Tag: carbon dioxide

May thirty-first …

Even more scary than carbon dioxide …

“This is a really big asteroid, similar in size to the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and it’s getting very close to us,” she said. “Fortunately we’ve been tracking its orbit very carefully so we know with great certainty it won’t hit us.

“We don’t need to panic, but we do need to pay attention,” she said.

Is that like, 97% of space scientists agree?

It’s 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest pass to Earth on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. PDT.

Maybe it is, the trajectory of objects is space is about observations and calculations, not computer modelling. Still asteroids pose a far greater risk to life on earth than does CO2.

Full article <HERE>.

Atmospheric …

Important announcement … 99.96% of the atmosphere is not CO2.

It wasn’t always so. The phanerozoic is the eon of abundant life on earth, that’s about 570 million years. All current life is descended from ancestors that existed throughout that entire span of time. For the first 150 million years or so our ancestors survived in an atmosphere that contained about 4000 parts per million of CO2, imagine that … only 99.6% of their atmosphere wasn’t CO2!

The graph is from Wikipedia, the present day is on the left, which may not be the best way to show it.

Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide

Carbon dioxide is essential to plants, the process of photosynthesis requires CO2 and releases oxygen. All the free oxygen in the atmosphere, essential for us to survive, is the result of photosynthesis. Oxygen is too reactive a substance to persist long in a free state. If photosynthesis stopped the atmosphere would soon be depleted of oxygen and animal life would cease.

Lovely day …

Melbourne is enjoying an Indian Summer, or at least a few days of one. I’ve just walked the dog along the beach, clear sky, no wind, calm sea and a top of about 25 degrees. Beautiful.

Or very alarming depending on your point of view, although it’s often said that if you don’t like Melbourne’s weather just hang around for a while.

Whilst not exclusively the province of old women, the weather does seem to hold a special interest for them, you often hear them discussing it. That is very interesting because old women are often witches. The Malleus Maleficarum(Latin for “Hammer of the Witches“) is a treatise on the prosecution of witches, written in 1486 and published the following year. It admits that men can also be witches but malificarum is the feminine form of the noun.

Outside certain backward parts of the world, witches are rarely prosecuted these days but it was big business in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The trials spread throughout Europe and Scandinavia and were conducted by Catholics and Protestants, in both ecclesiastical and secular courts. The victims were disproportionately women, especially the poor and the widowed.

That period coincides with the Little Ice Age. Clearly no coincidence because as the Malleus tells us in a chapter titled “How they Raise and Stir up Hailstorms and Tempests, and Cause Lightning to Blast both Men and Beasts” witches can control the weather. The chapter concludes with “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that, just as easily as they raise hailstorms, so can they cause lightning and storms at sea; and so no doubt at all remains on these points.” Even then, the science was settled.

The end of the Little Ice Age can best be explained by a modern theory. The burning of all those witches released a great deal of carbon dioxide.

 

China & the carbon fairy …

From a faraway land a tale of a faraway land, that has so much in common with our own antipodean paradise that it is worth reading as a parable …

Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con): Criminologists have observed that the victims of confidence tricksters are often willing—indeed, eager—to believe the story to which they fall victim.  The more absurd, fantastic or fabulous the story, the more willing they are to believe it.

This Select Committee report – Low Carbon Cooperation with China – and the government’s reply prove that Ministers and Members will willingly believe any delusion as long as it is sufficiently fabulous.  It contains all the characteristics necessary for the sort of fairy tale in which one wants to believe: it has a faraway country, mysterious powers that we attribute to ourselves, and pots of gold—green gold—at the end of the rainbow.

Pray continue …