Mario Goveia wrote: > Let's leave aside for now the questionable notion that 0.04% [rounded > off] of a clear gas in the atmosphere can trap heat like a "greenhouse" > while letting in heat from the sun.
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:51:03 -0700 (PDT) From: marlon menezes <[email protected]> Re: [Goanet] Motorbikes, two-wheelers and Global Cooling Mario, I can give you a vial of cyanide with a concentration of 0.04%. If you think it is insignificant, please do us a favor and lap it all up. Just because a number is small does not make it insignificant. Dopants as little 0.000001% (and much less) can change the properties of materials drastically. Mario responds: This is a red herring. Cyanide is a known poison, which is lethal at certain concentrations. In lower concentrations it is harmless. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/mim/environmental/html/hcn_text.htm Using a known poison like cyanide in a solution as an analogy, environmental activists often try to show that 0.036% of a clear plant food like CO2 mixed in with 99.964% of other gases in the atmosphere will make the atmosphere act like a "greenhouse", i.e. physically block heat from escaping and thus causing the earth to warm up. This is a bogus analogy between a poison that must be ingested and a gas that is said to block heat like a "greenhouse". This would have been simply an interesting scientific debate, but the environmental extremists want to use their controversial theories to impose controls on only the western economies which will bring them down towards the least common denominator and make them more like the less developed countries are today, i.e economically weak. Only 0.013% of the earth's atmosphere is comprised of man-made CO2. The environmental extremists ask us to believe that they can control this minute amount by requiring only the western economies to turn back the clock on their economies by 80% by 2050 from 2000 levels. In the meantime all the less developed countries can continue business as usual, including Russia, China, India, Australia, Brazil and Mexico. Of course this makes no sense, because the effects will be in opposite directions cancelling each other out. What the environmental extremists are essentially trying to convince us is equivalent to pretending that smoke in the atmosphere in a closed hall can be controlled by having a large and growing smoking section on one side. Their time could be put to better use if they tried to come up with contingency plans to cope with whatever Mother Nature has in store for the earth. Some scientists think that any further warming will be modest and may even be beneficial to humans by having positive effects on food production and by reducing the need for energy for heating.
