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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.
That the rate increase is going down isn't good enough, alas. That means it's still increasing. We need a reversal, with less CO2 pumped out than what is absorbed, and we're nowhere near that yet.
Still, it's a good first sign, but we're still getting worse, not better.
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.
So why did the UK & USA go to war in Iraq on the basis of chasing weapons of mass destruction that probably did not exist at a cost of some $1.1 trillion? Answer: because it suited other goals that politicians wanted. So: today politicians are chasing short term goals and keeping their eyes shut tight to the probable huge long term consequences of not dealing with climate change.
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.
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http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
Last year broke the record with a growth rate over 3PPM / Year. Looking at this years monthly data, in 2016 we're on track to smash last year's record with somewhere around 3.5PPM / Year. Every year this decade has been at or above the average for previous decade. Rather than a levelling off, the data looks like continual growth.
Confused as to how any report can be claiming a "levelling off". Mauna Loa is seen as the de-facto standard for global CO2 levels as it's in the middle of the pacific and therefore isolated from localised effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa_Observatory
Any evidence to back up your claim that the scientific consensus is now that CO causing climate change is a hoax?
Or is it just some "think tank"-organization's claim?
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Another Study Finds Earth's CO2 Emissions Have Flattened Over The Last Three Years
I just heard that President Elect by popular vote, Donald Trump has pledged to fix this problem so you can all breathe easier now. The president is hard at work assembling a crack task force from among the ranks of Big Oil and Big Coal to bring CO2 emissions growth back on track.
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.
Mission accomplished!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
And yet there are politicians and various groups who are pushing for climate change action. Are they just the honest ones, or just the ones who have figured out how to profit from it?
They're not comparing the same thing (human emissions versus atmospheric levels).
The models are overpredicting warming due to CO2.
No, its 'cuz if we were wrong about WMD in Iraq, it was likely that Saddam, who hated our guts over Gulf War 1, would have given said WMD to terrorists who would have deployed it on our densest population centers, the east coast and California. An anthrax attack could have possibly killed a million people. Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think? I live on the east coast, BTW, but have, or at least had immunity to anthrax due to having traveled to Iraq a couple times to assist the US Army. But it wouldn't be any fun to wake up one day and find that 90% of the people in my area dead due to such an attack.
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.
Note that the (near) flat line is only for fossil-fuel derived CO2: not all human produced CO2, and certainly not all Earth produced !!
>While the C=O bond in CO2 does absorb in the IR range
so more CO2 = more absorption?
almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
Nope.
Human activity only accounts for a bit over 3% of the CO2 in the world.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>How you can judge this as being a hoax, it's a mystery to me or anyone else with more than 2 brain cells
Just like it needs three atoms to be a greenhouse gas, it needs 3 braincells to understand.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Those figures are not in the right ballpark, hell they are not even in the same sport.
In reality the single largest CO2 emission source after human activity is volcanoes. The American Geophysical Union published a report that compared volcanic CO2 to human CO2. The short version is that the total annual volcanic CO2 contribution is 0.025% of what humans produce JUST from coal plants (which is a tiny fraction of our total CO2 production - but the easiest one to accurately measure).
Whoever gave you that number was lying through their teeth.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I would add that Gaddafi after seeing what happened in Iraqi decided to own up to a whole bunch of WMD that we basically didn't have a clue about and allowed them to be removed. It is highly unlikely this would have happened without the Iraqi invasion.
The problem with the invasion of Iraqi was not the invasion itself but the utter lack of post invasion planning by Bush and his fellow bunch of morons.
How much has Gore made so far?
"His name was James Damore."
We're talking about the *net CO2 increase*. Human activity is responsible for more than 100% of that.
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.
The WMD not only did exist, their presence was covered up possibly due to concerns over the public reaction over how much should have been there verses how little was found and possibly due to expected public reaction over people realising "Gulf War Syndrome" was caused by low level exposure to chemical agents.
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Which is almost as dumb as knowing the rules of the American electoral process, which have been in place for literally centuries, and then complaining when they don't like the results.
Stop your FUD. It's ridiculous. Do you really think that Republicans want dirty water and pollution choked skies? Think about what you're saying. Opposition to the ham-handed EPA does not mean wanting to have toxic waste dumps leaching into ground water.
You're giving yourself heart palpitations for no reasons. There are other, well-founded reasons, to be opposed to Trump. This is f00king retarded.
#NeverTrump,
#NeverHillary.
Vote Third Party in 2016 and beyond.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
That sentence seems to confuse two different phenomena. This story is about emissions - how much we emit. The previous story is about the airborne fraction - how much of what we emit stays in the atmosphere vs. being absorbed by plants or the ocean.
The green line here shows the trend in atmospheric CO2: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/g...
I've read one estimate where the global, yearly CO2 generation is 800Gt (Giga tons). Human actions account to 30Gt (~4 % )
You've read incorrectly. Before human actions, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were stable.
It's bitztream, the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating Slashdot troll!
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
This isn't what we want to hear. This greatly conflicts with our goal of radically forcing a change to touchy-feely types of energy and telling others what they have to do. Lets ignore it, just like we've ignored the likely-hood of the next coming ice age that global warming has been protecting us from.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think?
You seem to be forgetting the ~1 million civilian dead.
Okay, it's hard to estimate, I'll give you 500k. And helping ISIS grow in the subsequent power vacuum. And some torture.
What is the exchange rate of American lives to everyone else's lives?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are both stretching and bending modes. There are also a lot of rotational modes, but these tend to be longer wavelength.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The models are not overpredicting warming; that's a denier talking point, but it is not based on actual data.
Right at the moment, the measured warming is very close to what the models predict; well within quoted error bars.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The models are all closed so you can't really inspect what they attribute to what.
Huh? The main global circulation models are all available. You can look them up on the internet. And even run them yourself, if you have access to a supercomputer-- dozens of universities do this.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There are some tires that need burning and I've been putting this off for years.
The models are indeed failing. Just because the earth is warming don't mean the models are right.
The data is:
1. The Earth is warming
2. The warming rate fits the models to within the quoted error bars.
3. The warming rate does not fit the null-hypothesis ("anthropogenic gasses have no effect on global climate.")
This is how science is done: the null hypothesis is rejected. If you wish to say "the models aren't right", what you need to do is find a different model which fits the data, and is not already ruled out by other known facts (like, for example, if your model is "the sun is increasing in output," you need to explain why the satellite measurements of solar output aren't showing this purported increase.)
If you were really understanding of science you'd not make such a stupid statement
I have a pretty good understanding of science. This is the way science is done: sequentially improving models, and ruling out previous models when they are falsified by data. Right now, the consensus is that greenhouse gasses are causing warming. This consensus exists because the null hypothesis is strongly ruled out. The consensus will change if newer measurements rule out the current model, or if a new model is found that fits the data better.
But right now, the model we have seems to be pretty robust.
and if you were really that aware of GW concerns you'd know that models are being dismissed left and right.
Only by people who don't seem to know anything about either the models or about the data.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Do you really think that Republicans want dirty water and pollution choked skies?
It's not what anyone thinks; it's perfectly bleeding obvious. Exhibit A: Pat "the Rat" McCrory and his corrupt mollycoddling of Duke Energy.
Vote Third Party in 2016 and beyond.
Thanks for putting the Flim Flam Führer in office. But at least you kept your purity.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
AC Said "I've read one estimate where the global, yearly CO2 generation is 800Gt (Giga tons). Human actions account to 30Gt (~4 % )." you replied
Whoever gave you that number was lying through their teeth.
30/ (439 + 332 +30) = 0.037~, OBTW (439 + 332 +30) is 801 ; so round-off error is hardly "lying through their teeth", the numbers that SkepticalScience used are from Figure 7.3, IPCC AR4.
Most of us irredeemable deplorable climate deniers consider SkepticalScience to be a pack of rabid Climate Alarmists, it's kind of apropos that they blow your argument out of the water.
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We're talking about the *net CO2 increase*. Human activity is responsible for more than 100% of that.
For sure, everybody know that magic fairies sort out the 801 Gigatons of CO2 from natural sources and puts them in a separate bin so Gaia's green goodness can digest it, but totally reject the 30 Gigatons of nasty anthropogenic CO2!
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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.
You can't say that because it's racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, evidence of white privilege, and means you hate puppies and want unicorns to die. You monster.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.
Speaking as someone who was not only alive at the time but actively serving in the military at the time, you seem to forget Saddam himself was being conned by his own scientists who feared for their lives if they reported failure. Furthermore, the CIA believed they had WMD's, and the head of the CIA advised the Bush administration that WMD's were present.
So here you are, the President, sitting in the Oval Office. You've got a murderous thug of a dictator, someone who has shown no compunction about using WMD's against his own people when it suits him. His own services report having WMD's. Your own intelligence services confidently say he has WMD's. What do you do? Ignore all that?
Put this way, if you go to three different doctors and they all diagnose you with cancer, are you gonna say "nah, I feel fine, these guys don't know what they're talking about"? Or are you going to get treatment for cancer as if you actually HAVE cancer? And if afterwards when the chemo has made you sick as hell and all your hair falls out you discover you didn't really have cancer, are you going to blame yourself for making the decision to get treatment? Or are you going to blame those that wrongly advised you?
Based on your above comments, you'd have to blame yourself and hold those who wrongly diagnosed you as completely innocent. Not that that makes any fucking sense, but that's what you're doing.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Eccoing parent; summary is misleading at best. The rate of CO2 increase has stopped increasing. In other words, the CO2 is increasing at the highest rate it ever has, it's just that now the second derivative is 0. That means it's a linear increase, not exponential. We need the overall slope of CO2 concentration vs time to become 0 or negative in order to mitigate the damaging effects of greenhouse effect.
So? This is okay.
If this trip leads to a long-term reduction of CO2 emissions greater than 16.5 T then it's worth it. In effect, not taking the trip would cause more emissions.
How about the numerous reports indicating that the CIAs reports were completely wrong. They had a single expatriate source that had serious credibility problems bit the directive was go at all costs. So it was ignored. Cheney would go on talk shows claiming that leaks in the media confirmed the Govs position. When the Gov had been the original leaker.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
How about the numerous reports indicating that the CIAs reports were completely wrong.
They had a single expatriate source that had serious credibility problems bit the directive was go at all costs. So it was ignored.
Cheney would go on talk shows claiming that leaks in the media confirmed the Govs position. When the Gov had been the original leaker.
I believe one of the most prominent voices you are talking about is former Iraqi weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He very vehemently opposed the Iraq invasion and has been on of the leading voices in discussing how awful the intelligence was and obvious it was before hand that there were no WMD's in Iraq.
Regrettably for him and other revisionists his comments and those like him sang a different tune before the war. Ritter was quoted shortly before the war cautioning against it because Saddam would use his WMD's to defend Baghdad. This was a commonly made argument against the war, where if Saddam has nothing to lose, we can be sure he will deploy his chemical weapon arsenal:
As I testified to the U.S. Senate in 1998, Iraq has the indigenous capability right now to reconstitute a chemical weapons program within a matter of weeks. And my concern is if we continue to push for military action against Iraq, and once the writing becomes clear on the wall -- and believe me, if Saddam Hussein doesn't understand that President Bush is dead serious about going to war against him now, I don't know when he'll be -- when he'll recognize that. But at some point, I believe that Iraq will seek to reconstitute militarized nerve agent that will be used in defense of Baghdad. And I think the Iraqi government's efforts to acquire significant stockpiles of atropine are an indication that this is the direction that Saddam Hussein is heading.
Aaah, I see your mistake. You conveniently didn't seperate out NEW CO2 from CO2 that was already part of the cycle. The page you linked actually TELLS you why your argument is bullshit. The numbers you give are a complete lie - but like any good lie - it's based on taking something true and lying about what it means.
Of the carbon that is added on TOP of what's in the existing cycle, the carbon that's actually a problem, we make almost all of it.
Just look at what you're doing - your argument is listend on the very page you used to back it up with as a "myth". Yet you made that argument without any of the context of WHY it's a myth. In other words you were deliberately trying to deceive people, and my argument is entirely intact - yours however is shredded.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think?
You seem to be forgetting the ~1 million civilian dead.
Okay, it's hard to estimate, I'll give you 500k. And helping ISIS grow in the subsequent power vacuum. And some torture.
What is the exchange rate of American lives to everyone else's lives?
How many dead from Saddam's war against Iran? How about his genocide of the Kurds? How about his war against Kuwait? How about his genocide of the Shia Iraqis? How many people did Saddam kill beyond that just for suspicions of disloyalty in his decades of rule?
If you can't already answer those questions you can't pretend to appreciate the cost of inaction on Saddam's regime. You think ISIS didn't equally find it's roots from the brutal dictatorships of guys like Saddam and Assad? Do you honestly believe that prior to Saddam's removal by American forces the region was free of sectarian hatred, violence and massacres? Step 1 through 20 of dictator class is divide and conquer, and Assad and Saddam made an extreme practice of deliberately fomenting and encouraging sectarian hatreds to make it all the easier to divide and conquer those under them.
But yeah, the troubles in Iraq and Syria today are all the result of American intervention and nothing else...
Close to a quarter of a billion by 2013. Probably considerably more by now...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There may have been a few WMDs, it's always hard to get rid of everything, but they got rid of the vast majority. Not 100%, but imagine how many weapons would mysteriously disappear were the US to be forced to destroy all their weapons; people would patriotically hide them or hide them for sale later. Not to mention general incompetence, like the CDC losing vials of anthrax or smallpox.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In the past, we've been adding more CO2, each year-on-year, than in each previous year.
Now, we have three consecutive years where we are adding the same amount, not more than each previous year.
Total atmospheric CO2 is still increasing, but the increase has stopped being a curve and is currently a straight line.
In the past, we've been adding more CO2, each year-on-year, than in each previous year. Now, we have three consecutive years where we are adding the same amount, not more than each previous year. Total atmospheric CO2 is still increasing, but the increase has stopped being a curve and is currently a straight line.
That may be true, but you sure can't see it in the data yet.
I trust the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements. I don't trust the estimates of how much fossil fuel was used worldwide, particularly since the main part of the proposed decrease is in Chinese emissions, of which the reference cited says "Chinese emissions were down 0.7 percent in 2015 and are projected to fall 0.5 percent in 2016, the researchers said, though noting that Chinese energy statistics have been plagued by inconsistencies."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There was and wasn't weapons of mass destruction in the middle east. Depending on you view of what mass destruction is.
Well, the Israeli atomic bombs certainly should qualify.
The headline says that the rate of CO2 emission is unchanged over the past three years. However, that only means that our rate of pollution has been constant over the past three years. This does not mean that the CO2 level is flat. In order for the CO2 level to decrease, the CO2 emission rate must fall to below the amount that the environment (etc) can absorb/process.
The article seems to confuse or mislead as well, muddying the difference between CO2 level and CO2 emission rate.
My link points to research from 2014, your clueless or trolling answer to studies of which the newest is from 2010. And it is you who told me to "keep up". This site is becoming hopeless.
I see claims for this on both sides of the argument. Where can I find temperature data output from a model in the past in comparison to actual temperature data as recorded since that model was run?
I've been graphing it myself. What you need is the climate sensitivity out of the model-- this will be in units of degrees C per doubling. The prediction is that the delta-T equals the sensitivity times the Log_(base2) of the carbon dioxide currently divided by the carbon dioxide at the reference year. You can find carbon dioxide levels in the Mauna Loa dataset, here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c... and you can find temperatures in whichever source you like, such as Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST), or the NASA GISS data. This site has list of different sources of data, with a link to the BEST: https://climatedataguide.ucar....
The older the prediction, the longer a run of years you can compare predictions to reality, of course. The 1979 National Academy of Sciences report "Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment" is a good place one; it has error bars on the prediction: 3 C, plus or minus 1.5 C (per doubling): https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12... The prediction hasn't actually changed much since then though, so that's a good one to pick in that it's representative of pretty much all the later models
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Your nom de plume is well chosen, Obfuscant, since obfuscating seems to be what you are interested in doing. I'm not sure why. Is there some point in your deliberate obfuscation?
Correct. We have reasonable measurements.
The way science is done is that you propose a hypothesis, and compare it against observations. "I think that there's maybe some other factor causing temperature rise, I don't know what it is" is not science. If you want to attribute the temperature rise to another cause, identify that cause. If you can't reject the hypothesis because you didn't ever frame a hypothesis-- it really isn't science.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm not sure why. Is there some point in your deliberate obfuscation?
I am attempting to clarify your incorrect representation of what "science" is. That is not obfuscating, it is the opposite. And you're now resorting to name games.
The way science is done is that you propose a hypothesis, and compare it against observations.
You cannot use random observations, you need to design your experiments carefully to rule out extraneous causes. And to rule out correlation you need to have a control for any experiment you conduct. It is not science to say "I cannot account for this variable so it must be the cause".
If you want to attribute the temperature rise to another cause, identify that cause.
Stop it. I am not trying to attribute anything to anything. You reached the end of what I wrote and kept reading things I didn't say, and now you keep demanding I identify causes.
All I am saying is that science, in this case, is missing the necessary control experiment that allows true proof, so it is not the true scientific method. You cannot disprove the null hypothesis (which is not actually what you claimed it was based on what measurements we are taking) without a control experiment.
If you can't reject the hypothesis because you didn't ever frame a hypothesis-- it really isn't science.
And you cannot reject the null hypothesis without doing the experiment, so that, too, isn't really science when you say you have such proof.
It is the best we can do without the ability to actually have a control, so the best we can say is that the answer is probably right, it is likely to be right. The "consensus" says ... isn't science, it's voting on the truth.
Do you get it now?
You're the one who chose the name obfuscant. It is appropriate. You are trying to deliberately obfuscate. I assume you like it.
Many sciences are observational. Despite that, they are still sciences.
Bye.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
For sure, everybody know that magic fairies sort out the 801 Gigatons of CO2 from natural sources and puts them in a separate bin so Gaia's green goodness can digest it, but totally reject the 30 Gigatons of nasty anthropogenic CO2!
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The CO2 that's not from human sources were already part of the natural process, it was put there by the same processes that will remove it again. But the processes don't remove more than they put in. Extra CO2 does not get removed the same way.
You can't breath in more than you breath out. A tree can't produce more oxygen than the CO2 it absobs and when it dies releases EXACTLY the same amount of CO2 as it absorbed while alive.
Natural CO2 levels basically do not change on any time scale under a hundred million years.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Again with the magic fairies !
Look you said "Whoever gave you that number was lying through their teeth."
I showed the number while not exact was very far from lying through their teeth, and referenced it through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a scientific and intergovernmental body under the auspices of the United Nations, in their 4th Assessment Report, as referred to via a well known Climate Change Alarmist's website.
If you want to talk about lies, take a look at this Infographic USA CO2 emissions trending down, European Union CO2 emissions trending down, Japan's CO2 emissions trending down, Russia's CO2 emissions trending down? How about China and India CO2 emissions trending up sharply; where are the lies of omission now.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Nothing magical about it. Just a little thing called evolution. Natural sources of CO2 co-evolved with natural absorbers of CO2 until they reached a balance where they essentially cancel each other out and the natural CO2 and Oxygen levels are constant.
When either goes out of whack - things go really, really weird. The first time that happened was when photosynthesis evolved. We had CO2 to Oxygen convertors but nothing to convert the other way - the Earth's oxygen level shot up rapidly to massive levels and every animal on the planet went extinct, life had to start those over from bacteria and make new ones that could survive in an oxygen rich atmosphere, indeed were dependent on it.Then a balance evolved and the levels were basically constant for millions upon millions of years.
The second time when when some plants developed a molecule called lignin. Lignin is the molecule that makes wood hard - the difference between trees and all other plants is the lignin in their cells. Unfortunately nothing had yet evolved which could digest lignin, no plants, no animals, no fungus. So the world grew forrests of trees which were converting CO2 to oxygen - but there was nothing that could eat them when they died, so that oxygen was never converted back to CO2. The Oxygen level jumped to almost twice it's usual level, at over 40%.
This had some odd outcomes - for one thing, primitive booklungs normally constrain the sizes of creatures with them - since they are not very efficient, but in that atmosphere they worked a *lot* better. Insects and arachnids reached record sizes. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan,
Not a world where humans could have survived. Coincidentally - all those trees that didn't rot - got covered over with mud, and they are the fossil fuels you burn in your car now.
That CO2 you're producing, in other words, hasn't been part of the carbon cycle for over 300 million years. The world evolved to a balance that does not include it.
That's what you are pretending isn't happening. Nothing magical about it - just the balance of nature as produced by evolution. Evolution ALWAYS favors steady-states, that has the highest survival rates all around. It favors replacement without growth or decline in populations. It favors keeping the carbon level constant. So plants and animals that keep their conversion correlated with each other has better survival rates - and that's what evolution produced.
The natural variation in the CO2 level is zero on any kind of human timescale. It's not supposed to change.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Planting trees would help. So would sequestering paper in landfills rather than recycling it. And it's easier to not recycle than it is to recycle, so this seems an underappreciated approach. (Too bad recycling is more of a religious act in so many minds, rather than an ethical or pragmatic one.)
Sprinkling iron oxide and/or other nutrients in the ocean to encourage photosynthesis is another promising approach that has spawned "religious" objections.
Whatever happened to OTEC? The "waste" cold seawater was claimed to be chock-full of nutrients. Generate electricity while making nutrients more accessible sounds like a win-win. And it's of a (more) natural origin, which could reduce the "religious" objections. Or so an optimist might think.
Maybe that would be more nutrition than the local ecosystem could handle. In that case, don't dump it in the ocean directly. Use it to grow algae (or algae and what, indirectly, eats algae) first, then harvest the fish or crabs or lobsters or whatever, then dump the nutrient-depleted seawater in the ocean.
Sounds expensive to set up, with no certainty of payoff. I may have just answered my own question. Or so a pessimist might think.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.