AGW Theory - Discussion

Except Nausi apparently.

I don't question it, I understand the relatively limited effect it has on atmospheric temperature. Case in point is a direct comparison of mars and venus. Both have effectively the same percentage of CO2 and yet one is hotter than the other. Obviously one can deduce that the reason Venus is so much hotter than mars is due to something other than the CO2 composition in it's atmosphere.

Clearly CO2 is far beyond the point of saturation in heating up both planets.

Quite the opposite. As people like you love to point out when they want to support their case, the planet does have ways of counteracting increases in CO2. However, once you reach a certain threshold, some of those systems (such as the ocean) become saturated and you're kind of screwed. In the case of the ocean, there are also things that live in there that can be affected by even minor changes in pH that result from absorbing more acid.

No, you're just parroting the dribble Saevel is putting out. As has been said the several other times he's brought up this bogus point, the interface that matters most in the where the outermost part of the atmosphere meets open space. This interface is the last place where heat can either be released back out into space or reflected back down to the surface contributing to the GH effect. This layer is not saturated. As more CO2 gets pumped in, this layer moves more outward, and it still retains the same absorptive properties that leaad to global retention of heat.

Give up on the Mars/Venus thing. They're not even comparable. Yes, the pressure on Venus contributes to its temperature, but ignoring the amount of CO2 in its atmosphere (not just concentration) is stupid.

This theory works for all the years except the past 18ish when there has not been any atmospheric warming but co2 has been pumping out like crazy?

In Scientific American a few years back there was an article that traced AGW back to 10,000 BCE. That's when slash and burn agriculture started spreading like wildfire. (Pardon the pun.)

I'm not ignoring the CO2, it plays it's small role, clearly mars is proof positive you need a bit more than CO2 to raise temperature.

Yeah, you need an atmosphere...

Good news everyone! We actually have an atmosphere here on Earth!

Mars has an atmosphere its about 100 times thinner than Earths which is about 100 times thinner than Venus.

Mercury's atmosphere is about a trillionth as dense as earth, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's. *sighs* We're getting there...slowly..

It doesn't even have enough pressure to maintain liquids on its surface. One one-hundredth the density means about .147 psi. Or in layman's terms, basically none. Mars is also quite a bit smaller than earth or Venus, meaning the volume of its atmosphere is way way way less. You may as well be arguing that horsepower doesn't matter because a 3 horse go-kart is faster than a battleship.

Does it matter?

Ahh this was cute to watch people who don't understand physics try to use Venus as an example.

Psst, Venus's runaway temperatures isn't due to CO2 concentrations at all. If that's all the atmosphere had then it wouldn't be anywhere near it's current temperature.

Sulfur dioxide is the real culprit. It's not a greenhouse gas, but it's presence in large quantities cause's rampant cloud formation such that it blocks out virtually all light, both up and down. The surface of Venus would be incredibly dark, a really deep twilight. The lower atmosphere is actually warmer then the planet surface as almost all light is absorbed before it hits the surface and thus never gets absorbed and re-emmited as IR radiation. The polar vortex's act like a giant turbo oven that circulates this ultra warm atmosphere across the planet in a way very similiar to our own, just at a much faster speed.

Venus is heated from the top down (technically from the lower middle down) and not from the bottom up. Normally it would be very cold since such little light actually reach's the middle, but the small amount that does make it never leaves so it builds up, a little bit at a time, over millions of years until you get this dim yet ultra hot ball of acidic hell. The atmosphere isn't even a true gas but instead exists as a super-critical fluid.

It's such a radically different model then our own that no direct comparisons can be made. Anyone attempting to use it as a "see CO2 is BAD!!!" just shows their own ignorance.

That's actually false.

The Ocean's ability to absorb CO2 and thermal energy is 10,000 that of the atmosphere. It was another one of those theory's that was thrown onto the stack of "CO2 IS BAD SEE" without someone knowing the chemistry behind it. The Ocean can not "acidify" as long as there are deposits of calcium carbonate. The PH balance of various spots in the world is changing because our climate is constantly changing, especially as we finish a solar maxim. The Ocean can lag several decades to a full century behind the atmosphere due to it's raw mass. Any significant changes now would of been in response to things happening in the late 19th and early 20th century, not a few decades ago.

And please get your orders of magnitude strait. The Ocean is working on two to three order of magnitudes larger then the atmosphere. Any condition that would of had a significant impact on the Ocean in our perception of time would of been so disruptive that it would of caused a mass extinction event.

lol

Ok, the amount if misinformation you're spewing is overwhelming. Like seriously, take a semester at a community college or something, cuz that's about how much time it'd take for the rest of us to correct you.

And now the insults and personal attacks begin.

Neither of those two posts is incorrect. The atmosphere greenhouse effect of Venus is a result of it's Sulfur dioxide concentration, likely caused by a meteor impact aeons ago. CO2 is transparent to incoming visible light and most IR light, it's only opaque on three select bands. There simply isn't' enough present energy on those bands to cause the temperature effect we observe, was a mystery to astrophysicists for a long *** time. Our sun would have to be much much hotter (hot enough for Earth to be uninhabitable) or Venus much closer for there to even be enough energy on the right bands for CO2 to contain. But if we factor in the sulfur dioxide, well that changes because SO2, while opaque to only a very small range of IR light, is opaque to most visible light and thus creating a radically different atmospheric interaction then Earths. Remember water vapor constitutes less then 1% of the upper atmosphere yet it completely dominates the greenhouse effect.

The info about Ocean's tolerate for CO2 and heat is also correct and is based on sheer mass. The Ocean is huge, 70% of our planets surface along with being 1000x denser. H2O has much higher thermal capacity as Oxygen or Nitrogen. Combining those results in the Ocean and Atmosphere working on different orders of magnitude. To raise the Ocean's average temperature by a fraction of a degree you need to raise the atmospheres average temperate by several degree's, usually in the 4~5C+ range. And that's only counting the topmost 500m layer, deep ocean is virtually immune to atmospheric conditions in human perceivable time scales. Thus any condition that would acidify or heat the Ocean, in a human perceivable time scale, would have to be so disruptive to live on the surface that it constitutes a mass extinction event. Otherwise the change is happening very slowly, over centuries and thus giving most life a chance to slowly adapt.

Couldn't find a good FFX pic

Yeah that's always been a favorite of mine "no dumping waste in the ocean, we'll ruin it"

The ocean is enormous, it's pretty tough to realize the full scale of it all. Our contribution to it is pretty minuscule, just like the co2 we pump into the atmosphere.