Too Little

The earth's carbon, isn't it in a closed system and therefore couldn't it increase or decrease only so much, within limits I mean?



This concept made me think that global warming wasn't a problem; then I considered the time involved: humans releasing carbon into the atmosphere more suddenly than ever before...carbon from volcanoes and other subterranean sources would change that system...so it's not really closed after all.



I guess I'm not much of a climatologist...Hee hee.

Senior Meteorologist Dr. Wolfgang P. Thuene was a former analyst and forecaster for the German Weather Service in the field of synoptic meteorology and also worked for the German Environmental Protection Agency. Thuene currently works in the Ministry of Environment and Forests of Rheinland-Pfalz. In 2007, Thuene rejected the idea that mankind is driving global warming. “All temperature and weather observations indicate that the earth isn’t like a greenhouse and that there is in reality no ‘natural greenhouse effect’ which could warm up the earth by its own emitted energy and cause by re-emission a ‘global warming effect’. With or without atmosphere every body loses heat, gets inevitably colder. This natural fact, formulated by Sir Isaac Newton in his ‘cooling law’, led Sir James Dewar to the construction of the ‘Dewar flask’ to minimize heat losses from a vessel. But the most perfect thermos flask can’t avoid that the hot coffee really gets cold. The hypothesis of a natural and a man-made ‘greenhouse effect’, like eugenics, belongs to the category ‘scientific errors,” Thuene wrote on February 24, 2007.



“The infrared thermography is a smoking gun proof that the IPCC-hypothesis cannot be right. The atmosphere does not act like the glass of a greenhouse which primarily hinders the convection! The atmosphere has an open radiation window between 8 and 14 microns and is therefore transparent to infrared heat from the earth’s surface. This window cannot be closed by the distinctive absorption lines of CO2 at 4.3 and 15 microns. Because the atmosphere is not directly heated by the Sun but indirectly by the surface the earth loses warmth also by conduction with the air and much more effectively by vertical convection of the air to a very great part by evaporation and transpiration. Nearly thirty percent of the solar energy is used for evaporation and distributed as latent energy through the atmosphere,” Thuene wrote. “Summarizing we can say: Earth’s surface gains heat from the Sun, is warmed up and loses heat by infrared radiation. While the input of heat by solar radiation is restricted to the daytime hours, the outgoing terrestrial radiation is a nonstop process during day and night and depends only on the body temperature and the emissivity. Therefore after sunset the earth continuous to radiate and therefore cools off. Because the air is in physical contact with the ground it also cools off, the vertical temperature profile changes, and we get a so called surface inversion which inhibits convection,” Thuene explained.

There is a big difference between the climatic change that happened in the past and what is being witnessed at the moment, however. Most important of those is time scale. At no time in the past has the climate been subjected to such a rapid, sustained "forcing" (ie factor causing a change).



It is not human "power" that is creating the problem, it is the fact we are accidentally disrupting a key part of the climate cycle.



The amount of time it will take for the effects of our current actions to wear off, even if we ceased it all immediately is probably closer to 500 years than 100 years.



But nobody shows any time of stopping burning carbon based fuels any time soon.



It is really a human issue though (as well as the inevitable extinctions that will occur). The potential for human suffering as a result of man made climate change is staggering.



I am not here to debate people's right to believe what they will, however, only to talk about the evidence, seeing as evidence is being claimed.

What is this evidence that you are referring to?



I'm pretty certain there is no *direct* evidence of such a mechanism, not even most climate change "sceptics" would claim that.



I'd also be interested to know where you get the 50%/6% statistics from.

the climate changed a millions of years ago when the dinosaurs were alive, there were no humans back then to cause that