What is the real problem?

Politics and obscuration confound much of the global warming debate. In the long term there isn't much doubt that global warming is occurring. After all, technically we're in the last ice age still. Just by the Minkowski cycles we'll see a warming trend for the next hundred years (and then temperatures will plummet like a rock). Politicalization has led to the misleading fudging of data. For example, a few years you could read about the megatons of CO2 emitted in the Mammoth Lakes area. Those numbers have been revised downward to mere tons. Given the extent of killed forests, and the level of CO2 in the soil over many square miles, I have severe doubts about the new smaller numbers.

Politics has also obscured that only a minor part of CO2 comes from the burning of fossil fuels. According to studies that the Woods Hole Institute performed, over half of the CO2 increase can be attributed to "land use change" -- that is, the burning of the rain forests in the Amazon and Indonesia. Of the remaining portion CO2, most of it comes from the production of cement. When you heat limestone to produce cement, it releases prodigious amounts of CO2. The development of China and the 3rd world is responsible for most of this change.

Fudging of data and revising history also impacts our estimation of the volcanic contribution of greenhouse gases. As another example, the overturning of the lakes in Africa percolated with volcanic CO2, was estimated to have released more CO2 than the entire industrial output of the the United States, and yet the UN report estimates volcanic contribution as a minor part of the CO2 increase. To be fair, perhaps they attribute volcanic contribution as a steady-state variable that does merely maintains the level of CO2 without increasing it -- a fallacious assumption.

Likewise politics overcomes common sense in the discussion of "biofuels". In no shape, way, or form, does bio-diesel, ethanol, or natural gas, help reduce CO2 emissions. When you burn something that contains carbon, it produces CO2.

Water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas than CO2, and there is hundreds of times more CO2 in the atmosphere. Anthropogenic CO2 pundits claim that it is the altitude of gas that contains but fail to explain how CO2, a heavier gas and H20, reaches the greenhouse altitudes.

Anthropogenic CO2 pundits claim thousands of scientific papers support their assertions, but a quick survey of papers on climate show that the vast majority of them refer to each other, and precious few contain original data. I found it painful to find many of the papers commented on how one mathematical model differed from the results of a computer model, and those papers were cited as evidence of global warming. Number of papers and claims of consensus in no way constitutes scientific method, but isn't anyone bothered by the low quality of the cited papers?

Now for the really scary stuff: many of the Earth's previous ice ages are marked with elevated levels of CO2. It appears that the Earth avoided a fate of a giant snowball only because of its greenhouse gases. Part of the carbon cycle is the accumulation of carbon rich sediments becoming limestone, and subducting under the continents, to be emitted again through volcanic action. We know that the carbon content of the sediments has varied widely over millions of years. This means in geologic times volcanoes can belch a huge bolus of CO2 any time now.

Another consideration is that Antarctic ice is cold enough to sequester CO2 for millions of years. At times Antarctica is cold enough to freeze CO2 out of the atmosphere. I expect some deep ice to be positively fizzy with the stuff. Now let's suppose that an iceberg the size of an average U.S. state breaks off -- you don't need global warming for that event as increased snowfall in Antarctica due to to global cooling will do it too. That huge iceberg drifts north, and dumps its load of freshwater and dissolved CO2 in warmer waters, killing all life in the region.

In the last decade we've seen the Sun go through unusual patterns of activity and inactivity, and yet the publicly available data on the Sun shows remarkable stability in its radiance. The Earth's magnetic field appears to be dying. We don't know a lot about the coupling of the Sun and its variability and the Earth's magnetic field and weather, but there is obviously a connection.

Really big things are happening in the natural world. Politics, lies, and obscuration interfere with our investigating what is really happening. Some of those things can kill us all. We really do need to spend some time and money on some basic research.

As you can see I don't post often. I hope to do better. My next post is going to be on just getting rid of the CO2. If its such a problem, how much will it cost to just extract it? Its interesting to note how many solutions depend upon sequestration when pyrolizing CO2 with a catalyst to pure carbon and oxygen is an exothermic reaction.