I had a drive-by commenter the other day who took exception to a graph I had posted showing temperatures versus CO2 concentration. The commenter didn't like that the graph ended in 1950 and demanded that I use another graph from Wikipedia. The graph I posted came from the UN, incidentally. Well, the absurdity of a commenter ordering me what to do on my site aside, the Wikipedia graph he pointed to had no provenance, so I wasn't inclined to go along, anyway. In a couple of ensuing exchanges, the commenter informed me, with great authority, that the graph proves CO2 increases cause global warming. I told him the graph shows no such thing.
What the graph shows is a high degree of correlation between CO2 and temperature. There is no cause and effect here. The argument that higher temperatures cause rising CO2 levels is equally valid.
Now scientists are warning that thawing of permafrost will release trapped carbon into the air.
This vast carbon reservoir, contained in permafrost soil in northeastern Siberia, contains about 75 times more carbon than the amount released into the atmosphere each year by the burning of fossil fuels, the researchers said in a statement.
Siberia isn't the only place on Earth with massive lodes of permafrost — parts of Alaska, Canada and northern Europe have them too. The Siberian area is possibly the world's largest, covering nearly 400,000 square miles, with an average depth of 82 feet, and probably holds about 500 billion metric tons of carbon.
By any measure, this is a lot, and it is in fact twice what scientists previously believed was there, ecologist Ted Schuur of the University of Florida said in a telephone interview.
"There's a huge pool of carbon, even more than people thought before, perhaps double the amount of carbon that we thought," said Schuur, one of the article's co-authors. "If you have twice as much carbon there, essentially in the future twice as much could be released into the atmosphere."
Cars, power plants and other fossil fuel burners release at least 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, contributing to global warming, the scientists said.
As the Siberian permafrost thaws, it will release the carbon contained in old grass roots and buried animal bones into the atmosphere, in what could be an unstoppable contributor to global climate change, according to the researchers.
Which tends to support that rising temperatures cause rising CO2 levels. What if what the alarmists are so worried about is just a natural cycle? If the scientists who are now sounding the alarm about permafrost carbon are correct then it may very well be the rising temperatures that are to blame for the concentrations of CO2 we are seeing. Don't get me wrong, I think man contributes to the CO2 levels, but I can't say how much. And neither can anyone else. You can measure and quantify how much man emits, but you cannot tell how much of the rise we are seeing comes from man and how much from natural causes.
Incidentally, the scientists quoted then state that this could trigger a vicious circle. More CO2, more heat, more CO2 release, still more heat. Rather than a vicious circle, this is circular logic. The above graph does not support that contention at all. Instead it supports the idea that at a certain point natural factors kick in to reduce the CO2. They weren't doing Kyoto 400,000 years ago after all.
Politics, War | Gaius Thursday, 15 June , 2006 | 
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