How much CO2 do we humans add to the atmosphere? A lot less than Al Gore would have you believe.From WND:
"Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038 percent)," said meteorologist Joseph D'Alea, the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chief of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecast.
"Only 2.75 percent of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. The amount we emit is said to be up from 1 percent a decade ago. Despite the increase in emissions, the rate of change of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa remains the same as the long term average (plus 0.45 percent per year)," he said. "We are responsible for just 0.001 percent of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor."
Former Harvard physicist Lubos Motl added that those promoting the fear of man-made climate changes are "playing the children's game to scare each other."
"By the end of the (CO2) doubling, i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 – assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time – Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only – a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to," Motl explained.
NPR and other news outlets have stories on global warming every day, when any effects have been minimal at best. The human impact on global warming seems to be almost infinitesimal when you look at the big picture. The Chicken Little cries of "the sky is falling" are laughable.
We do need new clean energy sources, though. Not so much to protect us from global warming, but because our fossil fuel resources are going to run out someday. We need energy, and finding new sources should be a top priority. Many of the ideas of the global warming fans are ideas I share....conservation, clean alternatives to oil/coal/gas....but we need these things more to protect our economy than our atmosphere, in my opinion. I could be wrong, and I wish the global warming fans would admit as much.
image courtesy npr's flickr site