Martin123, Bob Cormack, and Publius --

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If I'd had the "call," I might have been a preacher, a fundamentalist preacher. Trouble is, at 7, the "age" of reason for kids -- I was already finding fault with organized religions.

This is a venue change, trying to get the subject more light, but you need to see Publius' posting, "Climate Change Stupidity: The Earth also shines" for what comes before this.

http://www.xomba.com/climate_change_stupidity_the_earth_also_shines

Martin123,

It seems like you are stuck on the concept of "pollutants," confusing them with the way the planet is kept temperate by a life-dominated proportional balance of CO2 as part of the climate balance. Web of life, one strand damaged affects all others, that kind of grasp -- would aid your understanding.

Cormack and Publius -- go for it. You continue to outline what you are, and I hope you are able to turn a buck at it. Cormack -- Inhofe? Schwartz's paper?

(I think Schwartz will live to regret offering that proof of an assumed identity - paper touted as the deathknell of AGW. In fact he probably regrets it now. The folks at Journal of Geophysical Research surely would rather have a series of meaningful publications to their credit than the Schwartz proof that an "assumption" is an "assumption," offering.

The only "debate" is what to do about it. In my religiously fundamentalist view -- one of the things is better "thought-police" training; that is 1 + 1 = 2 and there is no debate. Get it?

Bob -- The website of Inhofe's is one of the finest Denier Websites in existence. For science it is useless and for politics -- it isn't much more than a con job. Look for a post with your subject later.

Pollution and Poison

I may allude to CO2 as Pollution, but it is a thermal poison.

As Venus is, Earth will become. Maybe you do not understand what Venus is? Man has nothing to do with Venus' situation and likely never will -- pending man's survival of the CO2 challenge before us now. Meaning, we tiny humans will not survive to possibly deal with the resources of Venus for our species benefit, unless we solve the key to the survival of ourselves and the rest of the life on Earth -- endangered by this man-made warming from the burning of fossil carbon.

If mankind can survive itself, one of the most difficult challenges in the solar system, beyond the intense magnetic field of Jupiter and its radiation "belts" (these are "real" "Van Allen Belts" on a Jovian scale) -- is the mining of the planet Venus. It is just "too" hot -- for water solution carbon based life.

Earth will become like Venus, heading that way in roughly a billion years -- as our Sun warms. Water Vapor will be forcing. The temperature will rise as the oceans boil into the air and space. Much Oxygen in the water will remain in the air for a while, but the H2 will largely escape to space, although plenty will be available for H2SO4, which, like on Venus, will reside high in the atmosphere, buoyed by the CO2, which will form from the high temperature release of the rock's carbonates with hot water, (steam) and will last for at least a couple of billion years... Eventually, as the Sun evolves further, the envelope of Earth's air will be "stripped" by our red giant Sun's wind, and will be blown away. The "mass" fraction of the Earth's atmosphere before the red giant wind sweeps it away will be predominated mostly by CO2, and the total "weight" of the air, and the surface pressure will be ~100 times what it is now. Sure, the Nitrogen (N2) will still be a proportion of the air; but instead of 78%, will then be ~4% of the total. Little free Oxygen will exist; since it is so reactive with the temperature and available elements to react with.

But in the immediate future. . .

Anthropogenic Global Warming if allowed to become the dominant characteristic of the earth's atmosphere will severely constrain life -- fostering extinctions and for humans, large scale deaths as a result of dramatic changes to food, rain water and ocean levels. (Because -- if we allow large continued CO2 emissions, we raise the Temperature of the planet, and can't bring it down, and neither can nature restore it in our presence with Business as usual. Nature's balance is being upset by man and no natural working mechanisms can restore the consistency of air to pre-mankind industrial revolution proportions of CO2. That is, as long as man continues to burn fossil C, Nature can't handle the amount.)

So you don't do Science, which is the Latin for "knowledge." That does not mean you can't understand it.

When astronomers finally figured out the albedo - sunlight relationship and applied it to Venus, to Jupiter and the other Gas Giant worlds, it was amazing to some that Venus was reflecting about 70% of the Sunlight it rec'd. Although closer to the Sun the 70% reflection suggested that the planet, below the "clouds" might be as cool as Earth. The Science Fiction writers wrote many fantasies, some fine stories about Venus's oceans.

However. When the microwave radiation was received in radio telescopes, and understood, it indicated that the surface of Venus was a hell-hot place. Many Russians and American scientists had almost believed the SF stories and hoped for clement conditions for a next-door planet to maybe settle in the future. (Venus is closer to Earth than Mars, but who cares?) The remarkable feat of the Russian Venera program showed us the surface, and showed us the nature of a Carbon Dioxide greenhouse. It is a hell-hot place.

The just-right-for-mankind level of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is probably somewhere in the 280ppm to 310ppm CO2 range although during our evolution (Under Gods Tight Rules) it never got much above 300 ppmv -- with the current locations of the landmasses and the oceans around the globe.

As tectonics moves the lands and seas around the planet -- the CO2 just-right-for-Mankind-and-all-other-Earthly living things -- may change. It is within this range that mankind evolved and that life on Earth also evolved (and used to develop) and become all the variations of life we see.

Connections in the physical chemical energy world are not mere "ideas" -- but rather facts and nuts and bolts relationships designed into the nature of the universe. If you like God as your designer, fine. Use your God concept -- but just don't place man on the same level, where some would suggest Man is ascendant to the physical world in which he lives; above it.

Maybe a better characterization would be -- just a bright monkey and nasty to all he touches -- until he develops an awareness of the connectedness of the universe's internal things; how they connect one to another and to all in proportion under physical laws.

This is way beyond the idea of "pollutants." This is not the noxious particulates, or mercury, lead, arsenic, NOX, or plutonium, or ozone. I mention this because there is a difference between most ideas's of pollution and the warming via CO2.

The situation is not a political debate. It is a life and death debate.

Fact: the atmospheric proportion of CO2 is rising. Fact: the rise is virtually 100% the result of Man's burning of fossil fuel. Fact: without CO2 in the air, Earth becomes a snowball or iceball. Even though H2O is a more significant "greenhouse" gas than CO2 -- when a certain range of temperature is reached -- it is not much of a greenhouse gas when frozen out of the air as ice. Those of you familiar with "dry ice" (solid CO2) know that CO2 freezes at a lower (absolute) temperature than H2O. CO2 becomes a dominant Greenhouse Gas over a larger range of "lower" temperatures, simply because it is a gas at lower temperatures than water.

The deniers say this doesn't matter.
They say, for example: (and seriously)

1) god will care for His favorite.

2) man could not possibly do anything to affect the planet.

3) dumping this CO2 in the air is good for you, and for plants.

4) there is no evidence. Nothing is happening. you are getting upset over nothing.

5) if god thought we were doing wrong he would strike us down.

6) We, Inhofe's friends, have these experts, the finest money can buy and we have paid them well to do the necessary "science" to show there is absolutely no danger to this CO2.

7) the evidence isn't in. we are still checking on the influence of van allen radiation and cosmic rays and the definite 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 . . .2025 alignment of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way and the Suns passage near it every year, in Sagittarius.

8) earth shine on the moon proves the earth is cooling

9) the autocorrelation fact states that the mean can't be very far from our initial assumptions and we assume the quantities from the past can be applied directly to the prediction of the future, and no changes occur.

10) we can't afford to fix things; and we can't afford to stop burning Fossil C and what would the people in the middle east do?

11) we can't afford to pay for your excessive use and waste of resources, especially. We are only making on honest buck.

12) where would we put the co2? In the ground? How? we can't afford that.

and of course,

13) it is all a big lie.