>I frankly wonder whether Ms. Roukema would be following Ms. Pelosi and her merry band of lemmings off this particular cliff. One hardly needs to be a hard-edged conservative to recognize the lunacy that will ensue if the U.S. Government succeeds in branding carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
It is by no means a pollutant. It is a fertilizer. Real greenhouses pump up their internal carbon dioxide content to approximately 1000 ppm from the current quantity of CO2 in the earth’s overall atmosphere of 300 ppm in order to provide improved growing conditions. It will probably be ‘news’ to many TRB readers, but 1000 ppm of carbon dioxide was the quantity in the earth’s overall atmosphere up until recently. The predecessors of modern humans happily coexisted with an equally ‘happy’ abundance of flora during that time. Look it up.
Modern humans would never know when to stop huffing and puffing for more oxygen if not for the carbon dioxide we breathe. When blood-borne carbon dioxide levels rise to a certain level, the body senses this, and responds by prompting the lungs to breathe more rapidly and/or deeply. Only when the body senses a large enough drop in the level of blood-borne carbon dioxide does it allow the respiratory system to relax again. Said another way, if carbon dioxide didn’t exist in our bodies at some level, we would basically forget to breathe, leading inexorably to death by suffocation. Some pollutant.
By far and away, most of the total volume of ‘greenhouse gas’ in the atmosphere consists of water vapor. If the total volume of atmospheric greenhouse gasis were to be represented by a football stadium containing 100,000 fans, you’d really have to look hard to find the section containing the carbon dioxide contingent. It would only contain forty people.
Long-term warming of the oceans results in a lower total quantity of dissolved carbon dioxide present therein as the laws of physics forces the excess quantity of dissolved carbon dioxide out of solution in the sea water and into the air in the form of an atmospheric gas. Long-term cooling of the oceans results in a higher total quantity of dissolved carbon dioxide present therein as those same laws of physics causes the sea water to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide from the air and back into solution. Based on this information, would you characterize increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide gas as a leading indicator of increasig sea/air temperature, or a lagging indicator thereof? Think about it.
9:33 PM
Anonymous said…
If increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide gas is a lagging, rather than a leading, indicator of increasing sea/air temperature, what is it that causes the increase in the temperature of the air and sea water? Good question.
Look to the sun. Periods of unusually cool temperatures at ground level on the earth correlate rather precisely with long (e.g., decades or more) periods of time during which sunspot (i.e., solar ‘storm’) activity is at a minimum (consider, for example, the Maunder minimum, which gave rise to the little ice age). Similarly, periods of unusually high average ground temperatures at ground level on the earth time correlate very well in which sunspot activity is unusually high (consider, for example, the post-WWII period up through most of the 1990’s) until 1998 or so.
Have you noticed that summer is rather slow in ‘ramping up’ this year? Is an excess of cloud cover becoming apparent to you? If so, you might find this interesting: Solar Cycle 24 is about 2 years late in arriving. As a result, only a handful of sunspots have appeared so far. Most of these fade back into the surface of the sun within a few days at most.
Why is this?
Just released solar research by NASA has determined that the delay in the appearance (in earnest) of new Solar Cycle 24 sunspots is almost certainly due to the remarkably slow pace at which opposite ‘jet streams’ that exist within 7,000 km below the surface of the sun are migraging toward the sun’s equator (where they will merge). Only now have the northern and southern jet streams, respectively, descended to the critical 22.5 degree northern and southern latitude positions on the sun’s surface at which the sunspots of a new solar cycle typically begin to appear. Such slow progress of the solar jet streams toward convergence at the solar equator this time around likely portends a solar cycle that is much less active oveall (i.e., many fewer sunspots at the peak, and many fewer sunspots overall).
At least one thing appears certain: the 50+-year period of high sunspot activity that coincided with the post-WWII space age appears to be coming to a screeching halt.
Do your own research and consider whether the recent change of terminology on the part of dedicated environmentalists (from “global warming” to “climate change”) was intentional. Such individuals have long since considered the possibility that they will beginning to look very, very stupid in the face of an anomalously large drop in global surface temperatures. Accordingly, you can be certain that the transition from global ‘warming’ alarmism to global ‘cooling’ alarmism will be complete well before the bulk of the earth’s residents start stocking up on raincoats and snowshovels.