Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 04:32:07 -0000 From: Gary Fritz <fritzxxxnospamrii.com> Subject: Re: Octane ratings.....what's the truth?
Dave Hinz <DaveHinznospaml.com> wrote: > Great. So tell you what. How about YOU send me to a reputable site > with good, solid data, rather than abuse and alarmist handwaving. OK, here are several: Vostok ice cores show CO2 levels have jumped 20% within the last 100 years, to levels not seen in the last half-million years. http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/Closer_Look/index .html I don't think anyone has any rational explanation for the sudden and unprecedented (within the last 500k years) spike in CO2, unless it is caused by human activity. Given the amount of fossil fuels that humans burn, it would be hard to argue humans AREN'T causing the spike in CO2. Coal releases about 200lbs of CO2 per million BTUs when completely burned (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterly/co2_article/co2.html). If we assume the carbon in oil and natural gas burns in a similar way, and also produces about 200lbs per million BTUs, we can then use the current annual world fossil-fuel consumption of 200 * 10^15 BTUs (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/pdf/ieoreftab_2.pdf) to estimate a yearly dump of 4*10^13 pounds (20 BILLION TONS) of CO2 from oil, coal, and gas. If I'm figuring right, that works out to about 6667 pounds of CO2 per year -- weighing as much as a Hummer H2!! -- for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Of course, since North American accounts for about HALF of that consumption, that is about SIX Hummer's worth of CO2 per person in North America. This is far more than, for example, volcanic sources; man-made sources create 150x more CO2 than volcanic sources (http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man.html). And it only started happening about 100-120 years ago. So I think we have to assume humans have caused the spike in CO2 levels. So why worry about CO2 levels? In the ice-core record, temperatures are highly correlated to CO2 levels. No one knows for sure what's cause and what's effect, but in the past the two track pretty closely. In the last 100 years, temps have increased consistently with CO2 increases, and we established above that the CO2 increases are almost certainly man-made. This is not a proof, but does strongly indicate man- made CO2 increases are driving the temperature increases. One of the projected impacts of climate change is an increase in sea level. This chart shows the observed increase in sea level over the last 15 years. Not only are sea levels rising, but the rate of change is accelerating. http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming- basics/facts_and_figures/impacts/slr.cfm Another projected impact of global warming is increased number and severity of tropical storms. http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming- basics/facts_and_figures/impacts/storms.cfm I could keep going, but that's what I found in about 20 minutes of searching. This is all good, solid data. No abuse or alarmist handwaving. Satisfied? If you want to look at computer modeling -- which is of course based on theory rather than hard observational data -- here's a comparison of two models simulating global climate. One includes only *natural* drivers (sun, volcanic emissions, etc), while the other includes man-made drivers (human-produced greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols). Guess which one matches the observed temperatures. http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming- basics/facts_and_figures/temp_ghg_trends/motemp.cfm Now I've done your homework for you, or at least enough to demonstrate that there IS a lot of cold, hard data supporting the global-warming argument. I leave it to you to either bury your head in the sand and ignore all this data, or admit that there seems to be something going on here. Even if your 5th grade teacher was wrong.
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