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The Great Global Warming Swindle
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Hob
Hob
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Re: The Great Global Warming Swindle
Mar 09, 2007, 23:17
Refutations? I dunno if that's a word, but I'll use it anyway.

DM, just on the off chance that you're not a troll (anyone care to offer a percentage likelihood of that?) Here's the thing:

Earth's CO2 levels fluctuate. Yup. They always have done, hopefully they always will. But a closed system like Earth's atmosphere can usually compensate for fluctuations, maybe not instantly, but over the long terms things balance out. This strange blip of an interglacial we're curently experiencing will end at some point, and things will go back to normal. Read yer Lovelock.

So there's no problem with someone professing that natural sources of CO2 cause greenhouse warming. The problem comes when they say that just because natural sources of CO2 exist, that anthropogenic CO2 increases are irrelevant. They're still a factor. It seems a bit like saying that as most people die of natural causes, we needn't bother doing anything to try and prevent murders.

And when you take into account that the 'natural balance' of CO2 production and sequestration over the long term is one of those wonderfully dynamic complex systems, we have to be very wary of people who simplify the issue by pointing out that anthropogenic sources are smaller than natural sources of CO2. Because in any dynamic re-iterative system, small variations in conditions can have massive knock on effects.

To simplify (be wary now...) if Earth's painstakingly evolved homeostatic mechanisms of CO2 turnover are such that they can cope with having a few million years worth of organically sequestered carbon bunged back into the atmosphere in a tiny fraction of the time it took to sequester them, then we're OK. If it can't, maybe we are fucked after all.

There, I've said me bit, and care not a jot if it makes any sense, so I'll shut up now.
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