Several years ago, I was commuting between LA and Auckland carrying a computer with me. Kiwi customs required a declaration that I would take the laptop back out of the country within 90 days each time I entered and when I returned to the US, customs required a notarized document prepared before I left the country certifying that I had brought the computer out of the country with me and was returning with the same computer.
Sometimes they didn't ask anything, but a couple of times, there was a careful inspection, complete with checking the serial number against the notarized letter.
If you can raise the money to go through the network, you get a lot more exposure and recognition (competition for prizes, etc.). If your piece is aired on the network, it's more competitive for Emmys etc. and if you have marketing tie-ins, like coffee-table books, you can tie into the PBS marketing machine.
For something like the question at hand, your suggestion of going through the local public stations instead of the network is excellent.
I don't know about commercial networks, but the biggest hurdle in getting something on PBS is not getting editorial interest, but raising the money to pay for the air time. It is very expensive to get a documentary aired on PBS and the money comes from the film production company, not from PBS's operating budget.
My uncle and aunt have a film production company that has made several documentaries that have aired on PBS and they tell me that the cost of airtime is a lot more than the cost of producing the movies.
The best way to get something on air on PBS is to find a way to raise money for the production and the air time. Ken Burns's approach to this, from what I hear, is that he's a wizard at getting large corporations to sign on to sponsor the production and air time.
You might go after some RF engineering companies to see if their charitable giving or public relations divisions would be interested in sponsoring a short broadcast documentary.
They might as well say "watching too much TV makes you fat"
That one's been done. A peer-reviewed medical study found that when you hook people up to metabolic monitors and found that when you watch TV you burn significantly fewer calories than when you sit and do nothing.
A different study found that when you actually looked at obesity, it was correlated with TV watching, but not video game playing. Moreover, if you factored in the role of the parents, siblings, and other aspects of the child's environment, TV stopped being a factor either.
In other words, stop the presses. Modern medicine has found that good parenting makes the difference, not TV or video games! TV won't make you fat if your mom makes you turn it off and go outside to play.
If the USA loses a sufficient number of jobs, i.e. unemployment rises, the consumers will have less capital with which to buy foreign-made products. Domestic workers who are out of work will be willing to work for less, thus driving down the cost of locally made goods. When the cost of local goods and services drops below the cost of foreign made goods and services, then jobs will start to flow back into the USA. Adam Smith's invisible hand at work.
Adam Smith put this argument in a nutshell when he discussed the wages of labor:
If a family earns enough that it can raise more than two children to maturity, the supply of workers will increase, driving wages down until starvation limits the supply of workers.
If a family does not earn enough to raise two children to maturity, the supply of workers will decline, driving wages up, decreasing infant mortality, and allowing the supply of workers to grow.
Equilibrium is achieved when wages allow an average of exactly two children per family to survive to adulthood, with the rest starving. This is how the invisible hand works.
See The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Ch. 8:
The demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the supply of men; quickens it when it goes too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast.
Because in this posts, and others throughout the thread, there as been an assumption that the statements of my esteemed colleques are scientific facts or truths. In reality, what they are is an interpretation of the data by these scienties, often in fields which they are not experienced
Let's recognize that the UCS report on scientific integrity does not say that Global Warming exists. It does not pronounce on scientifit truth. What it says is that the Bush administration is hurting scientific integrity by politicizing the scientific process. Specifically, there are two accusations: That the administration is suppressing scientific reports from government scientists when it doesn't like the conclusions; and using political litmus tests when appointing scientists to committees that the law says must represent balanced viewpoints.
The problem is not that the Bush administration comes to incorrect scientific conclusions---it's that the Bush administration is preventing the public from learning about scientific work conducted by the government whose conclusions don't fit the administration's political agenda, and that the Bush administration is trying to bias the scientific process to support conclusions it has drawn in advance of the research.
Whether or not you agree that global warming is occurring, you should be concerned if a political litmus test by either the right or the left is used to choose which scientists get to participate in the debate.
Is a Nobel prize winner for work in cosmology really worth listening on climatology?
Two of the Nobelists who signed the statement (Rowland and Molina) won their prize for the discovery of stratospheric ozone depletion.Many others are well-known experts on atmospheric science.
Does a prize for quantum physics give one the right to judge dangerous lead levels?
Other signatories won Nobels in medicine. They do know about lead.
More to the point, though, is that the report is not attacking scientific content. It's attacking the politicization of science. The report says nothing about lead levels or climatology. What it says is that genuine scientific reports produced by scientists with expertise in these fields were suppressed or edited to introduce distortions by people from the administration who did not have scientific expertise.
The report also points to examples where people who are nationally recognized as distinguished scientists in their fields were removed from scientific advisory boards and replaced with people who did not have a comparable level of expertise, and that this was often done in apparent violation of the Federal Advisory Committes Act.
The report quotes Lewis Branscomb, whom President Nixon appointed to head the National Bureau of Standards, who later went on to be chief scientist at IBM, and who was named by President Bush to serve on advisory committees on technological approaches to counterterrorism saying that the Bush administration is worse than anything he has seen in his lifetime for subverting the integrity of science.
The report also quotes William Ruckelshaus, who was EPA administrator under Presidents Nixon and Reagan criticising the way the Bush administration is using political litmus tests to subvert the integrity of science advice. When Reagan's head of EPA thinks you're politicizing science, you know you're in trouble!
Clinton was quite gullible on these sorts of things. Remember when he bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan because he had "intelligence" telling him that nerve gas was being made there?
Is it the best Bush can do to say, "I am just like Clinton?" Doesn't exactly make him look good, you know.
The US didn't exactly sell Saddam the WMD he used to gas the Kurds, but when we found out that he had gassed them we increased the amount of foreign aid we were giving him.
That's the Reagan/Bush/Bush strategy: find a bad guy whom a Democrat has labeled a terrorist. Then find another bad guy. Say that bad guy 1 is not a terrorist because he's against bad guy 2. Give aid to bad guy 1 until he becomes a threat to the US.
Reagan and Bush I did this with Saddam: Jimmy Carter called him a terrorist and cut off aid. Reagan said he's not a terrorist and restored aid.
Reagan also played similar games with Osama bin Laden---the CIA recruited him when he was a drunken Saudi playboy and convinced him to go to Afghanistan and put some meaning in his life fighting Soviets.
Clinton declared Pakistan a pariah state for building nuclear weapons.
Bush II declared Pakistan just peachy, never mind the nukes.
How long until the nuclear technology Pakistan is selling around the world blows up in our faces? Will anyone remember then that it was W. who gave them the green light.
It costs billions if you want to get more energy out than you put in. If you're content for your reactor to be an energy sink rather than a source, the price drops by about seven orders of magnitude.
EXIF is more limited in this respect---it has fields for time/date, photographer, and comments. EXIF is extensible, just as TIFF is, but without a well-defined extension mechanism.
IPTC is extensible and has fields such as you are suggesting:
Title,
Byline,
Caption,
Category,
Headline,
Time/Date,
Keywords,
Special Instructions,
Priority,
etc.
It's meant as a standard for submitting news photos, so the predefined fields are specific to photojournalism, but it is easily extendable to other sets of fields.
EXIF and IPTC are two industry-standard metadata formats that can be embedded in JPEG or TIFF files.
Stripping these data out is an inexcusable bug in image editing software.
If the metadata is in the file, software like ACDSee (which is almost useless) should be able to recognize it wherever the file is.
And if I have a photo with my niece Suzie, acting as flowergirl in my friend Janet's wedding, do I file the photo in the folder "Niece Suzie" or the folder "Janet's Wedding?"
I suppose that I could put copies of the file in each folder, but that's stupid. The metadata is there that could allow me to search for Suzie or "Janet's Wedding" wherever the files are.
Many serious photographers maintain databases of their photos so they can search for photos using multiple criteria.
The question why Microsoft is not building this capability into their file system is legitimate, given the amount of hoopla MS is emitting about search capabilities.
A lot of people consider water vapor to be a green house gas.
Anyone who knows anything understands that water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas and contributes more to the natural greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide does.
However, the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere is very close to its saturation value, so excess water vapor will precipitate out quickly.
The saturation vapor pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 1000 PSI, so excess carbon dioxide introduced into the atmosphere will not precipitate. It must be removed by other processes (e.g., photosynthesis), which run a lot more slowly. Current estimates of the residence time of anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere are around 60 years.
Other than this, your criticisms of hydrogen as fuel is right on target. I would only add that nuclear power looks like a very good source of power for industrial-scale electrolysis. This still wouldn't address the question of transporting hydrogen, though.
Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.
I am constantly frustrated when I try to buy Legos for my daughter. She loves building with Legos, but is not really interested in the kind of macho directions Lego has been going (fighting themes). Clikits does not fit the bill, and it's almost impossible to find a store that carries Belville sets.
Maybe if Lego would try harder and with more imagination to reach the other 50% of the zero-to-seven set, they's make more money.
I know that you are being humorous, but nonetheless, I will point out some problems:
Some of us enjoy being able to see through the air, see the sun, moon, and stars, etc.
Reducing visible light hitting surface would be bad for agriculture. Plants need light to photosynthesize, you know.
Combining opacity in visible with greenhouse gases would make the earth's temperature more uniform: cooler tropics, warmer poles. This would seriously affect climate and weather patterns and seriously reduce both agricultural diversity and wild biodiversity. Certain plants and animals we like to consume need tropical climates to grow. Others grow best in colder climates.
Oops. A minor error in my post, above, which doesn't affect its conclusions.
CO2 is in fact a vapor at room temperature. The critical temperature is 31 C, closer to body temperature than room temperature. However, at room temperature, its saturation vapor pressure is more than 1000 psi, so my argument that CO2 will not precipitate out of the atmosphere is still valid. Nothing in my argument changes.
Just for reference, one substantial volcanic eruption releases more CO2 and C0 into the atmosphere than every single internal combustion engine that ever existed.
This is not true. You can look at the atmospheric CO2 concentrations before and after any major eruption in the last 50 years (the time during which CO2 has been continually monitored around the world) and see that the amount of CO2 you are talking about was not released into the atmosphere.
Over the past 100 years, fossil fuel burning has released somewhere around 170 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. If a volcanic eruption released this much carbon, it would increase the CO2 concentration from 360 parts per million to 440 parts per million. That didn't happen.
You can also go back 500,000 years using glacial ice cores and see that the CO2 concentration never approached its current value during that time, even though there were many portions of that time span during which volcanic activity was much greater than it is today.
Also, water vapor is a more effective greenhouse substance than CO2
But the concentration of water vapor is limited by the saturation vapor pressure. If I dump a whole lot of water vapor into the atmosphere, the excess will precipitate out. The residence time of a water vapor molecule is quite short.
On the other hand, CO2 is not a vapor at room temperature, it's a gas. Its atmospheric residence time is much longer, so CO2 emitted today will be around for 50-100 years.
Finally, becauee small warming caused by increased CO2 causes the saturation vapor pressure of water vapor to rise, the water vapor effect amplifies the effect of CO2, causing approximately double the warming we would see with CO2 alone. This has been experimentally verified in studies of the troposphere following the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
Finally, I would point out that chemical analysis of glacial ice cores demonstrates that over the past 500,000 years, whenever CO2 concentrations were high, temperatures were high. Whenever CO2 concentrations were low, temperatures were low. During ice ages, CO2 concentrations were exceptionally low. During interglacial periods, CO2 concentrations were high.
Today, CO2 concentrations are about 30% higher than they were during any time in that 500,000 year record. Because the oceans take a long time to heat up, we will not see the full warming due to the current CO2 concentration for many decades, but it is a great stretch to assume that the mechanisms that regulated the ice ages will suddenly stop working and fail to deliver substantial warming over the next century.
The earth naturally draws heat out of the atmosphere and absorbs it below the surface.
Let's see---the first law of thermodynamics tells us that heat flows from hotter objects to cooler ones. The core of the earth is about 6000 degrees C (due to heating by radioactive decay). Heat is constantly flowing from the hot core to the cooler crust, then to the oceans and atmosphere.
You aren't going to make heat spontaneously flow the other way.
Did you learn any science at some point, or do you get on in life by just making stuff up as you go along?
Since when are forest fires referred to as "El Nino"?
The article described how El Nino cycles modulate brush fires and forest fires. This has nothing to do with US forest management policy, because most of the fires they're talking about are in South America and Africa.
The difference is that the plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere for several years, then return it to the atmosphere when they burn. It's a closed cycle with no net growth of atmospheric CO2.
There is no corresponding cycle to balance burning fossil fuels over the short term, so the more fossil fuels we burn, the longer the residence time of CO2 molecules, and the greater the concentration.
If you look at charts of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you see annual cycles, ENSO cycles, and other short term fluctuations, but these are all superimposed on a much larger trend, which is unmistakably due to human intervention.
ENSO has been around for millennia, but somehow despite all these fires, the atmospheric CO2 concentration rose slowly over the past 10,000 years from around 270 parts per million at the end of the last ice age to 290 parts per million a century ago. Since then, it's climbed rapidly to around 360 parts per million---much greater than it's ever been in the 500,000 years for which we have reliable records.
Is your snide comment about Kyoto supposed to indicate that El Nino did nothing drastic to CO2 for over 10,000 years and then just coincidentally happened to have a big effect that exactly correlated with human use of fossil fuels?
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes they didn't ask anything, but a couple of times, there was a careful inspection, complete with checking the serial number against the notarized letter.
But unlike Elton John and his homosexuality, George Bush does make being stupid his entire identity.
If he'd go easy on the stupidity and let it be just one facet of his personality, maybe people would stop beating up on him so much about it.
For something like the question at hand, your suggestion of going through the local public stations instead of the network is excellent.
My uncle and aunt have a film production company that has made several documentaries that have aired on PBS and they tell me that the cost of airtime is a lot more than the cost of producing the movies.
The best way to get something on air on PBS is to find a way to raise money for the production and the air time. Ken Burns's approach to this, from what I hear, is that he's a wizard at getting large corporations to sign on to sponsor the production and air time.
You might go after some RF engineering companies to see if their charitable giving or public relations divisions would be interested in sponsoring a short broadcast documentary.
That one's been done. A peer-reviewed medical study found that when you hook people up to metabolic monitors and found that when you watch TV you burn significantly fewer calories than when you sit and do nothing.
A different study found that when you actually looked at obesity, it was correlated with TV watching, but not video game playing. Moreover, if you factored in the role of the parents, siblings, and other aspects of the child's environment, TV stopped being a factor either.
In other words, stop the presses. Modern medicine has found that good parenting makes the difference, not TV or video games! TV won't make you fat if your mom makes you turn it off and go outside to play.
Adam Smith put this argument in a nutshell when he discussed the wages of labor:
If a family earns enough that it can raise more than two children to maturity, the supply of workers will increase, driving wages down until starvation limits the supply of workers.
If a family does not earn enough to raise two children to maturity, the supply of workers will decline, driving wages up, decreasing infant mortality, and allowing the supply of workers to grow.
Equilibrium is achieved when wages allow an average of exactly two children per family to survive to adulthood, with the rest starving. This is how the invisible hand works.
See The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Ch. 8:
Of course, you might ask, "who owns Corbis?"
Let's recognize that the UCS report on scientific integrity does not say that Global Warming exists. It does not pronounce on scientifit truth. What it says is that the Bush administration is hurting scientific integrity by politicizing the scientific process. Specifically, there are two accusations: That the administration is suppressing scientific reports from government scientists when it doesn't like the conclusions; and using political litmus tests when appointing scientists to committees that the law says must represent balanced viewpoints.
The problem is not that the Bush administration comes to incorrect scientific conclusions---it's that the Bush administration is preventing the public from learning about scientific work conducted by the government whose conclusions don't fit the administration's political agenda, and that the Bush administration is trying to bias the scientific process to support conclusions it has drawn in advance of the research.
Whether or not you agree that global warming is occurring, you should be concerned if a political litmus test by either the right or the left is used to choose which scientists get to participate in the debate.
Two of the Nobelists who signed the statement (Rowland and Molina) won their prize for the discovery of stratospheric ozone depletion.Many others are well-known experts on atmospheric science.
Does a prize for quantum physics give one the right to judge dangerous lead levels?
Other signatories won Nobels in medicine. They do know about lead.
More to the point, though, is that the report is not attacking scientific content. It's attacking the politicization of science. The report says nothing about lead levels or climatology. What it says is that genuine scientific reports produced by scientists with expertise in these fields were suppressed or edited to introduce distortions by people from the administration who did not have scientific expertise.
The report also points to examples where people who are nationally recognized as distinguished scientists in their fields were removed from scientific advisory boards and replaced with people who did not have a comparable level of expertise, and that this was often done in apparent violation of the Federal Advisory Committes Act.
The report quotes Lewis Branscomb, whom President Nixon appointed to head the National Bureau of Standards, who later went on to be chief scientist at IBM, and who was named by President Bush to serve on advisory committees on technological approaches to counterterrorism saying that the Bush administration is worse than anything he has seen in his lifetime for subverting the integrity of science.
The report also quotes William Ruckelshaus, who was EPA administrator under Presidents Nixon and Reagan criticising the way the Bush administration is using political litmus tests to subvert the integrity of science advice. When Reagan's head of EPA thinks you're politicizing science, you know you're in trouble!
Clinton was quite gullible on these sorts of things. Remember when he bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan because he had "intelligence" telling him that nerve gas was being made there?
Is it the best Bush can do to say, "I am just like Clinton?" Doesn't exactly make him look good, you know.
That's the Reagan/Bush/Bush strategy: find a bad guy whom a Democrat has labeled a terrorist. Then find another bad guy. Say that bad guy 1 is not a terrorist because he's against bad guy 2. Give aid to bad guy 1 until he becomes a threat to the US.
Reagan and Bush I did this with Saddam: Jimmy Carter called him a terrorist and cut off aid. Reagan said he's not a terrorist and restored aid.
Reagan also played similar games with Osama bin Laden---the CIA recruited him when he was a drunken Saudi playboy and convinced him to go to Afghanistan and put some meaning in his life fighting Soviets.
Clinton declared Pakistan a pariah state for building nuclear weapons.
Bush II declared Pakistan just peachy, never mind the nukes.
How long until the nuclear technology Pakistan is selling around the world blows up in our faces? Will anyone remember then that it was W. who gave them the green light.
It costs billions if you want to get more energy out than you put in. If you're content for your reactor to be an energy sink rather than a source, the price drops by about seven orders of magnitude.
Using symlinks to simulate database operations on a hierarchical file system is a kludge, not an elegant solution.
IPTC is extensible and has fields such as you are suggesting:
- Title,
- Byline,
- Caption,
- Category,
- Headline,
- Time/Date,
- Keywords,
- Special Instructions,
- Priority,
- etc.
It's meant as a standard for submitting news photos, so the predefined fields are specific to photojournalism, but it is easily extendable to other sets of fields.EXIF and IPTC are two industry-standard metadata formats that can be embedded in JPEG or TIFF files. Stripping these data out is an inexcusable bug in image editing software. If the metadata is in the file, software like ACDSee (which is almost useless) should be able to recognize it wherever the file is.
And if I have a photo with my niece Suzie, acting as flowergirl in my friend Janet's wedding, do I file the photo in the folder "Niece Suzie" or the folder "Janet's Wedding?"
I suppose that I could put copies of the file in each folder, but that's stupid. The metadata is there that could allow me to search for Suzie or "Janet's Wedding" wherever the files are.
Many serious photographers maintain databases of their photos so they can search for photos using multiple criteria.
The question why Microsoft is not building this capability into their file system is legitimate, given the amount of hoopla MS is emitting about search capabilities.
Anyone who knows anything understands that water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas and contributes more to the natural greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide does.
However, the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere is very close to its saturation value, so excess water vapor will precipitate out quickly.
The saturation vapor pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 1000 PSI, so excess carbon dioxide introduced into the atmosphere will not precipitate. It must be removed by other processes (e.g., photosynthesis), which run a lot more slowly. Current estimates of the residence time of anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere are around 60 years.
Other than this, your criticisms of hydrogen as fuel is right on target. I would only add that nuclear power looks like a very good source of power for industrial-scale electrolysis. This still wouldn't address the question of transporting hydrogen, though.
I am constantly frustrated when I try to buy Legos for my daughter. She loves building with Legos, but is not really interested in the kind of macho directions Lego has been going (fighting themes). Clikits does not fit the bill, and it's almost impossible to find a store that carries Belville sets.
Maybe if Lego would try harder and with more imagination to reach the other 50% of the zero-to-seven set, they's make more money.
I know that you are being humorous, but nonetheless, I will point out some problems:
CO2 is in fact a vapor at room temperature. The critical temperature is 31 C, closer to body temperature than room temperature. However, at room temperature, its saturation vapor pressure is more than 1000 psi, so my argument that CO2 will not precipitate out of the atmosphere is still valid. Nothing in my argument changes.
This is not true. You can look at the atmospheric CO2 concentrations before and after any major eruption in the last 50 years (the time during which CO2 has been continually monitored around the world) and see that the amount of CO2 you are talking about was not released into the atmosphere.
Over the past 100 years, fossil fuel burning has released somewhere around 170 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. If a volcanic eruption released this much carbon, it would increase the CO2 concentration from 360 parts per million to 440 parts per million. That didn't happen.
You can also go back 500,000 years using glacial ice cores and see that the CO2 concentration never approached its current value during that time, even though there were many portions of that time span during which volcanic activity was much greater than it is today.
Also, water vapor is a more effective greenhouse substance than CO2
But the concentration of water vapor is limited by the saturation vapor pressure. If I dump a whole lot of water vapor into the atmosphere, the excess will precipitate out. The residence time of a water vapor molecule is quite short.
On the other hand, CO2 is not a vapor at room temperature, it's a gas. Its atmospheric residence time is much longer, so CO2 emitted today will be around for 50-100 years.
Finally, becauee small warming caused by increased CO2 causes the saturation vapor pressure of water vapor to rise, the water vapor effect amplifies the effect of CO2, causing approximately double the warming we would see with CO2 alone. This has been experimentally verified in studies of the troposphere following the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
Finally, I would point out that chemical analysis of glacial ice cores demonstrates that over the past 500,000 years, whenever CO2 concentrations were high, temperatures were high. Whenever CO2 concentrations were low, temperatures were low. During ice ages, CO2 concentrations were exceptionally low. During interglacial periods, CO2 concentrations were high.
Today, CO2 concentrations are about 30% higher than they were during any time in that 500,000 year record. Because the oceans take a long time to heat up, we will not see the full warming due to the current CO2 concentration for many decades, but it is a great stretch to assume that the mechanisms that regulated the ice ages will suddenly stop working and fail to deliver substantial warming over the next century.
Here's a simplified description. There are details missing, but this explains the major points:
- Heat comes in as visible light, which is not absorbed by CO2.
- When the visible light is absorbed by earth and ocean, it is converted to heat.
- Heat is emitted from from earth and ocean in the form of infrared light.
- Infrared light is absorbed by CO2.
- Absorption of IR light by CO2 heats the atmosphere.
- As the atmosphere heats, it emits IR light at high altitudes, where there is not enough CO2 to reabsorb it.
Thus, it is possible for CO2 to block outgoing heat (infrared light), while admitting incoming heat (visible light).Let's see---the first law of thermodynamics tells us that heat flows from hotter objects to cooler ones. The core of the earth is about 6000 degrees C (due to heating by radioactive decay). Heat is constantly flowing from the hot core to the cooler crust, then to the oceans and atmosphere. You aren't going to make heat spontaneously flow the other way.
Did you learn any science at some point, or do you get on in life by just making stuff up as you go along?
The article described how El Nino cycles modulate brush fires and forest fires. This has nothing to do with US forest management policy, because most of the fires they're talking about are in South America and Africa.
There is no corresponding cycle to balance burning fossil fuels over the short term, so the more fossil fuels we burn, the longer the residence time of CO2 molecules, and the greater the concentration.
If you look at charts of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you see annual cycles, ENSO cycles, and other short term fluctuations, but these are all superimposed on a much larger trend, which is unmistakably due to human intervention.
ENSO has been around for millennia, but somehow despite all these fires, the atmospheric CO2 concentration rose slowly over the past 10,000 years from around 270 parts per million at the end of the last ice age to 290 parts per million a century ago. Since then, it's climbed rapidly to around 360 parts per million---much greater than it's ever been in the 500,000 years for which we have reliable records.
Is your snide comment about Kyoto supposed to indicate that El Nino did nothing drastic to CO2 for over 10,000 years and then just coincidentally happened to have a big effect that exactly correlated with human use of fossil fuels?