, will be a small part of the problem when carbon dioxide levels build up in the next decades as they will under any practically realisable way that does not involve the death of hundreds of millions of humans .

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N-der on February 15, 2007 - 5:01pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I agree that the breathing argument was stupid and I feel ashamed I missed the whole carbon cycle in that process. I wouldn't call it arrogance ... ignorance maybe ;)
As for the impact of the CO2 on the greenhouse effect, I didn't read ANY blogs, I read this: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
I'm not an expert, but the numbers seem right (checked them in other, unreliable sources, like Wikipedia) and I just don't understand why some people are saying "it's all carbon dioxide" without showing the whole picture.
Water vapor IS a greenhouse gas and the fact that H20 in the atmosphere is, to quote Sir David King, "complicated" doesn't change that. If CO2 is contributing to the GH effect 9-26% (from the article you gave as an example) and human emissions are adding about 1%/year of CO2 in the atmosphere (~7 blnT/750) why everybody is talking about carbon dioxide all the time? I know the reports include it, but NO BODY READS THEM. Usually, at best journalist read the summary and that's all you get in the media (and on TOD as well, by the way) - CO2! We emit and it gets hot. Simple as that. If I was ignorant how would you call this? Humankind, over the last ~250 years, emitted in to the atmosphere 320 billion Tons of CO2! That’s important. This is the magnitude that makes difference in the global scale and I would love to see arguments like that instead of showing Katrina victims and linking them directly to fossil fuels burning.
Also there are some negative feedbacks that don’t “sound right” and are “politically incorrect”. Like the variation in albedo caused by land use changes, or the cooling effect of the aerosols. To use your source again:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/efficacy_fig28.gif

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AlanfromBigEasy on February 16, 2007 - 8:40am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The tasks of the climate modeler are quite different from that of public policy. We can change those things under our direct control, perhaps a little about those things under our indirect control and nothing about the rest.

The climate modeler needs to be concerned about ALL factors, the public policy makers (i.e. the rest of us) need only be concerned about CO2, fluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxides and carbon capture and, perhaps, albedo ($50 to $100 tax for any car other than white, roof color requirments ?).

Best Hopes,

Alan

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