You cannot plan effectively for your future until you understand what climate change holds for you. If you decided to do that then the Greenhouse Effect would be the first thing you would want to master. It’s not difficult and you will own it by the time you finish this page.
About 30% of the light arriving from the sun hits our atmosphere and bounces off, back out into space. The balance of the sun’s light continues on, toward the planet’s surface, where it will encounter something that is either light or dark in color . When the surface is light in color, it reflects the sun’s light back through the atmosphere and then on out into space. If the incoming light from the sun encounters a dark colored surface, it is absorbed and then converted into infra red – infra red is heat. The infra-red then rises into the atmosphere where a very small portion of it will bump into molecules of greenhouse gas, such as Carbon Dioxide (CO2). When that collision occurs, the greenhouse gas (GHG) molecule begins to vibrate slightly and then it tosses the infra red heat back toward the planet’s surface. That’s the greenhouse effect.
If the greenhouse effect did not happen, every night when the heated side of the planet turned away from the sun, the heat collected that day would all escape into space and earth would be turned into an icy and mostly lifeless planet.
You may have already figured out that the quantity of heat that gets reflected back toward earth, depends entirely on how many molecules of greenhouse gas (GHGs) are up there in the atmosphere. The levels of GHGs in the atmosphere are always changing – slowly. Over the past few million years the levels of CO2 (the principal GHG) have ranged from a low level of 180 parts per million (ppm) to a high of 280ppm. It takes about 20,000 years for the GHG levels to rise from that low point (180ppm), to the high point of 280ppm and about 100,000 years to return to the low point. Then it starts over.
The quantities of CO2 involved are very small -180ppm expressed as a percentage of the entire atmosphere looks like this: 0.018% or, eighteen one thousandths of one percent. That still amazes me – that’s a very small amount of stuff to be controlling something as important as the temperature of earth. Historically, at Antarctica where the measurements just mentioned were taken, the temperature increased or decreased 1ºC (1.8ºF) for every 10ppm change in the level of CO2. For perspective, the current increase in mean temperature being attributed to human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere, is about 0.6ºC. For me, these numbers are so small and take so long to change, that this greenhouse effect looks like a very sensitive system indeed, with very small additions and subtractions (10ppm change caused a 1ºC change in temperature, plus or minus) of GHGs causing profound changes in the natural environment. As of 2009, we have added 110ppm of CO2 to the normal level of CO2 to the atmosphere – the level is now 390ppm and rising. Breathtaking, don’t you think?
(Peer reviewed research, supporting the claims made in this factoid, can be found at the web site shown below)
Ray Charles can see that you are canadian.
what talking points are you refering to. I simply stated that you have no clue what you are throwing out of your mouth… Keep sucking off your government but the sad thing is your people and hard earned tax money are paying for lazy fucks cause they think someone owes them something… P.S your health care sucks!!!
Well, for starters that “P.S. your health care sucks” makes you sound like Sean Hannity’s parrot. He states it and you idiots believe it. Our healthcare is fucking awesome and it’s something most Canadians are very proud of. Even conservative Canadians.
Then correlating Obama with Communism is another Fox News talking point. You are an absolute fucking moron if you think Obama is a Communist.
Lastly, where the fuck do you get Nazi from? Oh yeah….FOX NEWS.
Idiot. Go kill yourself.
I’ll check out stefbot’s videos tomorrow, but it’s not so much your ideas I’m against, it’s the reality of those ideas. Much like Communism, it looks great on paper, but runs into inevitable problems.
Just for the record, we agree on personal freedom and competition. We just differ on how to get there.
I thought that way too once… open your mind, try these ideas on… look at youtube user stefbot he has really good arguments against the coercive state and for a more open-source, competition welcome state of society.
that’s what happens in a socialist system, everyone believes the government is supposed to take care of people.
Communism DOESN’T look great on paper. Anyone with half a brain can understand why it will never work. Free markets is not some grand plan to solve all the problems of society which is good in theory but can never work, it’s man’s default mode of exchange. The kind of regulations you want look great on paper, but in reality, they are used by the biggest corporations to keep the little guys out. That’s their dirty little secret, the regulations you fight for are exactly what they want.
A monopoly is a single company that provides a service. If you have more than one, it’s not a monopoly. The “private sector” is not a single entity, it works with different rules than the government which just prints money and puts us all into debts. The government is the only monopoly I see here. But you have no problem with government being a monopoly on the initiation of force against innocent people, right?
So Obama hires lobbyists, die-hard communists, radicals and Alinsky-ites in his administration, and we have to ignore all that and bash Fox News and Alex Jones instead? Look at who these people are, where they come from, not what the media lapdogs say.
Marx said it was necessary for communists to kill the lesser races and classes which would never evolve to the soviet man’s level. That looks great on paper to you? Using communism’s failures as a way to bash free markets is really absurd. Free markets are what you have when noone imposes anything, communism needs to be imposed.