That humans are raising Earth’s temperature is about as certain as any scientific consensus can be. And while the western world may be able to mitigate the impact somewhat, a low-lying Pacific island state can hardly build a sea wall around their entire country. Therefore, I feel it’s very important that people consider the amount of carbon dioxide their activities are generating and do something about it.
So I’m pleased to say that the Mozilla Foundation (that is, Frank, Zak and I) hope to use a small part of our giving budget to offset all the emissions caused by all flights taken by us or Foundation-sponsored volunteers (e.g. localisers attending FOSDEM last February) in 2006.
The current plan is to do this by making a donation to a carbon offsetting charity. The charity concerned needs to be a formal charity, and ideally would be US-based for convenience. So far I have only found carbonfund.org which meets those criteria; if anyone knows of others, I’d be interested to hear about them.
In doing the research to try and work out how much we need to donate, I have been looking at the different carbon offsetting sites to see how they calculate their figures.
The first thing is that the flight distance between two points on the earth seems to be fairly standard – everyone uses Great Circle distances (handy calculator). A great circle is the shortest distance across the surface between two points on a sphere.
However, what does vary is the figure used for emissions per mile, and then the cost per metric tonne of CO2 emitted. This can lead to wildly different offsetting figures for the same flight. I’ve tried to reverse-engineer what these sites do using inputs for flights of different lengths.
| Site | $ per Kg | Kg per mile | $ per mile |
|---|---|---|---|
| climatecare.org | 0.0145 | 0.23 | 0.0036 |
| carbonfund.org | 0.0055 | 0.27 | 0.0015 |
| carbonneutral.com | 0.0163 | 0.18 | 0.0029 |
| atmosfair.de | 0.026 | 0.6 [0] | 0.0156 |
[0]: Or, seemingly, 0.4 for flights under 3-4000 miles)
So it seems that if you offset with atmosfair.de, you pay almost ten times as much as with carbonfund.org! Of course, you would expect the amounts to be somewhat different, if they were tied to the real cost of whatever initiatives were being taken, and because working out the actual impact of 1Kg of carbon is an inexact science. But still, a tenfold difference seems excessive.
Again, if you know of other sites which provide carbon emission calculators for flights, and enough information to be able to work out the above figures for comparison, let me know and I’ll add them to the table.
The current price for a tonne of Carbon Dioxide under the EU’s Emission Trading Scheme is approximately €16, which works out at $0.0205 per kg. That should be a good baseline price, because you could buy some of the allowances and take them off the market. This would make it more expensive for large companies to buy the credits they need to emit CO2. (Ironically airlines are the one group of large companies who don’t have to buy ETS allowances for their emissions; making sure they did would probably be the most direct way to tackle the problem.)
Also note that the CO2/mile figure should vary dramatically depending on how long the flight is. At cruising altitude modern jets are pretty efficient, but taxiing on the ground (which seems to take up half the time on some short haul flights) and take-off/climb are much less efficient.
However what the different organisations will actually do with the money is probably far more important than the details of the calculations. Not all offsetting schemes are equally useful or ethical. (e.g. Planting a tree takes a long time to take effect, and realistically only temporarily sequesters the Carbon Dioxide.)
But Gerv… it’s not. There are scientists, not industry sponsored hacks, that are asking “wait a minute… is this true?”. There is still a certain amount of questiong going on: that maybe this is just part of the Earth’s cycle of warming and cooling. It’s not that certain, not yet.
Gav
Gav: The ice cores evidence shows that the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is significantly higher than it’s been for the last 800,000 years. The same evidence shows that CO2 levels are closely linked to global temperature over the period.
It’s also obvious from observation that the cause of the rise in CO2 levels is human activity. (At least, we’ve been pumping the stuff out, and no-one has postulated that it’s all magically disappearing, to be replaced with CO2 from some other source which is actually causing the rise.) The rise has been far, far faster than any other rise over that time. The increase in CO2 concentration is not a natural process.
The CO2 rise we are responsible for also causes other, non-warming, deleterious effects on the environment such as ocean acidification, which attacks coral reefs and upsets the marine ecosystem.
But the real question is: how certain would you like to be before you think we should do something? What percentage of climate scientists, in your view, forms a consensus?
There’s quite an impressive book by Michael Crichton, “State of Fear”, related to this subject. While not every small bit about the possibility of weather manipulation should be believed (science fiction), he also presents a theory of fear as an instrument of social control. “Global warming” is used as such. And because because people tend to believe theories as facts, man-made global warming gets mentioned “as certain as any scientific consensus can be”. I agree that people often use their planet as wasteful as can be. But we cannot know enough about climate to speak of man-made global warming, if we’re unable to get an accurate weather forecast for the next ten days. The Climate of earth changed all the time, temperatures went up here, declined there. Sorry, there’s no evidence.
Jonatan: Yes, fear can be used as an instrument of social control. However, that doesn’t therefore mean that all our fears are, in fact, groundless. Terrorism is used (incorrectly) as a justification for restricting our freedoms, but that doesn’t mean there’s no terrorism, or that nothing at all should be done about it.
That’s a non-sequitur. By your logic, I am not able to predict that next winter is going to be cold, and the summer after that is going to be hot, because they are more than ten days away!
We know these things because we have historical evidence that winters are cold and summers are hot, and we have a scientific explanation for it in the shape of the varying tilt of the earth relative to the sun. Similarly, we can look at historical data, and our knowledge of science, to make predictions about the likely future direction of the average world temperature.
Not even the most sceptical global warming scientists believe that. They might believe that the evidence is inconclusive, or contradictory, or incomplete – but none of them believe that there is no evidence at all. Your position more resembles that of an ostrich than a scientist.
Gerv,
Perhaps this link will help, it’s a compilation of carbon offset sites:
http://www.earthfuture.com/climate/calculators/
I was going to mention that book state of fear. I think the statement “That humans are raising Earth’s temperature is about as certain as any scientific consensus can be.” is pretty far off. Gerv your a religious person. Thats like saying evolution is about as certain as any scientific consensus can be.
Richard Klein: Are you arguing that humans have had no effect whatsoever on earth’s temperature?
The greenhouse effect – that is, the fact that CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere affect the temperature of the earth by reflecting back radiated heat – is a fact. It’s what means that our planet isn’t a large frozen ball of ice.
That there is now more CO2 in the atmosphere than any other time in the last 800,000 years is proved by the ice core data – assuming they haven’t made a mistake. And if you think they have, you’d need to come up with some evidence.
You might argue that there is doubt about whether the magnitude of the warming is linked to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. After all, the coupling might be quite loose. But presumably then it’s a coincidence that at the exact time in history where the CO2 level is higher than it’s ever been, we have the hottest nine years since records began. This Wikipedia page presents convincing evidence that the consensus of scientists is that most of the warming is caused by man’s activity.
Your connection with evolution is entirely spurious. The scientific consensus for human-caused warming is based on observable evidence. The scientific consensus for evolutionary abiogenesis – that is, that the first life came about by chance, and all subsequent life evolved from it – is based on faith. No experiments have been devised to test or prove that it’s true.
However, now is not the time to be getting into a debate about evolution. One thing at a time!
Climatology is a relatively young field, and scientific consensus therein is very much a moving target. Considering carbon dioxide to be the most important culprit is a newly popular theory within the last decade and a half — it’s practically a fad.
As far as the ice core thing, the assumptions they have to use there (basically, standard uniformitarian assumptions) are staggeringly unlikely to actually hold true in practice. Uniformitarian dating methods (such as those used to tell how old the ice cores are) can only be reckoned as anything like reliable in a closed system. From a perspective of physics, however, there is in the real world no such thing as a closed system, *especially* on a multi-millenial timescale.
Recent news items aside, I am old enough to remember when scientific consensus in climatology was quite a bit different from what it is today — and I’m not that old. I cannot say the same thing for medicine or chemistry or mathematics or even particle physics — they have all maintained a largely cohesive view of their respective disciplines throughout my lifetime with only very minor refinements at the edges of their respective fields, but climatology has entirely reworked the fundamentals of its view of how the world’s climates work, *twice* within my memory, once since I graduated from high school.
I suspect that in another ten years a different human activity, other than carbon dioxide emmisions, will be blamed for climate shift by scientific consensus. As far as that goes, I am still not convinced that the short-term trend of global warming represents a long-term environmental problem, considering the widespread evidence that the earth’s climate *used* to be much *more* of a greenhouse than it is now.
If you want to donate money to an environmental charity, that is of course your business, but you’ll pardon me if I don’t get too excited about it. I’m much more interested in the software development side of things.
Relatively young compared to what? Chemistry only emerged from alchemy a few hundred years ago. The closest the ancients got to biology was cutting open animals and predicting the future from the entrails. In medieval times, medics were telling people to lick toads.
I’d say a small block of ice buried under millions of tonnes of other ice is fairly close to a closed system, in the sense that it’s very hard for outside factors to have any effect on it. But if it’s a closed system you want, then you’ll have to give up on many sorts of science based on real-world observations of data (e.g. looking at stars, earthquakes, rivers), because we can’t close the universe.
Your statement of the stability of other disciplines is somewhat rosy. The particle physicists can’t even agree on how many fundamental particles there are.
What’s your view of the latest research into the consequences of ocean acidification? Or of sea temperatures on hurricane formation? A rise in global temperature would lead to a rise in sea level merely due to the expansion on heating of the water, leaving aside ice-cap melting. Will you tell a Pacific islander that this isn’t a long-term environmental problem? Or is your view of a “problem” merely things that affect you and your friends and neighbours?
All of you here proposing conspiracies and the generation of a “climate of fear” need to tell us what it is that the conspiracists hope to gain. If there were to be a large government/industrial conspiracy in this space, surely it would be to persuade us to use more energy and fossil fuels, as that’s where the oil companies and car companies make money. Where’s the motive?
I’m sorry about the word “evidence”, what I ment was “proof” (I’m just a stupid German guy… :) )
But you are quite exaggerating in your remarks, which somehow shows the level of interest for different opinions.
First: What I meant is that we do not even have the technology to forecast the weather and so we do not have the technology to forecast our climate, although newspapers and magazines tell us so (yes, I know that climate and weather are different terms..). The thing with man-made global warming is, that we do not have the data to do empirical research on it. And what we are talking about is not as vague as warm and cold. It is about degrees or better about their fractional digits. What we have is sporadic (or otherwise very incomplete and improper) data from some different cities. With some luck they go back to around the beginning of industrialisation. But we cannot trust the data, because we do not know who measured and how precise his/her method was. So lets say we do have some sort of graphs showing the development of temperatures in some cities. They go up you’d most probably say. That’s wrong. Some go up, some down. Even if we suggest most of the graphs to make a move upwards, what do we do about regions with less or no population? We have to ignore them, because there is no data, not even bad one. But to talk of global warming means to do research all over the planet. Also *one* ice core (or some of the same region) cannot tell me a trend for the globe, it tells me the trend of where the ice built. With all we say we can only refer to populated regions. In my opinion this is quite incomplete. The same thing goes for glaciers. Newspapers say glaciers are melting? Ok, some do, thats true. But others are not. And an overwhelming amount of them has not even been touched by men.
Second: As I said, even the improper data is limited in time. To get a strong evidence or in fact a proof of *man-made* warming in the places we did some sort of incomplete research in, we would need data from the same regions way back (ok, perhaps you’d disagree in the amount of years, but) some thousand years, at least. As long as we do not have these, we cannot talk of man-made global warming by CO2. Climate is just too complex to determine the one and only bad factor right know. For now global warming is a theory; nothing less, nothing more.
To not get this wrong, I’m not saying there is no reason to think of what we do with our environment. But our understanding for it is much too lax to say: We do everything wrong, we have to do this and that. I agree with the first part, but for the second we have to get some sort of independent research (not founded by the industry and not funded by Greenpeace or what) to be able to see what else would be better.
To come to Carbonfund.org: They say “toward a zero carbon world”? Oh, you better leave the planet for that, because you won’t be able to live in a zero carbon world. It is a charity trying to collect money and with some luck helping one research project in whereever, persuading the “scientists” to better find evidence that a zero carbon world would be great, or otherwise they would stop funding. Most of the money will even go away for some more grippy advertisement for their zero carbon world, no matter what they pretend to do.
Perhaps the Mozilla Foundation would go better with a local project/group or university, funding them directly and without determining the outcome of their study.
Bye from Germany; apart from carbonfund.org I really like what Mozilla is doing and appreciate the fact that some people care about their environment. I just wanted to help finding the direction of this care.
Reading about the conspiracy-thing: The theory of fear as a driving force of social control does not say anything of a conspiracy. What I ment was fear as a self-runner with for example politicians riding the train. What do you think is the reason for Arnold Schwarzenegger to “care about his environment”? It is power, because environmental concerns are popular. The same goes for the media, they want and have to sell to stay alive. So they also ride the train. “Hey cool, theres is global warming, a cathastrophe ahead. Buy me, Vote for me.” Most of the people writing or talking about the environment do not have the slightest idea of what they talk about, neither do I to some extent. And they do not even directly intend to fear people, but they do it because they see some kind of success by doing so.
OK – no problem :-) I see what you mean now. But I’d still disagree that there’s no evidence.
The percentage of CO2 in the air is pretty uniform throughout the atmosphere, isn’t it? (Remember, the ice core measurements are about the amount of CO2, not about temperature, which is of course local.)
So if, hypothetically, in 50 years time the temperature is 3 degrees above what it is now, the ice caps and glaciers have mostly melted, and the sea level has risen six feet, would you still say there’s no way we can blame it on man, and so don’t need to do anything to stop our carbon emissions, because we still don’t have a thousand years of data?
Greenpeace and environmental groups don’t tend to fund much research; it’s too expensive. Research tends to be funded by government or industry. So if you think all the researchers are biased due to their funding sources, you have to explain why government and industry would want us to believe that the planet is warming up.
I’m not arguing that humans have no effect on the earth’s temperature. Just that it may not be entirely related to green house gases.
I’m not connecting evolution to the argument, but instead connecting evolution to the word “consensus”. Just because something is said to have scientific consensus does not me that it is fact.
I had to put my two cents in here. I am not only a geek, but also have a degree in Atmospheric Science and worked over 10 years as a meteorologist in a government field office. My background is not in climatology, but I likely have a better understanding of the issues than most.
We can throw research studies at each other all day and get no where. Here is where I believe most responsible meteorologists stand on the subject. This is also a summary to what I’ve concluded from the research I have read over the years.
1) Yes, the Earth has been warming in the past few centuries. However, it is important to note that in the very long history of our planet a few centuries is not that long of a time. It’s important to note that when you hear such things as the “warmest yearly temperatures ever recorded” that relatively the record we have is very short. Also, while the evidence points that we’ve been warming globally the past few centuries…the evidence in itself is not proof of future warming. In fact there is a working theory that melting of the global ice caps may actually cause a global cooling.
2) There is no clear evidence to how much human activity in itself has contributed to global warming. Since global cooling and global warming likely occurred before industrial times…there is little doubt that although most humans are providing some contribution to global warming humans are not the only cause to global warming. In fact, volcanoes when they burp put out significant CO2 levels and the sun itself is a HUGE contributer to global trends in cooling and warming.
A good non-bias place to start regarding global warming is this FAQ: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html .
Cheers,
Bryan
What it does mean is that people tend to take action based on the conclusions that come from that consensus. Scientific consensus is that California is subject to earthquakes; so they have strict building codes. Scientific consensus is that the Indian Ocean tsunami is unlikely to be the last, so they are putting in place a warning system. Scientific consensus is that CFCs damage the ozone layer, so we banned them. And so on.
BryanSD: Reading the page you reference, I don’t see any discussion of the “ice caps causing cooling” or “volcanoes being a HUGE contributor”, and it says the solar contribution is small by comparison. I agree that humans are not the only cause; that’s a straw man.
One other thought, not necessarily in response to what you said: If humans have nothing to do with it at all, we would still need to put in place mitigation measures such as flood defences. “It’s not human caused” is not an excuse to ignore the issue.
No, that’s not fair. Global warming theory does not actively contradict scripture in the way that evolutionism does. Although I think it *unlikely* that the current theories of global warming will prove to be correct, it is actually *possible*, and I don’t see a theological problem with a Christian believing that may be the case. Evolutionism would be another thing altogether, as biblically speaking it’s wrong in so many ways one scarcely knows where to begin. Let’s save that for another thread.
We’re not in the same timeframe here. You’re talking about centuries. I’m talking about less than a generation. (Incidentially some of the ancients had rather better biology than you seem to imply, but they didn’t have cellular biology, so that can be considered a pretty significant change as recently as the nineteenth century.)
Biologists are still speculating about whether the lakes down there *might* be a biologically closed system, i.e., whether living organisms come and go. (They’re hoping living organisms don’t come and go, because they’d like to find something they can interpret as evidence for Evolution…) Living organisms are one thing, and molecules are something else altogether — we *know* that the latter come and go all the time. It takes months, perhaps even years if there are enough miles of sufficiently dense ice blocking the path, but on the kind of timescale these people are talking about that gets lost in the underflow. The system is open.
I’m not the one who wants a closed system. It is uniformitarianism that won’t work without a closed system. The study in question _assumes_ that molecules do not enter or leave, and if they in fact do so all the time, then the study is not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Now you’re suggesting that we should seek certain environmental outcomes because they would be more convenient for humans than other outcomes. Do you really believe that? Most environmentalists would be appalled, because their usual doctrine is that we should seek to *avoid* guiding the course of the environment for the sake of human convenience. Most environmentalists would say that the humans should adjust to fit the environment, rather than the other way around.
As a Christian, I believe that we should try to take care of the Earth as best we can, as a matter of stewardship, because its care was entrusted to the human race. However, I don’t think it necessarily follows that that means we should oppose any change in sea level, when evolutionists and creation scientists alike agree that sea level has changed significantly in the past and that pretty much every part of the surface of the Earth has at one time or another been submerged.
So why would you want to give money to a charity doing nothing than promotion? I know that environmental groups do not fund much research, but they rely on the small things they do to argument. What do you think such organizations do with the money? clear your carbondioxide footprints? Silly. They just cannot. The most effective thing they do is advertising and securing their jobs. Lets get an example, why do I think Mozilla to be good? Because they *do* something, they are involved in the development of the web by pushing into the market, by developing standards, etc. As you said, (most) environmental groups/charitys do not much research. Why should one help them? Because they promote? You could argue that they make noise, get people aware of their environment. But it is not what is needed. People are or will get aware, what counts is working on our knowledge of environment to actually be sure to do the right thing. Because we just do not know enough to say things like “the temperature of the earth will rise about three dgrees in the next 50 years”.
An easy question, for I wrote too much today already :) : Who says you
a) that reducing the emission of Carbondioxide stops what you call a global warming of 3 degrees in the next 50 years?
b) that the article you noted tells the truth?
The answer is simple, you believe the BBC as a reliable source. But in this case it is wrong, they are only “cooking with water”, too. They have to rely on a press information by some sort of institute, telling the outcome of an analysis. And bang, there’s the super headline, because everyone knows global warming is true. But thats it. No second team that analysed ice cores and got to exactly the same result. No journalist who read a complete article in “Science” to write his one. The fact is that the belief in man-made global warming is built on top of disinformation.
An example: You mentioned the three degrees in 50 years. Who told you that? The media. Did you read the full analysis saying that the super-ultra-new computer model which came to that result uses more variables of unknown value than there are/were security holes in the history of Internet Explorer? These models are guessed, as an evidence they are as thin as toilet paper.
Where is the evidence of rising sea levels caused by men? It just can’t be measured. Sea levels varied over the hundreds of years as much as the earth’s climate varied in its history. What we know of global warming is that there is a greenhouse effect that can become a problem one day. But this effect is going on for thousands of years. It is not man-made. We always want our planet to be as neat as we know it. But we try to manage nature and are absolutely unprofessional in doing so. The consequence is that everyone should look for himself: What can I do. Theres a good motto, “think globally, act locally”. To think globally we need to get a better view of nature, analysing it, getting results and views with quality.
What I intended with posting here was
1. tell, that what you believe as truth has to be scrutinized
2. wanting the Mozilla Foundation not to waste their money. One should ask oneself: What can I be sure of? If I give money, whom can I trust? So my advice stays the same, try looking for a local group and cooperate with them rather than with a charity that does not change anything.
I think it is a great idea to give some money to charities in order to offset the emissions caused by air-travel. It’s is fruitless to argue again and again over the same facts. The donation shows the Mozilla Foundation as a thoughtful and responsible organisation.
The only point I’m sharing with the discussion here is Jonatans “try looking for a local group and cooperate with them” – in the sense that you should make sure the money goes to a group which really helps the problem and isn’t using all the money for administration and so on.
I’m skeptical that carbon-offsetting works. Most of the schemes are either planting trees – which may or may not last, and don’t remove the carbon from the biosphere – or projects to provide alternative power-generation in developing countries. This last one, while it’s certainly good and worthy as a charitable act a) isn’t guaranteed to replace rather than supplement existing fossil-fuel arrangements, and b) isn’t necessarily energy-costed based on the fuel costs of producing the equipment, which can be 75% of the energy that the device will generate over its lifetime.
I don’t know if Inconvenient Truth is/will be available outside the US, but it is an easy way to educate yourself on warming climate. Most scientists have said it got the facts mostly right.
One of the things the film does explain is that there will naturally be areas that will get more hotter than other areas – some even colder. Also some areas will get more rain, some will get less. It does make a very compelling case for CO2 causing a lot of the warming, and what effects this can cause (melting ice, changed ocean currents etc.).
I agree that the scientific consensus is on CO2 causing warming, and we should act on it now. If 10 years from now we learn of another cause, we can address that then. But I have not seen anyone say that any harm would be caused to the environment and the climate by reducing/offsetting carbon release now. On the other hand, not doing anything now could cause a lot of problems.
Gerv:
Regarding solar contributions…you’re misreading what the information in the link is telling you.
However one very important point…the article does not distinguish the difference between naturally occurring greenhouse gases and those that are contributed by human activity. Let’s not forget the “greenhouse effect” is a natural phenomenon and without it…the Earth would be as cold as Mars. Not all greenhouse gas is bad and in fact it’s necessary for life! The point is we need to really understand the role changes in solar insolation, natural greenhouse levels, and human contributed greenhouse levels all play. For example, some numbers someone came on contributions from volcanoes.
Also, the FAQ bases the less significance of changes in solar output than greenhouse gas for the short term (less than a century)…but admits that in the long term there is impact. However, there is mounting evidence starting to surface that changes in solar output (as well as solar insolation)fluctuates a lot more in the smaller time scales than previously thought. From Space.com:
Another point I want to make…
No we don’t want to ignore the issue and I never suggested that. But, I’m not convinced we fully understand the issues and more importantly their causes. Without this understanding how do you propose a reasonable solution to the problem? Before we make dramatic changes to our lifestyles (which I know is not what you’re suggesting in your original post), shouldn’t we agree on teh problem first?
If humans do contribute significantly to global warming then having everyone drive less, consume less electricity, and adopting more friendly environmentally sound policies has to be considered. However, if the human contributions are minimal to global warming…preventing Grandma from running the air conditioner on a hot summer night may needlessly kill her and do nothing for the environment.
Hey, and let’s not all forget to do something about the erratic path and tilting our planet does instead of going around the Sun in a perfect circle. Someone really needs to do something about this:
Having done some more research, it turns out you can determine both CO2 concentration and temperature from an ice core, because the temperature affects the relative concentration of the O-18 and O-16 isotopes in the water.
There are some very interesting graphs based on an ice core from Vostok. They show that the CO2 level and global temperature are very, very closely linked.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that it indirectly speaks to your question of a closed system. Let’s say the system wasn’t closed, and CO2 was leaking out or in, affecting the concentrations. O-16 or O-18 would also have to leak out/in at exactly the same rate for the two graphs to maintain their parallel shape (unless you claim the shape matching is a coincidence). Which is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor strongly suggests that the concentrations of neither CO2 nor O-18 have changed since the ice was laid down.
Additionally, because they can slice it very thin, they can get multiple data points per year, and see yearly variation in temperature – and so count the years. So the scale has some validation too.
I’m blown away by this. Isn’t science amazing? :-)
Well, I’m more arguing that we should, for the sake of human convenience, avoid guiding the course of the environment – i.e to get our meddling fingers out.
There are more activities in the universe apart from research and promotion. As others have mentioned, the companies we are considering donating to use the money for carbon mitigation – e.g. by installing alternative power or planting trees.
No, I picked an example value. That’s why I used the word “hypothetically”.
Adam: If you plant a tree where there was no tree before, and replant another if and when it dies, surely you have “permanently” removed “one tree’s worth” of carbon from the atmosphere? I note your caveat about alternative power generation, but we’d have to analyse a particular scheme to see if it had that weakness.
The list of assumptions required to make this work is extensive, but here are just a couple of the biggies: You have to assume that temperature has the same impact on the relative concentration of O18 and O16 today as it did then (which it probably doesn’t entirely since the composition of the atmosphere is probably not entirely the same; we have no way of knowing how _much_ different it could have been then versus now, because we don’t know how _much_ different the composition of the atmosphere was). Additionally, you have to assume that the relative concentration of O18 and O16 has not changed since the ice was formed; it probably has, however, because ice, even very dense ice, is not a closed system at the molecular level, especially on a geological timescale. A *lot* can happen at the molecular level in a century or so, to say nothing of the hundreds of millenia of which the study speaks.
probably…
Why would CO2 and O2 leak at the same rate? They’re not the same mollecule. They’re of comparable size, at least, so the rates might not be orders of magnitude out, but they don’t have entirely the same behavior, and they *certainly* don’t always have the same concentration in the environment. It’s not reasonable to assume that they always move at the same rate.
I’ll let others debate the “facts”. Translation, I can’t prove it right or wrong purely on science.
This may sound like a cop-out but there are two outcomes for those who address climate change as a threat. 1) If it is truly a threat, companies are doing the right thing therefore they should be applauded. 2) If it is NOT a threat, these same companies are reducing their energy usage (save $$), reducing the world’s oil demand (sorry middle east), seeking/funding innovations, and helping out developing countries through offset/credit programs. Personally, I think a company wins either way in the long run. What if we left our kids with houses/cities run on renewable power b/c of some crazy science? I can think of a lot worse.
As noted, there are many sites you can use to determine ones footprint or a company’s footprint. I would recommend picking a calculator/strategy with the idea you could improve on it down the road. As you track your activities better, you’ll be able to refine your impact.
One of my recent projects at work was to determine the CO2 footprint of my company (14 manufacturing sites, two corp. offices, corporate jet travel, etc.). I’d be happy to assist you in determining your footprint and discover ways to offset related emissions.
Perhaps. But correlation is not causation. It’s a rather big leap to say that the temperature variations of the past were caused by CO2 levels.
Congrats, this is a great idea.
Offsetting is only a small first step, but its an important one!
Hopefully Mozilla can gather the support of the community and industry to move its infrastructure to be truly ecologically sustainable. I hope you can look at using public transport instead of cars, trains instead of planes and wind/solar power in place of fossil fuels.
Ultimately as a user of your fine products i am partially driving your resource consumption. I’m really trying to keep my emissions low, with recycled products, public transport and green electricity. There is only so much individules can do, we really need industry to play its part, low co2 software is a practical way we can all reduce our emissions (and at the same time use a superior product!)
This is a win / win. Big thanks and keep up the great work!
peace
almost forgot :)
Its based on Australian bucks so some adjustments will be in order but this is a personal greenhouse gas calculator (ms excel, pdf and some supporting material) from Sydney university
+ http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/apphys/greenhouse/greenhouse.html
there is an on-line version available on my website @
+ http://breakin.freeshell.org/green/frontHi.html
and @
+ http://www.cat.org.au/greenhouse/stinkOmeter.html
It puts International Air @ 0.3 Kilograms per passenger-km and Domestic Air 0.8 Kilograms per passenger-km
Thanks again!
A very nice idea and example you’re giving us. I hope the scheme will extend to Mozilla.com too..?
I was reading some of the contrarian comments in the beginning and it came to me that most of them could’ve been addressed by citing articles from realclimate.com. A really nice scientific blog about climate change: E.g. on the issue of consensus see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=80, on the State of Fear see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michael-crichtons-state-of-confusion/ (and to the posters raising that book up in a scientific debate: c’mon! it’s a thriller by a fiction writer!). The blog is US centric which is notable as most of the contrarian chitchat is US based (no surprise there as US is the largest perpetrator in CO2 emissions per capita).
We have little control over their policy in this matter; if you feel they should do something similar, I encourage you to make that feeling known to them :-)
You’ve misunderstood my argument; what you have said is exactly my point. It’s extremely unlikely that they do/did move at the same rate, not least because they are in different phases (the CO2 is a gas, the O2 is a solid). However, if the rates varied, then the graphs wouldn’t be in step, would they?
So either they moved at the same rate (which is unlikely) or they didn’t move at all – i.e. the system approximates a closed one.
Indeed, correlation is not causation. But if A and B are related (which I think the graph shows), then either A causes B, B causes A, they are both caused by C or it’s an enormous coincidence.
No-one I have seen has put forward an argument either that higher temperatures causes greater CO2 concentrations, or that there is a third factor causing both higher temperatures and higher CO2 concentrations. Do you know of such an argument?
Actually CO2 is just one of a number of greenhouse gases including methane and water. Maybe changes in water concentration caused climate change and CO2 came along for the ride. And of course there are many many other things in general that can affect the climate (some mentioned in the previous comments here).
Sure. It’s trivial: Substantial climate change resulted in substantial changes in glaciers (ice coverage), the numbers/types of animals/plants (consumers and producers of CO2) and perhaps changes in ocean chemistry and that caused CO2 concentrations to vary.
Also, if the CO2 is causing the climate change, you need an explanation for the CO2 shifts. I don’t know of one backed by scientific evidence.
I guess the point is that you’re using circular logic. You’re defending global warming with this correlation but you have to assume global warming exists for the correlation to be relevant. If you want to assert that CO2 causes climate change, cite actual evidence to that effect.
In fact, we know don’t know all that much about the reasons for historical climate shifts.
Do you know of any scientists who are suggesting that theory?
Do you know of any scientists who are suggesting that theory?
The CO2 concentration has gone up 33% in the last 100 years. What globally significant changes have there been to the number and type of animals and plants in that period? What changes in ocean chemistry do you know of that would cause the ocean to release large amounts of CO2?
The albedo of glaciers is a small factor which makes global warming a bit self-sustaining (snow reflects heat), but I don’t know of anyone suggesting that it’s a major or dominant factor yet. And it has no effect on CO2 concentration, unless you are suggesting all the CO2 was trapped in tiny pockets in the ice.
Er, the fact that humans are generating the stuff at the rate of gigatonnes per year?
The correlation between CO2 concentration and global temperature is evidence that CO2 is related to climate change. Causation is strongly suggested merely by process of elimination of the other possibilities.
No. That’s not the point. The point is that you can’t assume that explanation A is correct just because you aren’t aware of any others. I mentioned water concentration simply to illustrate that other explanations might exist that you had not considered.
That’s not what I’m talking about. Actually, you’re trying go the opposite way to what I was suggesting (I’m saying temperature->effects and you’re saying CO2->effects).
No, the historical shifts.
A process which you have not performed. In fact proof by elimination doesn’t work so well except in very controlled and simple situations (think “math”).
I should add that the correlation could be taken as valid and useful evidence if there were predictions of the variations and correlations (by some model, computer simulation, etc) and the historical correlations quantitatively agreed with the predictions. But you haven’t asserted this. Do such predictions exist and do they match the actual data?
Heya Gerv,
I just did some carbon offsetting for my flights to/from Google HQ. I used a Scottish charity that plants trees – they calculated that my flights would require about 6 trees, coming to about �35 to plant. Pretty cheap! They calculate based on hours in flight not exact mileage.
They are Trees For Life: http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/
On climate change skepticism, I am really disappointed to see this. To claim there is not 100% consensus might be right, but then, there never will be. It is awfully convenient to avoid making hard decisions by claiming there is disagreement …. it is idiotic to demand this when in any other situation of life and death we’d take the approach “better safe than sorry”.
Anyway, ironically the idea that global warming mitigation would make everybody poorer is itself not a matter of consensus. I see no economic reason why this MUST be so, though it COULD be so if we – again – shied away from hard decisions.
Other thing to check is Naomi Oreskes study of published literature:
http://www.norvig.com/oreskes.html
which found that out on 978 abstracts published on ISI 75% accepted the consensus, 25% took no stand either way and none rejected it. So to claim there is no consensus seems highly misleading to me.
Michael Crichton is a novelist not a scientist.
The way I see it, there are two possibilities:
(a) the globe is warming (natural or not) or
(b) there is no warming.
Very few people seem to be arguing that the world isn’t warming, so I’ll concentrate on the potential causes of warming. There are, as has been mentioned, many possible factors. Dividing it up, I’d say there are a few categories:
(a) more energy entering the system
(b) less energy leaving the system
(c) more energy conversion from within the system to heat
There isn’t much we can do about (a), because its controlled by the Sun – how much radiation it puts out and how near we are to it are difficult to affect.
I can’t think of a good reason for (c) to be occuring, though please give me some suggestions – I don’t think we’ve had an unusual period of vulcanism and hopefully there isn’t some kind of slow-burn nuclear reaction going on under our feet. I don’t think the amount of heat we are generating is that noticeable on a global scale (even factoring in things like increased light absorption due to urban development)
So, (c), less energy leaving the system. To look at this, we need to look at the cause of the asymmetric absorption of light – the composition of the atmosphere. Some gases, notably CO2, methane and water vapour, absorb strongly in the IR region, and we do have more of those gases than we previously had floating around, whether the cause is Earth-as-normal or activities-of-Man.
We have a lot of extra (compared to older data) gas up there holding in heat, and the temperatures are rising, so no matter what the cause of the gases is, it’d be a good idea to remove some of them. I see two ways to do that:
(a) reducing our output and
(b) actually sequestering the gases (they are not mutually exclusive).
Reducing our output requires that we move towards less travel, especially air travel, change industrial methods away from very heavy use of energy where possible and ideally reduce overall electricity consumption – I can’t see this happening voluntarily, we all like our toys and the new economies (notably China) are catching up fast.
The other solution is technological, a deus ex machina job, and its this that I’d like to see people working towards. Invest in fusion research, invest in technologies for the clean burning of fossil fuels, invest (ideally) in kit that actually absorbs these gases from the air. Invest in alternate generation technology like windfarms and tidal energy(though not as a primary energy supply). Invest in solar cells. Invest expecially in energy storage and delivery technology, otherwise a lot of power is wasted in transmission.
However, the best single idea I’ve seen so far is to invest in canals. Yes, canals. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/11/canal_dreams/ for more details.
Oh, incidentally, CFCs are not greenhouse gases – they disrupt the ozone layer which stops the really high end UV from reaching us and giving us all cancer. So the scare was justified, and because we stopped emitting all the CFCs the hole in the ozone layer has stabilised and may repair itself in the next 50 or so years. Not bad for a ‘fad’.
State of Fear is a novel, and the difference between a novel and reality is the reason I’m not suggesting we spin the world backwards to go back in time to get those extra data points for the climate graphs.
Summary for people who skip to the bottom: I think there is warming happening, I don’t care if its man-made or natural, I think we should do something about it, lets develop technological solutions to the problem.
But, given the amount of smart minds which are being applied to this problem, I don’t have to spend much time refuting explanations you suggest that no-one else is suggesting.
But the current shift is happening at a speed which is unpredented in the last 800,000 years. That rather suggests that a non-natural force is at work driving the change.
So you should cite where they did the analysis. You’re taking some piece of data you don’t understand and drawing your own conclusion (A causes B) and then declaring you must be right because no has proven you wrong and scientists accept B anyway.
People who are debating whether there is scientific consensus about climate change might be interested in this article. There is a lot of money going into spreading rumours that climate change isn’t real, because actually doing something about it is very costly for the oil and oil-reliant industries. For Christians to buy into that propaganda because they want to discredit scientific views of evolution seems very dangerous. Really, these people trying to create the impression of a debate are not on your side; they are not good allies for religious people.
UK residents might be interested in the EquiClimate scheme from Ebico, which offsets your Carbon Dioxide emissions by the simple expedient of buying and retiring ETS emission credits. There’s also a PledgeBank pledge for those wanting to leverage their own contribution.
In response to those who wish to quibble about the reason for global warming:
Why does this need to be so complicated? We are making a mess and should take steps to clean it up. As this is a difficult problem to measure, we should use a combination of methods to reduce our overall impact on our environment. These can be direct and simple, such as working to reduce energy consumption, emissions and waste or more complex, like trying to offset emissions.
Even if our massive consumption of natural resources isn’t altering the global temperature – which, given deforestation, CO2 emissions and the vast amounts of fine dust we generate, seems unlikely – we still know that these things are causing many other problems, from large-scale extinctions to mass desertification to pollution that reduces quality of life and increases the incidence of death due to related illnesses.