Friday, December 17, 2004

Global Warming and Carbon Emissions

Thanks to the Belmont Club for the link to this article. It goes in depth on what had to be done to lower or maintain the carbon levels in the atmosphere. The end analysis is that to do what is being proposed may be impossible.

As Wretchard states, SO WHAT.

Go and read the article at the Belmont Club. His article discusses policy and junk science that seem to be the norm in politics today.

I was bothered by the comments that seem to be leading that the idea of Global Warming is based on junk science. I must admit that is pretty much walking around with your head up your ass. Any isolated environment, no matter the size, which dumps more waste products into that environment without some manner to recycle them into the system sooner or later will suffocate on its own wastes. If you have ever brewed beer, you'd know exactly what I mean.

Now you may wish to say that placing gigatons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere every year is far from poisoning the waters with alcohol, but its just a bigger carboy. Even worse, is that there is no reason to be this wasteful. We have seen advancements in recent years that have lowered emissions from cars and power plants. Being more conservative with energy expenditures would not only lower emissions, it would lower the US dependence on oil and save you some cash.

I suppose this could also be a lesson in how to cook a lobster. If you dump him in boiling water he dies quickly, but painfully. If you put him in a pot of cold water and bring it to a boil, he'll get used to the temperature change up until the point where he dies.

1 comment:

Granted said...

Interesting read. While I agree on most points, my question is, are we adding carbon to the atmosphere at a rate greater than the atmosphere can compensate? The reason I have to ask is because, while yes, we can, and do, polute the environment, this particular problem is questionable. For example, Krakatoa (east of Java, even though it isn't) put more particulate & carbon dioxide into the air in a single event than we have in the last 100 years. Yet, the earth didn't become an oven. No, the global temperature lowered by several degrees and we had some of the worst winters on record. So, my question is, on this one topic (dioxins and all the other industrial pollutants are demonstrably bad) do we have evidence that we're really doing what we think we're doing. It's all based on a series of computer models and those models are based on certain assumptions that could be wrong. I don't agree that it's junk science, but it could be faulty science.