CO2 does not really affect albedo. There is now some evidence that aerosols (primarily soot iirc) do increase the planets albedo and for a while was partially masking the results of increased CO2 concentrations. So while industries have gotten cleaner in many ways, reducing aerosol production while CO2 production continued apace, the effects of the CO2 are no longer being masked as much. I suppose it could be argued that putting out more aerosols would be a counter to the greenhouse effect but I am not sure that doing so on the off chance that all of the pollution effects may cancel out (a la Mr. Burns immune system) is a wise idea.
According to Realclimate, approximately 30% of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic. While in bulk terms CO2 is less prevalent physicallyas water vapor the natural water cycle is rapid (and balanced) and so tends to be affected by climate change more than causing it. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/
The CO2 cycle hasn’t been in balance since we started dumping large quantities of the stuff - the time it takes to sequester CO2 with existing natural mechanisms is much longer.
Just a question about the carbon cycle: the role of forests in sequestering CO2. Take the USA, by about 1900, the White and green mountains of New England had been stripped bare. trees had been felled with no thought of replanting or conservation-old photos of the now-richly forested white Mountains show bare mountainsides. So, since the 1920’s these forests have regrown. Now, i suspect that the lumber that these trees went to is still with us 9mostly in the form of houses). Are forests efficient ways to remove CO2? I once read that there is more forest land now in the NE. If this is true, we should be cutting wood and using it (not burning it).
Well, considering that China’s fuel economy standards are higher than the U.S. standards, I’d say they’ve got it figured out already. U.S. built cars couldn’t even be driven in China. Or, for that matter, in many other countries with higher standards than the U.S. has (our fuel economy standards are among the lowest in the developed world).
If you’ve seen the film, you probably saw the graph illustrating this. The fact that Gore singles out the U.S. by highlighting our poor fuel economy standards definitely reinforces the idea that the film is propaganda. Or at the very least a giant campaign ad. He’s essentially saying that the U.S. is a huge part of the problem where CO2 emissions are concerned. If you read between the lines, it kindof implies that if he’d secured the presidency then we’d already be on our way out of this hole we’ve dug.
As for the little side argument going on above, I got bored and started digging around for info on several of CEI’s donor foundations. The foundations donate their money to a lot of places, but the recipients they have most in common are conservative think tanks, several of which are linked to the oil industry. The Sourcewatch profile on CEI describes it as “…an ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business.” And I guess improving fuel economy standards is contrary to the way the U.S. auto industry does business.
Cite? Show as a % what money the foundations donate to 'conservative think tanks" and what defines a think tank “consevative”, and what do you mean by “linked”? A small % of donations recieved?
Sourcewatch has already been debunked as a unbiased cite- it is no less biased than CEI. From my earlier post "*And, Sourcewatch is hardly nonpartisan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcewatch
"Critics claim that most of the project’s investigative and critical articles are aimed and directed at what SourceWatch perceives to be prominent conservatives, those that are right-of center and Republican Party organizations and individuals. The Center for Media and Democracy, which sponsors SourceWatch, has also targeted and focused on individuals within companies, lobby groups as well as academics, analysts and media personalities.[4][5] [6]
Sourcewatch has been criticised by conservatives and opponents of environmentalism for its political stance. Alan Caruba, who describes himself as a critic of "environmental propaganda’ writes “Source Watch is a project of the Center of Media & Democracy, a left-wing organization that devotes a lot of time to attacking the public relations profession in general and conservative writers in particular.”[7].
The website ActivistCash.com, operated by industry lobby group the Center for Consumer Freedom, describes the Center for Media & Democracy, the organisation behind SourceWatch, as “a counterculture public relations effort disguised as an independent media organization… it is essentially a two-person operation” run by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. ActivistCash adds “If someone in a shirt and tie dares make a profit (especially if food or chemicals are involved), Rampton and Stauber are bound to have a problem with it.” [8] The Centre is funded by organisations, described by ActivistCash as ‘leftwing’, such as the Homeland Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the DJB Foundation, the Carolyn Foundation, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology.CMD Financials."
And more:http://www.answers.com/topic/sourcewatch
“Some critics believe the project to have a liberal or left-wing outlook. Many of the project’s investigative and critical articles are aimed and directed at prominent conservatives, those that are right-of center and Republican Party organizations and individuals.”
Thus Sourcewatch is hardly “non-partisan”. "*
Armstrong Foundation: Number one recipient of funds is National Center for Policy Analysis, whose board chairman works for Thompson Petroleum Corp. Source: Media Transparency
Barre Seid Foundation: Contributes to education, the arts, and churches primarily. Top non-education donations made to The Heartland Institute, which has published on its site a piece about global warming (quote from the last line of the piece “…the voice of reason and truth. The one that says there is no global warming!”
Castle Rock Foundation: Created to distribute the unrestricted funds of the Adolph Coors Foundation (which is restricted to donations within the State of Colorado). Number one recipient of funds is The Heritage Foundation (Richard Scaife is Vice Chairman).
Carthage Foundation Scaife Foundations: Financed by the Mellon industrial, oil, and banking fortune. Also donates to Heritage Foundation. Number one recipient of funds is Free Congress Foundation, Inc. (conservative think tank)
Koch Family Foundations: Koch Industries is an oil & gas corporation
Earhart Foundation: Number one recipient of funds is Atlas Economic Research Foundation “Johnny Appleseed of Conservative Think Tanks”
Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation: Number one recipient of funds is Rice University. Also donates to National Center for Policy Analysis, whose board chairman works for Thompson Petroleum Corp.
Jacquelin Hume Foundation: Number one recipient of funds is San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Also donates significantly to Institute for Justice (heavily donated to by several of the above mentioned conservative think tanks)
JM Foundation: Number one recipient of funds is Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Also donates to National Center for Policy Analysis, whose board chairman works for Thompson Petroleum Corp.
John M. Olin Foundation: Closed at the end of 2005. Funds right-wing think tanks. Number one recipient of funds is Harvard University ($24 M). Also contributes significantly to The Heritage Foundation.
That’s only half of them. The value of donations to the “conservative think tanks” and the other organizations I mentioned are actually much higher than the donations to CEI. If you want more information, look it up yourself on the link I provided in item no. 1 (dollar values are provided). I consider this sufficient information to link CEI to conservative groups who consider corporate welfare to be of greater importance than the environment.
And I apologize to everyone for continuing to let this hijack go on. Hopefully it’ll get back on topic (if this tangent didn’t completely kill it).
But recall that a lot of the carbon is tied up in leafy material, roots, forest floor, brush and soils. Table which I don’t fully understand. So there are lots of offsetting effects when wood is harvested, since only a fraction of the total carbon stock is converted to market products. Also, a portion of the manufactured wood products will burn or rot over time.
The studies that I’ve read about forest carbon sequestration discuss 1) reducing tropical forest loss, 2) expanding existing forests, 3) increasing forest density and yes 4) conversion to wood products. See the first discussion paper here. “Although not the complete answer to the carbon problem, carbon sequestration through forestry does have the potential of stabilizing, or at least contributing to the stabilization, of atmospheric carbon in the near term (20–50 years) and hereby allowing time for the development of a more fundamental technological solution in the form of reduced carbon emission energy sources.”
What if we said: “CEI is almost solely funded by those who would like global climate change issues to be ignored, as well as ‘free market’ types, with the vast majority of funds coming from those with an interest in the petroleum and chemical industries, and were the largest single recipient of ‘Public Information and Policy Research’ (Warning: PDF file) funds from Exxon in 2004.” Do you buy that?
The Center for Media and Democracy makes no secret of its agenda, either – http://www.prwatch.org/:
The above statements clearly express a commitment to following the money. Thus, one cannot “debunk” these organizations by exposing a “left-wing” or “anti-conservative” bias in them – that comes with the territory; most of the money with which these organizations are concerned is in the hands of mostly conservative think-tanks, PR firms and media outlets. That’s just how it is, David Horowitz’ preposterous ranting about a well-funded, all-powerful national leftist “network” notwithstanding.
So if you want to “debunk” SourceWatch, or detract from its credibility, the only way to do it is to point out errors or falsehoods in its published statements. Which you have not yet done, in this thread.
CEI, on the other hand, is, on its own terms, much easier to debunk. It straddles the fence – it claims to be a politically motivated, pro-free-market organization, but at the same time it claims objective scientific credibility for its statements. Unlike with CM&D and SourceWatch, the names of CEI’s backers and sources of funding are, in fact, prima facie evidence of its lack of credibility; they render everything CEI might publish, not automatically dismissable, but automatically suspect, at the outset. Heightened scrutiny is warranted in examining all of CEI’s statements. Because when big corporations and buisiness-conservative foundations spend a lot of money to get a message out, we know why they’re doing it, and it is not for the public good, although that might be an incidental by-product on some rare occasions.
Of course, it is much more effective to “debunk” CEI’s statements by pointing out errors and falsehoods in those statements – which many in this thread have done already, WRT global warming.
So let me get this straight. You claim that if “some critics” believe that a certain source is biased, then that source has been “debunked as a [sic] unbiased cite”? Isn’t that a rather low standard for debunking? I think we could generally agree that conservatives and “opponents of environmentalism” have made a habit out of howling bias at anything which they don’t agree with, so their opinions about what is and isn’t biased are rather low on credibility.
In a nutshell, a great deal of CO2 is captured by forests. If we make our goal the reduction of new CO2 being added to the atmosphere, then we should shift away from using coal, oil, and old-growth forests, because they contain carbon that hasn’t been in the atmosphere for hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. Instead, we should plant new forests, which will capture CO2 that’s in the atmosphere right now. Any wood that we process from those forests will only be releasing CO2 that was in the atmosphere anyway, and any new forests that we leave alone will be reducing the overall carbon in the atmosphere.
Lets permute:
1.Gore and environmentalists are correct and we therefore clean the planet and save us all.
2. Gore is wrong but we clean up the environment mistakenly and the world is cleaner.
3.We say Gore is wrong and polute to corporations hearts content and the world gets filthier.
two wins one loss.
If only it were that simple. Of course, you’re only looking at one side of it. “Cleaning up the environment” also means “slowing the pace of economic growth, particularly that of underdeveloped countries.”
I must have forgotton about god oops I mean money. I am familiar when gm built a plant from scratch in Mexico. hey could have built a clean plant on the cheap because it was new. The reason they didn.t is because it was cheaper not to. They owned the government and knew they were free to do what they wanted. They sent their polutants right into the Rio Grande. Jobs come at a great price .
Less Greenhouse gases does not = “cleaning up the environment” although the two can be connected, of course. CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is GOOD. It’s just that more CO2 that we are historically used to may raise the temp more than we are used to. However, in general “less CO2” = “less economy”. Would you be content to not drive, and use 75% less electricity? In order to reduce CO2 for generating power, we have to generate power from one of the following sources:
Nuclear- which the Greens hate due mostly to Luddite concerns and ignorance (not that Nuke doesn’t have problems)
Hydro, which is great except that the Sierra club wants to destroy all the dams. :rolleyes:
Wind, which is great except NIMBY and “raptor burger” (Wind Turbines kill thousands of hawk & eagles a year). And, enough wind power use coudl also change the weather by changing prevaling winds. so far, this hasn’t been a problem, but Wind doesn’t generate a significant amount of power. Should Wind be used to generate 75% of power, don’t be surpised if we get dramatic and dangerous weather changes from that.
Solar- which is expensive and in large usage will change the Earth’s Albedo, which could also cause severe climatological changes.
None of which will power cars, although they can all be used indirectly for Electric cars or maybe Hydrogen power cars. Neither of which are currently practical.
And then there’s the problem of the 800# gorilla- China, which either is or is about to be the worlds worst polluter due to it’s huge use of coal in outdated coal burning power plants. How do we get them to stop?
For the USA, there are a few more or less painless choices:
Raise the milage requirement. Hybrids are the way of the future. If the average car got twice the milage with effectively zero pollutants (not counting CO2 as a "pollutant) , it would be a huge change, and we could do this without killing the economy.
More Nuke power, and have laws that stop “Green” delaying lawsuit tactics. Sorry, Luddites, if we want less greenhouse gas power, Nuke has got to be ONE of the options. Don’t worry, I am not talking a huge Nuke program, but it should be increased.
Tell the Sierra club to “get stuffed” when it complains about Greenhouse gasses from one side of it’s mouth, while demanding we dynamite the dams with the other. Hydro has been mostly fully developed here, but we need to keep what we have.
More wind power, with laws that stop NIMBY tactics, and more research on seeing how to stop raptors from becoming hawkburger. If we just use Wind as part of the solution, it is unlikely to cause significant winds/climate changes.
More solar. See above.
See, if we have a BALANCE between Fossil Fuel, Nuke, Wind, Solar & Hydro, we run very little risk of any of them harming the environment. We are damaging the environment because we have put far too many eggs in the Fossil fuel basket.
Twist China’s arm, economicly- they just can’t keep going on like they are.
More research $$ for other power sources.
Use the stupid Kyoto treaty for toilet paper. It’s crap.