Self-cleaning planet
On a day when we learn that household energy bills may rise by almost 40% - over and above the already massive increases in the cost of fuels - to help fund the Government's grandiose scheme to turn the country into a giant wind-farm, it's interesting to learn that nature may have found its own solution to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
According to a new study from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, large amounts of ozone are disappearing from the Atlantic ocean, especially from the tropical area around the Cape Verde islands. This has nothing to do with the ozone "hole" around the Antarctica which they doom-mongers used to threaten us with, and about which we hear much less nowadays. Rather, it's relatively low-lying, useless ozone which is actually a greenhouse gas. And its loss is particularly great news because when it is broken down it produces a chemical that, in turn, attacks the even more greenhousey methane.
What is happening, it seems, is that bromine and iodine, produced by sea spray and emissions from phytoplankton, attack the atmospheric ozone. And as Professor John Plane, one of the lead researchers, notes, "the production of iodine and bromine mid-ocean implies that destruction of ozone over the oceans could be global". It has been known for a long time that the oceans serve as carbon sinks. It now seems they may be ozone and methane sinks as well.
Science Daily quotes Professor Alastair Lewis, who describes it as a good news story "at the moment" but still manages to find a downside. It could only take "a small increase in nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel combustion" to produce the opposite effect, he warns. But then reputable scientists have to invent worst case scenarios, otherwise they might be open to accusations of not taking the threat of global warming seriously enough. The findings point to a different conclusion, that the planet retains a vast and little understood capacity for rebalancing itself. All the climate change projections on which governments base their ruinously expensive and probably suicidal plans are crude speculations. No-one really understands how the climate works.
According to a new study from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, large amounts of ozone are disappearing from the Atlantic ocean, especially from the tropical area around the Cape Verde islands. This has nothing to do with the ozone "hole" around the Antarctica which they doom-mongers used to threaten us with, and about which we hear much less nowadays. Rather, it's relatively low-lying, useless ozone which is actually a greenhouse gas. And its loss is particularly great news because when it is broken down it produces a chemical that, in turn, attacks the even more greenhousey methane.
What is happening, it seems, is that bromine and iodine, produced by sea spray and emissions from phytoplankton, attack the atmospheric ozone. And as Professor John Plane, one of the lead researchers, notes, "the production of iodine and bromine mid-ocean implies that destruction of ozone over the oceans could be global". It has been known for a long time that the oceans serve as carbon sinks. It now seems they may be ozone and methane sinks as well.
Science Daily quotes Professor Alastair Lewis, who describes it as a good news story "at the moment" but still manages to find a downside. It could only take "a small increase in nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel combustion" to produce the opposite effect, he warns. But then reputable scientists have to invent worst case scenarios, otherwise they might be open to accusations of not taking the threat of global warming seriously enough. The findings point to a different conclusion, that the planet retains a vast and little understood capacity for rebalancing itself. All the climate change projections on which governments base their ruinously expensive and probably suicidal plans are crude speculations. No-one really understands how the climate works.
Comments
Yes, climate models can be wrong, and yes, we don't understand everything about a very complex system. But then, we don't understand everything about the human body, either. And what happens when you put too much CO2 into one of those?
But re: the cost of 'sustainable' energy, the Register has a wonderful piece based on research by a proper scientist i.e. someone who actually knows how to crunch the numbers. And, yes, wind farms are crap.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/20/mackay_on_carbon_free_uk/
One point we can probably all agree on is that banning standby buttons on TVs etc will not make a damn bit of difference. Mine are still glowing away as I type this.
two words:
ICE EPOCH
two more:
CENTRAL HEATING
put them together and waddaya got? a rather pleasant, nice n' toasty planet on which to continue this (so-called) civilisation of ours
To call the most likely scenario an "orthodox" is a sly use of language. An orthodox is an unquestioned point of faith. Man made climate change is just a theory, and one which we must remain sceptical about, but at the same time must be taken very seriously, as the consequences would be so serious. Creationists write-off evolution an orthodox or dogma, but of course it is anything but. I worry that you're making the same mistake here.
We are now seeing the first fruits of the environmentalist orthodoxy in the bio-fuels debacle, are we not? Almost as soon as the EU and other governments had committed themselves to bio-fuel targets as a "solution" to climate change, it became apparent that they were anything but. Of course, environmental groups changed their minds as soon as the consequences began to materialise; but then it's easy for scientists and pressure groups to change their minds. The trouble is, biofuel targets are now in the system, and bureaucratic regimes - especially one insulated from the democratic process, like the EU commission - having set their targets, are loath to change them. So the disaster continues.
What happened, of course, was that bio-fuel was embraced as a solution much earlier than it should have been, before the proper assessments had been made, because governments were anxious to be seen to be "doing something". Without the climate of "orthodoxy" there would have been more willingness on the part of those involved to say "hang on a minute, are we really sure about this?"