Yeah but that is why deforestation is such a concern. The density of plants in a rainforest compared to the sparsely populated field that replaces it is significant. And then they often fail because the soil is too poor to support the non-native plants…
Photosynthesis converts CO2 to plant food and oxygen. That moderates the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. There is significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere that at any time in the last 700,000 years. We are lucky plants modate the effect.
Well at any rate, sounds like the temp actually went down a degree last year so all the carbon hype must be working. Now we need to know when to stop so we don’t get into a global winter again.
One third of Smith Island, MD has gone underwater in the last 30 years. At high tide, much of Norfolk, VA is under water. The headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet and the largest naval base on the Atlantic are there, and people routinely have trouble getting to work because of coastal flooding that did not exist 30 years ago. The lower end of Annapolis, MD is frequently under water at high tide, and the US Naval Acadamy is about 100 feet from the flooded streets, and barely up hill. If you are looking for a security threat, don’t look at steel and aluminum, look at the rising oceans due to global warming.
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How can You use one year to decide that we know the limits?
It’s not interesting to know the stats for one year at a specific location, that’s not about global changes. In my part of the world (Europe), the temperature has gone up for many years.
Last year we had only 13 days counted as summerdays in my country (a day with 25,1 celsius or above registrered any place here) and that whas the warmest year ever recorded in this country since 1886 in average.
So far we’ve had 29 days this year. Midsummer evening (today), it’s a tradition here to have bonfires and send “the witch to Bloksbjerg”, have a party with the kids and so on. This year most of the kids will have a very disappointing party as 48 out of 93 counties has banned open fire - including a barbeque - because of drought.
That has never happened before, normally it’s raining - no, not cats and dogs, more like cows and horses on that day.
I drove my car down to the groceries, then got back and found a lot of links. Hereby related it to cars.
http://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-10-hottest-global-years-on-record
There is many more links available.
I’m afraid that we have allready crossed that line. That’ll be our descendants that will suffer from that
I was answering Random Troll’s claim that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries.
I looked it up and it seems that the half life of CO2 in the atmosphere is around 13 years.
Can you please bring this back to topic? Thanks.
The question of how a carbon tax will help may not have been fully answered. Somebody back a ways did the math and showed that the fuel savings of an electric car will not pay the extra expense. Bingo. But if gas went back up to $4.00 or more a gallon, it would come closer. The idea is to drive up the cost of gasoline (and all petroleum based fuels) to the point where people actually start making choices like getting a small car instead of a big SUV to drive to work. The rebate per person / family will make the extra cost affordable for average and poor people. By collecting the tax at the wellhead, the mine, and the port, it gets the mechanism of collection quite small bureaucratically. It also gets private industry and individuals, not government, deciding how they will best save fossil fuel. No more winners and losers, no more Solaras, or however they spelled it.
It would be cheaper for me to flush my toilet into the river behind my house than pay all the sewer charges. For the same reasons, it is cheaper to keep dumping CO2 into the air and let somebody else fix it or suffer for it. That does not make it rational. There area already more people working in America installing solar panels than mining coal, and they are a lot safer.
Another good website for the economics of Carbon Fee and Dividend is citizensclimatelobby.org.
Europe has done that for quite a while. So far it has forced people into smaller vehicles. Gasoline averages about $6.25/gal there. Do you think that would make a lot of people move to electric cars if we paid that much?
the trouble of the logic is that solar and renewables are painted to be the universal good and all fossil and consumables to be a universal evil
Australia experience with overly aggressive stimulation of solar/wind, at expense of coal/nuclear clearly demonstrated the flaw of the “give us more good, remove all evil via tax incentives” logic when it was removed from the realities that the power grid has also to be balanced and provide sufficient reserve capacity when unpredictable wind/solar stress the combined system
IMHO, electric vehicles have their niche in urban transit, but hybrid systems made ICE much better and pushed pure-electric into their rightful niche, I’ve read that estimates for pure-electric market niche were substantially reduced lately, so it looks like they are part of solution, they are NOT the only solution
Coal, nuclear, and oil are poor supplements to wind and solar. Natural gas furnaces start up much faster and are better able to supplement commercial wind and solar power.
Not it isn’t. I don’t know of any group that says that. Those are just sound bites by radical conservative groups who don’t want to have an honest discussion on the subject.
Quite true, but nuclear is very much at its sweet spot for the base load generation, where fluctuation is not needed, or is of long period of change. On-demand generation is still substantially more expensive than at-mass/baseline generation.
Whether we use nuclear, wind, solar, or something else is a necessary discussion, but it is secondary to deciding that we will take action… Global warming is going to cost trillions of dollars and kill a billion people. Then, if we do nothing, it will get worse. I see the carbon fee and dividend as the best way to encourage people to do things different.
No, I don’t have a proof of my figures. But a lot of the world’s people live within 5 feet of sea level, and their neighbors may not make room without a fight. Droughts are already increased. A $100 billion hurricane season may get common.
Seems to me we just got done trying a similar economic model and the result was extremely slow growth, high unemployment, and a record increase in food stamps.
Loss of life will probably be less, since global warming is happening slowly. The cost is probably that high though. When my daughter was doing her undergraduate word at MIT she did a few projects with some of the leading climatologists in the world. None of them say this WILL happen. They all say the scientific evidence points in a certain direction. Deny the plethora of data from all over the world.
Fox news again Bing? Unemployment was been steadily declining starting one year after Bush’s Great Depression. Been on a linear path down ever sense. Although there are now very good indicators that the Great Tax cut is reversing that.
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That’s the logical reaction, but humans aren’t always logical. Modeling the US on Europe when it comes to cars is hard to do – some Europeans tend toward smaller cars anyway because some of their streets are, literally, wagon tracks within walled cities and if you have a big car you’re in trouble.
Additionally, I think anyone willing to pay $50,000 to $80,000 for a pickup truck is not going to give much of a hoot if the price goes up a few bucks at the pump.
What a carbon tax is more likely to do is to get those of us already driving relatively efficient cars to move even closer to adopting electric – and while that’s definitely a good thing, it’s also not addressing the main problem. I’d rather get 1 Hummer off the road than 3 Civic Hybrids.
Well, the economic model we tried under Bush was “let the banks gamble with our money and lose, and then try to make half the country homeless to save their necks.” The economic model we tried under Obama was “don’t let the black guy get any wins,” and yet he still managed to reverse the direction of the freefall. But I don’t really see what either economic model has to do with “raise gas prices.”
Naw, I think it was Russian Pravda or the Labor Department. Of course don’t forget to look at the work force participation rate. Man, though I see a lot of “Now Hiring” signs around that weren’t there a few years ago regardless of what your charts say, and geez the old market is doing pretty well, allowing me to spend more. So the current economic model seems to be working pretty well.