Richard Henry wrote:
"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:9kyLf.494$fL3.244@fed1read01...
Richard Henry wrote:
"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:eIlLf.421$fL3.193@fed1read01...
Ken Smith wrote:
And you think that the amount of CO2 man has added will have no
effect.
"Trivial" effect, no sarcasm intended.
What degree of CO2 increase would you consider to be non-trivial?
Something on the order of what natural sources regularly (and
irregularly) produce. The irregular events I consider more worrisome as
the overall environment has a better chance of coping with relatively
slower changes; we ramp up our CO2 production over decades, the
biosphere adjusts to utilize it. A volcano blows off ten times as much
in one hour and there's no immediate place for it to go. Homeostasis (in
this case meaning staying on the "natural" attractor that determines our
climate) is a lot easier to maintain when the individual elements of the
system have adequate time to react to changes by sequestering excesses
of any resource, and Earth's biosphere has gotten very good at that.
Actually I worry less about rapid volcanic CO2 releases than things
like deep-ocean methane ice blowoffs. A seaquake releases a few cubic
kilometers of that in say an hour upwind of a populated coast and the
population is non-trivially screwed. This is not alarmist fantasy, it's
actually happened in large, deep inland lakes, killing every
air-breather for kilometers around. That was estimated to be from on the
order of a few cubic _meters_ of methane ice.
Are you talkinga about Lake Nyos in Cameroon? That lake burped off carbon
dioxide (CO2, heavier than air) and methane hydrates will burp off methane
(CH4, lighter than air).
No, I meant an event at the Black Sea (for which I cannot find a
link), and freshly-melted methane is heavier than air. The stuff has
been found all over the planet, from the British Columbia coast (Canada
is apparently thinking about mining it for energy), to the Gulfs of
Mexico and California, to the Black Sea. Evidently there's twice as much
carbon sequestered in the clathrates as in all the petroleum known to exist!
Don't forget the Edmund Fitzgerald; it is thought that it sank due to
a methane ice blowoff.
I agree that a volcanic burp causes human emisions to pale. But only for a
few days. Meanwhile, the constant human emissions continue. Scientists are
able to sample atmoshperic CO2 levels by various means, such as air bubbles
trapped in galcial ice. The current concentration is thehighest it has been
for the last half-million years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:C...ide_400kyr.png
I just love the way the industrial age/CO2 correlation is presented
as fact in the yellow box.
I notice that the recent spike is from two data sources, the Siple
Dome and Mauna Loa.
The raw data from Siple is "restricted to WAISCORES investigators",
which makes me suspicious. Also, I'm kinda suspicious of CO2 data from
an aircraft refeuling station in the Antarctic.
You do know that Mauna Loa is a volcano, right? And that even
"inactive" volcanoes leak all sorts of gases? I can't think of a worse
place to put a CO2 monitoring station, except possibly in a cattle feedlot.
That aside, check out their site:
http://www.oar.noaa.gov/organization...rs03/cmdl.html
and compare these statements from the
"...it is the only lab with a primary mission of monitoring
atmospheric parameters continuously over decades to centuries."
"The observatories at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and at the South Pole have
been in operation since 1957."
Decades to centuries, with a half-century's worth of data...
Now, you may take the above as quibbling or even "conspiracy theory"
paranoia, but notice the other graphs on your cited page, specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:P...on_Dioxide.png
The literal bottom line is:
"Both measurements and models show considerable uncertainty and
variation; however, all point to carbon dioxide levels in the past that
have been signifcantly higher than they are at present."
That spike simply doesn't fit.
Mark L. Fergerson