Doh!
Should be:
what happens to animal populations that aren’t regulated by predation or low birth rate
Thanks, Akatsukami. You gave me enough to do some further research on this really cool (!) subject.
Am I correct in believing that the 180/160 you refer to is oxygen isotopes as referenced at the Delphi Project?
http://delphi.esc.cam.ac.uk/#Delphi Project
You may also be interested to know that extensive research on my part has revealed that the taverns near the climatology departments of research universities are known as (ahem) isobars.
This is not an offer to agree or disagree with opinions, which may be done only by a current prospectus.
(my 2 cents on Global Warming, Greenhouse Effect, Tree-hugging hippies…)
Why is everyone so worried about too much CO2? I mean, plants love carbon dioxide- in fact extra carbon dioxide beefs up plants. A good analogy would be that humans need Vitamin A. Enhancing how much Vitamin A humans naturally get gives the body an added health advantage. But enhancing the level of toxicity causes liver damage. Likewise, soybeans need carbon dioxide to survive. Enhancing how much carbon dioxide soybeans naturally get provides thicker stems with more leaves and branches, increased yields and a more extensive root system that helps to use nutrients more efficiently. Sooo that means: more C02=more plants=greener earth=environmentalists still not happy.
Hell, even if the temperature rose on the earth plants love warmer weather!(take for example where most rainforests lie) Who complains if winter produces 4 feet of snow instead of 5? La Nina and El Nino can kiss my ass, too. I thought La Nina was supposed to bring cooler temperatures and more rain? WHAT THE F" HAPPENED THERE, CAN WE SAY BIG ASS DROUGHT??? ahem… ok I sorta lost it there, I best be going now before I get on why politicians want to decrease the productivity of our country to cool down the earth… ARGH (DAMN KYOTO PROTOCOL!)
“I’m not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”
– Calvin and Hobbes
manhattan:
Yes, those very ones.
(It occurs to me – much too late to do any good – that “18O/16O” could easily be misinterpreted as “one hundred eighty/one hundred sixty”. Manhattan got it right, of course.)
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
imthecow…: What you’re speaking of is called a limiting nutrient. And CO2 doesn’t qualify.
Imagine you’re job is to bake chocolate chip cookies, and I give you exactly enough chips, flour, sugar, eggs, and butter to make 10 dozen cookies, how many more can you make if I then give you an extra 10 lb. bag of flour? Not a single extra cookie, unless I also give you more of the other ingredients.
Plants do just fine at the current concentrations of CO2. They won’t do significantly better unless we add more nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, magnesium, etc. to the environment (I believe there was an experiment in the pacific a few years ago where a lot of iron was dumped into the ocean to see if plankton blooms could be encouraged, inducing phytoplankton to absorb more CO2 from the water).
If plants were going to take up the excess we wouldn’t see the increases that we do (25% increase in atmospheric CO2 in ~ 150 years). Some of the excess is being absorbed by the oceans, but not all – the numbers are still rising. No one can point to an event, whether it is a drought, flood, heat wave, snow storm, hurricane, El Nino, La Nina – and blame it on human activity. But every year throughout the 80s set a new temperature record. After a two year cooling trend due to Pinatubo, the 90s has continued the trend.
Maybe none of it is due to us, maybe only some of it is, or maybe it’s an abberant trend that will turn around in another year or decade. I think if there’s a chance that we’re having an effect (and most scientists think that the odds are pretty good that we are) then we deal with it like an insurance policy: Ideally you buy health insurance before you get sick, not knowing whether you ever will.
The Earth’s climate has changed significantly over the eons. It has been much warmer in the past, and it has been much colder. Modern humans didn’t show up on the scene until the beginning of the current interglacial. Compared to what the climate has done for the past half million years, this period has been incredibly stable. For most of the past 10 kyrs there’s been fewer than a billion humans. Now we have 6 billion living in every corner (most of whom live within a few meters of sea level). I suggest that it’s not the time for global climate experiments for which we don’t know the consequences (and anyone who says they know the conesquences, good or bad, has a political or economic agenda and is lying).
jrepka writes:
Actually, that’s not entirely the case.
This statement is not justified on a global level, either by the surface data (see http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/ ) or the satellite data (see ftp://wind.atmos.uah.edu/msu/t2lt/t2ltglhmam.d03 ).
If this means “somewhere, a local record is being set”, why, sure; for last year (which the white boxes, the satellites, and the radiosondes all agreed was the warmest on record (not that “the record” is a very long one)), I can find you places that set record lows. Of course, such data gets laughed out of court by those who have not already made up what they are pleased to call their “minds”.
I can also find you an adult American male who’s only 4’6" tall. His existence says nothing about the adequacy of nutrition in this country.
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Interesting links. The first shows some graphs, which do seem to bear out exactly what jrepka was saying. The second shows a very interesting table of numbers, but neglects to say what units the numbers are in or what they measure. All in all, I’m not that convinced.
I have also heard that recently, each subsequent year has been the hottest ever measured since the data has been collected. (For the earth as a whole, not just isolated spots.) Can anyone point us at some data that actually proves or disproves this claim?
I think I mentioned in the original post. The article in question stated global temperatures have swung wore than the projected 1 degree predicted by the GHE, and swings were strongly correlated to sunspot activity.
On CNN there was an article that more or less stated that run of the mill trees would pick up ~50% of the surplus CO2.
Greg Charles writes:
Huh? jrepka said:
(Emphasis mine)
In fact, the CRU datadon’t show that – not unless we are to interpret “every year” as meaning “every year except the ones that don’t”.
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Don’t you hate when you make what you think is a pretty reasonable, well-thought out statement, and then realize that you’ve included some stupid media non-reference as part of your reasoning?
After reviewing the pages referenced by Akat, I formally disavow that sentence from my post. It was probably from some newspaper article, but my use of it without ahving a better reference is indefensible.
I stand by the rest of my argument however. Photosynthetic biomass certainly removes CO2 from the atmosphere; The bulk of this occurs in the oceans, where CO2 is chemically absorbed at the surface and then absorbed by primary producers in the photic zone. Were it not for absorption by the oceans, the atmospheric CO2 concentration would be much higher than it is currently.
Trees take up their share, but remember that only old-growth actually store the excess as cellulose. Sustainable agriculture simply absorbs CO2 now only to release it again after the harvest (when the products are burned or otherwise disposed of).
A signifiacnt portion of oceanic CO2, once converted to biomass, settles to the ocean floor and is stored in sediments for long periods of time (converted to limestone or to kerogen).