Posted on 02/26/2009 1:53:41 PM PST by sourcery
Excerpt:
The earth's climate really is strongly affected by the greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player. There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth's temperature—on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can. It is like putting an additional ski hat on your head when you already have a nice warm one below it, but your are only wearing a windbreaker. To really get warmer, you need to add a warmer jacket. The IPCC thinks that this extra jacket is water vapor and clouds.
Since most of the greenhouse effect for the earth is due to water vapor and clouds, added CO2 must substantially increase water's contribution to lead to the frightening scenarios that are bandied about. The buzz word here is that there is "positive feedback." With each passing year, experimental observations further undermine the claim of a large positive feedback from water. In fact, observations suggest that the feedback is close to zero and may even be negative. That is, water vapor and clouds may actually diminish the already small global warming expected from CO2, not amplify it. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com ...
Some good information in the slides. The more facts that are on the table, the more laughable the taxes to fix global warming becomes.
Are you a climate scientists? I'm just an engineer who started out studying the solar wind.
There is no “correct” value of CO2, just as there is no “earth normal temperature”. However, if you drop CO2 below about 240ppm, photosynthisis begins to become impossible. This is well known and indisputed. In fact, real greenhouses generally add additional CO2 to the tune of approximately 1000ppm to make the plants grow bigger, better and faster. In fact some scientific studies show that increased CO2 in our atmosphere has helped plant growth planet wide. It also makes plants more efficient in water usage, and more drought resistant. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has varied greatly over the eons, and in fact during one of the largest ice ages was 15 times higher than today. If you were to think of all the air as your 1024x768 monitor and made the CO2 molecules black pixels, there would be 299 black pixels out of 786,432
The charts I have seen show ice core data at over 10 times today’s 380 ppm levels. But that’s just what I have dug up.
Where did you get the information on 240 ppm stopping photosynthesis. I am sure it would be fairly easy to run actual experiments, but just haven’t seen any data. Could be that’s why? This would be handy information to have ... I doubt all plants would die at some value, but there must be some minimum for all plants greater than zero.
I’ve seen a paper on that. I’ll look for it.
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