"Yes, natural emissions are quite large (about 220 gigatonnes of C vs 9 GT C for anthropogenic emissions), but they are essentially a constant in the equation and do not affect the final result."

220 vs. 9

Wow.

TAX THE SUN!

Jim Prentice's impending $30/tonne green shift tax is coming soon....be happy that your conservative government is on top of the file.

Or at the least, they're very good at tax increases.

Dang. Nice one.

But you must remember that all of the delegates will have a really nice time in Copenhagen at taxpayers expense. But I don't know why they should be doing it in Dec in a northern country - this should have been in the summer so that the delegates could have enjoyed the nice temperatures. All the delegates will be wined, dined and driven around in big cars (no bikes/buses for them) and I just wonder how many will arrive in their private jets. If there were serious about addressing climate change (which they are not since climate change is a naturally occurring event that can't be controlled) they would be doing this whole meeting over the internet.

Paging Robin Hood, paging Robin Hood......Your needed.

Let's play the Copenhagen Game !!

Here's what's in the proposed Copenhagen Accord.

For example, Para 41 obligates Annex 1 nations (that means us/Canada) to provide at least 0.7% of our GDP to the 3rd world nations to pay for our climate debt. For Canada, this means we would start donating at the $9.5 Billion level and increase this donation annually as/if our GDP increases.

So where do we find $9.5 billion ? Increase the annual deficit and national debt ? Take it out of Transfer payments to the Provinces ?

The other area that is interesting is that regardless if we go with a 6% cut from our 1990 GhG emission levels (the Kyoto target) or the 20/20 target . . 20 % reduction of our 2007 GhG emission levels by 2020, Canada needs to reduce our carbon GhG emissions by about 150,000 megatonnes (Mt).

So what does this mean? Look at the list below – it is a subset of a list I downloaded from Environment Canada. Start cutting all or some of the categories back until you have a total cut of 150,000 Mt. My favorite way would be to stop using every car, truck, bus, boat, plane and train in Canada. That would total 147,534 Mt and be close enough to our 150,000 Mt target that could claim victory.

Electric/heat generation 126 000
Fossil Fuel Industries 70,000
Mining & Gas 23,000
Residential 40,000
Automobile 41, 000
Light Gas trucks 45, 000
Heavy Gas Trucks 6,640
Heavy Diesel Trucks 40, 100
Railways 7,000
Off Road Diesel 25,000
Off Road Gas 6,7000
Domestic Aviation 7, 804
Metal Production 13, 800
Chemical Industry 8,900
Mineral Production 9, 400
Agriculture 60,000

Your target is 150,000 . . . what would you cut ?

The graph is meaningless, AGW isn't about CO2.

AGW is about social justice for African Americans that don't live in America. You betta ask somebody!

Hard

As long as they're transferring the wealth to Quebec, Ontario and Atlantic Canada and not our foreign enemies I can stomach the new tax. After all, politically the issue is "settled" regardless of who I vote for.

There's nothing to cut Fred - there's more civil servants to hire, and a big shiny Carbon Tax coming to help pay for it.

You honestly don't think the government would suffer - did you?

As long as they're transferring the wealth to Quebec, Ontario and Atlantic Canada and not our foreign enemies I can stomach the new tax.

Wasn't that called the NEP?

hardboiled: "Or at the least, they're very good at tax increases."

*Very* good? I wouldn't go that far. And I've seen better -- much better.

Allan: it's even more interesting than that. Willis says that he assumed that 220 GT annual emissions from the natural world was a constant that did not change. However, he knows as well as anyone that all of the sources and sinks of CO2 have not been quantified. The annual ocean-atmosphere CO2 exchange alone is on the order of 15,000 GT. What all this means is that relatively trivial changes in the natural world are entirely sufficient to make the human contribution irrelevant.

Actually, I'm hoping that Copenhagen will produce a large malodorous stench that will emanate from Jim Prentice and Stephen Harper and the other Canadian delegates in the form of a methane like cloud that will hover over the Tivoli Gardens, and drive the little mermaid to abandon her famous perch. Is mathane a hydro-carbon?

largen , a little early to be drinkin'

but yes, Methane is a hydrocarbon.

I would dearly love to see a volcanic eruption or two really soon that would knock the wheels off the greenies little track. I'd love to see how they are going to cap & trade with Mother Nature.

The soon-to-be former (knock on wood) Gun Registry will become the CO2 Registry. No pink slips. Just reassigned government employees.

I would be interested to know how the 9GT of human emissions breaks down. What portion of it is the simple act of breathing out as opposed to what we produce by burning fossil fuels, industrialization, etc.

It is admittedly just a guess, but I'd bet on what we breath out as being the larger share. If true, that leaves just 4GT or so produced otherwise. A reduction of 25% of that would equal out to all of 1GT, or less than half of 1 percent of total human and earth produced carbon emissions.

It is beyond insane to believe that that miniscule reduction could make more than an imperceptable difference.

Ah, horse puckey! It's high time to call these crypto-communists out! Paint a bull's eye on them and declare "open season". They are now "fair game" in the "hate humans" category. Probably make chewy sausage, though, but you won't have to add pork to the mix. I prefer mine "smoked".

(more in the comments).

*Andrew Sandlin

Read it and it makes a very simple statement, maybe so simple that the 'elite' may be able to understand it.

Posted by: Fred at November 10, 2009 11:01 AM

Ah, I'll take electric/heat generation for 126,000 Alex.

Maximize corpses, freeze in the dark!

"The soon-to-be former (knock on wood) Gun Registry will become the CO2 Registry. No pink slips. Just reassigned government employees.

You know, I had that same thought this morning: what happens to all those "high paying" federal government jobs, down at te registry? They sure aren't going to save us taxpayers any on salasries and pensions with that bunch. D'ere Union, eh?

With 1 in 10 Canadians being a public servant, could not ever 10 people have a public person to rob them? Then you can put a face to the robbers.

Copenhagen is shaping up to be a non-event----
OBOZO won't attend because it is not about him---........besides by that time he may be irrelevant---a "former president".
Much like BALI---India/China/Brazil won't sign on to the stupidity---they will save us from the solution to this non-existant problem....unless all pretense to limiting harmless emmisions is blatantly replaced by an global agenda...forming a global government with a mandate to impoverish the developed world.

cgh, so what you're saying is the post-industrial increase in CO2 PPM could possibly be more natures doing than our own?

Cal2 - It's never too early in my time zone.

I liked it better when the left was yammering about saving the rain forests.

Allan, the fact is that we just cannot know at this time. What we do know is that ocean temperature changes its solubility. As the oceans warm up, they give up CO2 to the atmosphere. As they cool down, they absorb CO2. The geologic record is very clear on this, by the way. Changes in CO2 concentrations have always followed, never preceded, a change in temperatures. If CO2 is the dominant driver in climate as the global warmers insist, then this is utterly impossible. By their theory, a change in CO2 MUST be followed by a temperature response.

So, what we know is that the world's temperatures have been slowly, steadily rising for the past 150 years from the last of the Little Ice Age (LIA). That means that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been rising as well, independent of any human activity. The response times of climate resulting from change can be very long. For example, the Wisconsin Ice Age of 40,000 years ago resulted in major changes to ocean levels, dropping as the ice advanced and rising as the ice retreated. The Antarctic ice sheets are still not finished responding to the rising sea levels from more than 10,000 years ago.

Even in recorded history, climate and ocean levels have varied greatly from the present day. For example, at the famous Battle of Thermopylae, the pass defended by the Greeks against the Persians was about 30 feet wide at its narrowest. Today, the pass is about 3 km. wide as a result of falling water levels in the Mediterranean over the past two millenia. (Must have been all those SUVs the Spartans drove to and abandoned on the battlefield).

Now comes the unknown part. Large parts of that CO2 would be sequestered in biomass. More atmospheric CO2 means more plant life. Since we cannot assess accurately how much biomass is present on the planet today compared with, say, 1650, we have no real way of knowing how much of the CO2 increase is human and how much is natural oceanic release subsequently removed into vegetation, etc. There are many more complications than this one, but this can serve as an example.

What is also forgotten is that CO2 will not endlessly accumulate in oceans. In the presence of liquid water, CO2 becomes limestone. Increase the concentration of CO2 or carbonic acid in water, and you increase the rate of calcium carbonate formation. (Greatly simplified, the formula is CO2 + basaltic rock + water = water + calcium carbonate + sand.)This again is a process that has not been quantified within the context of the AGW theory and accounted for. AGW theory and the IPCC simply takes it as a given that all increase in CO2 is of human origin. It's anthropocentrism at its worst.

There is not even agreement on CO2 concentration. IPCC uses the Antarctic ice core records. However, there is little agreement between those and the direct chemical measurement records of CO2 going back to the early 19th c. So there are even question marks, albeit much lesser ones, around the claim that CO2 has risen over the course of the past century and by how much. The real argument is not over whether it has gone up but rather by how much.

Finally, even if all the emissions of CO2 are of human origin as claimed, it still doesn't produce the effect that the IPCC claims it will, because the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere are essentially at saturation. What the IPCC claims is that CO2 produces a positive feedback in increasing water vapour (the dominant greenhouse gas) which produces most of the warming. The problem with this is that such a feedback mechanism has never been demonstrated. In fact the reverse appears to be the case; higher temperatures result in decreased cloud cover, and increased heat loss (and vice versa). Meaning that the feedback relationship between CO2 and temperature is negative, not positive. Hence, the entire theory of AGW collapses.

Yet, the theory of wealth redistribution continues to live.

During an Alaska cruise this spring I was informed (by the national park rangers, no less), that from the time it was sighted by George Vancouver in 1790 until the time it was visited by John Muir in 1890, the glacier in Glacier Bay National Park had receded 50 miles. Must have been all those SUVs the Alaskan natives were driving back in the 1800's, or maybe the big campfires. I got a strong feeling that the rangers felt that AGW was a lot of BS but they couldn't actually come right out and say it, probably for fear of losing their jobs.

In short - increase CO2 conc and the plants and the world loves it. Decrease CO2, and the plants starve and so do we.

Yet, the theory of wealth redistribution continues to live.
Posted by: set you free at November 10, 2009 1:28 PM

The eternal optimist. The people with the billions are going to share. How nice.

1. [quote]The Wisconsin Ice Age of 40,000 years ago resulted in major changes to ocean levels, dropping as the ice advanced and rising as the ice retreated. The Antarctic ice sheets are still not finished responding to the rising sea levels from more than 10,000 years ago[/quote] cgh

2.[quote]For example, at the famous Battle of Thermopylae, the pass defended by the Greeks against the Persians was about 30 feet wide at its narrowest. Today, the pass is about 3 km. wide as a result of falling water levels in the Mediterranean over the past two millenia [/quote]cgh.

Those two quotes seem to conflict, or not. The depth of the Ocean may increase (more water) when surface ice melts, but that does not mean that the ocean bottom (or the continental crust) has a fixed distance relationship to the Core. The outer core has irregularities (jelly) of up to 8 kilometers, enough for gravity to balance per ocean/crust mass. I think the outer core may explain how water has been distributed on the planet..

I would like to see proof that the water level, relative to land mass, increases when land ice melts..

All that's going to be proven is that government will reach into your wallet under any excuse that it can.

Thanks Jim Prentice.

cgh - thanks for the information

I did the arithmetic. The average human exhales about half a litre of air, and the concentration of CO2 is about 4%. So, when you breathe out, you're putting about 20 ml of CO2 in the air. Humans breathe between 9 times a minute (sleeping), and 20 times during heavy exertion. It's pretty hard to weight this - most people spend more time sleeping than they do in heavy exertion, so I'll just pick 10 times. So, every minute, you're putting about 200 ml of CO2 in the air. 1440 minutes in a day, so each of us adds 288 litres. CO2 had a gaseous density of 1.98 g/L. So each day, we put about half a kilo in. 6 billion of us (I counted!) means we add 3 billion kilos. 365 days means we add 1.2 billion tons each year, or about 13% of that 9 GT figure.

But in 1900, the world population was only 1.6 billion. And it's possible that those additional 4.4 billion people plus the growth in paved areas put us over some "tipping point" where the amount of carbon put in the air doesn't get balanced by the systems which take it out.

So, the solution is simple. Kill 4.4 billion people. That would please those lunatic AGW advocates no end. (I actually think Fruitfly said something like the Earth can only support 2 billion people. One of them being him, of course.)

I just don't get the socialist mind set. They claim they love people, but they keep starting things like welfare, nationalising businesses, and punitive taxation, all of which have been shown to be failed policy, and make people poorer and more miserable.

Then we go to Afghanistan, where young girls get acid thrown in their faces, and get denounced when we try to restore those girls' human rights. It's ironic that this week marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and hundreds of millions had their freedom restored, because these socialist human rights "lovers" all favoured appeasement and detente. That's why I think so many of them are hypocrites.

0.038% CO2

LuigIffy’s Carboni’s tax, etc.?

Required reading.

Facts/data/figures, etc., mean less than zilch to an AGW enviro-fantasist.

It’s for the uncommitted & lurkers who must see/read/ponder this.
…-

“MOT: Climate catastrophe cancelled

Finnish Broadcasting Co. YLE, TV1, Nov 11th 2009 at 8.00 pm.

Voiceover (VO), reporter Martti Backman: Governments around the world are preparing for a grand climate conference, which should decide how humanity responds to the threat of a climate catastrophe. Negotiations are under way to replace the Kyoto treaty with a new treaty of Copenhagen.

VO: The threat is based on assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. According to the panel, the Earth is going through an unprecedented period of temperature increase, caused by man and his carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and oil.

(Pictures from An Incovenient Truth)

The Earth’s climate has always been changing. But now we are told that warming is happening faster than ever. The view is based on this figure.”

http://ohjelmat.yle.fi/mot/taman_viikon_mot/transcript_english

Less than 0.04%
Not 4%
Out by two orders of magnitude.
(Same math has Dow breaking 10,000 instead of 4500?)

Got it ! Exhale is 4% CO2

"The soon-to-be former (knock on wood) Gun Registry will become the CO2 Registry. No pink slips. Just reassigned government employees.

The thought had occurred to me too that they couldn't let all those swivel servants go, poor optics dontcha know, but I was hoping they would turn it into a Sex Offender Registry.

At least that would have the potential to be useful to Canadian society.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/fq/emissions.html#q7

"The average person, through the natural process of breathing, produces approximately 2.3 pounds (1 kg) of carbon dioxide per day." So I was off by a factor of 2 in my calculations. And the .038 number is the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, not in your exhaled breath.

http://www.uigi.com/carbondioxide.html

"As an example, exhaled air contains as much as 4% carbon dioxide, or about 100 times the amount of carbon dioxide which was breathed in. "

I do check my work, fellas.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=national&year=2009&month=10&submitted=Get+Report
Third coldest October...ever recorded

The green-slime constantly points to thinning ice in the Arctic and that's correct, but blaming co2 is all wrong. It was studied for years by Swedes/Norwegians and is the Spitzbergen Current,+imo changing wind patterns.

How will moving production from clean factories here to dirty factories in China reduce pollution?

Phillip, there's no contradiction between the two. The Wisconsin ice age lowered sea levels because of all the water that was locked up in continental ice masses. With respect to the historic reference to the Mediterranean, that's quite different. That sea is an intersection between two tectonic plates, Africa and Europe, with only a very restricted connection to the Atlantic. There are a very complex series of interactions between water inflows and outflows to the Atlantic Ocean that have a large role in determining the relative sea level of the Mediterranean. As a result, the Mediterranean has a tendency to change sea level with great frequency in geologic terms. For example, 6 million years ago, before the ice ages, the sea had almost entirely disappeared with the closure of the Gibraltar straits.