| It's almost summer in the northern hemisphere, and
that can only mean one thing — it's time for global-warming (search)
activists to sound the alarm.
Though temperatures obviously rise due to natural causes during
the summer, global-warming activists like to take advantage of this
time to dramatize their cause.
This year is no exception, as global-climate worry-warts gathered
this week in Washington, D.C., at a conference sponsored by the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (search) to
convulse about the Bush administration's refusal to embrace the
Kyoto global-warming treaty (search) and clamp down on emissions of
greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
Speakers at the conference said they hoped to convince the U.S.
public to pressure politicians into policy changes.
"In this country, it depends a lot on what happens in the next
election," geochemist Daniel Schrag of Harvard University told
Reuters. "I don't think we can expect to change the minds of this
administration in the next couple of months."
Schrag then went on to provide alarmist factoids about the build-up
of carbon dioxide (search) in the atmosphere. He said the current
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 380 parts per
million — higher than it has been for at least the past 430,000
years.
"In the next 100 years, unless immediate action is taken,
carbon-dioxide levels will rise to between 800 and 1,000 parts per
million. The last time carbon dioxide was that high was during the
Eocene (search), 55 to 36 million years ago," Schrag told Reuters.
At that time, he said, "palm trees lived in Wyoming, crocodiles
lived in the Arctic, Antarctica was a pine forest and sea level was
at least 300 feet higher than today."
But is atmospheric carbon dioxide all that really separates us from
coconuts in Laramie and Inuit crocodile wrestling?
Hardly. About 95 percent of the greenhouse effect (search) — the
atmospheric warming due to the trapping of solar energy that makes
life possible on Earth — is due to water vapor, 99.999 percent of
which is of natural origin.
The other 5 percent of the greenhouse effect is due to carbon
dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other miscellaneous gases.
Although carbon dioxide is the most dominant of these gases by
volume, comprising about 99.4 percent, the other gases trap more
heat. So the contribution of carbon dioxide to the 5 percent of the
greenhouse effect not due to water vapor is much less than 99.4
percent — it's about 72 percent.
Carbon dioxide, therefore, is responsible for roughly 3.6 percent of
the greenhouse effect (5 percent, representing the percentage of the
greenhouse effect not due to water vapor, multiplied by 72 percent,
representing the percentage of that 5 percent due to carbon
dioxide).
But carbon dioxide is produced both naturally and by humans. About
97 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide is natural, in fact. Only
about 3 percent is from human activity.
That means that only about 0.11 percent of the greenhouse effect
(that is, 3 percent of 3.6 percent) is due to human releases of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Put another way, about 99.89 percent of the greenhouse effect has
nothing to do with carbon-dioxide emissions from human activity.
Factoring in the other greenhouse gases, the total human
contribution to the greenhouse effect is about 0.3 percent. In other
words, about 99.7 percent of the greenhouse effect is due entirely
to nature.
When you consider that the greenhouse effect contributes about 60
degrees Fahrenheit to the Earth's average temperature (which would
be about zero degrees Fahrenheit without the greenhouse effect), it
doesn't really seem like atmospheric carbon dioxide levels — even if
they triple or quadruple because of human activities — are all that
important to global climate.
If the carbon dioxide-emissions reductions called for by the Kyoto
global warming treaty were implemented, human greenhouse
contributions would be reduced by about 0.03 percent. Atmospheric
physicist Fred Singer says this would have an "imperceptible effect
on future temperatures — one-twentieth of a degree by 2050."
As the Kyoto protocol would require cutting energy use by about 30
percent by 2010 — necessarily causing inestimable negative economic
consequences — it's easy to see why U.S. politicians can't run away
from the Kyoto protocol fast enough.
It seems we don't need to worry about coconuts in Wyoming so much as
the nutty global warmers who meet every summer in Washington, D.C |