380 ppm, 20,000 ppm or none of the above?
We’ve discussed CO2 and Global Warming previously; today we learned some new and useful facts — from the Left. There are 20,000 ppm of water vapor in the air, versus 380 ppm of carbon dioxide. Still, the Global Warming charlatans try to sell their get-rich-quick and get-poor-quick schemes by focusing on the CO2 in the air. Alexander Cockburn takes a swipe at exposing the silly fraud of Global Warming in The Nation, of all places:
imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.
And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That’s the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it’s at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn’t even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere’s CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels…
We’re warmer now because today’s world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive…The not-very-reliable data on the world’s average temperature (which omit data from most of the world’s oceans and remote regions, while overrepresenting urban areas) show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and 1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm?…
Water covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there’s 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. “The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards,” Hertzberg concludes. “It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse.” In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.
Maybe now that some in the Left are joining the game of exposing this silly fraud, the developed world’s anxiety can perhaps begin to move on and alight on a more appropriate object.
May 28th, 2007 at 2:20 am
Alexander Cockburn’s suggestion that a 30% drop in man-made CO2 emissions should have caused a drop in the atmospheric CO2 concentration is utterly bizarre. Even with a 30% drop, you are still adding CO2 to the atmosphere at 70% of the former rate, so it is common sense that the atmospheric concentration will continue to rise. His argument is like saying that if you are filling a swimming pool by pumping in water, then if you reduce the pumping rate the water level in the pool should go down; of course it won’t - the level will continue going up, just a bit more slowly than before! Cockburn’s argument suggests a complete lack of understanding of even the most basic of scientific principles.