Slashdot Mirror
Earth Releasing More CO2 Than Originally Thought
grqb writes "A new study out of the UK suggests that terrestrial sinks across the planet are mopping up much less carbon than predicted, on balance, and so the planet may warm at an even faster rate than expected. The study focused on the carbon content in soil at 6000 sites in the UK between 1978 and 2003 and found that the soil released the equivalent of 8% of the UK's total 1990 carbon dioxide emissions. These emissions are more than the entire reduction in emissions the UK has achieved between 1990 and 2002 as part of its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. This would effectively cancel out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and would have wider global implications as well."
I can't believe everyone always neglects the most obvious solution (albeit one that takes a few generations)...
HAVE FEWER CHILDREN.
People, the earth does not need 6 BILLION humans on it. We are in no danger of becoming extinct and our gene pool is plenty large. With 4 billion fewer people on the planet, you can count on the level of environmental damage being much lower.
Even neglecting environmental concerns, I don't see how humans continue to have more children than enough to replace themselves. Imagine how crappy a world with 10+ billion humans on it will be.
Want to cut down on excess CO2? I know a few women that should be shot. They are large producers of CO2...babbling on all the time.
First your carbon ignorance:
... the sooty particulates we've added to the atmosphere from burning all that coal / oil / gas make great nuclei for the formation of water droplets in the atmosphere.
... then burning the 4.65billion tons of carbon that are in that 9.3billion tons of oil gives you about:
... making the west fat. Why don't you share a little of it? Scared to feed hungry muslims? Scared to feed the blacks of Africa? Are you trying to keep them repressed so that you can live fat? Think about it.
In fact, the Carbon released by the industrial revolution has been tagged.
The ratio of C14 and c13 isotopes compared to c12 is much less in carbon from coal and oil than it is in the biosphere. Hopefully you are aware that this isotope shift is also what makes carbon dating possible. Oil and Coal are very old, and therefore have much less of those isotopes.
A shift in the isotope ratios in atmospheric carbon over time would be a strong indicator that we have released the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel sources. Of course I suppose you think its just a coincidence that the large jump in carbon dioxide over the last 200 years has happened at the same time as the industrial revolution over the last 200 years.
Do some research, Im sure someone must have looked into the isotope ratio question. If I could think of it, then no doubt many scientists have already tested it.
Now for your water vapour ignorance:
Has water vapour been increasing or decreasing? We know carbon dioxide has been increasing and that it is a strong greenhouse gas. We know other greenhouse gases such as methane have been increasing tremendously due to agriculture. I suspect water vapour has also been increasing
Whether it is directly from our carbon dioxide emissions is irrelevant, it may just be another side affect of how we've placed back into the environment a large part of the carbon that was sequestered away a billion years ago. If we've caused an increase in water vapour than it only makes it more our fault for global warming. Carbon dioxide is not the only problem, just an easy one to track.
Now to correct your ignorant math:
900 grams carbon dioxide per person
is 5.4million tons per day (not billion), or 1971million tons per year (about 2billion tons per year, not the 1971billion you've stated).
How can you compare 2billion tons per year of human exhaled carbon dioxide with 9.3billion tons per year of oil? It's Apples and oranges! You need to find out how much carbon dioxide is produced by burning 9.3billion tons of oil per year.
Assuming that oil consists of 50% carbon (a wild guess on my part, by weight the percentage is probably much higher)
18.6BILLION TONS OF CARBON DIOXIDE! TEN TIMES WHAT HUMANS EXHALE.
And of course that doesnt account for all the coal and natural gas the world burns, which could easily double my carbon dioxide estimate as many poor countries burn far more coal than the US does.
And now about the rest of your ignorance:
Dr. Alfred Bartlett may have been speaking of the SOLAR energy consumed by a growing plant, you have not distinguished the energy input from the environment from the fuels burned by the farmer.
Starvation is caused by government corruption and greed. There has been an excess of food in the world for decades
'wealth redistribution scheme'. Indeed, spreading the wealth around so that all people can live at a respectable level is evil! Let them starve while we grow fat in contradiction to your previous paragraph!
go back to school DUMBASS, preferable one where the curriculum has not been set by George Bush or by Religion. The real problem with global warming is how you've let yourself be mislead.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"