This articles demonstrates several things that I have long argued, but people said I was nuts. While global warming is scary its not the scariest thing going on. The globe should be cooling. By now we should down 1 degree faranheit (used throughout) at the equator and maybe 4 or 5 degrees at the poles. This discrepancy is really really frightening because it raises the chances that we will lose control entirely and the climate will “tip” or go haywire. And in fact you see a little of that already with the equator up a full degree but the poles are up 8 degrees in some places.

So instead of shrinking, our glaciers should be growing and our supply of fresh drinking water should go up as the cold rains fall as the oceans evaporate a tad. The ocean should be dropping a bit as should our food production (yah I know bummer). But tell that to Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. Why is this so dangerous. Well because the cooling that should be happening will not happen uniformly, there should be heat spikes and since the global cooling is being masked by the warming we won’t know in advance when that happens. But when it does in will exponentially hammer the environment.

In addition this article also makes the point that a warm ocean will cease to accept carbon. The single largest carbon sink we have, the bottom of the pacific ocean, will quit working and then, well, we are done. In fact, in the latest edition of National Geographic they claim that the Earth is currently at 380 parts/mill. of carbon above a baseline for the planet at about 250 parts/mill. It further argues that things will get really bad around 450 parts/mill. This article argues that we are ALREADY THERE!

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Study: Carbon dioxide increasing faster than expected in atmosphere

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON – Just days after the Nobel prize was awarded for global wanning work, an alarm­ing new study finds that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is in­creasing faster than expected.

Carbon dioxide emissions were 35 percent higher in 2006 than in 1990, a much faster growth rate than anticipated, researchers led by Josep G. Canadell, of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and In­dustrial Research Organization, re­port in today’s edition of Proceed­ings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Increased industrial use of fossil fuels coupled with a decline in the gas absorbed by the oceans and land were listed as causes of the in­crease.

“In addition to the growth of global population and wealth, we now know that significant contribu­tions to the growth of atmospheric C02 arise from the slowdown” of nature’s ability to take the chemical out of the air, said Canadell, direc­tor of the Global Carbon Project at the research organization.

The changes “characterize a car­bon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing,” the researchers report.

Kevin Trenberth of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo, said the “paper raises some very important issues that the public should be aware of: Namely that concentrations of C02 are increasing at much higher rates than previously expected, and this is in spite of the Kyoto Protocol that is designed to hold them down in western countries.”

Alan Robock, associate director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University, added: “What is really shocking is the reduction of the oceanic C02 sink,” meaning the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide, re­moving it from the atmosphere.

The researchers blamed that re­duction on changes in wind circula­tion, but Robock said he also thinks rising ocean temperatures reduce the ability to take in the gas.

“Think that a warm Coke has less fizz than a cold Coke,” he said.

Neither Robock nor Trenberth

was part of Canadell’s research team.

Carbon dioxide is the leading “greenhouse gas,” so named be­cause their accumulation in the at­mosphere can help trap heat from the sun, causing potentially dan­gerous warming of the planet.

While most atmospheric scien­tists accept the idea, finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emis­sions has been a political problem because of potential effects on the economy.

Earlier this month, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and for­mer Vice President Al Gore for their work in calling attention to global warming.

“It turns out that global warming critics were right when they said that global climate models did not do a good job at predicting climate change,” Robock commented: “But what has been wrong recently is that the climate is changing even faster than the models said.

In fact, Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than any models pre­dicted, and sea level is rising much faster than IPCC previously pre­dicted.”

According to the new study, car­bon released from burning fossil

fuel and making cement rose from 7.0 billion metric tons per year in 2000 to 8.4 billion metric tons in 2006. A metric tons is 2,205 pounds.The growth rate increased from 1.3 percent per year in 1990-1999 to 3.3 percent per year in 2000-2006, the researchers added.

Trenberth noted that carbon dioxide is not the whole story — methane emissions have declined, so total greenhouse gases are not increasing as much as carbon diox­ide alone.

Also, he added, other pollution plays a role by cooling.

There are changes from year to year in the fraction of the atmos­phere made up of carbon dioxide and the question is whether this in­crease is transient or will be sus­tained, he said.

“The theory suggests increases in (the atmospheric fraction), as is claimed here, but the evidence is not strong,” Trenberth said.

The paper looks at a rather short time to measure a trend, Robock added, “but the results they get cer­tainly look reasonable, and much of the paper is looking at much longer trends.”

The research was supported by Australian, European and other in­ternational agencies.