There are also natural sinks (sinks absorb, sources emit), such that if human activities were absent, the sinks would cause a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Posted on 12/04/2006 4:21:39 AM PST by yoe
Washington has no shortage of bullies, but even we can't quite believe an October 27 letter that Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe sent to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Its message: Start toeing the Senators' line on climate change, or else.
We reprint the full text of the letter here, so readers can see for themselves. But its essential point is that the two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate about the issue must stop and ExxonMobil should "end its dangerous support of the [global warming] 'deniers.' " Not only that, the company "should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history." And in extra penance for being "one of the world's largest carbon emitters," Exxon should spend that money on "global remediation efforts."
The Senators aren't dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can't refuse. But in case the CEO doesn't understand his company's jeopardy, they add that "ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years." (Our emphasis.) The Senators also graciously copied the Exxon board on their missive.
This is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in the paper. We respect the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but we didn't know until reading the Rockefeller-Snowe letter that they ran U.S. climate policy and led the mainstream media around by the nose....
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
When words cease to have meaning, you are probably talking to a Psycho Bunny.
Didn't she just get re-elected for six more years?
Olympia Snowe is a disgrace to the human race!
So is Senator Rockefeller!
And while I am at it . . .
We aren't, and there's an explanation:
"Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing."
For the Pleistocene/Holocene epochs, in which the Earth has experienced glacial (continental glaciation) and interglacial periods, the Holocene has been abnormally stable compared to other interglacials. The glacial periods have a less stable climate than the interglacials.
The water vapor content of the atmosphere is a climate feedback, not a climate forcing. Do you know the difference?
Really. There are two sources of global temperature estimates, NOAA and GISS, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies. NOAA's analysis put 2005 as the second-warmest year ever, about 0.1 degree less than 1998, the warmest, which featured a massive El Nino. El Nino years are warm years in the record. 2005 did not have an El Nino, and the GISS analysis indicated that it was the warmest year in the record.
There is an El Nino underway now in the Pacific. A very recently published analysis (last week, in fact) indicated that Europe is experiencing its warmest autumn in 500 years. NOAA reports that January-October 2006 global temperatures are tied for the 5th warmest; if El Nino strengthens it could push November and December higher.
Heck of a downward trend there.
Irrelavant, but your point about underground coal fires is well-taken.
"To see why the anthropogenic greenhouse effect does not, however, rely on the direct perturbation of the surface energy budget by greenhouse gas changes, let's consider an idealized limiting case. Suppose that the lowest dozen meters or so of the atmosphere is so full of water vapor or cloud water that it acts like a perfect black body. It is as opaque as it can be to infrared. Now suppose that we double the atmosphere's CO2 content. This doesn't increase the infrared emission to the ground, because the low level air already has so much greenhouse-substance in it that it is radiating like a perfect blackbody, whose emission is determined by its temperature alone. It is radiating as much as it possibly can, for its given temperature. In radiative transfer-speak, its emission is "saturated." Furthermore, since the low layer is opaque to infrared, the CO2-caused change in downward emission aloft does not reach the ground. Does that mean there can be no further global warming in this case? No! What happens is that the increase in CO2 throws the top-of-atmosphere budget out of kilter, forcing the whole troposphere to warm up to bring the planet back into balance. Convection links the whole troposphere, which means the low level air warms up. The warming of the low level air, in turn, increases the flux of energy into the ground by all three of the mechanisms enumerated previously. In particular, the downward infrared flux increases because the air itself has become warmer -- not because it has become more optically thick in the infrared. The increase in downward flux then communicates the warming to the surface."
Regarding CO2, this is incorrect. Volcanic emissions of CO2 about about 1/150th of fossil fuel energy CO2 emissions. Volcanoes emit about 1/4 of the SO2 (sulfur dioxide) emitted by coal burning in an average year -- a large eruption like Pinatubo will increase the volcanic emissions of SO2 for the year in which the big eruption occurred.
Bookmark & bump.
Swooning with their regained power, they smite those who stand against them.
There are also natural sinks (sinks absorb, sources emit), such that if human activities were absent, the sinks would cause a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Feedback is a product, while forcing is a producer? Do I have that vaguely right, at least?
Thanks for all the info. I still don't want taxes or caps. Your .1 % of GDP solution sounds a lot better to me. Just redirection all the pork barrel spending into carbon control research would probably give us about .2 % of GDP to play around with.
That's not bad terminology.
Water vapour: feedback or forcing?
In climate terms (as best I can put it), a forcing is a factor that changes slowly, and a feedback is a factor that responds rapidly. I.e., let's say I could put a sunshade in orbit that would reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth by 10%. Provided it stayed in orbit, that would be a forcing. The cooling it would induce would in short order cause the relative humidity of the atmosphere to decrease (colder air holds less water).
Vee haf vays of makink you zuppoort varmink!
It's gotta come from somebody's pocket/vault/treasure chest/pork barrel...
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