Some global warming quetions....

Jerry Carlson asks some very interesting questions...

1. Why don't advocates of restricting and burying CO2 ever mention opportunities of longer growing seasons and higher CO2 availability for crops?

Agronomic research shows that doubling atmospheric CO2 levels to about 700 parts per million raises corn and soybean yields 20% to 40%. We see more opportunity in using CO2 for higher crop yields than in burying it under the sea floor. Greenhouses commonly enrich their atmospheres with carbon dioxide.

Historically, advances in civilizations have accompanied warmer, wetter epochs in climate cycles. Dr. Raymond H. Wheeler and hundreds of research assistants documented this with a lifetime of analysis beginning in the 1930s. If the climate follows Wheeler's cyclical pattern, we may well be entering a warmer, wetter epoch which will benefit agriculture.

Two decades ago I had many visits with physicist Iben Browning, a climate researcher and author of many works including Climate and the Affairs of Men, written with Nels Winkless III and published in 1975. Browning documented that past climate change has impacted humanity in massive ways, such as the barbarian invasion of China and the Phoenician presence in Stonehenge Britain.

He reminded readers in his 1975 book that the climate since 1925 had been unusually mild and beneficial; that a cooling could occur anytime.

And Browning told me that as he refined his computer models of climate change, "We get our best correlation with measured climate data when we ignore the presence of man and his use of carbon-emitting fuels."

2. Why is the IPCC's projected future global warming almost linear or accelerating, when it's well-known that the greenhouse-gas impact of CO2 fades sharply with each incremental increase of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Some background: The trendline level of CO2 in the air measured at Mona Loa, Hawaii, was 385 parts per million (ppm) in January 2008. When observations began at Mona Loa in 1958, the level was 315 parts per million.

Since 1990, annual increases of CO2 have ranged from 0.5 to 2.6 ppm. At a trendline rise of about 1.8 ppm per year, it will take 35 years to increase atmospheric CO2 to 450 ppm. CO2-control advocates claim this high a level has never occurred in 650,000 years, and would force devastating global warming.

However, the dominant "greenhouse effect" comes from water vapor in the atmosphere. CO2 causes only 3% of infrared heat blocking, and the physics of CO2 are such that the greenhouse effect of each added increment of CO2 shrinks on a logarithmic scale.

An analogy: If one layer of insulation in your ceiling traps half of the roof's energy loss, adding an identical second layer traps only half the loss escaping the first layer. Each added increment of CO2 in the atmosphere has a logarithmically diminishing greenhouse effect.

Although physicists proved this years ago, you won't see it in the dramatic graphs of Al Gore's slide show, An Inconvenient Truth. It projects a nearly parabolic soaring of global temperature from a linear rise in CO2.

Advocates of man-caused global warming defend their case by saying that although CO2 itself has only a 3% role, it amplifies warming by various feedback mechanisms.

"This is a hypothesis, not a proven fact," counters Dr. John Christy, Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Other scientists argue that current climate models underestimate the cooling influence of cloud cover.

Go to the link and check out his other questions...