Posted on 05/10/2012 6:26:07 AM PDT by servo1969
Forgot to mention, the 7000Mt human emission is annual. Pinatubo’s 41 Mt was one-time.
True, but tragically he was positioned by the media years ago to pass those junk science concepts on to our kids. He's just another little cog in the Progressive Brainwashing Machine.
The question: Why, despite steadily accumulating greenhouse gases, did the rise of the planet’s temperature stall for the past decade?
The short (and obvious) answer: Because trivial changes in the abundance of an essential atmospheric trace gas are not a significant driver of climate.
This, however, appears too complex for “climate scientists”
Provoked Scientists Try To Explain Global Warming Standstill – … The hunt for this missing energy, and the search for the mechanisms, both natural and artificial, that caused the temperature hiatus are, in many ways, a window into climate science itself. Beneath the sheen of consensus stating that human emissions are forcing warmer temperatures — a notion no scientist interviewed for this story doubts — there are deep uncertainties of how quickly this rise will occur, and how much air pollution has so far prevented this warming. Many question whether energy is missing at all.
For answers, researchers across the United States are wrestling with a surge of data from recent science missions. They are flying high, sampling the thin clouds crowning the atmosphere. Their probes are diving into deep waters, giving unprecedented, sustained measures of the oceans’ dark places. And their satellites are parsing the planet’s energy, sampling how much of the sun’s heat has arrived, and how much has stayed.
“What’s really been exciting to me about this last 10-year period is that it has made people think about decadal variability much more carefully than they probably have before,” said Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist and former lead author of the United Nations’ climate change report, during a recent visit to MIT. “And that’s all good. There is no silver bullet. In this case, it’s four pieces or five pieces of silver buckshot.”
This buckshot has included some familiar suspects, like the Pacific’s oscillation between La Niña and El Niño, along with a host of smaller influences, such as midsize volcanic eruptions once thought unable to cool the climate. The sun’s cycles are proving more important than expected. And there are suspicions that the vast uptick in Chinese coal pollution has played a role in reflecting sunlight back into space, much as U.S. and European pollution did decades ago. (GWPF)
http://junkscience.com/2011/11/03/greenhouse-advocates-cant-see-the-obvious/
The manmade CO2 is highly dependent on economic activity and can be accurately estimated from sales of fossil fuels and by-products. The economy is tied to fossil fuels; ending the use of fossil fuels means ending the economy and vice versa. The powers-that-be supporting Bill Nye and others like him know this.
Nye the anti-science guy, so incompetent he was kicked out of disney as an exhibit.
“7000 Mt for manmade”
Numbers about man made emissions have also been greatly exaggerated. I’d like to see actual spreadsheets of those numbers, but, of course, since liberal Luddites make up the numbers we’ll never see their math.
Yeah, it's one of those radical, new Tea Party ideas. "Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one." - Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776.
(but then I guess global warming would give more time for "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot")
Now as for Nye's "Science is right so pass out the government cash and screw freedom" attitude, I believe that it was covered by President Eisenhower's farewell address:
... Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
So he warned both that science may become controlled by the government through the process of government funding, with opinions outside the government defined orthodoxy withering from lack of funding and that the same government's policy might be controlled by scientists, forming a vicious cycle. That sums up the global warming industry very well.
Water Vapor Rules
the Greenhouse System
Just how much of the "Greenhouse Effect" is caused by human activity?
It is about 0.28%, if water vapor is taken into account-- about 5.53%, if not.
This point is so crucial to the debate over global warming that how water vapor is or isn't factored into an analysis of Earth's greenhouse gases makes the difference between describing a significant human contribution to the greenhouse effect, or a negligible one.
Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (5). 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.
For those interested in more details a series of data sets and charts have been assembled below in a 5-step statistical synopsis.
Note that the first two steps ignore water vapor.
1. Greenhouse gas concentrations
Note: Calculations are expressed to 3 significant digits to reduce rounding errors, not necessarily to indicate statistical precision of the data. All charts were plotted using Lotus 1-2-3.
Caveat: This analysis is intended to provide a simplified comparison of the various man-made and natural greenhouse gases on an equal basis with each other. It does not take into account all of the complicated interactions between atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial systems, a feat which can only be accomplished by better computer models than are currently in use.
Greenhouse Gas Concentrations:
Natural vs man-made (anthropogenic)
1. The following table was constructed from data published by the U.S. Department of Energy (1) summarizing concentrations of the various atmospheric greenhouse gases, and supplemented with information from other sources (2-7). Because some of the concentrations are very small the numbers are stated in parts per billion. DOE chose to NOT show water vapor as a greenhouse gas!
| (all concentrations expressed in parts per billion) | Pre-industrial baseline | Natural additions | Man-made additions | Total (ppb) Concentration | Percent of Total |
| Carbon Dioxide (CO2) | 288,000 | 68,520 | 11,880 (2) | 368,400 | 99.438% |
| Methane (CH4) | 848 | 577 | 320 | 1,745 | 0.471% |
| Nitrous Oxide (N2O) | 285 | 12 | 15 | 312 | 0.084% |
| Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.) | 25 | 0 | 2 | 27 | 0.007% |
| Total | 289,158 | 69,109 | 12,217 | 370,484 | 100.00% |
The chart at left summarizes the % of greenhouse gas concentrations in Earth's atmosphere from Table 1. This is not a very meaningful view though because 1) the data has not been corrected for the actual Global Warming Potential (GWP) of each gas, and 2) water vapor is ignored.
But these are the numbers one would use if the goal is to exaggerate human greenhouse contributions:
Man-made and natural carbon dioxide (CO2) comprises 99.44% of all greenhouse gas concentrations (368,400 / 370,484 )--(ignoring water vapor).
Also, from Table 1 (but not shown on graph):
The various greenhouse gases are not equal in their heat-retention properties though, so to remain statistically relevant % concentrations must be changed to % contribution relative to CO2. This is done in Table 2, below, through the use of GWP multipliers for each gas, derived by various researchers.
Converting greenhouse gas concentrations
to greenhouse effect contribution
(using global warming potential )
2. Using appropriate corrections for the Global Warming Potential of the respective gases provides the following more meaningful comparison of greenhouse gases, based on the conversion:
( concentration ) X ( the appropriate GWP multiplier (3) (4) of each gas relative to CO2 ) = greenhouse contribution.:
| This table adjusts values in Table 1 to compare greenhouse gases equally with respect to CO2. ( #'s are unit-less) | Multiplier (GWP) | Pre-industrial baseline(new) | Natural additions (new) | Man-made additions (new) | Tot. Relative Contribution | Percent of Total (new) |
| Carbon Dioxide (CO2) | 1 | 288,000 | 68,520 | 11,880 | 368,400 | 72.369% |
| Methane (CH4) | 21 (3) | 17,808 | 12,117 | 6,720 | 36,645 | 7.199% |
| Nitrous Oxide (N2O) | 310 (3) | 88,350 | 3,599 | 4,771 | 96,720 | 19.000% |
| CFC's (and other misc. gases) | see data (4) | 2,500 | 0 | 4,791 | 7,291 | 1.432% |
| Total | 396,658 | 84,236 | 28,162 | 509,056 | 100.000% |
Compared to the concentration statistics in Table 1, the GWP comparison in Table 2 illustrates, among other things:
Also, from Table 2 (but not shown on graph):
To properly represent the total relative impacts of Earth's greenhouse gases Table 3 (below) factors in the effect of water vapor on the system.
Water vapor overwhelms
all other natural and man-made
greenhouse contributions.
3. Table 3, shows what happens when the effect of water vapor is factored in, and together with all other greenhouse gases expressed as a relative % of the total greenhouse effect.
| Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics | Percent of Total | Percent of Total --adjusted for water vapor |
| Water vapor | ----- | 95.000% |
| Carbon Dioxide (CO2) | 72.369% | 3.618% |
| Methane (CH4) | 7.100% | 0.360% |
| Nitrous oxide (N2O) | 19.000% | 0.950% |
| CFC's (and other misc. gases) | 1.432% | 0.072% |
| Total | 100.000% | 100.000% |
As illustrated in this chart of the data in Table 3, the combined greenhouse contributions of CO2, methane, N2O and misc. gases are small compared to water vapor!
Total atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) -- both man-made and natural-- is only about 3.62% of the overall greenhouse effect-- a big difference from the 72.37% figure in Table 2, which ignored water!
Water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas, comes from natural sources and is responsible for roughly 95% of the greenhouse effect (5). Among climatologists this is common knowledge but among special interests, certain governmental groups, and news reporters this fact is under-emphasized or just ignored altogether.
Conceding that it might be "a little misleading" to leave water vapor out, they nonetheless defend the practice by stating that it is "customary" to do so!
Comparing natural vs man-made concentrations
of greenhouse gases
4. Of course, even among the remaining 5% of non-water vapor greenhouse gases, humans contribute only a very small part (and human contributions to water vapor are negligible).
Constructed from data in Table 1, the charts (below) illustrate graphically how much of each greenhouse gas is natural vs how much is man-made. These allocations are used for the next and final step in this analysis-- total man-made contributions to the greenhouse effect. Units are expressed to 3 significant digits in order to reduce rounding errors for those who wish to walk through the calculations, not to imply numerical precision as there is some variation among various researchers.
Putting it all together:
total human greenhouse gas contributions
add up to about 0.28% of the greenhouse effect.
5. To finish with the math, by calculating the product of the adjusted CO2 contribution to greenhouse gases (3.618%) and % of CO2 concentration from anthropogenic (man-made) sources (3.225%), we see that only (0.03618 X 0.03225) or 0.117% of the greenhouse effect is due to atmospheric CO2 from human activity. The other greenhouse gases are similarly calculated and are summarized below.
TABLE 4a.
Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the "Greenhouse
Effect," expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)
Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics % of Greenhouse Effect
% Natural
% Man-made Water vapor 95.000% 94.999%
0.001% Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 3.618% 3.502%
0.117% Methane (CH4) 0.360% 0.294%
0.066% Nitrous Oxide (N2O) 0.950% 0.903%
0.047% Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.) 0.072% 0.025%
0.047% Total 100.00% 99.72
0.28%
From Table 4a, both natural and man-made greenhouse contributions are illustrated in this chart, in gray and green, respectively. For clarity only the man-made (anthropogenic) contributions are labeled on the chart.
The Kyoto Protocol calls for mandatory carbon dioxide reductions of 30% from developed countries like the U.S. Reducing man-made CO2 emissions this much would have an undetectable effect on climate while having a devastating effect on the U.S. economy. Can you drive your car 30% less, reduce your winter heating 30%? Pay 20-50% more for everything from automobiles to zippers? And that is just a down payment, with more sacrifices to come later.
Such drastic measures, even if imposed equally on all countries around the world, would reduce total human greenhouse contributions from CO2 by about 0.035%.
This is much less than the natural variability of Earth's climate system!
While the greenhouse reductions would exact a high human price, in terms of sacrifices to our standard of living, they would yield statistically negligible results in terms of measurable impacts to climate change. There is no expectation that any statistically significant global warming reductions would come from the Kyoto Protocol.
Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service;
in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal
Research to Watch
Scientists are increasingly recognizing the importance of water vapor in the climate system. Some, like Wallace Broecker, a geochemist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, suggest that it is such an important factor that much of the global warming in the last 10,000 years may be due to the increasing water vapor concentrations in Earth's atmosphere.
His research indicates that air reaching glaciers during the last Ice Age had less than half the water vapor content of today. Such increases in atmospheric moisture during our current interglacial period would have played a far greater role in global warming than carbon dioxide or other minor gases.
Dr. Wallace Broecker, a leading world authority on climate
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University,
lecture presented at R. A. Daly Lecture at the American Geophysical Union's
spring meeting in Baltimore, Md., May 1996.
Known causes of global climate change, like cyclical eccentricities in Earth's rotation and orbit, as well as variations in the sun's energy output, are the primary causes of climate cycles measured over the last half million years. However, secondary greenhouse effects stemming from changes in the ability of a warming atmosphere to support greater concentrations of gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide also appear to play a significant role. As demonstrated in the data above, of all Earth's greenhouse gases, water vapor is by far the dominant player.
The ability of humans to influence greenhouse water vapor is negligible. As such, individuals and groups whose agenda it is to require that human beings are the cause of global warming must discount or ignore the effects of water vapor to preserve their arguments, citing numbers similar to those in Table 4b . If political correctness and staying out of trouble aren't high priorities for you, go ahead and ask them how water vapor was handled in their models or statistics. Chances are, it wasn't!
References:
1) Current Greenhouse Gas Concentrations (updated October, 2000)
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
(the primary global-change data and information analysis center of the U.S. Department of Energy)
Oak Ridge, TennesseeGreenhouse Gases and Climate Change (data now available only to "members")
IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme,
Stoke Orchard, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL52 7RZ, United Kingdom.
2) "Carbon cycle modelling and the residence time of natural and anthropogenic atmospheric CO2:on the construction of the 'Greenhouse Effect Global Warming' dogma;" Tom V. Segalstad, University of Oslo
3) Greenhouse Gases and Global Warming Potentials (updated April, 2002)
Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center (CDIAC), U.S. Department of Energy
Oak Ridge, Tennessee.4) Warming Potentials of Halocarbons and Greenhouses Gases
Chemical formulae and global warming potentials from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 119 and 121. Production and sales of CFC's and other chemicals from International Trade Commission, Synthetic Organic Chemicals: United States Production and Sales, 1994 (Washington, DC, 1995). TRI emissions from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1994 Toxics Release Inventory: Public Data Release, EPA-745-R-94-001 (Washington, DC, June 1996), p. 73. Estimated 1994 U.S. emissions from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, 1990-1994, EPA-230-R-96-006 (Washington, DC, November 1995), pp. 37-40.5) References to 95% contribution of water vapor:
a. S.M. Freidenreich and V. 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
b. Global Deception: The Exaggeration of the Global Warming Threat
by Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, June 1998
Virginia State Climatologist and Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginiac. Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Appendix D, Greenhouse Gas Spectral Overlaps and Their Significance
Energy Information Administration; Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Governmentd. Personal Communication-- Dr. Richard S. Lindzen
Alfred P. Slone Professor of Meteorology, MITe. The Geologic Record and Climate Change
by Dr. Tim Patterson, January 2005
Professor of Geology-- Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
Alternate link:
f. EPA Seeks To Have Water Vapor Classified As A Pollutant
by the ecoEnquirer, 2006
Alternate link:g. Does CO2 Really Drive Global Warming?
by Dr. Robert Essenhigh, May 2001
Alternate link:h. Solar Cycles, Not CO2, Determine Climate
by Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., 21st Century Science and Technology, Winter 2003-2004, pp. 52-65
Link:5) Global Climate Change Student Guide
Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences
Manchester Metropolitan University
Chester Street
Manchester
M1 5GD
United Kingdom6) Global Budgets for Atmospheric Nitrous Oxide - Anthropogenic Contributions
William C. Trogler, Eric Bruner, Glenn Westwood, Barbara Sawrey, and Patrick Neill
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California7) Methane record and budget
Robert Grumbine
Useful conversions:
This page by: Monte Hieb
Last revised: March 2, 2007Source:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
My view is that the global warming from increased CO2 is rather small and benign. The big reason for the hubub up to the early 2000’s was a bunch of natural warming in the 80’s and 90’s, first from solar and then from the ocean (which lagged the solar). The current lull in warming is not due to less solar (that’s a myth propagated by the alarmists) but because the natural warming cycle has ended and we now have negative PDO. The lowered solar of 2007-9 has yet to manifest in the atmosphere. It will appear from the ocean with a lag just like the warming.
We used to enjoy his show when our younguns were younguns. Now, he is just another, albeit high-ish profile, looney addle-pated crackpot apologist for the religion of human caused planetary climate change.
Scary how much this zip-head may have influenced children who are now adults of franchise age.
I’ve stopped thinking people like this are just stupid. I now think they are evil. It takes a peculiar moral blindness to accept the extreme liberalism that has overcome much of our country.
Bill needs to take a good look at California - outside the gated communities - and see the future he is trying to create.
“Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines released more green house gases ....”
And all the shipping sunk during two world wars? where is all the oil? Diluted, dispersed, dissipated, and evaporated. Pretty amazing how that works.
The “0.28% of greenhouse effect is human” is a myth. The GH effect of CO2 is at least 10%. The rise of CO2 in the atmosphere is due to human increases not being absorbed fast enough, i.e. it is human origin. There is a 30% increase of GH effect from the increase in CO2. Therefore the human addition to the greenhouse effect is more like 3%, not 0.3%
The following is from a source that supports, as you do, the BS of "man-made global warming". Seems they differ with you on the importance of water vapor in Earth's greenhouse system....
ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2008) — Water vapor is known to be Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117193013.htm
“Fossil fuel combustion and other human activities are currently emitting about 30 billion tons or 30 Gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. So for each ton of carbon that is put in, we get 3.7 tons of CO2.This is only a small fraction (4%) of the 770 Gigatons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere each year by natural processes in the ocean and on land.”
http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/
First, even if his degree was in physics or climatology, he would still be wrong.
Second, if you think mechanical engineers don't know anything about physics or climatology, you are dead wrong. All mechanical engineers use classical physics (i.e. non-relativistic and non-quantum) everyday, and many are conversant in heat transfer, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics, which are the critical components of climatology.
That’s going to leave a mark.
Damn Dihyrdogen Monoxide....that stuff should be banned.
Was this your view all along or have you recently reconsidered?
Urban heat islands, aka 'rat nests, are about 5 degrees warmer than the countryside. What will happen is the 'rats will die off first resulting in a climate negative feedback. The survivors will be mostly conservatives. Being that leftists tell us Earth is overpopulated I'm not seeing any down side here.
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