2/17/2007
most greenhouse gases are not manmade
If true pristine natural places exist, completely untouched by human presence, and human activity is so dangerous, would it follow that environmentalists are looking for the extinction of the human race? Environmental lobbyists have focused on curtailing more and more human activities on ‘public’ land, beginning with anything motorized, but extending those behaviors to hunting and fishing.
It is as Orwell said in Animal farm, “four legs good, two legs bad.”
“Greenhouse” gases occur naturally in mother nature; and there is a purpose for them. By characterizing them as man-made, environazis are leading us to believe that they’re pollutants. They’re not. We make CO2 when we exhale. Plants release CO2 and other GHGs when they die, and when vegetation goes through the normal process of decomposition. The world’s oceans store and release enormous quantities of CO2. Nitrous oxides are greenhouse gases naturally produced in nature in the soil through microbial processes.
Carbon dioxide, in fact, underpins the entire food web. It is a natural fertilizer, in fact, used in agriculture to increase crop yields. It is not a byproduct or pollutant but an intended result of energy production. Efficient combustion of hydrocarbons produces more CO2; just one more reason why those who advocate ‘energy efficiency’ as a global warming solution haven’t quite perfected their argument yet.
Combustion and emissions contribute only about 2% of the ‘GHGs’ that actually KEEP OUR PLANET habitable, while environmentalists focus their diatribes on eevvilll coal mines, SUVs and power plants.
Methane is another gas that comes from decaying plants and animals. These gases allow sunlight to enter our atmosphere freely but then absorb and otherwise trap infrared solar heat (infrared heat from the sun). These gases (CO2, nitrous oxides and methane) form a wonderfully protective blanket sustaining life; without them, the Earth would be uninhabitable, the equivalent to Mars. These gases keep our planet habitable!!!
Take a close look at these pie charts.
Then, try to imagine that decreasing, or even eliminating our contribution to these already present naturally occurring (and beneficial) phenomenons would do anything at all to affect the world’s temperature one way or another. Climatology is a fascinating but inexact science because you can’t even depend on your weatherman to give you an accurate 5-day forecast so you know for sure whether you can walk outside without an umbrella. If they can’t know for sure what’s going to happen tomorrow, what makes anyone think they will be accurate in predictions made for 100 years down the road?
Don’t forget, in the 1970’s, they were predicting an ice age in 10 years.
I need someone to help me with the math for a Kyoto $ wasted counter. I want to have a counter showing the money wasted on Kyoto up on my websites, similar to the one that’s at Junk Science dot com. You can see the wasted money increasing at an exponential rate at Steven Millroy’s Junk Science dot com. When all is said and done, it boils down to this: for the bargain price of just $100 trillion we could theoretically lower global mean temperature by about 1 degree C. And even that 1 degree C is debateable.
Thanks to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Virtuous Republic, Big Dog’s Weblog, Right Truth, Shadowscope, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, Diva Dish - Weekly Celebrity Gossip Round UP, Pursuing Holiness, Rightlinx, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, stikNstein… has no mercy, The Uncooperative Blogger ®, The Right Nation, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, Right Pundits, The Random Yak, A Blog For All, 123beta, Adam’s Blog, Maggie’s Notebook, basil’s blog, Phastidio.net, The Bullwinkle Blog, Conservative Cat, Random Dream, Conservative Thoughts, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Chaotic Synaptic Activity, Faultline USA, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, Right Truth, and High Desert Wanderer, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
And thanks to Jo’s Cafe for her Weekend Specials.
123beta linked with President's Day Open Trackback Weekend
February 17th, 2007 at 11:34 am
President’s Day Open Trackback Weekend
I’m looking forward to a three-day weekend! My last one for a long time. And there’s so many things I need to do…
February 17th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
I guess you deserve congrats for catching up with what the rest of us learned in fifth-grade earth science. Yes, there is a carbon cycle. Bravo.
But the core of your argument seems to be that small percentage changes can’t possibly lead to big effects, because you can’t imagine them. I’m somehow not ready to make major policy decisions based on your personal ability to imagine how a planet works, especially when in the same breath you suggest that even experts aren’t good enough for your tastes.
On the cosmic scale, global warming severe enough to effect us isn’t a big effect. A 1% increase in earth’s surface temperature is about 7 degrees F. Climate science is hard because we’re dealing with a very complex system where even a tiny change is one we care about a lot.
When I look at a complex system that is easily fubared but hard to fix, one whose correct functioning is vital, I say we should have a strong bias to messing with it as little as possible. Conservatives have learned that lesson with governments and economies. I don’t get why so many can’t get the same lesson when it applies to climates.
February 17th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Well at least you’re not like some of the lefties who don’t understand the distinction between CO and CO2. No, carbon monoxide and dioxide are not the same thing.
Actually, the core of my argument is that there is no core argument for the leftists who claim that we’re going to have melting glaciers in the antarctic and other malarchy.
As I said, it’s hysteria.
The big changes (the coming ice age in the 70’s) - that have been forecast in the past have never come about.
So we’re supposed to trust it now when you’re purposely skewing your results to over emphasize our contribution to an already naturally occurring circumstance that is causing no damage?
So what if the temperature increases by even 10 degrees fahrenheit! (And historically that won’t happen, we’re talking an overall 1 degree temperature difference for the last several hundred years)
Bottom line is, carbon dioxide emissions are the direct result of energy use; which environmentalists want to curtail at all costs. Even experts who accept detectable antopogenic warming as reality leave no doubt thta, regardless of any foreseeable technological developments, suppressing CO2 imissions will restrict growth, destroy jobs, and diminish human welfare.
But environmentalists REALLY DON’T CARE about human welfare; they elevate their fear over everything else. You people really have some big problems with this victimhood thing. And you’re portraying NATURE as the victim of something that hasn’t even been proven; that nitrous oxides, CO2 and methane, which are naturally occurring, and which serve a purpose, are somehow magically warming our environment.
Let’s put the sun, the midaeval warming period, and other factors back into the models, and take temperatures from country settings instead of in cities that are warmer and THEN take a look at the data. oops, we can’t do that, because that would get rid of your hockey stick!
“We in the Green movement aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of six-year-old children to Asian brothels.”-Carl Amery, of the Green Party, quoted in Mensch & Energie, April, 1983
February 17th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
First, the technique of picking somebody on the fringes of a movement and judging everything by that makes you hard to take seriously. It’s like judging limited-government types by hauling out Tim McVeigh. It adds noise and heat, but no light.
Second, the environmentalists I know do actually care about human welfare. Read The Economist for example, who regularly make environmental arguments entirely based on the human benefits. Yes, there are kooks who wouldn’t mind seeing the human race go back to our population levels 50,000 years ago, but they’re kooks.
Third, the reason to take today’s science more seriously than the science of thirty years ago is that it’s better. The scientific method is a ratchet, slowly but continously improving things. As a bonus, you might note that computers have improved just a tiny bit in the interim.
Fourth, yes there’s uncertainty. But even assuming for a moment that the the amount of uncertainty is as large as you say, that still doesn’t mean we should carry out a huge uncontrolled experiment on how much we can change the atmosphere before we regret it. The conservative approach, which I would think that more Conservatives would support, is to say, hey, let’s not screw with something we don’t understand perfectly but is working pretty well for us.
The argument you’re making is basically that we should continue changing the atmosphere without regard for possible side effects because it’s good for people. This is the the same argument you hear all the time from the economic left for interventions in the market. You say, “What’s the big deal about 2% of the greenhouse gasses?” They say, “What’s the big deal about losing 2% of our GDP?”
The only difference I see is that you think we should mess with something much bigger, much less well understood, and much more expensive to fix if we break it.
February 17th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
wow, a little touchy today, are we? I’m going to be doing a lot of quoting from people on the movement. Now you can claim whatever you like; these quotes are on the record.
Green is green as far as I’m concerned, whether you’re a stupid green who doesn’t realize what he’s doing, or a sophisticated one who does; the result is the same.
So smarten up, lefty, because it’s going to get a lot hotter for you over here, and if you can’t stand the heat, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN.
Let’s face it; climate is not stable, and neither are greenhouse gas concentrations. Even if you take man totally out of the equation, attempting to ’stabilize’ either one would cost trillions and would have absolutely no effect on ’stabilizing’ the climate. I guess that’s the bottom line, now, isn’t it?
February 17th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Sorry, I had mistaken you for a person interested in discussion rather than rhetorical combat with straw-man enemies. My bad. If you change you mind, feel free to drop me a line.
February 17th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
I mistook you for a leftist. Actually, I didn’t mistake you at all! Thanks, meathead or whatever your name is, for airbrushing me with the usual leftist stupidity. I bet you don’t even know what strawman argument means, although you people love to use that as an insult. Really liked the fifth grade science stuff, too bad you didn’t pass it.
As far as debate is concerned, it’s too bad that you’re failing on that score, too, which is the REAL reason you’re running away.
Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.
February 17th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
If it was a strawman argument, why couldn’t you easily refute it? bwahahahaha!
February 18th, 2007 at 8:37 am
Thanks for clafifying Cao..the entire topic is becoming so confusing!.:razz:
February 18th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Hi, Angel, it’s confusing only because they’re trying to confuse us, and herd us along like a bunch of cattle to the slaughter; they don’t want us to know the truth. So that’s why we need to be ever vigilant in exposing what the truth IS, because we’ll never hear it in the classroom, and we’ll never hear it from the media, and particularly the UN’s IPCC socialist scientists who are purposely skewing the data in the computer models.
March 8th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
March 9th, 2007 at 4:52 am
I don’t have time to make the other references, but even Richard Lindzen, whose results on climate were published in the report of 2001 says this is a bunch of hogwash:
If you were doing that with a business report, the federal trade commission would be down your throat.
Chart from Geologic Constraints on Global Climate Variability (a powerpoint presentation), produced by Dr. Lee Gerhard of the Kansas Geological Society.
Reference from Francis T. Manns, Ph.D., P.Geo. (Ontario), with Artesian Geological Research.
And I have more, which gives more detailed information, but the effect of cooling precipitation is missing from the models. Roy W. Spencer is principal research scientist at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala. He is also U.S. team leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA’s Terra satellite. He says that our computer models are not accurate enough yet to take all the components into consideration.
But already looking at the models most experts agree there is no ‘consensus’ on global warming, which makes the hysteria look like a political maneuver to grow government bigger, based merely on emotional responses to made-up stories. The population explosion never happened, the ice age they predicted in the ’70’s never happened, and global warming isn’t happening either. When you’re in the habit of crying ‘wolf’, eventually people just stop listening. The problem for environmentalists is - there is no ‘wolf’ in reality, lol.
In the IPCC’s draft report, the math was manipulated to remove the middle age warming period to make our modern contribution to warming bigger, and removed the solar effect on warming to enhance the appearance of human contributions. If you look to the industrial revolution, you can see that although there was more CO2 put into the atmosphere added by humans, than at any other time in history, it had little effect on climate temperature.
CO2 doesn’t cause warming, warming causes more CO2. That’s another misconecption. CO2 is not a waste product; it’s a natural gas emitted into the atmosphere that has the effect of feeding plant life.
It really is common sense; we don’t live in a closed atmosphere like a terrarium; to think that we could have any influence on a dynamic system that corrects itself like climate - is ridiculous.
June 20th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I’m not a “brainiac” but I found this to be pretty interesting.
From - John R, Lott:
Man-made greenhouse gases account for about 3.2 percent of the total (see Table 1). Even if man-made greenhouse gases were cut by 50 percent (sending us back to pre-industrial revolution levels), that would be just 1.6 percent. On top of that, the sun’s energy output is more important than greenhouse gases. If greenhouse gases make up 25 percent of the causes, man’s share of the effect falls to 0.8 percent and a 50 percent cut in that reduces the impact to just 0.4 percent. Of course, there is also the issue of temperature changes driving changes in carbon dioxide and not the other way around, but the main point is already clear.
From - geocraft.com :
Water vapor constitutes Earth’s most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth’s greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many “facts and figures’ regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.
Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC’s, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small– perhaps undetectable– effect on global climate.
From - ibiblio.org :
All US cars and light trucks subject to CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards represent only 1.5% of worldwide man-made greenhouse gases. If proposed legislation to require a 40% increase in CAFE standards is enacted into law, the reduction in the car and light truck portion of global greenhouse gases would be virtually undetectable - only 0.4%, and not until 2010.
The earth has been changing its atmosphere on its own since time began. We have to stop freaking out about this and let nature happen. Ice caps melt then are replenished over time. It’s just how God planned it. We need to let the earth alone… stop trying to fix it. We’d probably make things worse if we tried.