My belief in Global Warming is getting shaky

[goku]

if you're really worried about global warming then plant kudzoo on the sides of all the buildings in the cities. plants naturally clean the air.

all the oil in the ground was once carbon in the air, no?

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by goku

if you're really worried about global warming then plant kudzoo on the sides of all the buildings in the cities. plants naturally clean the air.

And precisely how much kudzoo must be planted to keep up with rate of human contributions of CO₂ to the atmosphere? Let's see some numbers and some sources to validate your claims.

Your post blatently ignores the scope of the issue. Plants do have an impact on CO₂, but they cannot intake it at the rate we're adding it. Also, studies have shown that plants, due to stomal closure, actually absorb less CO₂ as atmospheric concentrations rise.

A further point which counters your suggestion is the fact that human poplulation growth is removing total mean surface area available for the plants... There's just not enough room to plant enough plants to fix the problems we're causing.


All of that aside, though... how about some numbers and some sources? I'd like to see if you have even the faintest ability to support your claim that "planting kudzoo on the sides of all the buildings in the cities" will be enough to mitigate the risk.

[freeztar]

If you're going to suggest using plants to clean up CO2, Goku, then why choose kudzu? You're from Georgia, right? Surely you've seen the wrath it has caused around here. It's not called the "plant that ate the South" for nothing!

But like IN stated, planting more terrestrial plants is not likely to help, given massive deforestation (particularly in the tropics) and conventional agricultural land use.

Algae, on the other hand, seems promising for lots of reasons.

[goku]

kudzu, just a thought.
my point is, real things that could be done that are not being done. the people that are screaming it the laudest don't even believe it, al gore.

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Essay

Did they really have climatologists back then?
...
Just what is it that you're cynical about? I'm cynical about government's ability to help fix the problem. Disaster Capitalism is too entrenched. It's up to people to save the Creation.

Yes of course they had climatologists.

Originally Posted by wiki

...Perhaps the earliest person to hypothesize the concept of climate change was the medieval Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031-1095 AD). Shen Kuo theorized that climates naturally shifted over an enormous span of time, after observing petrified bamboos found underground near Yanzhou (modern day Yan'an, Shaanxi province), a dry climate area unsuitable for the growth of bamboos.

Early climate researchers include Edmund Halley, who published a map of the trade winds in 1686, after a voyage to the southern hemisphere. Benjamin Franklin, a renaissance man in the 18th century, was the first to map the course of the Gulf Stream for use in sending mail overseas from the United States to Europe. Francis Galton invented the term anticyclone.[2] Helmut Landsberg led to statistical analysis being used in climatology, which led to its evolution into a physical science. ...

I note they left out Ben Franklin, who was the first to identify & map the Gulf Stream. >> Benjamin Franklin - Map of Gulf Stream

I won't endeavor to wholly justify my cynicism, but I do agree some of it applies to having confidence in the governments of the world abilities to get things done. Ground up is the better bet I also agree, and to borrow a corporate phrase, just do it. :

If you Google terra preta, Hypography is on the first page of results. Check out those threads and all the ones on charcoal here to see what peeps are just doing.

http://hypography.com/forums/terra-preta.html

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by goku

if you're really worried about global warming then plant kudzoo on the sides of all the buildings in the cities. plants naturally clean the air.

Having plants store carbon from the atmosphere in their tissue is only part of an effective plant-based means of removing carbon from the air. Unless the plants die and are somehow removed from contact with air, such as being buried in layers of sediment, they simply decay, releasing the carbon back into the air (though you can do useful things with this process, such as burning plant-decay produced methane as a fuel).

There are other problems with the specific approach goku proposes

Despite some folk tales, kudzu needs somewhat fertile soil. Like any vine-y plant, it’s unwise to plant it near pavement, as it tends to crack it and send vines into drains and conduits. Its vines, while long, are limited in length (about 30 m max according to the linked wikipedia article). It’s messy to clean up after, attracts bugs that aren’t good to have around buildings (personal experience), and would likely get into lots of mechanical and electrical system it shouldn’t.

It doesn’t grow well in the cold weather the majority of big US cities get.

Compared to forests, cities simply aren’t very big, so while growing a lot of plants in them can improve the local air quality, it doesn’t have much of an impact of the global carbon cycle.

Originally Posted by goku

all the oil in the ground was once carbon in the air, no?

Now that’s a thought-provoking question, to which, as best I know, the answer is yes.

The most widely accepted (but not the only) theory for where oil comes from is that it comes primarily from sedimented plant, and to a lesser degree, animal tissue. Though they may get some from sources such as the deep earth via carbolic acid in water, I think plants get nearly all of the carbon in their tissues from atmospheric .

However, it’s important to note that while nearly all the carbon in oil (and the greater amounts in coal) was once in the air, it wasn’t all in the air at the same time. There’s estimated to be about 5,000 billion tons of carbon (GtC) in all the fossil fuels (anywhere from about 30% to 85% of it practically usable), while there’s about 750 GtC in the atmosphere.

All of these amounts are miniscule compared to the 40,000 GtC in the deep oceans, and the 170,000,000 GtC estimated to be locked in its crust.

With all this data, you can get some fanciful numbers relative to human health and safety:
0.00035 = Current atmospheric concentration
0.00300 = Atmospheric concentration if all fossil and plant fuel suddenly burned
0.00500 = OSHA maximum for prolonged exposure
0.01000 = OSHA maximum for 60 minutes exposure
0.02150 = Atmospheric concentration if oceans vaporized
0.10000 = level causing rapid loss of consciousness (per OSHA)

(Sources: Fossil fuel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Carbon cycle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Carbon - Encyclopedia of Earth, Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, MSDS for a Argon/CO2 gas)

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Essay

....Actually, I was pondering how we could continue polluting the planet without it reacting in some unforeseen way (I'd just read Silent Spring, and joined Students for Environmental Action at my highschool). I was expecting something like a massive die-off of bees. Silly me.

"...the new ice age the climatologists said...." Did they really have climatologists back then? [the 70's] I remember one article in a Newsweek ( and maybe a Nat.Geo.) about a few scientists who thought that if the current brief decline in average temperatures continued, we might head into an ice age. I think they advocated studying things to see if the trend continued, as well as looking into past climate to see if we could learn anything. There was no big "ice age" hype, by thousands of scientist, worldwide, sustained for decades. ...

Here is a well writ piece that covers the history of climate models in computers, as well explaining what & how they do what they do.

...
Jean-Marc Jancovici : climate change - how can we know what will happen later on ?
...Modelling is a discipline that did not start yesterday : it took its rise in the 60's (the first atmospheric model was implemented on the first computer, the ENIAC). What enabled a soaring of the discipline is more the tremendous increase of the available processing power (and the availability of stallite data to confront model runs to observations) than breakthroughs in physics, what was pretty well known already a couple of decades ago. ...

[Michaelangelica]

What do you think of this report?
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

What do you think of this report?
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong

He's basically saying that there's a limit on how opaque the atmosphere can become... that the equations are "wrong" because they don't factor in the fact that the atmosphere can only block so much radiation.

Well... yeah... okay... but once it's reached that point we'll already be like the planet Venus.


Also, exactly which climatologist is talking about "runaway greenhouse" effects? Seems like a bit of a strawman if you ask me...

In other words, he has a point about the opacity, but his conclusions are non-sequitur. He even throws in an appeal to conspiracy there at the end. That's just icing on the cake really.


A Skeptical Look at Climate Change: The Beginning of the End

An interesting theory was proposed by Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, a relatively unknown European scientist. His theory, through the combination of various atmospheric mathematical laws, essentially states that the optical depth of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must remain constant.

Looking here, it appears that he's assumed constant optical depth. Well, if one assumes constant opticat depth, then of course they'd come to a very different conclusion about global warming.

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

What do you think of this report?
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations Totally Wrong

I think the original article is a better source, as it gives the actual calculations said to be a correction. My calculus ability does not extend to deriving or solving differential equations. Looks like a new & contentious debate on the topic in any regard.

DailyTech - Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong"