It would be much better if the candle were shoved in a 40%-efficient power station to make electricity and electric light instead.Taken from here.
It might be helpful to look at this through the lens of a textbook example from Ethics 101: The Drowning Stranger.Paradoxically, when people are standing around blaming each other, nobody wants to actually take action to solve the problem--it's like an admission of guilt. Instead they usually resort to counter-blaming ("look how much energy Al Gore is using!").
"A man is drowning near the end of the dock," the professor says. "What is your responsibility?"
"I didn't push him in!" the student says, with abrupt, vehement anger.
From the professor's perspective, this anger is strangely out of place, but for the student it seems justified. The student, instinctively, heard the question of responsibility as an accusation of blame. And, for what it's worth, the student's statement is correct. He didn't push the hypothetical stranger off of the hypothetical dock.
The problem, of course, is that the student's response -- standing by as the stranger drowns while adamantly insisting on his blamelessness -- is itself so irresponsible as to incur the very guilt the student set out to deny. Very well, he didn't push the man in, but he did just stand there and watch the man drown without lifting a finger to save him.
First let's get the poor hypothetical stranger out of the water and then we can deal with the question of who was to blame for causing his predicament.
... Minor constituents like water vapor and carbon dioxide gas (CO2) had been found to intercept heat radiation.[7] Theorists pointed out that the result would be what later came to be named (misleadingly) a greenhouse effect, an obstruction in the outflow of radiant energy that keeps the planet's surface warmer than it would be without an atmosphere.[8] If the composition of the atmosphere was to change - e.g., if over the course of many millennia the emission of gases from the world's volcanoes increased or decreased - it could eventually change the planet's temperature. Was this the solution to that famous scientific problem, the origin of ice ages? Attracted by the puzzle, a prominent Swedish physical chemist, Svante Arrhenius, calculated how much cooling would result from cutting the atmosphere's CO2 level in half.You do know that CO2 traps heat, right? This is a physical property of CO2 which can be directly observed. Steven Dutch:
A colleague, Arvid Högbom, brought Arrhenius a strange new thought. Högbom had calculated that human factories and other industrial activities were adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a rate that was comparable to the natural processes. To be sure, the gas released from the burning of coal in the year 1896 would raise the level in the atmosphere by scarcely a thousandth part, but over the course of centuries it might build up to a significant level.[9-11] Arrhenius attempted to calculate the consequences of doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere, and in 1896 announced it would raise the Earth's temperature some 5-6°C.[10][12-15] A little extra warmth some centuries in the future did not sound like a bad idea in chilly Sweden. ...
... a handful of scientists took a mild interest in greenhouse warming as a topic for research. By 1910 they all set it aside. Arrhenius's idea looked implausible on several grounds. In particular, laboratory measurements seemed to prove that in the part of the infrared spectrum where CO2 interfered with radiation, the existing CO2 and also water vapor were already blocking the radiation so thoroughly that more gas could make little difference: the absorption was saturated. Moreover, Arrhenius had overlooked many important phenomena, such as how cloudiness might change if the Earth got a little warmer and thus more humid. Given the universal belief in a self-stabilizing balance of nature, it seemed probable that cloudiness would increase until it reflected enough sunlight to maintain the status quo. Another geophysical stabilizer was seawater, for a simple calculation showed that the oceans would absorb most of the gas that we added to the atmosphere.
... the physicist Gilbert Plass took up the question. In 1956 he showed, more convincingly than Callendar had been able to do, that the old supposed proof that the absorption of infrared radiation was saturated was a complete misunderstanding of how radiant energy works its way through the atmosphere. Plass calculated that doubling the CO2 level would bring a 3-4° rise; assuming emissions would continue at the current rate, he expected about one degree of warming per century. Other scientists found that Plass's calculation, like Arrhenius's, was too crude to give reliable numbers. But they also saw that the possibility of greenhouse warming could no longer be dismissed.[32][33]
Another supposed proof that humans could not cause greenhouse warming had relied on the fact that the oceans absorb CO2. Learning of Plass's work, the oceanographer Roger Revelle took a close look at seawater. To be sure, eventually most of the carbon that humanity added to the air would end up precipitated on the sea floor - but how long was eventually? In 1957, Revelle calculated that it would take a few centuries for the oceans to absorb CO2 added to the atmosphere, and remarked that the accumulation of gas may become significant during future decades if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially.[34] Two Swedish meteorologists, Bert Bolin and Erik Eriksson, clarified Revelle's cryptic chemical argument and proceeded to a striking calculation: with industrial production climbing exponentially, the atmospheric CO2 level would rise by 25% as early as the year 2000.[35]
... we have an atmospheric gas, carbon dioxide, that is known to be effective at trapping solar heat. You can shine infrared light through carbon dioxide and measure the absorption. You can fill a transparent vessel with carbon dioxide, put it in the sun, and compare its temperature with an equivalent vessel of air.Given that the level of atmospheric CO2 is continuing to increase, what do you think is going to happen?
We live in a universe of patterns. Once a pattern is established, the burden of proof is on people who claim the pattern does not hold. When some philosopher of science points out that we cannot prove that the sun will rise tomorrow, I say he's absolutely right. There is no way to prove axiomatically that the sun will rise tomorrow, and nobody in science cares in the slightest. When the sun doesn't rise as scheduled, call me. Until then I absolutely refuse to waste time worrying about it. When Immanuel Velikovsky claimed the planets underwent wild disturbances in their orbits, the burden of proof was on him to show that it happened. The burden was not on scientists to show it didn't.And by the way, the Arctic sea ice extent was up in 2009; "Arctic temperatures" do not equate to "global climate change"; and in any case Antarctic temperatures are down....again...
... we have a clear record of carbon dioxide increasing in the last couple of centuries and pretty solid evidence the climate is actually getting warmer. In fact, if you do a search of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature over the last 70 years, the vast majority of references to climate change - long before the controversy erupted - are to warming.
So, we have increases in a gas known to trap solar heat, and indications of climatic warming. Straightforward cause and effect reasoning suggests the one caused the other. If you woke up uncomfortably hot in the middle of the night and found someone had put an extra blanket over you, you'd logically conclude the blanket caused the warming. You wouldn't argue that your getting warm caused the blanket to appear on the bed, or that the two events were unrelated, or that there was no reason to connect the blanket and the warming.
So people who doubt the cause and effect link have work to do:
* If they don't believe carbon dioxide traps heat, what's their evidence? Give step by step physical justification for the claim that increasing carbon dioxide will not warm the earth.
* If they give more credence to studies that doubt global warming, why? Specifically, why are those particular studies more credible than studies that support global warming?
Notwithstanding all the unsolved problems in climate modeling and establishing past global temperatures, the fact that climate is getting warmer and carbon dioxide is increasing makes for a straightforward case of cause and effect. The burden of proof is on people who doubt the cause and effect relationship to show either that the cause-effect relation does not hold, or that some other process is responsible. Not raise questions or cast doubts - prove.
From a geologic point of view, carbon dioxide is irrelevant to climate. This is because the CO2 will simply accelerate silicate weathering, drawing it out of the atmosphere and eventually precipitating it as carbonate.posted by russilwvong at 2:33 PM on March 31, 2010 [1 favorite]
While there may be transient effects, the timescale of those effects is too fine to resolve geologically, so they aren’t worth worrying about.
As for the effects of climate on the biota, that too is irrelevant. Species go extinct all the time, and when they do, something else radiates into their niche.
So from the planetary perspective, this whole CO2 thing is just another blip like the PETM. In a few million years, it will be nothing but a curiosity. Narrow-minded activists interested in the survival of particular subgroups such as ice-dwelling pinnipeds or bipedal primates might complain, but to what end? We’re all headed for the fossil record eventually, so changing the extinction time of a particular group by a few tens of kiloyears isn’t going to be detectable in the long run.
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posted by shii at 7:18 AM on March 28, 2010 [2 favorites]