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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread
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To: neolib who wrote (21830)6/4/2008 2:13:01 AM
From: Maurice Winn  Read Replies (2) of 36917
 
I suspect it's only wishful thinking on my part. <At least you understand that CO2 does in fact help warm the planet. >

Rumour has it that it does so and since it seems to do more than oxygen, which is the alternative, it seems likely to be a better insulator than oxygen, even though convection on a grand scale moves vast amounts of energy from low to high altitudes.

So, radiant heat absorbed by CO2 at low altitudes is soon convected up towards where it can radiate outwards. I'd have to check up on the processes more carefully than I have done so far.

But wishful thinking is okay by me in some instances. I certainly don't think that having CO2 in the atmosphere instead of oxygen causes MORE energy to escape, which would certainly worry me. So wishful thinking in this case is harmless.

There isn't much evidence so far that all the extra CO2 is warming us up, so if we weren't also getting all the benefit from the vast carbon burning industry, it would be a questionable way of avoiding reversion to the mean of the ice age.

It does concern me that if asked to prove that the CO2 is helping keep us warm, I couldn't actually say just how it is doing so. But many things in life are mysteries to me. I'm happy to just accept that it is doing a bit, albeit not very much. Only 0.7 degrees after a century of vast effort in carbon production and combustion. If it isn't actually causing warming, at least we aren't getting colder.

Mqurice
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