Is there evidence of a strong connection between C02 emissions and global warming?

Question

please be as specific as you can and give examples..thank you:]

Answer 1

The greenhouse effect is necessary to support life on Earth. With out it the planet would have a global average temperature of - 18 c. With the greenhouse effect it is 15 c ( a difference of 33 c). 95% of the greenhouse effect is caused by water vapour, 4.82% is cause by methane, nitorus oxide etc and the final 0.18% is caused by carbon dioxide. From these figures you can see that our carbon dioxide emissions could not effect the planet even if we tried hard. Now switching to hydrogen power may well mess up the climate by producing more water vapour.

Answer 2

According to research, one of the greatest contributor to global warming is the excessive emission of carbon dioxide. We know that the major source of the earth's energy is the sun. The sun then emits shortwavelength light and heat radiation waves to the earth. Some of these reflected rays will escape the earth through the atmosphere as longwave length ultraviolet rays. However, due to the excessice greenhouse gases in the atmosphere most especially carbon dioxide, these ultraviolet rays cannot escape the atmosphere so they will return to the lower atmosphere  causing this lower atmosphere to warm. Too much carbon dioxide is a very big threat in our environment because it is harmful for some organisms and it contributes to the thinning of the ozone layer. To control the carbon dioxide emission of the world, there is a remedy known as  the Kyoto Protocol which aims to control the carbon dioxide of every country participated in this program.

Answer 3

No. CO2 is in fact a very small part of the total global warming picture – around 3%. Of this 3% total, approximately 95% of the CO2 in the atmosphere occurs naturally, and the human contribution is only about 5% of this 3%. Thus the human contribution to global warming is very small. Further, CO2 levels (as a driver) do not correlate well with temperature, as has been seen in ice cores where the CO2 levels *followed* temperature increase by an average of 800 years. In more modern times, and with better data collection the “CO2 as driver of temperature” concept still fails, as we saw temperatures between 1940 and 1979 steadily decreasing amid warnings of an imminent ice age, while CO2 was increasing dramatically.

http://www.nov55.com/gbwm.html

Ultimately water vapor alone drives nearly 95% of the greenhouse effect, making it the main contributor to global warming by an overwhelming amount.  

http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=30

Answer 4

Well some would claim there is a direct link between the two, the logic is seriously flawed.  Lawyers call the logic they use "post hoc, ergo propter hoc."  Which means "after, therefore because of."

In actual english, it's pretty simple.  The logic used to link global warming and CO2 is similar to this...

A car drove by, then my house fell down.  Therefore, the car driving by caused the house to fall down.

Now, we all know that this isn't true.  But, in the case of global warming... we all bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Scientists noticed an increasing trend in the production of androgenic (man made) CO2.  Then they noticed a trend over the past 100 years of temperatures climbing almost imperceptably.  So logically the only cause was the increasing CO2 emissions...

100 years... it's hardly enough information to base a climate change model on, considering the scale of the geologic timeline.  An ice age lasted 10's of thousands of years... bet the cave men weren't conserned with global warming back then.

Answer 5

Not really.

This global warming stuff is going to turn out to be the biggest hoax ever.

They're already starting to find evidence of GLOBAL COOLING!!!!

I'm not kidding.

Here are some facts that should interest you:

1. There is global warming going on ON ALL THE PLANETS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM!! Hmmm, I wonder what's causing that?  Humans, or could it be this giant ball we call the sun?

2. There is no such thing as NOT climate change!  The temperature of the earth has always warmed, cooled, warmed cooled.  There's no such thing as the "normal" temperature of the earth.

It's completely human-egocentric to even think there could be such a thing.

3. There are some websites that show the photos a scientist took, who went around to a bunch of the sensors they use to measure the "official" temperatures that they then compile into the data to say global warming is happening.

I've seen the photos - these sensors are right next to air conditioner outlets on buildings (which blow out heat), on asphalt parking lots (d**n hot also!), and one of them was even right next to a trash burn barrel!

The point is, you can't trust the data at all. It's absurd.

4. By far, (like over 90%) the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is WATER VAPOR!!!

That's right kids, I guess we need to get rid of all this water to stop global warming huh?

Answer 6

Yes.  The progression in scientific understanding is explained by a physicist on this site:

www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

"Around 1938 an English engineer, Guy Stewart Callendar, took up the old idea. An expert on steam technology, Callendar apparently took up meteorology as a hobby to fill his spare time.(14) Many people, looking at weather stories from the past, had been saying that a warming trend was underway. When Callendar compiled measurements of temperatures from the 19th century on, he found they were right. He went on to dig up and evaluate old measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. He concluded that over the past hundred years the concentration of the gas had increased by about 10%. This rise, Callendar asserted , could explain the observed warming. For he understood (perhaps from Hulburt's calculation) that even if the CO2 in the atmosphere did already absorb all the heat radiation passing through, adding more gas would change the height in the atmosphere where the absorption took place. That, he calculated, would make for warming."

"The early experiments that sent radiation through gases in a tube, measuring bands of the spectrum at sea-level pressure and temperature, had been misleading. The bands seen at sea level were actually made up of overlapping spectral lines, which in the primitive early instruments had been smeared out into broad bands. Improved physics theory and precise laboratory measurements in the 1940s and after encouraged a new way of looking at the absorption. Scientists were especially struck to find that at low pressure and temperature, each band resolved into a cluster of sharply defined lines, like a picket fence, with gaps between the lines where radiation would get through.(24) The most important CO2 absorption lines did not lie exactly on top of water vapor lines. Instead of two overlapping bands, there were two sets of narrow lines with spaces for radiation to slip through. So even if water vapor in the lower layers of the atmosphere did entirely block any radiation that could have been absorbed by CO2, that would not keep the gas from making a difference in the rarified and frigid upper layers. Those layers held very little water vapor anyway. And scientists were coming to see that you couldn't just calculate absorption for radiation passing through the atmosphere as a whole, you had to understand what happened in each layer — which was far harder to calculate."

"By 1956, such computations could be carried out thanks to the increasing power of digital computers. The physicist Gilbert N. Plass took up the challenge of calculating the transmission of radiation through the atmosphere, nailing down the likelihood that adding more CO2 would increase the interference with infrared radiation.(26) Going beyond this qualitative result, Plass announced that human activity would raise the average global temperature "at the rate of 1.1 degree C per century."

"Fortunately, scientists could now track the movements of carbon with a new tool — the radioactive isotope carbon-14. This isotope is created by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere and then decays over millennia. The carbon in ancient coal and oil is so old that it entirely lacks the radioactive isotope."

"With painstaking series of measurements in the pristine air of Antarctica and high atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, he nailed down precisely a stable baseline level of CO2 in the atmosphere. In 1960, with only two full years of Antarctic data in hand, Keeling reported that this baseline level had risen. The rate of the rise was approximately what would be expected if the oceans were not swallowing up most industrial emissions.(39*)"

"New carbon-14 measurements were giving scientists solid data to chew on. They began to work out just how carbon moves through its many forms in the air, ocean, minerals, soils, and living creatures. They plugged their data into simple models, with boxes representing each reservoir of carbon (ocean surface waters, plants, etc.), and arrows showing the exchanges of CO2 among the reservoirs. The final goal of most researchers was to figure out how much of the CO2 produced from fossil fuels was sinking into the oceans, or perhaps was being absorbed by vegetation (see above)."

"The veteran climate expert Helmut Landsberg stressed in a 1970 review that little was known about how humans might change the climate. At worst, he thought, the rise of CO2 at the current rate might bring a 2°C temperature rise over the next 400 years, which "can hardly be called cataclysmic."(43) Meanwhile Hubert H. Lamb, the outstanding compiler of old climate data, wrote that the effects of CO2 were "doubtful... there are many uncertainties." The CO2 theory, he pointed out, failed to account for the numerous large shifts that he had uncovered in records of climate from medieval times to the present. Many agreed with Lamb that a "rather sharp decline" of global temperature since the 1940s put the whole matter in question.(44)"

"Research on changes in the atmosphere's CO2 had been, almost by definition, identical to research on the greenhouse effect. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, calculations found that other gases emitted by human activities also have a strong greenhouse effect — sometimes molecule for molecule tens or hundreds of times greater than CO2. Global climate change could not be properly studied without taking into account methane, emitted by both natural and artificial sources, and various other industrial gases."

"National economic statistics yielded reliable figures for how much CO2 humanity put into the air each year from burning fossil fuels. The measurements of the annual increase by Keeling and others showed that less than half of the new carbon could be found in the atmosphere. Where was the rest? Oceanographers calculated how much of the gas the oceans took up, while other scientists calculated how much the biosphere took up or emitted. The numbers didn't add up — some of the carbon was "missing." Plainly, scientists did not understand important parts of the carbon cycle. Looking at large-scale climate changes, such as between ice ages and warm periods, they turned up a variety of interactions with climate involving plant life and ocean chemistry. The papers addressing these topics became increasingly complex."

"An especially convincing finding came from holes arduously drilled into the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps...  Group after group cut samples from cores of ice in hopes of measuring the level. For two decades, every attempt failed to give consistent and plausible results. Finally reliable methods were developed. The trick was to clean an ice sample scrupulously, crush it in a vacuum, and quickly measure what came out. In 1980, a team published findings that were definite, unexpected, and momentous."

"In the depths of the last ice age, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere had been as much as 50% lower than in our own warmer times... Pushing forward, by 1985 a French-Soviet drilling team at Vostok Station in central Antarctica had produced an ice core two kilometers long that carried a 150,000-year record, a complete ice age cycle of warmth, cold and warmth. They found that the level of atmospheric CO2 had gone up and down in remarkably close step with temperature.(48)"

"The Vostok core, an ice driller declared, "turned the tide in the greenhouse gas controversy."(49) At the least it nailed down what one expert called an "emerging consensus that CO2 is an important component in the system of climatic feedbacks." More generally, he added, it showed that further progress would "require treating climate and the carbon cycle as parts of the same global system rather than as separate entities."(50) The rise and fall of temperature was tied up in a complex way with interlocking global cycles involving not just the mineral geochemistry of CO2 in air and sea water, but also methane emissions, the growth and decay of forests and bogs, changes of the plankton population in the oceans, and still more features of the planet's biosphere."

"Lines of thinking converged to emphasize the importance of the greenhouse effect. For decades geologists had been puzzled by a calculation that astrophysicists insisted was undeniable: the Sun had been dimmer when the Earth was young. Billions of years ago the oceans would have been permanently frozen, if not for high CO2 levels. Astrophysical theory showed that as the Sun had consumed its nuclear fuel it had gradually grown brighter, yet somehow the Earth's temperature had remained neither too cold nor too hot to sustain life. The best guess was that CO2 acted as a thermostat for the planet. Volcanoes presumably put the gas into the atmosphere at a fairly constant rate. But chemical processes run faster at higher temperatures, so on a warmer Earth the weathering of rocks would take up CO2 faster. As the rocks erode, rivers carry the soil into the seas, where the carbon eventually winds up in compounds deposited on the seabed. Thus a rough self-sustaining balance is maintained among the forces of volcanic emissions, greenhouse warming, weathering, and ocean uptake.(51) To be sure, the system might take thousands if not millions of years to stabilize after some great disturbance."

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Out of answer space... you'll have to visit the site for the rest.

Impacts of Global Warming

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/impac...

The Discovery of Global Warming

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index...