[Vision2020] Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears

Sun May 12 07:36:31 PDT 2013

"The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere,
carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported
Friday,* reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of
years*."

Perhaps a course in remedial reading would not be amiss.

w.

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:36 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>wrote:

>
> There is nothing notable, from a scientific viewpoint, about the number
> 400 as it relates to parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere.  It's no
> different, from a scientific perspective, than the numbers 398 or 407, for
> example.  It's not double the earliest readings of CO2, it's not some
> threshold beyond which how it acts as a gas changes.  It didn't just
> surpass the old record of 399 sometime in our past that now makes it more
> important.  It's just a number that humans see as impactful, because the
> hundreds digit just changed and it's followed by two zeros, all based on
> our choice of using base-10 for our numbering system.
>
> It is, in fact, just another excuse to "raise fears".  So, of course,
> you'll see all sorts of articles about it.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On 05/11/2013 12:29 PM, Art Deco wrote:
>
>   [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
>
> ------------------------------
> May 10, 2013
> Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears By JUSTIN GILLIS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/justin_gillis/index.html>
>
> The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere,
> carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported
> Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of
> years.
>
> Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily
> level above 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense,
> but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring
> human-produced emissions under control are faltering.
>
> The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has
> not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved,
> and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and
> the level of the sea.
>
> “It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this
> problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the
> National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new
> reading.
>
> Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps
> Institution of Oceanography <http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/> in San Diego,
> said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly
> losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought
> were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.
>
> Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places,
> every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively
> little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.
>
> China is now the largest emitter, but Americans have been consuming fossil
> fuels extensively for far longer, and experts say the United States is more
> responsible than any other nation for the high level.
>
> The new measurement came from analyzers atop Mauna Loa<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/science/earth/22carbon.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>,
> the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for
> monitoring the worldwide trend on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Devices there
> sample <http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html> clean,
> crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean,
> producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely
> tracked for half a century.
>
> Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic
> last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna
> Loa.
>
> But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna
> Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern
> Daylight Time on Thursday. The two monitoring programs use slightly
> different protocols; NOAA reported an average for the period of 400.03
> parts per million, while Scripps reported 400.08.
>
> Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle, and the level will dip
> below 400 this summer as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about
> 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a
> brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the
> ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below
> 400.
>
> “It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E.
> Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of
> Columbia University.
>
> >From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that
> going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight
> band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages to about
> 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global
> temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.
>
> For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the
> carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the
> burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the
> heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological
> instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they
> expect far larger changes in the future.
>
> Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level
> was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called
> the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far
> warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level
> might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.
>
> Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such
> conditions — except this time, billions of people are in harm’s way.
>
> “It takes a long time to melt ice, but we’re doing it,” Dr. Keeling said.
> “It’s scary.”
>
> Dr. Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide
> measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The
> elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per
> million — meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with
> air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.
>
> His analysis revealed a relentless, long-term increase superimposed on the
> seasonal cycle, a trend that was dubbed the Keeling Curve<http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/>.
>
>
> Countries have adopted an official target to limit the damage from global
> warming, with 450 parts per million seen as the maximum level compatible
> with that goal. “Unless things slow down, we’ll probably get there in well
> under 25 years,” Ralph Keeling said.
>
> Yet many countries, including China and the United States, have refused to
> adopt binding national targets. Scientists say that unless far greater
> efforts are made soon, the goal of limiting the warming will become
> impossible without severe economic disruption.
>
> “If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can
> go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck,” said
> Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “If
> you wait until you’re really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best
> you can hope for.”
>
> Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are
> politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide
> represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading,
> exactly 0.04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather
> undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher,
> said in a Congressional hearing several years ago.
>
> But climate scientists reject that argument, saying it is like claiming
> that a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom cannot have much effect. Research
> shows that even at such low levels, carbon dioxide is potent at trapping
> heat near the surface of the earth.
>
> “If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe
> our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2emissions have to occur right away,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist
> who studies climates of the past. “I feel like the time to do something was
> yesterday.”
>
>
>
>
> --
> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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