Global Temperatures have NOTHING to do with CO2

[highwaystar101]

Sqrl said:

highwaystar101 said:
Come on CO2 isn't exactly a potent greenhouse gas anyway, methane is supposedly 50 times more potent. And I know I've told this story several times, but when I was doing my BSc degree at university I learnt about a chemical that is 17,500 times more potent than CO2 and produced in fairly substantial quantities, but it isn't even taken into consideration when talking about emissions.

I'll take my girlfriends' fathers' point of view on climate change, he's worked as a climatologist for 30 years so I trust him. Humans are having an impact on the climate, but what the media and politicians say is a over hyped. Even so it is hard to measure.

To summarise, my viewpoint is that I believe humans are having an effect on climate change, but it's not 'as bad' as what the media and politicians say, which is a distorted worst case scenario.


But regardless of if you accept it is happening or not an effort must be made to switch to renewable/clean energy and eliminate pollution, because climate change is not the only adverse effect that comes from emissions.

Did you see my responce to you in the last thread about C02 not being a strong GHG?  I explained why it is actually the most important GHG for the AGW theory.  Even diehard AGW supporters will tell you C02 is the real threat, methane and other GHGs are such a miniscule part of our atmosphere (even compared to C02's miniscule amounts) that they pale in comparison to the collective radiative forcing of C02 despite its lower W/m^2.

Edit: Here I found the post, I'll just copy the relevant bits in:

@highwaystar,

 

On why other gases with more greenhouse potential are not talked about it is because they are such a negligible part of our atmosphere. Even C02 is miniscule, anyone can do the calculations with the ppm value.  At ~384ppm we just divide 384 by 1,000,000.  It comes out to 0.0384% of the atmosphere.  And C02 is the most abundant greenhouse gas, aside from water vapor, in the atmosphere.  After C02 it is methane at 1745ppb...thats parts per billion or 0.00017% of the atmosphere. Next is nitrous oxide at 0.0000314% of the atmosphere.

Of these gases, C02 has a radiative forcing of 1.46W/m² , methane is 0.48W/m², nitrous oxide is 0.15W/m² .  Radiative forcing, for the benefit of those not sure, is basically how much heat the gas is capable of trapping.  It's really net irradiance which can be positive and negative but for our purposes it is essentially trapped heat.

Beyond that we get into CFCs which are measured in parts per trillion and have radiative forcings ~0.05W/m² , with some exceptions peaking at 0.17W/m² .  But in total nothing comes close to the impact of carbon dioxide (excepting water vapor which is strictly more impactful) - which itself has an impact of debateable significance.

 

I won't disagree that we impact local enironments (thats blatantly obvious) but human activity is simply not effecting global temperatures in any significant way.

Haha, you went to a lot of effort there, I appreciate it. I actually recall that post now you mention it.