"Progress" on Reducing Carbon Emissions

When I think on this subject, it reminds me on the old Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin movie, "Sailor Beware", when Jerry had been sent to swab the top deck on the submarine. They forgot he was up there and, under attack, Jerry continues to try to swab the water off of the deck as the submarine is submerging.
Unforfunately I'm reminded of the scene more often than I would like these days.

 

And, temperatures are rising faster or slower this decade than last? Answer: slower, or maybe not rising at all. So much for CO2 being the primary driving force of climate change.

 

That makes no sense at all. Temperatures are always subject to natural variation. The trend is clearly upward, but that does not meam that some years, or even decades, will not show a slower degree of change or even a decline. However, that has nothing to do with whether CO2 is or is not the primary cause of global warming.

 

There are multiple drivers of global warming/cooling. But as we know that CO2 is one of the strongest and as human kind is one of the biggest "emitters" of CO2, it is good to start fixing that part, before it is too late.
And what is cool about fixing it, is that most of CO2 is generated by burning non renewable fossil fuels and fixing CO2 emissions will also fix our dependency on non renewable energy of which reserves are running out.

 

What about a Chia-Prius? If I wasn't so busy today I'd photoshop one.

 

It is interesting that when talking about cooling, the standard response seems to be that "temperatures are always subject to natural variation". But when temperatures rise, it is apparently all (or mainly) attributable to CO2. Strange how that works!

Sure, CO2 plays a role in climate change. But it is NOT the dominant driver of climate change. If it were, temperatures would not be declining at present. CO2 plays a minor role - probably one the order of 1 degree C or less per century. That was likely amplified significantly by natural variations during the 90s. Today, natural variations are countering the influence of CO2, thus causing temperatures to decline - and thus demonstrating that again, CO2 is not the primary driver of climate change. To make any other conclusion would be illogical.

 

CO2 can't be a massive driver because during the cretaceous levels were much higher than they are now. However, can it push things out of sync and cause some positive feedback loops that will push temps up further still? Also, even if the changes are small they could have some nasty geopolitical implications.

 

First, CO2 only represents between 3 and 7% of all greenhouse gasses, and human activity produces about 1.5% of all CO2 (the remainder is naturally produced). I find it difficult to believe that a planetary system can be thrown out of stability by such a small change.

Second, if man has anything to do with changes in global climate the cause is the number of humans infesting the planet. The major portion of the CO2 produced is roughly balanced by the CO2 scrubbed by natural vegetation. As we clear natural vegetation to feed and support all these humans, human produced CO2 will pale in comparison to the loss in scrubbing capacity through land use changes.

The real problem is that it is more politically convenient to blame a few "rich CEOs or conservative politicians" than to blame the teaming poor that are at the center of the population explosion. Dealing with the politically convenient problem provides a path to power for the socialists while no one wants to deal with the underlying issue.

 

Positive feedback loops are a requirement for a doubling of CO2 to cause a significant rise in global temps. Most models assume these positive feedback loops exist. To date, both the magnitude and even direction of some key feedbacks is not clearly understood.

For instance, the dominant proposed feedback to my understanding, is water vapor. However, low-lying clouds apparently produce negative feedback and high clouds positive feedback. So the net effect is still being studied.

 

Makes sense. The oceans degassing probably being the most obvious. One thing that I did fail to mention about the cretaceous is that the sun was less intense then than it is now. I have no idea how that would affect things. Clearly it would be hotter now than then, but by how much? The other question is "could the planet support 8-10 billion people with such a climate?" Maybe. Maybe not.

 

Please note that the 1.5% is the percentage of CO2 generated by man of the total CO2 generated by the planet. That is 1.5% of between the 4 and 7% of greenhouse gasses that CO2 represents, or 0.06% to 0.10% of greenhouse gasses. Given the fact that there is significant disagreement over the actual percentages of CO2 of total greenhouse gasses (some indicate it is as low as 2%), I still am not convinced that our planetary system is incapable of dealing with a small change in one component gas.

Your dripping faucet analogy is simply off point. For an analogy to have value it must represent a parallel system or effect.

Further, where did the 1.5% change per year come from? You can't "make up" numbers and inject them into a discussion or model without ensuring that they have validity - Oh, but in fact that is what is done in the models that blame human activity for climate change - the very same models that missed predicting the recent increase in atmospheric CO2, even with VMT (vehicle miles traveled) in the US down 10 billion miles per month over the past few months. The reality is we don't even have an agreed upon standard for measuring the Earth's temperature.

Again, the issue that concerns me, and should concern everyone that actually believes in man-made global warming is the staggering increase in human population, nearly tripled in the last 60 years, and the effect this increase will have on the natural system for scrubbing CO2. There is absolutely nothing that can be done in terms of reducing man-made carbon that will make up for clearing land to feed and house that level of population increase. If you want to pretend that it doesn't exist, OK, but do so at your own risk because the effects of that population increase are beyond our control (it ain't happening here!).

 

Bob, the developing world is churning out more and more CO2 every year. Coal is the fastest growing fuel source for power generation. By 2030 the developing world will produce more CO2 than the industrialized world. So, while it's true that US VMT is dropping it's rapidly increasing in places like Iran, India, China. I agree with you about population. However, that's something that can change faster than atmospheric CO2 levels (cynically or responsibly).

 

Every time I witness an individual saying something to contradict the general conclusions of the IPCC I think about how magically fantastic it would be if he/she was right and the vast majority of peer-reviewing climate scientists were knowingly wrong/deceitful.

Then we'd only have to quit using fossil fuels to improve air quality and to stop funding terrorism.

 

Don't forget about the expensive part. That just might be our saving grace.

 

? And CO2 causes asthma is documented where????

Please note that cow farts produce significantly more methane than man so we better not eat more chikin!

My point is that there are two sides to the CO2 issue, production and removal. The earth's system includes the removal of CO2. My concern is that in looking only at the production side of the equation we are neglecting the side that has the largest constant, and that constant is a negative number - removal capacity.

And as far as the models that the IPCC folks all swear by, I read recently that one of these models, the one that predicted the end of the flow in the Gulf Stream, neglected a small element, the wind. When included, it changed the result dramatically. The problem today is that there are 1) simply too many assumptions in the models that are being used to predict doomsday; 2) as the models substitute real data for assumptions the results change dramatically; 3) many of the systems of energy transfer and chemistry within the atmosphere are not fully understood; and 4) the entire issue is being used by the UN to gain power over individual countries, in much the same way the socialists in this country have used environmental law to strangle this country and gain political power.

 

Removal capacity is NOT a constant.

Many of the models have a decent job of predicting global temps. You are correct that there are a great many unknown and poorly understood systems that no doubt have an effect on climate. However, our poor understanding of these systems actually increases our risk because the error bars are that much larger. Not knowing what's going to happen can't be equated with "we have no impact". That's a very dangerous line of thinking.