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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (329648)	3/21/2007 1:26:12 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575025

"so you must be familiar with the global Carbon Cycle," Yes. I have referenced it several times. "you will find out that there is a flux of about 150-160GT/year coming out of oceans and forests, and almost all this flux gets eventually sucked back into oceans and lands." Yes. ""Some entity" allegedly adds about 3-4% to this flux, so I would not qualify this as overly dramatic, especially knowing that the past Earth have seen much higher CO2 concentrations, 10x-20x of today, with plenty of inhabitants and no industry folks around." It is more than that. There are 6+ GT of coal mined a year. That doesn't include oil production. Now, I am sure you have a firm grasp of compound interest. Even at a relatively low rate of input, if you keep increasing the rate of increase, sooner or later things get out of whack. Which is why we have roughly twice the CO2 content in the atmosphere than we did at the end of the Little Ice Age. Now true, it had to've been one of those massive coincidences that the LIA ended just after the Industrial Revolution started to get off the ground and fossil fuels started to be exploited in significant amounts. "especially knowing that the past Earth have seen much higher CO2 concentrations, 10x-20x of today, with plenty of inhabitants and no industry folks around." So? There are other mechanisms to get CO2 in the atmosphere. One I will discuss in a moment. "If you want to hear my opinion, I would say that the abilities of warm ocean areas to release stored CO2 from deep waters is vastly underestimated by current people of climatology, and the ability to sink CO2 in cold waters is overestimated. As result, it is quite possible that the current conclusion that oceans are net CO2 sinks may be incorrect." You are very incorrect. Ocean bottom water is know as one of the largest carbon sinks. That is assuming they haven't forgotten it since I took Chemical Oceanography. Now here is the problem. All of the big carbon sinks are sensitive to temperature. Now some, the warmer, the better. Like forests. But they are also under pressure from clear cutting and the like. Others, like bogs, permafrost, chlathrates and ocean bottom water, the colder the better. So any warming trend leads to a positive feedback. Which is why there tends to be either ice age or very hot temperatures and high CO2, and not a lot in between. That is why you don't need industry to flip the system over. All it takes is relatively small perturbations in the system. Probably on the close order of the changes we are introducing. "Sure it does. However, please consider that 90%+ of the greenhouse effect is provided by water vapor and cloud dynamics associated with it." Uh huh. Now, assuming that the CO2 injected into the atmosphere causes a rise in average temperature. What happens to the water content in the atmosphere? Take your time. "Please also consider that substantial part of CO2 absorption bands is already saturated, so the effect from additional concentration must be quite diminished." Sure. But it would increase it some. Which would increase the water vapor content. Which would increase temperatures some more. Which would cause more CO2 and methane. Now true, the methane degrades quickly. Into CO2. But while it is there, it increases the temperature more, both because it is a more potent greenhouse gas and it absorbs in different bands than CO2. There is a significant amount of methane locked up in permafrost and chlathrates. Ignore that at your peril in any analysis. My grasp of logic, numbers, analytical geometry and even chaos theory is just fine. My background in oceanography gives me a good basis on which to use it. The solution is pretty easy, all we have to do is reduce the rate of increase. If we can do that, then we can get off the treadmill and the global Carbon Cycle gets a chance to get caught up. However, the longer we go like this, the greater the chance we fall into a positive feedback situation.