Sunday, January 04, 2009

 

Easy Money

We had the friends mainly, informal, celebratory wedding party last night. We didn't drink as much as I thought we would, which is good, I guess. My new brother in law and hunting partner and I had an argument about anthropogenic global warming. I was trying to show him that at 280 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere almost all the heat was 'trapped' but we never got that far because he thought that the CO2 in the atmosphere was .23%. I knew that was an order of magnitude high so I bet $100 and we looked it up on Wikipedia. The results:

Nitrogen--78.08%
Oxygen---20.95%

That adds up to just over 99% which means that all the other gasses, and all of the greenhouse gasses (not including water vapor) are less than 1%, far less it seems because the next gas, a noble gas not greenhouse at all is:

Argon--.93%

which means the top three are 99.96% of the atmosphere. That means only .04 of the dry gas atmosphere of this planet are all the trace gasses, including all the greenhouse ones. Here's the next:

CO2--.038%.

That brings the total of the top four to 99.998%. Of course, of the tiny bit of CO2 diffuse in the atmosphere, only a tiny portion is man made. So there's a lot supposedly happening from just .0019% of the atmosphere. Actually, it's doing nothing at all, at least nothing measurable.

By the way, at the Huffington Post, of all places, there is this good overview of the truth about the Global Warming Hoax. My favorite part by Mr. Ambler:


Mr. Gore states, ad nauseum, that carbon dioxide rules climate in frightening and unpredictable, and new, ways. When he shows the hockey stick graph of temperature and plots it against reconstructed C02 levels in An Inconvenient Truth, he says that the two clearly have an obvious correlation. "Their relationship is actually very complicated," he says, "but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it is this: When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer." The word "complicated" here is among the most significant Mr. Gore has uttered on the subject of climate and is, at best, a deliberate act of obfuscation. Why? Because it turns out that there is an 800-year lag between temperature and carbon dioxide, unlike the sense conveyed by Mr. Gore's graph. You are probably wondering by now -- and if you are not, you should be -- which rises first, carbon dioxide or temperature. The answer? Temperature. In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years. In fact, the relationship is not "complicated." When the ocean-atmosphere system warms, the oceans discharge vast quantities of carbon dioxide in a process known as de-gassing. For this reason, warm and cold years show up on the Mauna Loa C02 measurements even in the short term. For instance, the post-Pinatubo-eruption year of 1993 shows the lowest C02 increase since measurements have been kept. When did the highest C02 increase take place? During the super El NiƱo year of 1998.

So maybe the relationship between temperature and CO2 is not that complicated at all.

Labels:


Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?