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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mel221 who wrote (144349)	7/11/2014 5:03:20 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

"Is this a feel good set of policies" No; it is a good (but weak) set of policies" "will they halt global warming in its tracks?" No; we could hold levels right here (not zero emissions, just enuf to keep levels at 400), and we will still heat for 40 years. Climate Change: The 40 Year Delay Between Cause and Effect skepticalscience.com The reason the planet takes several decades to respond to increased CO2 is the thermal inertia of the oceans. Consider a saucepan of water placed on a gas stove. Although the flame has a temperature measured in hundreds of degrees C, the water takes a few minutes to reach boiling point. This simple analogy explains climate lag. The mass of the oceans is around 500 times that of the atmosphere. The time that it takes to warm up is measured in decades. Because of the difficulty in quantifying the rate at which the warm upper layers of the ocean mix with the cooler deeper waters, there is significant variation in estimates of climate lag. A paper by James Hansen and others [iii] estimates the time required for 60% of global warming to take place in response to increased emissions to be in the range of 25 to 50 years. The mid-point of this is 37.5 which I have rounded to 40 years. "By the time any world wide policy is implemented, it will be too late" That happened in '97, and the US chose not to participate. EU on track for Kyoto and 2020 emissions targets phys.org