[raybbr]

"Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038 percent)," said meteorologist Joseph D'Alea, the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chief of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecast.

"Only 2.75 percent of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. The amount we emit is said to be up from 1 percent a decade ago. Despite the increase in emissions, the rate of change of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa remains the same as the long term average (plus 0.45 percent per year)," he said. "We are responsible for just 0.001 percent of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor."

I thought "scientists" were behind the belief in global warming. Even the simplest student should be able to tell from those numbers that CO2 is irrelevant in the warming of the earth.

[Crazieman]

The first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel.

Poor guy, must make him cry to watch it now.

[aruanan]

I thought "scientists" were behind the belief in global warming. Even the simplest student should be able to tell from those numbers that CO2 is irrelevant in the warming of the earth.

The fact that the numbers are small or that the amount of one thing is tiny in comparison to other things has nothing at all to do with whether or not it can have a large impact. That's determined by other factors. If you don't know those other factors, simply making an assessment by saying, "Them number's are soooo small; they can't possibly have any effect on something this big" is itself unscientific and unthinking. See how many molecules of botulinin it takes to bring down an organism billions and billions of times greater in terms of numbers of molecules. There are a lot of other things involved. In the matter of anthropogenic GW, it turns out that even doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the total amount of atmospheric CO2 wouldn't have effect past a certain (small) point).