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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (49874)	5/17/2004 9:08:16 PM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Moom, originally I got the 10% figure from calculating how much CO2 we've produced from fossil fuels. Production figures are available. Ascribing all the increase to us isn't right because as you will see, the fluctuations without us are much bigger than what we've achieved so far. Carbon dioxide emitted so far from fossil fuel combustion is roughly double what has built up in the atmosphere. The rest has gone into the oceans and plants etc. It is pretty much certain that the increase is due to burning fossil fuels. If carbon dioxide didn't enter the other sinks the build up in the atmosphere would have been much bigger. On the other hand, how much carbon in future will get stored in sinks and therefore what is the equilibrium concentration in the atmosphere for each level of emissions is a very uncertain question and the most interesting.... The effect of concentrations on temperature is uncertain but to get small climate sensitivities you have to assume that the negative feedbacks are greater than the direct warming caused by doubling CO2 (about 1 C) and the indirect warming caused by the higher water vapor. All the climate modeling and my statistical analysis shows that this isn't the case. It makes sense to focus on where the real uncertainties are rather on bogus ones. Natural fluctuations in CO2 and methane are large as you say, but levels haven't be as high as they are now for millions of years and we are heading for levels way back in time.... (the sun was dimmer then too). The real long-run changes seem to be driven by plate tectonics... though that is pretty uncertain... anyway that is much too slow to make any difference to our current predicament. mOOm