Re: [asa] CO2 content

Burgy:

> The gentleman who sent the graph to me stands by it. He adds these
> additional comments:
>
> "The graph is from that Azolla presentation. ... you can find the
> original at the link on the
> bottom of http://www.hgs.org/en/cev/838
>
> Slide 80 (where the graph is from) has 3 other sources. I suspect that
> the bottom of the
> picture cropped off the other sources which are listed on slide
> 80. The
> presentation is quite interesting and shows that feed back loops will
> eventually remove the CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere. Our
> change is
> a pimple in a small hole."

This lacks any understanding of the role of scale. Sure eventually
the global system will re-equilibrate. The runaway greenhouse at the
end of the Permian was geologically short-lived -- but 90% of Earth's
species went extinct in the process. Even geologically small
excursions in global climate change will have dramatic effects on
ecosystems and particularly on human communities -- and those human
communities most affected will be the poor and those living in
especially vulnerable areas.

There is also considerable uncertainty in how the global climate
system might respond to given magnitudes and rates of CO2 increase.
The Earth climate system does not have only one equilibrium state.

Keith

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Received on Tue Aug 26 17:22:36 2008