[asa] Re:

On 1/11/07, Bill Hamilton <williamehamiltonjr@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Pim Van Muers writes
>
> From: PvM <pvm.pandas@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed Jan 10 2007 - 12:17:36 EST
> The webpage provides interesting statistics but irrelevant to global
> warming question. It's the addition of greenhouse gasses by human
> activity which needs to be looked at. It's somewhat saddening to me
> how this site misses the important issues and instead attempts to
> trivialize the data.
>
> And again
>
> From: PvM <pvm.pandas@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed Jan 10 2007 - 01:04:49 EST
> Of course, it's not what the earth already emits naturally, it's the
> effect of what humans have added that should be our concern. However
> there is some data about termites:
>
> If human additions to greenhouse gasses were significant compared to natural
> emissions, or if we are near a "tipping point" where a small addition to
> natural emissions would send the earth into thermal runaway (I know a scientist
> at MIT who has this worry) then human emissions are a problem. The first
> doesn't seem to be the case, and if you said anything about the second, I
> missed it. What is the reason you concentrate on human emissions?

Good questions. Imagine a large tub with a water level filled half
way. Now whether there is a stop in the outflow or we have a case with
a million liters of water entering every second and a million liters
being pumped out, the content of the tub will remain constant. In
other words, the inflow and outflow have reached an equilibrium. This
was the case with CO2 levels in the atmosphere which remained at about
180ppm if I recall directly, however due to mostly influx of human
contributions of CO2, the atmospheric CO2 has reached new levels which
are almost double. In other words, the tub is now close to
overflowing, and even though the contribution of humans may dwarf the
massive in and outflow, the impact of this contribution is
significant. So your scenarios, although perhaps somewhat intuitive
fall apart when realizing that this is a case of fluxes in an
equilibrium and once this equilibrium is disturbed, a new equilibrium
will be reached, with all the consequences thereof and since we cannot
control natural inflow and outflow of CO2 we need to face the obvious
question.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Jan 11 23:53:43 2007