Global Warming

While your "excursions and alarms" about methane are subject to some question, there is none about the fact that CO2 is not the cause of any significant amount of climate warming. Suggest that you read some unbiased documentation about the role of water vapor -- which happens to be a **major** atmospheric greenhouse gas, as opposed to CO2 which is a very minor (almost insignificant) one.

OK, I will.

Hundreds of leading scientists worldwide cannot be biased.  It could be that what you are reading is tilted toward denial of what is happening.

I googled this on internet and found the following very credible and well explained most recent new rebuttal of 2.September 2010 by James Frank in http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm:

Link to this page

The skeptic argument...

Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
"Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas. If you get a fall evening and the sky is clear, heat will escape, the temperature will drop. If there's cloud cover, the heat is trapped by water vapour and the temperature stays warm. If you go to In Salah in southern Algeria, they recorded at noon 52°C. By midnight, it's -3.6°C. It's caused because there is very little water vapour in the atmosphere and is a demonstration of water vapour as the most important greenhouse gas." (Tim Ball)

Intermediate

When skeptics use this argument, they are trying to imply that an increase in CO2 isn't a major problem. If CO2 isn't as powerful as water vapour, which there's already a lot of, adding a little more CO2 couldn't be that bad, right? What this argument misses is the fact that water vapour creates what scientists call a 'positive feedback loop' in the atmosphere — making any temperature changes larger than they would be otherwise.

How does this work? The amount of water vapour in the atmosphere exists in direct relation to the temperature. If you increase the temperature, more water evaporates and becomes vapour, and vice versa. So when something else causes a temperature increase (such as extra CO2 from fossil fuels), more water evaporates. Then, since water vapour is a greenhouse gas, this additional water vapour causes the temperature to go up even further—a positive feedback.

How much does water vapour amplify CO2 warming? Studies show that water vapour feedback roughly doubles the amount of warming caused by CO2. So if there is a 1°C change caused by CO2, the water vapour will cause the temperature to go up another 1°C. When other feedback loops are included, the total warming from a potential 1°C change caused by CO2 is, in reality, as much as 3°C.

The other factor to consider is that water is evaporated from the land and sea and falls as rain or snow all the time. Thus the amount held in the atmosphere as water vapour varies greatly in just hours and days as a result of the prevailing weather in any location. So even though water vapour is the greatest greenhouse gas, it is relatively short-lived. On the other hand, CO2 is removed from the air by natural geological-scale processes and these take a long time to work. Consequently CO2 stays in our atmosphere for years and even centuries. A small additional amount has a much more long-term effect.

So skeptics are right in saying that water vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas. What they don't mention is that the water vapour feedback loop actually makes temperature changes caused by CO2 even bigger.

Rebuttal written by James Frank. Last updated on 2 September 2010.

John, I´ve researched your remarks in depth and recently more and more credible evidence points to your being very very right that methane release has now really already become a major factor in the dangerously underestimated vicious circle of global warming.

Unfortunately it is more likely that cows will fly than that the world´s politicians, who are preoccupied by other pressures, will wake up or unite in time to react and avert an imminent catastrophe.

Even James Nash´s article below is a grave understatement of the danger!

I give it a maximum of only 10 years!

Starting A Runaway Global Warming Process

Thursday, November 4th, 2010 at 11:29 pm     


      ~ More

Author: James Nash
Title: Starting A Runaway Global Warming Process

Article: Accelerated global warming could lead to a runaway methane global warming effect due to the release of methane currently trapped in unstable methane hydrate deposits in the arctic that could be destabilised by accelerated global warming effects. Core samples taken from old ocean sediment layers have been used to trace back in time the climate changes that have occurred over the past tens of millions of years. By analysing the incidence of different fossil shell remains of sea creatures occurring in these sediments it is possible to track the changes in the sea water temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 occurring at the time the shells were formed and deposited. These shells contain carbon from the CO2 in the atmosphere which was dissolved in the sea water in which the creatures lived just as takes place today. From these records it appears that there have been short periods of only a few hundred years in the geological past when rapid increases of the Earth's temperature have occurred superimposed on top of the rise and fall of average temperatures over the longer term. For these short periods temperature rises of up to 8 degrees centigrade appear to have occurred on top of existing long term rises of 5 to 7 degrees to give temperatures up to 15 degrees centigrade warmer than today. Temperatures then fell back to the long term trend, the whole rise and fall only lasting a few hundred years. The most likely cause of this rapid global warming over such a short period is the release of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is 60 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas but only remains in the atmosphere for about ten years and so looses it's greenhouse effect quickly compared to CO2 which remains in the atmosphere for 100 years. CO2 would not be available in sufficient quantities to achieve the rapid warming and if CO2 was the cause then the raised temperatures would last a lot longer. Methane hydrates occur extensively today all over the world. They consist of methane stored within unstable water bound deposits that if disturbed release the methane. They occur in major river deltas such as the Amazon delta and in old delta areas such as the Gulf of Mexico. Major rivers carry millions of tons of silt containing vegetable matter that continues to decay after the silt is deposited in the river delta. This anaerobic decay produces methane which gets trapped in the silt as methane hydrates until the conditions of water temperature and pressure change which can release the methane in vast quantities very quickly. Another form is a frozen slush/ice methane hydrate where the methane is trapped in an ice/water mixture which releases the methane when it warms up or the pressure on the ice is reduced. Frozen methane hydrates can contain 170 times their own volume of methane. These frozen hydrates occur in the seabed deposits of the Arctic Ocean. Methane can also be trapped by permafrost layers which over-lay lower unfrozen layers of vegetable material that is decaying and producing methane which remains trapped by the frozen permafrost on top. If the permafrost layer were to melt then the methane in the layers below would escape into the atmosphere. Given the vast areas of permafrost in northern latitudes there is a significant potential for methane to be trapped that would be released if the permafrost melted as a result of global warming. The theory for these rapid rises and falls of temperature, based on the geological records from 55 million years ago, is that gradual global warming due to some natural cause had resulted in temperatures 5 to 7 degrees centigrade higher than average (i.e. higher than today's temperatures). At this point methane trapped in methane hydrate deposits started to be released into the atmosphere and accelerated the rate of warming. This would result in further warming releasing more methane. As the atmosphere warmed different types of methane deposits would start to be released and so a cycle of methane release leading to increased warming leading to more methane release from other areas of methane deposits elsewhere in the world would become established as global warming effected different areas of the world. There is an intriguing photograph of what appears to be a methane plume coming up out of the Arctic ice sheet which indicates that the phenomenon described above can occur. There have also been incidences of oil drilling inadvertently triggering large releases of methane from hydrate deposits. One theory to explain the loss of ships in the so called Bermuda triangle is that they have been engulfed in a sudden methane release which reduces the buoyancy of the sea water so that the ship sinks. So, does methane pose a threat today? Let us review the situation. We know there are extensive methane hydrate and permafrost deposits all around the world. We have evidence that we are at the beginning of a period of global warming that is probably being made worse by the continuing build up of CO2 in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel burning. Recent computer modelling incorporating the feed back effects of global warming that has already occurred suggests that by about 2050 we may start to loose the beneficial effects of the Amazon rain forest as a carbon sink. This could lead to temperature rises of 5 to 8 degrees centigrade by 2100. This would be uncharted territory and no one really knows at present how the world's environmental systems would change but we now have the evidence from the geological past. On the basis of this evidence global warming can lead to methane releases which once started would escalate. This would be the worst possible thing to happen because once started there would be no way of stopping a runaway methane global warming event. We CAN reduce our CO2 emissions from fossil fuels but we COULD NOT reduce methane emissions once they started, huge natural forces would take over and change our world. This would probably result in the melting of the Antarctic icecap which would raise sea levels by 50 metres and would completely change the climates of the world. So what should we do? We should be careful and not risk starting the sequence events described above. To do this we must reduce total CO2 emissions from now onwards and take measures to protect carbon sinks such as the Amazon rainforest. If we all carry on burning so much fossil fuel as we do now we will be running the risk of starting an unstoppable runaway methane global warming event within the foreseeable future. Only major absolute reductions in CO2 emissions NOW will avoid this risk. James Nash is a climate scientist with Greatest Planet (www.greatestplanet.org). Greatest Planet is a non-profit environmental organization specialising in carbon offset investments.

an increase in the  earth's average atmospheric temperature  that causes corresponding changes in climate and that may result from the greenhouse effect.

You may find more some references site to Global warming in the web

AL GORE GLOBAL WARMMING

A new scientific paper says that man has had little or nothing to do with global temperature variations. Maybe the only place it's really getting hotter is in Al Gore's head.

Because he must be getting flustered now, what with his efforts to save the benighted world from global warming continually being exposed as a fraud.

The true believers will not be moved by the peer-reviewed findings of Chris de Freitas, John McLean and Bob Carter, scientists at universities in Australia and New Zealand.

Warming advocates have too much invested in perpetuating the myth. (And are probably having too much fun calling those who don't agree with them "deniers" and likening skeptics to fascists.)

But these scientists have made an important contribution to the debate that Gore says doesn't exist.

Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20th century.