Slashdot Mirror
Another Study Finds Earth's CO2 Emissions Have Flattened Over The Last Three Years (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Worldwide emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide have flattened out in the past three years, a new study showed Monday, raising hopes that the world is nearing a turning point in the fight against climate change. However, the authors of the study cautioned it's unclear whether the slowdown in CO2 emissions, mainly caused by declining coal use in China, is a permanent trend or a temporary blip...
The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is projected to grow by just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant. According to the article, almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is projected to grow by just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant. According to the article, almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
A big factor is of course the cost of solar and wind, which are now already cheaper than coal and oil, even without subsidies.
http://www.climatecentral.org/... contains the graph
http://assets.climatecentral.o...
This shows the rise in the CO2 level in the atmosphere over the last 5 years.
For over a year now, it's been over 400ppm, and the rise in 2015-16, over the same period the year before has been the largest this past year than any time in the last five years.
Seriously?
The problem exists.
The models aren't failing.
There is scientific consensus.
The "good news" here is that the problem isn't worsening as fast as it used to.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
CO2 does not cause warming. This has been shown to be a hoax.
If you want to be extremely pedantic, CO2 does not cause warming, the sun does. And no molecule that doesn't undergo a reaction (either chemical or physical) causes any warming. But that's pushing it a bit too much.
What a chemist will tell you is that CO2 or any molecule with three or more atoms has a scissoring motion that absorbs infrared wavelengths around the heat emissions that you can expect for a black body around the Earth's current temperature. So, rather than these emissions escaping towards outer space and having radiative cooling, you have them being partially absorbed by CO2 and other gases (water, methane, CFC gases and so on) and then emitted once again as the molecule relaxes to a more fundamental state. These emissions then happen in every direction, including back down to Earth, for a further chance at heating the planet. The important part here is the scissoring motion and the three atoms it needs. A diatomic molecule (oxygen, nitrogen, etc) will not cause this because the frequencies at which it absorbs energy are substantially different.
How you can judge this as being a hoax, it's a mystery to me or anyone else with more than 2 brain cells.
They're not comparing the same thing (human emissions versus atmospheric levels).
Probably did not exist?
Oh except that we found stockpiles of said chemical weapons all over the country, troops were killed when they hit IED's made of chlorine rounds that we missed, and Syria who never had a known stockpile has been able to use Chemical weapons a few times, meaning the suspected export of unknown quantities of Chemical weapons during the run-up to the invasion occurred as feared.
The only thing we did not find was an active production system but they had six months to dismantle and hide or ship such to Syria.
It's too early to celebrate because the data really doesn't show this purported downturn yet. Here's the measured carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the last five years:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c...
And the full record:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c...
If there's a recent downturn, I can't see it.
(A different link graphing the same data: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/progr... )
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's fashionable to pretend that it was all based on bloodlust but for those of us who were alive at the time, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. The decision was made with the best information at the time and in retrospect it was a mistake.
I was alive at the time, and it was a transparently stupid thing to do. It never looked like the right thing to do, and it was obvious before we even went in that it would spiral out of control. The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.
It's transparently stupid to declare anything as the obvious 'best' answer to Saddam era Iraq.
Saddam's attempted genocide of the Kurdish people in his Al-Anfal campaign through the use of chemical weapons, massacres of villages with conventional weapons, concentration camps for the captured, mass graves for the captured males old enough to bear arms, and systematic rape of the women. The rape wasn't about punishment or intimidation but an attempt to impregnate the victims with half-Arab children and effectively breed the Kurds out of existence. The campaign is documented extensively as any really good genocide needs to be administered well to make sure it's thorough. Unfortunately for Saddam, plane loads of said records were captured in the first gulf war.
Saddam left over a million dead in his war with Iran in which he again made absolutely extensive use of chemical and biological weapons.
Saddam again tried to conquer a neighbour, this time seizing all of Kuwait, effectively reducing the number of existing UN member nations by 1.
Saddam then waged another genocide, this time against Shia Iraqi's leaving hundreds of thousands dead.
Saddam no longer rules Iraq and is now dead. That's not nothing and to say it's transparently obvious an Iraq under his rule would be a better world today is an insult to his victims.