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chris_gerribGlobal Warming Sealioning
Scott Adams continues his global warming sealioning, asking what if climate change causes more CO2?. Herewith a response:
We can tell what the sources of CO2 are by looking at the isotopes of CO2 in the atmosphere. This article gives the details. It also notes that we can look at history to see how much CO2 should be in the atmosphere (about 500 ppm vs. the current 400 ppm) so we can see how much faster we're dumping CO2 into the air then it's being absorbed.
It's also worth noting that we can trace most high-CO2 periods in the past to specific volcanic eruptions. In short, warming doesn't cause CO2 levels to rise, CO2 levels cause temperature to rise.
Finally, the difference between now and the last Ice Age is about 4 degrees Celsius. (XKCD had a nice graphical representation of this.) It doesn't take a massive change in average temperature to produce a wild swing in climate.
The Death of Coal
The headline says it all: Solar Could Beat Coal to Become the Cheapest Power on Earth.
Scott Adams continues his global warming sealioning, asking what if climate change causes more CO2?. Herewith a response:
We can tell what the sources of CO2 are by looking at the isotopes of CO2 in the atmosphere. This article gives the details. It also notes that we can look at history to see how much CO2 should be in the atmosphere (about 500 ppm vs. the current 400 ppm) so we can see how much faster we're dumping CO2 into the air then it's being absorbed.
It's also worth noting that we can trace most high-CO2 periods in the past to specific volcanic eruptions. In short, warming doesn't cause CO2 levels to rise, CO2 levels cause temperature to rise.
Finally, the difference between now and the last Ice Age is about 4 degrees Celsius. (XKCD had a nice graphical representation of this.) It doesn't take a massive change in average temperature to produce a wild swing in climate.
The Death of Coal
The headline says it all: Solar Could Beat Coal to Become the Cheapest Power on Earth.
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no subject
Date: 2017-01-04 06:08 pm (UTC)Yes, but “in short” is too short, because warming permafrost and peat bogs release gargantuan quantities of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions
It's a vicious cycle, which only titanic Aliens-style “atmospheric processing plants” could mitigate, pulling the methane and CO2 out of the atmosphere to make fuel. If such existed, and they don't.