Whichever sells best.
Global warming is set to accelerate alarmingly because of a sharp jump in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Preliminary figures, exclusively obtained by The Independent on Sunday, show that levels of the gas - the main cause of climate change - have risen abruptly in the past four years. Scientists fear that warming is entering a new phase, and may accelerate further.
But a summit of the most polluting countries, convened by the Bush administration, last week refused to set targets for reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. Set up in competition to the Kyoto Protocol, the summit, held in Sydney and attended by Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea as well as the United States, instead pledged to develop cleaner technologies - which some experts believe will not arrive in time.
The climb in carbon dioxide content showed up in readings from the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taken at the summit of Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The measurements have been taken regularly since 1958 in the 11,400ft peak's pristine conditions, 2,000 miles from the nearest landmass and protected by unusual climatic conditions from the pollution of Hawaii, two miles below.
Through most of the past half-century, levels of the gas rose by an average of 1.3 parts per million a year; in the late 1990s, this figure rose to 1.6 ppm, and again to 2ppm in 2002 and 2003. But unpublished figures for the first 10 months of this year show a rise of 2.2ppm.
Scientists believe this may be the first evidence that climate change is starting to produce itself, as rising temperatures so alter natural systems that the Earth itself releases more gas, driving the thermometer ever higher.
Note that's unpublished data.
Part of the problem is that the United States has removed these measurements from the .gov sites (in easily interpretable form) from after 2000.
You can find the raw data in the lay press from the BBC in tabular form through 2003.
Searching the scientific literature publications Science and Nature, I can't find published data on atmospheric carbon dioxide after 2000. Thank the Bu$hCo policy meisters for that. So, I take the liberty to publish the data here:
You can find the lab's original digital data through 2004 here with descriptive information and a link (.pdf). There's more global data here.
I can't see a precipitous rise yet but there's a steady increase over the years. The function looks linear about an average since 1960. This isn't good, but at least it's not an exponential increase. Yet.
In the internet we move from the Rethuglican stonewall to sheer hysteria about the environment. I'm more than happy to speculate, and there is a lot of data to support that we are in the midst of a warming world, but when people talk "Gaiea", all I can do is laugh at them. There's a lot of solid data to back us, and we have real corporate opponents who want to suppress it.
The last thing we need is someone trying to build a new age pseudo religious myth fighting on our side.
Because if we make people like Lovelock our spokesmen, we are going to lose.
2 comments:
Most of the science community agrees that the earth is coming out of what is called a "mini ice age", from some 300 years ago. Just a thought worth looking into.
Also some logic. I remember from science classes that plant life absorbs carbon dioxide, and converts it into oxygen. So, doesn't it seem that an abundance of CO2=cleaner air?
Also, studies have shown that in throughout the 1900s, the earth's mean temp rose only 1/2%, and that was in the first 50 years. With all the rhetoric of a warming earth due to our mass use of fossil fuels, one would expect to see a greater jump in the 2nd half of the century. But there is no increase at all.
Finally, the changes in the earth are documented, cyclical patterns. More greenhouse gases are naturally released into the atmosphere. Do you really believe that an SUV driving soccer mom is sending more harmful gases into the atmosphere than these documented, global scale natural happenings?
website for your consideration:www.oism.org/oism/s32p686.htm
That would have to be an awful busy soccer mom to do it all by herself.
Give me about five billion human beings consuming all of the fossil carbon they can stuff into their gas tanks, and yes, with time, you're going to change the atmospheric carbon balance.
The data is out there we're doing that now.
In fact, you find multiple posts and links from me.
I'd like to make it clear that life has done just fine with much more CO2 in the air than we have now. It's just that things are going to get awfully messy for us if the earth undergoes a phase change all at once. It won't itself destroy civilization. We have to do that.
My general attitude is that you don't go mucking with an ecological balance lightly.
The increasing carbon load due to fossil fuel burning could be lightened or perhaps reversed by developing alternative fuel sources that utilized solar energy to fix atmospheric carbon dioxide.
You can find more on that from me here with multiple secondary links you can follow if you're interested.
No, the current environmental and energy situation exists primarily to enrich a few wealthy families in charge of a few very large corporations. Technological development, economies, religious movements, the War on Terror, and whole societies are actively manipulated by these groups to keep things going the way they are. It's been going on a long time.
That's another major theme of this site as discussed here.
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