--- Nick Palmer wrote: > The thermal condition of the planet is set by the > output of the sun PLUS the heat "retaining" capacity > of the atmosphere and land. Without the natural > greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, Earth would be > an ice planet. This solar output red herring is the > latest rhetorical trick of the global warming > deniers.
Yes and no. You are leaving out a big item here, perhaps the biggest item of all - "natural" CO2 removal, which is negatively impacted by thermal pollution. There seems to be denial by those who do not think that human produced thermal pollution is a risk factor. It is a huge factor. On the positive side, it can become less so IF distributed sources such as cold fusion or ZPE can be perfected before it is too late. It is not 'just' the heat itself but WHERE the heat is dumped. If heat rejection from power plants takes place directly in the river/ocean environment as a heat sink, which is often the case with nuclear and coal-fired plants, then the effect of human thermal pollution is magnified many fold over dumping heat into the atmosphere where some of it can radiate away much faster than in the oceans. But there is much more to the interlocking cycle than re-radiation. Around half of all carbon dioxide produced by humans since the industrial revolution has already dissolved into the world's oceans! with some positive and some adverse effects for marine life. But also helping tremendously to slow the rise of atmospheric CO2 as some of that has already been safely removed by blue-green algae. This factor has led short-sighted individuals, even at the highest levels of government, to think that the Earth is self-regulating. NO! that is not the case past a certain tipping point. That self-regulation is only true in the short term, and we are now passing rapidly through the stage of self-regulation. The most active marine life for taking CO2 _out_ of the ocean is algae and single celled organisms which are FAR more productive in colder water. Fish know this but humans, even some environmentalists, do not seem to get it. Yet fishermen from California and even Mexico for instance, routinely go to all the way to Alaskan waters at great expense- why ... duh ... that is where the fish are, and the fish go there because that is where their food is. It is not that algae "like" cold water, and in fact they could grow faster in warm water, in theory, it is just that cold water holds far more CO2 in the surface layers where they can get both the carbon and the light necessary to convert it into protein easily. ALGAE (and humans, eventually) NEED COLD WATER to flourish. Period. Let me try to hammer this in one more time as there seems to be some strong persistent and incorrect opinions on this. Scientists who undertook the first comprehensive look at ocean storage of carbon dioxide found that the world's oceans serve as a massive sink that traps the greenhouse gas - up to a point - that point being ocean temperature. If ocean temps do not rise much, then CO2 is removed and there is a self-regulating effect. But the effect of thermal pollution is MAGNIFIED in the oceans, which is where 90% of CO2 can be removed easily. The hotter oceans get, the less CO2 can be dissolved in the surface layer. The less that is dissolved, the less that algae can remove. It's not rocket science. The research says that the oceans' removal of the carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere has slowed global warming considerably for 150 years, but that *grace-period* has effectively ended because of rising ocean temperatures. And the CO2 removal cycle is now failing at a faster rate in recent years because the oceans have gotten too warm to absorb any more CO2. The self-regulation effect in now on hold and will turn to "runaway" before it returns to self-regulating, unless something is done. Ironically, the melting glaciers have actually helped to oceans cooler, but that is also self-deceptive to think of as a real "fix" for the problem. This is the big point... no the HUGE point about focusing attention on thermal pollution - but ocean not atmospheric. Do not fall prey to the suggestion that Earth is self-regulating in the long term. It is not. The reason we are not in a runaway situation already is that single-cell ocean life has kept up the pace with us, but that process is now fully maximized and can do no more. We are 15-25 years away from a "run-away" greenhouse effect now. I can only pray that "God," however that force is personally defined in the sense of discretion or foresight, has 'chosen' the later date, which will permit us some extra leeway needed to overcome entrenched ignorance and greed, such as we see now at the highest levels of our great petrocracy. Jones
