The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says even this small component of warming caused by man’s use of fossil fuels will cause dramatic warming in the future. This dramatic warming is forecast by the use of computer models. The IPCC’s forecasts are flawed for many reasons, but one significant error is the residency time of carbon dioxide in the air far into the future. The IPCC claims carbon dioxide, once emitted into the air, stays there for 50 to 200 years. The vast majority of studies say the residency time for carbon dioxide is more like 5 years.
The very small human component of the greenhouse effect has profound implications when governments are considering reducing carbon dioxide concentrations to fight global warming. The United States produces about 20% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions each year. If we were somehow able to shut down all sources of carbon dioxide emissions from the United States, the effect on the global average temperature would be 20% of .1 degree, or .02 degrees. And that’s with shutting down everything that makes carbon dioxide! This decrease of .02 degrees is so small it is completely irrelevant. If achieved, it would drop the global average temperature from 59.0 to 58.98 degrees, and it would take billions, if not trillions, to achieve. After all — we make 87% of our energy from burning fossil fuels. If there were a way to eliminate all carbon dioxide emissions on a global scale, the decrease in temperature would be .1 degree — dropping the temperature from 59.0 degrees to 58.9 degrees. Once again, completely insignificant at a cost that would quite possibly bankrupt the world.
When so much is at stake you would think this would be common knowledge, but apparently it is not. Part of the reason is that there are so many competing factions looking to squeeze every dollar they can from the lie. Interestingly, the Chicago Climate Exchange closed its doors recently. This can only be seen as good news. Not for Al Gore, Goldman Sachs and others, but for the nation at large: very good news. Apparently, the Republican revolution of 2010 has caused the climate exchange to be taken off life support. The Republicans took over the House of Representatives and made significant gains in the Senate. Because of this, the idea of a national cap and trade law that would allow the buying and selling of carbon allowances on a national scale is over. “It is dead for the foreseeable future,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and the Environment, part of the Competitive Energy Institute. “Economy-wide cap and trade died of what amounts to natural causes in Washington,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund that supported cap and trade legislation.
So on the bright side, not all is lost. The bad economy is dragging on and on, and enough people, except for the 20,000 delegates in Cancun, have come to see that trying to control the climate is potentially out-of-this-world expensive and impossible. They’ve seen that a few individual investors would make billions while nations go broke and the climate goes on doing what it has been doing for millions of years — changing on its own. If only more people knew the total temperature payback for eliminating all carbon dioxide emissions was one-tenth of one degree of cooling.
“It’s the combined greenhouse warming from these gases give the Earth its current average temperature.”
Hmm, proofreading appears to be a dying art. Let’s try this…
It’s the combined greenhouse warming from these gases that gives the Earth its current average temperature.
Hey, I’m all in on the alternative media thing, but without basic competence nobody will take it all that seriously.
Work just a bit harder and get it right the first time eh?
“It’s the combined greenhouse warming from these gases that gives the Earth its current average temperature.”
Proofreading is not the problem, comprehension is. Tell me this is not the only thing you got from this excellent article.
Working harder and getting it right, eh? NOT!
It’s the combined greenhouse warming from these gases that GIVE the Earth its current average temperature.
Ha! How ’bout a big “NOT!” on your “NOT!”
It’s the warming that we’re talking about, not the gasses. The warming GIVES. If it was the gasses, then, yes, the gasses would GIVE.
And nothing’s ever going to get better if every time someone is corrected we get a snippy “who cares about grammar! It’s the SUBJECT of the article that counts!”
No. Grammar always counts. It’s important if we want Pajamasmedia to supplant the New York Times.
“And nothing’s ever going to get better if every time someone is corrected we get a snippy “who cares about grammar! It’s the SUBJECT of the article that counts!””
That was exactly my POINT!
Ah, you’ve found the shiny object. Perhaps this was an oversight but it can also be used to good effect on purpose. Used it myself to get things past the lawyers when I worked in the bureaucracy.
Usually they had to review a copy of the study or report while it was still being revised by comments. So the grammar would get a little out of whack. But for lawyers this offended their inner English major and they’d have to comment. Nothing about the legal aspects but lots of English teacher comments. Annoying yes, but they’d end the email with “Otherwise, I see no problem,” which meant I had my legal sign-off to move the study forward. Never underestimate the effectiveness of having a shiny object to distract the monkeys.
If the lawyers were English majors AND were taught grammar by nuns in the 7th and 8th grade, they would know which parts of speech refer to the subject and its tense. English majors only ? Not so much.
Isn’t it interesting that, when the e-mails were made public from that university in England that global warming was pretty much bogus, that the New York Times refused to print any of them. In fact, the Times still defends global warming as if it’s gospel. But as soon as the Wikileaks e-mails went public, e-mails that were highly critical of the United States and its foreign policy, the New York Times couldn’t wait to print them? Just shows you how much the far left and their publications hate this country and how ready they are to accept whatever junk comes out of Europe as the “truth.”
…when the e-mails were made public from that university in England that global warming was pretty much bogus, that the New York Times refused to print any of them.
Sounds like there should be an addition to the stock list of logical fallacies: argumentum ad grammaticum, claiming that an argument is invalid because its author made a grammatical error.
(Feel free to correct the Latin.)
As to the religion of global warming, consider me an atheist. It was never about the environment or saving the planet. This is and always has been a big government control and money play by liberals with skin in the game. There is always some huge social issue waiting to be pounced upon by liberals in the interest of bigger government and more control of our day to day lives; DDT, nuclear fallout, acid rain, deforestation, global cooling, global warming, swine flu to name a few. This dovetails nicely with socialist/communist ideals. Big govt is needed to solve all our problems. Most environmentalists are far left sympathizers. Like watermelon – green on the outside, red on the inside.
At first I figured this nonsense about global warming being caused strictly, or at least mostly, by human-generated carbon dioxide (CO2), was just due to the incredible technical ignorance exhibited by >99% of the American/British/European public. These people had found it much easier while in school to enroll in bullshit subjects such as sociology and psychology, rather than taking real subjects such as chemistry, physics, engineering, & math. Even way back in the 1970s, when I was doing my graduate work in chemistry, I noticed that each of my chemistry classes held less than a dozen students (& virtually all of those students were white males & Asians), whereas each class in sociology and psychology held huge numbers of students (easily a hundred or more) that spanned all types.
But then I realized anthropogenic global warming was just another Leftist cause by which wealth might be redistributed – while lots of bureaucrats made a ton of money while doing the redistributing of other people’s money. Ever since President (W) Bush’s invasion of Iraq ended Saddam’s “Oil for Food” program (which had been greatly enhancing the weath of UN officials & bureaucrats the world over), these overseers of our wealth had to find a new way to skim off huge amounts of money into their own pockets. And issuing carbon-credits in one form or another was the perfect way to do it because the gullible & technically ignorant public could be made to believe anything.
Since any first year chemistry student knows that water vapor is a much “stronger” greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide, water vapor had to be ignored; at least until the bureaucrats could figure out a way to pass a law prohibiting rain storms & especially hurricanes, & preventing rivers & oceans from evaporating water vapor into the air.
That left only carbon dioxide to outlaw. However just how much carbon dioxide do the bureaucrats want to remove from the air? If the carbon dioxide level in Earth’s atmosphere ever dropped below about 250 ppm, plants would suffer, & at 150 ppm most plants would die. These bureaucrats forget that a plant’s stucture comes from the carbon atoms it extracts from the air. If there is no carbon dioxide in the air, there won’t be any more plants. Obviously since plants generate (as a waste gas) the vast bulk of all oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, all animal life – including humans – would die. O, I forgot to mention, that in order to lower CO2 levels this far, the bureaucrats would also have to figure out a way to outlaw volcanoes, forest fires, & “fire” in general, which all generate vast amounts of carbon dioxide “naturally”. Remember that one good “snort” by a volcano could easily generate more carbon dioxide in five minutes into the atmosphere than a year of human burning of stuff.
Water vapor mitigation is step 2. Permits will be required to irrigate cropland, as a significant amount of that water will be transpired by leaves into the atmosphere instead of flowing into lakes and rivers, as Gaia desires.
Because you are using the UN’s numbers in the article, I call BS on it. Try using some real data… Oh sorry there is none because the “scientists” have fudged and faked most of it. What a crock o crud.
I think you missed his point. When combating a bad argument, it’s often helpful to use the bad argument against itself. We can argue all day about the UN’s numbers, but if you take THEIR OWN NUMBERS, and use THEM to prove the argument is false, you have taken away any basis for the warmers to argue against your conclusions. If you take REAL numbers (which aren’t available due to the corruption of some original data, and the disappearance of the rest), they can argue about the validity of the numbers. They CAN’T argue against the validity of their OWN numbers.
It’s kind of like taking a mugger’s gun from him and shooting him with it.
“It’s kind of like taking a mugger’s gun from him and shooting him with it.”
That is great!
AHHH Yes but not to worry, Obama and the EPA (portraying Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) have arrived in the nick of time to implement CO2 restrictions on our economy by Imperial Decree. At last the U.S. and California will singlehandedly save the planet while tilting their mighty staffs at the windmills of global warming. Hurrah I say and save the bear too.
You … you mean that humankind cannot manipulate the climate to its liking? Holy crap! I suppose that means we have no control over plate tectonics either. Whaaaaaaaaa!
Bummer! I was planning to move San Francisco to Antarctica!
there’s a difference?
Not that I disagree with the article, but it doesn’t account for the level of CO2 in the atmosphere actually increasing.
There is some human contribution to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels as well as wood and other “renewable” resources. The author uses the UN figures for the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide in his argument: “In addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment showed that 3% of the atmospheric CO2 comes from man-made sources.”
Carbon dioxide has also increased in the atmosphere during other periods of warming, including those before humans existed. For one thing, the oceans release more carbon dioxide when they are warmer. It’s sort of like a glass of soda losing its carbon dioxide faster when it is warm. Warming precedes increased atmospheric carbon dioxide from the oceans.
I’m not sure about the contribution of volcanoes, etc. to atmospheric carbon dioxide. But volcanoes also release substances which cool the atmosphere.
Carbon Dioxide has a narrow band of wavelengths that is can absorbe or emit. This basic band contains 2.7, 4.3, and 15 micrometers. All of these are absorbed to extinction within 30 feet of the ground. Adding more CO2 will not increase the amount of energy absorbed, since all the energy that CO2 can absorbe is already absorbed,it will only reduce the distance required to maybe 29 feet. This clearly will not cause an increase in global warming. It is all a fraud of monumental proportions, and is just another method the wealthy elite have created to transfer money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
I await the required gramerical and spelling analysis that this site seems to require by it’s readers.
Sorry about the grammar complaints above, but I’m just so weary of global warming, I’m just looking for other things to occupy my time here. AGW really is a done deal, and as I hop about the net (Moonbattery, Drudge, IHateTheMedia, here, etc.) I just keep getting one article after another on AGW being crap. It’s time to take it out of our isolated “classroom” and pound it in the mainstream; get all the warmers exposed and fired.
No more preachin’ to the choir!
…Oh, and it’s “grammatical”; not “gramerical.”
…And “its”; “this site seems to require by ITS readers.”
Hey! You asked!
BINGO! Somebody mentioned the elephant in the room!
Folks, did you catch this? It does not matter ONE BIT what numbers you start with – CO2 has only so much reflectivity. After that point, you can increase the CO2 by THOUSANDS of times and it will make ZERO difference to warming. We reached that concentration long ago.
And the warmists know this. They are not misled. They are not incompetent.
They are simply liars.
“. . . global warming . . . is just another method the wealthy elite have created to transfer money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. “
Yes. And often vicious, dictatorial rich people in poor countries. Even some UN bureaucrats don’t seem to be sure they can trust them with the money they intend to give them. Those African dictators will need some good UN socialists to control their money for them, perhaps:
Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.
That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027776.php
These data are very interesting and I have not thought about this aspect of the problem at all. Has this topic been discussed in the literature of global warming? If so, can you provide a reference or two?
i will say again, until obama builds a death star in orbit around earth, fires up the turbo lasers, and blasts the earth to smithereens, our human ability to destroy the planet remains science fiction.
This analysis ignores the “feedback” mechanism that has been so hyped by warming alarmists. They insist that a small temperature increase caused by increased CO2 results in more water vapor in the atmosphere and therefor more warming — a positive feedback loop. But the feedback effects are hotly debated and haven’t been proven one way or the other. Nevertheless, climate models include the assumption that feedback is highly positive and results in much higher temperatures. Change this assumption, and the models show no warming.
For a more authoritative explanation (I’m not a scientist), see http://www.drroyspencer.com/.
The Alarmists have never heard of rain.
Well, once again and for the umpteenth time, let us not forget that the entire “global warming” movement (or whatever they are calling themselves these days) is not about science or the good of humankind….It is about power and money. “Climate change” legislation, no matter how ludicrous, provides progressives with a platform to advocate the complete takeover of everything. After all – If “the environment” is everything around us and is also endangered by human conduct than all human conduct must be controlled…Right? This is why so many antediluvian Marxists have migrated to the “green” movement. That historic need of the intelligentsia to treat ordinary human beings as malleable clay “for their own good” just will not die.
There is also the money and the prospect of a “green” economy that will primarily benefit a few well-connected insiders like Al Gore. It might take a million dollars to produce a “green” job paying $30,000 a year or so but if the government is paying you for it then why not?
They can’t give up the concept.
In the 144 years since Das Kapital, nothing besides health care and AGW have had such potential to justify their takeover of world power. It would be like a sex addict giving up the internet. The fact that it is all a lie is as irrelevant to a power junky as any addiction is to other kinds of junky.
And it’s not like they haven’t tried dozens of other cons. Racism, feminism, secularism, homosexual rights, anti-colonialism, diversity….they all have only limited appeal to the rubes.
No, other than class warfare and control of health care, AGW is the best they’ve got and their sticking with it.
I agree with the main premise of this article, but the statement that without greenhouse gases the temperature on the earth would be zero is not even close to the truth. The moon has no atmosphere at all and its night time temperature is not zero. In fact, I believe a temperature of absolute zero is impossible even in the farthest reaches of intergalactic space.
Since we are dealing with a subject based on science it is counterproductive to engage in the very same wild hyperbole which the global warming movement regularly resorts to, such as a PBS Nightline show last night on global warming which made hysterical projections of what would happen if the entire Antarctic ice sheet melted even though no one seriously believes that will happen anytime in the foreseeable future.
The author was referring to zero degrees Fahrenheit, not zero degrees Kelvin (which is absolute zero or -273 degrees centigrade).
Well, the side of the moon exposed to the sun is 107 degrees C and the dark side is -153 degrees C. It can get down to -233 in the right circumstances.
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/moon.htm
I strongly suspect that the author was assuming 0º, either Fahrenheit or Celsius, not Rankine or Kelvin.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have assumed so much of his readers…
It doesn’t matter which scale you use, 0 degrees is a mistake. I think we can give him some slack on that. Minor misspeaks don’t invalidate an argument.
Global Warming/Deep Freeze is just the hubris and greed of humans. The big shiny thing in the sky dictates the warming and cooling cycles on the this rock and controlling a miniscule amount of CO2 isn’t going to alter a thing other than bring down the nations that are actually producing and make them dirt farmers like huge tracks of the world, yeah. I think the greenie weenies want everyone to return to the caves and die off from starvation or freeze to death. This isn’t about mankind for these nutbags, it is about “Earth, Gaia, or Mother Nature” in which people are a horrible virus that must be exterminated.
In the nineteenth century in the West, people had large families. Yet, death was at everyone’s door. Families might have six or ten children, but often only a few would survive until adulthood. In addition, there was no social welfare state, to speak of. Thus, the threat of famine and pestilence—the wolf—was always at the door.
In the West, today, life expectancies have changed dramatically. Famine and pestilence are kept at bay. Comparatively speaking, we live lives that are, in many respects, richer than those of past Roman emperors. Yet, the mind needs something to fear and something to worry about.
Traditional religious beliefs can console us and our fears and worries. Secularism offers no such consolation. Thus, in a secular world, ginned up fears run wild, amplified by our media culture. Global warming is an “end of the world” philosophy or religion. But, the religion of secularism does not believe in salvation in the hereafter. Salvation must be achieved now! Without God to provide salvation, however, the other “big G” —Government provides the secularists with a poor substitute for God.
As with all religious zealots, we doubters must be either converted to the cause, or destroyed as sinners and blasphemers.
God save us all from such secular evangelism. God save our Republic!
Right on, Harvard guy. Environmentalism is a poor secular substitute for religion. No salvation can ever be had through government. Government is more like a malignant tumor. It does nothing useful and just keeps getting bigger.
OK fair is fair. We should not produce any carbon dioxide to grow food, transport food, manufacture medicine or transport medicine to third world countries unless they are willing to use their carbon credits to get these benefits from the productive world. People that attend these conferences should go by sailboat or pay double for the frivolous use of carbon. Me? I think I’ll go out and burn a tire it is cold here. If there is no carbon dioxide what will the poor plants do? PETA people will have to eat dirt.
PJ O’Rourke recently commented that if fossil fuels are the cause, there is nothing we can do. There are 1.3 billion people in China and the all want a Buick.
There is really no valid physics which justifies the so-called “green house effect”. Even Green House to not work because of the so-called green house effect–they work because the roof (normally glass) traps convective heat. The green house is a myth and only invented to explain how the atmosphere is hotter “than expected” based on black-body physics. But those calculations are erroneous and there is no reason to explain since there is no discrepancy. The atmosphere has temperature for many reasons but the two biggest are due to the (a) temperature of the earth and ocean, heated by the sun mainly, which heats the air and (b) pressure in the atmosphere–the more pressure, e.g. near the surface, the higher the temperature. Green House Gas theory is not in compliance with the Laws of Thermodynamics which far as I have heard, have not been repealed.
For a fuller and better explantion, see the new book “Slaying the Sky Dragon” http://www.amazon.co.uk/Slaying-Sky-Dragon-Greenhouse-Theory/dp/B004DNWJN6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293716789&sr=1-1.
Excellent, Art.
The whole global warming thing just makes me sad. I was an Eagle Scout (class of ’85) and cared a great deal about the environment. I wanted to see changes that would require corporations to clean up after themselves, prices for products and services that would include the cleanup cost, etc. Reasonable people can see the need for these kinds of things if we don’t want to live in a cesspool (see modern China). I cheered when the power plant near my folks’ lake cabin installed a state-of-the-art filter to remove particulates from their emissions, celebrating a step forward. I still do like it when things like that are achieved. I like it when populations of endangered species make a comeback…I can now see bald eagles fairly routinely, and I don’t recall ever seeing one in the wild until I was an adult. I still remember the awe I felt when I saw my first one. The environmental movement used to do good, important work and I was happy to support them.
Somewhere along the way, the movement was hijacked by political (NOT environmental) extremists, enabled by a bunch of folks whose primary concern was that they saw a potential way to make some dollars. I’m not sure exactly when that happened, but I THINK it was somewhere around the early 90′s that it began in earnest. That was when I began to see reports of people keying people’s SUVs and things like that, anyway.
The environmental movement may yet find its way back to its real mission, but it’s going to have a long, long row to hoe before it’s going to be able to really do anything worthwhile again. Lasting damage has been done to its credibility by this global warming/climate change nonesense, and I think that is a sad, sad thing. Because many of our protections against legitimate environmental threats were safeguarded by these clowns, and now people won’t take them seriously for a long, long time.
It just makes me sad. And angry.
You do know that the Green movement in Europe was taken over by ousted communists after communism fell in Russia, don’t you?
It just took them a few more years to get around to the US.
I looked into the link that backed up the claim about 5 year residence time, only to find that 5 years is the low end of the estimates. Others range as high as 1,000. Which one is right? I don’t know, but this whole argument depends on it. It’s also true that the rest of the science is also on the shaky side, including the all-important value of how much heating comes from a given density of CO2. The truth is hard to see.