Global warming?

[Coign]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Who is saying that?

How else is man causing global warming? It is all about carbon taxes and carbon emissions. I don't hear anyone saying hydrogen cars are a bad idea because they will give off water vapor and that is the true cause of global warming.

[Undertoad]

Leaning towards not correct, as one of the study's main authors is not credible.

[Happy Monkey]

Greenhouse gasses. Most of the discussion is about CO2, because it's the largest contributor that we can fix the easiest (though still not easily). That page also discusses water vapor.

The water created by burning hydrogen isn't an issue; the environmental impact of hydrogen cars would depend far more on how the hydrogen was collected.

[Spexxvet]

Don't humans add to global warming just by creating heat? When you add so much energy to the environment, it's bound to heat up. We also add heat by cutting down trees and paving our world. And then there's the farting. No just our own. Our appetite for meat has created a system where there are far more animals being farmed thann there would have been if left to nature. And they're all farting.

[Coign]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Don't humans add to global warming just by creating heat? When you add so much energy to the environment, it's bound to heat up.

This is false and untrue. Turning on your heater and the heat it creates, burning a campfire in the summer time and the heat it creates, exhaling and breathing your 98 degrees of body heat, and the heat it creates ... has absolutely ZERO effect on climate and/or weather.

Global warming on a global scale is number one effected by clouds and water vapor. They are the vast majority of what temperature the Earth is and that fact has never been argued against.

The argument is, does the small fraction of carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere have an effect on climate?

[Coign]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Greenhouse gasses. Most of the discussion is about CO2, because it's the largest contributor that we can fix the easiest (though still not easily). That page also discusses water vapor.

The water created by burning hydrogen isn't an issue; the environmental impact of hydrogen cars would depend far more on how the hydrogen was collected.

From my article cross referenced with your Wiki.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_vapor (Also check out that "strange" increase in water vapor as measure in Boulder, CO)

Greenhouse gasses are:

water vapor: 1%-4%
carbon dioxide: .039%
methane: .000179%
nitrous oxide: .00003%
ozone: .0 to 7×10−6% (Essentially zero)

And, since the other components of the atmosphere (oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor) aren't materially affected by human activity, the "greenhouse effect" is essentially a totally natural phenomenon, unaffected by human activity. We could repeat the spectral analysis and calculations for Oxygen, or O2 ( The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere remains exactly the same at all heights up to about 85 km, and is about 20.9% by volume ) and Nitrogen (N2) which is the whopper at 78.1% - but we won't. We'll leave that as your homework problem now that you know how to do it. Just look up the atomic absorption spectra for both, and do the math. You'll discover that Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't even "greenhouse gases", so that leaves the principal greenhouse gas... you guessed it.... Water Vapor. Curiously enough, the UN IPCC reports don't even mention water vapor, since it is technically not a "gas" in the atmosphere. Dr. Roy W. Spencer has one of the best comments we've read on this subject:


"Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas -- water vapor -- into the atmosphere every day, and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming is not manmade, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds."

We can safely ballpark water vapor as being responsible for more than 95% of all the greenhouse effect, with oxygen and nitrogen playing no role and carbon dioxide being relatively insignificant... particularly the even smaller human-produced part.

The reason the people latch on to Carbon is that is the only one that has any effect more than zero, and even that effect is in doubt.

And if you continue reading the article they do propose an explanation.

[DanaC]

Not to mention not only are we creating higher levels of CO2, we're also stripping away the world's ability to manage that CO2 (as HM suggests, deforestation would be a key part of that).

[Happy Monkey]

What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas -- water vapor -- into the atmosphere every day, and removes about the same amount every day.

Water vapor rains. CO2 stays up there.

[Coign]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Water vapor rains. CO2 stays up there.

Yes, and evaporation from 70% of the Earths surface area puts water back into the sky. Such is the magic of the circle of life.

And CO2 being a very heavy element also sinks. A large argument on the sun heating up the earth is that CO2 is a byproduct of global warming not the causation of it. The article puts this science experiment for you to try. Leave a bowl of ginger ale on the counter and in a saucepan, put a pan of ginger ale on slow heat. The warm ginger ale will go flat releasing its CO2 faster than the one on the counter. (The ocean is ginger ale.)

Hypothesis, increased CO2 in the atmosphere released from the ocean is an effect, not a cause of global warming. It happens after the result, not the cause of the result.

[infinite monkey]

This is false and untrue.

Noooooo, it can't be BOTH, can it?

[Coign]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

Noooooo, it can't be BOTH, can it?

Sorry, my intended meaning was misconception and untrue. Not only is your thinking on it wrong, but it is also scientifically wrong. (Covering both opinion/thought and the factual status.)

Or am I just feeding the snarking comment troll.

(I got your sarcasm, just wanted to point out I wasn't "trying" to be redundant, I just misspoke.)

[Pete Zicato]

Generation Hot

For Generation Hot, the brutal summer of 2010 is not an anomaly; it's the new normal.

[ZenGum]

Coign, most of the discussion on this page is based around things like this:

Greenhouse gasses are:

water vapor: 1%-4%
carbon dioxide: .039%
methane: .000179%
nitrous oxide: .00003%
ozone: .0 to 7×10−6% (Essentially zero)

[and the atmosphere also includes oxygen 20% and nitrogen 79% etc]

Your argument seems to be that because CO2 is only a tiny percentage of the atmosphere, it is responsible for an equally tiny percentage of heat retention. This isn't the case. Small percentages can have big effects. A 200 ml cup of coffee might have only 100 milligrams of caffeine, but that is the 0.05% that keeps you awake. When it comes to the greenhouse effect, CO2 is a kicker like this.

Perhaps you're thinking that water vapour is still 25 to 100 times more common in the atmosphere than CO2, but the same point applies. They are not equally as powerful at being greenhouse gases. In fact, methane is more powerful than both, and CFCs are even worse.

And here is the issue. All your posts simply report the relative concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere. This incorrectly assumes that all the gases are equally potent as greenhouse gases. The real issue is the relative contribution these gases make to the overall greenhouse effect.

But even if anthropogenic CO2 only contributes a little to the greenhouse effect, that still matters. In a feedback system like the global climate, every little factor does count in determining the ongoing state. The Earth does have a natural greenhouse effect, and that is a good thing- we'd be some 20 degrees C cooler without it, and water vapour, natural methane and natural CO2 are the main causes of this. The recent increases in CO2 and methane are increasing the strength of the effect. This will have an effect.

[Lamplighter]

For the climate-warming addicts, here is an article saying data review
by the "Berkeley Project" is pushing skeptics into the fringes.
arsTechnica
By John Timmer
Oct 24, 2011
Climate skeptics perform independent analysis, finally convinced Earth is getting warmer

[Urbane Guerrilla]

However, the climatological theorizing record -- it's not exactly good. Climatology isn't a predictive science. They keep hoping they've gotten there, but then the atmosphere goes and does something different. The grounds for skepticism are at least as good as the grounds for credulity.

Meanwhile, the AGW platform continues to be contaminated with anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-wealth toxins, with precisely zero effort made to detox its thinking. Grounds for suspicion, except perhaps among those who think Counterpunch.org is the way, the truth, and the light.