Global Warming

[EternalOptimist]

Yep, there are lots of processes that put greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, there are lots that take them out. Greenhouse gasses may be rising as a proportion of the atmosphere.
That means zippo if the greenhouse effect has not been proven to be a real phenomonem
there are real doubts that a greenhouse effect could even exist

[TimberWolf]

Yep, there are lots of processes that put greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, there are lots that take them out. Greenhouse gasses may be rising as a proportion of the atmosphere.
That means zippo if the greenhouse effect has not been proven to be a real phenomonem
there are real doubts that a greenhouse effect could even exist

For sure the Earth had much more CO2 in the atmosphere than today's levels. Oxygen was a trace gas when life began. Then life poisoned the atmosphere with oxygen and our ancestors died, or had to eek out an anaerobic existence living in bogs and intestines.

[RichardCranium]

There are various theories, including one that the oceans are absorbing a lot.

Are you referring to the carbon cycle, or the answer to

"Oh, woe, woe, woe, we are making CO2 and where does it go?"

The latter reaction from politicians (nobody who calls themself a 'scientist' should be saying it) is a bit reactionary.

The molluscs that produce shells (and much smaller critters that use it to make smaller structures) are predominantly in the oceans. They get their CO2 from dissolved CO2 in the oceans. Increase the CO2 and the plankton have a field day. (The whales will fix that provided we haven't hunted them to near-extinction.)

But green plants will also suck up what is there in the atmosphere.

You would have to work damn hard to overtake both those sets life forms and the ability to soak up carbon. The earliest green plants reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere from somewhere in the range 20%-40% (probably about 25%) down to near 0% and did so in incredibly quick time.

We'd have to clear entire rainforests to have an impact on what green plants can do. And we'd have to do something serious to find extra CO2, like open up all the gas fields and oil fields and burn their contents as fast as possible. Ideally, we'd want to be burning fossil fuels at a rate of at least 1 million years of deposition every year. (Carbon deposition was a very inefficient process.)

I wonder at what rate we are burning them?


This is a big part of the problem. We have cocked up so many constants and slow moving variables in the last couple of centuries that trying to predict what will happen in the next century is damn near impossible.

But the people who call themselves "scientists" who invent lies and the politicians that propagate them do not seem to realise that they are either trying to make a global change that is not necessary and thereby waste the last of the fossil fuel bonus, or dooming us to extinction. It is the lying that makes me angry - ignorance we can fix.

[TimberWolf]

Are you referring to the carbon cycle, or the answer to

"Oh, woe, woe, woe, we are making CO2 and where does it go?"

The latter reaction from politicians (nobody who calls themself a 'scientist' should be saying it) is a bit reactionary.

The molluscs that produce shells (and much smaller critters that use it to make smaller structures) are predominantly in the oceans. They get their CO2 from dissolved CO2 in the oceans. Increase the CO2 and the plankton have a field day. (The whales will fix that provided we haven't hunted them to near-extinction.)

But green plants will also suck up what is there in the atmosphere.

You would have to work damn hard to overtake both those sets life forms and the ability to soak up carbon. The earliest green plants reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere from somewhere in the range 20%-40% (probably about 25%) down to near 0% and did so in incredibly quick time.

We'd have to clear entire rainforests to have an impact on what green plants can do. And we'd have to do something serious to find extra CO2, like open up all the gas fields and oil fields and burn their contents as fast as possible. Ideally, we'd want to be burning fossil fuels at a rate of at least 1 million years of deposition every year. (Carbon deposition was a very inefficient process.)

I wonder at what rate we are burning them?


This is a big part of the problem. We have cocked up so many constants and slow moving variables in the last couple of centuries that trying to predict what will happen in the next century is damn near impossible.

But the people who call themselves "scientists" who invent lies and the politicians that propagate them do not seem to realise that they are either trying to make a global change that is not necessary and thereby waste the last of the fossil fuel bonus, or dooming us to extinction. It is the lying that makes me angry - ignorance we can fix.

For sure we need to change. If not for climate change for something else we will run out of. Like space or food.

I thought it was single celled organisms rather than plants (which arrived pretty late on the scene - most of our ancestors only had one cell) that caused snowball earth and reduced the CO2 and produced the oxygen poisoned atmosphere.

[Addanc]

Milankovitch cycles, it the Sun what done it sir. Oh look, we are at the peek of warm period.