Ashley, we agree on an environmental matter! Yay! <I like the idea of using taxes on fossil fuels to assess the dispersed and delayed costs. > I hope that includes a compensating reduction in other taxes on activities which have no effect on the commons.
Given the size of the atmosphere and total greenhouse influences, such as desert size, ice cover, cloud cover, methane and other gases, I remain very unconvinced that we are doing more with our CO2 emissions than "farting against thunder" or "peeing in the ocean".
If CO2 was the only determinant of sea level and temperatures, I'd agree that we have had a significant effect. But it isn't. It's small beer.
Another aspect of the greenhouse effect which I've never seen mentioned is the quantity of oxygen in the atmosphere. Just how much has the mass of the atmosphere shrunk over the last billion years, or even just the last 500 million when life like ours was really on the go?
A lot of oxygen has been stripped out too. Nitrogen has been stripped out by lucerne and other free nitrogen stripping microbes and plants.
Politicians and the public are now getting really excited about the Greenhouse Effect and that we have to do something about it. It's like a new religion. Given that old religion has gone out of fashion in much of the world, perhaps that fills a need. Worship of nature aka Gaia.
I doubt that human efforts for or against will be any more effective in changing atmospheric processes than Tamiflu has been in cutting the death rate from H5N1. It's still running at about 75% who.int though it dropped for a while, for some reason, to about 33%.
bloomberg.com
<The H5N1 virus is known to have infected 256 people in 10 countries in the past three years, killing 152 of them, the WHO said yesterday. Last year, 42 fatalities were confirmed, after 32 in 2004 and four in 2003. More than five of every 10 reported cases were fatal. >
Why are the effects of CO2 emission delayed? As soon as CO2 reaches the atmosphere, it starts green-housing the incoming radiation. Temperatures should start rising immediately.
Although CO2 level is up 30% since 100 years ago, that hasn't made a significant difference to the air temperature. It has been positively freezing around here. I would like to see about 5 degrees of warming and 15 in winter.
Mqurice |
