you do understand that the US is not as densely populated as other countries right? In some places it is a 20 minute drive from your house to the nearest store. 10 minutes to your nearest neighbor.
That'll have to change. And indeed, I'm sure it will.
In addition, many coastal areas have been gaining land area, not losing, due to river sediment, and will continue to do so for a long time.
Please support this with a citation. Most of the science I've seen shows the opposite.
He's right - but in an irrelevant sense. There are indeed plenty of areas where recent deposition of sediment has lead to a local increase in land area. Whether you consider flushing topsoil from agricultural areas into the sea to try to build new land to be an effective use of the soil though, is another question. Putting on the hat from my year of soil science courses at uni, I think that you could get better production from even very poor soil than by treating it like that - but what the fuck would I know? I only spent a year studying the subject.
Whether there is a net increase in land area is a much more contentious claim. If, indeed, the GPP is making that claim. It's also a very complex question. Looking locally, we've got accumulation onto beaches, due to erosion of the adjacent mountain area ; but we've also got isostatic rebound (from the loss of the glaciers a few millennia ago) also helping land to emerge from the sea ; but at the other end of the country (where my family used to be mariners), the same glacial rebound is leading to subsidence of the land into the sea (because of flow in the asthenosphere) ; then there's the regional subsidence pattern that's due to (essentially) the Alps falling down and begin dumped into the North Sea via the Rhine - of which the Thames is generally a small tributary (I don't normally bother to count the Southern North Sea as being a "real" sea : you can see the sun from the bottom of it!).
Oh, and on top of that, you've got the eustatic changes from changes in ocean temperature and melting of land-bound ice. And that's just in one country.
Historically humans have built population centers near oceans for transportation reasons. These population centers (Venice, New Orleans, New York, Sydney) will have to be relocated.
Hmmm, being cynical, the transportation facilities will have to be moved. The people can look after themselves. But you can't expect those wharves and quays and cranes and railroads to move themselves. But you can expect a (wet) human to eventually get up and move themselves. Modern transportation facilities don't need a lot of people to operate them.
No, I'm not that cynical. But I know an entire class of politicians who are.
There was no mass extinction until the end of the Eocene
I think that you need to speak to a better palynologist.
I do speak to palynologists, regularly, for geosteering decisions in horizontal oil wells, during the time period when the major faunal changes of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum were happening. Even I can see the differences in the fauna across the slides, and I sure ain't a palynologist. I probably couldn't play one convincingly on TV.
I wonder how much (if any) gas seepage occurs in the region? I'd like to think that these were at least evaluated prior to it being drafted for CO2 measurements
You've got the cart before the horse, somewhat. The CO2 measurements were background measurements for attempts to understand the out-gassing of the volcano, with an implication that this might be a viable technique for predicting volcanic eruptions. That project hasn't really worked - and good men have died in the effort to make it work - but the CO2 measurements have been spun off into separate atmospheric projects.
and I'd think it would be addressed in the site FAQ. I couldn't find it there anywhere.
It didn't take me long to find it - about 5 minutes. And I don't carry the site map in my head. (Though I have searched it before, looking for something else. Which I found.)
Like for example, iron-fertilizing the oceans to create massive plankton blooms that, hopefully, remove carbon faster?
It has been tried. Twice. It didn't clearly work on either occasion, to the puzzlement of the scientists working on it. Which suggests that the reality of the situation is significantly different to the simple models that predict that it should work. They might manage to work out WTF is happening and how to make it work, but until they do, that one is practically off the table.
To mis-quote myself in another context : "a microgramme of measurement outweighs a megagramme of speculation.
It's even been fingered in heavy seismic activity which has occurred since.
What heavy seismic activity? I can only find two significant ones since 2004 within 5 degrees (latitude or longitude) of the site :
Date Time Latitude Longitude Depth(km) Magnitude
2008-11-22 08:01:16.4 31.02 N 110.80 E 2 4.7
2008-03-24 15:24:44.0 32.66 N 110.44 E 33 4.7
Are you thinking of the Sichuan earthquake of 2008? Which was 850 miles away.
"China" is quite a large country. Almost 10 million sq.km - larger than the USA.
feeling that that level is the "trigger" for global warming.
That's a bit poorly expressed. If it weren't for the global warming from around 280ppm CO2, then we'd be in a profound ice age, possibly back in a "snowball Earth" scenario. We're around 15K warmer than we would be without any greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Should you take atmospheric tests for CO2 from just one spot, a volcanic spot?
Why do you think that it's only measured at one point? One station happens to be the one which has the longest series of records, but that's always going to be the case. What the reasons for actually establishing an atmospheric measurement station at Mauna Loa were... well, why not check the website? http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/volcanicco2.html is telling me (I'm a geologist) that they were investigating CO2 emissions from the volcano as a tool for eruption prediction, and there's the implication that they started collecting background CO2 readings as part of that. Obviously, if you're looking for changes in the volcanic-sourced CO2 component, then you'd need to know how much non-volcanic CO2 there is too. So, they measure the volcanic CO2 near to a fumarole (small "smoking" gas pit ; common on volcanoes), and also at a convenient point appreciably away from any fumaroles to get the background reading.
Or should it be taken and averaged over several points on the planet?
Why do you think that it's not. I use atmospheric methane readings as a calibration check on the quality of service that my clients are getting from their sub-contractors while CO2 readings are a useful proxy for the working of a part of the gas detection system. It's part of my job. But I don't report these anywhere except to the clients because they're not particularly interesting. And the quality and duration of the records are not going to tell anyone anything new.
(Incidentally, all the sub-contractors claim to be able to detect the 2ppm of atmospheric methane ; none do. And most don't understand that they've been found out.)
I agree. We should be working _hard_ to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels ASAP for a whole multitude of reasons.
To quote my Dad's chemistry lecturer back in the 1950s, "oil is too good stuff to burn" (Dad went on to be a plastics chemist ; 'nuff said.)
building standard LFTR reactors [youtube.com] to provide the electricity _and_ burn the worst of the existing nuclear 'waste' (that still has 98% of its original energy still present).
LFTR... Ah, the liquid fluoride stuff. Interesting ideas ; one wonders if one will ever be built, and if so, whether it'll live up to the hype.
Most people think LFTRs need water cooling - they do not [wikipedia.org]. They can be built anywhere without the need for huge cooling towers and enormous containment buildings (running at atm pressure means no need to contain the primary coolant flashing to steam).
Won't that (running your coolant at atmospheric pressure) be atrocious for thermodynamic efficiency? For maximum efficiency you want as high a temperature difference as possible between your starting and final states. Which is the main reason for running steam generators for power plants in the supercritical state.
what are the five most common gasses in the atmosphere, and what are their concentrations? Can you answer that? I'll give you N2 and 02, but what about the next three?
Not googling : Argon (about 1%) ; then probably CO2 (0.038+%) ; then... hmm, I'd have to Google for #5. Ammonia, or nitrogen oxides?
Be honest with yourself. Did you google it?
I'm a SCUBA diver and have worked in the past as a gas analyst (still may go back to do it occasionally, if someone is needed to care-for and feed one of the GC-MS equipment units on a site somewhere). But yes, I'd have to Google for number 5. [...] OK, I'm actually moderately surprised by the answer, though I shouldn't be given the argon content.
And the trees are only strong carbon consumers while they are growing. So you'll need to log them off periodically, and store the wood somewhere where it won't get burned.
True and agreed.
But you could get a more long-term stable effect by pyrolysing the wood to produce (more or less) water and partly-mineralised carbon. The water, although a greenhouse gas itself, will precipitate out of the atmosphere in a matter of hours to days, but the carbon (a.k.a. "biochar" and other similar neologisms; or just call it "charcoal") will be much less prone to being returned to the natural cycle than the wood.
Not a working day goes by for me without me noting the presence of "carbonaceous matter" in a mudrock sample ; that's essentially natural "charcoal" which has been buried for millions of years. 0.2 to 0.5% non-carbonate carbon in a mudrock is perfectly normal, which is equivalent to several metres thickness of "charcoal" over the entire continental surface of the Earth. Decidedly non-trivial.
The pyrolysis would consume non-trivial energy, and that would almost certainly have a carbon footprint associated with it. But, it's a relatively small footprint (you're not burning all the wood, only 10% or so of it) and the payback in making the carbon really difficult to put back into the system is non-trivial.
Anyway, that's my geological â0.02 worth. It might be a useful contribution to managing CO2 levels, but it would take real political commitment to do it on a sufficient scale.
burning all of the oxygen in the atmospher would only get us up to 0.28875 bar, so there is no way the Earth could go Venus.
There is also a significantly different tectonic regime, with the plate tectonics of the Earth leading to substantial absorption of CO2 by reaction with silicate minerals. That is going to continue to happen for hundreds of millions of years, even if you muck around seriously with the atmosphere, so if you did try to turn Earth into a second Venus, you'd have to maintain those conditions for a good part of a billion years before you'd worked the consequences of the changed atmosphere into any sort of stability.
Geologically, there is significant evidence that the interaction of water with rock (the mantle specifically ; the crust is pretty irrelevant in this) has led to significant weakening of the rock, which allows the mantle to continue convecting above the asthenosphere (around 400km below surface) even as the temperatures slowly decrease with the ebbing away of radiogenic heating and the heat of formation. Possibly (this is not certain ; I'm not even particularly sure that there is anything approaching consensus on this), this didn't ever happen on Venus, resulting in the decidedly different tectonic style on Venus. (Quite what that tectonic style is, isn't a consensus matter either ; but it's clearly not plate tectonics of a terrestrial style.)
I'm not weighing in on this "debate", but the temperatures in the UK are artificially warm because of the ocean currents.
I know what you're trying to say, but it's getting severely mangled between brain and keyboard.
Compare the UK to other regions of similar latitude to demonstrate this.
Temperatures in the UK, and other western coasts of continents, are NATURALLY warmer than the corresponding eastern coasts at the same latitude, because of heat played onto the western coasts by clockwise (anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere) ocean currents, of which the Gulf Stream is an example.
I recently (a couple of years ago) had a personal demonstration of the magnitude of these effects. After a normal period of working at sea in the North Atlantic (off Ireland) and North Sea, I was sent to work offshore South Korea, actually noticeably further south, but the temperature was a good 8-10 degrees colder. Colder to the extent that the client supplied quite nice winter coats for the vessel's crew (well, OK, for the non-Burmese crew) - the only better such "goody" that I've had was Arctic-rated equipment from a client in Canada.
Wearing my geologist's (hard-) hat, which observable long term stability of climate are you talking about? I earn my living reading the geological evidence of changing climates in the past (in particular, picking up the PETM is a very popular horizon for me to be called to land oil wells on). I don't see any long term climate stability, thank Bog! Makes my life easy.
Some even question whether there's *any* IR left over in the proper bands for C02 to make a difference.
Who questions this and are they credible?
I've no idea who questions this, but their credibility is limited to anyone who has ever done any IR spectroscopic analysis, or who has ever even seen IR spectrograms for water and CO2.
You mean that [CO2] had increased from 0.0025% to 0.0035% ? (Actually, I think that you've slipped a decimal point - 1ppm = 0.0001%, so you're out by a factor of 10. Not that it's your significant mistake.)
On the same basis of comparison, average global temperatures have increased from about 283K to 284.5K over the same interval, a relative increase of *0.005300353.
"Apples and oranges", as my maths teacher used to say. If you're going to compare two things, make sure that they're comparable to start with. And that you perform the comparison calculations in comparable ways. Unless you want a reputation as a politician.
On the other hand, average water vapour content is actually tied to average global temperatures and thus is a global warming feedback mechanism.
Water vapour is the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. And with a lot of it laying around loose on the surface, it quite rapidly responds to changes of temperature - downwards as well as upwards - with a time constant of just a few years. The corresponding removal process for CO2 has a time constant up in the tens of thousands of years. As has been seen in the past. Without some form of artificial geoengineering, the present spike in CO2 is going to take on the order of 100,000 years to be taken away by natural processes.
Glacier depletion, decreased crop yields, heat stress, increased severe weather, and sea level rise are the major other threats. None of them will "destroy us all", that result is still most likely to be the outcome of a substantial nuclear exchange.
Why am I reminded of the "What did the Romans ever do for us?" sketch in 'Life of Brian'?
it's like saying "This town stinks" when you visit the evening after their Baked Bean Eating Contest.
More like "the evening after the advertised start of the one-day baked bean eating contest, as people are accelerating eating their beans (and their neighbour's beans) and the atmosphere is starting to get rank". Meanwhile people are ignoring the bones of people laying in the dirt, in poses of contorted agony, amid fossilized signs advertising past baked bean eating contests.
It's not the most wonderful of analogies, but there are important points of comparison left out.
Oil-sulfur plant spray IS just oil and sulfur. [...] "There is slight oxidation of sulfur to the volatile oxide."
Hmmm, but dry sulphur is pretty much stable against oxidation. It's stable against atmospheric oxidation on the shorter end of the geological timescale. At least as stable as bone, compared to flesh.
I can find references for solubility of sulphur in (various) organic compounds, but I'm not going to spring $39 for the actual paper. Ah, I finally found some numbers for relevant solubilities. And after spending so long trying to find them, I think that I'll file it locally. EDIT : Lameness filter bullshit kicked in ; so I'm going to have to destroy the table. Stupid Slash.
Solubility of Elemental Sulphur, Linke, 1965[NL]solvent; Solubility (g sulphur / 100g solvent)[NL], at 20degC, at 100 degC, Other temperature[NL]CS2, 41.8, 92,.[NL]CCl4,., . , 0.86g/ 100g solvent saturated solution at 25degC[NL]Benzene, 1.7, 17.5,.[NL]Linseed oil, 0.6 (at 30deg),.,.[NL]olive oil, 4.3 (at 30deg),.,.[NL]lanoline (anhydrous), 0.38(at 45deg),., .
They are some interesting figures : sufficient solubility that I can well see the contact between solid sulphur and the "oil" allowing significant dissolution and the presentation of single S8 moieties (or individual atoms) to atmospheric oxygen at a noticeable rate.
I'd forgotten about that -modest solubility of sulphur in some organics- until now, to be honest. Though seeing that 10:1 solubility contrast across a domestic temperature range reminds me that I did know of it a long time ago - and consider it as a way of growing crystals of some of the lower-temperature allotropes of sulphur (which can't be grown from the melt).
All it takes is a secret national security letter to compel compliance.
I'm going to hazard a guess that Kaspersky (headquarters : Moscow) and FSecure (headquarters : Helsinki) are going to be less than disturbed about a secret order from a foreign government requiring them to (secretly) do something that is likely to be very bad for their business, if not actually illegal. The most that the staff of the companies US offices can do (which would keep them personally in compliance with US law, probably) would be to pass on the request from the Black Hats, along with requesting compliance with both the requests in the letter and the requests for secrecy in the letter. And even that might not be enough to keep them out of jail. Tough : they have a political problem at home.
Incidentally, that's Moscow, Russia not Moscow, Idaho ; and Helsinki, Finland, not Helsinki, Alaska. Just to be clear about the countries involved.
Fine - then the "oil-sulphur" mix didn't contain sulphur (or contained some other sulphur-containing compound than elemental sulphur ; which is what the name implies it contains).
As for my rant about H2S : well if you had to deal with as many false alarms as I do, it'd piss you off too. And a large part of the reason for the piss-off, apart from the amount of paperwork that an H2S alarm generates, is that if your operation goes from "possible" to "confirmed" on the sour gas front, then everyone on board the vessel gets told "shave it or get off". Facial hair interferes with the seal of a respirator. I'm happy with that - it's part of "the territory" for me - but some people get all upset, and complain and kick-back and generally there is unhappiness.
A significant part of that is down to the archaic description ("smells like rotten eggs" ; a referent that very few people have) and the dribbling paranoia that the compound's (undoubted) toxicity induces, which prevents us from actually being able to demonstrate it in the training room.
Slashdot Mirror
That'll have to change. And indeed, I'm sure it will.
What? That doesn't work?
He's right - but in an irrelevant sense. There are indeed plenty of areas where recent deposition of sediment has lead to a local increase in land area. Whether you consider flushing topsoil from agricultural areas into the sea to try to build new land to be an effective use of the soil though, is another question. Putting on the hat from my year of soil science courses at uni, I think that you could get better production from even very poor soil than by treating it like that - but what the fuck would I know? I only spent a year studying the subject.
Whether there is a net increase in land area is a much more contentious claim. If, indeed, the GPP is making that claim. It's also a very complex question. Looking locally, we've got accumulation onto beaches, due to erosion of the adjacent mountain area ; but we've also got isostatic rebound (from the loss of the glaciers a few millennia ago) also helping land to emerge from the sea ; but at the other end of the country (where my family used to be mariners), the same glacial rebound is leading to subsidence of the land into the sea (because of flow in the asthenosphere) ; then there's the regional subsidence pattern that's due to (essentially) the Alps falling down and begin dumped into the North Sea via the Rhine - of which the Thames is generally a small tributary (I don't normally bother to count the Southern North Sea as being a "real" sea : you can see the sun from the bottom of it!).
Oh, and on top of that, you've got the eustatic changes from changes in ocean temperature and melting of land-bound ice. And that's just in one country.
Hmmm, being cynical, the transportation facilities will have to be moved. The people can look after themselves. But you can't expect those wharves and quays and cranes and railroads to move themselves. But you can expect a (wet) human to eventually get up and move themselves. Modern transportation facilities don't need a lot of people to operate them.
No, I'm not that cynical. But I know an entire class of politicians who are.
I think that you need to speak to a better palynologist.
I do speak to palynologists, regularly, for geosteering decisions in horizontal oil wells, during the time period when the major faunal changes of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum were happening. Even I can see the differences in the fauna across the slides, and I sure ain't a palynologist. I probably couldn't play one convincingly on TV.
I am.
You've got the cart before the horse, somewhat. The CO2 measurements were background measurements for attempts to understand the out-gassing of the volcano, with an implication that this might be a viable technique for predicting volcanic eruptions. That project hasn't really worked - and good men have died in the effort to make it work - but the CO2 measurements have been spun off into separate atmospheric projects.
It didn't take me long to find it - about 5 minutes. And I don't carry the site map in my head. (Though I have searched it before, looking for something else. Which I found.)
It has been tried. Twice. It didn't clearly work on either occasion, to the puzzlement of the scientists working on it. Which suggests that the reality of the situation is significantly different to the simple models that predict that it should work. They might manage to work out WTF is happening and how to make it work, but until they do, that one is practically off the table.
To mis-quote myself in another context : "a microgramme of measurement outweighs a megagramme of speculation.
What heavy seismic activity? I can only find two significant ones since 2004 within 5 degrees (latitude or longitude) of the site :
Date Time Latitude Longitude Depth(km) Magnitude
2008-11-22 08:01:16.4 31.02 N 110.80 E 2 4.7
2008-03-24 15:24:44.0 32.66 N 110.44 E 33 4.7
Are you thinking of the Sichuan earthquake of 2008? Which was 850 miles away.
"China" is quite a large country. Almost 10 million sq.km - larger than the USA.
That's a bit poorly expressed. If it weren't for the global warming from around 280ppm CO2, then we'd be in a profound ice age, possibly back in a "snowball Earth" scenario. We're around 15K warmer than we would be without any greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Nice presentation. The data isn't new to me, but that's a good way of presenting it.
Why do you think that it's only measured at one point? One station happens to be the one which has the longest series of records, but that's always going to be the case. What the reasons for actually establishing an atmospheric measurement station at Mauna Loa were ... well, why not check the website? http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/volcanicco2.html is telling me (I'm a geologist) that they were investigating CO2 emissions from the volcano as a tool for eruption prediction, and there's the implication that they started collecting background CO2 readings as part of that. Obviously, if you're looking for changes in the volcanic-sourced CO2 component, then you'd need to know how much non-volcanic CO2 there is too. So, they measure the volcanic CO2 near to a fumarole (small "smoking" gas pit ; common on volcanoes), and also at a convenient point appreciably away from any fumaroles to get the background reading.
Why do you think that it's not. I use atmospheric methane readings as a calibration check on the quality of service that my clients are getting from their sub-contractors while CO2 readings are a useful proxy for the working of a part of the gas detection system. It's part of my job. But I don't report these anywhere except to the clients because they're not particularly interesting. And the quality and duration of the records are not going to tell anyone anything new.
(Incidentally, all the sub-contractors claim to be able to detect the 2ppm of atmospheric methane ; none do. And most don't understand that they've been found out.)
To quote my Dad's chemistry lecturer back in the 1950s, "oil is too good stuff to burn" (Dad went on to be a plastics chemist ; 'nuff said.)
LFTR ... Ah, the liquid fluoride stuff. Interesting ideas ; one wonders if one will ever be built, and if so, whether it'll live up to the hype.
Won't that (running your coolant at atmospheric pressure) be atrocious for thermodynamic efficiency? For maximum efficiency you want as high a temperature difference as possible between your starting and final states. Which is the main reason for running steam generators for power plants in the supercritical state.
Not googling : Argon (about 1%) ; then probably CO2 (0.038+%) ; then ... hmm, I'd have to Google for #5. Ammonia, or nitrogen oxides?
I'm a SCUBA diver and have worked in the past as a gas analyst (still may go back to do it occasionally, if someone is needed to care-for and feed one of the GC-MS equipment units on a site somewhere). But yes, I'd have to Google for number 5. [...] OK, I'm actually moderately surprised by the answer, though I shouldn't be given the argon content.
True and agreed.
But you could get a more long-term stable effect by pyrolysing the wood to produce (more or less) water and partly-mineralised carbon. The water, although a greenhouse gas itself, will precipitate out of the atmosphere in a matter of hours to days, but the carbon (a.k.a. "biochar" and other similar neologisms; or just call it "charcoal") will be much less prone to being returned to the natural cycle than the wood.
Not a working day goes by for me without me noting the presence of "carbonaceous matter" in a mudrock sample ; that's essentially natural "charcoal" which has been buried for millions of years. 0.2 to 0.5% non-carbonate carbon in a mudrock is perfectly normal, which is equivalent to several metres thickness of "charcoal" over the entire continental surface of the Earth. Decidedly non-trivial.
The pyrolysis would consume non-trivial energy, and that would almost certainly have a carbon footprint associated with it. But, it's a relatively small footprint (you're not burning all the wood, only 10% or so of it) and the payback in making the carbon really difficult to put back into the system is non-trivial.
Anyway, that's my geological â0.02 worth. It might be a useful contribution to managing CO2 levels, but it would take real political commitment to do it on a sufficient scale.
There is also a significantly different tectonic regime, with the plate tectonics of the Earth leading to substantial absorption of CO2 by reaction with silicate minerals. That is going to continue to happen for hundreds of millions of years, even if you muck around seriously with the atmosphere, so if you did try to turn Earth into a second Venus, you'd have to maintain those conditions for a good part of a billion years before you'd worked the consequences of the changed atmosphere into any sort of stability.
Geologically, there is significant evidence that the interaction of water with rock (the mantle specifically ; the crust is pretty irrelevant in this) has led to significant weakening of the rock, which allows the mantle to continue convecting above the asthenosphere (around 400km below surface) even as the temperatures slowly decrease with the ebbing away of radiogenic heating and the heat of formation. Possibly (this is not certain ; I'm not even particularly sure that there is anything approaching consensus on this), this didn't ever happen on Venus, resulting in the decidedly different tectonic style on Venus. (Quite what that tectonic style is, isn't a consensus matter either ; but it's clearly not plate tectonics of a terrestrial style.)
I know what you're trying to say, but it's getting severely mangled between brain and keyboard.
Temperatures in the UK, and other western coasts of continents, are NATURALLY warmer than the corresponding eastern coasts at the same latitude, because of heat played onto the western coasts by clockwise (anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere) ocean currents, of which the Gulf Stream is an example.
I recently (a couple of years ago) had a personal demonstration of the magnitude of these effects. After a normal period of working at sea in the North Atlantic (off Ireland) and North Sea, I was sent to work offshore South Korea, actually noticeably further south, but the temperature was a good 8-10 degrees colder. Colder to the extent that the client supplied quite nice winter coats for the vessel's crew (well, OK, for the non-Burmese crew) - the only better such "goody" that I've had was Arctic-rated equipment from a client in Canada.
Wearing my geologist's (hard-) hat, which observable long term stability of climate are you talking about? I earn my living reading the geological evidence of changing climates in the past (in particular, picking up the PETM is a very popular horizon for me to be called to land oil wells on). I don't see any long term climate stability, thank Bog! Makes my life easy.
I've no idea who questions this, but their credibility is limited to anyone who has ever done any IR spectroscopic analysis, or who has ever even seen IR spectrograms for water and CO2.
You mean that [CO2] had increased from 0.0025% to 0.0035% ? (Actually, I think that you've slipped a decimal point - 1ppm = 0.0001%, so you're out by a factor of 10. Not that it's your significant mistake.)
On the same basis of comparison, average global temperatures have increased from about 283K to 284.5K over the same interval, a relative increase of *0.005300353.
"Apples and oranges", as my maths teacher used to say. If you're going to compare two things, make sure that they're comparable to start with. And that you perform the comparison calculations in comparable ways. Unless you want a reputation as a politician.
Water vapour is the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. And with a lot of it laying around loose on the surface, it quite rapidly responds to changes of temperature - downwards as well as upwards - with a time constant of just a few years. The corresponding removal process for CO2 has a time constant up in the tens of thousands of years. As has been seen in the past. Without some form of artificial geoengineering, the present spike in CO2 is going to take on the order of 100,000 years to be taken away by natural processes.
Why am I reminded of the "What did the Romans ever do for us?" sketch in 'Life of Brian'?
More like "the evening after the advertised start of the one-day baked bean eating contest, as people are accelerating eating their beans (and their neighbour's beans) and the atmosphere is starting to get rank". Meanwhile people are ignoring the bones of people laying in the dirt, in poses of contorted agony, amid fossilized signs advertising past baked bean eating contests.
It's not the most wonderful of analogies, but there are important points of comparison left out.
Hmmm, but dry sulphur is pretty much stable against oxidation. It's stable against atmospheric oxidation on the shorter end of the geological timescale. At least as stable as bone, compared to flesh.
So, conjecturally, the sulphur is (slightly) soluble in oil. In water ... "The solubility of elemental rhombic sulfur in water is 1.9(±0.6) Ã-- 10^â'8 mole S8Âkg^â'1."(Phosphorous and Sulfur and the Related Elements, Volume 5, Issue 1, 1978)
I can find references for solubility of sulphur in (various) organic compounds, but I'm not going to spring $39 for the actual paper. Ah, I finally found some numbers for relevant solubilities. And after spending so long trying to find them, I think that I'll file it locally. EDIT : Lameness filter bullshit kicked in ; so I'm going to have to destroy the table. Stupid Slash.
Solubility of Elemental Sulphur, Linke, 1965[NL]solvent; Solubility (g sulphur / 100g solvent)[NL], at 20degC, at 100 degC, Other temperature[NL]CS2, 41.8, 92, .[NL]CCl4, ., . , 0.86g/ 100g solvent saturated solution at 25degC[NL]Benzene, 1.7, 17.5, .[NL]Linseed oil, 0.6 (at 30deg), ., .[NL]olive oil, 4.3 (at 30deg), ., .[NL]lanoline (anhydrous), 0.38(at 45deg), ., .
They are some interesting figures : sufficient solubility that I can well see the contact between solid sulphur and the "oil" allowing significant dissolution and the presentation of single S8 moieties (or individual atoms) to atmospheric oxygen at a noticeable rate.
I'd forgotten about that -modest solubility of sulphur in some organics- until now, to be honest. Though seeing that 10:1 solubility contrast across a domestic temperature range reminds me that I did know of it a long time ago - and consider it as a way of growing crystals of some of the lower-temperature allotropes of sulphur (which can't be grown from the melt).
Fucking Lameness filter!
Da. Ya ponimayu.
I'm going to hazard a guess that Kaspersky (headquarters : Moscow) and FSecure (headquarters : Helsinki) are going to be less than disturbed about a secret order from a foreign government requiring them to (secretly) do something that is likely to be very bad for their business, if not actually illegal. The most that the staff of the companies US offices can do (which would keep them personally in compliance with US law, probably) would be to pass on the request from the Black Hats, along with requesting compliance with both the requests in the letter and the requests for secrecy in the letter. And even that might not be enough to keep them out of jail. Tough : they have a political problem at home.
Incidentally, that's Moscow, Russia not Moscow, Idaho ; and Helsinki, Finland, not Helsinki, Alaska. Just to be clear about the countries involved.
As for my rant about H2S : well if you had to deal with as many false alarms as I do, it'd piss you off too. And a large part of the reason for the piss-off, apart from the amount of paperwork that an H2S alarm generates, is that if your operation goes from "possible" to "confirmed" on the sour gas front, then everyone on board the vessel gets told "shave it or get off". Facial hair interferes with the seal of a respirator. I'm happy with that - it's part of "the territory" for me - but some people get all upset, and complain and kick-back and generally there is unhappiness.
A significant part of that is down to the archaic description ("smells like rotten eggs" ; a referent that very few people have) and the dribbling paranoia that the compound's (undoubted) toxicity induces, which prevents us from actually being able to demonstrate it in the training room.