Reader Mail: Good Questions From A Climate Change Skeptic
Posted: Monday, January 1st, 2007 by damnHippyTags: Agriculture, Climate Change, Reader Response, Science
Two days ago I received an email with some very good questions regarding climate change. I thank the person who sent it because it's wonderful to address my readers real and very legitimate concerns regarding this very complex issue.
The original email text is in bold below in it's entirety and my response is interspersed.
If there is an excess of CO2 in our atmosphere caused by oxygen fueled combustion, why is there not an obvious corresponding shortage of oxygen?
Very good point but there is an effect on atmospheric oxygen levels. You need to keep in mind though that our atmosphere is roughly 20% oxygen while CO2 only accounts for about .038%. That means any effect on atmospheric oxygen will be pretty small. Here's a great article about the measured drop in oxygen levels recorded over the last 20 years or so. The interesting thing is that it's not just from the combustion of fossil fuels, but also from deforestation. It is possible though that the drop in oxygen is minimized by the increase in CO2 which may make existing plants grow faster and better.
CO2 comes out of my mouth and plants need it to survive, and Methane comes out of my ass. How can these elements that were at one time the building blocks of life on earth now suddenly cause the icecaps to melt?
My last post on the site addresses how CO2 can be considered a pollutant even though it's a naturally occurring substance necessary for life on Earth. The long and the short is that too much of something, natural or not, in our atmosphere will have real effects and we're drastically increasing the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere by about 1 percent every two years.
Explain how the UN now blames cows, not humans for causing excess CO2?
Excess methane, not CO2 and they're right. Scientists estimate about 25% of anthropogenic methane emissions are due to cows and other livestock. Cows burp and fart methane gas when they eat, so yeah, global warming is partly due to cow farts.
Methane is #2 on the list of greenhouse gases that we need to get under control. Perhaps more attention should be paid towards reducing methane emissions.
Next year marks the 20th anniversary of the UN announcing that the earth has been experiencing unprecedented warming for several years. I say again that was twenty years ago. The question is obvious.
I think you're talking about the report the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in 1996 which was only 10 years ago and is still valid.
The journal Nature, says that a sample of air from 50 years ago before pollution controls and when we heated our homes with fuel oil and coal, is dirtier than a sample of air from today. Please explain.
Particulate matter in our atmosphere is different from CO2 and methane which are colorless and odorless. You're right though, we have succeeded in reducing the amounts of particulate matter in our atmosphere which is good thing… mainly for public health. There is an effect called global dimming though that is a result of "dirt" in our atmosphere, check out this post.
If the earth’s environment was like a stagnant fish tank, your points would standup (sic). However, our planet is resilient and adaptable because of the carbon cycle that cleans our atmosphere. Volcanoes come to mind?
The carbon cycle is a long one. The CO2 that we release today will continue warming our planet for between 50 - 200 years. Although I agree with you that our planet is very resilient and self-correcting by nature, we are overwhelming the natural processes which remove CO2 from our atmosphere which is why atmospheric levels of CO2 are increasing. We're disturbing the balance.
Volcanoes can also overwhelm the natural balance of our planet's systems, but we can't control that. We can control what we do to affect our climate. We only have one Earth to mess with, if we screw it up too much, we're only screwing ourselves.
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