Thread: Climate change
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Old 03-06-2007, 00:41   #32
simon simon is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: England
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I hadn't seen this before, but I must comment on it.

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Originally Posted by Argos View Post
Well, scientists can play with numbers and simply tell us anything. But if we look at those numbers which they don't show us so much, we get a quite different picture. The CO2-contents of the atmosphere was NEVER so low in earth history than in the last few million years (read beginning of glacial cycles), the surface temperature of the earth was most of the time considerably above the values of today. For a low resolution graph of temperature and CO2 for the last 550 mio years look here - sorry text in german, but I think, you can figure it out, anyway. I want to compare the hystery with a man who has almost been drowned, now the water goes up to the throat, and he has fear that he may die of thirst.
The important thing isn't that the CO2 level is getting higher, but that it's rising very rapidly and is beginning to cause rapid temperature rises.

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Another interesting graph, rarely shown is this, again in german - the correlation between the length of the solar (sunspot) cycle and the global temperature. I always knew that some magicians can influence the irradiation of the sun!
Got to love the global warming deniers graphs! Notice that the graph ends just after 1980. Why is that? Because the relationship between length of solar cycle and temperature broke down then.

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What else should we know, before "we die because of our own fault to destroy our environment"? Volcanic activity produces about 34 +/- 22 Megatons CO2 through active surface eruptions and about 31 +/- 22 Megatons of passive outgassing per year, both very strongly fluctuating, whereas mankind produces about 7 Megatons, of which 4 Megatons are buried by algae and plants. Despite those facts the rise of CO2 goes on in a very constant way of 1.5 ppm per year.
Argos' figures for emissions from volcanic activity are about right, but his figure for human emissions are 1000 times too low. Our emissions are 7 Gigatons, not 7 Megatons, and they're about about 100 times the emissions from volcanoes.

It's also incorrect that the rise of CO2 is constant. A few years ago it jumped to over 2 ppm per year and has stayed there. The reason is not known, but it suggests that positive feedbacks are beginning to kick in.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Argos View Post
Well, almost any plants and animals have a very high ability of adaption for warmer climate, whereas there is much lower tolerance for colder regions. So most species will not have problems. In general warmer climate means more evaporation of water, thus higher humidity, less deserts, more CO2, now bound in the ocean waters,which helps plants for assimilation. In fact many plants suffer because of the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and many plants had to find new ways of assimilation to avoid extinction (C4-cycle, CAM-cycle).
It's complete nonsense that plants and animals have a high ability to adapt to higher temperatures. If that were the case you should find all the polar and temperate species living in the tropics as well, but you don't. Plants and animals are found in certain climatic zones that they are adapted to.

Given space and time, species can move. The problem is that it's happening too fast for many of them and the experts predict that a large proportion of species will be made extinct.

The difference in global temperature between the middle of an ice age and an interglacial like we're in now is 5-6C. It takes about 5000 years for that change to take place. That's a rate of 1C per thousand years.

In the last 30 years the average global temperature has increased by 0.6C. That's a rate of 1C per 50 years. It's 20 times faster. It's been shown that climatic zones are shifting polewards much faster than most species can move. The rate is expected to increase over the course of this century unless our emissions fall a great deal. The climate models predict that the Earth will warm by at least a few degrees over the century. We're talking about getting on for the difference between an ice age and an interglacial, not in 5000 years, but in 100. It's the sheer speed of the change that's the big problem.
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