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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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Comments 108951 to 109000:

  1. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    Phillipe Chantreau @9 Good Comment The problems with Svensmark's theory seem to be: 1. Particle growth. 2. Competition with other sources of CCN's that allow his Cosmogenic sourced CCN's to predominate and thus drive the impact. 3. Questions re the total impact of CCN's on the net positive or negative impact of the radiative forcing impacts of Cloud changes. 4. No evidence of long term trend in Cosmic ray fluxes to support long term trend in climate influences. So.... A minor contributing factor to residual climate variability.. Yeh, Maybe. A major driver of climate change. Show me the data. Otherwise he's dreaming. And his act of climbing into bed with the more radical climnate denialist cause has damaged his case. He may well have identified a modest contributor to residual climate variability. But by overselling his case and getting into bed with the whacko's, he has done himself a dis-service. Sad really.
  2. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    I'm not so sure about that, chris. "No sense of responsibility for the world around them" is hardly a rare failing. Ancient herders, modern farmers seem equally willing to wreck rivers and underground water storages, clear totally unsuitable land, discharge filth, fertiliser and garbage into any land or water they see as not immediately useful to themselves. The fact that it might kill the livelihoods of the oyster farmers a few kms downriver is ignored until a government or community or producer group gets together and tells them to cut it out. Surprise, surprise, it needs laws and inspectors to enforce those laws to get everyone into line. America, Russia and Australia managed to produce unprecedented dustbowls at almost the same time due to foolish land clearing and cultivation practices. Anyone with any respect for the land they were using would have done a whole heap better. I don't know what it's like around you, but Australian farmers still have an obsession with clearing land without much regard to objective best use of that land and its water and nutrient status. Irrigation and fertiliser should 'take care' of all that. Considering our record of idiotic overuse of our major food bowl river system, I'm half inclined to the view that a command and control system might have done better. Except when you look at how badly the USSR mucked up some even bigger water resources. Mis-management of natural resources is a pretty universal thing.
  3. A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    Dana Good Post Personal view is that Svensmark has at best possibly identified a small contributing factor to the residual climate varibility left after allowing for AGW, El Nino's etc. Useful line of marginal investigation (and he may be right at that level) but don't stop the presses. And this post supports that. However one area I would pick up on, just to be pedantic.... Links to Chernobyl. The theory of GCR influences is specific about the energies of the radiation involved, height in the atmpsphere etc. The suggestion that Chernobyl might be expected to provide supporting evidence is drawing a long bow.... The difference between Alpha, Beta & Gamma radiation etc, and the energies envolved. I personally wouldn't expect Chernobyl to provide any evidence pro or con.
  4. Urban Heat Islands: serious problem or holiday destination for skeptics?
    Thanks Ned, that's brilliant. Well here's the standard simple regression diagnostics Ned's forensic re-approximation of Ned's analysis. Just to show how trivial this stuff it (and show up BP as looking bad), here's the state of play: I did a little bit of very basic regression on Ned's data in R which you can see here. Take home message - the 95% confidence interval of the R squared is between 0.02 and 0.16, and the regression is significant before correcting for autocorrelation. In order to determine if temporal autocorrelation is likely to be a problem I ran a more advanced diagnostic which strongly suggests that it is (see link function statistic). Properly accounting for temporal autocorrelation would almost certainly bring the effective R2 value to somewhere even closer to zero (or possibly below) indicating that BP's model is not significant, but this is beyond my area of expertise - I'm a psychometrician, not a time series analyst, so I know a different subset of the black arts than the TSAs. And that's before we even start thinking about spatial autocorrelation, which if significant would lower the effective correlation coefficient and R2 even further. Over to you BP. Which part of your findings would you like to retract first?
  5. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    C02 is locked in plants, they die, get buried, get heated.....result = Coal...Oil...Gas. Burn these and allow 'C02' release to atmosphere. Plants lock up C02...Plants get 'eaten'....C02 is released.........What is the difference? Of course humans and all veggie eaters contribute to GHG's. The C02 would remain 'locked in' otherwise. Henry
  6. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    RSVP @ 2 Fair point - the more economically developed and prosperous the country, the better the state of its environment. Witness by contrast the environmental catastrophe still dogging vast tracts of the former Soviet bloc and its rustbelt industries where no one 'owned' anything and thus felt no sense of responsibility for the world around them.
  7. Urban Heat Islands: serious problem or holiday destination for skeptics?
    kdkd writes: Thanks for this. Any chance you can post the csv file of the raw data that you used up to a site like this one so that I can take the regression diagnostics a bit further. I'm still traveling but a friend of mine posted the file for you. Hopefully it worked OK -- let me know if it doesn't. csv file The columns X and Y are the x and y coordinates, respectively, of the points on BP's graph. Presumably the X coordinate is the base 2 log population density difference between 2000 and 1990, while the Y coordinate is the raw temperature trend in K/year, but I have not verified either of those calculations. Disclaimer: See all the various caveats in my comment above. This is not an actual replication of BP's analysis since I don't know what stations he used and don't have his actual data -- I basically just attempted to digitize the points off his graph. Note that he says he used 270 stations, but I was only able to get about three quarters of them off the graph (some may have been overlapping or otherwise lost in the noise of the jpeg-compressed image). kdkd continues: [...] uncorrected for autocorrelation [...] It's important not to lose sight of this. Without knowing anything about the spatial distribution of the stations that BP used, it's impossible to know how much of the already-low significance of the model is just due to autocorrelation.
  8. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    Why is it assumed that conservatives would not be concerned with the environment when they basically own it and have a lot more time to enjoy it?
  9. Breathing contributes to CO2 buildup
    Welcome Kate and I'm thrilled that you're contributing here! I wonder whether this piece could be improved with some more figures on the exact amount of CO2 that human respiration contributes. I get the idea that we're only exhaling the carbon that has first been photosynthesised out of the atmosphere, but from one point of view, the origin of the CO2 is irrelevant, what matters is the total amount. So I wonder whether this argument could be supplemented with a consideration of the total contribution of human respiration to CO2 emissions (for completeness, perhaps we would also need to consider human CH4 emissions...).
  10. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Thanks Adelady, yes there's a difference, various carbon sinks and their residence times are not very clear to me. (joke follows) CO2: 'double cheese-burger with no salad, in fact leave the bun and beef out too' for plants.
  11. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    "Almost" being the operative word. This is OT but there's a lot of work being done on the 'vegetation' that we're interested in, crops, and it's not looking very wonderful. As for general ecological vegetation there's a whole lot of discouraging material about interactions between animals, insects and vegetation being disrupted. (Think knocking off the dodo leading to the decline of the trees which had depended on seeds being distributed and fertilised in dodo droppings. Noone saw that coming.) And our knowledge of how much our crop and useful plants are dependent on other ecological interactions is very much in its infancy. The consequences of imbalances in distribution and concentration of plants which will thrive and those which will decline in an atmosphere with increased CO2 (and ozone, etc) are nearly unknown, and the knock-on effects ... ?
  12. Why I care about climate change
    John, This post is excellent. I had intended to say so when you posted it but somehow never got around to it. I've come back to it today and want to thank you for a very clear and cogent explanation. I share both of your motivations (though with your daughter being switched for my own! Not that I don't also in some way care about the fate of your daughter and the whole next fifty generations who will be affected by these matters, but that my daughter symbolises that for me in way that is very concrete and personal). Though like others, I also think that a concern for the truth isn't irrelevant. This isn't about someone being wrong on the internet, but about thousands, or even millions, of people, many of them having a lot of money and influence, passing on dangerously misleading half-truths (or outright deliberate fibs). The truth matters and ignorance is not bliss, especially when as a politician, journalist, CEO or billionaire, you decide to share it with an audience of millions. Keep up the good work brother!
  13. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Phillipe Chantreau #24 "Pulling out what has been stored in the crust for millions of years and injecting it in the cycle is different. That's a true net addition. " Which almost sounds like there should be more vegetation in the long run. As long as population increases, however this may not be true, but if stabilized or was to reduce, why not?
  14. The Big Picture (2010 version)
    Daniel Bailey #109 The normal dose of aspirin for a headache is usually one or two pills max. If that takes care of it, you are in luck, while for some, the headache remains...(sorry). The dose of course depends on your weight, but my point here is that there is a minimal dose that works, and taking more has no extra benefit. Such things do occur in nature, and I suspect that while CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas, the effect is relative to many factors and therefore its significance as well. For example, I can imagine a planet like the Earth (all things being exactly equal) with an atmosphere that has double or half the volume. I assume you would allow that those conditions, would influence the overall impact of a greenhouse gas. I am not espousing David Hume's philosophy (the king of skeptics), but I would recommend checking out what he had to say about causation, simply to temper anyone's sense of sureness in anything. Taking empiricism to the extreme, he would say that "effect" is only a human expectation projected onto "reality". All you can truely observe is a succession of ordered events. This to me sounds closer to "science" than I feel comfortable with, however, this thinking is logical, and supposedly truer to a "detatched" spirit.
  15. The Asymmetric War on Climate Change: No Cause for Alarmism?
    The assumption that the IPCC process is overly cautious is difficult to sustain given the multiplicity of reservations properly expressed in the primary scientific literature. Surely we shouldn't expect the IPCC to go down the alarmist path. I think examining four papers known to be consistently contrarian and finding that they are very likely to dismiss AGW is akin to taking a sampling of German newspapers between 1933 and 1945 and finding that they are twenty times more likely to carry anti-Semitic articles than their British equivalents in the same era. For my part, I'm more surprised by the relative lack of traction of contrarian arguments given the vast investment allegedly underpinning their emergence and propagation. For example, here in Australia we have the Treasury advice to the opposition (prepared in case they got into government) spelling out firmly the need to embrace a Carbon tax (contrary to their election platform). While the Treasury's arguments would have been essentially economic, such advice coming from an essentially conservative bunch of bureaucrats suggests a strong perception in favour of the AGW consensus.
  16. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    jyyh, I'm thinking that most of the comments are leading into material for an Intermediate level post. The obvious issue that using carbon cycle resources badly can cause damage is a step beyond the simple truth that the breathing of animals, including us, and plants photosynthesizing is a carbon neutral cycle. Once we move into deforestation or oxidising carbon by exposing and ploughing soils or burning dung instead of using it to replenish soil nutrients, we're beyond this central, simple, obvious point.
  17. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    John I'd be happy to. Given that my contribution would be limited to grammar only - or to Basic level essays for readability and comprehension issues. And I'd echo, shout or jump up and down to support the commendation of the Arctic Sea Ice blog. An absolute tour de force.
  18. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Could this carbon fuel issue be reformatted as "Using carbon cycle fuels produces ecological changes, using carbon sink fuels produces physico-chemical imbalance in nature, which produces ecological changes."?
  19. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    What are the chances that 2010 beats 2005 for the record? That should give some new life to warning people on global warming. People hang on records and big news items like a record year.
  20. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    "cruzn246, nobody claimed the Earth is in equilibrium. The sentences you quoted are expository. " Then naturally we should be heating or cooling. Right? Which one should we be doing now? "@cruzn246: I don't think you understand what equilibrium means in this context." Archie, explain it to me.
  21. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    cruzn246, nobody claimed the Earth is in equilibrium. The sentences you quoted are expository.
  22. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    @cruzn246: I don't think you understand what equilibrium means in this context.
  23. We're coming out of the Little Ice Age
    "A long-term increase in the Earth's average temperature is caused by a change in the planetary energy balance (incoming vs. outgoing energy), also known as a 'radiative forcing.' If the amounts of incoming and outgoing energy are equal, the planet is in equilibrium and its average temperature will not increase on average." I couldn't resist commenting on this. Are we in equilibrium? Is it possible to be in equilibrium? Think about it folks. Do we know exactly what output from the sun produces this state? I truly doubt we are ever in equilibrium. It's just such a hard thing to achieve in any system, much less an extremely complicated one like ours.
  24. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Thanks for noticing Daniel :-) Philippe @ 24: Actually, Greece was deforested long before the Common Era - they used heaps of timber for their triremes. Similarly, large swathes of Croatia were deforested by the Venetians who needed the wood to build the piles upon which much of their city rests today. In short, even biomass ain't carbon neutral especially if we use it at a rate greater than it can be replaced. Why else did we turn to coal (coal mining is a challenging and dangerous enterprise even today)?
  25. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    I think this is relevant. "Climate Scientists Defend IPCC Peer Review as Most Rigorous in History" by Stacy Feldman - Feb 26th, 2010 at Solve Climate.com * "Nicholls, a professor at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, said the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment report was subjected to several rigorous tiers of review. The study cites over 10,000 papers from the scientific literature, "most of which have already been through the peer-review process to get into the scientific literature." * "The report went through four separate reviews and received 90,000 comments from 2,500 reviewers, all of which are publicly available, along with the responses of the authors, Nicholls said." As J Bowers @14 comment implies, any political bias is more likely toward watering down the report to satisfy economic and political interests. You still hear skeptics asking why they changed the name to climate change, from global warming. Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was named as such, over 20 years ago.
  26. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Daniel Bailey (# 28), Let's disagree without being disagreeable. I certainly have no reason to cast aspersions on your character. Before TV degraded our debating skills, folks like Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde gained fame by creating pithy sayings like the one that started this argument. Mark Twain could be abrasive (to use scaddenp's term) as illustrated by the following: "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."
  27. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    archiesteel, (#30), All of these guys are smarter than I am so they have my respect even if I disagree with them.
  28. We're heading into an ice age
    The link for the Tamino post in the Further Reading section is broken. The correct link location is: http://web.archive.org/web/20080501114257/http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/10/13/solar-cycle-24/ The Yooper
  29. Philippe Chantreau at 14:07 PM on 27 September 2010
    Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Chriscanaris, I disagree. As long as humans were leaving alone the stores of fossil carbon, they were carbon neutral. No matter how the carbon cycle was affected by fire, domestic animals or anything else, the total store was still limited to the what was available from atmosphere and biomass. You can transfer some from here to there, change the relative importance of some reservoirs and sinks, create new sinks and means of emissions from reservoirs, but there is no net addition to the cycle. Pulling out what has been stored in the crust for millions of years and injecting it in the cycle is different. That's a true net addition.
  30. Hockey stick is broken
    scaddenp, (From "Lies, Damn Lies & the IPCC) My problem with MBH 08 & 09 plus the hundreds of subsequent papers and commentaries including those by my ex-colleagues such as Gabby Hegerl or distinguished statisticians such as Tamino is their ignorance of the historical record. The first test of any paleo-climate reconstruction should be whether it portrays past climate in a plausible way. Any set of proxies that disagrees with history should immediately be discarded. Specifically, I mean that at least the following warm periods should be seen: Minoan, Roman (2), Medieval and Modern. Cold periods should include: Dark Ages and Little Ice Age. For proxies that go back into pre-history, one would expect to see the Younger Dryas. While we don't have a true historic record of this there is a good archaeological record of the Clovis people. You should be honest enough to recognize that MBH et seq. fail this test in dismal fashion, yet there are some proxies that portray the historical and even pre-historical (Younger Dryas) temperatures quite well. You don't have to believe they are correct but at least admit that they pass the initial acid test of being consistent with history and archeology. The proxies I find credible are ice cores. As the historical record in the southern hemisphere is thin, one can only check a tiny part of the Antarctic ice core record against history. It is quite a different story in the northern hemisphere where we have the Greenland ice cores. Here is a "ftp" link to Richard Alley's (2000) ice core data for central Greenland: I downloaded this file and prepared a number of plots over different time periods. This is quite time consuming so you can get the same information from the following site and learn about the Eisenhower administration at the same time: http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553 Your comments will be appreciated as I plan to visit NOAA in Asheville, North Carolina in mid October to discuss this and related issues.
    Moderator Response: [RH] Embedded link.
  31. We're heading into an ice age
    I have been thinking about this topic for a bit and I am somewhat curious as to where the assertions that the "These two factors, orbit and tilt, are weak and are not acting within the same timescale – they are out of phase by about 10,000 years. This means that their combined effect would probably be too weak to trigger an ice age. You have to go back 430,000 years to find an interglacial with similar conditions, and this interglacial lasted about 30,000 years" comes from. From my understanding of Ruddimans work we were heading into an ice age until anthropogenic influences kicked in. Ruddiman in his real climate post seems to defend this assertion well... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/12/early-anthropocene-hyppothesis/
  32. Philippe Chantreau at 13:55 PM on 27 September 2010
    A detailed look at galactic cosmic rays
    Dana, thanks for mentioning in your review that the main problem about the GCR hypothesis is particle growth. That physical part of it has no solution to date. I do not believe that any significant effect on cloud nucleation exists from GCR at all. No correlation has been demonstrated to the necessary level of confidence.
  33. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    @gc: "Tamino is to CAGW folks as McIntyre is to skeptics." I don't think this is a fair analogy to make. I also don't understand why you mention BP in the same sentence as Tamino.
  34. A detailed look at Hansen's 1988 projections
    @angusmac: "Do you mean model sensitivity and radiative forcing are the erroneous components?" No, the climate sensitivity *and* the CO2 emmissions are the erroneous components in Scenario C. "Model sensitivity at 4.8 °C for 2xCO2 is the same for all scenarios. Therefore, I would be pleased if you would explain the other "erroneous" component in Scenario C that cancels out the error to give the correct real-world results." Sure, I'll repeat it once more, even though it's been explained many times in this thread. The other erroneous component in Scenario C is CO2 emmissions.
  35. Hockey stick is broken
    GC - you claim Tamino supports papers that deny the historical record. I assume this has something to do with MBH? Can you be more specific please? I assume you think MBH denies history. Do you also assume that all those other papers in Paleoclimate chapter of AR4 using different methods and proxies, published since M&M are also "denying the historical record"?
  36. Billions of Blow Dryers: Some Missing Heat Returns to Haunt Us
    Daniel: Yes, I know that the nature study is from 2008. The current study uses models and salinity as temp proxies. The Wegener study used thermomiters. I think the temp results need to be examined again in about 5 years to see if they are consistent.
  37. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    scaddenp (#26), Absolutely no question that Tamino and Berenyi Peter are way above my pay grade (even though I studied statistics under J.C.P. Miller). John Cook (#19) suggested the following thread for the discussion of MBH 08 & 09: http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm Hope to see you there shortly!
  38. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Re: gallopingcamel (27)
    "How dare you suggest that it is uncivil to mention a person's name when discussing technical issues?"
     OK, now you've completely lost me. My point solely was that to link a person's name with the quote represented by the title of this post was being uncivil. PERIOD. Hey, disagree all you want. We're disagreeing right now. You don't see me casting character aspersions on you just because you're reading more into my comment than what was actually in it. If you can't disagree and be civil at the same time, that's where I draw the line. Is that your position, GC, that you reserve the right to be uncivil when discussing technical issues? Than you don't have the good character I thought you had. And that's a sad thing. The Yooper
  39. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    Thanks adelady! Maybe you could proof my articles for me before I post them?!
  40. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Daniel Bailey (#23), When people publish papers they must expect criticism. How dare you suggest that it is uncivil to mention a person's name when discussing technical issues? Newton's "Laws of Motion" and Einstein's "General Relativity" were widely criticized in contrast with the non-scientific world where the name "Lord Vol**mort" must not be spoken.
  41. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Tamino is certainly abrasive but I value his expertise (especially when it crosses over into my time series problems). However, I wonder what "denying the historical record" papers you mean? Perhaps you could comment on an appropriate thread?
  42. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    GC - my apologies. I had misunderstood your reference (read everything but the article title) and was too quick on the trigger. I will try to take your advice :-) and lighten up.
  43. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    archiesteel (#21), Tamino is to CAGW folks as McIntyre is to skeptics. No doubt they are good at what they do but one needs to recognize that they both operate with blinkers on. My doubts about Tamino are based on his support for papers that deny the historical record. If "Climate Science" chooses to ignore history you can't expect anyone to take it seriously no matter how clever your statisticians may be. John Cook has already noted that these arguments belong on another thread so I will leave it at that.
  44. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    It's good to see that you're willing to call voluntary-head-in-the-sand for what it is. You cannot have a rational debate with those who use irrational logic. By taking them seriously, we inadvertently reinforce their validity (just as how Monckton's "expertise" is based on climate scientists willingness to hold public debates with him and as Jo Nova demonstrated in a post on the 23rd of Aug, “they have finally acknowledged that… they need to call us skeptics. (They can hardly pit expertise against “deniers” eh?)”) Scepticism is based on a compelling argument - to which some conclusion can eventually be reached. Denial merely rants the same nonsense regardless of how many times it is addressed.
  45. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    During the melt season, Neven's Arctic Sea Ice blog is unsurpassed. And no deniers, um, skeptics, er, irrational posters ..., OK, "non-positive" contributors in the bunch. The Yooper
  46. The Phony War: Lies, Damn Lies and the IPCC
    Re: gallopingcamel (20) Just because people have differing opinions doesn't mean that they cannot be civil while discussing those differences. My experience, on this blog and on the two you cite, is that discourse is pretty well-behaved until someone barges-in in full drive-by fashion, comments something to the effect of "You're all wrong and are idiots for even thinking you're right" and then the brouhaha begins. The mistake most run afoul of, that I see happen most often, is those commenters that mistake a science-based forum for a debate forum (minus the science to back it up). They typically don't have a good fundamental understanding of critical thinking and the scientific method, let alone are up to speed on the core studies in the field/thread in question. As archiesteel (21) points out well, my main objection to your post at (5) is your linkage of the quote directly to a specific person. The title of this post uses the quote you reference, yes, but doesn't name anyone in specific; that's the difference. Making it personal. We can have a science-based discourse, disagree in toto, and still keep it civil and not make it personal. But we have to choose to do it that way. The Yooper
  47. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Chris #21. The non carbon neutral effects of burning wood, dung, charcoal and other biomass are secondary. Mainly in deforestation. Using carbon cycle fuels rather than carbon sink fuels could have been managed, or managed better. If carbon cycle fuels had been treated as a crop - with replanting or coppicing or similar processes - we could have maintained some balance. Especially if we'd started out that way and developed and extended those practices with population increase. The underlying problem is that we've been wasteful, profligate even, with every kind of substance we could use as fuel. Even coppicing was used principally as a way of getting desired form for building materials rather than as a way of maintaining fuel stocks.
  48. 2010 Climate Change Resource Roundup
    Grammar nazi alert! It's rational the adjective, not rationale the noun.
  49. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Re: chriscanaris (21) Actually, I did notice. :) A worthy, thought-provoking read is Ruddiman's Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Ruddiman contends that human induced climate change began as a result of the advent of agriculture thousands of years ago and resulted in warmer temperatures that could have possibly averted another ice age. A nice graphic for visualization of the ensuing "Golden Age" is: We'll have to update this graphic around 2030 or 2040, when we hit that IPCC 2-3 degrees C with the legend "Agriculture ends" and an arrow pointing to the date. :( The Yooper
  50. Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere?
    Roger A. Wehage @ 13 Actually, we've been burning biomass for tens of thousands of years and fossil fuel for about 200. My point was that we've been a non carbon neutral species almost since our arrival on the planet. Indeed, as best as I can tell, we are the only non carbon neutral species. More to the point, much of what we build and consume (aside from food) is not carbon neutral and, failing a major technological revolution, never will be. Even producing the technology required for renewable energy is not a carbon neutral exercise. I was merely pointing out that it makes little difference whether cattle bred for meat and dairy or free ranging ruminants that do not form part of our food chain roam the world. I feel a certain wry amusement having been labelled a 'sceptic' that folk don't notice when I'm agreeing with an AGW proposition :-)

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