Here are questions regarding the notion of anthropogenic CO2 causing runaway global warming that all who opine might find worth personally investigating:
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| Aerosol forcing in motion |
- atmospheric CO2 molecules boil off the upper atmosphere and are self limiting
- the impact of increasing atmospheric CO2 is non-linear, we’ve already seen most of the warming effect
- global warming is caused more by sunspot and cosmic ray activity, as well as earth’s many orbital cycles (ex: when earth’s orbit is more circular, the planet is hotter)
- recent measured temperature change just below the “CO2 belt” in the upper stratosphere is down, not up, contradicting fundamental runaway CO2 threat theories
- anthropogenic CO2 is only 3-5% of CO2 emitted, the rest is natural
- yearly fluctuations in natural CO2 emissions are an order of magnitude greater than all yearly anthropogenic CO2 emissions
- there is evidence that historically (over the past several million years) rising CO2 levels were the effect of global warming, not the cause
- the southern icecap is actually increasing in mass (Ref. Antarctic Ice)
- greenland’s icecap is not melting at a significant rate (Ref. Greenland’s Ice Melting Slowly)
- sea level rise is insignificant - much flooding is due to land subsidance
- storm fury is more visible today because of overbuilding into marginal areas
- the western arctic is warming but the eastern arctic is actually cooling
- warming in the northern hemisphere over the past 20-30 years could be due to the interdecadal oscilation between the northern and southern Atlantic ocean temperatures
- the most recent IPCC summary acknowledges there is no evidence to suggest the gulf stream that warms Europe may be disrupted
- global temperature measurements are weighted towards areas that are increasingly urbanized, and urban areas absorb more heat
- there are now over a million square miles of urbanized land, and this urban heat island effect could cause some warming on a global scale
- transpiration from watered, forested land, especially in the tropics, is the forcing mechanism to maintain global monsoon circulation and prevent drought - in turn - deforestation causes drought, creating hotter land and additional heat island effect
- the tropical forests have declined from over 7 million square miles to less than 3 million, and tropical forests release more moisture and are cooler than open land
- using mechanized pumps, in the last 100 years we have depleted aquafirs in all the agricultural lands of the world, lowering water tables from, say, 10 meters deep to over 500 meters deep. The resulting agricultural land heat island comprises perhaps 10% of all land surface on earth
- even taking into account the possible errors in measurement, the recorded warming over the past 150 years is about .5 degrees centigrade, not a significant amount
- the claims that the last 10 years include several of the “warmest on record” is disputed, just as the claims the landbased icecaps are rapidly melting (net loss) is completely false
- CO2 forcing theories and the computer models associated with them do not sufficiently take into account natural balancing processes in the earth’s climate regulatory system
- the computer models that predict global warming due to CO2 rely on huge assumptions that are impossible to verify - the role of water vapor, land status, and solar cycles on global warming are gigantic wild cards in these computer models, which, depending on the assumptions made, completely change the predictions of these models
These are a few questions that anyone who is listening to the debate about global warming should wish to hear answered. There is much, much more. Global warming alarmists and the things they’re trying to do are extreme. If you pause to consider the laws being proposed based on blind acceptance of global warming alarm, you may find many of them do more harm than good. In the name of reducing CO2 emissions, there is reduced attention to other pollutants, and massive new rounds of deforestation to grow biofuel.
March 24th, 2007 at 7:43 am
Very sound arguments and soon Al Gore will most likely fade from the spotlight.
Here is a British Documentary that outlines the issues well stated above. and should have won the Hollywood Academy attention over An Inconvenient Truth
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831
March 27th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Anyone over the age of 25 will realise that the climate is changing. You don’t have to know much about the science, only that, you know it’s wrong when you see a wasp on your christmas cake. - Steve Punt, The Now Show
However if you do want to open to science then please see http://www.realclimate.org. You’ll soon find that the evidence for a imminent climatic catastrophe is overwhelming and scary. 80% of scientists across the world believe we are responsible for changing the climate. There’s a lot of crap out there. Make sure you know the truth and be prepared to argue your point with logic and science.
March 27th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Gareth - even there is runaway global warming - reducing CO2 emissions is not necessarily the way to stop it. We have deforested 5.0 million square miles of tropical rainforest, nearly 10% of the land surface of the earth. This is causing extreme weather and droughts and global warming, if anything is.
What about the fact that mechanized pumps have enabled deep wells for irrigation, which has lowered water tables on over 10.0 million square miles of agricultural land by over an order of magnitude; nearly 20% of the land surface of the earth?
Don’t you think making 30% of the earth’s surface hotter through deforestation and depleted water tables will cause climate change? Why don’t we reforest the tropics and replenish our aquafirs, and see what that does?
If we really had serious problems with global warming, we should consider releasing benign aerosols into the atmosphere as a last-ditch measure. It would work. Reducing CO2 emissions by any amount actually feasible, on the other hand, is something that even those scientists who think we have runaway warming AND think we should reduce CO2 emissions admit would only slow the warming.
So did you read these 23 questions? Have you seen them all answered to your satisfaction? Because it isn’t just whether or not the earth is warming, it’s why, and what we should do about it.
Deforesting the tropics to grow biofuel because somehow biofuel is “carbon neutral” is one of the biggest environmental disasters in history.
April 11th, 2007 at 8:17 am
While I am not a climate scientist I will attempt to address some of these issues (note very few are actual questions but are rather assertions) over lunch.
- atmospheric CO2 molecules boil off the upper atmosphere and are self limiting.
I don’t follow this argument. CO2 is heavier than both O2 and N2 so I don’t see why it should “boil off” in the upper atmosphere (letting alone that it is already vapour so it can’t really boil). If you can supply more detail I can try to address the point.
- the impact of increasing atmospheric CO2 is non-linear, we’ve already seen most of the warming effect
True, the effect is non linear, but the rest of your statement does not follow. We have not seen the warming from the current concentration of CO2 since there are many different mechanisms that delay warming at various time scales. For example, the oceans warm slower than the atmosphere does.
- global warming is caused more by sunspot and cosmic ray activity, as well as earth’s many orbital cycles (ex: when earth’s orbit is more circular, the planet is hotter)
The factors that you list above do influence climate, but not as much as you imply. While sunspots seem to be related to the little ice age, they do not show any increase to cause the warming that we have seen over the last 30 years. Orbital cycles (there are several in addition to the eccentricity that you mention) take place over very long periods of time. Eccentricity has a period of about 100,000 years so it is unlikely that it is causing the current warming.
- recent measured temperature change just below the “CO2 belt” in the upper stratosphere is down, not up, contradicting fundamental runaway CO2 threat theories
I am not sure what you mean by the CO2 belt. However, the stratosphere is cooling and this is expected since if you trap more infrared near the surface there should be less available to warm the stratosphere.
- anthropogenic CO2 is only 3-5% of CO2 emitted, the rest is natural
True, but the important number is the CO2 increase and we can show that that is 100% anthropogenic.
- yearly fluctuations in natural CO2 emissions are an order of magnitude greater than all yearly anthropogenic CO2 emissions
I would not have said an order of magnitude, but others can judge for themselves here. The key thing though is that the increases are consistent. EVERY year the high is higher than the one before.
- there is evidence that historically (over the past several million years) rising CO2 levels were the effect of global warming, not the cause
In fact there is no such evidence unless you accept the correlation = causation argument. There was a paper just a couple of weeks ago looking at this very topic. I can dig it out if you wish.
- the southern icecap is actually increasing in mass (Ref. Antarctic Ice)
Actually, if I read your link correctly, you end up by saying that we don’t know whether there is mass increase or loss.
- greenland’s icecap is not melting at a significant rate (Ref. Greenland’s Ice Melting Slowly)
I read your link and I agree with your numbers, but let me add a little context. The paper that you base this on is Recent Greenland Ice Mass Loss by Drainage by S. B. Luthcke, et al. As it points out Greenland has gone from a small annual mass increase 10 years ago to a significant annual ice loss. They also add that they are seeing an acceleration in the ice loss.
- sea level rise is insignificant - much flooding is due to land subsidance
Sea level is rising, whether it is insignificant depends on your definition of significant.
- storm fury is more visible today because of overbuilding into marginal areas
True, but of course that does not address whether global warming is causing increased frequency (probably not) or increased intensity (probably). More important, can you explain why warmer water temperatures would not give more powerful hurricanes?
Anyway, lunch is over. If you wish I can post some other replies later.
John
April 11th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
John Cross: Thank you for such a thoughtful response - you addressed 11 of the 23 questions, and I encourage you to address the other 12…
This list was compiled from many sources and I only included the questions - or assertions - that seemed relevant to me. It is appalling to me that more people - especially our leaders - are not personally attempting to understand this information, when so much is at stake. It is absurd to insist someone be a climatologist in order to question global warming alarmism when 99.9% of the people who are spewing the alarm are themselves not climatologists.
I’d like to respond to all of your comments but I don’t have the space and some of these I frankly need to personally research more myself - my point in posting this was to find answers - because I believe that is important - not to suggest that all of these assertions are beyond debate. Debate is the point.
Here is the source quote, coming from an unsolicited email I received from a retired physicist, regarding the “boiling off” assertion:
“The ionosphere processes all gaseous exhausts from the earth and prevents the earth from getting the very ‘blanket’ theorized. This powerful ionization is relentless and absolute, and is created by the interaction of the earth’s magnetic field and the sun’s gamma rays.”
I’d be interested in exploring this further, since this connects to many of the other points raised.
In general the 23 questions listed here point to two fundamental questions - how much is the earth really warming, and is this warming really caused primarily by anthropogenic CO2? I’m not sure we know.
In the latest IPCC report, fully 1/3 of warming was acknowledged to come from changes in land use. I think this understates the case. Tropical deforestation has affected 10% of the land surface of the planet and reduced our tropical rainforests by 60%. This is certainly responsible for drought in the equatorial regions; it has slowed the monsoon circulation, it has increased the heat absorption on the hottest latitudes of the planet, it has lowered cloud cover over these hot areas, and it has taken vast perennial CO2 sinks out of the global equation. Tropical deforestation rates track exactly with increases in atmospheric CO2, but perhaps more importantly, these vast areas are now simply hotter with less rain, and on such a scale this itself can cause warming and extreme weather.
And nobody has explained why lowering the water tables through use of mechanized pumps, affecting 20% of the earth’s land surface, would not also contribute to heat absorption significant enough to affect the planet’s overall temperatures.
Until we really know what is causing global warming, we should not be deforesting the tropics to grow biofuel. We ought to all agree on that, but you don’t hear one peep.
April 12th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Ed: thank you for hosting these responses. I have added the rest below but would like to provide you with a few comments before we get to the assertions. First, good science is based on endless skepticism and as such criticism and questioning are good things. This must be tempered, however, with an understanding of the fundamentals of the issue and knowing what should be questioned and what should not. For example, it is not reasonable to question the source of the rise in CO2 since it is one of the most certain things about this whole complex mess. Along a similar line, the abilities of a molecule to absorb longwave IR radiation shouldn’t be questioned. However other areas like the effect of cosmic rays on clouds are interesting areas where there should be (and is) active research.
I am interested to see what you do with my responses. I hope that you won’t just let them sit there (although I am afraid this does happen quite often when I post long answers like this - or sometimes they are erased in the dead of night to never be seen again). Instead you should question the ones that you wish BUT you should also retract the ones that you can’t address well.
In regards to the e-mail you are quoting, I am afraid I am not much enlightened. I would have though that when he was talking about a “blanket” he was talking about the greenhouse effect since that is commonly (and inacurately) called a blanket. But if so then he has no idea of what the greenhouse effect is which I can’t believe from a physicist. Thus I am confused by it. More clarification would be appreciated.
- the western arctic is warming but the eastern arctic is actually cooling
I have a problem in responding to a statement like this since I don’t know where it came from. If you can document it better I might be able to address it. However for lack of information let me present one paper that I found in a quick google search. Figure 9 shows warming trends and again, people can draw their own conclusions.
- warming in the northern hemisphere over the past 20-30 years could be due to the interdecadal oscilation between the northern and southern Atlantic ocean temperatures
Sure, it is possible, but it doesn’t seem likely since if such a strong warming was due to the NAO then we would see this pattern in the past climate records. It does not seem to be there.
- the most recent IPCC summary acknowledges there is no evidence to suggest the gulf stream that warms Europe may be disrupted
Could you please reference this statement. I was not aware of it and I don’t believe that it is correct. There is evidence that the gulf stream has been disrupted in the past, but if your point is that we are unlikely to see it happen this time I would agree.
- global temperature measurements are weighted towards areas that are increasingly urbanized, and urban areas absorb more heat
Urban areas do absorb more heat, but this is a well known and established phenomena and is well accounted for in the analysis. There have been a couple of papers published in the last 10 years that look at this issue and essentially find that if anything we over-compensate for it by a very small amount. One of the interesting things that was done was to divide the temperature stations into two groups – one urban and one rural. When the trends from these were compared there was very little effect.
- there are now over a million square miles of urbanized land, and this urban heat island effect could cause some warming on a global scale
I think I answered this above, but if not please elaborate.
- transpiration from watered, forested land, especially in the tropics, is the forcing mechanism to maintain global monsoon circulation and prevent drought - in turn - deforestation causes drought, creating hotter land and additional heat island effect
- the tropical forests have declined from over 7 million square miles to less than 3 million, and tropical forests release more moisture and are cooler than open land
I confess that I have not looked at the landuse issue in much detail and thus don’t have any comments on the above (except half-assed that I can’t back up by peer-reviewed literature), but if you can provide some papers I can review them.
- using mechanized pumps, in the last 100 years we have depleted aquafirs in all the agricultural lands of the world, lowering water tables from, say, 10 meters deep to over 500 meters deep. The resulting agricultural land heat island comprises perhaps 10% of all land surface on earth
To me you are saying that the average water table has been lowered from 10 to 500 meters. From a quick google search I would disagree with this but if you can give your reference I can assess it.
- even taking into account the possible errors in measurement, the recorded warming over the past 150 years is about .5 degrees centigrade, not a significant amount
I guess that depends on what you call significant. Keep in mind that we are only about 5C away from an ice age. In addition, while we have only seen 0.5C, there is more “in the pipeline” that we will experience as a result of CO2 produced in the past.
- the claims that the last 10 years include several of the “warmest on record” is disputed, just as the claims the landbased icecaps are rapidly melting (net loss) is completely false
I am not sure what you mean by disputed. I am not aware of anything that you would call a dispute, at least not in the peer-reviewed literature.
- CO2 forcing theories and the computer models associated with them do not sufficiently take into account natural balancing processes in the earth’s climate regulatory system
Do you have examples? The only mechanism that I can think of was Lindzen’s iris effect, but that paper by Misnchwaner and Dessler showed that it was not a valid mechanism. Are there others?
- the computer models that predict global warming due to CO2 rely on huge assumptions that are impossible to verify - the role of water vapor, land status, and solar cycles on global warming are gigantic wild cards in these computer models, which, depending on the assumptions made, completely change the predictions of these models
Again, I can’t answer this without specifics. However I can comment in general terms. My background is in fluid mechanics and I can state that for a flow with a Reynold’s number over 4,000 it is impossible to predict where a molecule of air will be after traveling only a short distance. This means that all models used in the design of airplanes can’t actually predict how a molecule will travel over a wing. But the point is that it is not necessary. They do provide useful results. Models will not be able to tell us everything about everything, but if we are careful how they are designed and used that do provide useful information.
April 12th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
John - I think the land-changes and the role of water vapor are not sufficiently understood. In the case of land-changes, I don’t think nearly enough effort has gone into understanding its effect. Take a look at this recent post http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2007/04/11/deforestation-global-warming/
In this you will see a reference (and link) to a recent study by Lawrence Livermore Laboratory where they admit they really haven’t looked at land change enough; they state “Although carbon-cycle effects have been taken into account in the promotion of afforestation as a climate change mitigation strategy, the biophysical effects of land-cover change have been largely ignored.”
Even if the IPCC report is true, and land-changes only cause 1/3 of global warming (and I think that is understated), that doesn’t mean that land-changes are only 1/3 responsible for droughts and extreme weather.
As for the citation regarding the gulf stream in the IPCC report - refer to the top of page eight of the summary for policymakers, to the final bullet point of the section entitled ”Some aspects of climate have not been observed to change,” where they state “There is insufficient evidence to determine whether trends exist in the meridional overturning circulation of the global ocean…”
My biggest concern is that tropical deforestation is being encouraged in the name of growing biofuels - and the environmental havoc this is wreaking (including global warming) may be far worse than simply burning whatever amount of petroleum tropically-grown biofuel might have replaced.
April 26th, 2007 at 7:44 am
I will agree wholeheartedly that we do not know enough about the world’s many different warming and cooling processes and how they may or may not interact with each other. For that very reason I have a problem with statements like “For example, it is not reasonable to question the source of the rise in CO2 since it is one of the most certain things about this whole complex mess” or “True, but the important number is the CO2 increase and we can show that that is 100% anthropogenic.” Another thing that bothers me is people often forget the time lag that can be built into certain processes.
I think everyone reading this acticle will be familiar with the famous Temperature and CO2 chart derived from ice cores. That chart does show the interdependency of temperature and CO2, but the significant fact that often gets overlooked is the rise in CO2 levels FOLLOWS the rise in temperature, sometimes by many decades if not centuries. The same is true for falling levels, sometimes it takes many hundreds of years for the levels to drop AFTER the global temperature has already fallen significantly. Simply put, this chart shows that the worlds various CO2 sinks or sources take quite some time to activate as temperature rises and falls.
Why then are we so positive that anthropogenic sources of CO2 are responsible for all of the rise in CO2 levels over the last 100 years? Could it be, for instance, the warming of the ocean from an increase in solar activity 150-250 years ago is very slowely releasing its huge amounts of stored CO2? Could it be the warming of the permafrost layer? Perhaps world deforestation also plays a significant role? The point is, do we really know for certain, certain enough to fix the blame soley on the “3-5% anthropogenic CO2 release each year” for such a complicated issue as the warming of the earth? And, if that simple arguement were true, then what exactly did cause previous periods of warming and cooling when man was not present? I’m sorry to be a skeptic, but I have a problem with the sky is falling and its all our fault propaganda.
May 4th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
A COUPLE FORUMS LEFT MORE OR LESS IS HOW TO COOL THE EARTH USING AN UNDEBATEABLE SOLID SIMPLER EASIER METHOD.
THE METHOD DOES NOT WOBBLE WITH AN INFINITY OF NEW FACTORS ADDED TO THE PROBLEMS CAUSE IT IS FOUNDED ON THE UNCHANGING CLEAR CUT BOUNDARIES OF PROBLEM.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT WHAT DOES NOT CHANGE ABOUT THE PROBLEMS FOR DECADES LOOKING FOR THE SOLID HANDLE TO REMOVE THESE PROBLEMS WITH LITTLE RESISTANCE BY A MULTITUDE OF FACTIONS BECAUSE OF ALL POSITIVE GAINS FROM THE SOLUTIONS WASH AWAY ITS NEGATIVES SO THOSE NEGATIVES DON’T HURT ANY FACTION SIGNIFICANTLY.
May 4th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
It would be too bad if civilizations in the distant future could only shake their heads in sadness, when they saw how we fought CO2 when all we needed to do was fight the dryness. Instead of building clean coal and nuclear powered seawater desalinization plants to refill every aquifer on earth, we allowed no new energy projects. We let the life in our cities, our lawns and even our trees to die in the high density clusters we called neighborhoods - heat islands that could have had roofs of reinforced concrete to hold turf and plants, but instead there was water rationing, and energy rationing, and forbidden technologies, and no new steel refineries, no new concrete quarries were allowed. Where heavy equipment should have been breaking ground, lawyers were filing briefs. Where tropical rainforests should have stood we grew fuel crops, and the earth died of heat exhaustion, but not because there was too much CO2, but not enough water.
May 6th, 2007 at 11:57 am
David Rohrbacker:
You said:
You say this because you don’t understand the science. Here is an exercise for you. Take a random year in the past say 15 years (we have reliable data on them). Obtain an estimate for the amount of oil produced. Take a portion of this number (say 80%) to account for the fact that not all oil is used as fuel. Calculate the CO2 produced by this over the year. Now convert this to the PPM rise in CO2 concentrations and compare to what the atmosphere actually did. You will find that the anthropogenic production is more than what is showing up in the atmosphere.
Now, consider what this actually means. We are producing more than what is showing up in the atmosphere. Thus it does not matter what other sources there are if we did not produce this amount the CO2 concentration would not be rising. The logic is rock solid although as a thought experiment consider what mechanism could get around this (something that didn’t produce CO2 when anthropogenic was released but did when non-anthropogenic was released or something like that).
Now, here is a question for you, does this change your mind about the source of CO2 and if not, why not?
Ed, since this is your list of questions, feel free to answer my question as well.
Regards,
John
May 7th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
John - thank you for your question. The point I am most emphatic about in these posts is this - we are declaring war on industrial CO2 emissions when there may be other causes of atmospheric CO2 increase, as well as causes of global warming other than CO2 - or more of a factor than we are currently acknowledging.
In particular, the removal of 5.0 million square miles (10% of the earth’s land surface) of tropical rainforest, with now less than 3.0 million square miles remaining. There are several consequences of this devastation, which today is accelerating in the name of growing biofuel.
(1) There is less year-round CO2 uptake. Tropical forests are green 365 days per year, unlike northern forests, and their annual capacity per square mile to absorb CO2 is far greater than northern forests.
(2) The massive one-time CO2 released by removal of tropical forests. Please note that there is - along with the correlation you’ve noted between industrial CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 rise - a near perfect correlation between tropical deforestation and atmospheric CO2 rise over the past 150 years.
(3) The heat-island effect of replacing tropical forest with rangeland or biofuel plantation. This well-documented effect is already the prime land change factor in the recent IPCC report which holds that fully one-third of global warming is caused by changes in land use.
(4) The biophysical effects of depleted water tables in the deforested tropics, as well as nearly every inhabited area on the planet, certainly 20% of the earth’s surface - due to mechanized well pumps introduced over the past 100 years - which increase the thermal conductivity of the land.
(5) The effects of drought-induced warming, on a regional level throughout the tropics due to deforestation (which undermines cloud formation through transpiration), as well as throughout the world due to the collapse of the monsoon circulation. Tropical deforestation is a direct cause of worldwide droughts and extreme weather.
(6) The release of landlocked CO2 into the atmosphere because of global warming - there could well be a bidirectional cause and effect, which is to say, increased global temperatures may cause atmospheric CO2 to rise, and in turn, increased atmospheric CO2 may contribute to global warming.
The bottom line to me is that we are no longer paying nearly enough attention to other potential causes of global warming - and you don’t have to be a climatologist to know that if we warm up and dry out our planet through deforestation and depleted water tables on a global scale, then the climate is going to get hotter and more extreme.
And the fact that tropical deforestation is accelerating in the name of growing “carbon neutral” biofuel to combat global warming is a disgrace, and should be challenged.
May 8th, 2007 at 8:44 am
Hi Ed: First, I am not opposed to what seem to be your primary goals i.e. raising awareness and discussing the issue of land use change. However I do not agree with your comments about CO2. Looking at your points:
1) True, however I am not sure the balance is as you present. While there is much more growth in a rain forest, there is also much more decay.
2) I disagree with your point here. With my calculation, there is no wiggle room - it is very open and shut. In regards to carbon uptake and the subsequent reduction in it due to land clearing, the calculations become harder and more error prone. I am willing to look at any calculations you can provide, but I suspect that the errors are significant. In regards to your comment about the rise in CO2 matching the rise in land clearing, I am reminded of this graph .
3) I would be interested in seeing your reference for this point (about the IPCC and land use changes).
4) I am not sure how the reduction in the water table would work out. If you have any references that back up your point I would be interested in them.
5) I could argue chicken and egg here.
6) I agree except for the contribution of land-locked CO2. While it may contribute, there is no doubt that it is not the current cause of the CO2 rise. This, as I mentioned above, is totally anthropogenic.
Regards,
John
May 8th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
John: Thank you for your most recent comment - by number, here are my responses:
(1) You state: “While there is much more growth in a rain forest, there is also much more decay” How would you extend this argument? Are you saying that living CO2 sinks are meaningless? That would be the logical conclusion to draw from your reasoning.
(2) You state: “In regards to carbon uptake and the subsequent reduction in it due to land clearing, the calculations become harder and more error prone” My point exactly. I feel there is far too little work being done on this. As for your graph, I am familiar with the admonition that correlation does not equal cause. We aren’t talking about pirates, we are talking about the most significant land based CO2 sink on the planet, and it has been over 60% wiped out.
(3) Here is the reference from the IPCC report regarding the role of land use change in causing CO2 increases: “The IPCC report claims that up to 27.5 GtCO2 per year originate from burning of fossil fuel, and up to 9.9 GtCO2 per year originate from “land use change.” (Reference: http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf, top of page three) This suggests that up to 26% of anthropogenic CO2 comes from “land use change,” which one may assume is associated with deforestation. And it is fair to say that the primary driver of deforestation today is the mad rush to establish biofuel plantations where tropical rainforests currently stand. Please note they are saying land use change causes 1/3 of rising CO2 emissions - not mentioned is how much additional global warming effect could come from heat island phenomenon associated with deforestation and water table depletion, meaning the role of land use changes in causing global warming, using the IPCC’s own logic, could well be greater than 1/3rd. Here is a recent post that references a study just released by Lawrence Livermore Lab on this topic: http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2007/04/11/deforestation-global-warming/
(4) No. I have no references on water table depletion. And it is astonishing to me that something that has affected 20%+ of the world’s land surface and subsurface would not be considered a factor in global warming. Won’t deforested, dried out lands cause global warming? If a water table is 10x lower than it was, won’t the land have a higher thermal conductivity?
(5) So could I.
(6) In the IPCC report to policymakers, the changes in land use they claim cause rising levels of atmospheric CO2 are precisely because of the release of land locked CO2 - the burning of forests to grow biofuel.
Again it isn’t sequestering CO2, per se, that bothers me. It’s the fact that sequestering CO2 is kind of like fuel cell automobiles. The perfect solution, fuel cell cars, has been 10 years off for the last twenty years, and it still is. Meanwhile the emphasis on fuel cell technology by environmentalists delayed electric cars and hybrid cars by a decade or more. Similarly, real reductions in genuine pollution, such as particulate matter, sulpher dioxide, nitrogen oxide, ozone, carbon monoxide, can be achieved. But the big air polluters just got a rain check because everyone’s attention is now focused on CO2. As if we are going to sequester CO2 and/or replace 90% of the world’s source of energy - that’s right, 80% comes from fossil fuel, and another 10% comes from burning biomass. It might be smarter to plant forests and clean up our air, because the chances that you are going to stop CO2 emissions are slim and none. And one big volcanic eruption and we’ll be wanting to warm the planet. Meanwhile our air is still filthy. And our tropical forests are being destroyed because of the uncritical endorsement of anything in the name of reducing CO2 emissions.