Climate Change - Is CO2 the cause?- pt 4 of 4

Part 4 - Professor Bob Carter examines examples of the scientific data being ignored over popularist views about CO2 causing climate change and Global warming. Inconvenient Truth author Al Gore would find his presentation contradicted by this presentation? Will kyoto`s greenhouse reduction goals be in vain?

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  News & Politics

[Taylor Adams]

Does anyone know were I can find sources for these 4 videos?

[Bushvision]

Yep , I put them on Youtube and have the originals cheers Leon ashby

[Taylor Adams]

Im sorry. I don't understand what you said? Where are the sources?

[Bushvision]

If you want a copy of the video, I have that If you want to know where each bit of data comes from you can either google Bob Carter to see his web site info or email him bob.carter@jcu.edu.au for a copy of where the different data comes from

[grindupBaker]

... so they mean the >9,000,000,000,000 tons reserves estimate when they say "1,000 years of coal left". I suppose it depends largely on how far we go to rip it out. The yanks are ripping the top off some of their mountains to get at it. Global Warmage isn't about oil of course, it's about coal.

[grindupBaker]

I'm greatly in favour of all hemp product development (I was teenager in the 60s). Serious but uncertain because the sites I've found says there's claims all the way from just 861,000,000,000 tons left to >9,000,000,000,000 tons. That's from the other debate (peak oil) where bods say "why you worry, 1,000 years of coal left (it was "2,000 years of coal" in 1966 when I was in oil exploration (geophysical seismic processing). We use 8,600,000,000 tons coal / year with currently a 2% p.a increase

[MilesUmbrae]

Seriously? 9 Trillion?

The way coal-plant-lovers in the USA are talking it sounds like there would be a lot less of it left.

And yeah, it's too bad we don't have tree-eating pigs or some equivalent animal...

I do however not have any facts about alternative plants like hemp and such, need to look into that at some time...

[grindupBaker]

Yes but our species does not eat trees and our food animals do not eat trees to any worthwhile extent, so more trees is not an offset benefit. More trees will reduce the CO2 increase but will not even make a dent if we burn the 9,000,000,000,000 tons of coal that took 50,000,000 years of Carboniferous vegetation to manufacture.

[MilesUmbrae]

Ignoring time; depends on which kind of "plant" we are talking about.

Food-crops need increased nutrients from the soil in combination with an increased volume of CO² to be able to increase the yield, also the upper limit of 50% increased yield requires a lot of specific circumstances to happen.

If we on the other hand are talking trees then that claim is closer to being correct, because trees draw most of their nutrients from the air and basically only uses the soil as an anchor and for water.

[MilesUmbrae]

..contained within the tree, which returns the CO² back into the cycle within a short time-span compared with the CO² contained within the fossil-fuel which has been kept out of the cycle for millions of years.

Returning such wast amounts of CO² within such a short time-span is shocking the Eco-system.

However your assertion that more plants can help to reduce the amount of CO² in the atmosphere, but nature cannot increase the amount of plants naturally fast enough on its own.

[MilesUmbrae]

A few corrections;

Plants do not start mass-producing if there is excess CO², IF the excess CO² is combined with an abundance of nutrients and minerals in the soil then the individual plants with slowly start to grow in size.

Trees on the other hand are mainly 'feeding' off the different gasses in the air and water from the soil.

Flora does not store CO², they convert it with the help of other ingredients and bind the Carbon within their cells, so burning trees will only release the carbon cont.

[Pat Doyle]

Part 2 - Along with the sheer volume of carbon we are releasing, the source is a huge problem. When one burns a tree, very often, a new tree grows, and that tree takes up the carbon released when you burn the old one. Today, we burn the remains of ancient vegetation, releasing a vast store of CO2 with no way to grow enough plants to absorb it all. Did you know you eat arsenic all the time? Try multiplying the dose by 1,000X and see how increasing something that has done no obvious harm can hurt.

[Pat Doyle]

Compared to what we do today, that is miniscule. CO2 gets removed from the atmosphere by plants and by dissolution into the oceans. On an annual basis, all the wood burned in history di not come close to what we put into the atmosphere today. Natural systems could cope with sequestering most of the CO2 produced by man in pre-industrial times. Today, we take carbon that has been stored for millions of years in oil and coal and add it to the system by the megaton. Continued...