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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (85812)	8/19/2000 8:15:51 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

And the once thriving solar and wind energy farms are falling into disrepair. Cheap oil is hard to beat. Short term. Great news about the tropics moving to the poles, huh? Replant the rainforest in Northern Canada. Delicious Canadian Pineapple, next to the Swedish Bananas. And the Saharan Burnt Catfish. The global warming is almost certainly not a myth. The question is "what is causing it?" and that is not known. We are at peak solar output in the solar cycle. We've (the written record people) have only been at the north pole for a short period of time, but the fossil record up there should be excellent. There was a serious academic study I saw that said after you adjusted for solar influx and a bunch of other factors, there wasn't much room for greenhouse gases in the observed effects. Not that the effects aren't there, but that we can't demonstrate them as the cause. One of the problems with carbonate geochemistry is that warmer water holds less CO2. It's a bit of the chicken and egg problem. CO2 warms the water. Warm water releases CO2. And methane chemistry is possibly just as complicated. Most of the warming could be caused by other factors such as variability in solar flux and the CO2 flux could be increasing because of increases in solar output. We don't have any method to assess absolute solar intensity as a "fossil" record. This is where my brand of conservatism comes in. To be "conservative" we should probably not introduce more known heat intensifying gases as the tent gets a little hot... that just isn't being "conservative". If you look at the volume of carbon released by fossil fuel mining it is truly mind boggling. Where are the subsidies for the alternatives or conservation? Dead, dead, dead. "And rightly so!" some might say. Why should oil companies subsidize these "uncompetitive" energy sources and alternatives? Because they aren't correctly being assessed for the economic liability associated with the spills and potential large scale climatic factors being generated by short term market inefficiencies. With that said, I don't see any workaround for using oil short term...

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (85812)	8/19/2000 8:57:45 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 108807

microtech.com.au This is a very good overview of the complexity of the light intensity problem. chomsky.arts.adelaide.edu.au This one, the complexity of where and how carbonate is stored. Here is one line that puts the problem into perspective: glnet.edu.cn As the world's biggest carbon reservoir, carbonate rocks contain about 6.1x10^7 billion tons of carbon, which is 1694 times and 1.1x10^5 times larger than those of oceans and world vegetation respectively (Houghton & Woodwell, 1989). Carbonate rocks occupy an area of about 22 million square kilometers in the world (Yuan, 1997). That is a lot of historic carbon dioxide. We are clueless how this system works. BTW, the human contribution is "only" 7 billion tons per year, in gas form though. Half is returned to this sink, leaving about 3.5 billion tons.