Monday, December 25, 2006

Not Enough CO2

Atmospheric CO2 is very low by geological standards. Lack of sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere stunts plant growth.

We need to get together with Russia, China, oil producers, coal producers, and in fact the rest of the world to see what we can do to get more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Anon has left a couple of good links in the comments:

CO2 Science
CO2 in Geologic Time

Anon has a few more links of interest:

CO2 geologic time with error bands.
Debunking the hockey stick.
Hockey stick hysteria or why low pass filters can eliminate useful data.

Don't look now but Congress is getting in on the act with an act of Congress once the Democrats are in.

Cross Posted at Classical Values.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Evidence ? When CO2 is more abundant than today ?

Anonymous said...

Look at the graph here. CO2 toxicity starts to show up somewhere north of 10,000ppm (1%) from what little research I've done, so we'd be all right even in the Cambrian period.

Note the lack of correlation between the CO2 level and the global temperature average over this vast time span.

I don't think CO2 levels drive the climate.

Anonymous said...

I found an even better chart of CO2 levels, this one includes the range of error, which show how much uncertainty there is in these kind of figures. But clearly, CO2 levels over the last several thousand years are at the low end, especially compared to 200 million years and 400 million years ago.

However 380ppm is 0.038%, even 7,000ppm is only 0.7%, anyone who wants me to believe this low a concentration can have s significant "greenhouse" effect is going to have to show me the math. Arguing from correlation between CO2 level trends and recent temperature trends has its own problems.

A Jacksonian said...

One of the great things about being a geologist is being able to actually get that 'long term perspective'. So, when you want a long-term perspective on climate and weather you do NOT go to meteorologists... you go to geologists. Thus, my view on global warming which still stands. Without taking the larger, geological context of things like the speed of plate tectonics, orogeny (mountain building) and the sudden loss of inland seas, no one can make any basis for discriminating between relatively short term variations in a chaotic inter-glacial period that has typically seen fast and steep temperature variations, larger global effects and the effects of mankind. CO2 levels are at a historic LOW and there is no correlation between CO2 and global temperatures except at the very low end. And even *that* does not take into account break-up of the last supercontinent and the loss of inland seas due to the continents moving faster and riding higher on the mantle.

The Earth has even had sudden, intense, glacial periods that ended just as abruptly with NO change in CO2 that was appreciable and the picking up the exact same warm period right after the glacial period.

And let us not forget that Mars is also undergoing a warming spell... so insolation also plays a part in all of this...

But that is what you get when you ask climatologists to speculate on a mere 100 years worth of data and not on 4.2 billion years worth. It is not their field.