Posted on 09/05/2006 12:34:40 PM PDT by VegasVic
NORWICH (Reuters) - Air from the oldest ice core confirms human activity has increased the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to levels not seen for hundreds of thousands of years, scientists said on Monday.
Bubbles of air in the 800,000-year-old ice, drilled in the Antarctic, show levels of CO2 changing with the climate. But the present levels are out of the previous range.
"It is from air bubbles that we know for sure that carbon dioxide has increased by about 35 percent in the last 200 years," said Dr Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey and the leader of the science team for the 10-nation European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica.
"Before the last 200 years, which man has been influencing, it was pretty steady," he added.
The natural level of CO2 over most of the past 800,000 years has been 180-300 parts per million by volume (ppmv) of air. But today it is at 380 ppmv.
"The most scary thing is that carbon dioxide today is not just out of the range of what happened in the last 650,000 years but already up 100 percent out of the range," Wolff said at the British Association Festival of Science in Norwich, eastern England.
CO2 was close to 280 ppmv from 1000 AD until 1800 and then it accelerated toward its present concentration. Wolff added that measurements of carbon isotopes showed the extra CO2 coming from a fossil source, due to increased human activity.
The ice core record showed it used to take about 1,000 years for a CO2 increase of 30 ppmv. It has risen by that much in the last 17 years alone.
"We really are in a situation where something is happening that we don't have any analog for in our records. It is an experiment that we don't know the result of," he added.
Professor Peter Smith, of the University of Nottingham in England, said the study showed more needed to be done.
"There is an urgent need to find innovative technologies to reduce the impact we are having on our climate," he told the science conference.
Yep, generally lagging it by some 800 years. No evidence that CO2 drives climate change, but the evidence suggests the opposite relationship.
What's that, professor? You mean you're not personally willing to reduce your lifestyle to living naked in the woods, eating tree bark, and having no clean water? You want someone else to figure out how solve these problems?
In theory, measuring CO2 will tell you temperature patterns. In practice, theory is often wrong.
Correlation is not causality
Nice post! It shows what we've come to know of as the cyclical nature of weather. We've always called it 'seasons.'
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
Nope, the findings seem to fit science with or without man perfectly. And guess what, the CO2 levels still do not tell a story that effectively changes the temperature of earth enough to call it man made.
It is amazing that the global warming freaks (The ones who think humans are causing it) make such crazy assertions as to suggest that we are responsible for global temperature changes.
Its like saying that humans cause the average temperature at 3pm to be warmer than at 3am.
Or that humans cause the average temperature in August to be warmer than the average temperature in February. (in the No Hem)
Just plain crazy..but I guess if you make it hard enough to disprove, you can make any crazy assertion.
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 (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.
Yadda yadda man-made --- graph? what graph?
Sir: There is an even greater problem than traffic congestion and that is its consequential emissions of carbon dioxide which are steadily rising. It is this which should be targeted.
One way to do this would be to provide every road user with a "ration" of carbon dioxide. The allowance could be embedded in a smart card which deducts the carbon content each time fuel is purchased. The card would be issued with the annual or half-yearly tax disc. If the allowance was exhausted there would be a punitive tax added to each subsequent purchase of fuel. Alternatively carbon credits could be purchased from road users with a surplus of credits via a carbon trading scheme. At the same time it would provide a strong incentive to switch to more carbon efficient vehicles.
In each case the price would be set by government and adjusted to reflect the nation's performance in meeting its carbon dioxide abatement targets. Obviously there would need to be fine tuning to redress the imbalance between rural and urban residents and to allow for the disabled and pensioners. But this would be far more cost-effective than journey pricing based on satellite technology and would remove any suspicion that the prime purpose is to raise revenue.
PROFESSOR PETER F SMITH
There is only ONE explaination!!!
Now what ya gonna do mateys?
Join us! Be a pirate!
Those hundred thousand year old SUV's must be classics by now.
I dunno, I think it could be lack of plants. They put out O2, so it's probably the destruction of the rain forests more than anything. /s
How about the obligatory "Global Warming Cuased be Decrease in Pirates" post? I like that one!
Just as I thought...
We must eliminate 1/2 of the world population immediately. This will not only reduce human CO2 emisions, but also save water.
I suggest doing this by eliminating ALL radical muslim countries (I think that covers them all) as a good start, followed by all liberal states and Congress.
You got that graph from my favorite source I think. See website with original report posted above.
Good one.
An easier solution... limit all CO2 production to 1990 levels EVERYWHERE on earth.
This means China must shut down immediately.
This means 80% of Asia must shut down immediately.
Of course, it might be better to understand the impact of C02 (not speculate as is currently the fad) before making any dramatic changes. After all, we might find that C02 HELPS the environment in the long haul.
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