Global Warming and Climate Change - Actual Physics and Calculations

Global Warming and Climate Change - The Actual Physics and Calculations

  • The importance and effects of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere are becoming better realized.note 11

  • Right Now US Gov't data shows that the Earth's atmosphere contains
    of Carbon Dioxide note 48 That amazingly fast increase is primarily DUE TO US burning fossil fuels!
    Actually, the enormous amounts of fossil fuels we burn (coal, petroleum and natural gas) produce and release nearly TWICE this amount of increase, and we just happen to be lucky that (cold) ocean water is extremely good at absorbing a lot of the carbon dioxide we are sending into the atmosphere! (this number is metric tonnes, and the same number in American short tons would be about 10% higher)

    This real-time carbon dioxide calculator has been in these web-pages since some time in 2007. It is EXTREMELY accurate (better than one-tenth of one percent precision, just check the footnote to see the three simple and accurately known numbers which get multiplied to derive it)! In July 2009, massive news coverage was made of a project where a German Bank spent millions of dollars to provide this same running-total of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in Times Square in New York City. The news reports announced that several experts had spent a couple years doing the calculations upon which their figure is based. Well, the number they show on that expensive display is WRONG! And if it took several EXPERTS a couple years to multiply THREE SIMPLE NUMBERS TOGETHER ((1) the US MEASURED concentration of CO2 at the South Pole, (2) the Density of carbon dioxide, and (3) the total mass of the Earth's atmosphere, then their calculators are pretty slow! And still they got an answer that is around 20% wrong! See the Footnote for an example of the actual calculation, which a Fifth Grader should be able to do! But we DO recognize that the great visibility of a huge display of this number in Times Square, even if it is actually wrong, can have great value. But I might not want to put my money in a German Bank that spent millions of dollars to calculate what a Fifth Grader should be able to calculate, and more accurately!

  • In the half million years before 1900 AD, there had never been more than 2.3 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. note 7 note 2

  • CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs OUTGOING heat from the Earth and therefore acts as a blanket allow the Earth to warm up.note 35 note 53

  • Once the Earth heats up enough, plants which provide our food will no longer be able to raise sufficient water from the soil to keep from drying out and dying, which will eliminate all food supplies.note 55

  • We do NOT have any practical way of REMOVING very much CO2 from the atmosphere. .note 18 note 19

  • EVERY gallon of gasoline or diesel burned adds more than 18 pounds of CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere, essentially permanently. We have been doing such things for 200 years.note 13 note 14 note 15

  • The Earth is so massive and so poorly conductive of heat that a time delay appears likely before such effects are detected. The calculations here suggest that delay may be around 140 years. note 4

There is a perspective that may be useful regarding getting the public and politicians to see the true urgency regarding very quickly ENDING all fossil fuel burning. REDUCING usage is not nearly enough. In fact, there is a reasonable chance that it may already be too late for humanity to have any extended future on Earth. This will be discussed more fully below.
You may see a red blotch along the right hand side of the text here. It will be discussed later as being the LIKELY extension of the US government's Scripps graph below, regarding the actual situation in the year 2100 AD. It really is amazing that our human activities WILL cause that graph to go that spectacularly out-of-bounds, at a time when many of TODAY'S living children are likely to still be alive, and who may then likely starve to death! You are encourage to check out the DIRECTION of the graph's line in recent years, to confirm that it really DOES point directly toward that red blotch!

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Cynics and skeptics will laugh at this, saying that it is just another joker who says that the sky is falling, someone paranoid with fearful thoughts and nothing to base them on. But I was educated at the University of Chicago as a Nuclear Physicist. Physicists CANNOT let wild imaginations or speculations color their logic, or else the field of Nuclear Physics would be entirely worthless.

The central problem is that MOST of the carbon dioxide we keep adding to the Earth's atmosphere will remain there for many thousands or millions of years. And that carbon dioxide is a natural result of burning (oxidizing) any fuel. We choose to keep digging up coal and pumping up petroleum and natural gas, which had been sequestered deep in the earth many millions of years ago. The carbon in those fuels had been removed from the atmosphere long ago, and our burning of fossil fuels is causing all that carbon to be combined with oxygen (oxidized) and released into the atmosphere. We CHOOSE to constantly keep adding astounding amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, around 400,000,000,000,000 cubic feet of it each year! Four hundred trillion cubic feet of it this year ... and then ANOTHER four hundred trillion cubic feet more of it next year ... and again the year after ... and the year after that. It doesn't "go away!" That might not sound like any terrible thing, but it really is. You saw above the US Government's measurement of the TONS of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and how that number of TONS is rising at a mind-boggling rate. To understand this all better, first look at this US government (Scripps) graph of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the past thousand years.

Graph of Carbon Dioxide Concentration 1000 AD - present

It is obvious that before the Industrial Revolution began (around 1800), the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was fairly constant. In fact, ice core data note 7 extends this data and this relatively constant graph line back for a VERY long time, 419,000 years (around 420 computer screens to the left), where it was NEVER above 300 ppmv. SINCE the Industrial Revolution began, and we started burning a lot of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), the curve goes wildly upward, and WILL cross through where the red blotch is far above the existing graph.

We will often abbreviate "parts per million" of the total atmosphere as ppm.

It might be useful to refer again to that Footnoted Vostok ice-core data graphnote 7. If THIS (Scripps) graph is compressed horizontally by a factor of 400 to match the Vostok graph, the graph line then TURNS ABSOLUTELY STRAIGHT UP! In fact, the graph still slants slightly to the right, but it could not be displayed, because that side tilt would be less than 1/4 of a pixel width of the computer display! So look again at Footnote 7 and consider the graph to stop and turn absolutely straight upward! You may have heard spokespeople claiming that, Oh, the atmosphere goes through natural variations and there is not anything unusual happening now. They have obviously never seen a graph go along decently for 419,000 years and then abruptly make an absolute right-angle turn straight upward!

It is only in the most recent decade or so that people have even realized that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has such enormous consequences. A very interesting thing was discovered during this research! In highly respected publications of the middle 1990s, no one then seemed yet even AWARE that carbon dioxide had such an extreme effect as it has regarding "being a blanket" in keeping the Earth's radiated heat from being able to normally escape to outer space! At that time, references to the "Greenhouse Effect" blamed water vapor, ozone, oxygen, nitrogen and artificial pollutants! (This specific text is from the extremely highly respected and trusted Mark's Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, 1995.) Carbon dioxide was not even mentioned! So it is no wonder that many people now still seem ignorant of the strong effects of infrared heat absorption by carbon dioxide today!

Also: Prior to around 1965, there was extremely little awareness that carbon dioxide even had ANY significant greenhouse effect. It was discovered in a peculiar way! When the US and Soviet Unions were planning to send spacecraft to land on Venus, they assumed that the very bright white color of Venus' clouds, which reflect 76% of the sunlight coming at Venus, were CLEARLY causing all that solar heat energy to be reflected off into space. So they assumed that the surface temperature of Venus would be cooler than Earth! In fact, all scientists then confidently calculated the expected surface temperature of Venus to be about -41ºC or -42ºF, extremely cold.note 11

However, when spacecraft were first sent to the planet Venus, and all quickly melted and failed. the concept started getting attention. Astronomers had long seen the very reflective white color of Venus, with a very high visual albedo of 0.76. They had used the Stefan-Boltzmann relationship to calculate what the surface temperature should be. That showed that if ALL the sunlight was captured (no albedo), the surface of Venus COULD be as hot as 332ºK or 59ºC or around 140ºF. However, the highly reflective white color caused 76% of that incoming (visible) radiation to immediately be reflected away, and the calculations then suggested that the temperature of Venus was likely to be COOLER than Earth's, even though it is closer to the Sun, at around 232ºK or -41ºC or -42ºF. So there had been an expectation that the surface of Venus would be quite cold! However, in 1956, radar data suggested that the surface must be around 600ºF, but virtually no one believed that! When spacecraft were sent to land on the surface of Venus, they all melted and burned up before even landing! After many tries, a very well insulated craft landed and survived for a few minutes, and it found that the surface temperature of Venus is around 860ºF! Consider that! Logically, the surface of Venus SHOULD be around -42ºF but it ACTUALLY is +860ºF. It was soon realized that this was because of an extreme greenhouse effect of the carbon dioxide, which makes up most of the atmosphere of Venus. This was the very first strong evidence that carbon dioxide can have that effect, and the incredible effectiveness it can have.

Looking at this graph, where it had been pretty smooth and constant for 800 years, and then to see the extreme upturn of the curve in recent decades, even if viewers do not fully understand, they must certainly see that this COULD BE a problem. But when you then realize that our CURRENT lifestyles GUARANTEE that the curve will rise to at least where the red blotch is, FAR above the basic graph, the certainty of a dire problem has to be obvious. In fact, a very grim reality is that it seems fairly unlikely that ANY humans will still be alive to see that graph get to the red blotch (in just 100 years). Before that day, when little kids today might still be alive, the Earth will have gotten so warm that no plants will be able to draw enough water up from the soil to keep their leaves from drying out and shriveling and dying. And once ALL food supplies (plants) are then gone, human and animal life will have no possible way of surviving more than a few months.

The Physics of THIS presentation is generally only about the situation that we ALREADY have caused, the 390 ppm that the Scripps graph shows for today, which is due to the previous decades of our burning fossil fuels for a thousand reasons. Calculations regarding what we might or might not do in the future is outside the realm of rigid Physics analysis, but there are clearly even more grim things ahead for us, since we all LOVE our prosperity and modern lifestyles.

Unfortunately, once the added carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, it stays there! You may have seen scientists on TV talking about the carbon dioxide emitted by the very first Model T automobiles, or even earlier coal-fired factories, all still being in the atmosphere.

So even though THIS presentation is centered on PAST errors and the 390 ppm carbon dioxide concentration we already have, the red blotch that is so far above the basic graph lets us see what we are already planning for our children and grandchildren! Because, you and I and everyone else will NOT give up what we call modern living, to all live nearly Stone Age lives! These paragraphs about the future seem very appropriate here, since no one else seems to realize the gravity of the situation.

There are truly frightening things to come! Any Almanac can confirm that we are currently adding from 25 to 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. note 16 Many reference books can confirm that there are currently around 3,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the entire atmosphere. note 16 (The table in this footnote also has that yearly data for each of the past 50 years and some other years.) The point is that each year, we are increasing that CUMULATIVE total amount by nearly an extra percent.

Now look at 100 years from now, the year 2108, when many kids today are likely to still be alive. Even with the most conservative possible approach, the ACTUAL increase over those coming 100 years, would therefore be at least a 50% increase, assuming that we do not INCREASE the amount of fossil fuel burning, or 390 * (1.00 + .50) which is about 586 ppm. note 16 If leaders today are concerned at the consequences of the current 390 ppm, which has never happened before, they should probably be even more concerned for their children and grandchildren, who are nearly certain to be in a totally unknown environment due to the 586 ppm of carbon dioxide. note 16

This is NOT "a thousand years from now". It is a time where some kids living today will still be alive and will have to deal with. Given that the discussion and calculations below indicate that even the current 390 ppm is extremely likely to cause the entire extermination of all plants on Earth, and then therefore humans and animals, what would 586 ppm do?

If you have been paying attention to the news, you know that the BEST that any politician or leader has ever HOPED for is a "50% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 50 years". No one really thinks that businesses will ever accept that hardship, but let's examine that BEST CASE SCENARIO. Assuming that we somehow got all other countries to agree to such a drastic reduction, which seems extremely unlikely, that would mean that we would then have reduced the 25 to 30 billion tons that we are now adding each year down to STILL ADDING 12 to 15 billion tons each year after 50 years. The math is not too hard, and it shows that this BEST CASE SCENARIO would result in around 468 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere around 2058. Sadly, that is not much less than the 490 ppm if we continued with the current 25 to 30 billion tons each year! All companies world-wide would have to experience massive hardship (of operating on HALF the fossil fuels they currently use) and the only beneficial effect would be to reduce an expected 490 ppm to 468 ppm, which is still wildly above current concentrations, and even more wildly above any natural situation that had ever existed before our Industrial Revolution. If there is a strong likelihood that even 390 ppm will end all life on Earth, does it really matter very much whether we get to 468 or 490 ppm in 2058? Or 586 ppm by 2108?

So, even the BEST hopes that world leaders express, still lead to total disaster, our self-created extermination of mankind and all animals on Earth, and in a terrifyingly short time.

This following presentation does not even consider any future possibilities for making things even worse than they are today! Much of the following discussion and calculations are based on a scenario that will never happen, of EVERY car, truck, airplane and train being immediately scrapped world-wide, and every furnace and industrial process that uses fossil fuels would be removed and dismantled, and every coal-fired electric generation plant being permanently dismantled. THAT situation would result in the current 390 ppm not increasing any more, but it will not reduce significantly, possibly for millions of years, until organic materials get covered over by sediments and compressed into limestone and new petroleum, natural gas and coal. Which doesn't do us the slightest amount of good!

I wonder when it will finally dawn on people that we have been loading straws on a camel's back for the 200 years of the Industrial Revolution, and that when businesses and political leaders PROMISE to think about reducing the number of straws we will add in the future, they NEVER even consider stopping adding more straws completely! So they all merrily believe that they are free to keep adding straws onto that camel's back, in rather large numbers! As long as they PROMISE to think about adding fewer straws at some time in the (distant) future, they believe that all will be well. Have none of them ever heard the Fable where A SINGLE STRAW broke the camel's back? They all seem to assume that as long as THEY PERSONALLY were not the ones that added that fatal straw, they could deny culpability. But when this particular camel dies, there will be no one left living to listen to any denials!

In the early 1800s, we had a very strong camel, and we were loading a moderate number of straws on its back (rarely more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide in any specific year) note 16. But as we have "advanced" our society, we have been using larger and larger shovels to load straws on the camel. THIS year we will add around 30 billion tons of NEW carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. NEXT year we will add yet another 30 billion tons more. And every year after that! Does this make ANY sense whatever?note 16

If we had any sense, we SHOULD HAVE been finding ways to REDUCE the number of ADDITIONAL straws we kept adding, but we do not seem capable of looking toward the future. At some point, someone will add that straw, on top of the many millions before it (some of which YOU provided), which breaks the camel's back. A terrifying part of this is that there is compelling evidence that this MAY HAVE ALREADY OCCURRED, that the camel is already wobbling. But until we actually see blood coming out of the camel, we have no intention of slowing down adding more and more and more additional straws. After all, for anyone to be expected to give up a modern lifestyle? To submit to any suffering whatever? Other than a token number of people, everyone will disclaim any culpability and live merrily on! Really unbelievable! But possibly as soon as 2080 or 2090, the Earth may become an extremely quiet place, with no animals and no humans anywhere. Shouldn't someone actually CARE?

Many Native American Indian Tribes had a brilliant perspective, of only making decisions after considering the impact on their descendents SEVEN GENERATIONS after them. Our leaders would never dream of such attitudes, and they prefer to instead make choices which increase THIS QUARTER'S NET PROFITS.

Added notes:

Many skeptics (and all businesses!) claim that there is no actual problem! They point out that whether or not there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the Earth's average temperature has only been seen to have risen by about 1.1°C from about 13.75° C in 1900 up to about 14.9°C today. (2°F rise from 56.75°F up to 58.75°F). They ASSUME that if it had only risen by ONE degree Celsius in a hundred years of Industrial Revolution, then it CAN'T rise drastically above that now. They are wrong! In fact, in September 2009, the prestigious Hadley Centre of the British Met Office announced that they now believe that we are facing a certain 4°C or 7.2°F rise during THIS century, and possibly as soon as the year 2060. They admit that they are being very conservative, and that the rise could be far greater than that! They also find that the Arctic region might rise spectacularly faster, up by 15.2°C or 27.4°F during this century! They say that many regions of Africa are likely to rise by around 10°C or 18°F! This information was presented at a noted Conference at Oxford University.

In November, 2009, some experts are now talking about worldwide temperature rise of more than 6°C in coming decades.

A few researchers (including me) have tried to warn about such coming disasters for a number of years. To deaf ears!

The Oxford Conference still has an element of optimism that may be misplaced. They announced that IF fossil fuel burning was SOON controlled and then reduced, we might avoid these disastrous near future events. I think they were wrong in that optimism. This presentation and the related one centered on Global Warming, discuss an aspect of the problem that no one else seems to have yet recognized. We only SEE limited temperature rises, BECAUSE the Earth is extremely massive and its Crustal rocks are really bad at conducting heat inward. So even when we are causing the AIR to be heated up to an equilibrium temperature that is far hotter than we now measure, the colder ground quickly cools that air. The calculations in the related presentation seem to indicate that there should be about a 140-year lag time before the actual average Earth temperature achieves its equilibrium. And if that understanding is correct, then we have even bigger problems! There is a decent chance that by sometime early in 1997, we had already burned enough fossil fuels to cause a situation around 140 years later where no plants may be able to live on Earth. That would mean no food for any animals or humans. This is REALLY bad!

So, we humans may have ALREADY written the script of a near future where humans and animals will no longer have any food to eat, possibly in not much more than one century from now, due to the consequences of a complete end of plant growth, due to global warming THAT WE HAVE ALREADY DONE.

There seem to be thousands of people who enjoy going on TV to announce every imaginable OPINION. They seem to be focused on sugar plums and other fantasy dreams. Often those people have no education in the important scientific fields, and/or they have some personal (financial) interest in promoting one or the other side of the story. It is sad that modern society has devolved to the point that BOTH sides of such issues are simply able to pay large enough amounts of money to noted people to get their side of the story presented as having credibility. Leadership today seems to have become equated with spin! The actual FACTS are never important, as long as every situation can be spun to look attractive. So it is all very confusing to the public, who necessarily have to believe the "experts" in such subjects, due to the complex and advanced nature of processes involved. In many cases, even the best science still does not have complete understandings of many things, which adds to the frustration of everyone regarding not really knowing what is actually happening.

This presentation is the result of many years of research by a respected Nuclear Physicist. Physicists (hopefully) to not concede actual truth just to receive some cash payment or some high-paying job, as we are expected to always be accurate and truthful in our research and our conclusions.

This presentation contains several major portions, which each seem necessary to ensure that each reader be able to follow the logic and understand the implications. Briefly, those portions can be stated:

I have never seen anyone address "the near future" in any way other than in assumptions and speculations which are baseless. Remembering that THIS whole presentation is about THINGS WE HAVE ALREADY DONE, it seems reasonable to note the following. We are currently adding around 25 to 30 billion tons of CO2 each year. If we take the most conservative possibility (15), this means that about 30 billion tons is added each two years. We know that the entire atmosphere currently contains around 3,000 billion tons. This means that we are increasing the amount by about 1 additional per-cent every two years. For the coming 100 years (50 of these 2 year intervals), and we continue to add the CURRENT amounts each year, it is easy to see that around 2108 AD, it should then be 390 * (1.0 + 0.50) or around 586 ppm. That is nearly DOUBLE the concentration of the highest amounts that had occurred before 1900 AD. But NO government leader is yet even talking about staying at current levels, but instead "reducing future increases". But even that is not realistic, because China and India are building thousands of new coal-fired electric power plants every year, and manufacturing countless millions of new vehicles. The demand for burning fossil fuels is RAPIDLY growing. A hundred years from now, in 2108 AD, it seems UNLIKELY that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will be less than 600 ppm, and quite possible far higher still. Since no one seems to even worry about the consequences of what we have already done, there certainly is no one planning future societies regarding 600 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere!

The results of these years of research indicate that our modern society and industry have ALREADY done such massive increases to the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, especially since about 1950, that the results may be uncertain but they are certainly extremely dire. We will cite below a top quality research paper from 2003 which included essentially this very same analysis and logic and arrived at essentially the same conclusions. They specifically noted that the extremely high average temperatures will essentially completely stop plant growth on most of the surface of the Earth. They noted that the missing plants would therefore no longer be able to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and provide the oxygen necessary for all animal and human life. They calculated that the remaining oxygen in the atmosphere could be used up by plants and animals over a period of around 4,000 years. However, they also noted the same fact as we have here, that once plant growth has ended, there will then be no food sources for any animal or human life, which they concluded would end within months of the end of the plant life.

This particular presentation has added in the analysis of the process of the warming of the Earth itself, to determine the time-scale which will apply. The conclusion here is that the average temperature of the Earth will have risen to its Equilibrium temperature after a delay of around 140 years. IF no one ever burned any fossil fuels again after today, that means that the average temperature of the Earth will rise by around 25ºF over the next 140 years. In the Tropics, the daytime temperature is often around 140ºF now, and if that rises to 165ºF, plant processes cannot bring up sufficient water from the soil to keep from drying out and dying. Even in the Temperate regions of the Earth, like the United States, there are no conventional crops that could survive with a 25ºF average temperature rise. In addition, many seeds NEED to experience freezing temperatures in winter, and when that would no longer occur, those seeds would generally become inert.

Sadly, the majority of the "experts" who are seen on TV have NOT spent their careers researching the subjects they try to speak about. Most DO have some Degree that is in some related area, as both camps know that is important regarding gaining credibility. But it seems to rarely mean that they speakers truly have a deep knowledge of the subjects involved. One of the more interesting of these is a Professor of a University in Oregon who absolutely denies that ANY global warming or even local glacier melting has ever even occurred, but he is not willing to drive a few miles to some nearby mountains where huge areas of the previous glaciers are now simply gone! He claims to not need to go to the trouble of going up those mountains because he KNOWS that the glaciers are all still there! He won't even look at photos that other Professors have taken up there!

This presentation is meant to aid in dealing with all the confusion. It will require you to spend some time and even effort, but this presentation hopefully includes both the description of each aspect of the larger subject and also the mathematical and logical basis for attempting to get to understandings and conclusions for yourself. Essentially, with some time and effort, YOU should be able to make even better and more knowledgeable speeches than most of those TV speakers do!

As a personal observation, I note that rarely seems to happen! It appears that most people today who have interest in subjects such as this one buy some book or read some article by some author, and without further thought, simply ACCEPT the opinions and conclusions of that specific author! Such authors virtually NEVER provide the math or the logic they used to get to their conclusions or discuss whatever assumptions they had to accept in that process. That is why this presentation sort of REQUIRES you to invest some time and effort. Rather than "accepting the opinions" of some Physicist, it is hoped that you will occasionally scribble down some calculations of your own, to either confirm or deny calculations and statements made here. The subject is TOO IMPORTANT for you to simply accept ANYONE'S opinions. Is Vice President Al Gore's opinion true that things are terribly bad? Is President Bush's opinion true that there is not even any such thing as global warming? Both sound very convincing to their own followers! Hopefully, if you struggle through this presentation, you may be able to form your own conclusions, to decide if EITHER of them is right or not!

As a Research Physicist, I have spent a number of years studying the scientific processes that represent energy flows in the Earth's environment, and I present here the results of several years of that research. It is arranged such that most readers should be able to do any necessary math to either confirm or deny statements made here. I have often tried to separate away the very worst of the math into footnotes! These subjects are too important to simply have to believe some spokesperson who may or may not actually understand the science involved. At the very end of the Footnotes, there are some brief references to the even far more advanced math that is commonly used in the actual advanced science research, but this presentation attempts to only use math that is familiar to nearly everyone.

As a Physicist, I find it darkly amusing that so many people read a few paragraphs of some author, and suddenly start believing that they are now an absolute expert on all these advanced subjects. An interesting example is that College Professor in Oregon who has personally NEVER gone up those nearby mountains, but he constantly gives speeches where he explains to listeners that NO melting of glaciers has occurred! He even sometimes claims that the glaciers there are getting larger! It turns out that he is paid a lot of money by business groups which need to insist on such preposterous claims to avoid hurting their business profits. It would obviously be really bad for him if he would ever actually go up those mountains, as he would then SEE that HALF the glaciers are GONE, with more disappearing all the time. But he gives so many speeches, and he includes enough statements that sound scientific, that there are a lot of people who believe what he tells them. Does it frighten you that he purports to be an expert regarding LOCAL mountains but he has NEVER even taken a few hours to go up them to actually see the situation?

This discussion is essentially about THINGS THAT HAVE ALREADY HAPPENED. Many political leaders seem to think that we are currently fine and that all they have to do is SOMEDAY avoid adding even more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That is definitely NOT the case. Again, this discussion and the included calculations are primarily regarding EXISTING amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. NO ONE knows what the future will be, even scientists! A central point of this presentation is that even if everyone on Earth suddenly and immediately chose to not add a single extra pound of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, we still have a truly catastrophic future to look forward to. The fact that political leaders still seem comfortable with adding massive (but reduced, still billions of extra tons every year) additional amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere FOR MANY MORE YEARS into the future, simply suggests that they do not (yet) really comprehend the terrible nature of our situation.

Politicians and business leaders have said astounding things regarding global warming and climate change over the past 35 years! People seem to feel free to express absolutely any personal opinion, if they think they cannot be proven wrong, and if they believe that opinion affects whether their businesses make billions of dollars or not! Didn't we learn anything from the tobacco companies that KNEW that they were causing hundreds of thousands of people to die each year from cancer, as early as the 1950s, but STILL absolutely insisted that they were innocent, into the 1990s? Didn't we all realize that they had outright lied to the public for around 40 years while they became some of the largest and most powerful corporations on Earth? And can't we see that there are vested interests that now want to insist that there is no such thing as global warming, or if not that, that mankind has nothing to do with it, because of economic threats to their corporations? Of course, there are groups with opposing views that see no problem in disrupting countless millions of dollars of business for a few dozen spotted owls or the equivalent.

Businesspeople discovered long ago that if you ask a hundred "experts" in any field, you will certainly find at least one that agrees with your point-of-view! Especially if the "expert" knows that he will get very large amounts of money, and probably a guaranteed future cushy job as a result! If there were some business today that felt it could make billions of dollars by insisting that the Earth is Flat, they nearly certainly could find some "expert" who would be willing to attest to that being true. It would NOT mean that it were actually true!

I am a Physicist. I don't have any association with any giant corporations or with any tree-huggers. I was educated, well, at the University of Chicago, and I have ethical responsibilities to them regarding the quality of that education and of the science that I attempt to apply. My loyalties are to truth, data, accurate research, and pure logic. Period. In the spirit of a true scientist, when I research a subject, I really have no particular interest in how the results turn out, whether they agree with what I had expected or completely refuted my expectations, except that they be as correct as modern science and solid logic can make them.

A frightening number of people today seem to understand "science" as entirely different from that! They think that someone "comes up with an idea" and then "finds ways to prove it is true!" It might be handy if that were true, but it turns out that the MAJORITY of scientific research results in findings that PROVE THAT THE ORIGINAL HYPOTHESIS WAS WRONG! And this is where the terrible difference shows up! Someone who "insists on proving that he/she is right" then SELECTIVELY picks experiments or data that appears to support the hypothesis, while absolutely avoiding ever mentioning any experiments or data that contradicts it. In true scientific investigation, BOTH MUST BE CAREFULLY EXAMINED. The first person here is nearly guaranteed of "finding the proof he/she insists on finding" but it is meaningless. The second person here might not "find some miraculous result, but WILL "advance the sum total knowledge of science."

With this preamble, this presentation gives the pure science behind each of the various subjects involved, and includes the actual calculations and the actual logic that support the statements made. This is presented so that virtually anyone should be able to do the same calculations and logic to confirm these statements.

One important finding in this research is that it seems that all previous researchers have considered the interactions of sunlight, winds, oceans, ocean flows and all that, but that they seem to have never considered the effect of how massive and how poorly-heat-conducting the Earth's Crustal rocks are. An extremely important consequence of this is that the atmosphere cannot possibly adjust to any new equilibrium temperature without also heating (or cooling) the Earth itself as well. These calculations suggest that this factor causes around a 140-year lag in atmospheric and Earth temperature changes behind changes in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. This appears to be an explanation for why science has not (yet) seen the far greater temperature changes that all scientists have expected from such great changes in carbon dioxide concentration; they are simply still to come, with the very worst to come more than a hundred years from now.

We note that nearly all political and business leaders have a very bad misunderstanding about a critical aspect of this subject. They all seem to think that all that has to be done is to get carbon dioxide emissions reduced a little "by the year 2050" and all will IMMEDIATELY be well. Or that they can continue to single-mindedly focus on profits until some LAST POSSIBLE DAY, and then make changes, and all will be well! That is NOT the case! What is critical is the CONTENT of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere! This is a cumulative effect. Actually, all the carbon dioxide that we have dumped into the atmosphere figures to stay there for thousands or millions of years! A scientist recently (early 2007) mentioned in a TV interview that the carbon dioxide released by the earliest Model T cars a hundred years ago, is still in the atmosphere! There are no known significant mechanical methods to remove it, and the natural methods of ocean creatures forming calcium carbonate and petroleum and natural gas and coal all take immensely long time intervals. Whatever carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere, or more technically, into the Carbon Cycle, is likely to be there beyond the existence of mankind. In itself, that would not be a serious problem, except for the SCALE of the amounts we are adding to the atmosphere. We are currently adding about 400,000,000,000,000 cubic feet of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere EVERY YEAR! That is about 1,000,000,000,000 cubic feet each day. But each person or each business has always said "WE are adding very little and WE are not causing any problems."

There are absolutely ludicrous things presented by businesses in their attempts at sidestepping the fact that there IS a very huge problem. One of the funniest is where giant corporations now "buy carbon credits" from some remote tribal group. They claim that by paying such tribes some money, they have justified that they are then free to continue to send just as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere! It is double-talk! That remote tribe probably was NOT going to massively start industrial operations! But the Executives of the giant corporations seem to be able to trick the public into believing that they are being "environmentally responsible" by "buying such carbon credits". The concept is absolute insanity, and it simply is a trick which allows those giant corporations to continue making the billions of dollars of profits that they insist on. And they seem to get away with it, as no one seems to think that "carbon credits" is remotely as bad an idea as it actually is. IT DOES NOT EVEN TRY TO FIX THE PROBLEM AT ALL! It merely tries to pawn off future blame on tribes around the world!

The argument of "we are a very small polluter so we cannot be having any significant effect" might be valid except for the fact that there are so many of us people on Earth! There is an interesting way to show how many of us there are! You may not realize it, but every breath you exhale contains about 4.4% carbon dioxide in it! Big deal, you say? It is true that YOU only exhale around twelve times every minute, which turns out to be around 600 pounds of carbon dioxide in a year. (It comes from the carbon in the foods you eat and the oxygen in the air you breathe in.) But that means that every THREE people exhale a ton of carbon dioxide per year. There are over six billion of us living (and breathing)! Astoundingly, we humans collectively exhale TWO BILLION TONS of carbon dioxide every year! (Fortunately, when the plants grew that initially provided all [100%] of the food we eat, those plants REMOVED two billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air, so there is no bad long term effects like there is when we burn fossil fuels, where we ADD additional carbon dioxide into the mix.) (And, in case you are curious, there are NO other animals that are in such great numbers as humans where the total amount of exhaled carbon dioxide is remotely as great as what we humans exhale. It is very fortunate that Nature has established the Carbon Cycle to continually remove and replace carbon dioxide and oxygen, in a system that had been stable and reliable for many millions of years. At least until we started burning fossil fuels in massive amounts to foul up the Carbon Cycle.)

This discussion shows that recent decades of human society releasing so much new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ALREADY has caused that our equilibrium temperature is FAR higher than the actual temperatures we are yet experiencing, and that even if we NOW suddenly totally changed our ways (which is not going to happen) and somehow stop increasing the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content, the atmosphere figures to continue to heat up for the next 140 years. This is all a FAR more serious problem than our leaders seem to comprehend. There is a valid possibility that we may have ALREADY done so much damage to the atmosphere that 140 years from now, the entire Earth may be too hot for virtually any plants to be able to survive and not wilt and die from excessive evaporation/transpiration. And if there were no plants, there would be no food for any animals or people. It turns out that this concept is not even new! .

(Archer and Barber, 2003, Photosynthesis and Photoconversion, Chap 1, p.4, calculated those things several years ago, and expressed their concern that the end of human and animal life may soon happen.) They also noted and calculated that if all plants were gone and people were still breathing oxygen, we would consume all the remaining oxygen in the atmosphere surprisingly quickly! (But we would run out of food far quicker.)

Keep in mind that is due to things we have already done!

Only very recently (April 2007) have some scientists been (finally) trying to explain that it is therefore not nearly enough to slowly reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Some have (finally) started to say that AT MOST we may have TEN YEARS to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and they (even including ex-Vice President Gore) are even (finally) starting to say that it may already be too late to do anything to stop true catastrophe from happening. This presentation explains the Physics behind such statements.

FINALLY starting to get to the actual subject at hand!



. There is simple and absolute logic that exists

  1. There is a situation called Radiative Equilibrium where the energy radiated IN to the Earth (from the Sun) must, on average, equal the radiation energy the Earth radiates back out to space. Both are easily and reliably calculated. note 1 (this situation is true for any object in any environment, once it achieves a stable [equilibrium] surface temperature.) Note: We will occasionally make an incorrect use of the term energy in this discussion, and the word power (which is energy per unit time) would be technically correct. However, we realize that in common conversation, the term energy is often used when discussing power, and we are hoping to make this presentation reasonably understandable! Energy is measured in watt-seconds or kilowatt-hours, where power is measured in watts or kilowatts. We hope no undue confusion will be caused by this.

  2. With ZERO ppm (parts per million) of CO2 in the early Earth with no atmosphere, this radiative balance was simple, based ONLY on the distance of the Earth from the Sun, the radiation rate of the Sun, and the average surface temperature of the Earth, (and therefore the outgoing infrared radiation of the Earth to outer space). There were therefore only four arrows in the schematic of energy flows, one representing energy IN from the Sun, one representing the OUTWARD radiation of the warm Earth (to cold deep space), and the middle two that represent energy which immediately reflected from the Earth (and which therefore never was involved in the processes of the Earth). This situation easily shows that the (actual) Equilibrium temperature of the early Earth was then around -9ºF or -23ºC. note 1 (The first Law of Thermodynamics' Conservation of Energy and the Stefan-Boltzmann equation). (This exact number depends on how reflective the early Earth was, which no one actually has any way of knowing, and other researchers have used slightly lower Albedo number for the early Earth to get a slightly warmer early Earth temperature of around -4ºF or -20ºC. The effect of this difference is irrelevant for this discussion, only slightly affecting some numbers we will calculate.)

    We know that the Sun has created fairly constant radiation output for billions of years due to its internal nuclear fusion processes. We know that the Earth has been relatively near the same distance from the Sun as we are today. This indicates that the actual total amount of INCOMING solar energy (at the top of the atmosphere) has been fairly constant, at around the current 1353 watts per square meter of area (referred to as the Solar Constant). note 22 That value of the Solar Constant is more technically referred to as the Air Mass Zero Insolation, per that footnote.

    We know the size of the Earth has not changed, and so we know the projected area that the Earth presents to the Sun, and so we can easily calculate the total solar energy aimed at the Earth (projected area times Solar Constant). This is calculated below note 1 at 1.7233*1017 watts. We are going to describe these huge amounts of power in terms of 1015 watts, called peta-watts or PW, so we are going to call this 172.33 PW.

    Note: There are some textbooks which present the following logic and calculations in a slightly different way, where they consider the energy flow for one-square-foot or one-square-meter of SURFACE area. The logic is exactly the same, but the numbers are obviously different; instead of presenting the TOTAL energy flow rates for the entire Earth, they are considering a tiny fraction of that area. Their approach often includes another factor, 4, in their calculations. That doesn't really apply here (except in our footnotes), but it seems necessary to refer to that factor. The Solar Constant is the INSTANTANEOUS energy flow for one square meter of area, directly facing the sun (and above the atmosphere). Think about the situation of the Earth and Sun. The area of the Earth which intercepts sunlight is Pi times the Earth's radius squared, also called the Projected area. But we live on the SURFACE of the Earth. It turns out that the total surface area of a sphere is given by FOUR times Pi times the Earth's radius squared. After all, half the time, any area of the Earth's surface is in night, pointed away from the Sun. Even during the daytime, the Sun is rarely exactly overhead. The collective geometric effects of these things is that the Solar Constant value of 1353 watts per square PROJECTED area, is sometimes described as an AVERAGE of 1353/4 watts (or 338 watts) per square meter of SURFACE area, in from the Sun for the whole surface area of the Earth. We think their way can be a little confusing (as it probably has been here!) and so we choose to consider the TOTAL EARTH ENERGY FLOW RATES instead of just for an average square meter of real Earth surface area! There is NO doubt that the Sun sends the 172.33 PW of energy at the Earth!

    Our drawing shows that 172.33 PW of energy being divided up into two different arrows coming in to Earth. They are the same, but we are distinguishing here (the left arrow) representing the energy that actually gets ABSORBED by the Earth and (the next arrow) representing the energy that immediately REFLECTS OFF of the Earth (and therefore has no significant effect on Earth). No one actually knows what the reflectivity, or what is called Albedo, of the Earth was before it had any atmosphere or white clouds or oceans, but we have assumed that it was likely to be relatively close to what it is today, at around 34%, in these calculations. As already noted, some researchers feel that the early Earth had an Albedo which was a little lower, at 30% or 31%, which slightly changes these numbers. Therefore we know that the early Earth immediately reflected away that 34% of 172.33 PW or 58.59 PW, telling us the power in both the second and third arrows in our drawing. This also tells us that the first arrow must necessarily represent the remaining 66% or 113.74 PW.

    Once the (early) Earth had warmed to the extent necessary where its surface temperature reached a specific temperature that was stable, called Equilibrium, then the fourth arrow we show, of the RADIATION that the Earth gives off to outer space, must have also been 113.74 PW. This situation would enable the surface of the Earth to remain at reasonably constant (average) temperatures, a situation that could continue without change for a very long time!

    The Earth eventually established an atmosphere, and then rain and oceans. This did not materially change much, except that we now have a new pair of arrows that show solar energy bouncing off the atmosphere. This probably slightly increased the Albedo of the Earth, especially due to the white clouds that now could be in that atmosphere, but otherwise no tremendous changes occurred regarding the energy balance of the Earth. (Our drawing seems to have had the arrow on the right vanish, but please realize it should still be there!)

  3. The incoming sunlight is a combination of infrared, visible and ultraviolet light, because the Sun's surface temperature is around 11,000ºF or 6,000ºC. (Planck's Law, Wien's Law). note 22 Since the Earth's surface temperature is currently around 14ºC, those same Laws show that all OUTGOING radiation is far in the infrared. Without any atmosphere, that difference in wavelength (color) would not have mattered as all the radiation could pass freely in both directions, and that radiative equilibrium would exist. When an atmosphere developed, most of it (nitrogen and oxygen) is essentially equally transparent to incoming and outgoing radiation. But a few types of components of the atmosphere behave differently for the two.


    . Blanketing Effect or the Greenhouse Effect

    There are two specific compounds that are in significant quantity in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide and water vapor, which are each much less transparent to infrared radiation than to the other colors of light. As a result, these two compounds pretty much allow the INCOMING (shorter wavelength, mostly visible and ultraviolet) solar radiation to come through freely. (toward the left on these charts) But those two gases absorb significant fractions of the outgoing much longer wavelength far-infrared radiation. (FAR toward the right on these charts). Those gases in the atmosphere absorb that heat. That causes the atmosphere there to become a little warmer, and the then-extra-heated warmer gases then re-radiate much of that energy, roughly half going upward and out toward space and roughly half going back downward toward the Earth. . About half of the radiation which the Earth sent up to get absorbed in the atmosphere, then gets re-radiated back down toward the surface of the Earth therefore provides an additional heat source for the Earth's surface, keeping it warmer than would otherwise be true, an effect generally called the Greenhouse Effect. The effect is extremely similar to why a blanket keeps you warmer, even though it does not produce any of its own heat; it simply enables your own body heat to remain near you.

    This effect changes with the amount of carbon dioxide or water vapor present. When the amount is SMALL, then the amount of heat re-radiated back down toward Earth is essentially PROPORTIONAL to the temperature variance of the Earth's surface. (The graphs of the Vostok data show this for the various maxima and minima points). This is called a LINEAR relationship between the temperature of the Earth's surface and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is ONLY TRUE when the amount of carbon dioxide (or water vapor) is SMALL. The reason is this. The small FRACTION of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere only causes a SMALL amount of additional heating of the atmosphere. And since only half of that will later get radiated DOWNWARD toward the Earth's surface (with the other half being radiated UPWARD toward outer space) the GROSS AMOUNT of the re-heating of the Earth is minimal. And the data suggests that it is pretty close to being a direct proportionality. And THAT therefore only increases the surface temperature by a very small amount, and a "second iteration" of this effect is extremely small. BECAUSE the process is therefore a SINGLE ITERATION, it is extremely close to being a LINEAR relationship between carbon dioxide content and the Earth's surface temperature.

    This situation changes drastically when the amount of carbon dioxide is very high. It becomes a NON-LINEAR relationship. And this is why. When the AMOUNT of heat re-radiated back down toward Earth is significant, it can cause enough ADDITIONAL heating of the Earth to cause a second iteration of infrared radiation from the Earth.

    Consider the absolute limiting case, where the Earth's atmosphere has so much Carbon dioxide and water vapor in it where it absorbs 100% of the radiation being sent upward from Earth. (We are going to make an assumption here in that the Earth's atmosphere behaves as though it has "one-layer". Venus happens to be a situation where its atmosphere [of 95% carbon dioxide] behaves as though it is MANY layers. In that case, some of the logical simplifications here do not apply and a more complex analysis is required. It also resulted in what is referred to as a runaway Greenhouse effect on Venus, where the surface temperature is around 860ºF.)

    In our case, we know that the Earth RECEIVES the 113.74 PW of energy from the Sun. Due to Equilibrium considerations, we see that it then RADIATES that same 113.74 PW up toward outer space. But since the atmosphere would absorb ALL of it, NONE would directly get out to space! But instead, that heated atmosphere would radiate half (56.87 PW) of that energy upward and outward, to be lost to space, but it would also radiate another 56.87 PW of (infrared, heat) energy back down toward the Earth. (that is one iteration). Given sufficient time to attain equilibrium, the Earth's surface would rise to a temperature to now radiate away (113.74 + 56.87) 170.61 PW. But now the atmosphere would absorb ALL this 170.61 energy. So now it would radiate half of that, 85.31 PW outward toward space and also half downward to the Earth. Notice that we now have 113.74 + 85.31 or 199.05 PW getting to the Earth, which gets it up to an even higher temperature. (this is the second iteration, this time adding another 28.44 PW). A third iteration would add yet another 14.22 PW. And then another 7.11 PW and then 3.56 PW, and 1.78 PW, etc.

    It is a simple Algebraic Summation to calculate the total of this infinite number of iterations. In this limiting case of the atmosphere absorbing 100% of outgoing radiation, the Algebraic total would turn out to be 227.48 PW of TOTAL OUTGOING RADIATION from the surface of the Earth. With a one-layer model for the atmosphere, THIS IS THE LIMITING CASE.. We can then use the Stefan-Boltzmann equation to determine the maximum possible temperature for the Earth's surface. It is actually a PROPORTION of temperature based on the original Equilibrium temperature of the Earth (which we had calculated as 250.5ºK or -8.7ºF or -22.6ºC); over the early Earth's equilibrium temperature which would result in a MAXIMUM Earth Average temperature of about 76.6ºF or 24.8ºC.

    THIS implies that the (average) temperature of the Earth's surface has an asymtote at 76.6ºF, as long as our one-layer-atmosphere assumption is true. The LINEAR relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and Earth temperature was true for LOW levels of carbon dioxide, but that relationship curves away from the linear relationship into one where additional amounts of carbon dioxide would not cause any increases at all in the Earth's temperature!

    Notice that this limiting case is somewhat self-perpetuating, in that some of the very same heat energy can be radiated back and forth many times between the Earth's surface and the warmed gases of the atmosphere, due to the atmosphere containing either or both of water vapor and carbon dioxide. Again, if you pile on a thicker or better blanket over your body, you are actually not creating any extra heat energy, but you have the sensation you are much warmer, because your own body heat is able to benefit you more than once!

    Please note that we still have Equilibrium in this situation. The Sun is sending in 113.74 PW and 113.74 PW more infrared radiation would be coming down from the heated atmosphere, exactly providing the 227.48 PW that the 76.5ºF surface radiates upward. The Sun is sending IN the 113.74 PW of power, and the total of what the heated atmosphere radiates off to space is also 113.74, again exactly balancing.

    Water vapor is generally very low in the atmosphere, the bottom 5 kilometers or so, being involved with our weather systems. You might have noted that jet airliners nearly always fly ABOVE all clouds at their 10 km altitudes. Its concentration in the atmosphere greatly depends on evaporation from the oceans, and its AVERAGE effects are therefore relatively constant over extended periods of time, although locally there are regularly great variations.

    The far greater contribution to the Greenhouse Effect is from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, primarily because it is present through the entire depth of the atmosphere, but also for more technical reasons.

    There are an assortment of other gases in the atmosphere which also absorb a lot of infrared, such as methane, but the total amount of methane in the atmosphere is very small when compared to carbon dioxide. Where the concentration of carbon dioxide is now in the 390 ppm range, only about 2 ppm of the atmosphere is methane gas. This results in that gas being worthy of serious attention, but it is currently of relatively less importance regarding Global Warming.

  4. With around 280 ppm of CO2 consistently present in the atmosphere during many centuries prior to 1800, note 2 the "blanket effect" of that amount of CO2 had raised the Earth's equilibrium temperature (by around 1900) by about 66ºF, up to about 13.75ºC or 56.75ºF. note 3

    This has complicated our picture! Everything shown on the left is still completely true, as we still have the same amount of energy coming in from the Sun, roughly the same amount reflecting back off to space. That means that the Earth is still receiving the net 113.74 PW of energy from the Sun. However, we have now divided up the previous single outward radiation arrow on the right into three separate arrows. Because we know that the surface temperature of the Earth was then (1900 AD) around that 13.75ºC, much warmer than was true with the original Equilibrium, there has to be some source for the extra energy that warmer Earth was now radiating outward. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann relationship as shown in the footnotes, we can easily determine that an Earth's surface at an average temperature of 13.75ºC must necessarily be radiating away 195.86 PW of power.

    How could this be?

    We know that we only receive 113.74 PW (net) from the Sun.

    How is this possible? It is due to the effect indicated by the first crooked arrow on the right in our drawing. Consider this arrow to represent 82.12 PW of power. It goes upward as part of the 195.86 PW of power radiated from the relatively warm Earth. But much of that energy (164.24 PW of the 195.86 PW) gets ABSORBED in the atmosphere, primarily by the carbon dioxide and water vapor in it. Then, the (now warmer) atmosphere radiates 82.12 PW of that power back down to Earth's surface.

    This allowed the Earth's surface to be in energy Equilibrium at that 13.75ºC temperature. We received 113.74 PW from the Sun, and another 82.12 PW in this far infrared (invisible to us) radiation from the warmed atmosphere, and therefore the surface received a total of 195.86 PW of power to be able to then radiate 195.86 PW from the surface.

    Note that the full 195.86 PW radiated from Earth does NOT actually get through the atmosphere to be lost to space. We just saw that 82.12 PW were removed from that outward flow (our first new arrow). Actually, the Earth-atmosphere combination has to lose a total of 113.74 by radiation (which are our second and third new arrows), for the overall Equilibrium of the combination. This happens in an interesting way, being represented by the final two arrows on the right in our drawing. We will discuss the rightmost arrow first. Remembering that we heated up the atmosphere, and that warmed atmosphere RADIATED DOWNWARD the 82.12 PW needed for Equilibrium of the surface situation. But the atmosphere is not smart enough to know to only radiate downward! The reality is that it also radiates the very same amount UPWARD, out to space! So that last slightly-kinked arrow represents another 82.12 PW of radiation that left the Earth's surface and got absorbed by the atmosphere, BUT which then got radiated UPWARD rather than downward.

    We now know the power in the remaining arrow, the radiation from the Earth's surface that actually goes straight on through the atmosphere to outer space, it is 195.86 - 82.12 - 82.12 or 31.62 PW.

    If you examine this situation, you can see that every point is in thermal Equilibrium, the Earth's surface, the atmosphere, and the whole combination. THIS is the explanation why the temperature of the Earth has been fairly constant for the thousands of years of civilization, until around 1900. It also explains why it was moderately constant, but with variations such as ice ages, over millions of years. As the surface of the Earth would warm a little, more plants could grow, each REMOVING more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by photosynthesis, thereby slightly reducing the remaining amount of carbon dioxide remaining in the atmosphere, and therefore allowing more of the Earth's radiation to escape through the atmosphere, cooling the Earth back down. It was naturally self-correcting. That is why it was always close to an Equilibrium situation; that when changes occurred, there were generally secondary effects that cancelled the changes in the long run.

    You probably already noted that the actual total amount of power that escapes from the Earth-atmosphere system is 31.62 + 82.12 or 113.74 PW. This is exactly in accordance with the total (net) energy coming in to be absorbed by the Earth-atmosphere from the Sun, so we have the needed Equilibrium there.

    The centrally important result here is that the Earth RECEIVES only the consistent incoming 113.74 PW but the logic and figures above show HOW the Earth could currently be hot enough to be radiating away far MORE energy (the 195.86 PW) without violating the Conservation of Energy!

    It is also important to notice in the calculations above that the carbon dioxide and water vapor (and lesser components such as methane and ozone) in the atmosphere of the year 1900 necessarily captured a total of 164.24 PW of the 195.86 PW the Earth surface tried to radiate away. A HUGE fraction! You might see how and why if MORE carbon dioxide or water vapor was put into the atmosphere (as we have been massively doing by burning fossil fuels), that 164.24 PW absorbed certainly increases to an even larger fraction. THAT is the problem we face!

    Actually, the situation is more complex than that! That RESULTANT fraction is very large due to the multiple times that energy can go back and forth! Infrared heat can keep going back and forth between the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth many times, making the total effect of this situation greater than the actual fraction captured in any cycle. In an attempt at clarification of this effect, imagine for a moment that EXACTLY 2/3 of the energy radiated upward from the Earth gets absorbed into the atmosphere. Which would mean that 1/3 would then get radiated back down to Earth. But that 1/3 would eventually get re-radiated back up again from the Earth's surface (for a second iteration). So now we have 2/3 of THAT 1/3 get re-absorbed by the atmosphere (now 2/9), and half of THAT gets re-radiated back down to Earth (now 1/9). And if we continue through another iteration, we would find that another 1/27 would be radiated back down toward Earth, and then another 1/81 in the following iteration, and so on, forever. The TOTAL effect of the atmosphere would therefore NOT be the simple 1/3 (like we have simplified into for this discussion), but instead it is a TOTAL of 1 + 1/3 + 1/9 + 1/27 + 1/81 + 1/243 etc. The sum of this infinite series is a simple algebra problem which is exactly 1.5 in this case. The point being made here is that the "single-time" effect would then appear to be 1.0, but the cumulative effect turns out to be 1.5 times that much energy (re-radiated back to Earth in smaller and smaller amounts each time!)

    This might seem to be an odd point to make, but it is actually quite important. Say that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to rise where 9/10 gets absorbed by the atmosphere in each iteration. The amounts of the iterations would then become 1 + 0.45 + 0.205 + 0.09225 + 0.0415 etc for which the infinite sum is 1.82. This seems to be close to what the current data suggests, where we have an INPUT of the 113.74 PW, but that enables the Earth to radiate away: 113.74 (the 1 portion); 51.18 PW (the 0.45 portion, due to the second iteration); 23.31 PW (the 0.205 portion, due to the third iteration); and so on, where the TOTAL radiated by the Earth would then be (1.82) 207 PW.

    The ULTIMATE maximum summation of such terms would then be exactly two times the input energy, which does not change. This reasoning implies that the MAXIMUM the Earth should be able to radiate away would be 3 * 113.74 or 227.48 PW. If we apply the Stefan-Boltzmann formula (backwards) we can determine that the MAXIMUM rise over the early Earth's equilibrium temperature would result in a MAXIMUM Earth Average temperature of about 76.8ºF or 24.9ºC.

    If this reasoning is valid, it could be INCREDIBLY GOOD NEWS! It would indicate that the higher temperatures calculated here, which were based on the clearly LINEAR relationship which has applied for most of ancient history, would not and possibly COULD NOT occur! IF it turns out that the WORST THAT WE COULD EVER DO was to cause 77ºF, no matter how wildly we continue to dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at least that implies that MANY plants would still ALWAYS be able to live, meaning that there would forever be a food supply for people and animals!

    Getting back to our drawing above, it might therefore be more accurate to show the first kinked line on the right to be extended to be a long zig-zag line, where each downward portion represents additional energy which acts to heat up the Earth's surface. This effect is somewhat reduced by the fact that the Earth is so massive and such a poor conductor of heat that it heats and cools very slowly. The simple application of Algebraic Mathematical Summation can be used to accurately present that collective effect, as noted here!

  5. We have ALREADY added so much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (especially during the past 50 years) that we are now (2007) at close to 390 ppm note 2 concentration (measured in many research locations, including the South Pole).

  6. Given that the proportion that 280 ppm of CO2 caused a 66ºF rise, then IF THE RELATIONSHIP WOULD CONTINUE TO BE LINEAR, then 390 ppm of CO2 MUST cause a 92ºF rise, which means that the CURRENT Equilibrium temperature MUST ALREADY BE 83ºF.

    NOTE: There is very strong evidence that this linear proportion has always existed in the past. The Summation argument presented above implies that for small or moderate amounts of carbon dioxide, a linear relationship would be quite accurate. It would only be where the iteration terms in the Summation become large, as is becoming true now, that the relationship would veer away from being that nearly linear relationship. That is a simple Algebra Summation problem.

    It is generally accepted that the average Earth temperature probably fell to around 2ºC or 36ºF during some Ice Ages in the past few million years. The Vostok ice-core data (Barnola, Raynaud, Lorius; 2003) gives atmospheric carbon dioxide values for the past 419,000 years which occasionally dropped to a low of around 188 ppm. To try to check if the relationship is a linear proportion, we can do a proportion calculation: (188/280) * 66 = 44ºF as the equilibrium temperature rise at that ancient time. Since this is based on the initial equilibrium temperature of -9ºF, this gives an equilibrium temperature at that ancient time of 35ºF, a remarkably good match to the 36ºF mentioned above. This then strongly establishes that the linear proportion is valid.

    The Vostok graphs also confirm this. We are talking about a temperature which was around 23ºF lower than today, when the CO2 was 188 ppm. The Vostok graphs show that they found the temperature was around 9ºC lower than today, which is 16ºF lower. That is not strict linearity, but it is within the range of the accuracy of the data.

    We can better think of all this by using that last drawing above. We know that there are around 3,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. We know that we are currently adding around 25 to 30 billion new tons of carbon dioxide every year directly due to burning fossil fuels. This is only an 0.7% increase per year, right? Irrelevant??? No. It DOES turn out that some of that carbon dioxide will get absorbed into the oceans, but for the moment, let's just stay with the thought of a 0.7% increase in a year. We learned above that the atmosphere is currently blocking and absorbing 164.24 PW of the radiative power the Earth's surface is giving off. You saw the absorption graphs for carbon dioxide and water vapor above, where they are nearly 100% absorbent of many far infrared wavelengths. Say that total absorption increased by just 0.4% in that year, from 164.24 PW to 164.90 PW. Looking again at our drawing, we still have the Sun providing the 113.74 net intake. But now we have the more absorbent atmosphere now making it so that half-of-164.90 PW or 82.45 PW is now being radiated back down toward the surface from the atmosphere (instead of the earlier 82.12 PW) That means the surface is then receiving a total of 113.74 + 82.45 or 196.19 PW (but it is still only radiating away the earlier 195.86 PW). By now, you are probably familiar enough with the Stefan-Boltzmann relationship to know that this means the TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE MUST NECESSARILY RISE A LITTLE BIT (and you can even now calculate how much!) (0.12ºC or 0.21ºF). You are now capable of calculating the EQUILIBRIUM temperature increase each year, for however much carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere! (The actual rise of the equilibrium temperature is slightly less than this, because carbon dioxide is very soluble in seawater, and so some of the CO2 that we dump into the atmosphere gets absorbed into the oceans. Our reasoning is flawless above, but the actual numbers are slightly less because of this effect.)

    By the way, you now know virtually the complete method of analysis that good researchers use regarding the math of Global Warming. You are encouraged to confirm or deny any of these figures or this reasoning, to determine your own conclusions. (For the non-math-geeks, sorry about providing so much calculation here, but these subjects are incredibly important, and I feel it important that any reader have the equations and the numbers to duplicate the numbers and the logic for him/herself. Most of the worst of the math is over, except in footnotes!)

    For the record, the figures used and calculated above were for the Earth's average surface temperature from the year 1900. As the included graph of temperature readings shows, we are now measuring an average Earth temperature which is about 1.0ºC higher than that. So those same figures for today are: Insolation, still 113.74 PW; total outgoing radiation from the Earth, 198.60 PW, of which 169.72 gets absorbed by the atmosphere, with half of that being radiated back down toward the Earth, 84.86 PW; and 28.88 PW passing through the atmosphere to be lost to deep space. The total loss of the entire system by radiation to deep space is therefore 28.88 PW plus the 84.86 PW radiated upward from the atmosphere, or a total of 113.74 PW, again showing that the total system is in equilibrium regarding the energy received from the Sun and radiated to deep space. All the logic and the equilibriums still apply.

    The main point made here is that the Earth's surface is therefore RECEIVING a greater amount of incoming energy than it can RADIATE AWAY, which therefore requires the surface to warm up that fraction of a degree to be able to radiate away sufficient energy. However, this is a Catch-22 situation, where the greater amount of new radiation from the now warmer Earth surface will cause an additional amount of (secondary) radiation going up and then coming back down from the atmosphere. The fact that the effect is therefore somewhat self-perpetuating is a great deal of why this is so very, very bad.

    This is horrific, but this all might seem impossible because we have not yet started to see any such really terrible effects. Only about 1ºC or 2ºF of total average global temperature rise has been measured during the past hundred years. As a result of the lack of extreme temperature rises, political leaders and business executives have gotten away with denying that there is even any problem. It IS coming, and it will be truly horrible!

    There will be an interesting situation which should occur when the average temperature of the Earth has risen about 9ºC or 16ºF above today. At that point, there figures to then be essentially no longer any radiation from the Earth's surface that actually gets straight through the atmosphere! The atmosphere will be absorbing ALL the outgoing radiation from the Earth! The Sun will then be providing exactly half of the energy we receive at the Earth's surface, with the other half coming from the re-radiation from the atmosphere. The atmosphere will then be radiating around 113.74 PW back down toward the Earth, and also supplying ALL the 113.74 PW in outward radiation to space! Further heating beyond that temperature figures to continue, but in more complex ways.

  7. The atmosphere can heat up fairly quickly but the Earth cannot. The atmosphere cannot actually get up to that equilibrium temperature until the Earth itself warms up. The warmed atmosphere simply gives up some of that excess heat to the below-equilibrium-temperature Earth (and oceans).

    If you have ever stood near a single-pane window in extreme winter, then you know the sensation of feeling that the heat of your body is being sucked out of you to the cold window. Similarly, near Chicago, the summer weather forecasts always include the phrase "cooler near the Lake (Michigan)". Those situations are somewhat similar to the rapidly heated atmosphere being right above a much colder Earth. Once the Earth has fully heated up to that air temperature, (or if Lake Michigan would ever fully heat up to the air temperature) then that effect ends, but the Earth's Crust is primarily rock, which conducts heat rather slowly. The issue therefore becomes one of determining how quickly the Earth's Crust can warm up to a new Equilibrium temperature. The calculations are presented here. note 4

    For reference sake, this calculation of the actual physical heating of the deep rocks of the Earth calculate to require an average of around 1.17 PW of constant power transfer from the atmosphere to the Earth for those 143 years of the calculations. This fairly small amount of power (around 1/2 of 1% of the total heat flow of around 196 PW) could be represented in those drawings above as a small arrow pointed into the Earth. It slightly, but not materially, affects the exact numbers presented above. But over those 143 years, that small amount of constant power calculates to increase the Earth's interior and surface temperature as shown and calculated.

    We should probably think of the atmosphere and the first 0.6-mile thick of Earth's rock as a combined system that is getting heated up. Relatively speaking, the atmosphere has minimal total mass. Even though it can heat up or cool down in a matter of hours, it involves a rather small amount of total heat needed to do that. The countless millions of tons of rock in the first 3,000 feet thick of the Earth's crust has tremendously greater mass (and a comparable thermal capacity per pound) and so virtually all of the needed heat needs to go there to raise or lower the temperature of the combined atmosphere-rock system.

    Why pick 3000 feet? Because the Earth's internal heat (from radioactive decay in the Core) causes the temperature to rise with depth, and it turns out that around 3000 feet deep, the current temperature is around the 83ºF that we determined that the atmosphere equilibrium temperature should now be. That means that no heating of any rocks deeper than 3000 feet should be necessary.

    As a further clarification of this: The small amount (the 1/2%) of heat IN the atmosphere, which gets transferred to the rocks of the Earth at any instant is very minimal, as compared to the amounts of heat energy actually needed to warm up all that rock. So it is NOT like the atmosphere is currently really hot and needs to transfer it to the ground and rock! It should be described differently than that. This might be clearer. We know that the incoming solar energy is continuing at the same rate it has for millions of years. So it is NOT like we are being overheated in that way. This situation is very much better described as that "blanket" concept, where less heat is able to escape by outward radiation. Therefore, there is a small NET increase in heat content, continuously, every second. In any one second, it would not seem to be to be any important amount of excess heat. But it constantly and continuously adds up! The energy calculations footnoted above just show that, over a 143-year interval, the TOTAL excess heat accumulated in those seemingly irrelevant one-second contributions really add up, enough to eventually raise that mass of rock plus the mass of the atmosphere up to the (current) Equilibrium temperature. It just is occurring at a rate that seems very slow and which might seem to be able to be ignored.

    You must have gone into an extremely cold bedroom on some night of your life, say at 45ºF. You were expected to go to sleep, as in a remote cabin or a tent. So you find all the blankets you can, or multiple sleeping bags. The room still might stay around 45ºF, but under your pile of blankets, it soon gets up to a comfortable 68ºF. What is the SOURCE of that added heat? YOU are! Fine. But you are not too smart (sorry!) and you do not throw off any blankets! A little while later, it is 80ºF under your pile of blankets. NOW, you consider it extremely cozy, and might even pop your head out from under the covers. But you STILL don't throw off any blankets! Remember that there is NO furnace in the room, and no heat source at all, except your body! And it keeps pumping out around 80 to 100 Kilo-Calories of heat, or around 350 to 400 Btus of heat, every hour. Your giant pile of covers only allows 100 Btus of heat to escape through them. You may remember something like this happening to you, where you get hotter and hotter and hotter. Until you would either get up to an Equilibrium Temperature, (where the amount of heat lost through the stack of blankets exactly matches the heat production of your body, or you finally get smarter and throw off a blanket or two.

    But say that you could not throw off any blankets. THAT is our situation on Earth. The "pile of blankets" is the accumulation of carbon dioxide and water vapor in the atmosphere. We have no way to "throw them off". In fact, by constantly releasing an extra 25 to 30 billion tons of new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year from the burning of fossil-fuels, we are essentially still adding more and more and more blankets to our situation.

    The sad part is that we happen to currently still be in those first few minutes where we thought extra blankets were a good thing! They WERE, as long as we later had a way to throw them off! We are essentially getting near that point like when all those blankets got us up to the 80ºF. We still don't yet EXPERIENCE what the long term effects of all those blankets will be! And it is as though we are still asking people to toss more blankets in top of us! There does not YET seem to be any dark side to this situation, because all we see is that we are currently "cozy".

    But it is as though your friends were not actually your friends, and they strapped down all those blankets on top of you. You are still at the 80ºF, but you are JUST STARTING to see some really bad possibilities, of extreme overheating. And amazingly, what is the SOURCE of the heat that will soon cause you to drastically overheat (and quite possibly then even die of pyrexia [fever, over-heating]), and rather quickly? Your own body is supplying the heat! Given the information above, we could use Stefan-Boltzmann again to calculate that the Equilibrium temperature under your big stack of blankets would be around 305ºF. Of course, YOU don't know that yet. But this story with the strapped down blankets would end very badly, as your body could not survive 305ºF. What can you do about it, if you cannot throw off any of the covers? Not a thing. THAT is where we have gotten ourselves regarding releasing so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. NOT "in the future". ALREADY. In the PAST decades. And we have no way to now throw off any of the blankets. Astoundingly, we seem totally willing to still keep adding more and more and more blankets! Political leaders, who clearly do not understand the significance of this, simply HOPE TO REDUCE CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS BY 50% BY THE YEAR 2050. You should hear that and realize what they are really saying is that we are enthusiastically adding more and more blankets, because they do not yet have a CLUE regarding how drastic this all is. They are still intending to be adding more blankets in 2050 and beyond! Just THINNER blankets on top of our existing pile! Unbelievable!

    A central point of this presentation is to try to make this logic and these calculations fully understandable by everyone. It will be absolutely necessary that our leaders fully understand all this IF they are to make the critical decisions which MIGHT allow humanity to survive beyond 140 years from now. Sadly, that time interval seems to allow current leaders and businesses to simply say "We will continue as normal for now, making a few token improvements so the public will buy our products or re-elect our Party, and we will leave it to others who follow us to make such decisions, IF they then think it is important." That mind-set is a very convenient cop-out so that business and political leaders can avoid having to make decisions that are either financially undesirable or politically unpopular. We NEED to somehow look beyond "next Quarter's Financial Statement" and "the next Election" and realize that just 160 years from now, financial profits and elections may be meaning meaningless concepts on a quiet and desolate Earth.

    The reasoning and the calculations of this presentation show that we ALREADY have "added so many blankets" that few existing plants are likely to be able to have leaves 140 years from now, because their water pumping (transpiration) systems will simply be incapable of supplying enough water to keep from all the leaves and fruit from drying up. Which means that essentially all crops and nearly all other plants will realistically die by the year 2150 or so. There really are very few existing plants that could possibly survive in Africa or Brazil where the summer noon air temperatures might get up to 180ºF. Leaf surface temperatures would be even higher. Actual crop plants are far more sensitive regarding temperature, and they would all die, too. And what would people (and animals) then eat, if there are no plants growing? THAT figures to describe the final chapter of this adventure. The most terrifying part is that this is discussing a time where grandchildren of people today may still be around in 2140 to experience how it all turns out. Shouldn't that possibility actually scare our leaders into action?

    For the record, these results of the fairly simple and obvious logic and math we have presented are not unique. In April 2006, the PBS NOVA program on Dimming the Sun discussed much of these same things, with relatively similar numbers. One expert, Doctor Peter Cox of the University of Exeter, thinks that the average global temperature might rise by as much as 10ºC (or 18ºF) by the year 2100. That is actually quite close to what these calculations seem to suggest. The NOVA program also noted that nearly all trees on Earth would die at such high temperatures, and most existing crop land would become useless, with massive famine following. Another respected expert, James Hansen of NASA was discussing an expected 3ºC (or 5ºF) rise above today's temperature, noting that three million years ago, that was the situation, and that all ocean levels were then around 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today. And Hansen was discussing that 3ºC rise by around 2050. (That is actually a greater sea level rise than I am expecting, but on the same scale.)

    This presentation is just providing you with the logic and the math that is the basis for such statements by respected experts such as Peter Cox and James Hansen. They and many other scientists have done these same examinations, but no one seems willing to let the public know what the logic and the facts are. Well, now you have them.

    It really seems incredible that virtually everyone today is so incredibly competitive regarding successful businesses that only short-term profits matter. If there is some person who claims that there might be "negative consequences 140 years from now" why should anyone really reduce the level of profits today? THAT it the terrifying thinking that will resist this recognition of what is to come. It is easy to imagine that the last few surviving people will still be trying to figure out how to maximize their financial profits, around the year 2160! Human nature is really something to behold!

    The 143-year calculated lag time is the result of how long it will take for the Earth to heat (or cool) all that rock up a new current Equilibrium temperature. This explains why we are not yet seeing any major increase in the average Earth temperature yet. The Earth's average temperature IS rising, somewhat slowly, but that is because it is still responding to effects of 140 years ago, of around 1865. We can see from the Carbon Dioxide graph note 2 that the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution around 1800 already started adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and by 1865, we had already added significant amounts. But keep in mind that cars and electricity and electric generating plants were not even yet dreamed about or invented!

    This 140-year lag in the effects on the average world temperature is fairly clearly seen if the two graphs included in this web-page are compared, the carbon dioxide note 2 and the average Earth temperature, note 5 but now shifting the temperature graph about 140 years to the left (and squeezing that graph to change the scale so the graphs have the same horizontal scale.)

    Note that around 1750, there was a significant dip in the CO2 concentration, and around 1890 there was a very similar dip in the global average temperature. Note that then there was a plateau from about 1810 to 1840 in CO2, and a similar plateau is in the global temperature graph from about 1940 to 1970. From about 1840 to 1850 there was then a rapid increase in CO2, and again, there is a matching rapid increase in global average temperature from about 1975 to 1985. Not only are the general shapes of the graphs fairly similar, but those brief variations also match up surprisingly well, all of which seems to support these calculations that the CO2 we put in the atmosphere is definitely directly causing increases in the average global temperature, and about at the mathematically predicted lag time of about 140 years.

    A calculation involving Calculus and the Kelvin Integral can even more accurately calculate the amount of time that the Earth will take to rise to that current Equilibrium temperature of 83ºF. There is NO doubt that it necessarily has to get to that temperature. note 3

    Note that the most troubling part of all this is that what we are SEEING now appears to be primarily a result of CO2 put into the atmosphere by the time of the Civil War! This helps explain the fairly small average global temperatures measured so far. When one looks at how the curve of the CO2 proceeds after 1860, it is truly terrifying!

    The ONLY good news that seems present here is that we probably therefore have around 140 years before the global average temperature will have fully risen to the current equilibrium temperature of 83ºF. We note that the British Prime Minister recently (Feb 2007) announced a personal vow to keep global warming from ever exceeding 3ºC (which is 5ºF). Even if he and all other leaders and businessmen and drivers and electricity users would immediately and totally END all contributions to CO2 to the atmosphere, we are destined to pass that level about 2110 anyway! And probably far more than 20 years before that! My personal guess is by 2050 (essentially the same as James Hansen of NASA predicts).

    And since few people would actually do those drastic and costly and inconvenient things, the problem and the consequences will certainly yet get even worse. Just imagine extending the graphs toward the right and curving them both even more upward!

    It really does not matter what politicians argue about or say, because no one will actually solve this because it would be too economically destructive to giant companies and cause too much hardship on all the people affected by mandatory cutbacks. No politician would ever get re-elected if he voted for such terrible rules! However, Nature seems to have planned far ahead of us! By the early 1990s, the US had already completely mined all of the economically-accessible Uranium for nuclear power plants (ALL of the 40+ US Uranium mines closed some years back), and now the US only has around 4 years' supply of petroleum and about 8 years' supply of natural gas (if no imports) at current consumption rates. And the entire world really only has around 20 to 30 years (known) supplies left of all three, particularly as China has begun consuming enormous amounts. (You can examine the official government and industry published data regarding these remarkable and frightening statements in a link at the bottom of this page.) (Note: as of mid-June 2007: several American Uranium mines are planning to re-open, because the price of Uranium has recently increased by a factor of four! They expect that it will take a couple years before they can actually start supplying any Uranium. Wanna guess at what the price of electricity will do around two years from now, with that four-times-as-expensive Uranium?)

    So, even though politicians and businessmen will never be able to even slow down our immense consumption of those fuels, they will all be saved from having to make those decisions in twenty or thirty years, where there are essentially no such fuels left to argue about. Given human nature, there will be a LOT of angry people then, and tremendous wars can probably be expected, over resources that won't even then still exist! Go figure!

Can you imagine the consequences of this? If we do nothing, catastrophe beyond imagination. But "doing something" would have to be so huge that the results would seem nearly as bad in the short run. The ONLY logical, intelligent thing to do would be to IMMEDIATELY BAN ALL VEHICLES WORLDWIDE, cars, buses, trains, airplanes, trucks, and put GM and Ford and Toyota instantly and completely out of business. Also, the majority of all electric power plants would have to be completely and permanently shut down. NOT "next week or next year or in 50 years, but TODAY". Also, absolutely stop ALL fossil-fuel heating of all buildings.

Note that doing all these horrendous things, essentially the end of modern human life, would not actually FIX the damage that we have already done, but merely keep from doing even more damage.

The world would seem to have to "stop completely" to have even a small chance of the survival of mankind and many animals.

Obviously, there are few people who would be willing to endure such hardships, because they would simply say it was all lies. I admit that I personally have no motivation to scrap my Corvettes! And I like my house heated in winter and I like to have electricity. WHO would agree to giving even one of those things up?

What this is saying is that the last year's (2006) publicity about global warming is "barely scratching the surface of the actual severity of the catastrophe."

This is bad, far worse than even I had realized. And FAR more urgent than I had realized, too. I used to assume that it would be at least centuries before significant global warming would occur. But this reasoning, all based on solid data, is irrefutable.

The NOVA program of April 2006 mentioned above actually had one good note in it! When they pointed out that the earth was far hotter around 50 million years ago, 25ºF hotter than today, the narrator noted that life struggled to survive. The useful fact here is that SOME life DID survive!

There are people who claim that human activity has no effect at all and that all these effects seen are all natural. Such speakers often refer to Ice Ages and imply that large changes in climate naturally occurs. Such speakers generally have absolutely no knowledge or understanding of those subjects! For one thing, millions of years usually go by while significant climate changes naturally occur, or at least many thousands. We are measuring changes now where measurable increases are occurring EVERY YEAR.

It seems important here to briefly discuss those natural processes and the sorts of causes that are now believed to be the causes of them. First, it is assumed that you know that we have seasons because the Earth's spin axis is tilted to its orbit around the Sun. As it happens, we in the Northern Hemisphere are tilted most toward the Sun around June 21 of each year, which causes the warmth of summer. It also turns out that the Earth does not go in a perfect circle around the Sun, but in a slightly (3%) elliptical orbit. Interestingly, we are now closest to the Sun on January 3 of each year!

The result of these two effect is that our (Northern Hemisphere) summers are slightly less hot, because we are then slightly farther away from the Sun (then only getting around 6% less incoming radiation and heat from the Sun.) The difference between summer and winter is therefore actually greater in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern!

There are some very SLOW effects that occur. All amateur astronomers are annoyed by an effect called Precession, because star maps are never exactly correct! It occurs because the Earth's spin axis is very slowly "wobbling" with a period of (currently) around 25,800 years. A direct result of that is that around 13,000 years ago, the Earth's axis was tilted the opposite way, which caused the Summer in the Northern Hemisphere to occur when we were CLOSEST to the Sun and Winter to occur when we were FARTHEST. That meant that around 13,000 years ago, (Northern) summers were hotter and winters were colder. If you happen to know that the most recent Ice Age ended around 10,700 years ago, this can start to seem to have some importance!

A second slow effect has even greater effects. We know (due to an analytical process called Fourier Analysis) that the Earth's orbital ellipticity (called eccentricity) also changes very, very slowly. We are actually headed for a time (around 24,000 years from now) when the orbit will be nearly circular (less than 1% eccentricity). But there are times when it can be as great as roughly 7% eccentricity.

Since the intensity of the Sun's radiation goes as the inverse square of the distance, that results in around a 15% difference in received energy between perihelion (nearest the Sun) and aphelion (farthest from the Sun). That is a rather large difference. When it is combined with the seasonal effect of the tilt of the axis, there CAN BE times when the two effects compound each other, where winters are extremely cold (in one or the other Hemisphere). The fact that snow is white compounds this even more, as a Polar region covered with white snow / ice cap reflects far more sunlight away and can cause it to get even colder yet. We are currently seeing the opposite effect. In August 2007, a group of noted researchers announced that the ENTIRE North Polar Cap will have melted by the summer of 2013. At that point, the darker colors of the land and ocean surface will start absorbing much more solar energy rather than reflecting it back out into space, and the polar area will heat up even more and even faster. It has already been noticed that the North Polar region is heating up several times faster than any other part of the Earth. The white color of snow is an interesting partial cause of that!

So, yes, there ARE natural effects that cause the Earth to warm or cool. There are also situations where the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere naturally increases and decreases, generally in response to the amount of plant life then living. But no such effects have ever had the extremely fast effects that we are seeing during the past 50 years.

I wish I had some wonderful idea to try to recommend some solution to this. But given that all the causes have already happened, it is hard to see how it might now be possible to change the past. If it were legal to buy land in Antarctica, it seems like about the only useful idea that would be available. Doing things like Conserving is certainly admirable, but a single jet airliner flight counteracts the good effect of hundreds of thousands of people who scrimp to conserve. ALL the possible solutions will be necessarily extremely painful in every possible way, and beginning in about 20 or 30 years, much of the world's population will be faced with all terrible choices on many matters.

After discovering these various things in careful scientific research, I did NOT want to accept them! I spent months in trying to find ANY flaws in any of the logic, the reasoning or the calculations. Sadly, I found none that were significant, and these concepts seem all frighteningly true.

Say that we do NOT find some solution to this situation, and mankind actually winds up living on a planet with such high temperatures. Man IS creative, and it seems certain that Antarctica would become a very popular place! There may even be crops that may grow there, so a limited number of humans might be able to endure. I must admit though that I am note sure I see WHY they would! They would be looking at a situation where for thousands of generations, nearly the entire world would be uninhabitable. Exactly what would they aspire to? I guess survival itself is a wonderful goal.

But it seems certain that all future people would have immense anger and hatred for the people who lived in the period between about 1950 and 2020 as having been so selfish and short-sighted to have so completely decimated the planet, its animals and its plants. They will certainly have access to historical records that will show us using a 5,000 pound SUV to do the simplest of errands and to use 750,000 pound airliners to carry 500 people who were in a hurry to get somewhere. I suspect they (if any survive) will not have much good to say about us.

Thoughts toward any Possible Solution

A related web-page discusses potential ideas regarding removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. IF we could remove truly massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, MAYBE we might have a slim chance of survival. There are certainly people who enthusiastically claim that they will find such solutions. That would certainly be wonderful!

If the problem only involved 100,000,000 pounds of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere, and then stashed somewhere, such as the "sequestration" concept that is being given massive media attention and massive financing, yes, it might be possible. That would be 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide, around 5,000 full tanker truckloads or so. And that volume of CO2 would be small enough to actually try to put into some cave or something.

However, each year, we are ADDING 60,000,000,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere! JUST to try to remove the carbon dioxide that we ADD in a given year would involve removing those 30,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide. For starters, that is 1,500,000,000 full tanker truckloads! Which is around FOUR MILLION FULL TRUCKLOADS EVERY DAY! Are you starting to see why the ideas regarding trying to remove and then sequestering all that gas in the ground is so small-scale as to be ludicrous? I am not sure how many tanker trucks exist in the United States. Maybe 800,000 might be realistic. That would mean that every single one of them would have to transport 2,000 truckloads each year, or more than five full truckloads every single day. Constant work! Where would the diesel fuel come from for all those trucks? Those people who are aggressively promoting sequestering the carbon dioxide in the ground, have certainly never bothered to calculate how much space even one year's supply of 30,000,000,000 tons would require! It is a pretty simple calculation, but I guess if they had done it, no one would then give them billions of dollars to work on it! But roughly a sphere around 55 miles in diameter would just about hold one year's worth! That is roughly 120,000 cubic miles! If you add up all the known caves in the world, there are only a FEW cubic miles of volume in them! And nearly all of them would "leak" because of faults in the rock layers or cracks etc. What a silly idea!

Possible Ways to Reduce Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere








Footnotes

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Equilibrium temperature calculations

The energy coming IN from the Sun is measured to be at 1,353 watts per square meter or 429.7 Btu per square foot per hour (at the TOP of the atmosphere) which is called the Solar Constant. That quantity is only true BEFORE the radiation encounters either the Earth's atmosphere or its body. In technical circles, it is called the "Air Mass Zero" Solar Constant or Insolation, meaning that it had NOT yet passed through any atmosphere.note 22

The average radius of the Earth is 6.367 * 106 meters. This means that the total area presented to the Sun is π * r2 of that or 1.2737 * 1014 meters2. If we multiply the Solar Constant (1353) by this area, we get a total amount of Insolation, or total energy coming in from the Sun, of 1.7233 * 1017 watts. (This is the Air Mass Zero value, above our atmosphere).

Some of this incoming energy is reflected away by clouds, the atmosphere and the earth itself. That fraction is called the Albedo (reflectance), and it is measured to be about 0.34, meaning that 34% of the Sun's energy aimed at the Earth gets immediately reflected back out into space without ever doing anything to the Earth or the atmosphere. The remainder, which does not get reflected away, gets absorbed by the earth and atmosphere. This amount is therefore (1 - 0.34) * 1353 or 893.0 w/m2 or 283.6 Btu/f2/hr. This is the AVERAGE figure for the entire Earth, meaning it includes those parts of the earth which are fully cloud-covered and those parts where the Sun is very low in the sky where most of the incoming energy is reflected. When the Sun is overhead on a cloudless day, around 340 Btu/f2/hr are measured locally.

The value we have just gotten is based on the Projected Area of the Earth toward the Sun. It is NOT the "average" energy rate for any actual area on Earth. It turns out that geometrically, a sphere has a total surface area equal to exactly four times the projected area. Therefore, the energy flux (flow rate) we just obtained would need to be divided by four to get an AVERAGE energy flow rate for any location on Earth. This can be understood easily by realizing that every point on the SURFACE of the Earth is facing AWAY from the Sun exactly half the time, and is also facing somewhat away from the sun for most other hours of each day. There would actually only be one instant, at noon, for some locations, where the Sun was exactly overhead where the instantaneous Insolation was the actual energy flow coming in. (You might see Insolation values given as around 223 w/m2 or 71 Btu/f2/hr. Those numbers in other references are AVERAGE values over the entire SURFACE AREA of the Earth. Our discussion will stay with the Solar Constant times the projected area. Those other references use a value of 1/4 the Solar Constant times the four times the ACTUAL SURFACE AREA, which therefore is discussing the same TOTAL energy flow.

Multiplying the total area of sunlight intercepted by the fraction of the Solar Constant which actually gets to the be absorbed by the Earth and atmosphere gives 1.1374 * 1017 watts of total energy coming IN to the Earth from the Sun. This is the ACTUAL AVAILABLE TOTAL INCOMING ENERGY.

Before the Earth had an atmosphere at all, this number was slightly higher, because there was no atmosphere to reflect some of that incoming energy back to space, so Earth's Albedo was probably slightly less then. We are considering here of the Earth having an initial atmosphere, but with NO carbon dioxide in it. So the Albedo would have been very close to the Albedo of today, of the combined Earth and atmosphere. Therefore, we can use the 1.1374 * 1017 watts figure as the actual total energy coming in.

For equilibrium, where the average temperature of the Earth neither rose nor fell, this incoming energy had to equal the amount of energy the Earth radiated to space. (The Earth cannot lose energy by either conduction or convection.) The Stefan-Boltzmann Equation gives the amount of this radiation (called Black Body radiation) that an object will radiate away, and it only depends on the surface area and the temperature of that surface. The equation is:

Q(rate) = A * s * T4

where Q(rate) is the total rate of energy flow outward, s is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant of 5.67 * 10-8 w/m2/K4 and T is the surface temperature in (absolute) degrees Kelvin. Since we know what Q(rate) has to be, and we know the total surface area of the Earth, we can calculate T from this equation. So we have:

1.1374 * 1017 = 5.0948 * 1014 * 5.67 * 10-8 * T4

(for clarification, the TOTAL SURFACE AREA of a sphere happens to be exactly four times the area presented to the Sun, which results in this area based on the area calculated above.)

This gives:

3.937 * 109 = T4

250.5ºK = T

This is the same as -22.7ºC or -8.8ºF.

This is therefore the average Earth temperature that is the Equilibrium temperature for the Earth at our distance from the Sun, -8.8ºF.

Other references used a slightly lower Albedo for the young Earth of around 0.31. That then calculates to an Equilibrium temperature of 253.3ºK or -19.9ºC or -3.7ºF. We will use the -9ºF in our calculations rather than the -4ºF used in some other similar calculations. The difference does not materially affect our results, except in a very minor way. (The exact value of the albedo depends on how many white reflective clouds happen to exist at that moment, so a really stormy day can cause more reflectivity and a slightly higher albedo for a few hours.)

If you carefully examine the Insolation graph again note 22, you will see several additional curves in addition to the theoretical Black Body curve and the Air Mass Zero curve which applies out in space. They are lower curves due to the atmosphere absorbing some of the energy on its way in to the Earth. The graph refers to them as Air Mass One, where they account for the reflectivity of each type of molecule at each wavelength. One of those lines also accounts for the selective molecular absorptivity of different molecules at different wavelengths.








.

Graph of Carbon Dioxide Concentration 1000ad - present








.

Graph of Earth Average Temperature 1880ad - present








. The Earth has an interior heat source, due to radioactive decay of Uranium and other nuclear atoms in the Core. This results in an OUTWARD conduction of heat through the Earth's Crust. This conduction has been measured and is accurately known to be 0.02 Btu/hr/sq.ft, around 0.0046% of the Solar Constant energy coming in from the Sun. The result of this is that the Earth gets warmer as you go deeper into it.

The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics indicates that the average thermal conductivity of the Earth's Crust is 0.97 Btu/hr/ft2/ºF/foot thickness. Nearly all types of rock have a thermal conductivity that is very similar to that value. We know that the Earth gets warmer as we get deeper, due to that internal radioactive heat source in the Core, at a rate that varies with location but is commonly about 1ºF for each 100 feet in depth.

We will use conventional thermal heat conductivity formulas here:

Q = A * DF * (conductivity/thickness)

and assume that we are considering a one-foot-square column of Crust.

(I apologize to purists for using the American system here instead of staying with metric, but these numbers are more familiar for most likely readers.)

We now need to have the amount of heat transferred to the ground from the air. Standard thermodynamic equations apply. There are two possible situations, natural convection and forced convection.

For natural convection, the equation for a flat surface being cooled from below and pointing up is:

where the Grashof number, the specific heat of the air, the viscosity of the air, and the thermal conductivity of the air are used in the usual ways.

For air, at moderate temperatures, standard atmospheric pressure, with standard gravity, at sea level, this simplifies a lot to:

where the Dt is simply the temperature difference between the air and the ground, in other words, starting at the differential that the Equilibrium temperature must cause.

Our current 83ºF equilibrium temperature is 25ºF above the actual earth average temperature of 58ºF, so Dt is 25 here. L is one. So we get a value for hm of 0.27. The heat transfer from the air to the ground is therefore 0.27 * 25 or 6.7 Btu/hr/ft2.

The surface of the ground then quickly heats up, because the poor conduction through the rock below limits the total heat flow. Other, more complex, standard thermodynamic equations establish the total result of these separate effects. The net result is an initial heat transfer of around 1.98 Btu/hr/ft2. This is the rate at the START of the heating process, and it gradually will reduce over the years to essentially zero when the soil has heated up to very close to the equilibrium temperature that the air is trying to be at.

For a forced convection situation, where wind is blowing the air across the land, hm is much higher, around 7.5 for wind that is moving at 5 mph. This situation of moving air causes the transfer of the heat to the ground to be far faster, as much as 187 Btu/hr/ft2. However the ground and rock are again not able to conduct very much heat away very quickly, because of the poor thermal conductivity of rock, so this very high value never actually applies in real life. So, even with wind so that there is forced convection, we are basically limited to that 1.98 Btu/hr/ft2 energy flow rate

We know that because of the increase in temperature with depth, the rock is already at the target 83ºF at a depth of about 2900 feet. This is because there is little heating in about the first 400 feet and then we have that rise of 1ºF for each 100 feet additional depth, so we have 400 + 100 * 25 or 2900 feet.

Therefore no heat is needed for any rock below that level in getting up to the equilibrium temperature. This means that our one-square-foot column of rock contains a total of 2900 cubic feet of rock that must be heated up. Since the density of most types of rock is close to 150 pounds per cubic foot, this means we have a total of 435,000 pounds of rock to warm up. That rock currently is at a range of temperatures from the surface 58ºF to the 2900 foot depth of 83ºF. Commonly, there is not much rise in temperature for the first four hundred feet depth or so, so this process will have to heat that rock up the entire 25ºF. The AVERAGE current temperature of the rock between 400 and 2900 feet deep is therefore halfway between these two limits, or 70.5ºF. We have now simplified this calculation into the heat needed to heat 375,000 pounds of rock by 12.5ºF plus 60,000 pounds of rock by 25ºF. Therefore, we need to supply a total of about 6,200,000 pound-degrees of heating. That rock has a thermal capacity of around 0.2, meaning it takes 0.2 Btu of heat to raise one pound of the material by 1ºF. Therefore, we finally know how much heat is needed to heat the necessary rock, 1,240,000 Btus.

There are amounts of water and other materials, especially in the topmost hundred feet, but they have minimal effect in slightly increasing this value

We determined above that we would have about 1.98 Btu/hour entering the surface of our one-foot-square column of Crust and rock. Again, this rate will gradually and uniformly reduce throughout the period of the heating, to zero, and so we can use half that 1.98 value or 0.99 Btu/hr for further calculation. We now know how much heat has to be added to the rock and the average rate it will be added. We can simply divide to determine the expected time required for this to occur. 1,240,000/0.99 gives 1,250,000 hours, which sounds like a really long time. But that is 52,200 days or 142.9 years.

This is the BEST or LONGEST time delay! If the forced convection situation of moving air applies very regularly, this period could be shorter.








.

Graph of Carbon Dioxide Concentration 1000ad - present with the Temperature Data from the other Graph superimposed IN RED but shifted 140 years to the left.








.

Polar Ice Melting

Several recent 2005 and 2006 PBS programs have described how the ice cap on Greenland is ALREADY melting back (and falling into the ocean) at 150 FEET EVERY DAY! Each year, TEN MILES of ice near the edges of Greenland is melting and flowing off to fall into the oceans and is gone! This is a LOT of ice! In a hundred years, that is a THOUSAND MILES of Greenland that will be without ice, most of the entire ice cap that is on Greenland. (And this is at CURRENT melting rates, which must certainly accelerate!) In other words, by the end of THIS century, Greenland seems unlikely to have ANY major permanent ice on it! The February 2007 Global Warming Conference announced that when Greenland's ice has all melted, that volume of ice will raise the level of the world's oceans by around 23 feet. (This fact is easily confirmed with simple calculations and the area of Greenland and thickness of the ice on top of Greenland.) Note the combined effect of these two KNOWN facts: That all of Greenland's glacial ice will have melted by the end of this Century, and that much ise WILL raise ocean levels by around 23 feet. How can spokespeople be trying to claim that ocean levels will rise at the rate of one millimeter per year or four inches in this Century?

However, Antarctica represents a far bigger disaster in the works. Antarctica is around 5,400,000 square miles (14,245,000 km2) in area. Sonar soundings indicate that the ice on Antarctica averages around 1.5 miles (2000 meters) thick. That means there is around 8,100,000 cubic miles (28,500,000 km3) of ice sitting on Antarctica. (nearly all of it currently above sea level). Actually, there may be more than that! It is known that the weight of all that ice has depressed the Crust of the Earth there by around 560 meters (1900 feet) and so as the ice melts and the weight is removed, the Crust will rise back up. That may then add additional ice to the problem, ice which is currently below sea level but then would be above! So the total of volume of ice which might be added to the ocean volume might be around 36,500,000 km3 instead.

That is 28.5 million (or 36.5) cubic kilometers of ice that would melt to become virtually the same quantity of water that would get added to the oceans. Any good resource can confirm that there are around 361.3 million square kilometers of ocean surface. Simple division says that if all that ice on Antarctica melted, the sea levels would all rise by 28.5/361.3 kilometer or 78.9 meters or around 260 feet! (or more, 36.5/361.3 kilometer or 101 meters or around 330 feet!) How hard is that to calculate? In any case, a ten-foot rise which would destroy many huge world cities would hardly be a start at Antarctica melting!

AFP image, published Sep 21, 2006 The PBS programs also note that roughly 1/3 of the North Polar Cap is already GONE, melted! (2006)

In early 2008, a group of highly respected Arctic researchers announced that by September 2013 (in just FIVE YEARS), the ENTIRE Arctic Polar Cap will have melted and the entire Arctic Ocean will be navigable!









.

Ancient Evidence of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere

It turns out that when snowflakes fell long ago and then became compressed into ice, tiny bubbles of the air (between the snowflakes) of that time got trapped in the ice. Many Research projects have been done (mostly in Antarctica and in Greenland) regarding examining (drilled) ice cores from as much as ten thousand feet deep of ice. This (Vostok) research has provided ACTUAL AIR from the past 419,000 years! This ice-core data therefore extends the Scripps graph back a long way. Think of stretching THIS graph (below) out 400 times wider to get the time scales to match up, and then pasting THIS (stretched) graph onto the left side of the Scripps graph. We then have a VERY long and very flat graph line, extending past several of your neighbors' houses to the left, with the line never varying much from what we see in those 800 years. In fact, that data shows that there was NEVER any time when the concentration even got up to 300 ppm (or below about 182 ppm) during the past 419,000 years, Here is the published Vostok data (in Nature, June 3, 1999) from the highly respected Vostok ice core research:

In other words, there is NO DATA in Earth's history which might help us know what might happen if and when the concentration would ever rise above 300 ppm! Now look at the most recent decades in the Scripps graph again, and the red blotch!

We note one additional important fact from this pair of graphs from the highly respected Vostok research. The temperature graph follows the carbon dioxide graph moderately well as to shape, but note that where there was a change of around 100 ppm, either up or down, in the upper graph, there was around a corresponding 10ºC (or 18ºF) change in the Earth's average temperature. This is important in this presentation because we have recently (1850 - 2008) caused an increase of OVER 100 ppm (so far) in CO2 concentration (from around 280 to 390 ppm). The Vostok data from these graphs seems to indicate that we should therefore EXPECT at least a 10ºC or 18ºF rise in average world temperature, which is in fairly good agreement with the 25ºF rise which was calculated in this presentation's logic. There are people constantly getting themselves on TV who keep announcing that there MIGHT be a ONE DEGREE RISE in the next century or two! Such people should look at data such as these graphs, to see that we HAVE ALREADY certainly caused a worldwide temperature increase of at least 10ºC or 18ºF. You may have also noticed in the news that Russia, China, India, Canada the US and many other countries are working as fast as they can to find and dig up all the fossil fuels they can! They seem to only now REALLY be getting going at using up fossil fuels, just in these past few years. Their efforts will make that Scripps graph curve even farther upward, if that is even possible!

As humans discovered the Industrial Revolution, where initially coal was burned to power many factories, when THAT fossil fuel was burned (oxidized), the carbon which had been trapped in the coal then combined with oxygen from the air to create carbon dioxide. note 13 These footnotes give the actual (basic) Bio-Chemistry which shows that for each pound of coal burned, about three pounds of carbon dioxide is formed.note 13 This is similarly true of all other fossil fuels: petroleumnote 14, gasoline, home heating oilnote 14, natural gasnote 15, etc.








. Interestingly, the government graph of carbon dioxide concentration (or actually the measured data on which it is based) can actually tell us FOR EACH YEAR or DECADE, just how much carbon dioxide was ACTUALLY added to the atmosphere by all human activity! We will examine the (annual averaged) measured South Pole data from US government documents. Specifically, we are interested in the DIFFERENCE which has occurred after each year, which we can present in the following table. Please note that these values do NOT have any direct connection with what caused them; they are simply the ACTUAL MEASURED INCREASES in the Earth's atmosphere.

Year South Pole
Concentration
CO2 (ppm)		 Increase
(ppm)		 Atmosphere Increase
Billions Metric Tons
Carbon Dioxide		 Total Mass of Carbon Dioxide
in the Earth's Atmosphere
Billions Metric Tons
1800(est) 280--2200
1900(est) 296--2324
.
1958314.78--2472
1959315.640.866.702479
1960316.450.816.312485
1961317.080.634.912490
1962317.620.544.212494
1963318.350.735.692500
1964318.680.332.572503
1965319.420.745.772509
1966320.721.3010.132519
1967321.320.604.682524
1968321.910.594.602529
1969323.121.219.432538
1970324.321.209.352547
1971325.120.806.232553
1972326.000.886.862560
1973327.621.6212.622573
1974328.490.876.782580
1975329.501.017.872588
1976330.601.108.572597
1977332.031.4311.142608
1978333.691.6612.942621
1979335.031.3410.442631
1980336.981.9515.202646
1981338.261.289.972656
1982339.391.138.812665
1983341.171.7813.872679
1984342.581.4110.992690
1985343.821.249.662700
1986345.321.5011.692712
1987346.991.6713.012725
1988348.951.9615.272740
1989350.441.4911.612752
1990351.771.3310.362762
1991353.121.3510.522773
1992354.241.128.732782
1993355.160.927.172789
1994356.481.3210.292799
1995358.351.8714.572815
1996359.991.6412.782828
1997361.201.219.432837
1998363.702.5019.482856
1999365.651.9515.202871
2000367.051.4010.912882
2001368.341.2910.052892
2002370.662.3218.082910
2003372.802.1416.682927
2004374.611.8114.102941
20053772965
2006381.742988
20073833012
20083853028
20093863035

The second column gives the (average of the) ACTUAL MEASURED CO2 concentrations at the South Pole since regular measurements have been recorded since 1958. The third column gives the DIFFERENCE of the year value with the previous year, that is, the INCREASE in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

The fourth column is the ACTUAL AMOUNT OF INCREASE of carbon dioxide in the Earth's, in billions of Metric Tons, during that year. The numbers in this column are based on the following:

The total mass of the Earth's atmosphere is 5.136 * 1015 Metric Tons. This number is extremely well confirmed, and YOU can even confirm it! The "atmospheric pressure" (14.7 pounds per square inch in the English system) is actually simply the total weight of all the air stacked above that square inch, all the way to the top of the atmosphere. So simply multiplying that number by the total area of the Earth's surface (in square inches!), the product is the total mass (weight) of the entire Earth's atmosphere.

The concentrations of carbon dioxide are specified in PARTS PER MILLION, so we need to take this into account. There is one further complication. The concentrations are measured in VOLUME and not WEIGHT or MASS. (ppmv and not ppmm). Therefore, we need to also take into account that carbon dioxide has a higher density than normal air, by the factor of the molecular weight ratio. Carbon dioxide has an atomic weight of 44. The mixture of nitrogen and oxygen which makes up nearly all of oour atmosphere has an atomic weight of around 28.8. This makes the density of carbon dioxide 1.529 that of air. Therefore, we applied these two factors to the differential value in column three to calculate the actual number of tons of carbon dioxide which was added to the atmosphere during that previous year, in column four.

The value in column five is the cumulative total of the increases, which is therefore the ACTUAL running total number of billions of tons of carbon dioxide in the entire atmosphere of the Earth. It is also exactly proportional to the column two value of ppmv.

We will shortly discuss the situation where we will continue with similar usage as today for the next 100 years. Realistically, this is extremely conservative, because it does not consider the additional burning of fossil fuels in China or India or many other countries.

Year Concentration
CO2 (ppm)		 Increase
(ppm)		 Atmosphere Increase
Billions Metric Tons
Carbon Dioxide		 Total Mass of Carbon Dioxide
in the Earth's Atmosphere
Billions Metric Tons
each
inter-
vening
year		 . 2.015.70
2108(est) 5862.015.704605








.

Nomenclature

Whether it is intentional deception or accidental choice, the US government decided some years back to describe these amounts in an odd way. Instead of simply describing the ACTUAL number of tons of carbon dioxide, government reports now describe a number which is MMTCe, for Millions of Metric Tons of Carbon equivalent. That number does NOT describe the actual amount of carbon dioxide sent into the atmosphere, but rather ONLY the amount of actual carbon in it! Since the 44 atomic weight of carbon doixode is made of 12 for the carbon and 32 for the two oxygens, the value they display must therefore be multiplied by 44/12 or 3.667 to give the ACTUAL amounts of carbon dioxide emitted.

So, for example, in 1998, official reports describe that the US sent 1,494.0 MMTCe of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We therefore need to multiply this value by 3.667 to get 5.498 billion tons of actual carbon dioxide that the US emitted that year. Since official documents indicate that was 24.3% of the world total, we can then see that the entire world emitted 22.63 billion tons of carbon dioxide that year.

You might have noted that there was only a 19.48 billion tons increase in the atmosphere that year. Where did the other three billion tons go to? It turns out that carbon dioxide is extremely soluble in water, and that year, it was absorbed into the oceans. This brings up another important matter, the fact that the solubility of carbon dioxide in water is EXTREMELY dependent on the temperature of the water, with the greatest solubility being in very cold water. When the temperature of the water changes by just a single degree (C), the solubility can change by around 5%. This means that even rather small changes in ocean temperatures can cause enormous amounts of extra carbon dioxide to be absorbed in the oceans or released from the oceans! Things like El nino and La nina change the temperature of large areas of ocean, which seems certain to have huge secondary effects on the carbon dioxide balance. I have never seen any researchers yet address this issue.

So there is yet another dreadful consequence of the Earth rising even one degree C in temperature, that massive ADDITIONAL carbon dioxide will then be released from the ocean waters, compounding the entire problem even more!








.

Carbon Footprint

There are an assortment of different things that can be meant by this popular phrase. Unless you know the rules used in generating a specific number, the number might not have much meaning!

Published records showed that the US emitted a total of 5.498 billion tons of actual carbon dioxide in 1998. (of a world total of 18.96 billion tons.) There were then around 300 million of us in the United States, so we might fairly say that we each, man, woman and child, caused the emission of around 18.33 tons of carbon dioxide, (5498/300) so one might say that each American (including little babies!) had a Carbon Footprint of over 18 tons (of carbon dioxide) in 1998. However, the US changed policy some years back and decided to ONLY count the carbon atoms in that carbon dioxide, which makes for a somewhat smaller number! Atomic Carbon is actually about 27% of carbon dioxide by weight. By only counting the carbon atoms, they can therefore also correctly say that each American was responsible for about 5 tons of actual carbon atoms that were sent into the atmosphere (but ALL of them were as carbon dioxide atoms, and not one was ever a loose carbon atom! So the reason for the change of description appears to have been entirely political, just to make it APPEAR that the US was not sending such extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere! In any case, there are some people who use this peculiar method of description to say that we Americans are each responsible for a Carbon Footprint of around 5 tons each year. There are also people who see that 82% of that carbon dioxide production is directly due to the combined usage of motor vehicles and the creation of electricity, and those people ignore our heating our homes and only say that we each are responsible for about 15 tons of carbon dioxide or 4 tons of carbon equivalent. You can see that there is quite a range of numbers which can correctly be applied here. Also, I am not so sure that tiny babies should be blamed for this, and it might be more correct to describe a HOUSEHOLD FOOTPRINT for the 80 million families (of usually two parents and about two children) in the US. In that case, the appropriate number for a HOUSEHOLD CARBON FOOTPRINT might be described as being either around 70 tons of carbon dioxide or 20 tons of carbon equivalent.

Given that WE are the ultimate beneficiaries of all the electricity generated in the US and of all the vehicle traffic, but that we also primarily heat our homes and buildings with the rest, a case can be made that charitability of reducing the numbers might be inappropriate!

For this presentation, we use a very conservative 45 tons of carbon dioxide or 12 tons of carbon equivalent per family.

The 12 ton number essentially ignores the actual carbon dioxide and instead talk about the (somewhat hypothetical) MMTCe number. That number does not even refer to any real chemical, but instead tries to use the quantity of Elemental carbon that is present. We feel that saying that each American family is responsible for a 45 ton Footprint of carbon dioxide is most correct and descriptive.

We mention that, in 1998, official reports describe that the US sent 1,494.0 MMTCe of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This would be 1,494 million metric tons which we might try to allocate among the 300 million of us that then were Americans. Dividing, we then confirm that each American had a Carbon (equivalent) Footprint of 1,494/300 or about 5 tons of carbon. However, the reality is no different! A family with two children would still be blamed for 4 * 5 or 20 tons of elemental carbon, or the equivalent of 20 * (44/12) 73 actual tons of carbon dioxide, each year. We have used very conservative figures in the 45 actual tons that we discuss here.

These comments are meant to confirm that the figures for numbers of tons added to the atmosphere in the table above are accurate, as they agree with other ways used to describe our CO2 emissions.








.

Venus and Carbon Dioxide

Astronomers had long seen the very reflective white color of the planet Venus, which has a very high visual albedo of 0.76. If 76% of the solar heat was immediately reflected away off to deep space, that only leaves 24% of that (heat) energy to be able to get down through the atmosphere down to Venus to cause the surface of the planet to heat up. They had used the reliable Stefan-Boltzmann relationship to calculate what the surface temperature of Venus should be. That showed that if ALL the sunlight was captured (no reflection / albedo), the surface of Venus COULD be as hot as 332ºK or 59ºC or around 140ºF.

However, the highly reflective white color caused 76% of that incoming (visible) radiation to immediately be reflected away, and the calculations then indicated that the temperat