CO2 in atmosphere on the rise

Global warming moving from theory to fact

Published on August 25, 2004 By Draginol In Politics

The CO2 level in the atmosphere is now 372 parts per million. Before the industrial revolution, which began the widespread use of fossil fuels (coal and oil mainly), that number was only 227 parts per million. That's a 30% increase.

CO2 is a green house gas. It is not a pollutant. When you burn something, anything, your best case scenario for non-pollution end result is water and carbon dioxide. There's no magic bullet to solving that as long as are relying on energy sources in which burning them is how we release the stored energy. But pollutant or not, CO2 is a green house gas.

The problem with green house gases is that they trap eat. The suns rays hit the earth and that energy is converted to heat. Much of that heat is returned out into space. But CO2 and other green house gasses keep that heat in place.

The result is that this has probably contributed to the Earth having grown warmer in the past century and it is likely to continue to get warmer. The problem environmentalists face is that they have a very poor track record when it comes to being correct in their predictions of doom. During the 80s there was talk of global cooling. In the 70s there was talk of running out of metals ranging from copper to tin by the year 2000. In the 60s we were told how DDT was going to wipe out all the birds (subsequent research has made the DDT claims look pretty iffy). In short, the environmental movement looks a bit like the boy who cried wolf.

What also hurts is that no one is willing to step up and propose realistic alternative energy sources. If global warming is a serious problem, then serious solutions need to be proposed. Wind and solar power are not serious solutions. At best, they could make up a couple percent of our energy needs today let alone what we'll need in 20 years and that's only if we went crazy with it.

Fuel cells aren't the full answer either because fuel cells only store energy. They're not energy sources. That energy has to come from somewhere. You can't just scoop up some hydrogen and put it into a box. It takes a lot of energy to power hydrogen fuel cells.

As a practical matter, if we want to solve global warming, we have to go with nuclear power. There's simply no other way, any time soon, to provide an energy source that is even remotely adequate. The problem with nuclear power are the waste products. If you think some CO2 is bad, what do you think of nuclear waste?

Unfortunately, there's no political solution to this. The Kyoto accords were a joke. By mid century, China will likely be putting more CO2 in the atmosphere than the rest of the world combined and it would have been excused by the Kyoto accords. India was also excluded along with many other "developing" nations. The Kyoto accords weren't a serious attempt to stop global warming, it was the result of politicians looking for ways to score points with their constituents.

If you accept that we need to bring our CO2 levels under control, then conservation isn't going to do it. Not by a long shot. Once the developing world starts using the same per capita energy as say France, no amount of conservation is going to do the trick. We have to make a fundamental shift from fossil fuels and we have to do that at the same time as we put an end to deforestation. Or we will have to find a technological solution to start removing massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. But I don't see any solutions even remotely on the table at this time that are serious.

They say a frog put into water will let itself be boiled to death if you turn up the heat on it gradually. Hopefully humans are a bit smarter than that. I'm not convinced that global warming is a "bad" thing. And I'm not convinced that CO2 is even a significant cause of it. But I think that there are plenty of other reasons to try to migrate away from fossil fuels.

Comments (Page 1)

Janders

on Aug 26, 2004

Very interesting and thoughtful, How do you propose we start using more nuclear power?

Gideon MacLeish

on Aug 26, 2004

Brad,

I agree with you on nuclear power, but with a qualifier.

As someone whose faced with the very real possibility of the waste being stored in an area that could contaminate our water supply, I think safe and reasonable waste storage options should be actively pursued. Yes, it has to be stored somewhere, and Yucca mountain may be the most viable place, but there are mixed returns on the opinions of many scientists...and I and many other families in our area do not want to gamble with the health of our families over mixed returns.

I am also in favor of a combined approach. In our area (310 completely sunny days a year on average), both solar and wind power are practical, viable solutions. They should be pursued in areas where they can lighten the burden on the power grid.

rm20010

on Aug 26, 2004

If fusion energy were a reality that would be great

What about hydro power? I think generators placed at natural locations such as waterfalls shouldn't be problematic, are they?

cactoblasta

on Aug 26, 2004

Wind and solar power are not serious solutions.

Not yet, anyway. Solar power in particular is rapidly improving in efficiency. The average house with access to sunlight can provide all normal power needs through the solar cells currently being mass-produced without really impacting on the roof's structural integrity. In ten years, the cells will be stronger, more durable and produce more energy. Certainly they'll never be a viable alternative to other sources in overcast, miserable locations, but places like Australia already make great use of solar energy to power just about anything that only needs a little juice (eg certain streetlights, water heating etc). As efficiency increases, the number of viable uses for the technology will increase.

Wind power is less efficient and is improving more slowly, but for countries with a lot of space it does make a plausible alternative to fossil fuels and dirty nuclear mining, especially if the price of fossil fuels maintains its slow rise.

on Aug 26, 2004

I still think we should go forward to researching solar arrays in space.

Put em up where earth will never block the sun, and in space there's no size or weight limits.

Of course, then we have this problem of finding a way to channel power down to earth.

matt07

on Aug 26, 2004

I'm not sure that fuel cells aren't a viable source of energy. An if not, it's certainly worth more research to develop them. But whatever we do, we need to find something other than oil. That also has additional effects, such as that we can stop kissing ass up to Saudi Arabia once we don't need there oil.

LDiCesare

on Aug 26, 2004

Please note that there is also natural gas and plants (biomass). Burning wood releases in the air CO2 that the plants pumped from the air, so if you plant trees you get a net effect of 0. Burning wood for energy is not realistic, but production of energy out of biomass is something that hasn't been researched a lot. There could be some hope in funding such research more.
Since you metnionned France, France produces most of its electricity through nuclear power. It's mostly sound economically.
As for global warming, please note that there are other effects that we can't work upon which have been correlateed to temperature changes on Earth and are therefore seen as causes, such as the activity of the sun, which people who don't want to change will use in order to stick with current fossile fuels.
Solar power is interesting because it's possible for just about anyone who has a house in a sunny area to put panels on their roof and sell the energy they don't use to an electrical operator. There's a growing market for such devices in southern France for instance (government lowering taxes on these installations).

cmcsonar

on Aug 26, 2004

Keeping in mind that the unit of measure is ppmv (parts per million by volume), it is clear that CO2 is a very small portion of the atmosphere. Among the so called greenhouse gases, it is a very distant second to H2O. And yet, some people portray CO2 as if it had almost mythical powers of dominating climate around the globe. A glance at some other measurements may help clarify the picture somewhat.

While the atmospheric parts per million of CO2 have continually increased during recent decades, atmospheric temperatures have risen, and fallen, uninfluenced by any notions that some people may have about the powers of CO2. Atmospheric temperatures respond to realities, not myths.

http://www.john-daly.com/#zjoi

lycen

on Aug 26, 2004

What are we going to do about the sun? A recent study says that solar flare activity is the highest it has been in the last thousand years. Global temperture changes are a natural thing, and there's not a damn thing we can do to stop it. We can't control weather locally, so how does anyone think we might affect global tempurature changes?
I'd love to see some real progress in alternative fuels, but not because I think we can stop natural global processes.

Draginol

on Aug 26, 2004

That is a good point, CO2 isn't very common in the atmosphere. You could just as easily claim that deforestation is the cause of the CO2 increase.

Solitair

on Aug 27, 2004

The cause of the CO2 increase is not actually that important. What is important is that unlike solar activity or ice ages, CO2 levels are well outside any previous level. People can argue for years (and have) as to whether the current global increase in temperature has anything to do with man, what they cannot deny is that CO2 levels are due to man. CO2 is known to be a greenhouse gas, and hence at least some of the current warming effect MUST be due to man.

Whether warming is good or bad can be debated. No point spending time and resources trying to lower CO2 levels though unless people actually think it's a bad thing.

As for moving to nuclear, the question is again why? To lower global warming? I think not. Not enough agreement. Far more likely to happen in 15-20 years when oil, coal and gas prices increase further due to diminishing supplies.

Paul.

bakerstreet

on Aug 27, 2004

I agree with the need for clean energy.

In the recent past here, there was a side-conversation about global warming. I mentioned that global temperatures and ocean levels have varied greatly, and changed quickly, in pre-historic and pre-human times. the answer enevitably is that we know what greenhouse gasses do, we know that there are growing amounts of them, and we know we make them.

I wonder, though, if the balance of gasses in the atmosphere doesn't vary as well. There have been many times that the Earth suffered mass-defloiation , or had large portions of the surface frozen. To me it almost seems like answering an unknown with another unknown when you point to C02 levels to answer people's skepticism of global warming.

I don't think we know much about it at all, from the damage that has been done to the ease at which the climate can adjust or bounce back. That is no reason to ignore our effects, granted, but I think it gives us the breathing room to weigh the almost equally troubling risks of nuclear power and other options.

Think about all the other mistakes we have made scientifically, spiritually, by thinking what we do effects our well-being or doom. What have we done to offend the Earth God? What should we do to gain favor? We find more often than not that the Earth God does his own thing without giving us much thought.

There is an inherent need for humans to look at things that trouble them and try and see what they did to cause it. Science shouldn't be so susceptable to that, especially in such an enourmously complex system as the earth.

Jay Walker

on Aug 28, 2004

Science shouldn't be so susceptable to that, especially in such an enourmously complex system as the earth.

Why not? "Science" is simply about applying a logical method to look at any question of curiousity. We certainly didn't make our huge advances in the last 100 years by ignoring things that bother us.

In any case, global warming is troubling at the minimum, given that our species has thrived through a period where temperatures were different than what most models are predicting that the next millenium will offer. However, I personally fear that the ozone layer damage is a more severe problem and harder to ameliorate than global warming.

As some friends, workmates and I were driving around the province 10 years ago or so I was looking at the trees as they passed by the windshield. I commented that they appeared to be sunburned. None of the other four people in the car commented.

Now, a decade later, the same friend tells me that a professional forester friend of his told him recently that the forests were indeed, becoming sunburned. How do you save sunburned forests? But I better not go off on this tack again, or I may fall back into the great depression that claimed me some 15 years ago.

Seeing the stupidity of masses of people in action give me little hope that society will be radically re-engineered that way that a failing business would be, for instance. Whether it's global warming, ozone depletion killing or diseasing the people and vegetation alike, garden variety toxic pollutants, nuclear warfare, DNA engineering gone awry, or whatever, I don't think we'll probably last. As a group, we're too stupid. We still act like we're only 5,000 people on this earth, instead of re-designing things to reflect our interdependance of six plus billion.

While I still think it's doubtful that much of the human race will survive another 200 years on this planet, I try instead to focus on the smaller things I can have effect over. Instead, I now focus on small things - helping a single student with a learning disability, helping my daughter, smiling at a clerk in the grocery store.

Sorry if I've kind of high-jacked this a bit Brad, but I just wanted to get this down somewhere.

JW

bakerstreet

on Aug 28, 2004

"Why not? "Science" is simply about applying a logical method to look at any question of curiousity.

Sure, but what most environmentalists express about the future isn't a "question" to them, it is akin to a religious faith. They've made up their mind what will happen, and prophesy isn't scientific. We can barely predict the weather, and we have a pretty big margin of error once you look further than a few days.

To the average person actvist enviromentalists are like a doomsday cult. The only time you really hear much from them are when they are scolding us and telling us we are destroying the world. People like that will find "proof" for their predictions everywhere they look, just like someone who believes in Nostradamous or Biblical prophesy will see parallels everywhere.

Picture some hairy guy in skins with antlers on his head, beating some other guy while pointing up at an erupting volcano.

"You, YOU have angered Oobnawumpta!! Now we will all die!!!"

When I hear things like:

"Whether it's global warming, ozone depletion killing or diseasing the people and vegetation alike, garden variety toxic pollutants, nuclear warfare, DNA engineering gone awry, or whatever, I don't think we'll probably last. As a group, we're too stupid."

That's what I picture.

Come on, we have less than 100 years of reasonably accurate weather data on a planet whose climate has varied enourmously in small amounts of time. As to the variance of the composition of the atmosphere, we have even less. I'm not saying we don't need clean energy, of course we do. Jeez, though, the whole "Man is the monster that will destroy himself with his scary science and newfangled technology" was cliche' back in the 50's.

We can't forget the other "We tried to fix the problem and by doing so destroyed the world" cliche'.

sandy2

on Aug 28, 2004

Intrestingly even Bush's administration admits that global warming is happening and that man is the cause of this. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/opinion/27fri2.html

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