Human greed and mainstream ignorance
In today’s Times Argus, a Vermont publication, Dr. Alan Betts reflects on the analogy between smoking and the “global carbon-dioxide pollution” that comes from the burning of fossil fuels.
We now have public health advertising to warn teenagers of the long-term hazards of smoking. Why? Because for decades the tobacco industry encouraged teenagers to start smoking as a way of building its future market. (…) The biggest consequences from all our carbon dioxide emissions are also in the future, so it’s hard to grasp the significance of our addiction to fossil fuels for our children.
Dr. Alan Betts is Vermont’s leading climate scientist and the past president of the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering. He received his B.A. in Theoretical Physics in 1967 and his M.A. in 1971 from Cambridge. He received his PhD. in Meteorology in London in 1970. From 1971-1979, he was a professor at Colorado State University before founding Atmospheric Research in Pittsford, Vermont, in 1979. Now how can such a well-educated man call carbon dioxide a pollutant and compare its effect with that of nicotine fumes?
All animals, including us humans, breathe out carbon dioxide, which is then used by plants during photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is the principle food of plants. When the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increases the food available to the Earth’s plants increases. Carbon itself is the basis of all life on Earth and carbon atoms continually move through living organisms, the oceans and the atmosphere. When you watch your child grow, you actually watch CO2 being further processed. So why all those horror stories about CO2 poisoning the planet?
Another climate change scientist, Dr James Lovelock of Great Britain, predicts Apocalypse in The Daily Mail.
We’re all doomed! 40 years from global catastrophe – and there’s NOTHING we can do about it.
What is it with all those scientists? Are their predictions of total disaster just clumsy efforts to get noticed and published? And are journalists really so ignorant to the basic facts of biology?
21 comments
Heard about ocean acidification? Even if you don’t think that the effect CO2 has on the climate doesn’t qualify it as a pollutant, that ought to do it. What Betts understand and you don’t is that whether or not something is a pollutant depends on where it is and in what quantities.
Lovelock is extreme, but no more extreme than some of the scientists people on your side love to quote.
The thing all these “scientists” have in common is that they are quacks.
There goes Thomas again, parroting Greanpeace’s jargon. Oh, no, the ocean is getting acidic. Hey, wait, this is actually a good point. If we double CO2, it creates ocean acidity. Really. This is like swatting mosquitoes on a bad camping trip. Uh, can’t we dump drain cleaner into the ocean to fix that or genetically engineer plankton to shit it out? Ocean acidity. O.K. let’s find the graph (an hour or two later…):
Ugh. Google images just shows worst-case scenarios. Actual measurements are lacking. Maybe because ocean-going people worried more about star-based navigation than the taste of toxic sea water, which tastes nearly as bad as toxic urine does, meaning mainly TOO SALTY.
Ever heard of a buffer? It’s a solution that resists changes in acidity. It’s based on things that suck up or release protons without much change, like Baking Soda. Add acidic vinegar or skin-dissolving base drain cleaner (NaOH) to a glass full of Baking Soda, and not much happens to the pH. I wonder if the ocean has a lot of buffering ability. I don’t know (yet).
Hey, what’s the pH of tonic water? That’s rather bitter indeed. Google search = nothing. I have some pH strips here, but no tonic water. But that would require that he ocean actually bubble like Champagne.
And CO2 fertilizes plankton, the lowest form of the food chain in the ocean besides deep sea eaters of sulfates from volcano vents.
Carbonic acid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonic_acid
“Carbonic acid only ever exists in solution in equilibrium with carbon dioxide, and so the concentration of H2CO3 is much lower than the concentration of CO2, reducing the measured acidity.”
And a link to a Wikipedia article on “Ocean Acidification”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
“Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.179 to 8.104 (a change of -0.075).”
“Note that, although the ocean is acidifying, its pH is still greater than 7 (that of neutral water), so the ocean could also be described as becoming less alkaline.”
It’s the END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, and I feel fine.
Thomas may though have a point. But I can’t find any graphs that link 1940s postwar CO2 increases with ocean pH. My intuition, given that the planet has been through many cycles of such issues, is that CO2 overall will FERTILIZE the ocean, just as it does photosynthetic organisms on land. Also, if the ocean gets too acidic, my god man, how hard is it to fix that? Most *any* mineral such as sand or clay is basic, as in BASE-ic, meaning anti-acidic. That the ocean contains 10,000 bacteria per square inch is also a tonic fact, given that the ones killed by acidity will then be replaced in population by the ones that feed on acid.
Dude, you gotta provide references, or we are just shooting in the dark trying to learn a whole new field of science, that you merely hand wave at us. F*ck you, up the ass, man strutting himself with his K-Mart underwear down his ankles. Do you homework instead of forcing us to do it for you.
Ocean Acidification? Go piss in the ocean. Let’s divert our sewage into the ocean. Nitrogen and basic (urea is a base) nitrogen too.
Nik, you even provided a reference yourself in the form of that Wikipedia article. You are quite right that the oceans are fairly well buffered, but a buffer doesn’t work by magic, it works by changing the kind of ions you find in the ocean, and that has consequences:
“it is believed that the resulting decrease in pH will have negative consequences, primarily for oceanic calcifying organisms. These use the calcite or aragonite polymorphs of calcium carbonate to construct cell coverings or skeletons. Calcifiers span the food chain from autotrophs to heterotrophs and include organisms such as coccolithophores, corals, foraminifera, echinoderms, crustaceans and molluscs.”
Based on what you write you seem happy with an ocean populated with acid tolerant bacteria, personally I prefer a little more life than that. Coral reefs are important.
Oh, and I had assumed that anyone interested enough in the subject to start a blog about it would already know some of the basic facts, so I assumed that mentioning ocean acidification would be enough for maggie to respond since she already should have done her homework.
Actually, Thomas, I must admit that I know very little. And the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know.
I think there are better ways to name a blog than “The Climate Scam: Nature, not Humans, rules the Climate” if you don’t know that much about the subject. By accusing IPCC and a large majority of scientists in the field of being involved in a scam you are sticking your neck out.
There is the argument that CO2 will acidify the oceans thereby hampering the calcification process of reefs. “In a study of calcification rates of massive Porites coral colonies on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Lough and Barnes (1997) found that ‘the 20th century has witnessed the second highest period [our italics] of above average calcification in the past 237 years’” pg 21 of the hansen critique pdf by Sherwood B. Idso and Craig D. Idso. The title of that pdf is, “Carbon Dioxide and Global Change: Separating Scientific Fact from Personal Opinion”
John M Reynolds
And I think you think too much, Thomas.
John, in the abstract to that article the authors states that calcification rates have started to drop, but suspects that “the recent decline may be a return to more normal conditions”. Knowing Idso we can also be assured that out of all articles published he has dug up the one most favorable to his cause. If you want the real picture, check the articles that has linked this one to see what others have concluded.
Maggie, sorry I’m not going to apologize for thinking.
“…he has dug up the one most favorable to his cause.”
Thomas, as long as the opposite view has been proven, then the calcification reduction due to acidification hypothesis is disproven. That is how science works.
John M Reynolds
“it is believed that the resulting decrease in pH will have negative consequences, primarily for oceanic calcifying organisms. ”
Hey Thomas, ever heard of the wonder of evolution ?
Don’t you think that the calcifying organisms can adept to a slightly more acidic ocean ?
The world is not a stable place, never was, never will be. Things like temperature and ocean acidity will change, even after we are long gone.
Don’t overestimate the influence we tiny humans have.
John, what view is it you claim is proven given that the paper you cite state that calcification is dropping? For that matter, if you know anything about science you should realize that you should be very careful about basing opinions on a single paper. Errors are quite common, that’s why I suggested you check citations.
Hans, yes, I’ve heard about evolution, but how long do you think it will take? While this adaptation is taking place, assuming it can keep up with the speed in which we change the environment, expect populations of corals to diminish dramatically, and since corals are important for many fishes, expect them to decline too etc.
Don’t underestimate the influence humans have!
Thomas, once upon a time one man said: “scio me nihil scire”. Perhaps you remember his name, I am not sure it was “Thomas”.
Thomas,how old are our coral reefs?answer; bloody ancient!which means they have survived recurrant ice ages every 100,000yrs,followed by rapid warming ,with susequent co2 and 125metre sea level rises.Have another squizze at those vostock ice core data that al gore got so wrong,and then plot humanities current position in that cycle.got it.ok,then try to give us some reason for that recurrant rapid warming spike every 100,000yrs
maggie,Bertrand Russell would agree with you.quote of the week from SEPP “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent are full of doubt”
Coral building species are pretty ancient even if corals have undergone mass extinctions a couple of time being replaced by new species filling the same niche. This is not that same as saying that coral structures are ancient, in hard time corals can survive as individual organism without forming the massive reefs we think of. Obviously todays coral reefs that exist on what was dry land during the last ice age are far more recent than that. I’d be amazed if you can find any conventional coral reef that is more than 10,000 years old given this fact.
Then you should be aware that CO2 changes during the ice age cycles were *far* slower than what we see today and given slow changes ocean chemistry buffers pH, it just isn’t able to keep up today. The time you should use as comparison isn’t the ice age cycle but the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum 55 million years ago, and the CO2 spike then led to a mass extinction of sea creatures and a long lasting drop in pH.
Maggie may find this edifying :
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/climate_of_here/
i am an indian, in one of the most backward regions; here the electricity is limited to 30% of population; not much of cars and buses; 95% of population has never seen an airport. population density is 200 persons per sq.km; our area does not contribute to global warming or pollution; we do not have any factories; nor use much fertilizer or insecticide. i invite all of you who preach against the polluting industries and aeroplanes to come stay with us for a month and decide if this is the life you would recommend for all the world.
As Einstein said, one would be enough to disprove a hypothesis. The 1997 paper shows that though the CO2 levels have been skyrocketting since the mid 1940’s, the calcification continued at a high rate. Your hypothesis that the calcification rates will decrease due to slight changes in acidity thus is proven false. That there has been a change recently in the calcification rates is interesting. How recently is recently? Without specifying when the calcification rate started to drop, you are only giving anecdotal and thus useless information. I gave you scientific data and you countered with nothing useful.
I have no idea how you know that the CO2 concentration has never experienced a large jump. The Vostok CO2 concentration data are quite sparse. The greatest change they show is at a depth of 1870.2 where the concentration dropped by an average of 0.24 ppm per year for 54 years. The average difference between the years is 1142. For the temperature data, the average span between readings is only 127 years. Comparing that to satellite temperature data which is captured once every 10 seconds, and you get an idea of how sparse the data is. In other words, the CO2 data are missing a lot of details. And don’t forget that the concentration of the weak carbonic acid is lower than the concentration of CO2 which is measured in ppm.
Hans, you don’t even have to go as far as evolution. Biology is a powerful feedback mechanism that the computer models cannot include. As more CO2 has entered the oceans, life in the oceans has responded positively. Salps are but one example of how life is thriving and is adding a negative feedback to CO2 concentrations now that their food source has become more plentiful.
John M Reynolds
John, you quote a second hand report that gives no details from an extremely biased website of an article. I look up the abstract and quote from this, and you accuse *me* of using “anecdotal and thus useless information”. Get serious! Since you thought this paper was important, you are the one who ought to be familiar with it. I’m not going to pay for access to every paper someone brings up in a discussion!
Your “large” CO2 change corresponds to 54*0.24=13 ppm. Not very big compared to todays change, is it? There may have been small fluctuations, real or measurement errors, but nothing of the current size.
Last I saw about the oceans, the warming had led to decreased vertical circulation, which means less available nutrients are circulated, and the low production areas in the oceans are expanding:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080305_oceandesert.html
Salps are expanding at the expense of krill, hardly a net benefit.
Yours is anecdotal because you provided no data. What were the dates? Like I asked, how recent is recent? Without that, it is indeed useless for discussion.
About the change in CO2, you misquoted me. As well, you cannot say, “[t]here may have been small fluctuations, real or measurement errors, but nothing of the current size” using the vostok data. Like I said, the data are too sparse to be useful.
As well, while krill keep the carbon near the surface, the salps’ daily travels between shallow and deeper water provide a mechanism for depositing the extra carbon onto the ocean floor where it gets trapped. That is a huge net benefit if you think CO2 is a driver for climate change.
About your link, it even admits, “[b]ut with a nine-year time series, it is difficult to rule out decadal variation.”
John M Reynolds
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