--- Mario Goveia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >Gabe, regardless of what the BBC or Dr. Peter Cox >say, all I can do is appeal to your common sense on >such warnings of dire consequences, "...unless we act >urgently to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases". > >When you hear such warnings, hang on to your wallet >because some researcher is getting ready to apply >for some grant money to "study" this "problem". >
Rather than common sense the above statement displays an utterly unjustified, hostile cynicism towards science and towards the process of obtaining funding for scientific research. No reasonable person would regard it as common sense to question the motives of a professional scientist simply because his scientific findings are inconsistent with one's preconceived unscientific ideology. Most reasonable people would regard it as prejudice borne out of scientific ignorance and/or an ideological agenda. It is also extremely naive to think that a researcher can get funding for his research by sounding false alarms in the print or electronic media. The rest of what was scribbled in the above post can now be recognized as repeatedly regurgitated slogans containing blatant factual errors, besides being totally irrelevant to the findings referred to in Gabe's forwarded article. Some of the factual errors are pointed out below. > > Carbon dioxide is only 0.036% of the earth's total > atmosphere. Additional carbon dioxide is caused by > nature and by human endeavor around the whole world. > The second sentence above is false. Human activity since the industrial revolution is responsible for a 30% increase in the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere. This means that post-industrial human activity has contributed substantially to the current 0.036% level of carbon dioxide. Without the latter activity the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere would now have been 0.027%. > > Much of this is recycled by photosynthesis through > the leaves of plants. > Only half of the man-made carbon dioxide can be recycled by such natural means. > >There is no way to curb any of the new carbon >dioxide created by nature. > All carbon dioxide created by natural means is recycled by natural processes. > >no mathematical way on God's green earth that any >additional curbing of the emissions caused by human >endeavor can have any noticeable effect on carbon >dioxide as a percentage of the atmosphere, because of >the minute percentage of the atmosphere that is made >up of carbon dioxide to begin with. > The above statement is pure nonsense both mathematically and scientifically. One merely requires elementary knowledge of basic arithmetic and chemistry to understand why this is so. Simply put, from the standpoint of simple arithmetic, minuteness of a percentage has no bearing on whether or not (or on the extent to which) it can be increased or decreased by any means. From the standpoint of science, for a pollutant to be harmful what matters is only its physically, chemically or biologically harmful concentration, and not the numerical minuteness of that value. As an example, 0.02% of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere can kill you in a few hours. Cheers, Santosh
