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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (7515)	4/24/2009 4:36:25 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

Man that CO2 is really poison. It gagged them to death huh? There h/b many mass extinctions in earths history but I've never heard of one caused by CO2. That's because you haven't read enough. It isn't a matter of "gagging" creatures to death, it is a matter of changing the climate so that it gets too warm for either the creatures themselves or for their food (plants or other animals or fish or plankton). The food web gets disrupted--creatures die off when that happens. You may have read that intense volcanic activity has caused extinctions--why do you think that happened? It was in part because of the GHGs that the volcanic activity threw into the air, including both methane and CO2. Here are a few paragraphs on the Permian extinction (the really Big One). When you read "methane" you could also read "CO2," since methane is a GHG just like CO2, only more powerful. It only has a residence time of about 12 years in the atmosphere, but it breaks down into CO2 and water vapor. Volcanism The world around the time of the P-Tr extinction. The Siberian Traps eruptions occurred on the eastern shore of the shallow sea (paler blue) at the north of the map. The earlier Emeishan eruptions occurred on the north edge of the almost enclosed shallow sea just north of the equator - at this time the blocks that currently form China and South-East Asia were just emerging. The final stages of the Permian saw two flood basalt events. A small one centered at Emeishan in China occurred at the same time as the end-Guadalupian extinction pulse, in an area which was close to the equator at the time.[83] The flood basalt eruptions which produced the Siberian Traps constituted one of the largest known volcanic events on Earth and covered over 200,000 square kilometers (77,220.4 sq mi) with lava. The Siberian Traps eruptions were formerly thought to have lasted for millions of years, but recent research dates them to 251.2 ± 0.3 Ma — immediately before the end of the Permian.[2][84] The Emeishan and Siberian Traps eruptions may have caused dust clouds and acid aerosols which would have blocked out sunlight and thus disrupted photosynthesis both on land and in the upper layers of the seas, causing food chains to collapse. These eruptions may also have caused acid rain when the aerosols washed out of the atmosphere. This may have killed land plants and mollusks and planktonic organisms which build calcium carbonate shells. The eruptions would also have emitted carbon dioxide, causing global warming. When all of the dust clouds and aerosols washed out of the atmosphere, the excess carbon dioxide would have remained and the warming would have proceeded without any mitigating effects.[80] The Siberian Traps had unusual features which made them even more dangerous. Pure flood basalts produce a lot of runny lava and do not hurl debris into the atmosphere. It appears, however, that 20% of the output of the Siberian Traps eruptions was pyroclastic, i.e. consisted of ash and other debris thrown high into the atmosphere, increasing the short-term cooling effect.[85] The basalt lava erupted or intruded into carbonate rocks and into sediments which were in the process of forming large coal beds, both of which would have emitted large amounts of carbon dioxide, leading to stronger global warming after the dust and aerosols settled.[80] There is doubt, however, about whether these eruptions were enough on their own to cause a mass extinction as severe as the end-Permian. Equatorial eruptions are necessary to produce sufficient dust and aerosols to affect life worldwide, whereas the much larger Siberian Traps eruptions were inside or near the Arctic Circle. Furthermore, if the Siberian Traps eruptions occurred within a period of 200,000 years, the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content would have doubled. Recent climate models suggest that such a rise in CO2 would have raised global temperatures by 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) to 4.5 °C (8.1 °F), which is bad but unlikely to cause a catastrophe as great as the P-Tr extinction.[80] However, one theory, popularized by the documentary Miracle Planet, is that the slight volcanic warming caused a melting of methane hydrate, and this created a positive-feedback warming loop, as methane is 45 times more efficient than CO2 at exacerbating global warming. en.wikipedia.org Here is a paragraph on the Triassic–Jurassic extinction: More recently however, some evidence has been retrieved from near the Triassic–Jurassic boundary suggesting that there was a rise in atmospheric CO2 and some researchers have suggested that the cause of this rise, and of the mass extinction itself, could have been a combination of volcanic CO2 outgassing and catastrophic dissociation of gas hydrate. Gas hydrates have also been suggested as one possible cause of the largest mass extinction of all time; the so-called "Great Dying" at the end of the Permian Period. en.wikipedia.org

To: Brumar89 who wrote (7515)	4/24/2009 7:40:44 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86356

There is a thing called the scientific method which is specifically constructed to counteract any true believers. Christy Todd Whitman when she was the EPA person under bush issued a report talking about the possiblility of global warming which Bush made her retract and she later quit. Then Bush's head guy for GW was caught rewriting scientific reports about global warming and he quit the next day. He was softening the scientists conclusions. The scientific community has just been outragesd at how the bush administration impeded and distorted their research. But if you are just going to dismiss the worlds scientists as a bunch of kooks bought and paid for, and the oil and coal industry scientists as the only ones with expertise and truthfulness, then there is nothing I say that would convince you of anything. Bottom line though is that if there is a good chance we are causing severe global warming surely you would agree it needs to be investigated. Wouldn't that make sense to you?