and offensive comments and cleaned up most of the language. But, I realized though I explained the Water Vapor situation in the xombyte, I did not do so explicitly in this chatter back and forth to publius in the comments. Let me try to do that here. . . ----- Publius quoted my wording. . . "Water vapor is an efficient absorber of outgoing longwave infrared radiation on Earth and is, therefore, a primary greenhouse gas. Since the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases with increasing surface temperature, and the increase in water vapor further increases the temperature, there is a positive feedback." Publius also mentioned the "Climate Forcing" concept I addressed in the byte, but not really in these comments. So I'll touch on that here -- or as I say in the Xombyte, "beat a horse that has been long dead. . ." Few people even worry about the long buggy whip or horse whip era the phrase began with. . .And some still kick their dog when they should know better. . . On the water vapor! How can Publius say "we" ignore water vapor as a GHG? Do you ignore the everyday NOAA weather forcasts and say we do not address water vapor? Water vapor, leads to rain, and snow and is both life and the weather! H20 is the most important component of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere in the universe. Have I not written "As Venus is, Earth will become?" Water vapor is the MOST important of the greenhouse gas components and it is not at all ignored. But it is not a forcing component at this stage of the Earth's climate in the face of solar evolution. When folks in the hot humid portions of the country feel local humidity and have heard the National Weather Service readings of humidity, do you think the Water Vapor is being ignored? Or when you hear a forcast for Rain or Snow, or a hurricane with its immense water and water vapor content -- is it obvious we are somehow ignoring water vapor as a part of the climate? Where do these deniers and contrarians thing rain snow and hurricanes come from? "Weather" and its variability "is" water vapor and its local variability. The extremes we see and the changes we are beginning to see are reflective of the "anthropogenic forcing" of change by further polluting the air with component gases, the greenhous gases, which have lifetimes in the air of much greater time span than a couple of weeks --which is a water molecules' gas phase maximum lifetime. As CO2, CH4, Chloroflourocarbons, N02, and the other GHGs which are man made or influenced are poured by man's activity into the air -- the result is that the air warms and the warmer air hold more vaporous H20. These man-made and contributed gases are forcing components whose atmospheric lifetimes are measured in years, decades and centuries, not in weeks. Increased Water Vapor in the air is a "resultant component" not a source of the global atmospheric heating problem, but a resultant. The problem is the continued dumping of the detritus of burning Carbon into the air -- at a rate much greater than we or nature can remove. And if we do not stop contributing in excess of what nature can remove or remove it ourselves -- we need, as a species, to stop contributing to the forcing. Do we talk about water vapor? Sure, all the time! Besides the change of phase from solid to liquid to vapor for water is completely beyond anthropogenic control. Is someone in the industrial or transportation or energy sectors producing more water vapor than nature does? Man has no control over the Water Vapor but we do over those things Pubby thinks are supported by man's god-given right to pollute. ---- I have to leave it alone and after a week read it again and hope it makes sense. I may further hunt for typos and attempt to fix or strengthen conceptual approaches. In other words, edit it -- fix wording and ideas to clarify the relationships becoming obvious as the CO2 keeps piling up. There is no maximum "limit" to the amount of CO2 that can exist in the air. Water is destined to eventually evaporate, and saturate the air completely planet wide and rise high enough to allow the increasingly intensifying UV from the warming Sun to break the water's hydrogen oxygen bond and allow most of the hydrogen so liberated to escape to space. As Venus is, Earth will become. But if the schedule is followed, it will take about 3 billion years yet to completely accomplish. The interesting thing about the entire scenario is that the astronomical model of the Sun is right on, and thousands of Sun-like stars show that the model predicted warming goes right along with the solar mass and the initial proportions of constituent materials in the molecular cloud that collapsed to be the Sun. (A reasonably intelligent way to delay, but not avoid the cooking of the Earth by the Sun -- when the water become the major forcing component -- is to move the Earth to an orbit farther from the Sun. But there are other bodies that complicate the issue. That is a major engineering challenge. Doing so could extend life's time on Earth a few billion years. Oh yes, one of the "easiest" ways to move a planet is to use another planet -- one with substantial mass -- to pull the desired orbit into existence. Read Larry Niven's "Time out of Mind" for a general idea of how Larry, and likely future planetary orbital engineers, would move things around the Solar System. Uranus is the Planet Larry wants to use as the shaper of orbits -- anyone want to tell me why? It is an elegant and beautiful approach. But it does take knowledge and a command of technology that might be only one or two centuries in our future. I takes real command of raw energies, of power. The choice of Uranus is a very nice use of circumstance that occured early in the solar system's history. Ideas Anyone?) As to the timeframe for the cooking of Earth, the initial stellar mass of our Sun is the determinant -- and with 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy a large number of Sun-like stars in various conditions of age, the "surprises" are going to be minimal to significantly nonexistent. For Earth, there is still uncertainty as to generally when the "runaway" water-driven moist greenhouse will begin. If it truly requires the 10% insolation increase, at the top of the atmosphere, then that condition can occur in the 900 million year to 1.2 billion year range, with the Sun cooking along as usual. (Anyone want to 'fine-tune' the Sun? That is why moving the Earth might be an easier endeavor than somehow tinkering with a star.) If we last long enough, say 20,000 years from now as a species, I think we might have a really good understanding of Earth's climate and a technological capacity to control it -- but who comes with us? Which other lifeforms do we allow to share the Earth with us? Of course, with the current continent/tectonic arrangement we might be able to accelerate the advent of a "runaway" ten- million-fold with enough CO2 pumped into the air. No doubt we can make it uncomfortable, kill a lot of life forms and humans -- but I think a sustainable runaway greenhouse with water as the actor is far outside of even our abiity to force it with the C we can access easily. I hope I am right on that. That said, after a few million years of CO2 excess, I think the H2O re-settles the issue. That is, if we kill our own species future along with much of Earth's life -- I think things would get "back to normal" in less than a few million years. That is, if we are able to cross that threshold, and unleash somehow or initiate the true runaway there could be no turning back. Or definitely no easy one. It would be like a slow death, not a swift one. Earth life would be over. But, I can't see our capability of doing this as truly possible. The Sun is not hot enough yet; but we could in the interim, while the Sun warms, significanly limit the potential life has already evolved. In desperation, and far too late we could lament not having hung the guilty trying to exploit that CO2 legacy path. That is, the turning point has been passed, perhaps, and the best we might hope for in the short 2,000-3,000 year term ahead is that there still be enough partial pressure of O2 in the air for us and other animals to breathe. That is, more than 17.5% - 18%? Again, we need to constrain the behavior of Multinational Corporations. Yes, yes, and we have a very bad meme in a religious guise that this species needs to repair or excise. Bad memes are mind viruses that can virtually kill species like ours untill they are corrected or excised.) By ourselves? our little individual recycling and green lives efforts are important for the perspective kind of like the transition form a smoking to a non-smoking nation. (Hey if you are a neo-conservative libertarian who wants to smoke, gee inhale deeply and stay in that smoke filled room and do not pollute the neighborhood and hurry with getting cancer and die. Please. Hurry. Obviously, you do not belong in the rest of the world or with it!) Individually, I think the very best you can do is work for zero population growth and then reduction of human numbers. If you are a mad scientist you can help by designing a virus that targets only women and kills them. (See Frank Herbert's "White Plague" for a quick method to eliminate the CO2 neo-conservative, libertarian plague. It would also aid in the elimnation of numerous religious memes, by letting them die out. Otherwise, we will see nothing that can prevent the extinctions ahead. That is, it is too late. What can you do? What legacy does the future bear from us? Tell us all how to get the CO2 out. It is not that we didn't have a warning -- or simply that we made mistakes. We mindlessly destroyed by inattention -- the finest goventment by electing not only incompetence, but coupled it with a whole drama of malfeasance in an administration so guided by the idea of corporate profit, of skimming profit, of manipulation of legal systems to steal energy of investment -- away from the world for their personal use -- that I can see our species Devil standing here, before us, as he will be seen by history and the CO2 legacy promoted. This Devil has multiple faces -- some few of the faces it wears, some few of them, maybe most of them, look like you and me. Of course, we will struggle, especially when the dawning occurs. It is easy to burn C "into" the atmosphere, but tough to get it "out" with economical easily accessible technology. (It costs more energy than you derived from burning the C in the first place -- to get it out of the air. With all chemical and mechanical operations acting at the requisite entropic values of less than 100% efficiency, to get the C back, takes more energy than you got from it when you put the carbon dioxide into the air. To recover the C from the CO2, means really, USING all green energy or at least not pumping more CO2 into the air while extracting it. The biological sequestration via plants also does not escape the laws of thermodynamics, and that is why the living systems of plants can only recover a limited amount of C over an arbitrary period of time. The efficiency cost to recover the C needs to be maximized by using devices which are non-polluting mechanisms. It requires energies on a scale only the Sun itself can supply. Nuclear fission, the French approach, may be the only short term means of getting the C out of the air. Look, the Oil Companies and cronies have taken the promise of nuclear power and trashed it. The problems with long-term use of nuclear energy are the same greedy problems humans have in many other fields. A contractor cuts corners, the disposition or NIMBY driven by a library full of regulatory hoops supported by the very same people who are polluting the atmosphere with CO2. The regulatory issue is not a business proposition, not an economy difficulty, it is a purely chimeric collection of rules to help one 'industry' over another. The focus of the current administration is wrong, likely the new administration will get it wrong too. It may take a civil revolution, or a bloody one to remove business from the direct control of government. The administration is wrong. The problem is far more important than profit motive, far more important than any other problem faced by this species. It concerns collective species survival, not of the Bush conglomerate Trillion dollar world wide value -- but the actual survival of our species and others. (Before we deal with the giants of industry, wealth and power, of governmental unscrupulousness, and deal with them for their role and their crimes against the species (humanity) and planet -- we need to hold them upside down and shake their pockets clean, and collect back from them, for the cleaning of the world, the money and power these scum have taken from it and from us and from your children's future.) If we need socialistic structure to take care of the damages of the fossil fuel era, so be it. All nuclear facilities need to be owned, built by closely monitored contracting, and operated by the federal apparatus to insure efficient and safe power generation and distribution. Privatizing the operation of an energy dependent society is like the privatizing of a national military. It is wasteful of human and national resources. Solar insolation is too weak right now for that runaway greenhouse to occur without overwhelming help from malfeasance. It is stress the earth-life system does not need, and stress that is avoidable. Tip: -- if you are young, avoid investing in current coastal properties. Was this offensive enough for you?

how many are interested in any of the things being posted here? freeze it you keep dancin who cares

I'll get back to you soon. You are a classic illustration! hang in there.

Geico was a Government Employees Insurance Company, and got it's start as a government employees thing. I enjoy the commercials, and I side with the caveman. I realize now you do not grasp what I am addressing. I have a few more equations to attempt to get into the mix, but you are into ego, not content. Thanks for the comments. I did not misunderstand one thing you replied. Yes I believe you did not see what I was addressing. I am getting the revised post ready. There is nothing to remove. I do think you need to stick to meaningful comments and content and refrain from comments that have to do with ego. Xomba has promise. thanks for your concerns. stay tuned. Be on content. be in context. thanks