Posted on 05/15/2008 7:12:29 AM PDT by cogitator
Halemaumau emissions plume, half-size (click for full size):
Wheeler Geologic Area, Colorado -- love the hoodoos. Apparently this place is so hard to reach that there was an attempt to make it a national monument, but that attempt collapsed because of lack of interest and potential visitorship, so it's a geological area in a national forest. Wheeler Geologic Area
Crystal Cave of Giants, Mexico:
Giant Crystal Cave's Mystery Solved (this article has a link to a different cave discovery, a very nice limestone cave in Sequoia National Park). It's pretty amazing that places like these are still being discovered in the modern era.
Ping! Had fun this week!
"Superman was warned that he shouldn't have used illegal alien labor when constructing the Fortress of Solitude in an earthquake-prone area, but the low bid was just too good to pass up..."
}:-)4
OK, that’s good humor.
So where are Algore and McCainiac and the other Warmists — shouldn’t they be calling on all Western nations to stop volcanic eruptions and gaseous emissions? After all, they contribute far more CO2 to the atmosphere than do humans....
Dilithium Crystals?
Actually, that's a very commonly held misconception. See the first point in my profile. CO2 is a minor constituent in volcanic emissions. One of the primary constituents, SO2, makes an aerosol in the atmosphere that blocks incoming solar radiation, causing a cooling effect if the eruption puts enough SO2 into the upper atmosphere. This happened for Pinatubo in 1991.
Great photos and thanks for the info.
ABSTRACT:
"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the product of oceanic respiration due to the well-known but under-appreciated solubility pump. Carbon dioxide rises out of warm ocean waters where it is added to the atmosphere. There it is mixed with residual and accidental CO2, and circulated, to be absorbed into the sink of the cold ocean waters. Next the thermohaline circulation carries the CO2-rich sea water deep into the ocean. A millennium later it appears at the surface in warm waters, saturated by lower pressure and higher temperature, to be exhausted back into the atmosphere. Throughout the past 420 millennia, comprising four interglacial periods, the Vostok record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is imprinted with, and fully characterized by, the physics of the solubility of CO2 in water, along with the lag in the deep ocean circulation. Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases. Increased carbon dioxide has been an effect of global warming, not a cause. Technically, carbon dioxide is a lagging proxy for ocean temperatures. When global temperature, and along with it, ocean temperature rises, the physics of solubility causes atmospheric CO2 to increase. If increases in carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, could have in turn raised global temperatures, the positive feedback would have been catastrophic. While the conditions for such a catastrophe were present in the Vostok record from natural causes, the runaway event did not occur. Carbon dioxide does not accumulate in the atmosphere."
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
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The graph above represents temperature and CO2 levels over the past 400,000 years. It is the same exact data Al Gore and the rest of the man-made global warmers refer to. The blue line is temps, the red CO2 levels. The deep valleys represent 4 separate glaciation periods. Now look very carefully at this relationship between temps and CO2 levels and keep in mind that Gore claims this data is the 'proof' that CO2 has warmed the earth in the past. But does the graph indeed show this? Nope. In fact, rising CO2 levels all throughout this 400,000 year period actually lagged behind temperature increases --by an average of 800 years! So it couldn't have been CO2 that got Earth out of these 4 past glaciations. Yet Gore dishonestly and continually claims otherwise.-Eye On The Left
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"The above chart shows the range of global temperature through the last 500 million years. There is no statistical correlation between the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through the last 500 million years and the temperature record in this interval. In fact, one of the highest levels of carbon dioxide concentration occurred during a major ice age that occurred about 450 million years ago. Carbon dioxide concentrations at that time were about 15 times higher than at present.":
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010405M
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FWD:
So, greenhouse [effect] is all about carbon dioxide, right?
Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in and even at what altitude it is found in the atmosphere.
In simple terms the bulk of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor by virtue of its abundance. Water accounts for about 90% of the Earth's greenhouse effect -- perhaps 70% is due to water vapor and about 20% due to clouds (mostly water droplets), some estimates put water as high as 95% of Earth's total tropospheric greenhouse effect (e.g., Freidenreich and Ramaswamy, 'Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models,' Journal of Geophysical Research 98 (1993):7255-7264).
The remaining portion comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other 'minor greenhouse gases.' As an example of the relative importance of water it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
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Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System
Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many 'facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.
Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
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From BBC News [yr: 2004]:
"A new [2004] analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past. They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer."..."In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface. This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it. Ice core disc, Epica Ice cores record climate trends back beyond human measurements It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3869753.stm
It's really hard to imagine how this little ball of fire could have any impact on our climate at all.
But the main arguments being made for a solar-climate connection is not so much to do with the heat of the Sun but rather with its magnetic cycles. When the Sun is more magnetically active (typically around the peak of the 11 year sunspot cycle --we are a few yrs away at the moment), the Sun's magnetic field is better able to deflect away incoming galactic cosmic rays (highly energetic charged particles coming from outside the solar system). The GCRs are thought to help in the formation of low-level cumulus clouds -the type of clouds that BLOCK sunlight and help cool the Earth. So when the Sun's MF is acting up (not like now), less GCRs reach the Earth's atmosphere, less low level sunlight-blocking clouds form, and more sunlight gets through to warm the Earth's surface...naturally. Clouds are basically made up of tiny water droplets. When dust particles in the atmosphere become ionized by incoming GCRs they become very 'attractive' to water molecules, in a purely chemical sense of the word.-Eye On The Left
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There's a relatively new book out on the subject titled The Chilling Stars. It's written by one of the top scientists advancing the theory (Henrik Svensmark).
And here is the website for the place where he does his research:
2008: "The Center for Sun-Climate Research at the DNSC investigates the connection between variations in the intensity of cosmic rays and climatic changes on Earth. This field of research has been given the name 'cosmoclimatology'"..."Cosmic ray intensities – and therefore cloudiness – keep changing because the Sun's magnetic field varies in its ability to repel cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy, before they can reach the Earth." :
http://www.spacecenter.dk/research/sun-climate
You can reply to me elsewhere. Threads in which I'm participating are not hard to find.
Thank you.
Well, you brought up widely held misconceptions related to CO2 emission. I just thought I would mention the other much more widely held misconception. After all, our goal IS to educate and inform, no?
BTW: Geology, especially historical geology is a huge passion of mine. Plate tectonics, structural geology, paleogeography, etc. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for posting the pix.
The topic of your posting is inappropriate for this thread. Glad you like geology -- you'll note that one of my pictures is of volcanic emissions from Kilauea volcano, and my first comment concerns the new eruption of Mount Etna. One poster asked (facetiously, to an extent) "shouldn’t they be calling on all Western nations to stop volcanic eruptions and gaseous emissions? After all, they contribute far more CO2 to the atmosphere than do humans....".
The latter comment is erroneous with regard to the CO2 content of volcanic emissions. Since my profile has information about this, and since I also described an important component of volcanic emissions in my reply (SO2), I felt that my response was appropriately on-topic. There was no other discussion of climate change other than the cooling effect of SO2 aerosols, and I did not direct the poster to examine other parts of my profile. Therefore, I respectfully request again that you request the deletion of your off-topic postings in this thread. They are distracting and superfluous here.
I saw your same postings in the other thread about "The Great Global Warming Swindle". So your objective of making me aware of that information -- which I have been aware for some time, actually -- has been met.
Thank you.
[[Dilithium Crystals?]]
No- DeAlkaline Crystals
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