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CO2 Levels Reach 400ppm at Mauna Loa For First Time On Record
Titus Andronicus writes "Today, NOAA reported, 'On May 9, the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time since measurements began in 1958.' For comparison, over the last 800,000 years, CO2 has ranged from roughly 180 ppm to 280 ppm. 'For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.' The last time Earth had 400 ppm was probably more than 3 megayears ago."
Megayears? Someone trying to sound smarter than they are?
I thought all (earth) years were pretty much the same size...
Well, except Leap years, so 12 years ago?
Stop breathing. It is the only way to keep the CO2 from rising...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
i hope there's a special place in hell for people who spent the 70's til present denying climate change - you know who you are. Unfortunately it will be the same place in hell as everyone else when it gets too hot around here.
Rinse and repeat.
Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on Earth, among the most active of all volcanoes, having erupted 33 times since its first well-documented historical eruption in 1843. The enormous cone covers half of the Island of Hawai`i and by itself amounts to about 85 percent of all the other Hawaiian Islands combined.
So this seems like a silly place to consider as a steady-state CO standard.
Dupe.
Again?? same title location was added this time to the title. http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/05/05/1320222/observed-atmospheric-co2-hits-400-parts-per-million#
Yeah, just put that CO2 sensor right here above the exhaust from a combustion engine. Now we'll get the readings we want... err, we were paid to get.... err, SCIENCE!
The summary seemed to lead in a specific direction - the 'for comparison' referring to 800k years isn't based on info from other types of measurements, pre-1958 at that site.
Interesting bits from the Mauna Loa wiki
- It's a volcano
- It's been erupting for at least 700k years
- It may have emerged above sea level 400k years ago
- Oldest dated rocks are less than 200k years old
- It's drifting away from the hotspot and will go extinct in the next 500k=1m years
- It erupted last from Mar-Apr of 1984
- Atmosphere observations come from two observatories near the summit
- From its location well above local human-generated influences, the MLO monitors the global atmosphere, including the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Measurements are adjusted to account for local outgassing of CO2 from the volcano
I looked it up because my kneejerk was "But it's on top of a volcano..." and I can't help but be skeptic when there's big leaps in causation in summaries...
They've monitored for the last 25 years, but they know the levels for the last 800,000 years? Now that's some scientific "facts" right there!
"But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase"
There's no proof of that. Only speculation, and only when ignoring natural CO2 sources like volcanoes.
This is a new report, and a somewhat arbitrary threshhold (400, after all, is just an integer with no chemical significance):
"NOAA has reported 400.03 for May 9, 2013, while Scripps has reported 399.73. The difference partly reflects different reporting periods. NOAA uses UTC, whereas Scripps uses local time in Hawaii to define the 24-hr reporting period. If Scripps were to use same reporting period as NOAA, we would report 400.08 for May 9."
So, since this is a new report, we get to rerun all our original criticisms explaining why the report is bogus, and NOT SCIENCE.
All the worlds plants took a collective sigh of relief. CO2 has been so low for so long, it was like hypoxia for plants.
Talk about timely info. On NPR today they were talking with environmental activists and groups and like they said volcano eruptions are being caused by global warming. So if the hawaiians did not drive cars they would not of had to worry about this problem.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/climateqa/mauna-loa-co2-record/
Can you read that or should I put in leet speak and tweet it?
No less an authority than the United Nations pins a full 9% of all human-related CO2 production on cows, but it's worse than that:
Source: Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars, UN report warns
Ken
Measuring ice core samples at different depths that correlate to known time frames are just one way the experts on the subject differentiate their facts from your "facts".
Yeah, well, you fail to consider, uh, derp.
Meteors fall, volcanoes erupt, tsunamis cross the globe.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So you say it is the highest since recording started in 1958 yet you claim to know that it is the highest in history.
Do you remember the differences between a 'theory' and a 'law'? Or between a 'theory' and 'reality'?
Smoke more of that dope since you have it.
The people you call "denialists" are the only ones thinking rationally - they are simply demanding real science. That is to say, sharing of results and data and methodologies.
Indeed this latest measurement proves they were right to exhibit skepticism. A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature. It proves beyond doubt that the thinking that people like you have had that CO2 in the atmosphere MUST cause warming is incorrect - it turns out that it's simply a gas, not a magic warming element that you assumed it to be.
Really it's just sad that you guys are so inept and drawing logical conclusions that you trumpet things like this which just show how wrong you are.
Isn't that downwind from China?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...no apocalypse yet.
Maybe we can freak out at 401ppm? 402ppm?
Sigh.
It is literally the exact same story, just from different sources. Look at the dates. It was 5 days ago. It's not like it was a year or even a month ago.
Actually this is a follow-up :
2013-05-05 : "individual observations [...] have exceeded 400 parts per million" "The daily average observation has crept above 399 ppm" "the daily observation will break the 400 ppm milestone within a few days"
2013-05-09 : "the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide [...] surpassed 400 parts per million"
Of course, Soulskill should have referenced timothy, they were obviously aiming for the dupe, but new data arrived in the meantime.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
"A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature."
Riiight, yes global warming is a hoax because Bill O'Reilly's toes were cold this Christmas season.
We've ALL been duped!
This is "yesterday"?
Observed Atmospheric CO2 Hits 400 Parts Per Million
Gosh. It's been first TWICE in a month. And Slashdot managed to mention it BOTH times!
Seriously. Does anybody really believe that we are wandering around in the atmospheric analog to the time Pangaea was splitting?
At least some academics have successfully publicised their findings and thereby secured funding for their continued project/employment.
BTW: .04 percent, not .0004 percent."
Correction: May 10, 2013
"An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of carbon dioxide in the air as of Thursday's reading from monitors. It is
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
See subect.
That is .075% of the history of the planet.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Yes you will confim the accuracy of readings when you make other accurate readings.
Your accuracy is confirmed by the repeatability and reliability.
Or are you a "Measure twice, cut wherever you damn well care because if you get the same value twice then you're just exhibiting confirmation bias and therefore automatically wrong" sort of guy?
This argument is nonsense. Cows (or other animals) don't "produce" carbon. They only borrow it. They release carbon into the air that was originally taken from the air by the plants that the cows ate. If you subtract the carbon used to "make" a cow from the carbon released by the cow's exhalations and from the carbon remaining in the cow's body after it dies (which will eventually rejoin the atmosphere due to bacterial decomposition), you get zero.
Fossil fuel production, on the other hand, digs up buried carbon from deep under the earth and releases it up where it can get into the atmosphere, so there is a net gain in atmospheric carbon due to that process.
So what's the big deal? We go back to the Jurassic period when the plants ruled the roost (both meanings intended --dinosaurs were bird-like). We can turn it around (after all, we made the mess, surely we can clean it up). But action must happen. That much extra CO2 is on the order of metric tons. Strip out the carbon, leaving only the oxygen. More air for all of us to breathe. Surely we can get an agreement that doesn't make people suffer horribly, yet cleans the air. The only solutions the tree huggers have offered cause pain and suffering, as if we all have to bow to their new climatological holy grail. A more reasoned, less "make the humans suffer" approach would be better. Subcontract it to the lowest bidder (and make sure they don't cheat and make the mess bigger, not smaller).
Are climate scientists really the best people to decide what to go about global climate change? They study the effects and may be able to predict things like rise in temperature, oven levels, ocean acidity and things like that, but they only solution they seem to propose is that we stop emitting carbon dioxide. Isn't it possible that other lifestyle changes could mitigate the effects and cause fewer disruptions than turning away from our primary energy source? Even if we do nothing, it's not likely that people will simply stay in areas and drown while the ocean levels rise.
A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature.
Where did you get that "fact"? The last decade had the highest average global temperatures on record.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly_1880-2012.svg
If you can't even get a simple quantitative *fact* like that right, why would anyone listen to any of your *opinions*?
And if you actually RTFA it's not about just the last decade, they have over 50 years of data showing a rise in both CO2 and ave global temperature.
. It also may indicate negative feedback loops responding to the changes.
But that's my skepticism in a nutshell. If I light some candles in my apartment it gets gradually warmer, For a while. Then the AC kicks in. The temperature feedback mechanism in my apartment is much larger than the heat source of a candle, or my gaming rig for that matter,
We know there's some sort of 100 k year cycle. Is it a feedback mechanism? Is it a strong one? Is more CO2 just going to kick in the cooling sooner, or overwhelm the cooling?
The one thing we do know is that "stable climate" is an oxymoron. Keeping temps at the same level just isn't one of our choices. So is warmer or cooler going to bring a better standard of living in the long run? And is more CO2 going to make it warmer (the simple analysis) or cooler (due to corrective feedback coming sooner)? And if it's going to get bad, what that cost in $, and what's it cost to avoid some of it in $, and what's the cheaper path?
It amazes my how many people have strong opinions about this, but have never thought about it beyond "man change - man change bad".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sheesh! What are they teaching people these days? Not mathematics, certainly.
PPM stands for PARTS PER MILLION. What we are talking about here is a change of 0.00012, or 1.2% of 1% of the atmosphere's gaseous composition. Climate hypochondriacs would have us believe that the atmospheric system is so precarious that a 0.00012 change in gas composition creates observable temperature results. Keep in mind that the CO2 effects are dwarfed by the oscillations of the major climate change gas, water vapor. There is simply no scientific evidence that CO2 changes of these tiny amounts quantitatively changes temperature in a world-wide system that has so many variables that no computational model today can hope to cope with.
Am I the only person worried about the macadamia nuts?
That's what i call a COOL STORY BRO!!
Multicellular plants just getting established then with larger concentration fluctuations. However life can adjust to slow, large changes. Significant changes in just centries instead of millions of years may stress life.
400, after all, is just an integer with no chemical significance
That's sort of a weird criticism. They aren't saying that their instruments are measuring 400. They aren't out there measuring integers. The measurement is 400 parts of CO2 per million parts of air. That's what the reading is, that's the chemical significance. The significant fact of that measurement is that it's the highest one they've ever recorded. There's plenty to discuss about this without resorting to some sort of weird misdirection tactic that 400 is just an integer.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Am I the only one that thinks taking CO2 concentration measurements near one of the most active volcanic regions in the world is not such a good idea? Not saying the measurements are wrong, it just seems like they could have picked a better spot...
OMFG... yes because being underwater will stop CO2 from escaping the water.... can someone break down bubbles for this moron?
no sarcasm tag... why? because thie fool should be be subject to a late term abortion...
Point is -- we need more medical marijuana and industrial hemp to suck up the extra CO2 from the atmosphere. Hemp and algae are the best ways to remove CO2 from the air. And unless you know of someway to get high off algae, I say let's go with reefer.
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, surpassed 400 parts per million and the global temperature anomoly is not following! Why?! Has someone stuffed up the temperature readings and it is getting warmer? or has Co2 rise slowed and the readings at Mauna Loa are wrong?
800,000 years out of 4+ billion years is a drop in a bucket.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/08_Beck-2.pdf (from 2008)
"The record clearly demonstrates that [CO2 levels were] significantly higher than usually reported for the Last [Glacial] Termination, with levels of up to ~425 ppm about 12,750 years ago, which exceeds the present CO2 concentration of 395 ppm."
This explains thoroughly that
a) it's fundamentally a fallacy to compare Vostok data with Mauna Loa CO2 results (from 3000+ m altitude), and
b) that CO2 values frequently exceeded 400 in both this and the last centuries (as high as 480 depending on how you look at it).
-Styopa
Ice is a truly horrendous media for the storage of samples.
1. it sublimates. (it goes away over time and lacks the physical integrity to hold any gas in a static condition)
2. it's gas-permeable. (your ice cubes stink of leftovers after only hours in the bin... they absorb the smells from the air over time)
There is no ice anywhere on Earth that can be proven to hold pristine samples of past atmospheres... not only does ice not hold gas samples properly, but nobody has any control samples of ancient atmospheres to compare with the ice samples. This is totally uncalibrated, unproven, unverified excrement... but it's embraced by every government funded climate scientist working to prove that bigger government is needed and that government (guided by climate scientists) needs to control the actions of the general public
The people you call "denialists" are the only ones thinking rationally - they are simply demanding real science. That is to say, sharing of results and data and methodologies.
Indeed this latest measurement proves they were right to exhibit skepticism. A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature. It proves beyond doubt that the thinking that people like you have had that CO2 in the atmosphere MUST cause warming is incorrect - it turns out that it's simply a gas, not a magic warming element that you assumed it to be.
Really it's just sad that you guys are so inept and drawing logical conclusions that you trumpet things like this which just show how wrong you are.
CO2 is going up. Global temp is going up. Deny it all you want and however you want, but if you bother to just measure it, you'll get something like this:
http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/zFacts-CO2-Temp.gif
They picked 400 because it's a round number. That's the only reason.
The Earth is billions of years old. We have CO2 records for this location for only the past 60 years during the current inter-glacial warm period... and even those readings are not from the same instruments (so the data may not be properly compared between the beginning of that 60 year window and the end of that window without proper traceability and calibration records for the various instruments used
60 years out of billions of years is so tiny a sample that it cannot even be seen on a graph (even if the whole 60 years pegged any available recording device it could be seen as a statistical anomaly). Outside of those 60 years, there are no records... so it's entirely possible such peaks occur naturally from time-to-time and we simply do not know that. This is interesting data, but there is so much missing context that everybody on all sides of the climate argument should tread carefully on it at the risk of being exposed as a fool in the future
And they've gotten a new highest one almost much every year since they started in 1958. I don't know if it's "significant", but it's not unexpected. The 400 is pretty much arbitrary.
sure it's an integer in a domain of reals, but other scientists also used that same round number to have a look at what was going on in geologic core data. e.g. the last dozen or so times the planet exceeded the 400ppm level in the last 30M years the west antarctic ice shelf collapsed. every time. this is seriously not good and meanwhile you're just arguing meaningless semantics.
(cite: ANDRILL)
So glaciers melt - they have melted before and came back in a few million years there is no reason to believe that this will not occur again. So we lose access to them now but this would happen eventually anyway. Sure not in our lifetimes but across the millions or billions of years before the sun kills the planet completely ice will come and go unless we find a way to control the natural process that regulates.
Glaciers melting lead to rising sea levels - well this means a few options accept the loss of land or put up barriers to protect it. You always hear that NYC will be underwater in X number of years. Of course it wont. Humans will find ways to solve that problem. Build dams, raise the island by bringing in extra soil, etc. Now a place like Florida does not have those type of options so likely it will slowly be sunk by hurricanes that destroy the sand barriers that we put up. Yes, entire towns will be destroyed in a storm but this happens today. It will likely be more frequent thus making it more difficult to make the decision to rebuild. Eventually people will move somewhere else. And during this process jobs will be created to rebuild homes, reinforce older homes, build dams, better water management process etc. It is said that global warming will cost X billion or trillion dollars. Well a lot of that will go into job creation oddly enough. "You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life."
We are killing the planet! - Ahh this old argument. There is nothing we can do currently to kill the planet. Nothing. Sure global warming might kill off a chunk of species that cannot adapt. Hell all out nuclear war might kill off 90% of the worlds species but life will survive and adapt. Over a million years or so the radiation will decay and the adaption process will continue. It would be a blip on the radar for the earth, kind of like the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs.
So as I see it global warming is just accelerating a natural process that would happen anyway some time in the future (hundreds, thousands or millions of years). Lots of money will be spent trying to fight or clean up the damage but that just means job creation. Species will adapt or die but over a long enough time period we will die off anyway (baring interstellar travel).
400 is way too low. We need to get to 1000 ppm to solve world hunger problem.
Hello? Seven BILLION people?
And enough livestock to actually feed a good chunk of them?
Hell, the planetary population only two billion in something like 1925?
Yet we've nearly quadrupled population in the last 90 years?
Roughly half of which live in central and eastern Asia? Countries where their pollution output would shame early 20th century industrialists?
Yeah, fossil fuel has a good deal to do with it. But let's not pretend the sheer mass of humanity itself isn't contributing greatly to increased CO2.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...the fact that there are 7 times as many humans on Earth as there was even a couple hundred years ago.
Not saying fossil fuels aren't contributing, but surely the population issue has to be a contributing factor too.
Look what the Benghazi Talking Points are doing the presidential prospects of Madam Super Duper Nazi Hillary Clinton ! Dead today, dead tomorrow and dead in 2016.
Go Hill Go, Round the bowl and down the hole, Go Hill Go.
Sorry, I ... just had to ... shucks .... type that thingy. :)
It may depend if the temperature stabilizes at +200F or -157F.
The one thing we do know is that "stable climate" is an oxymoron.
:S The climate *is* stable and we are pushing it hard from that stability.
I know, for some people it is difficult to grasp abstract concepts. 100 years is LONG TIME so 1 million years is long like that too! So if climate changes in a span of 100 thousand years or 100 years, it's the same thing! And who knows, maybe the sun is a giant burning lump of coal too! Burning coal is bright and hot. The sun is bright and hot. Case closed!
what's the cheaper path?
It is probably cheaper avoiding moving 2,000,000,000 from the coast. It is probably cheaper avoiding 500,000,000 refugees because their country disappears.
But the good news is we both will be long dead by that time, so I guess fuck the world? right?
The feedback mechanism is known. Temperature goes up, evaporation rate goes up leading to more rainfall which causes more erosion which sequesters more carbon. After a few thousand years this feedback will bring the CO2 level back down.
All we need is some patience and the climate will correct itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The 10ky cycle oscillated between 200ppm and less than 300ppm. We are now well outside the range of that particular feedback mechanism (and the rates of change are too).
You are travelling in a car down the highway at speed. Unfortunately, the windows are blacked out. Should you keep going?
Tobacco PR staffs climate change denial "think tanks" now...
http://www.csrees.usda.gov/funding/nri/highlights/2007_no9.pdf
Cool.
The 100 ky cycle is mostly driven by Milankovitch Cycles which change the insolation of the surface. The cycles are also modified by feedbacks such as the release of CO2 from the oceans as they warm or increasing albedo as more snow accumulates during the cooling side of the cycles.
Interesting, I hadn't thought about soil erosion. What I was thinking about was rock weathering where CO2 is consumed by silicate weathering which results in calcium carbonate. This page shows it pretty well, http://dilu.bol.ucla.edu/home.html. There are vast amounts of carbon sequestered as calcium carbonate, maybe half that has ever been released from the mantle. Wiki mentions that erosion also transports dissolved CO2 to the ocean where various organisms convert it to calcium carbonate, think shells falling to the bottom of the ocean to form limestone.
In geological time frames this has a large impact on global climate. When the continents are in one mass there is little rainfall in the interior and little erosion. Global CO2 levels increase along with temperature. And the opposite also happens, lots of continents, especially with mountain ranges in the right places so lots of rainfall on land causing erosion and CO2 levels go down. This is perhaps the current situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
My completely unscientific theory about the breaking point is simply that with warming comes rising seas, which means the bottom of those seas cool down because of diffused solar energy, thus currents are affected.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Yes, humans like round numbers and tend to make note of them. They're easier to remember than 399.73.
. It also may indicate negative feedback loops responding to the changes.
But that's my skepticism in a nutshell. If I light some candles in my apartment it gets gradually warmer, For a while. Then the AC kicks in. The temperature feedback mechanism in my apartment is much larger than the heat source of a candle, or my gaming rig for that matter,
So you're expecting nature's negative feedback mechanism to be as effective as an AC specifically engineered to give as strong negative feedback as possible? What's this, the Intelligent Design argument against AGW?
10,000 years ago there were MILLIONS MORE "beef" on this planet than now. The North American buffalo were only the last ones to die.
Same idiocy in blaming "fat" for fat Americans: (officially available - just google) statistics show that fat consumption in the US actually continually slightly decreased since the 1960s.
THESE opinions are a form of religion too, not just "god" talk.
My point precisely. There is no scientific reason for calling out 400 PPM as a landmark, other than hyperbole.
The Earth's temperature cooled very slightly between 1940 to 1970. So the doomsayers were actually predicting an ice age due to global cooling at that time.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
You might want to read that website, Einstein...
You know - try THINKING for yourself. There is no such thing as 'man made global warming'.
It's not quite that simple. It isn't all about temperature. Having higher temperature might indeed be not so bad, because the Earth has certainly experienced it before and it hasn't been a complete disaster for life on Earth. However, having such a high CO2 concentration in the atmosphere does other things, such as acidifying the oceans, that in the past have led to widespread changes in plankton types and distribution, and there is some evidence that these effects could be pretty bad for various types of carbonate-secreting creatures (e.g., corals). I don't know if I really want to find out what it would be like in the oceans if coral reefs became nearly extinct, for example.
While we do have to deal with change regardless, I don't think pulling the tail of the dragon is a good idea either. Human societies in the past haven't handled dramatic changes in climate very well.
Yes there's lots of people, everyone has noticed. However Mao didn't manage to feed China by cutting the population. China got fed when the Chinese farmers got a lot better at producing food despite Mao's interference, and got even better after he died.
Population reduction is a lot harder and a much longer term project than reducing consumption via economies of scale, distribution etc. Birth rates are going down but it's going to take generations to flatten out.
Considering that both stations are in virtually the same place, that points to a local rather than global phenomenon. Also since the measurements appear to go only one direction (up), and almost linear that's more likely some accumulating effect than a natural trend. Anyhow to extrapolate these measurements for a global trend, and to use them to explain the cause of the trend (man made) is utter hogwash to say the least.
But that's my skepticism in a nutshell. If I light some candles in my apartment it gets gradually warmer, For a while. Then the AC kicks in. The temperature feedback mechanism in my apartment is much larger than the heat source of a candle, or my gaming rig for that matter.
The feedbacks in place on this planet typical function over thousands of years. What's happening now is taking place over a 100 years. That's not lighting a couple of candles, that's dumping gasoline all over your apartment and setting it on fire.
It's not just the amount of warming, it's how fast it is occurring.
We know there's some sort of 100 k year cycle. Is it a feedback mechanism? Is it a strong one?
That's known as Milankovich cycles and it has to do with the natural orbital dynamics of the planet. It's not a feedback mechanism. And right now we should technically be cooling (an we were until we started burning fossil fuels in earnest).
Is more CO2 just going to kick in the cooling sooner, or overwhelm the cooling?
CO2 is not going to cool the plant. Fourier figured this out back in the early 1800's, and all the science done since then bears this out. Oh people have certainly tried to come up with negative feedbacks based on increased CO2, but none of them have stood up to the test. And now that scientists are runnin fully coupled climate models there is no evidence of a natural negative feedback from increasing CO2. In fact, they have been finding more positive feedbacks.
The one thing we do know is that "stable climate" is an oxymoron. Keeping temps at the same level just isn't one of our choices. So is warmer or cooler going to bring a better standard of living in the long run?
Neither. Our entire civilization depends on how the climate is. Climate shifts, even regional ones, can be quite painful to deal with an historically have caused whole civilization to collapse. And we could have kept things relatively stable if we hd started taking action 20 years ago, but we're way past that.
And is more CO2 going to make it warmer (the simple analysis) or cooler (due to corrective feedback coming sooner)?
There's plenty of peer-reviewed research to answer these questions, but in short yes to the first and no to the second.
And if it's going to get bad, what that cost in $, and what's it cost to avoid some of it in $, and what's the cheaper path?
That's just one aspect that climate scientists are researching. It WOULD have been cheaper if we had started taking steps to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but at this point we're going to see at least a 2C rise (even if we stopped all CO2 production today). There is also little hope for any serious actions to be taken in the near future. We lack the will and global cohesion. Basically, I doubt any serious action will be taken until it "gets bad" but by then it will be far to late to prevent anything.
It amazes my how many people have strong opinions about this, but have never thought about it beyond "man change - man change bad".
Science is not opinion. It is also not a popularity contest. The science shows that the climate is changing. The science shows that this will result in negative impacts. The science, in this case, is showing "man change bad". Make of that what you want.
~X~
Dissolved CO2 is acidifying the ocean, killing corals and the fry of clams and other shell-building animals in the plankton, so they're not going to be converting much of it to calcium carbonate.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Pretty much nothing below 200 meters is affected by solar energy, except for the quantity of dead stuff that rains down from better-lit regions above. The two regions are pretty well isolated from each other in most places.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
It fits into the new religion. Same old story.
Except those aren't on the table. There simply isn't a world-ending-disaster to worry about. Oceans rising could be quite expensive, of course, but preventing that could also be quite expensive (or just impossible). Glaciation would be much worse, but that's just a slow process on human scale.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That cycle take 100 M years to work, it's not at all the 100 k year cycle. Also, it's bizarre to call that process 'sequestration", when something like 99.999% of carbon is bound in rock, and what we see in the air and seas is just a minor exception to the normal state of carbon on Earth.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The best solution to our situation is a decentralized power grid. Solar power being used to split water molecules to generate hydrogen is a great solution. Then you need a fuel cell to power the house on that hydrogen. Your car can be filled up at home from the solar/water.
MYA = "Million Years Ago."
If you study climate science, then you may come to some answers on feedback mechanisms. Those who do study climate science believe that strong negative feedback mechanisms will not kick in until after economically devastating warming. It's all in the IPCC reports.
says, and he actually studies the topic experimentally
CO2 enrichment experiments in natural vegetation including forests and rangelands (both of which are agricultural as defined by USDA) usually show an initial increase in productivity that quickly comes to a hard stop as nitrogen limitation is expressed, usually within a few years. Same is true for unmanaged ecosystems.
If you value intellectual integrity, then you're going to have to reach for another argument for not doing anything about CO2 pollution. Or you could just follow what the data says.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
From that PDF:
This study showed that only about one percent of net primary productivity and 16 percent of eroded carbon contribute to carbon sequestration in eroding watersheds. Combining these results with global estimates from previous studies, the erosion-induced terrestrial carbon sink can potentially offset as much as 10 percent of the global fossil-fuel emissions of carbon dioxide in 2005.
So that PDF which tries to convince us that releasing carbon is a non-issue due to soil erosion cannot account for the other 90% of the carbon in the atmosphere? And it does not even mention the other ill aspects of soil erosion.
No, soil erosion can only 'correct' 10% of the 2005 level of the problem. Hint: world carbon emissions have _increased_ since 2005, and then there is the other 90% of the problem to deal with.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Simply round-up every female under 50 and have them sterilized. The savings over the next thirty years in education and prison costs would be hundreds of $trillions. Nothing else would have to be changed. No one's life style would be diminished. In eighty years the few remaining humans would inherit a slightly warmer Earth but could move where ever the weather was most pleasant. They could subsist off of the infrastructure left in place. Robotics and the accumulated knowledge and advancements of the next fifty years will insure the few million remaining humans will live in a virtual utopia.
The only quandary will be should we allow some people to reproduce or relentlessly hunt down and sterilize every female human to insure that for at least the next several million years the other species on Earth will not be subjected to a carbon releasing intelligence. Or we can do nothing. There have been mass extinctions in the past and the planet itself survived and life renewed itself so if we cause another extinction a new ecosystem will be formed in a few million years.
We really don't bother with labels like "organic", but we did just discard a load of manure because those horses had been given vermicide. We do go all boron on the ants, like teaspoons of the stuff.
I am looking for plans for a solar charcoal kiln, for once google has failed.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The PDF simply reports the results of a study - I don't see anything there that suggests that soil erosion is going to stop global warming in the short term, its just a cool study, IMO, that helps everyone learn more about the complexity of the total system.
Do you think science be put through a political lens before it's published or talked about?
but have never thought about it beyond "man change - man change bad".
that's because the Rs have abdicated their responsibility. they're the party of industry and heartless growth, and they need to grow up and apply this view to a new industry of climate manipulation, rather than just shill and try to bury the issue in unthinking support of old oil.
in the end, climate will work out; the only question will be who gets shafted by our implementation of climate change technology. the Ds, of course, want a sort of austerity and personal responsibility. the Rs should be advocating some kind of free market solution that shafts the poor and indigenous cultures, so that we can work out an equilibrium between the two.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
backwards.
The people making claims that they can use ice cores as proof of ancient atmospheric conditions (and therefore demand billions of humans change the way they live their lives to avoid a predicted future disaster derived in part from those ice cores) are the ones upon whom the burden of proof falls. They have absolutely NO empirical proof of the reliability of those cores and their accuracy.... no way to prove that the gases they find in those cores in 2013 have anything to do with the atmosphere in what is now Kentucky (or Hawaii, or any other place on Earth) on 1 Jan 50000BC (or any other particular date in the distant past) . The skeptic who points out the lack of proof bears no burden, just as the child in the old tale bore no burden to prove the emperor was "nekkid"... he just needed to call attention to the fact.
"the highest average global temperatures on record"
I'm not disputing the records in the slightest, but, 200 years of records is not a very good data set compared to 454000000 years of the earth existing.
The NOAA forgets to mention that they are comparing a direct carbon dioxide measurement (400ppm) with two estimates (180ppm to 280ppm). These are very important distinctions in science that they have failed to make. It's the same for temperatures. All other temperature readings outside of our records are estimates based on other observable factors.
So we hit 400 ppm. So what? It is now more than 15 years with rising CO2 and flat or cooling temperatures. My question to all those who still think that CO2 is the cause of all or any of our climate woes is simple:
How many years with CO2 increasing and temperatures dropping or flat before you admit that CO2 does NOT cause temperature increase? 20? 30? 50? Never?
The plants are doing better because of the increase CO2, animals are no worse off and it is not the "control knob" on the climate that it was claimed to be.
Yea, too much of something too quick can be bad. Whether life will adjust to the acidified oceans over the long term and pull out much of that CO2 I don't know and it doesn't matter much to us if things readjust over millennium or longer.
There is an amazing amount of limestone in existence, just look at the white cliffs of Dover.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The 100 k cycle is mostly the cycle of Earths orbit changing. Goes from circular to oval and back and sometimes it's summer in the northern hemisphere when the Earth is closest to the sun, other times is the opposite.
The erosion thing is quicker then 100 M years though maybe it should still be measured in millions. In geological time frames the carbon content of the atmosphere has fluctuated a lot, following things like massive volcanic out gassing and continents rearranging themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Do you think science be put through a political lens before it's published or talked about?
Quite the opposite, but I wish (ha, and a pony) that those with a political agenda would not misrepresent science as being in anyone's 'interest' or misquoting scientific papers to show one thing when the full results show something completely different.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
They measure in a volcanic area and report raised CO2 levels? Naaaah.. GET OUTTA HERE. Pull the other one.
Statements about maxima are unreliable for establishing trends. Running averages are a better measure, and the 5 year average in your graph shows a slight downward trend.
I don't know (and frankly don't care) whether temperatures have risen or not over the last decade. But you certainly demonstrated that you have no businesses interpreting statistics.
"I wish (ha, and a pony) that those with a political agenda would not misrepresent science as being in anyone's 'interest' or misquoting scientific papers to show one thing when the full results show something completely different."
Yeah. Where did you see that happening?
what makes you think the earth has a negative feedback mechanism in the climate, other than black body radiation? a giant AC? how can you believe there is negative feedback, then assert that the climate is unstable two paragraphs later? what makes you think that nobody has ever thought beyond "man change - man change bad"? Projection? What do you think climatologists and so on do all day? Party with that vast grant money the denialists think they are all conspiring to steal?
If anything, looking at the actual history of the climate, the climate is stable at a much warmer, wetter, and CO2 laden point than the one we are at now, and at which every living organism has evolved. It seems likely that this is related to all the CO2 pulled out of the air and buried during the carboniferous period, which coincided with the change in climate. in which case, returning a lot of that carbon into the air, a million times faster than it was taken out, might be expected to jar the climate from its current metastable state.
I repeat: what makes you think the earth has a negative feedback mechanism in the climate?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
ah yes
"Combining these results with global estimates from previous studies, the erosion induced terrestrial carbon sink can potentially offset as much as 10 percent of the global fossil-fuel emissions of carbon dioxide in 2005." http://www.csrees.usda.gov/funding/nri/highlights/2007_no9.pdf
Nothing to worry about, then. Everybody back to sleep.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
As I'd posted Beck's link to a number of threads on AGW, I wanted to post my response to some other links as well:
I just want to say thanks to some /. posters, in particular for the realclimate links (Rabett is a little too snarky for me) - specifically http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/650000-years-of-greenhouse-gas-concentrations/ [realclimate.org] [realclimate.org] .
The article is interesting, as is especially the commentary, in which people raise a number of well-informed questions and get well-informed answers.
I'm trying to honestly evaluate the claims of AGW as best I can as a layman. I'm not a climate scientist, and I'll admit, I have been made suspicious by the quasi-religious tone of the exercise (starting with Mr Gore) and the unquestioning adulatory tenor of its supporters (a Nobel and Academy Award for him, really?).
Anyway, I sincerely appreciate anything that increases my understanding of the science and details.
As a layman, it seems irrefutable that there is warming taking place. It seems that CO2 has recently spiked, and that makes anecdotal sense given the intense and constant consumption of hydrocarbons since industrialization.
However...the point of the AGW creed is not merely to prove warming or CO2. It is, in fact, to assert:
1) that the sole (or at least dominant cause) for global warming (later amended to 'changing climate' - hah) is human activity, AND
2) that this is an unmitigated catastrophe, AND
3) the only solution is expanding government control of the activities of individuals "for their own good".
#1 seems at least partially true.
#2 may certainly be true in the short run for people in coastal cities, but let's be honest, these very-human things were never established in their current locations based on their durability/safety, and in long enough timescales the survivability of anything approaches zero. Nothing is permanent, not even stuff that we deem "really important or inconvenient to change". That it's true in the medium- or long-terms is absolutely not proved, particularly not in the case of the most adaptable species this planet has ever seen (AFAIK).
#3 certainly doesn't logically follow either of the others, particularly considering some of the people volunteering (out of their own good nature) to be the ones making the decisions.
-Styopa
You have to admire the denialist logical facility.
1) AGW is a fiction, because historically high CO2 follows high temperatures, not the other way around.
2) AGW is a fiction, because currently high CO2 follows low temperatures.
I venture that if someone holds these opinions, you will never be able to create a logical argument powerful enough to cause him to abandon them.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You should probably have read the OP statement I replied to first before making your snarky comment...
"A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature."
In fact, if you look at the last decade, it's still up almost 0.1 degree USING THE 5 YEAR MOVING AVERAGE (0.15 without). His statement was wrong, it's not a decade of reduction, it's just a decade of slowed increase with much more volatility. You seem to be making a conclusion based only on the final two data points on a graph.
Even *if* my response to the OP was incorrect - which is wasn''t - your attempt to establish a useful "trend" from 2 data points out of 100+ is absurd. And the fact that you tried to call someone else out on that on that after making such a silly statement is just plain sad.
I'm not establishing a trend at all. I'm saying that your statement, taken on its own, was wrong and unscientific.
Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about, and that's all there's to it.
It may have not been any more "scientific" (whatever you think that silly broad term means in this context) than the OP's post but it was factually and mathematically 100% correct, since it simply boils down to the statements "after a decade of reduction in temperature" and "that statement isn't true". That's all my post pointed out, and that's all it was trying to point out. It was a simple logical statement, not a statistical one (and moving averages are not particularly good at establishing trends at the end of a dataset, anyway, obviously).
And despite your denial, you called the last two data points in a 100+ year graph a trend. It's pretty easy to scroll up there and read your own post, but I'll make it easy...
the 5 year average in your graph shows a slight downward trend.
I'm not establishing a trend at all.
Sigh, yet another semantic nitpick debate with someone who can't even be consistent between his own posts, let alone make their own on-topic contribution to the thread as a whole... where are all of these slashdot trolls coming from??
You used the existence of a maximum to try to disprove a point in the post you were responding to. But the reasoning underlying your response was incorrect.
The person you were responding to may have gotten the facts wrong. You got the math wrong. Simple as that.