Greenhouse Gases
Water Vapor and Carbon Dioxide

Over 97% of all greenhouse gases are natural and there is nothing we can do about them.  For example, India's population of one billion people produces more carbon dioxide just by breathing than is produced by all the coal-burning power plants in the United States.  Moreover, termites are said to produce more carbon dioxide each year than all other living organisms combined.

Environmentalists would have you believe that the greenhouse effect originated in the 20th century.  The greenhouse effect is essential to the survival of life on Earth.  If there were no greenhouse gases, the temperature of the air would be about 32°F (18°C) colder than it is.  In other words, the world would be frozen most of the time.*

The two predominant greenhouse gases are water vapor and carbon dioxide.  You produce both of these gases when you exhale.  Between 94½ and 96½ percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide comes from natural sources.*  Between 94 and 98 percent of the warming effect is due to ordinary water vapor, which comes from the oceans and lakes.

Please note that volcanos produce more carbon dioxide than all the activities of man.  So even if all industrial activity is outlawed (in order to "save the earth"), the volcanos will still keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and the air will remain just as it is.

It is also claimed that cows and termites produce more CO2 than man.

The subject of unstoppable coal fires is something I have just recently (and briefly) explored.  The Centralia, Pennsylvania coal mine fire has been burning since 1962,* and there are 38 of these fires in Pennsylvania alone.*  There's another such fire in Jharia, India, that has been burning for almost a century,* one in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, that has been burning since 1910,* and there are hundreds of coal fires buring in China.*  Australia's Burning Mountain, the oldest known coal fire, has burned for 6,000 years.*  And of course every air-breathing animal in the world emits carbon dioxide, a little at a time, so the idea of curtailing carbon dioxide emissions completely — as some have suggested* — is futile.

Note:  A lot of material about carbon offsets and emissions trading can be found on this page.


The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory:  [Scroll down slowly]  NASA is stacking the cards, you see.  If they made it clear that every species of atmospheric gas gets heated mainly by conductive transfer, and that all heated bodies radiate light, then even a child could connect the dots:  "Oh.  So the whole atmosphere radiates heat to the earth and makes it warmer.  All of the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas."  Crash, boom, there goes the theory.  And there goes the abundant funding that this fear-promoting "science" attracts so well.  For what CO2 and water vapor emit is miniscule compared to the buzzing multitude of heated nitrogen, oxygen, and even argon, all of it radiating infrared too.

Global warming and the 'settled science' baloney.  To appreciate how unsettled global warming science really is, the book Unstoppable Global Warming, Every 1,500 Years, by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery is an indispensible and relentless handbook.  Published in 2007 and stuffed with over 500 references, it shatters almost every common global warming myth. ... In one of many startling conclusions in the book, Singer argues that increases in CO2 levels throughout recent geologic history, are the result of global warming not the cause.  Increases in global temperatures (for extraneous reasons) cause CO2 to outgas from the oceans, increasing its concentration in the atmosphere.  And there's much, much more debunking.

The CO2 Lie.  A major tenet of the global warming religion, straight from the Book of Gore, has been that the ability of the earth to handle increasing CO2 emissions is finite and that once the "tipping point" is reached, the earth will warm uncontrollably.  Well, another climate domino has fallen — the myth that man-made CO2 is leading to climate catastrophe.

The EPA's Power Grab.  [Scroll down]  Carbon dioxide emissions are an energy use problem pure and simple, and not a byproduct problem like other forms of air pollution.  As Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, dissidents in the environmental movement, have written:  "Global warming is as different from smog in Los Angeles as nuclear war is from gang violence."  The only way to reduce CO2 emissions is to burn a lot less fossil fuel — ultimately almost none if the ambitious target of climate orthodoxy is to be met (an 80 percent reduction by the year 2050).

The Five Obama Fails.  Anthropogenic CO2 makes up about 3.2% of greenhouse gases.  New Zealand atmospheric scientist Augie Auer wrote that three-quarters of the earth is ocean, and 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is governed by water vapor.  "Of that remaining 5 percent, only about 3.6 percent is governed by CO2 and when you break it down even further, studies have shown that the anthropogenic (man-made) contribution to CO2 versus the natural is about 3.2 percent.  So if you multiply the total contribution 3.6% by the man-made portion of it, 3.2%, you find out that the anthropogenic contribution of CO2 to the global greenhouse effect is 0.115 percent ... It's minuscule ... it's nothing."

The Climate Science Isn't Settled.  The main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds.  Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances.  Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%.

December 7, 2009; Another Day of Infamy?  Bureaucracies are littered with and often controlled by Environmental Studies graduates with little or no science training.  They provide the data politicians use and they dominate the IPCC, especially the Summary for Policymakers.  Lisa Jackson, EPA Administrator referred to controlling pollution in her public statement introducing the policy.  CO2 is not a pollutant and for the Administrator to call it such is a measure of ignorance of the science.  As a chemical engineer Jackson should be no better than most.  But this is not about science it is about control, especially of industry.

No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds.  Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems.  In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

New study finds no rise in atmosphere share of CO2.  A study by Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, published in Geophysical Research Letters, finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

Four Colossal Holes in the Theory of Man-Made Global Warming.  One of the many revelations from Climategate is that behind-the-scenes, scientists who buy into man-made global warming are admitting what skeptics have been saying publicly for years now:  The globe has been cooling since 1998.  Again, if global warming has its bootlaces hitched to the amount of man-made greenhouse gasses that are being produced and those numbers are increasing, why hasn't the temperature gone up as well?  There's a simple answer:  Man-made greenhouse gasses are not a decisive factor in raising or lowering the temperature of the earth.

How Much Longer Before Climategate Explodes?  CO2 is a benign (actually beneficial) trace gas, which comprises around 0.03% of the earth's atmosphere.  Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), recently found that far from harming the world's oceans, elevated levels of CO2 help lobsters, crabs, shrimps, and other shellfish, grow thicker, stronger shells.  Plants require CO2 to perform photosynthesis, and would quickly die without it.  Far from being some "evil gas from hell," carbon dioxide is a life giving, vital part of the earth's ecology.

How is the government going to tax and regulate this?
 Elevated Carbon Dioxide In School Traced To Students' Breath.  School officials are taking steps to ventilate Newfound Memorial Middle School after unusually high levels of carbon dioxide were detected.  Inspectors testing energy efficiency at the school made the discovery and determined that the source of the carbon dioxide is the students themselves.

Cleaning out the climate science cesspool.  [Scroll down]  There has been no statistically significant global warming for over a decade, despite steadily increasing CO2 levels — and for several years average annual global temperatures have actually declined.  Carbon dioxide plays only a minor role, many scientists say, and our climate is still controlled by periodic variations in the same natural forces that caused previous climate changes:  ocean currents and jet streams, water vapor and cloud cover, evaporation and precipitation, planetary alignments and the shape of the Earth's orbit, the tilt and wobble of Earth's axis, cosmic ray levels and especially solar energy output.

Greenhouse Gas Observatories Downwind from Erupting Volcanoes.  Problems in the collection of atmospheric CO2 data parallel other absurdities in the global warming fraud.  The Climategate scandal is exposing the massive and systematic fraud behind the fabrication of the worldwide temperature record necessary to make the case for global warming.  But what about the record of atmospheric CO2?

If no single factor can account for the climate system, why pick on CO2?  The answer is that CO2 is the best culprit because it fits in with their anti-industry and anti-capitalism bias and the WWF, and others, are happy to be handmaidens to doom despite the "unfortunate lack of comprehensive and well-resolved data".

Controlling climate?  More like controlling humans.  The proposed "solutions" to scientifically fading man-made global warming fears are set to alter American lifestyles and sovereignty in ways never before contemplated.  MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen has warned:  "'He who controls carbon controls life.  It is a bureaucrat's dream to control carbon dioxide."  Washington, D.C., and the U.N. are in a field of dreams right now as they envision one of the most massive expansions of controls on human individual freedom ever contemplated by governments.

Global Warming:  A Classic Case of Alarmism.  The IPCC blames human emissions of carbon dioxide for the last warming.  But by general consensus human emissions of carbon dioxide have only been large enough to be significant since 1940 — yet the warming trend was in place for well over a century before that.  And there was a cooling period from 1940 to 1975, despite human emissions of carbon dioxide.  And there has been no warming since 2001, despite record human emissions of carbon dioxide.

Global Warming 'Science'.  The problem with such seemingly serious assertions regarding CO2 is that, in spite of its increasing presence, it still remains just a trace gas in the atmosphere.  As of November 2007, the CO2 concentration in Earth's atmosphere was estimated at 0.0382% by volume, or 382 parts per million by volume.  Another problem is that natural production of CO2 from such sources as combustion of organic matter, natural decay of vegetation, volcanic emissions, and the natural respiration of all aerobic organisms dwarfs that produced by fossil fuel burning.  The U.S. Department of Energy has released estimates that nearly 97% of total CO2 emissions would occur even if humans were not present on Earth and that, because of the overwhelming presence of water vapor, manmade CO2 causes less than 0.12% of Earth's greenhouse effect.  To attribute so much power to affect the earth's climate to a man-made gas so minor in amount would appear to defy common sense.

Alarmism Is Underpinned by Fraud.  In the geological past, there have been six major ice ages.  During five of these six ice ages, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was higher than at present.  It is clear that the colorless, odorless, non-poisonous gas called carbon dioxide did not drive past climates.  Carbon dioxide is plant food, not a pollutant.  Humans have adapted to live on ice sheets, deserts, mountains, tropics, and sea level.  History shows that humans and other organisms have thrived in warm times and suffered in cold times.

Sources and Sinks of Carbon Dioxide.  The constancy of seasonal variations in CO2 and the lack of time delays between the hemispheres suggest that fossil fuel derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year it is emitted.  This implies that natural variability of the climate is the prime cause of increasing CO2, not the emissions of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels.

EPA Poised to Declare CO2 a Public Danger.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will early next week, possibly as soon as Monday, officially declare carbon dioxide a public danger, a trigger that could mean regulation for emitters across the economy, according to several people close to the matter.  Such an "endangerment" decision is necessary for the EPA to move ahead early next year with new emission standards for cars.

Climategate:  A Willful Ignorance.  It is only willful ignorance that would keep a reporter or anyone else from knowing what has been known for years, that CO2 increases over the past 300,000 years have never caused temperature rise.  Indeed, the rise of CO2 always follows in the wake of a temperature increase.  What is so terribly wrong about the Copenhagen conference and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sponsoring it is that its own member scientists know that too.

Obama Gives China a Free Pass to Emit CO2.  The Copenhagen Conference ended in failure.  The "Copenhagen Accord," negotiated by a few of the participants at the end, is worth only the paper it will be printed on.  It is a possibly disastrous framework for future negotiations to take place in Bonn, Germany in mid-2010.  It suggests that the U.S. will once again pay most of the costs and get few of the benefits, if any.

Church bells to ring out warning on climate change.  The World Council of Churches on Thursday [11/12/2009] called on churches around the world to ring their bells 350 times during the Copenhagen climate change summit on December 13 as a call to action on global warming. ... "By sounding their bells or other instruments 350 times, participating churches will symbolise the 350 parts per million that mark the safe upper limit for CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere according to many scientists," it added.

The Editor says...
 Please refer to the chart immediately below.  (Click to enlarge.)  The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has reached 440 ppm on a couple of relatively recent occasions, with no ill effects.  The arbitrary standard of 350 ppm has no merit.  And another thing — aren't these the same people who howl about the "separation of church and state" when the churches are used to promote conservative politics?

CO2 in the atmosphere by chemical measurements 1812-2004

180 Years of Accurate Gas Analysis of Air by Chemical Methods.  [Scroll down]  It could be shown that between 1800 to 1961 more than 320 technical papers exist on the subject of air gas analysis containing verified data on atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  Callendar (engineer), Keeling (chemist) and IPCC do not evaluate these chemical methods though being standard in analytical chemistry, discredited these techniques and data and rejected most as faulty and highly inaccurate because not helpful proving their hypothesis of fuel burning induced rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Greenhouse Gases at Highest Level Ever.  Greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere reached record highs in 2008, with carbon dioxide levels increasing faster than previously, the U.N. weather agency said Monday [11/23/2009].

The Editor says...
 It is the policy of this web site to quote no more than one sentence from any Associated Press story, which is just as well because the story above, in my opinion, is a pack of lies.  In the second sentence, the reporter mentions that "detailed records" of greenhouse gas levels have been kept since 1998.  That's not true; measurements of carbon dioxide levels go back almost 200 years.  During the previous two centuries, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been much higher than they are now (see chart above), with no adverse effects.  Moreover, the writer doesn't even mention water vapor, which accounts for about 95 percent of the greenhouse effect.

CO2 driven global warming is not supported by the data.  CO2 — many seek to regulate it, legislate it, tax it, capture it, sequester it, cap it, trade it or otherwise control it.  And they who do would have us risk nothing less than worldwide economic destruction based on the theory that not doing so will inevitably lead to catastrophic global warming.  But one need only study the past two centuries of climate history to conclude that CO2 simply does not drive global warming.

NUMBY strikes Ohio.  Not Under My Back Yard — the phenomenon of citizens' groups organizing to stop the burial of carbon dioxide under their communities — succeeds again, this time in Ohio's Darke County, where Citizens Against Carbon Sequestration successfully fought off a proposed $92.6-million carbon storage plan.  Their 14-month protest effort involved yard signs, public meetings and a prayer rally.

Biomass fuel switch questioned.  Ice core samples from which temperature and atmospheric CO2 have been determined for the past 450,000 years refute CO2 causation of increased temperature in two ways. ... First, analysis shows that temperature increase PRECEDED CO2 increase by an average of 800 years.  Warming of the world's oceans led to the slow release of some of the huge amount of dissolved CO2, which is less soluble in warmer seawater.  Second, the eventual decrease in temperature also occurred first, i.e., cooling started while CO2 was still high!

Who is speaking for the plants?  All climate policy is designed to reduce atmospheric CO2, but that is not what the plants would vote for.  Plant producers have added CO2 to enclosed growing environments for 100 years to enhance growth.  Extensive research shows the beneficial effects including a significant increase in biomass including roots, size of the plant and yields.  Another benefit is a reduction in the amount of water used.  As CO2 levels increase the stomata (pores on the leaf) partially close thus moisture loss (transpiration) is reduced.  The current atmospheric CO2 level is reportedly 380 ppm.  Plant growth slows at 220 ppm and stops at 150 ppm.  Most plants grow 2 to 3 times faster in 1200 to 1500 ppm, but the optimum range is 800 to 1000 ppm.  This means plants are malnourished under current conditions.

Cap and Trade Primer:
 Eight reasons why cap and trade harms the economy and reduces jobs.  The most popular way to regulate carbon dioxide emissions is through a cap and trade program.  President Obama and many policymakers support some form of this regulatory policy. ... These proposals are very, very costly and economically damaging.  If enacted, last year's flagship cap and trade proposal, the Lieberman-Warner bill, would increase the cost of gasoline by anywhere from 60 percent to 144 percent and increase the cost of electricity by 77 to 129 percent.

Scientist:  Carbon Dioxide Doesn't Cause Global Warming.  Leighton Steward is on Capitol Hill this week armed with studies and his book Fire, Ice and Paradise in a bid to show senators working on the energy bill that the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade scheme could actually hurt the environment by reducing CO2 levels.  "I'm trying to kill the whole thing," he says.  "We are tilting at windmills."  He is meeting with several GOP lawmakers and has plans to meet with some Democrats later this week.

Earth in Carbon Dioxide Famine, Says Scientist.  Fears of man-made global warming are "mistaken," and far from suffering from too much carbon dioxide, as the daily headlines proclaim, our Earth is actually in the midst of a "CO2 famine."  So says Will Happer. ... Np, Dr. Will Happer is not a celebrity.  He is merely a physicist of considerable renown who happens to agree with many of the world's other leading scientists that the current panic over climate change is a lot of "hysterics about carbon footprints."

EPA Expected to Declare Carbon Dioxide a Dangerous Pollutant.  Don't exhale.  That advice may need heeding if the Environmental Protection Agency declares carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases dangerous pollutants, a move — expected in the next couple weeks — that would require the federal government to impose new rules limiting emissions.  But some skeptics say regulating carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, may be a difficult task, especially since people emit carbon dioxide with every breath.



Maybe there is no greenhouse effect after all.

Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics.  The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea the authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896, but which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism by which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system.  According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.

Greenhouse Theory Disproved a Century Ago.  The claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) can increase air temperatures by "trapping" infrared radiation (IR) ignores the fact that in 1909 physicist R.W. Wood disproved the popular 19th Century thesis that greenhouses stayed warm by trapping IR.  Unfortunately, many people who claim to be scientists are unaware of Wood's experiment which was originally published in the Philosophical magazine, 1909, vol 17, p319-320.

Why Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant.  The importance of this submission lies in the fact that the EPA needs to rapidly come to the conclusion that any and all hype about mankind's carbon dioxide emissions is based on the incorrect application of science.  Carbon dioxide has a nil effect on the global climate and does not cause climate change in any way, shape or form.  This submission will go against all the established interpretations, including those of many skeptical scientists, yet is based entirely upon the proper application of scientific principles, especially those of observation based evidence...

Rethinking the "greenhouse effect".  It is widely believed that without the greenhouse effect our planet's near-surface temperature would be about -18° Celsius, so we have greenhouse gases to thank for an average of +15° instead.  Water vapor, carbon dioxide and other such gases all combine to raise the air's temperature 33 degrees.  But is this true?  Actually, all we're going on is (1) that our atmosphere is much warmer than radiant energy calculations predict, and (2) that the air contains trace gases that react to infrared.  So we have assumed that these two things must be related.

Greenhouse Effect Poppycock.  What animates global warming concerns more than anything is the imaginary greenhouse effect and an equally imaginary law of physics called "radiative equilibrium".  Energy out must equal energy in, this "law" says.  Which does sound plausible on the face of it.  In this view, however, if the light emitted by a heated object is suppressed in some way, its radiant energy will increase past the level of radiant input until it breaks through the barrier... in obedience to this "law".  This notion originates from a long-ago misconception about how glass greenhouses work, thus the family name this "effect" goes by.

Update on the Greenhouse Effect Poppycock — Deception is near-total.  If glass lets visible wavelengths of sunlight in but doesn't let invisible long-wavelengths (infrared) out, thus raising the temperature inside, then glass thermometers have been misleading us for centuries.  According to the theory, glass thermometers necessarily register an extra "greenhouse effect," not the true temperature. ... Dissenters should have just stuck with the evidence:  there is no sign of CO2-caused warming at all.

Carbon Dioxide:  The Houdini of Gases.  How long does carbon dioxide linger in the air?  This is actually an important question, a question of so-called residence time.  Studies compiled by geologist Tom Segalstad rather convincingly show that earth's biological and chemical processes recycle CO2 within a decade, meaning that a CO2 molecule you're exhaling at the moment is bound to be captured by a plant or a rock or the ocean just a few years from now.  Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other authorities insist that carbon dioxide generally remains in the air for up to 200 years.

Heat Stored by Greenhouse Gases.  When investigating the propagation of energy, we must take into account the science of thermodynamics which allows us to predict the trajectory of the process; and the science of heat transfer to know the modes by which energy is propagated from one system to other systems.  We say that heat is not the same as temperature because heat is energy in transit.  Heat can exist in rotational, vibrational and translational motions of the particles of a system, whereas temperature is the measurement of the average of the kinetic energy of the particles of a substance.  The average of the molecular kinetic energy depends on the translational motion of the particles of a system.

Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics.  The relationship between so-called greenhouse gases and atmospheric temperature is not yet well understood.  So far, climatologists have hardly participated in serious scientific discussion of the basic energetic mechanisms of the atmosphere.  Some of them, however, appear to be starting to realise that their greenhouse paradigm is fundamentally flawed, and already preparing to withdraw their theories about the climatic effects of CO2 and other trace gases.

On the Phenomenon of Atmospheric Backradiation.  The phenomenon of "atmospheric backradiation" is presently advanced as an explanation of thermal conditions on Earth, and as the basis of some statements about climate change.  However, scientific evaluation in strict accord with the laws of physics and mathematics suggests that "atmospheric backradiation" is physical nonsense.

The sun heats the earth — period.  After all is said and done, it will be found that carbon dioxide does not and can not affect either the global temperature or climate change.  Carbon dioxide has no climate forcing effect and is not a greenhouse gas and, for that matter, neither is water vapour.

Politics and Greenhouse Gases.  Advocates and sympathetic politicians claiming that man-made global warming from use of carbon-based energy sources mandates international controls on economically prosperous nations were already worried that their victory is slipping.  Now another blow has been struck against the basic "science" used to support their case.  Following an extensive theoretical analysis, two German physicists have determined that the term greenhouse gas is a misnomer and that the greenhouse effect appears to violate basic laws of physics.


Politics of Climate Science:  Selective Research, Ignored Facts.  [Water] covers much more of the surface than land, makes it unique from the other planets, and without it life as we know it would not exist.  Search for water is a constant theme in space exploration.  Despite all this what we actually need is more knowledge about water and its functions on Earth, especially with regard to weather and climate.  All the emphasis is on temperature, but what happens to precipitation is far more important for plants and agriculture.  Precipitation is mentioned in claims of increased droughts with global warming, but it's a scare tactic and illogical.  Warmer temperatures mean more moisture in the air with more precipitation potential, not less.

Reducing Vehicle Travel Won't Make Much Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions.  A highly publicized July report by the Urban Land Institute, titled Moving Cooler, also called for policies reducing the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by people in their cars.  The reductions would be forced by highly intrusive land use policies allowing for only minor expansion of roadway capacity and forcing almost all new development to be within existing urban footprints.  It would employ such radical strategies as forcing people to pay $400 per year to park their cars in front of their own homes.

The Editor says...
 Allow me to simplify this issue:  Leftist politicians want to raise taxes and restrict your freedoms in order to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Group sues to force greenhouse gas regulation.  An environmental group is suing the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to force the agency to regulate emissions of gases blamed for global warming.  Public Citizen's lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday [10/6/2009] in Travis County District Court, accuses the regulatory agency of violating the state's Clean Air Act by refusing to issue standards for controlling the emissions of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants.

The Editor says...
 The state of Texas has not, as far as I know, declared CO2 to be a pollutant.

Humans and Their CO2 Save the Planet!  Carbon dioxide is first and foremost a plant food.  In fact, plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use the energy from sunlight to combine the CO2 with water to yield glucose, the simplest sugar molecule.  Carbon dioxide is also the source of all organic — this word just means "contains carbon" — molecules synthesized by plants. Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there would be no organic molecules synthesized by plants.  The less carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the fewer organic molecules synthesized by plants.  All animals depend on plants to synthesize essential organic molecules.  Without the organic molecules synthesized by plants, the animal world could not exist.  Without plants, there would be no biosphere.

I like trees, but not tree-huggers.  No, I am not a tree-hugger, and I will not become one; it's a dignity thing on both sides.  I am nevertheless well-disposed to trees, and have been for as long as I can remember.  This is among my motives for opposing environmentalists, currently demanding the reduction of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.  Trees live on carbon dioxide, and it is the hypocritical friend who flatters while he plots to choke you.

The Empirical President.  China, which has already passed the United States as the world's chief emitter of CO2, is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity per year.  That amounts to another U.S.A.'s worth of coal consumption every three years.  The rest of the developing world is rushing to do the same.  Brazil, Indonesia, India, and South Africa are burning coal because it is cheap and plentiful.  And no one is even asking them to refrain because to do so is to ask them to remain poor.

Al Gore and Friends Create Climate of McCarthyism.  Indeed, nobody emits CO2 for fun.  CO2 emissions result from other, generally beneficial acts, such as burning coal to keep warm, burning kerosene to cook, or burning petrol to transport people.  The benefits of fossil fuels must be weighed against the costs of global warming.  Gore and Hansen want a moratorium on coal-fired power plants, but neglect the fact that the hundreds of new power plants that will be opened in China and India in the coming years could lift a billion people out of poverty.

Higher Carbon Dioxide Levels Benefit Sea Stars.  Warmer water and elevated carbon dioxide levels help sea stars grow faster, reports a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The finding adds to a growing number of studies showing higher carbon dioxide levels are beneficial to marine life and do not cause harmful ocean acidification, as claimed by global warming alarmists.

A Primer on Global Warming: Dispelling CO2 Myths.  The scientific facts clearly show carbon dioxide is a good thing, not something we should fear.  CO2 is not a pollutant.  On the contrary, carbon dioxide makes crops and forests grow faster.  Satellite mapping shows the Earth has become about 6 percent greener overall in the past two decades, with forests expanding into arid regions.  The Amazon rain forest was the biggest gainer, with two tons of additional biomass per acre per year.  Certainly climate change does not help every region equally, but careful studies predict overall benefits — fewer storms, more rain, better crop yields, longer growing seasons, milder winters, and lower heating costs in colder climates.  The news is certainly not bad and on balance may be rather good.

EPA Rules CO2 a Danger, Prepares to Regulate.  EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the finding "confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations," while EPA's ruling said evidence human activities cause global warming is "compelling and overwhelming," according to an EPA press statement.  In addition to carbon dioxide (CO2), the ruling applies to methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).

The regulation of essential elements of life.  The EPA is now considering designating CO2 a dangerous pollutant.  The regulation of essential elements of life by our government scares me.  It should scare us all.  I am devastated by the notion that our own government founded on freedom would regulate and control the most fundamental aspects of life on earth. ... We generally have too much water where we don't need it and too little where we do.  Are you planning to regulate water also? ... Carbon dioxide is just as essential to life as water and oxygen.  Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than oxygen or water.

Lovely Organic Oil.  Let's examine a few things we know about carbon.  It is the basic building block of all life (no wonder the EPA wants to control this).  It is the byproduct of various processes such as breathing and burning.  It is essential for plant growth.  The optimal level of carbon in the air is unknown, but its relative amount of the airs composition is very small.  So when carbon is emitted it is absorbed by other parts of the environment in a seemingly endless cyclical process.

Climate, Water, Carbon Dioxide, and the Sun.  Without our atmosphere the Earth would be a frozen ice ball at about -18°C.  Natural greenhouse due to atmospheric blanket raises the temperature by about 33°C and at least 2/3 of this warming is attributed to the greenhouse impact of water vapor.  It is the water vapor that is by far the most important greenhouse gas.  CO2 and the other greenhouse gases play only a subordinate role in the overall temperature amplification:  in nature as well as in the climate models.

Spending billions on a non-existent problem.  The term "greenhouse gas emissions" is either deliberately misleading or indicates complete ignorance of the science, or both.  What they really mean is CO2, yet it is less than 4% of greenhouse gases and the human portion a fraction of that.  Why do they want it reduced?  It is not a pollutant and not causing global warming or climate change.  Reducing it is completely unnecessary and harmful for the plants and will cost trillions.

All life on planet depends on CO2.  The 2007 IPCC Report claimed with over 90% certainty that human produced CO2 is almost the sole cause of global warming.  But the evidence shows this can't be true; temperature changes before CO2 in every record of any duration for any time period; CO2 variability does not correlate with temperature at any point in the last 600 million years; atmospheric CO2 levels are currently at the lowest level in that period; in the 20th century most warming occurred before 1940 when human production of CO2 was very small; human production of CO2 increased the most after 1940 but global temperatures declined to 1985; from 2000 global temperatures declined while CO2 levels increased; and any reduction in CO2 threatens plant life, oxygen production and therefore all life on the planet.

The Great Government CO2 Power Grab.  The inevitable has happened.  The Obama government has declared CO2 — a nutrient required by plants to live, and a gas exhaled with your every breath — a pollutant.  Let there be rejoicing in the ranks of activists.  Do what we say!  Now, when I say that what occurred was "inevitable" it means that there was nothing anybody could have done to stop the government from doing what it lusted to do.  No facts would have stopped them, no arguments, no evidence, no sober quantifications of uncertainty.  This was going to happen as soon as Obama was elected.  Control is what was wanted and control is what was had.

Terms of Endangerment.  The White House is currently reviewing the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) "endangerment finding" that as a matter of law CO2 is a pollutant that threatens the public's health and must therefore be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.  Such a rulemaking would let the EPA impose the ossified command-and-control regulatory approach of the 1970s, even if Democrats never get around to passing a cap-and-tax bill, says the Wall Street Journal.

Rep. Barton: Even Democrats Divided on Climate Change.  [Scroll down]  Under Obama, the EPA has issued an endangerment finding saying that carbon dioxide is a hazard to public health.  "Of course, they've not really given any explicit examples of that, because they can't," Barton says.  "There's never been anybody who's been treated in an emergency room for CO2 poisoning.  It doesn't cause asthma; it doesn't cause your eyes to water; it doesn't cause cancer."  Barton says the average healthy adult exhales between four-tenths of a ton and seven-tenths of a ton of CO2 a year.

Truths and Myths About Carbon Dioxide, Scientific Consensus, and Climate Models.  Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life.  However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds.  Carbon dioxide is a bit player.  There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth's temperature — on the order of one degree.  Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can.

CO2 And You.  While a bill that's intended to cut carbon dioxide emissions wends its way through Congress, an arm of the legislative branch is warning that doing so will have nasty economic consequences.

When Expenses Outweigh Benefits.  Should the Environmental Protection Agency place limits on carbon dioxide emissions, the costs to the oil industry, its customers and consumers in general will be stiff.  Fighting global warming is not cheap.

Protect us from the EPA.  One man's meat may be another man's poison, but the Environmental Protection Agency has taken the idea to an absurdity.  EPA has just sent a proposal to the White House that would classify carbon dioxide as a health hazard.  But if there wasn't carbon dioxide around, there would be no plants.  And, for that matter, neither would there be any people or pets if we weren't allowed to exhale.

Green hysteria shackles our economic growth.  I am surprised so many people in Europe, the US and elsewhere have come to support policies underpinned by hysteria over global warming, particularly cap-and-trade legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions and subsidies for "green" energy sources.  I am convinced this is a misguided strategy — not only because of the uncertainty about the dangers that global warming might pose, but also because of the certainty of the damage that policies aimed at mitigation will cause.

In praise of Carbon:  There is no scientific theory linking carbon dioxide to the "runaway" global warming that is the basis of the calamitous predictions.  The contribution of the gas to the making of a comfortable planet by the greenhouse effect is well understood, modest and self-limiting.  It is only turned into a terror by computer models.  These are worthless; depending as they do on extensive guesswork about the ill-understood mechanisms and interactions involved in climate, and involving so many tunable parameters and feedback factors that they could produce any desired result by appropriate tweaking.  A quarter of a century ago, before science came under firm bureaucratic control, such models would have been laughed out of court.

Negligible Global Effect of Greenhouse-gas Emission Limits in Pennsylvania.  In this report, we provide a review of Pennsylvania's climate history and show that there is little observational evidence of unusual long-term climate changes taking place that could be linked to anthropogenic "global warming" — despite the frequent prognostications to the contrary, often accompanied by doom and gloom scenarios.  Instead of rising temperatures, the state's annual average temperature has remained relatively unchanged over the past century.

Eight Fallacies about Global Warming:  The reality is that there is no clear evidence that human emissions of carbon dioxide have any measurable effect on temperatures.  Such a claim rests on climate models of unproven accuracy and on lines of physical argument that expressly exclude consideration of other known important drivers of climate change. ... At its most basic, if scientists cannot be sure that temperatures are today rising, nor establish that the gentle late 20th century warming was caused by CO2 emissions, then it is nonsense to propose that expensive controls are needed on human carbon dioxide emissions.

Clown Cars.  In exchange for lower emissions of CO2, which is a pollutant based on politics, not reality, and is such a weak greenhouse gas that man's puny contribution can't possibly have any effect on climate, we'll have more death on the roads.  Is this the trade-off that the country should be willing to accept?  Do we really want more of these minis and micros being knocked around and crushed by bigger automobiles?  Are we willing to see these cars lose deadly battles with utility poles, guard rails and concrete walls?

Cap-and-trade — 'Largest tax increase of all time'.  Is the carbon dioxide that humans exhale a public danger?  Yes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  The EPA has released an endangerment finding on carbon dioxide.  The finding will allow the gas to be regulated under the Clean Air Act, something the Act was not intended to do when it was enacted over 30 years ago.  Aggressive cap-and-trade measures are being debated on Capitol Hill and, if enacted, are rumored to rake in trillions of dollars for the federal government and raise the cost of living for Americans by thousands of dollars.

Your EPA Mafia At Work.  I am increasingly of the opinion that the main goal of the Obama administration through CO2 regulation, exploding deficits, punishing taxation, and any other means at their disposal is the destruction of the economy and the complete control of impoverished Americans.  This is an administration that exists to impose an Orwellian socialist utopia when the smoke clears.  When it comes to CO2, Obama, all of his so-called science advisors, and the Environmental Protection Agency are all lying.  A criminal fraud is being perpetrated.

EPA:  Greenhouse gases threat to human health.  Declaring that greenhouse gases are a significant threat to human health, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed listing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act, a policy the Bush administration rejected.  The White House acknowledged that the EPA had transmitted its proposed finding on global warming to the Office of Management and Budget, but provided no details.

An obvious power grab:
 EPA:  Global Warming Threatens Public Health, Welfare.  The Environmental Protection Agency sent a proposal to the White House on Friday [3/20/2009] finding that global warming is endangering the public's health and welfare, according to several sources, a move that could have far-reaching implications for the nation's economy and environment.

EPA moving toward carbon regulation.  Taking another step toward regulating emissions of greenhouse gases, the Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency is declaring that global warming poses a threat to public health.

CO2 Fairytales in Global Warming.  Of course we know now that CO2 was rolled out as the "poster child" nemesis against the environment.  It was meant to get us hysterical enough to plead with our politicians to exact a tax on our carbon footprints so that we can save the planet earth.  But it's turning out that the CO2 "poster child" has significant problems.  Despite the fact that Carbon is a part of the CO2 molecule, the atmospheric science of CO2 directly contradicts what the AGW alarmists are trying to sell us.  Promoting CO2 as the environmental monkey on our back is absolutely ludicrous.  CO2 is friend to all life, not a foe.

EPA Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide for First Time.  The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, The New York Times reported on Wednesday [2/18/2009], citing senior Obama administration officials.  EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has asked her staff to review the latest scientific evidence and prepare documentation for a finding that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health and welfare, the newspaper said.  There is wide expectation that Jackson will act by April 2, the second anniversary of a Supreme Court decision that found that EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse pollution under the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Stop the CO2 Madness!  Carbon dioxide is not a "pollutant" as the Supreme Court has ruled.  How can the Earth's second most vital gas, other than oxygen, be a pollutant?  Not one single piece of vegetation on Earth could exist without CO2.  Without vegetation, no animal life including our own could exist on Earth.  The notion that the EPA would regulate it is preposterous.  It is absurd.  It is criminal.  It is immoral.  It has no basis whatever in the actual science of the world's climate.  It is based on a massive, global hoax masterminded by the United Nations and carried out by charlatans such as Al Gore and NASA's James Hansen. ... The assertion that human beings and/or industrial activity have any effect on [Earth's] atmosphere is an instrument of fascism.

Administration Selling Environmentalist Window Insurance.  The greens demanded that EPA classify carbon dioxide — the overwhelming majority of which is produced by Mother Nature — an "endangerment" to human health and the environment, at least when it comes from U.S. automobile tailpipes.  The reasoning, of course, was that U.S. cars cause "global warming."  It does not matter that, since the Court ruled, planetary cooling has accelerated even as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise steadly.  Browner's excuse is also lame because the Court did not order the Agency to regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act, but rather made clear that EPA can simply ground a reason for not doing so in the statute.  One obvious such reason is that even eliminating all U.S. vehicles would have no climatic impact.

Carbon is the World's Best Friend.  Carbon dioxide is not the dreaded greenhouse gas that the global warmers crack it up to be.  It is in fact the most important airborne fertiliser in the world and without it there would be no green plants at all.  In fact, a doubling of the levels of this gas in the atmosphere would bring about a marked rise in plant production — good news for everyone, especially those malnourished millions who can't afford chemical fertilisers.

Climate Fears Distort U.S. Energy Policies.  There is no question that the exaggerated concern about global warming is distorting energy policy in the United States, and indeed throughout the world.  The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, most of the media, and almost all politicians have demonized carbon dioxide as a pollutant whose emissions have to be reduced.  It is significant that proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have largely ignored natural climate influences, principally from changes in solar activity.  Yet the evidence is overwhelming that such natural factors control the climate and that the greenhouse effect from rising carbon dioxide, while certainly present, is insignificant and as yet undetectable.

Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas:  The internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented.  And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960's.  Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue.  Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today's cars.  Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless.  Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been.  So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide.  And, that is the rub.  Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.

Calling Carbon Dioxide A Pollutant Doesn't Make It A Pollutant.  It is becoming increasingly fashionable to maintain that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, one that should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Warning:  Breathing causes global warming.  Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson opened Pandora's box recently by agreeing to reconsider a Bush administration decision that excluded carbon dioxide from the list of pollutants the agency regulates under the Clean Air Act.  Human beings and animals exhale the carbon dioxide that plants use in photosynthesis.  A byproduct of photosynthesis is normally oxygen breathed by human beings and animals.  So to even consider classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant is, to put it mildly, quite a stretch.

The Saturated Greenhouse Effect:  Considering that we are told "the science is settled", one would think that the strength of the greenhouse effect (GHE) on Earth would be calculated based on atmospheric physics.  That is, the computer models of the atmosphere would incorporate the physics of how the greenhouse effect works, so that by inputing some measured physical properties, the atmospheric gases, the models would determine the strength of the greenhouse effect and the surface temperatures.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.

If greenhouse gases are bad, how come rising CO2 levels increase agricultural productivity?  Plenty of evidence from numerous studies indicates that the Earth has far more capacity to absorb greenhouse gases than the IPCC gives it credit for, many times more, and that additional CO2 will actually be beneficial to farming, both in the quantity and the quality of crops that can be raised.

Carbon Dioxide Levels Are a Blessing, Not a Problem.  For centuries, bloodletting was an accepted medical procedure administered by physicians to treat patients for most illnesses.  In today's world, we find it almost inconceivable that such a practice was condoned by entire populations.  Similarly, the claim that increased carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is causing "global warming" has been accepted as "fact" in many countries worldwide.  This belief has no more scientific foundation than the bloodletting of past generations.

The Plain Truth about Glorious Carbon Dioxide.  If any of the nitwits babbling about CO2 and global warming ever went to any of the several dozen excellent websites that provide accurate scientific data and analysis, they would cease from their abusive manipulation of the public and perhaps find honest work.  To begin at the beginning; at the heart of the global warming hoax is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  While it purports to represent the views of thousands of scientists, it does not.

Satanic Gas:  Carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table.  It is unique among the elements in the vast number and variety of compounds it can form.  With hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements, it forms a very large number of compounds.  There are close to ten million known carbon compounds, many thousands of which are vital to organic and life processes.  Carbon is essential for life.  [And yet] carbon is now being demonised by the media and by ministers of the Crown.

The Climate-Change Reformation.  Al Gore — outdone only by L. Ron Hubbard in his ability to weave science fiction into a religion — is reforming the climate change faith, and turning it toward the discussion of energy independence and American financial viability.  The truth, alas, has proved too inconvenient to ignore.  Among non-partisan researchers, there is now little doubt that human-generated carbon dioxide makes only an insignificant contribution to climate change.

EPA Proposes CO2 Regulations, Seeks Comments from Public.  The [Supreme] Court ruled the Clean Air Act (CAA) authorizes EPA to regulate automotive greenhouse gas emissions if and only if EPA determines they cause or contribute to air pollution that may reasonably be expected to endanger public health or welfare.  While the case specifically addressed automotive greenhouse gas emissions, the Court's reasoning could be extended to stationary sources such as power plants.

Greenhouse Gas Reporting:  Frequently Asked Questions.  The U.S. Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Program was established by Section 1605(b) of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 to provide a means for organizations and individuals who have reduced their emissions to record their accomplishments.

The Great Global Warming Swindle.  CO2 is a very small gas in the atmosphere.  It is vital of course — without it we wouldn't be here.  But it's small.  It's not at all the most important greenhouse gas, and greenhouse gases themselves, and the 'greenhouse effect', form only one small part of the earth's climate system (and not a very well understood part either).  There is no correlation between CO2 and temperature on any significant timescale, except where you find, in ice core data, CO2 levels being influenced by temperature levels (there's a time lag between the two phenomena).  Even global warmers admit that, for CO2 to make any difference, there would need to be some mechanism to amplify its effect in the atmosphere.  No such amplifier has been shown to exist.

Carbon Garden:  To listen to Gore and the legion of global warming alarmists, carbon dioxide is our greatest enemy.  Not extremist Islamic jihadis.  Not widespread economic collapse caused by hyperregulation of the world's economic leader, the U.S.  Not global protectionism.  Not a planet starved of energy.  Yet it's carbon dioxide concentrations, not empty gases spewed by self-important busybodies, that are making the Earth bloom.  CO2 levels are at their highest since humans began keeping records.  The increased CO2 is fertilizing plants with needed carbon, making them grow bigger and faster.

In praise of CO2:  Planet Earth is on a roll!  GPP is way up.  NPP is way up.  To the surprise of those who have been bearish on the planet, the data shows global production has been steadily climbing to record levels, ones not seen since these measurements began.  GPP is Gross Primary Production, a measure of the daily output of the global biosphere -- the amount of new plant matter on land.  NPP is Net Primary Production, an annual tally of the globe's production.  Biomass is booming.  The planet is the greenest it's been in decades, perhaps in centuries.

'Medieval Environmentalists' attack CO2 in their efforts to derail civilization.  Why are carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, particularly the relatively small amount emitted by human activity, the sole focus of most climate change debates?  In scientific circles, CO2 is referred to as a 'trace gas' that, for hundreds of thousands of years, has remained at or below five ten-thousandths of the atmosphere by volume.  Even among the so-called 'greenhouse gases' (GHG), CO2 accounts for less that 4%, with water vapour being by far the most significant GHG.  CO2 is clearly a miniscule component of the massive mechanisms that create climate and cause climate change.

Truth Stripped Naked.  A new study accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Letters debunks the greenies' climate hysteria and the political pretext for draconian restrictions on our economy that have become so popular with environmentalists and grandstanding politicians. …Climatology pioneer Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the department of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, said the new study shows "you can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide."

This global-warming fraud is designed to reduce our standard of living.  I read with interest Sen. John Kerry's and Teresa Heinz Kerry's "Too much hot air on global warming." … But the Kerrys say nothing about reducing emissions from the number-one source in Washington state.  Mount St. Helens, by itself, puts out thousands of times more CO2 than all the autos in the nation combined!

Alleviate world hunger produce more clean carbon dioxide.  Far from being a pollutant, man along with every animal on land, fish in the sea, and bird in the air is totally dependent on atmospheric carbon dioxide for his food supply.  Some politicians complain that the United States with only 3% of the world population uses 25% of the energy.  But the clean carbon dioxide which we produce is increasing food production everywhere on earth.

Global Warming Heresy:  Manmade carbon dioxide emissions are roughly 5 percent of the total; the rest are from natural sources such as volcanoes, dying vegetation and animals.  Annually, volcanoes alone produce more carbon dioxide than all of mankind's activities.  Oceans are responsible for most greenhouse gases. ... The bottom line is, the bulk of scientific evidence shows that what we've been told by environmentalists is pure bunk.

In Science, Ignorance is not Bliss.  NASA's Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2).  This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists.

"The Sky is Falling ... Again!"  That's right, the radical environmentalists with nothing better to do, august representatives of academia and your cozy little fuzz ball politicians, have ginned up a new crisis.  This time it is the ocean. … According to the all-wise pundits, man-made CO2 is rising into the upper atmosphere and is causing global warming.  That's somewhat interesting in that CO2 is heavier than air and should sink, not rise.

Unbearable Legislation:  America's energy infrastructure will be crippled, and for what?  China is building two coal-fired power plants a week and plans to build 97 airports in the next 12 years.  Even if the United States reduces its carbon emissions to zero, global emissions are still likely to increase.  If greenhouse gases are truly causing problems for the polar bear, U.S. legislative action will do nothing to protect it.

San Francisco Regulators Seek Greenhouse Fee.  San Francisco-area air quality regulators are proposing to charge a fee to most businesses based on the amount of greenhouse gases they emit.  The fee — 4.2 cents per metric ton of carbon dioxide — would affect everything from oil refineries to power plants and would include landfills, factories, and small businesses such as restaurants and bakeries.

The Myth of Vanishing CO2 Emissions:  Environmental activists and some politicians are now promoting the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent or more by mid-century.  CEO William O'Keefe and President Jeff Kueter, both of the George C. Marshall Institute, investigate whether this proposition is achievable and what this would cost Americans.

Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change.  Carbon dioxide, like water vapour and oxygen, is not only completely harmless but is an essential element in our life support system.  Not only do we exhale carbon dioxide every time we breathe, but plants need to absorb carbon dioxide in order to survive.  Without carbon dioxide, there would be no plant life on the planet.  And without plant life, there would be no human life either.

When Your Only Tool is Coercion, Every Problem Looks Like Too Much Freedom.  The entire purpose of [North Carolina's Climate Action Plan Advisory Group] was to find ways in which the citizens of the state could be forced to modify their behavior in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. … The interesting — and undisputed — fact is that these restrictions will not result in an overall reduction in global temperatures, even if the whole world adopts them.  Yet CAPAG refused to take this into consideration during its deliberations.

Earth Day Is a Holiday For Liars.  I have followed the apocalyptic claims and the legislated mandates of the environmental movement since the 1970s and their single unifying factor has been the lies told to achieve various elements the Green agenda. … There is no scientific justification for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Carbon dioxide represents a miniscule 0.038% of the Earth's atmosphere and increases in CO2 always follow climate change.  It does not initiate it.  The Greens are lying.

Environmentalists Oppose New CO2 Scrubber Idea.  Scientists at Columbia University are developing a carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubber device that removes one ton of CO2 from the air every day.  While some see the scrubber as an efficient and economical way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, many environmentalists are opposing the technology because it allows people to use fossil fuels and emit carbon in the first place.

The Editor says...
 One could easily conclude that the environmentalists don't care about reducing CO2 in the atmosphere as much as they care about suppressing and inhibiting industrial activity.

Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System.  Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect.  Interestingly, many "facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.

EPA Seeks To Have Water Vapor Classified As A Pollutant.  If successful, the push to classify water vapor as a dangerous pollutant would impact virtually everyone.  For instance, homeowners could see a wide variety of common activities that cause evaporation being regulated:  watering the lawn, or using a hot tub or swimming pool.  "Right now, we are not so concerned about the water vapor exhaled by people.  That is low on our list of priorities", said Mr. Donaldson.  "We'll tackle that manmade source at a later time."

The Editor says...
 Evidently he's not kidding.  This is just another way the EPA, having outlived its usefulness, is desperately looking for something to fix.  How do you suppose Mr. Donaldson is going to keep the lakes and oceans from producing water vapor?

Let the rest of the world make climate errors.  Kevin Rudd has an unfortunate proclivity for proclaiming Australia should lead the world in its response to global warming.  For a country so richly endowed with carbon-based energy resources, this does not immediately commend itself as the most obvious policy course for us to follow.  And the latest discussion paper on emissions trading from the Garnaut review, released last Thursday, should have set political alarm bells ringing on the potential costs of action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Are Carbon Cuts Just a Fantasy?  What if there's no way to cut greenhouse emissions enough to make a real difference?  That's the question raised by a commentary in Nature arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been too optimistic in its projections for the technological possibilities of reducing greenhouse emissions.  Their calculations are called "a bombshell" in a separate news article in Nature about the paper.

Dangerous assumptions.  The United Nations Climate Conference in Bali in 2007 set the world on a two-year path to negotiate a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.  Yet not even the most rosy-eyed delegate could fail to recognize that stabilizing atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations is an enormous undertaking.  Here we address the magnitude of the technological changes required to meet that challenge.  We argue that the size of this technology challenge has been seriously underestimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), diverting attention from policies that could directly stimulate technological innovation.  [Also available in PDF]

Report:  Temperature Changes Precede CO2 Changes.  Temperature changes precede changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide.  Scientists have found carbon dioxide levels typically rise roughly 200 to 1,000 years after temperatures rise.  That is, temperature change is the cause, not the result, of changing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

CO2 Regulation Could Crush Building Construction.  [Scroll down] If the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ever decides to regulate greenhouse gases, it would trigger the very same stationary source controls.  As a result, construction on any new or existing source with the potential to emit more than 250 tons of CO2 per year — which includes most large buildings — could come to a screeching halt.

'Green Hanukkia' campaign sparks ire.  In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.  The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide.  If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

The Editor says...
 Have the tree-huggers never heard of trees?  The world's vegetation depends on this "significant damage to the atmosphere."

The "carbon sink" and global warming:  According to this week's Science magazine, the ocean's ability to absorb carbon may be far greater than previously estimated.  That means that atmospheric CO2 gets eliminated perhaps twice as much as global warming alarmists thought, before this news came out.  Why?  Well, it turns out that there is a whole variety of tiny phytoplanktons --- single-celled plants --- that are called picoplanktons because they are so small.

The Virtues of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide:  The annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide attributable to human activities — primarily the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas — is about 1 part in 10,000 of that contained in the oceans and biosphere — a contribution of ultimately negligible consequence.  Since, however, this human-released carbon must travel through the atmosphere to reach the ocean and biotic reservoirs, human use, while it continues, has caused a transient rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide from about 0.03% to about 0.04% of atmospheric molecules.  The primary environmental result of this rise is plant fertilization.  We are moving carbon from below ground into the atmosphere, where it is available to produce more plants and animals — a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.

$800 Billion Annual Cost to Capture Carbon.  There will be a little more required to stop global warming than making "small changes to your daily routine," as Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" Web site has suggested.  One of the authors of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage estimated the worldwide cost could run an astonishing $800 billion annually.

California suit on car greenhouse gases dismissed.  A U.S. federal judge tossed out a lawsuit by California's attorney general on Monday [9/17/2007] seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from six automakers for damaging the state with climate-changing greenhouse gases.  Martin Jenkins, a federal judge in the Northern District of California, said the issue of global warming should be decided in the political rather than legal arena.

Organic beer is CO2 sinner.  Organic beer production emits substantially more greenhouse gases than ordinary beer, according to a Copenhagen University thesis.  Jakob Majcher, author of the thesis, studied the total carbon dioxide emissions in connection with the brewing of organic and conventional lagers.

The Climate is Less Sensitive to Greenhouse Gases Than Predicted, Study Says.  How sensitive is Earth's climate?  Sufficient to warm by at least several degrees in response to greenhouse gas pollution but perhaps not as sensitive as some scientists have feared, according to a new study.

[Is it possible that the climate is self-adjusting?  Is it possible that God is still in control of the things he created?  Is it possible that environmentalists don't know everything?]

The Greenhouse Myth:  The notion that our atmosphere acts like a greenhouse — that is, so-called atmospheric "greenhouse gases," like water vapor and CO2, "trap" incoming solar radiation to warm the atmosphere — is wrong.  Not only doesn't the atmosphere work that way, greenhouses don't either.

The Right to Breathe:  The United States Supreme Court this month heard arguments on the issue of whether carbon dioxide should be identified as a pollutant and be brought into the Environmental Protection Agency enforcement policies of the Clean Air Act.  Webster describes a pollutant as a harmful chemical or waste material discharged into water or the atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide, as it exists in the earth's atmosphere, has never been proven harmful.  It is not a waste material.  Carbon dioxide just happens to be the single most important part of the Earth's atmosphere as it relates to life on this planet.

Greenhouse crusade rests on flawed logic.  Shut down our coal industry — our children's wellbeing is at stake!  This is the message from Greens' leader Bob Brown, who argues that because burning coal emits large amounts of greenhouse gases, the coal industry should be shut down within a matter of years.  Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has echoed Brown's position, while Labor's environment spokesman, Peter Garrett, has also singled out coal, effectively calling for the growth of the industry to be frozen.

The Real "Inconvenient Truth":  Does the Earth's atmosphere primarily behave like an actual greenhouse?  No. … An actual greenhouse works as a physical barrier to convection (the transfer of heat by currents in a fluid) while the atmosphere facilitates convection.  So-called "greenhouse gases" in the Earth's atmosphere do not act as a barrier to convection so the impression of actual greenhouse-like activity in the Earth's atmosphere is wrong.

 Editor's Note:   The article below is loaded with environmental bias and rash presuppositions, as the author describes CO2 as a dangerous gas, and assumes that sequestering CO2 underground will alleviate the greenhouse "problem".

Scientists say buried gases may escape.  Carbon dioxide buried underground has dissolved the minerals that help keep the dangerous greenhouse gas from escaping, US scientists have revealed.  Researchers testing the viability of injecting CO2 into saline sedimentary aquifers, in a US Government experiment in Texas, found it caused carbonates and other minerals to dissolve rapidly, which could allow CO2 and brine to leak into the water table.

Coal plant to put power of CO2 to test.  Alabama Power Co.'s Barry Electric Generating Plant north of Mobile will be the site of the nation's first large-scale attempt to capture carbon dioxide emitted from a coal-fired power plant and to inject the gas deep underground.  The four-year, $175 million experiment begins in 2011 and will test the future viability of coal as a source of electrical power, Alabama Power's parent firm, Atlanta-based Southern Co., announced Wednesday.

Carbon capture and storage a pipe dream.  Let's review the problems with the idea of carbon capture and storage (CCS), which make it unlikely as an environmental savior.  Land-based CCS consists of three primary activities:  capturing carbon dioxide out of an emissions stream, compressing it into a liquid, and then piping that liquid over land, and down into the Earth where, in theory, it will be retained in geological formations for hundreds or thousands of years.  It sounds quite simple, until you dig into the details.

Carbon's Kindergarten Cop:  The Governor's pledge to lower greenhouse gas emissions in California to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 will bring Californians little or no environmental benefit, while costing the citizenry a substantial amount of money.  The Governor has long pandered to California's environmental interest groups, but as an earlier (and wiser) Republican Governor named Reagan observed, "Facts are stubborn things."

The Earth's atmosphere is composed of 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of other gases, including water vapor.  We call this "air" and humans depend on the oxygen content for life.  At the same time all six billion of us individually exhale about two pounds of carbon dioxide every day.  By contrast, Nature emits about 30 times more CO2 than humans.  The oceans of the world absorb and release CO2 all the time.  This is Nature's balance that maintains all life, animal and vegetable, on earth.*

Taking a Molecule to Court:  The Supreme Court, by agreeing to hear a case on whether the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must take steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, will finally judge on the alleged threat of global warming.  The stakes are huge.  Should the Court find in favor of the plaintiffs, it would put the EPA in control of the U.S. economy for the foreseeable future.

States Set to Sue the U.S. Over Greenhouse Gases.  New York is one of more than a dozen states, led by California, preparing to sue the Bush administration for holding up efforts to regulate emissions from cars and trucks, several people involved in the lawsuit said on Tuesday [10/23/2007].  The move comes as New York and other Northeastern states are stepping up their push for tougher regulation of greenhouse gases as part of their continuing opposition to President Bush's policies.

The Editor says...
 Nothing wastes your money faster than the states filing a lawsuit against the federal government.  The lawyers are the only ones who benefit, and no matter which side wins, the verdict will usually result in more regulations and intrusive restrictions on property owners and businesses.

Inhofe Warns of Global Warming Laws.  At a hearing on human health effects of global warming, Inhofe implied that [Barbara Boxer] was distracting members with studies of what might happen from global warming rather than focusing on "what will happen if we legislate global warming."  Inhofe believes that any mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions will bear too great a cost for the economy for too little benefit.

China overtakes US as world's biggest CO2 emitter.  China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, figures released today show. … China's emissions had not been expected to overtake those from the US, formerly the world's biggest polluter, for several years, although some reports predicted it could happen as early as next year.

High Court Hears Global Warming Hoax.  This week the Supreme Court heard arguments in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, a lawsuit brought by a coalition of 12 states, the cities of New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and environmental groups including the Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.  The case is an attempt to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate carbon dioxide as a dangerous air pollutant under the definition of the Clean Air Act.

The Editor says...
 As usual, leftist troublemakers head to the courts to accomplish what they can't get done at the ballot box.  When the Clean Air Act was written, who knew it would someday be used to regulate carbon dioxide?  And of course this won't be the end of it.  This kind of incrementalism only goes one direction, and it never stops.

New Jersey's Nutty CO2 Notions:  While an army of snowplows was at work on the roads of the Garden State, the little Green gnomes in the Department of Environmental Protection were working to reclassify carbon dioxide (CO2) as a "contaminant."  If this becomes law, the DEP might as well arrest everyone living in the Garden State because humans generate CO2 every time they exhale.

Nitrogen pollution drives trees to soak up more CO2.  Nitrogen pumped into the environment by human activities such as driving cars and farming is fertilising tree growth and boosting the amount of carbon being stored in forests outside the tropics, say researchers.  Their study provides a surprising example of how one type of human pollution is helping to counter another.

"Carbon sinks" drain water.  The rush to plant forests to soak up carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, could cause as many problems as it solves, with new research showing they can reduce local water supplies by up to 50 percent.  An international study on the use of forest plantations as carbon sinks has found that while intensive plantations can help mitigate the effects of global warming, they can also sap streamflows and cause salinity.

Rare Carbon Dioxide "Lake" Found Under the Ocean, Scientists Report.  A team of scientists based in Japan and Germany has found an unusual "lake" of liquid carbon dioxide beneath the ocean floor.  On Earth's surface carbon dioxide (CO2) is normally a gas, but in the cold, high-pressure ocean depths it cools and becomes a liquid.

From Garden State to Greenhouse State.  Carbon dioxide is the second most important "greenhouse gas", after water vapor, that helps keep the Earth habitable by retaining infrared (heat) radiation and warming the Earth.  This is a natural process that occurs with or without help from humans.  Additionally, life on Earth depends on carbon dioxide, which is used by the biosphere for food.

Who's Afraid of CO2?.  Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.  It is tasteless, colorless, nontoxic to humans at concentrations up to 13 times present levels and is essential to life.  Plants breathe CO2, and as they grow and reproduce they exhale oxygen, making the earth habitable for humans.  Instead of a disaster, the expected doubling of CO2 due to human activities will produce a number of benefits over the next century.

Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide:  Predictions of global warming are based on computer climate modeling, a branch of science still in its infancy.  The empirical evidence actual measurements of Earth's temperature shows no man-made warming trend.  Indeed, over the past two decades, when CO2 levels have been at their highest, global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly.

How come greenhouse gases increase agricultural productivity?  What about greenhouse gases?  Plenty of evidence from numerous studies indicates that the Earth has far more capacity to absorb greenhouse gases than we give it credit for, many times more, and that additional CO2 will actually be beneficial to farming, both in the volume and the quality of crops that can be raised.

Enhanced or Impaired?  Human health in a CO2-enriched warmer world.

Global Warming Policy:  Some Economic Implications.  The link between greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature increases is uncertain, and some scientists believe the net effect of any global warming could be beneficial.

US edges towards cap on greenhouse gases.  The US yesterday [11/1/2007] took a first step towards mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions, in direct defiance of the Bush administration's policy on climate change.  Yesterday's vote in a Senate subcommittee marks the first US move towards European-style policies.  Although the caps on emissions approved do not go as far as those in Europe, environmental campaigners said they marked a decisive break with the administration's policies.

How to Cripple an Economy:  Well-intentioned schemes to restrict emissions of carbon dioxide could cost the economy half a trillion dollars.

Photosynthesis in Second-Generation Pine Trees Grown in Air of Elevated CO2 Concentration.  The study was conducted at Christchurch, New Zealand in open-top chambers, where the trees were irrigated daily and fertilized every three months.  Water use efficiency was 49% higher in the foliage of the elevated CO2 treatment, although there was no change in needle stomatal conductance.

The True Agenda?  Global Governance!  Fully 95% of the carbon dioxide is produced by natural sources such as evaporating seawater, decaying organic matter, and from plant and animal respiration.  Each year, 157 billion metric tons is released in the atmosphere.  Of this amount, barely 457.2 million tons comes from cars and trucks.  According to American Enterprise Institute researcher, James Johnson, "Eliminating all U.S. gasoline powered vehicles would reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions by 0.18%."  Less than one half of one half of one percent.  Despite this minuscule contribution, Albert Gore, Jr., in his book "Earth in the Balance", advocates "eliminating the internal combustion engine" by the year 2018!

Living with the greenhouse effect:  A great deal of what you read and hear about the so-called "greenhouse effect" is either exaggerated, or misrepresented, or both.  The blanket of our atmosphere keeps the surface of the planet a full 33°C warmer than it would otherwise be, and crucially (as far as life forms like us are concerned) raises the temperature above the freezing point of water.

A Tale of Two Atmospheres

Global warming is a natural geological process.  An Ohio State University researcher predicts that the process could begin to reverse itself within 10 to 20 years.  The researcher suggests that atmospheric carbon dioxide — often thought of as a key "greenhouse gas" — is not the cause of global warming. The opposite is most likely to be true:  It is the rising global temperatures that are naturally increasing the levels of carbon dioxide, not the other way around, he says.

Global Warming vs. Prosperity:  Green's attempt to cut carbon dioxide emissions lacks supporting scientific evidence and will harm the country's prosperity.

Orange Juice Vitamin C Concentration:  How Is It Linked to the Air's CO2 Content?  On the basis of this study, in the words of the authors, "there is reason to believe that an atmospheric CO2 enrichment of the magnitude expected over the current century may induce a large and sustained increase in the number of fruit produced by orange trees, a small increase in the size of the fruit, and a modest increase in the vitamin C concentration of the juice of the fruit, all of which effects bode well for this key agricultural product that plays a vital role in maintaining good health in human populations around the globe."

Carbon Dioxide, the Staff of Life.  "I went to the trouble of adding up all the greenhouse gases, as provided in Gregg Easterbrook's excellent book, A Moment on the Earth, and then converted the total volume to a linear scale.  That's so you can get a better sense of mankind's total annual contribution.  That is, I wondered if there were one mile of greenhouse gas, how much of that would be the result of all of man's doing.  I found that out of 5,280 feet, mankind contributes five-eighths of an inch."

New findings indicate today's greenhouse gas levels are not unusual.  The most accurate way to determine the atmosphere's average CO2 content is to simply conduct a direct chemical analysis at many different places and times.  Fortunately, there are more than 90,000 direct measurements by chemical methods between 1857 and 1957.  However, in what appears to be a case of 'cherry-picking' data to fit a pre-determined conclusion, only the lower level CO2 data were included when the pre-industrial average was calculated (see below graph where data used in the averaging is highlighted).

Cherry picking historical CO2 levels


Greenhouse Policy Without Regrets:  A Free-Market Approach.  Because man's effect on his climate is not yet known, global warming policy should, first of all, do no harm.  Elimination of wasteful and waste-promoting government policies can still make greenhouse reduction easier in the long term.

States Sue Federal Government Over "Global Warming".  Seven states announced on Thursday [2/20/2003] their intention to sue the federal government over the issue of "global warming."  The states are seeking to force the Bush administration to regulate power plant emissions containing carbon dioxide, which they maintain is contributing to a buildup of greenhouse gases and the warming of the planet.

Figures reveal Europe falling far short of climate targets.  The European Union, self-styled global champion in the battle against climate change, is falling woefully short of its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and will need to take radical measures to achieve them, new projections have shown.

Climate Change Lemmings Jump Off The Cliff.  California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is making his own global warming treaties nowadays.  He and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair have agreed to set up a scheme modeled on the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol to reduce climate warming carbon dioxide emissions.

California to cap greenhouse gas emissions.  California would become the first state to impose a cap on all greenhouse gas emissions, including those from industrial plants, under a landmark deal reached Wednesday [8/30/2006] by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative Democrats.

Bill may stir California business exodus.  A measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions in California could foster fresh interest among California companies looking outside the state for a less regulated business environment.  The cap, designed to cut greenhouse gas output 25 percent by 2020, evoked stern responses from business advocates such as the California Chamber of Commerce, which said in a statement that the act would drive companies and jobs out of California and jack up power and fuel prices for residents of the Golden State.

Calif. sues 6 carmakers over greenhouse gases.  California filed suit against Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and three other carmakers on Wednesday, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have cost the state millions of dollars.

The Proper Roles of Reason and Religion in Developing Policies Related to Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions:  Global climate change may well be (1) no problem at all, (2) a problem not caused by man, (3) a beneficial phenomenon, or (4) something about which nothing can be done, which could well make extreme – but largely ineffective – ameliorative actions counterproductive to the common good.

Boulder, Colorado Sues Federal Agencies Over Global Warming:  The Boulder, Colo. City Council will join environmental activists in taking legal action against the federal government to try to control greenhouse gas emissions which environmentalists say is the cause of "global warming."

Another Global Warming Horror Story Bites the Dust:  New evidence from the carbon sequestration front turns an old gloom-and-doom hypothesis on its head.  Rather than adding to the atmosphere's burden of carbon dioxide, warming of earth's permafrost regions would likely end up removing carbon from the air, which would tend to stabilize surface air temperatures and not push them higher.

California Votes to Join the Third World.  In what could prove a disastrous move for consumers and businesses, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is poised to sign legislation imposing statutory limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the state of California.

EPA unveils first rules on carbon dioxide storage.  In its first regulations on the burial of carbon dioxide underground, the EPA on Tuesday [7/15/2008] unveiled measures to protect drinking water from the gas behind the bubbles in carbonated beverages.  The fledgling technology, known as carbon sequestration, is critical to reducing carbon dioxide released into the air from coal-fired power plants, one of the country's largest sources of the greenhouse gas.

Carbon Capture and Burial — a Stupid Answer to a Silly Question.  "There is no evidence that CCB [Carbon Capture and Burial] would provide any climate or environmental benefits whatsoever — just a huge misuse of investment capital and a massive increase in the cost of living for any society silly enough to tread this path. ... "It does not take much engineering, financial or biological knowledge to uncover the logistic, economic and environmental stupidities of CCB.

The dirty truth:  During President Barack Obama's visit to Canada this week, he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to spend billions developing technologies that would capture carbon and then store it underground.  Carbon capture and storage, as these schemes are known, is misguided environmentally, economically, and in the long term, politically too.  Carbon capture has only one virtue:  It solves short-term political problems for both leaders.


Methane

The public has become more skeptical of the global warming hoax, having tired of hearing about CO2, so the alarmists must now jump onto another horse:  Methane.

Mystery methane belched out by megacities.  The Los Angeles metropolitan area belches far more methane into its air than scientists had previously realised.  If other megacities are equally profligate, urban methane emissions may represent a surprisingly important source of this potent greenhouse gas.

The Editor says...
 I find it extremely hard to believe that a bunch of scientists have just now discovered that urban methane is a big problem.  It is far more likely that this new study is the first step towards a cap-and-trade scheme for methane as well as CO2.  As in the case of CO2, there is nothing that can be done to reduce urban methane emissions, short of crippling the economies of the offending cities.  This is just another excuse to fund more "research" and eventually impose additional taxes.

Global Warming Feedback Loop Caused by Methane, Scientists Say.  In the ongoing debate over global warming, climatologists usually peg carbon dioxide as the most dangerous of the atmosphere's heat-trapping gases.  But methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, might be even more problematic.

Methane levels no longer rising, say scientists.  Levels of an important greenhouse gas have stopped growing, say U.S. scientists.  Methane levels have stayed nearly flat for the past seven years, following a rise during the two previous decades, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

Tibetan meadows emit methane.  A three-year field study on the Tibetan plateau has shown that plant species differ in their ability to emit or consume methane, a potent greenhouse gas.  This could shed fresh light on the role of plants in global methane budgets.  The saga began in early 2006 when Frank Keppler, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and his colleagues, revealed that plants — thought to be helping combat climate change by taking in carbon-dioxide — may collectively emit millions of tonnes of methane.

The Editor says...
 There seems to be no shortage of news items about new discoveries in the field of atmospheric science.  This just goes to show how little is known about how the earth works.  Yet the public schools continue to teach students that the earth formed itself.

More methane a mystery.  Levels of climate-warming methane — a greenhouse gas 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide — rose abruptly in the earth's atmosphere last year, and scientists who reported the change don't know why it occurred.

The Editor says...
 Sometimes unexpected things happen in the atmosphere, and when they do, all the computer models and predictions are then invalid.

This is being discovered just now -- just as the public grows tired of hearing about CO2?  What a coincidence!
 As Arctic Ocean warms, megatonnes of methane bubble up.  Deep in the Arctic Ocean, water warmed by climate change is forcing the release of methane from beneath the sea floor.  Over 250 plumes of gas have been discovered bubbling up from the sea floor to the west of the Svalbard archipelago, which lies north of Norway. ... Just because it fails to reach the surface doesn't mean the methane is harmless, though, as some of it gets converted to carbon dioxide.

The Editor says...
 In order to believe that methane release is the result of man-made global warming, you would have to believe, among many other improbable things, (1) that global warming extends all the way to the floor of the Arctic Ocean, and (2) that a fraction of a degree of warming is enough to cause this methane production, and (3) that it's reasonable to ignore the global cooling over the last ten years.

But really, is the claim of "megatonnes" of methane really plausible?  Let's run the numbers.  A "tonne" is a metric ton -- 1,000 kilograms.*  The density of methane at 59°F. and standard atmospheric pressure is 0.68 kg per cubic meter.*  Thus, since one kilogram of methane occupies 1.47 cubic meters, a tonne would occupy 1,470 cubic meters, or about 52,000 cubic feet, and a megatonne of methane gas would take the form of a cloud 1.47x10^9 cubic meters in size, or about 52 billion cubic feet.  That's a lot of flammable gas bubbling up.  Even if the gas is under several atmospheres of pressure, deep under the ice-cold ocean, that's still a huge volume of gas.  It is difficult to believe that such a volume of gas does not reach the surface, but is instead "converted to carbon dioxide."  By what process?  Spontaneous underwater combustion?

More panic:
 Methane's role in global warming underestimated.  Greenhouse gas calculations blame carbon dioxide too much for global warming, and methane too little, suggest researchers Thursday [10/29/2009].  In the journal Science, a team led by Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York finds that chemical interactions between greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide cause more global warming than previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other efforts.

Methane Madness.  Even before the exposure of factual errors and potential misconduct at the IPCC, the East Anglia Climate Centre, and other organizations, the public in America and elsewhere (Australia, New Zealand, and even Britain) had begun to doubt the claims of climate scientists.  Now, with these disturbing revelations concerning the way climate science actually works, the public has become even more skeptical.  Maybe that's why climate science has shifted its attention to methane.



Volcanos

Environmentalists are quick to minimize and dismiss the atmospheric influence of volcanos, because they know volcanos can't be taxed and regulated into submission, no matter how many megatons of "greenhouse gas" they emit.

Mount St. Helens is the state's No. 1 air polluter.  Right now, the biggest single source of air pollution in Washington isn't a power plant, pulp mill or anything else created by man.  It's a volcano.  Since Mount St. Helens started erupting in early October [2004], it has been pumping out between 50 and 250 tons a day of sulfur dioxide, the lung-stinging gas that causes acid rain and contributes to haze.  Those emissions are so high that if the volcano was a new factory, it probably couldn't get a permit to operate.

Smashing Environmentalist Myths:  I have never believed the earth is fragile.  Did you know that your typical volcanic eruption puts more pollutants in the air than all auto emissions in the history of civilization combined?  But the earth also has a mechanism for cleaning itself.  It doesn't just sit there, get dirty and die.  It has its own corrective measures.  For us to think that we have the ability, just by virtue of living our lives in a way that enhances our lives, to destroy this planet is the height of folly.

Hawaii's biggest polluter is completely out of control.
 Gas from Kilauea forces 2,000 from Hawaiian park.  Elevated sulfur dioxide levels from Kilauea volcano and a change in wind direction Tuesday [4/8/2008] forced 2,000 people to leave Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island.

Trivia:
 Hawaii is the only state that is getting bigger.  It is also the only state that has no straight-line borders.

Chile volcano blasts ash 20 miles high, forcing evacuations.  [Scroll down] So far, Chaiten has emitted only a few thousand tons of sulfur dioxide, "which is very small," said Simon Carn, a University of Maryland-Baltimore volcanologist who uses satellites to measure volcanic gases.  In general, a volcano must spew at least 1 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to have a global effect on climate, said Alan Robock, a Rutgers University professor who co-authored a book on the subject. … The Philippines' Mount Pinatubo produced a brief cooling of the climate after spewing 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in 1991.

Warming or Cooling?  You Be the Judge.  In 1991, the volcanic eruption at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines put more carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere than did the whole human race during the most recent century of the industrial era.  Notwithstanding all the heat and fury released in the neighborhood of the volcano, the event had a cooling effect on the world as a whole.

Volcanoes and climate:  [Scroll down]  Volcanoes also release large amounts of water and carbon dioxide, the two most important greenhouse gasses.  From an isolated point of view, a volcanic eruption might thus be expected to result in atmospheric warming.  However, there are large amounts of water and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already, and even a large eruption will not be able to change the atmospheric composition of these compounds much.  In addition, the water generally condenses out of the atmosphere as rain within few days, and the carbon dioxide quickly dissolves in the ocean or is absorbed by plants.

The Editor asks...
 If the thousands of tons of CO2 from a volcano are absorbed so "quickly," why is there any concern over industrial production of carbon dioxide, where the CO2 trickles into the atmosphere from thousands of locations all over the world?  Why all the fuss over carbon credits?  Some "experts" say "carbon dioxide … stays around for more than a century."  Which "expert" is right?

Global Warming Heresy:  Manmade carbon dioxide emissions are roughly 5 percent of the total; the rest are from natural sources such as volcanoes, dying vegetation and animals.  Annually, volcanoes alone produce more carbon dioxide than all of mankind's activities.  Oceans are responsible for most greenhouse gases. ... The bottom line is, the bulk of scientific evidence shows that what we've been told by environmentalists is pure bunk.

Ian Plimer argues CO2 is not causing global warming.  Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, argues that a recent rise in temperature around the world is caused by solar cycles and other "extra terrestrial" forces.  He said carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, widely blamed for global warming, is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes erupting.  "We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes," he said.

Supplemental information:
 1000 people evacuated after Colombia volcano erupts.  A 1993 eruption of Galeras, which rises in the Andes mountain chain to an altitude of 4,270 meters (14,029 feet), killed nine people, including six scientists who had descended its crater to take gas samples. ... Huila, at some 5,363 meters (17,595 feet), last erupted in November 2008, killing 10 people.

Forced evacuations around Philippine volcano.  Security forces will forcibly evacuate thousands of residents reluctant to leave their farms near a smoldering volcano in the Philippines despite fears of a major eruption, officials said.  Authorities in Albay province on Thursday declared a round-the-clock ban on anyone entering with a five-mile danger zone around the Mayon volcano, which is spewing lava and ash.

The Editor says...
 The volcano is spewing a lot of other stuff, too, like carbon dioxide and methane.

Volcanic explosions expected in Chile quake's wake.  Besides aftershocks, Chile's magnitude 8.8 earthquake on 27 February may also leave a legacy of volcanic explosions.  "We expect to see an upsurge in volcanic activity over the next 12 months," says David Pyle, a volcanologist at the University of Oxford. ... In particular, they found that after a magnitude 8.3 in 1906 and a magnitude 9.5 earthquake in 1960, there were three or four more volcanic eruptions within about 500 kilometres of the epicentre in the following year than would normally be expected.

Volcanoes may help climate.  A vast network of under-sea volcanoes pumping out nutrient-rich water in the Southern Ocean plays a key role in soaking up large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2), acting as a brake on climate change, scientists say.

"[N]ature produces far more greenhouse gases than we do.  For example, when the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, within just a few hours it had thrown into the atmosphere 30 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide — almost twice as much as all the factories, power plants and cars in the United States do in a whole year.  Oceans emit 90 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, every year.  Decaying plants throw up another 90 billion tonnes, compared to just six billion tonnes a year from humans."

— Against Nature — Part I of III (Broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK, 1997)    
[Source]    


It's the cows!

The cows missed the movie.  Two British news reports could not have come at a better time for Fred Singer, a scientist and global-warming denier, who has incurred the wrath of global-warming guru and former Vice President Al Gore.  The Independent reported Sunday that a new U.N. report found that livestock is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gases.  In other words, in the universe of global-warming alarmism, cow gas does more damage to [the] Earth than SUVs.

Global warming is in deep manure.  President Obama's agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack announced at the Copenhagen climate change summit that methane gas emissions from the U.S. dairy industry will be reduced by 25 percent by 2020.  Step aside big oil and big industry, now we have big cow flatulence causing global warming.

Did someone mention Copenhagen?

Cows With Gas:  India's Contribution to Global Warming.  Indolent cows languidly chewing their cud while befuddled motorists honk and maneuver their vehicles around them is an image as stereotypically Indian as saffron-clad holy men and the Taj Mahal.  Now, however, India's ubiquitous cows — of which there are 283 million, more than anywhere else in the world — are assuming a more menacing role as they become part of the climate-change debate.

Of Flatulent Cows and Liberal Madness.  The other day we were once again warned about that dire danger to our existence — cow flatulence.  It just so turns out that the gaseous emissions of the bovine digestive tract account for more greenhouse gasses than all the SUVs, airplanes, trucks and cars combined.  In other words, as far as global warming is concerned cows pose a greater threat to our survival than transport.  And this according to the UN no less.

Ruminant Animals Are Not Kyoto Villains.  Dr Gerrit van der Lingen explains why emissions of methane from cattle and sheep should not be part of any emissions trading system in New Zealand:  New Zealand's contribution to global anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas emissions (AGHGE) is only 0.1 percent.  AGHGE are mainly from agriculture and fossil fuel use.  One of the most abundant greenhouse gases comes from ruminant animals (cattle and sheep, with a minor contribution from goats and deer), which produce methane (CH4) through enteric fermentation.  According to the MAF, 98.7% of agricultural methane comes from ruminant enteric fermentation.  Most of that gas is released into the atmosphere by burping, accounting for almost half of all New Zealand's AGHGE.

Cow 'emissions' are more damaging to the planet than CO2 from cars.  Meet the world's top destroyer of the environment.  It is not the car, or the plane,or even George Bush:  it is the cow.  A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife.  And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.

Cow burps make for bad air Down Under.  Belching and flatulence in cows and sheep annually produce 90 percent of Australia's methane emissions in the agricultural sector, a recent study shows.  In an effort to monitor Australia's national greenhouse gas inventory, Australian researchers went about calculating methane emissions from belching bovines and other livestock.

The world's top destroyer of the environment.  A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife.  And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.  The 400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens, pigs and goats.

Killer cow emissions:  It's a silent but deadly source of greenhouse gases that contributes more to global warming than the entire world transportation sector, yet politicians almost never discuss it, and environmental lobbyists and other green activist groups seem unaware of its existence.  That may be because it's tough to take cow flatulence seriously.  But livestock emissions are no joke.

UN downgrades man's impact on the climate.  Mankind has had less effect on global warming than previously supposed, a United Nations report on climate change will claim next year.  The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there can be little doubt that humans are responsible for warming the planet, but the organisation has reduced its overall estimate of this effect by 25 percent.

Wake up and Smell the Ammonia.  A new report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization shows that the global livestock sector is responsible for a higher share of greenhouse gas emissions than transport.  Livestock account for 9 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane emissions, 64 percent of ammonia emissions, and 65 percent of global nitrous oxide.  Livestock affect climate through the process of deforestation caused by expansion of pastures, off-gassing from manure, and "enteric fermentation by ruminants", a fancy name for methane cow burps.

Farmers fear wind of change.  Australia is likely to become the only country in the world other than New Zealand to impose an [emissions trading scheme] on agriculture.  Government modelling in NZ shows farm profitability plummeting to zero.  Under calculation methods imposed on Australia by the Kyoto Protocol, a fully grown cow is deemed to emit the equivalent of two tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.  With 30 million cattle in Australia, that makes cows a major emitter.

Eat Kangaroos, Save the Planet.  Australian sheep and cattle producers should consider shifting to kangaroos to help reduce emissions of "greenhouse gases," a major report on climate change says.  Unlike sheep and cows, kangaroos release a negligible amount of methane when they belch and emit wind.  Methane is one of the group of gases blamed by many scientists for global warming.

Smelling an activist rat.  Heather Mills  — celebrity divorcee and green extremist — last year urged us to stop drinking the milk of cows.  Milking ex-husband Paul McCartney may have been fine, but Mills felt milking cows was going too far.  You see, the burps of these gassy beasts were heating the world to hell, she told a press conference.  "There are many other kinds of milk available.  Why don't we try drinking rats' milk and dogs' milk?"  And with that, she roared off in a Mercedes four-wheel drive, trailing clouds of hypocrisy.

Global warming set to shake our eating habits.  Climate change is likely to deprive us of the pleasures of eating beef and lamb, instead forcing us to contemplate platefuls of kangaroo meat and threatening another Australian table staple — seafood.  A report to be released by the CSIRO today says changes in temperature, ocean currents, rainfall and extreme weather events could cost Australian fisheries tens of million of dollars.

Nitrous Oxide:  Nitrous oxide — or N2O — is known to be destructive of stratospheric ozone.  In addition, in the words of Crutzen et al. (2007), it is "a 'greenhouse gas' with a 100-year average global warming potential 296 times larger than an equal mass of CO2."  One of the main sources of N2O is agriculture, which in Finland accounts for almost half of that nations's N2O emissions (Pipatti, 1997).  Moreover, with N2O originating from microbial N[itrogen] cycling in soil — mostly from aerobic nitrification or from anaerobic denitrification (Firestone and Davidson, 1989) — there is a concern that CO2-induced increases in carbon input to soil, together with increasing N[itrogen] input from other sources, will increase substrate availability for denitrifying bacteria and may result in higher N2O emissions from agricultural soils as the air's CO2 content continues to rise.

Climate change experts target cow flatulence.  Britain's finest scientific minds have turned their attention to a problem that they claim is threatening the future of the entire planet -- farm animal flatulence.  Experts at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen say the average cow contributes as much to global warming as a family car that travels 12,000 miles.

Bovine flatulence blows up the atmosphere faster than autos.  Environmental alarmists and much of the media refuse to look at other industries and other reasons carbon dioxide is pumped into the air. … According to a United Nations report released in late November (and widely ignored by the media), bovine flatulence is responsible for 18 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  By contrast, it is estimated that the U.S. auto fleet accounts for 6 percent of global CO2 emissions.

Our Carbon Hoofprint.  In 2006, a 400-page report by the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization fingered livestock and the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the No. 1 contributor to so-called climate change.  The FAO report, titled "Livestock's Long Shadow," also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens, pigs and goats.  But mostly it puts the blame on the world's 1.5 billion cattle. ... The FAO says livestock produce 35% to 40% of the methane put into the atmosphere.

EPA 'Cow Tax' Could Charge $175 per Dairy Cow to Curb Greenhouse Gases.  Call this one of the newest and innovative ways your government has come up with to battle greenhouse gas emissions.  Indirectly it could be considered a cheeseburger tax, but one of the suggestions offered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act is to levy a tax on livestock.

Cow farts collected in plastic tank for global warming study.  Experts said the slow digestive system of cows makes them a key producer of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that gets far less public attention than carbon dioxide.  In a bid to understand the impact of the wind produced by cows on global warming, scientists collected gas from their stomachs in plastic tanks attached to their backs.

Ads target meat-eaters on greenhouse.  Australians tucking into a juicy steak in front of the tele are being asked to consider how their meal impacts on climate change.  Meat-eaters are the focus of a $400,000 television, print and billboard advertising campaign launched today linking methane emissions from cows to global warming.

Reference material:
 A report called Livestock impacts on the environment was published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

No more beef if Britain hopes to cut carbon emissions.  Roast beef and diary products may have to disappear from the British diet if the country is to meet its pledge to cut carbon emissions by 80%, a government report has warned.  It found that the greenhouse gases generated by agriculture, and especially by Britain's 10.5m cows, will seriously undermine any attempt to meet the targets.

Burping of the lambs blows roast off menu.  Give up lamb roasts and save the planet.  Government advisers are developing menus to combat climate change by cutting out "high carbon" food such as meat from sheep, whose burping poses a serious threat to the environment.  Out will go kebabs, greenhouse tomatoes and alcohol.  Instead, diners will be encouraged to consume more potatoes and seasonal vegetables, as well as pork and chicken, which generate fewer carbon emissions.

'Cow Tax' Uproar Underscores Greenhouse-Gas Divide.  Is the Environmental Protection Agency preparing to slap a "cow tax" on bovines for their contribution to global warming?  The agency says no.  But in recent weeks, farmers and livestock ranchers have flooded the EPA with letters warning of catastrophic consequences if such a tax was imposed.

New Zealand seeks to curb livestock's gas emissions.  Over thousands of years of evolution, sheep, cattle and other cud chewers developed a nasty habit.  They burp and break wind a lot.  That gives New Zealand a distressing gas problem.  The country's 4 million people share two islands in the South Pacific with 40 million sheep, 9 million beef and dairy cattle and more than a million farmed deer, all producing the methane that many climate scientists say is one of the worst culprits behind global warming.

The Editor says...
 Sheep and cattle have been around for thousands of years, through warm weather and cold, and if they were in any way responsible for "global warming", then the warming would not be a recent development.  If the Earth is warming, it must be due to a force more powerful than cows.

Tax cows, hogs for passing gas, burping?  For farmers, this stinks:  Belching and gaseous cows and hogs could start costing them money if the federal government decides to charge fees for air-polluting animals.  Farmers so far are turning their noses up at the notion, which they contend is a possible consequence of an Environmental Protection Agency report after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases amount to air pollution.

No -- It's the termites!

Before you go pointing fingers at the cows, keep in mind that Termites produce 11% of the naturally occurring methane in the atmosphere, and swamp gas accounts for almost all the rest.  (Another report puts the figure at five percent.)  Each termite produces only about half a microgram per day, but there are so many of them in the world that together they produce about 20 million tons per year.*.

Global-warming theory and the eugenics precedent.  Fifteen years ago it was estimated that the digestive tracts of termites produce about 50 billion tons of CO2 and methane annually.  That was more than the world's production from burning fossil fuel.  Additionally, cattle, horses and other ruminant animals are huge producers of both CO2 and methane, but, being unable to respond to our demands on this issue, their activity is ignored.  When it comes to methane, another greenhouse gas, termites are responsible for 11 percent of the world's production from natural sources.

Termites emit ten times more CO2 than humans.  Not only is carbon dioxide's total greenhouse effect puny, mankind's contribution to it is minuscule.  The overwhelming majority (97%) of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere comes from nature, not from man.  Volcanoes, swamps, rice paddies, fallen leaves, and even insects and bacteria produce carbon dioxide, as well as methane.  According to the journal Science (Nov. 5, 1982), termites alone emit ten times more carbon dioxide than all the factories and automobiles in the world.  Natural wetlands emit more greenhouse gases than all human activities combined.  (If greenhouse warming is such a problem, why are we trying to save all the wetlands?)  Geothermal activity in Yellowstone National Park emits ten times the carbon dioxide of a midsized coal-burning power plant, and volcanoes emit hundreds of times more.

No -- It's the moose!

Burping moose bad for the environment.  Amidst all the talk about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming comes news that Norway's national mascot may be contributing to the destruction of the environment, through burping and other bodily functions.

Belching moose add to global warming.  A grown moose belches out methane gas equivalent to 2,100 kilograms (4,630 pounds) of carbon dioxide a year, contributing to global warming, Norwegian researchers said Wednesday [8/22/2007].  That is more than twice the amount of CO2 emitted on a round-trip flight across the Atlantic Ocean from Oslo to the Chilean capital Santiago, according to Scandinavian Airlines.

No -- It's all kinds of things!

Aquatic life emits gases.  Mussels, freshwater snails and other underwater creatures emit a potent greenhouse gas as they feed, according to a study that adds a small aquatic dimension to the impact of wildlife on global warming.  The animals, also including worms and insect larvae, emitted nitrous oxide — commonly known as laughing gas — as a by-product of their digestion when nitrate was present in water.


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