I don’t see much I can do to influence the conversation over global warming, but I have to do everything I can. So this morning, I emailed the following to Stephen Harper, Jim Prentice, Bob Dechert (my MP), The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail and The National Post. Ideally, I want everyone to know about this, and I want everyone to know that everyone knows. I believe this clearly shows that 1) the composition of the atmosphere is changing and 2) it is us that’s causing that change, two hurdles for many people to accept AGW.

Anyway, it’s quite long and has some basic calculations. If you can, please take time to familiarize yourself with the numbers, I think this is how we should be trying to get the message out. The extreme short version is that global annual CO2 emissions equal 1% of total atmospheric CO2, and CO2 is rising by about 0.5% every year but you should go through the numbers for yourself.

Dear sirs,

I am writing to beg you to take this letter seriously, listen to what I have to say and check the numbers for yourselves. It may sound like hyperbole but I truly believe this may be one of the most important letters you will ever receive. We are at a critical time, where we need a fair, ambitious and binding deal very soon or it may be too late. Obviously the media isn’t responsible for educating the public, but there are people that should be held acccountable for actively misinforming. Of course, I apologize in advance for sounding condescending if you already understand these numbers.

As you know there is substantial public confusion about whether climate change is real and whether it’s being caused by us. Part of the blame certainly lies with the scientists and their poor communication but the media in general is also partly to blame because of their instinct to provide “balance”. Of course, business and government have lead the disinformation campaign, as thoroughly documented in “Climate Cover-Up” by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore. The issue has been completely politicised, but it’s not a political issue and it’s not appropriate to treat it as one. That said, though I’m *completely* opposed to the development of the tar sands at all, I think the future of humanity is important enough that everyone at least understand the issues and negotiate in good faith.

There are really two aspects, both quite unintuitive, that must be understood. First, that we are actually changing the composition of the atmosphere and second that changing the atmosphere is capable of changing the climate itself. Every scientific explanation I’ve ever seen focuses on the complicated physics of “radiative forcing” and how CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas. Meanwhile, activists assume people understand the science and that it’s just a matter of convincing them to take action. but I don’t think 1 person in 100 understands any of it, aside from their position on whether it’s a problem or not. This is the crux of the problem, if it doesn’t intuitively make sense, it’s easy to dismiss as a scam, which is exactly what many have done.

I can’t help with the physics part because I’ve never made much of an attempt to really understand it myself. I’m just a guy sitting on my couch and for the life of me I don’t understand how this angle hasn’t been publicized more but I’ve read a lot and have never seen these calculations. When I thought of it this way, it seemed so much more obvious. I hope you agree. I’ll just give you the numbers and let you confirm them in any way you seem fit. Contact an appropriate scientist to help.

First, the mass of the atmosphere. It seems like a completely impossible calculation, but it’s actually quite trivial to at least get an estimate. The mass of a column of air to the edge of the atmosphere is about 14.7 psi, the average air pressure at sea level. Calculate the surface area of the Earth in square inches, multiple by 14.7 psi, and presto, there’s the mass of the atmosphere. The Earth’s radius is about 3,960 miles and the area of a sphere is 4 π r² (obviously the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere because of mountains, etc but as seen from space, it’s close enough for this calculation). So the surface area comes out to about 197,000,000 square miles, or about 7.91 x10^17 square inches! Times 14.7 gives the mass of about (from now on, I won’t continue repeating “about”) 11.6 x 10^18 pounds or 5.28 x 10^18 kg. It’s easier to call that 5,280,000 gigatonnes (divide by 1,000 for tonnes, divide by another billion for gigatonnes). This is easily verifiable fact #1, the atmosphere weights a bit more than 5,000,000 gigatonnes.

The atmosphere is currently approximately 390 parts per million CO2 *by volume*. At first, I thought that meant * 390 / 1,000,000, but CO2 is denser than air so you have to multiply the result by 44 / 29, the ratio of the density of CO2 to the density of “air”.
5,280,000 * 390 /1,000,000 * 44 /29 gives 3,100 gigatonnes total CO2 in the atmosphere, another easily verifiable fact (here’s a reference, http://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-co2-by-weight-in-the-atmosphere/ and it also lists the weight of CO2 for a few different concentrations). Wikipedia confirms both of these numbers.

Now, find the global total CO2 emissions for 2008. One source is at http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9023772&contentId=7044468 click on the map on the right where it says download the excel workbook. In the contents worsheet, click on “carbon dioxide emissions”, it will take you to worksheet 40. Row 87 gives the total CO2 emissions each year from 1965 to 2008. Cell AS87 gives the value for 2008, 31,577.8 million tonnes, i.e. about 31.6 gigatonnes CO2. Here’s another reference that gives the same value http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5793BB20090810

I can again show you a calculation that helps make sense of this number. It’s more complicated, and quite shocking, but completely real. Let’s consider regular gasoline, which is basically 89% octane and 11% heptane. For order of magnitude calculations, let’s just consider the octane. The chemical formula for octane is C8H18 and the combustion equation is 2C8H18 + 25O2 = 16CO2 + 18H2O. Ignoring the oxygen consumed and water produced because they’re irrelevant here, for every 2 molecules of octane burned, 16 molecules of CO2 are produced! The atomic weights of H, C and O are 1, 12 and 16 respectively, so the molecular weight of octane is 8 * 12 + 18 * 1 = 114. Similarly, the molecular weight of CO2 is (12 + 2 * 16) = 44. The end result is that for every 2 * 114 = 228 g of gasoline, 16 * 44 = 704 g of CO2 is produced. This is “conservation of mass”, and is completely unintuitive because we tend to think the gas is burned up and disappears. The reality is the reaction consumes a lot of oxygen from the atmosphere, and we are converting gasoline into 704 / 228 = 3.1 times as much CO2 by mass! It doesn’t matter how fuel efficient your car is, either, regardless much gas you use, 3 times the mass is released as CO2 (this doesn’t even include the “carbon footprint” of producing, refining and transporting the fuel). Now, go to http://fueleconomy.gov pick a car and see how much CO2 it produces. For a 2010 Lexus RX 350 AWD with the default driving assumptions, 9.2 tonnes of CO2 a year would be produced. Now multiply by maybe 500,000,000 for the total number of cars in the world, very roughly 4.6 gigatonnes of CO2 a year, just from cars.

Add all the other uses of jet fuel, coal, natural gas etc., I think the 31 gigatonne number starts to seem more reasonable. That’s about 5 tonnes of CO2 for every human on the planet, *every year*.

Therefore, the numbers tell us that in 2008, we dumped 31 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere that already had 3,100 gigatonnes in it, i.e. 1% of the total. How did that affect the ppm? Check ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt In 2007 it was 383.71 ppm, in 2008, 385.57, an increase of 1.86 ppm or 0.48% (the reason it’s less than 1% is that about 50% is consumed by plants or absorbed into the ocean, causing acidification, another problem). That doesn’t sound like much, but consider that before the Industrial Revolution it’s been estimated to have been about 280 ppm, in 1959 it was 315.98 and in May 2009, it topped 390 ppm.

The argument that CO2 is “plant food” is misleading at best, because we’re creating way more of it than plants can use, simply because the CO2 level is rising. The benefit to plant growth is also likely to be offset by more severe weather. If you even want to try to blame volcanoes, you need to account for how the 1% that we’re emitting does nothing while only the volcanoes contribute to the increase. Finally, there is one difference that you must account for any other “natural cycles” argument – that difference is that it’s us changing the atmosphere faster than any natural cycle ever has.

Furthermore, once you have these numbers in front of you, saying things “CO2 is an infinitessimal part of the atmosphere” becomes deliberately misleading. I’ve shown you exactly how much it is. And despite what Michele Bachmann says, CO2 is a dangerous gas to humans and animal life in general. At 1,000 ppm, the effects of CO2 poisoning begin to be felt. The IPCC has predicted that CO2 could be as high as 970 ppm by 2100, when your grandchildren might still be alive.

The IPCC (and science in general) is very cautious about claiming certainty, but I believe that I’ve shown clearly 1) how the atmosphere is changing, and 2) that it’s human activity that’s causing it.

As for the “greenhouse effect”, CO2 has been known to be a greenhouse gas for over 150 years (see John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius). To claim otherwise, you need a lot of very good evidence. In fact, Arrhenius calculated that doubling CO2 (from about 290 ppm at the time) would cause 5-6C of warming, *very* close to today’s estimates. As the atmosphere warms, the ocean has actually been absorbing a lot of the heat, this is what leads to more severe hurricanes, more extreme rain or snow events, etc. The next time you catch yourself thinking “What happened to global warming?” during a really extreme winter storm, this is exactly what has been predicted.

Now, what to do with this info? As I suggested, verify it with a scientist. Even more interesting would be to see if the denier scientists can confirm any of this. I expect Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, Fraser Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cooler Heads Coalition etc. won’t be able to because they’re not scientists, they’re conservative think tanks dedicated to the principals of free markets and limited government (see the About page on their websites). Might even make a good bit of investigative journalism for the newspapers.

If I’ve made a significant mistake, please let me know, otherwise, now that you have the facts, if you use contradictory numbers as “science” without the required proof, I will consider it deliberate fraud. By all means, debate the costs, the mechanisms, the checks & balances, etc, but government and the media have to start accepting facts as facts and being accountable for deliberate misinformation.

Jeff Stone
stone1343@gmail.com

Finally, we found a real scientist, Patrick Michaels (with an ’s’) but unsurprisingly, he works for the Cato Institute, who I’ve discussed *many* times before.

http://mediamatters.org/research/200405200001

Michaels is part of a small and dwindling cadre of scientists who remain skeptical about the effect of human activities on global warming and the seriousness of the potential impact.

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=4

Dr. Patrick Michaels is possibly the most prolific and widely-quoted climate change skeptic scientist. He has admitted receiving funding from various fossil fuel industry sources. His latest book, published in September 2004 by the Cato Institute, is titled: Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

Doesn’t mean his science his wrong, but if he’d actually proved anything, don’t you think the deniers would be featuring his talking points a little more prominently? Maybe I’ll look into it a little deeper some day…

I’ve been looking at Sort of Political’s blog some more and I’m really impressed at how much he is part of the problem…

He has a few links to Joanne Nova’s “The Skeptic’s Handbook”, which has been debunked. Joanne herself has an entry in DeSmogBlog’s Skeptic Disinformation Database, with a couple interesting quotes,

Joanne Nova holds a Bachelor of Science degree in microbiology from the University of Western Australia.  She also has a Graduate Certificate in Science Communications from the Australian National University.  After graduation, Nova joined the Shell Questacon Science Circus, a Shell-sponsored program that employs university students to travel around Australia teaching interactive science programs to children.

and,

Mistakenly Referred to as a Climate Change Expert

Although Joanne Nova has not published any research in peer-reviewed journals, she is often presented as an expert in the area of climate science.  For example, Fred Singer’s Science & Environmental Policy Project mistakenly described Joanne Nova as holding a PhD in meteorology.

Furthermore, Nova has been a speaker at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change where she is listed as one of several specialists on the issue of global warming.  In 2009, she gave a presentation entitled, “The Great Global Fawning: How Science Journalists Pay Homage to Non-Science and Un-Reason.”

Joanne Nova has also given presentations for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Cooler Heads Coalition.  The Cooler Heads Coalition is run by CEI and its mission is to “dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis.”  Members of the coalition include conservative think tanks such as FreedomWorks (formerly Citizens for a Sound Economy), the Heartland Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, the George C. Marshall Institute, JunkScience.com, the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Fraser Institute.

The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) lists Ms. Nova as a “qualified endorser” of the Manhattan Declaration.  The ICSC defines a qualified endorser as an individual that is “well-trained in science and technology or climate change-related economics and policy.”

Gee, she’s in with all of the great disinformers… Check them out individually at the Disinformation Database or Exxon Secrets,

Fred Singer & his Science and Environmental Policy Project

Heartland Institute

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Cooler Heads Coalition

George C. Marshall Institute

Fraser Institute

If it wasn’t so fraudulent, it would be funny…

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_Ways_With_The_Right

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)

6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)

7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)

8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)

And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won’t be going over the cliff with them.

Amen.

We all know you don’t believe in global warming, but here’s a friendly tip for you. When you finally realize how badly you’ve betrayed humanity for your retirement fund, you’re gonna need to start saying you’ve been fighting the good fight all along, like you always do. To help you out, you might want to find some examples now of conservatives who DO believe the whole global warming thing. Surely there must be some? Don’t worry, in the meantime I’ll do my best to ensure that no one ever forgets who fought so dishonestly for so long to deny it.

Which do you like better:
“Conservatives: The ones who managed to delay meaningful action against global warming for 20 years.”
“Conservatives: The ones who put Big Oil ahead of humanity for 20 years.”
“Canadian Conservatives: The ones who are actually so stupid that, even in 20 years, they couldn’t figure out that global warming wasn’t a political issue.”
“Canadian Conservatives: The ones to blame when the ocean erases your small island country.”

I use the 20 year figure because it was 1989 that Global Climate Coalition was formed. Do you remember the Global Climate Coalition? They’re the ones whose own scientists told them in 1995 that climate change “cannot be denied”, yet they continued denying it until 2002.

The numbers aren’t so complicated, you might even understand them yourself if you finished high school, I can even show where the numbers come from:

Total CO2 currently in the atmosphere ~ 3,100 gigatonnes
Total 2008 CO2 emissions ~ 31 gigatonnes

Historic CO2 levels:
280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution
316 ppm in 1959
325 ppm in 1969
337 ppm in 1979
353 ppm in 1989
368 ppm in 1999
peaked over 390 ppm in May 2009

Models predict CO2 as high as 1360 ppm by 2100.

What value of CO2 do your experts say we should aim to stabilize at, how do we accomplish that and what effects might we face at that level? Remember that at 1000 ppm, people start finding the air stuffy.

My experts say 350 ppm and I believe them a lot more than I believe the American Petroleum Institute or Exxon Mobil.

Anyway, not expecting an answer anytime soon…

All my love,

stone1343

Today, for Blog Action Day 2009, I’d like to appeal to those who may be “on the fence” to get committed and take action.

The Problem, in a nutshell:

The atmosphere is currently about 390 parts per million CO2, and the world’s best climate experts believe we need to get back to 350 ppm. It was around 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. Our global emissions amount to about 1% of the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, every year. Regardless of all other natural factors, that has to have an effect. CO2 has been known to been a greenhouse gas for 150 years.

The Solution:

The experts recommend a reduction in CO2 emissions of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. To accomplish this, we need government, business and the public all committed to taking action. We all need to demand that our governments step up to the challenge and become part of the solution not part of the problem.

I have such a bad headache that I’m going to leave it at that for now.

Lost in all the talk about global warming, is some simple math that can help you understand the carbon dioxide (CO2) problem more intuitively. The executive summary of this post is as follows:
- Every gallon of gasoline used produces about 20 pounds of CO2.
- A car could produce 20 tonnes or more of CO2 per year.
- The world’s 500,000,000 vehicles could produce about 10,000,000,000 tonnes (10 gigatonnes) of CO2 per year.
- When you factor in all the other uses of fossil fuels, the estimate of global CO2 emissions of 27 gigatonnes per year seems reasonable.
- The entire atmosphere weighs approx 5,000,000 gigatonnes and it is currently about 390 parts per million (ppm) CO2, which would be around 2,000 to 3,000 gigatonnes CO2.
- 27 gigatonnes of human-created CO2 will actually affect the composition of the atmosphere, possibly causing the level to rise by about 1%/year.
- The pre-industrial CO2 concentration is estimated at around 270ppm, we are currently at about 390ppm, almost a 50% increase in 200 years.
- It has been known for 150 years that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas, in the concentration currently found in the atmosphere. Anyone who says it’s a trace gas or a naturally-occurring by-product of life is misleading you, either deliberately lying or because of their own ignorance.

So far, you don’t need to be a scientist to comprehend the numbers, but the shock comes when you look at the number that scientists are starting to agree on that CO2 needs to stabilize at: 350ppm.

The worst part is that it’s mostly only in the US and Canada that acceptance of these numbers is split largely on political boundaries. Conservative leaders in both countries are absolutely willing to lie to the public to maintain the status quo, and regular people don’t have the ability to do the calculations for themselves. Now ask yourself why they’ve been lying to you – the answer is the same as it was for tobacco: money, politics and “free markets”.

Before the lying, astroturfing trolls get here and accuse me of incorrect science, let me say that I’m just a home dad who put this together in an afternoon of Google research. I’m sure I’ve made mistakes and it’s much more complicated than I’ve shown, but I think you’ll agree that we’re dumping CO2 at a scale that is actually capable of changing the atmosphere. Given that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, even at the current “minute” level, you can see that increasing it without boundaries could have potentially catastrophic consequences.

If you haven’t seen the numbers presented this way, verify them for yourself, learn about the subject and you’ll begin to see how blatantly the misinformation has been propagated. To me, there is no other conclusion but that the people who’ve made this a political issue have miscalculated and our children and grand-children will be paying the price for decades of obstruction. This is not something I’m willing to forgive and I hold you partly responsible (assuming you are what I call a “denier” and I am what you might call an “alarmist”).

I’ll even go so far as to issue a challenge to the despicable, lying, Astroturfing frauds, similar to the one at Greenfyre’s, show me evidence that I’m substantially wrong about any of these basic numbers:
- 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas
- up to 20 tonnes or more of CO2 yearly for a single vehicle, or perhaps 10 gigatonnes for 500,000,000 vehicles.
- total global CO2 emissions of about 27 gigatonnes a year
- total CO2 in the atmosphere about 3,000 gigatonnes
- explain a natural mechanism that accounts for measured increases in atmospheric CO2 since 1959 while somehow excluding the substantial amount of man-made CO2
- provide evidence that CO2 does not act as a greenhouse gas at current levels, and that doubling it (or more) will make no difference to melting ice caps and glaciers, sea level rise, climate patterns, etc.

I don’t want politics (“the lefties just want socialism”), anything about Al Gore (because I hate to tell you this, but regardless of how you feel about his politics, he has the facts on his side and all you have are lies), economics (“it’s too expensive”) or propaganda (“just a bunch of alarmists”), I want evidence, backed by scientific research, not just something that you read on someone’s blog.

However, if you don’t have any evidence, but you still just don’t see the possibility that it’s a problem we’re creating and that we have to get under control, take a stand for your position. Comment below for the rest of us to laugh at your stupidity. Who knows, maybe in 20 years I’ll be eating my words.

“Back of the envelope” calculations:

Generally, the gasoline your car uses is about 90% “octane” (that’s what the octane rating indicates, it’s more complicated than this, but for these calculations, it’s close enough) and 10% “heptane”.

The molecular formula for octane is C8H18, meaning it’s composed of 8 carbon atoms and 18 hydrogen atoms, while heptane is C7H16.

Octane combustion is given by this equation:

2C8H18 + 25O2= 16CO2 + 18H2O

which means that 2 octane molecules and 25 oxygen molecules from the atmosphere combine to produce 16 CO2 molecules and 18 water (H2O) molecules. The result of the reaction is energy released that is used to move the car.

Now, if you look at the “Periodic Table of the Elements“, you can find the atomic weights of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, which I will round off to 1, 12 and 16, respectively. You can use these numbers to compare the relative mass of the inputs and the outputs:

Octane: 8 C atoms x atomic mass of 12 + 18 H atoms x atomic mass of 1 = 8 x 12 + 18 x 1 = 114
O2 (an oxygen molecule in the atmosphere): 2 O atoms x 16 = 32
CO2: 1 C atom x 12 + 2 O atoms x 16 = 44
H2O: 2 H x 1 + 1 O x 16 = 18

You can verify that the equation balances:

2 x 114 + 25 x 32 = 16 x 44 + 18 x 18
1028 = 1028

This is conservation of mass, and this is the key part that doesn’t seem intuitively obvious to us. We tend to think we put gas in, it’s burned up and “disappears” because we don’t realize the mass of the exhaust. In fact, the equation tells us if you burn 228g (2 x 114) of gasoline, you consume 800g (25 x 32) of oxygen and the result is 704g (16 x 44) of CO2 plus 324g (18 x 18) of water. Expressed another way, for every gram of gas, you consume 800 / 228 (about 3.5g) of oxygen from the atmosphere and produce 704 / 228 (about 3.1g) of CO2 and 324 / 228 (about 1.4g) water. A litre of gas weighs approximately 770g and the resultant CO2 would weigh 770 x 3.1 (about 2.4kg).

For comparison, the combustion equation for heptane is:

C7H16+11O2 = 7CO2+8H2O

You can do the calculations yourself if you want to, but the end result for the purpose of this post is that it’s close enough to the octane equation and it’s a relatively small fraction of the gasoline, so it can be ignored.

There’s the bottom line, 1 litre of gasoline in produces about 2.4kg of CO2 out.

In gallons, 1 US gallon of gas produces almost 20 pounds of CO2!!! Here’s a separate citation for this number.

Depending on your vehicle and the number of miles you drive, you can easily produce 20 tonnes of CO2 each year (for example, assuming 15 mpg x 25,000 miles/year). Using fueleconomy.gov, you can estimate your own annual “carbon footprint”.

That’s one vehicle, multiply that by the number of cars on the road in the world, say 500,000,000 (estimates vary, but we’re looking for rough numbers here), you get 10,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2, just from vehicles, i.e. not including heating and generating electricity from fossil fuels or even burning wood. Current estimates of total CO2 emissions from human activity are about 27,000,000,000, or 27 gigatonnes, per year, so you can see that my numbers are close enough.

Now, the weight of Earth’s atmosphere is 5,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes or 5,000,000 gigatonnes, and it is approximately 390ppm CO2, which would translate to 5,000,000 x 390/1,000,000, or about 2,000 gigatonnes CO2. Here, Wikipedia says 3,000 gigatonnes, so I’ll use that number, but again you can see how close my calculations are.

So there’s currently 3,000 gigatonnes CO2 in the atmosphere, and we’re creating about 27 gigatonnes more each and every year. You might notice that’s 0.9% (27/3000), so if CO2 is increasing by that much each year, then it would seem from these calculations that it’s caused by us. In fact, it’s not even that much. In two years, from July 2007 to July 2009, CO2 went from 384.4ppm to 387.8ppm, >1.5ppm per year, but only an increase of 0.8%.

I’m not a climate scientist, but I think my methodology is close enough, and I believe it shows that the amount of CO2 we’re currently dumping into the atmosphere is actually significant enough to change its composition, which is another point that just doesn’t seem intuitive because we tend to think of the atmosphere as basically infinite. Remember that before the Industrial Revolution, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was relatively stable, the natural “sources” and “sinks” more or less balanced each other, the one thing that has changed is us producing almost 30,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

We’re currently at about 390ppm, and increasing by more than 1ppm each year, imagine where we’ll be in 10, 50 or 100 years.

At around 600ppm, people perceive the air as “stuffy” and CO2 poisoning starts around 1000ppm. We are in fact on a path to extinction. But the problem is not dying of CO2 poisoning, it’s the greenhouse effect, which John Tyndall discovered in 1859, exactly 150 years ago this year. It doesn’t matter whether CO2 is a naturally-occurring by-product of life or how minute the concentration of CO2 is, the point is, it does act as a greenhouse gas at the level currently in the atmosphere.

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius calculated that if CO2 were to double, it would increase the temperature by up to 6C (almost 11 degrees F).

Any talk about “natural cycles” is also invalidated by this one point: The one difference between past climate changes and the current one is the amount of CO2 we’re creating.

The pre-industrial level of CO2 has been estimated at about 270ppm, so it has already increased by almost 50%. Anyone who tells you the CO2 level hasn’t changed since pre-industrial times is assuming you’re not smart enough to follow the basic math above. They would also have to account for how CO2 went from 390ppm down to 315ppm when measurements at Mauna Kea began in 1959, then has gradually increased back to 390.

Republicans: “The biggest threat to America is the gays… and the atheists… The two biggest threats to civilization are the gays and the atheists… and public health care… The three biggest threats to civilization are the gays, the atheists and public health care… and the Employee Free Choice Act. The four biggest threats… Amongst the biggest threats to civilization are the gays, the atheists, public health care and the Employee Free Choice Act.”

(with sincerest apologies to Monty Python)

Not to mention evolution,  climate change (you gotta love this blog’s name, “Axis of Right”, not only identifying themselves as right-wing but also implying “correct” and more patriotic than the left because of the awesomeness of their stars and stripes banner, not to mention putting the word “scientists” in air quotes and accusing the media and the UN of being in on the conspiracy.), NOT torturing, the Fairness Doctrine, pornography, gun control, a black man in the White House and of course not just Islamic terrorism, but Islam itself.

BTW, according to WorldNetDaily, Obama’s economic stimulus package “makes a deliberate – and unconstitutional – attempt to censor religious speech and worship on school campuses across the nation”, purely by prohibiting stimulus money being used to repair religious facilities.

I know this is supposed to be a blog about atheism, but global warming is (obviously!) another of my main concerns. It actually all fits together perfectly: Christians, Republicans, liars, deniers.

Here’s another reference about skeptics being paid to disagree with global warming…

More about Lawrence Solomon, apologizing for falsely calling scientists deniers. His book, “The Deniers”, is promoted as a “must’read” on freedominion.com, with no disclaimers. And he even admits that his subjects aren’t really deniers, from DeSmogBlog,

Solomon even says so. He says that while reflecting on his own research, “I … noticed something striking about my growing cast of deniers. None of them were deniers.”

Nigel Weiss, among others, objected to being used, Solomon and the National Post eventually had to apologize to him. But the series has been publicized on at least one right-wing site, freerepublic.com.

Let’s be clear, many of the deniers are status quo, small-government, right wingers with their own agenda. Many call themselves “Christians”, although there’s nothing Christian about their beliefs. They use the same techniques that Big Tobacco used (Fred Singer attacked a 1993 EPA  report on the dangers of smoking, calling it ‘junk science’) and they have successfully stalled action for over 25 years (if you’re skeptical of this story, here’s a reference to the 1979 report, JSR-78-07). They still have lots of believers, for example, Sarah Palin and junkscience.com. It all goes to reinforce the right’s war on science and the “elite”. They even shamelessly promote “Carbon Belch Day”, while Exxon and Peabody are committing crimes against humanity.

Here’s an excellent series, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.

On the point of lying, conservatives even have their own version of Wikipedia (with charming entries on homosexuality, Creation Science and lots more), here’s just one nice example of right wing hatred. The hard right is in a major battle all over the country to have creationism taught in schools (no reference needed, look it up if you don’t believe me).

I do still think there are reasonable people with legitimate reasons for voting Republican, however, I also think until the lying, hating, ignorant, largely “Christian” extreme right is marginalized to the point of irrelevance, voting Republican is voting to continue America’s loss of international credibility. Hatred and war are not the solution to terrorism, especially when America is mortgaging its future to the Middle East for oil. The US should take a good look at itself, and realize that they have a serious problem with the way they treat their poor and sick, the small-government model of capitalism is in tatters (dragging the rest of the world down with it) and the world needs the US to take a strong position on the environment. Four more years of right-wing hatred and ignorance

We all know America is extremely polarized, I believe that until reasonable Republicans disavow the tactics of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Phil Gramm, Dick Cheney and so many others, they are not acting in the interest of promoting an America that is a leader on the world stage. John McCain is no “maverick” to me and Sarah Palin is part of the scary right wing that should never get close to power.

In his piece, Wikipedia’s zealots, Lawrence Solomon says,

The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after a professor of history and science studies at the University of California San Diego, but the page offers only sketchy details about Oreskes. The page is mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she wrote, and that Science journal published, called “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” This paper analyzed articles in peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the alarming positions on global warming taken by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position,” Oreskes concluded.

Oreskes’s paper — which claimed to comprehensively examine all articles in a scientific database with the keywords “climate change” — is nonsense. As FP readers know, for the last 18 months I have been profiling scientists who disagree with the UN panel’s position. My Deniers series, which now runs to some 40 columns, describes many of the world’s most prominent scientists. They include authors or reviewers for the UN panel (before they quit in disgust). They even include the scientist known as the father of scientific climatology, who is recognized as being the most cited climatologist in the world. Yet somehow Oreskes missed every last one of these exceptions to the presumed consensus, and somehow so did the peer reviewers that Science chose to evaluate Oreskes’s work.

Ok, so the Oreskes paper is “nonsense” because she didn’t include any of the scientists that he’s featured.

Solomon continues, explaining how Oreskes’ paper was challenged by Benny Peiser of CCNet.

When Oreskes’s paper came out, it was immediately challenged by science writers and scientists alike, one of them being Benny Peiser, a prominent U.K. scientist and publisher of CCNet, an electronic newsletter to which I and thousands of others subscribe. CCNet daily circulates articles disputing the conventional wisdom on climate change. No publication better informs readers about climate-change controversies, and no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.

(In all cases, above and below the emphasis is mine, illustrating Solomon’s habit of creating “credibility” with words). Let’s continue,

For this reason, when visiting Oreskes’s page on Wikipedia several weeks ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes’s correctness.

Here’s some sources for the Peiser v. Oreskes issue:

Gristmill

DeSmogBlog

MediaWatch

Wikipedia on Bebby Peiser

I think Peiser’s position can fairly be summarized by this quote from his October 2006 email to Media Watch:

“I do not think anyone is questioning that we are in a period of global warming. Neither do I doubt that the overwhelming majority of climatologists is agreed that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact. However, this majority consensus is far from unanimous.”

The rest of Solomon’s article detail his attempts to update the Wikipedia entry on Oreskes, only to be continually thwarted by someone named “TableTop”,

By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident.

and concluding,

Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots.

Okay, Solomon says  (see above) “… no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.” Let’s see, his Wikipedia entry says,

Benny Peiser is a member of the Faculty of Science at Liverpool’s John Moores University. He was born in Israel and educated in West Germany and previously was an historian of ancient sport at the University of Frankfort/M. He is a social anthropologist with particular research interest in human and cultural evolution. His research focuses on the effects of environmental change and catastrophic events on contemporary thought and societal evolution.

Peiser is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a member of Spaceguard UK. He has written extensively on neo-catastrophism and the potential risk posed by near-Earth objects. He is the editor of CCNet, an electronic science and science policy network with more than 3,000 subscribers from around the world. It is in this capacity that a 10km-wide asteroid, Minor Planet (7107) Peiser, was named in his honour by the International Astronomical Union.

Peiser is a member of the editorial board of Energy and Environment and a scientific advisor to the Lifeboat Foundation.

all of which gives him zero credibility for addressing climate change. What else can we find?

DeSmogBlog says he is

an advising member of the “Scientific Alliance,” an organization formed by a UK businessman who was fed up with “all this environmental stuff.”

and surprise, surprise:

In December 2004, the Scientific Alliance teamed up with ExxonMobil funded George C. Marshall Institute to produce a paper titled “Climate Issues and Questions.”

In January 2005, the Scientific Alliance held a half-day seminar on the “alarmism” around the issue of climate change. Speakers included Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen.

So, Peiser is a social anthropologist in a “denier” organization, who in short, believes in anthropogenic global warming.

The fact that Lawrence Solomon can’t get his version of the truth into Wikipedia speaks more for the credibility of Wikipedia than it being controlled by zealots.

The fact that the National Post continues to allow Solomon to spout his crap speaks volumes for the credibility of that newspaper.