Warming? Humans are not to blame (Letter to the Editor)

The Columbus Dispatch ^ | Saturday, June 11, 2005 | ROBERT H. ESSENHIGH E.G.

[Loyal Buckeye]

Last Saturday’s "Heating up" editorial on global warming covers quite a lot of territory but still misses the principal point: that man’s addition to the carbon-dioxide flux in the atmosphere, by fossil-fuel combustion, is essentially irrelevant.

Of the two main reasons, the first is that nature does a far bigger job in the carbon-dioxide supply rate, and the second is that carbon dioxide is secondary to water as a so-called greenhouse gas. So shouldn’t we first try to control water? And behind that again is the alternative warming concept, most generally known as the Arctic Ocean Model, which is considered by many to be the real driver for the temperature oscillations and has been for the last million years or so.

So, is the carbon dioxide driving the temperature, as so many people seem to believe? Or, is the temperature driving the carbon dioxide? If it’s the latter, then what’s the problem with carbondioxide emissions?

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — and can the it be wrong? — nature’s rate of carbon supply to the atmosphere (carried as carbon dioxide) and back out again is about 150 gigatons per year. About 60 gigatons per year come from and go back to vegetation, and 90 gigatons per year are from and to the sea.

And from man? That’s about 5 or 6 or possibly 7 gigatons per year, which is about the size of the noise in the nature data and is essentially trivial by comparison. And, of the two gases in the atmosphere that do most of the warming, carbon dioxide, as noted, is secondary. Water is responsible for roughly 80 percent to 85 percent of the absorption and re-radiation, and carbon dioxide is responsible for (most of) the balance of 15 percent to 20 percent. The radiation, by the way, isn’t "trapped." It is coming and going: It’s known as Radiative Exchange (governed by what is known as the Schuster-Schwartzchild or S-S Integral Equation of Radiative Transfer). But, next, when it comes to atmospheric heating, we need the heat anyway. If the atmosphere wasn’t warmed, the Earth would be too cold to live on, and we wouldn’t be here. So what’s the big problem?

What has the correlation between rising temperature and rising carbon dioxide got to do with anything? In fact, quite a lot. First, it is real. Second, if we reverse the drivers as suggested, we then see that it is most probably the rising temperature that is driving up the carbon dioxide, not the other way around. The quantity of carbon dioxide that water — in the sea or lakes or rivers and so on — can absorb will drop as the temperature rises.

You can run the numbers using the Absorption Equilibrium Constant for carbon dioxide in water (this is standard physical chemistry). And if the water can’t hold it, it goes into the atmosphere, and there you have a possible, or most probable, answer to most, or all, that is going on with the current rise in carbon dioxide.

These numbers have been around for decades. In the last million years, the world has been subject to a temperature cycle with a 100,000-year period (the Arctic Ocean Model again), and we are currently in the final rise of the latest interglacial period.

We can certainly go for carbondioxide control and sequestration, but this is likely to be somewhere between highly and catastrophically expensive. And to what end, if that isn’t the problem? I’m not alone in this position. Merely one of a large minority. But those with the power evidently don’t want to listen. So is this science or just politics?

ROBERT H. ESSENHIGH E.G.

Bailey Professor of Energy Conversion

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Ohio State University Columbus

[Loyal Buckeye]

Rising temperature is driving increased carbon dioxide, not vice versa. In any event, man's role in adding carbon dioxide is irrelevant.

[OpusatFR]

Goody. We can once again farm Greenland.

[marblehead17]

ping

[Irish_Thatcherite]

Rising temperature is driving increased carbon dioxide, not vice versa. In any event, man's role in adding carbon dioxide is irrelevant.

What idiot thought that a trace element of CO2 could have a drastic effect on the climate in the first place!

[Irish_Thatcherite]

I don't see the name 'Philip Cooney' printed anywhere.

[BigBobber]

Very clear and concise explanation of global warming science.

Thanks for posting.

[Nathan Zachary]

It's pure politics one of the biggest scams ever to rob the wealth of successful nations, fill the pockets of UN-NGO elitists along the way, and redistribute the remainder to developing nations who are already polluting more than G7 nations and are exempt from the Kyoto accord, even though they will be polluting even more in the future as they grow. The kyoto accord does NOTHING whatsoever to reduce any of these immagined greenhouse gases. NOTHING!!! But as usual, sheeple are blind to the facts. One day, this scam, after it has robbed every person and nation on the plannet will be exposed, but sheeple have no one to blame but themselves and their leftist (pro- UN world government, run by un-elected elitist tyrants) governments who were in on the scam all along.

[GOP_1900AD]

Just as I learned it in my Geochemistry of Natural Waters course as an undergrad. Sometimes, the old, boring knowledge is the most relevant knowledge. Oh, but it doesn't make for big movies and books by UFOlogists which feed on doomer hysteria ...

[muffaletaman]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Science/Global-warming-cyclical-says-climate-expert/2005/06/12/1118514924793.html?oneclick=true

Professor Carter said greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide were not causing the earth to warm up. On both annual and geological (up to 100,000-year) time scales, changes in temperature preceded changes in carbon dioxide, he said. This was true even in the famous 1960-1991 graph showing rising amounts of carbon dioxide.

http://www.junkscience.com/news2/triton.htm

MIT Researcher Finds Evidence Of Global Warming On Neptune's Largest Moon

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. --We're not the only ones experiencing global warming. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher has reported that observations obtained by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based instruments reveal that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, seems to have heated up significantly since the Voyager space probe visited it in 1989. The warming trend is causing part of Triton's surface of frozen nitrogen to turn into gas, thus making its thin atmosphere denser.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/mars_weather_000223.html

The receding ice caps on Mars hint at a climatic warming trend. If the caps melted, Smith said, they would cover the planet to a depth of 29.5 feet (9 meters). If concentrated in one place like the northern plains, "that would make a modest-sized ocean."

= = = = = = = = = =

You know, it could just be that something bigger than global warming is going on - might by solar system warming, and that won't be caused by your SUV or my lawnmower and BBQ...

[mattdono]

This Global Warming theory is so fundamentally flawed, that one only have to have an understanding of what it's like to stand around a campfire to understand, precisely, what's going on.

The "liberal intelligensia" always has to either 1) impress themselves with their own studies or 2) loathe themselves into submission because they are self-hating individuals.

Look at the diagram below (excuse it's novice nature, I'm no graphic artist by any means).

It is a fact that the sun is burning hotter today than it has been burning in the last 8000 years.

If Earth is at the same relative distance to the Sun (which it is and has been FOREVER), then the Sun heats up (which it is), then...TADA! the Earth will heat up.

If you stoke a campfire and you are sitting 5 feet away, what do you do?

Move away usually? But, if you couldn't, your rump would be warm in a hurry, wouldn't it? Of course.

And, ask yourself this question: are you more effected by your internal temperatures or ambient (external) temperatures?

Hmm, no mystery there. If it is 40 out and you are standing out in the cold, you're going to get cold.

Conversely, if it's 110 out, without A/C (or some other cooling apparatus), you're going to get hot...fast.

So, really, what's more plausible, the Earth is warming up because...

A. We are creating internal temperatures to increase by our human like activity. Or,

B. The main heat source for our planet (the Sun) is burning hotter and that --not some mystery flurocarbons, is what's causing it to heat up.

Me? I'm going with B.

[photodawg]

I have always been suspicious of the use of the Terminology "greenhouse effect". That insidious analogy is responsible for much or the layman's enthusiastic acceptance of the global warming concept. We all have been in a greenhouse ( or opened a car door on a hot summer day)and have experienced the unbearable heat it can generate. This makes us extrapolate this feeling to the earth's atmosphere as gasses supposedly trap light and convert it to heat thereby "warming" the entire earth to unbearable levels just like the greenhouse or closed up car.
The problem with this supposition however, is that the model breaks down, and is not a true analogy of how earth's atmosphere and the sun's rays actually interact. A greenhouse is, by volume of the ratio of its gasses to its solid and liquid material somewhere approaching 4:1 while the ratio of the earth's atmosphere to its land and water masses is on the order of 1:1000. The model that the global warming proponents are using to advance their theory isn't really applicable to the real world. It just doesn't hold water....or heat for that matter. Am I wrong on this?????

[kabar]

It's not Global Warming, it's Ocean Warming