Shumard's Diary on the "Straw Man" of CO2 induced global warming is ludicrous to anyone who really knows the CO2 science. Each argument sounds plausible but each is itself a distorted piece of information that is exactly what the disinfomation specialists paid by Exxon/Mobil and other Bush allies try to inject into these discussions again and again in order to get people to conclude that the arguments for global warming are not fully supported. Are they not? According to Scripps Institute of Oceanography scientist Tim Barnett in his featured presentation to the AAAS in February, the arguments that say there is still doubt that our rapid global warming we are seeing is not caused by human activity, "are no longer tenable." (
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2005/0217warmingwarning.shtml)
That's you, Shumard. Give it up and go back to your cushy little oil industry paid job or "research" project, and stop trolling on Daily Kos. But to make sure that no one is fooled by your arguments (that you include only in your link), let me go through them one by one and blow them to pieces.
(Shumard's assertions are in quotes.) (See http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2005/2/3/20297/59655/117#117 for Shumard's original article.)
Shumard: "Here are the major weaknesses with homo-genic CO2 theory of global warming:"
Shumard: "Multiple extreme cycles of global warming and cooling have taken place in geologic history, long before man or SUV's, or hydrocarbon/coal-fueled powerplants were around. Dinosaurs and large cold blooded amphibians inhabited polar latitudes of Alaska and Antartica at one time."
Reply: AND, all of them. short of those that were meteoritically induced, were associated with dramatic increases in atmospheric CO2 during warming events and with dramatic decreases in CO2 during cooling events. (See http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html for a chart of the almost exact parallels between atmospheric CO2 and world temperature over the past 400,000 years. BTW, you'll also see that we are absolutely off the chart relative to the last 400,000 years for levels of atmospheric CO2.)
Shumard: "Global non-homogenic CO2 turnover (producion and removal) rates, and the capacities of natural CO2 'sinks'(non-biologic carbonate sediment formation in oceans, aquatic biosequestration (coral etc.) and photosynthesis) are many orders of magnitude greater than current or projected future man-made CO2 production rates."
Reply: Bull! Yes, absolute capacity is many times greater but annual capacity is maxed out and it will take at least 1000 years to reabsorb the CO2 we've already produced in the past 150 years. That's why atmospheric CO2 continues to go up so rapidly. The carbon sinks are maxed out. The sinks are running over. We are in a state of All Sinks Plus. Also, the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere will stay there for several hundred to several thousand years, and that extra CO2 is like having five-hundred-year, triple-pane glass in your greenhouse to keep the heat accumulating and it is not going to go away by a non-existent rapid reabsorption by the oceans like you would like people to believe.
Reply: Oh, and the oceans are acidfying so rapidly that we're in danger of killiing most of the shelled sea creatures which provide the calcium to stabilize and sequester the carbon dioxide the oceans are absorbing.
Shumard: "Also there are very strong balancing (homeostatic) mechanisms that apply to global CO2 turnover(formation vs removal). One of the most important of these is not even biology (plant, animal or human) based. It has to do with the absorption (removal) of atmospheric CO2 (a weak acid) by the oceans which are constantly receiving an enormous alkaline (basic) input from fresh, very basic (metal oxides and sulfide) minerals being injected continuously into ocean basins due to global tectonic activities (undersea volcanic activity, black smokers, new undersea crustal formation and sea-floor spreading [i.e., mid-Atlantic ridge] etc)."
Reply: Again, the estimated total global yearly sequestration from mineral sources worldwide (i.e., granitic mountains such as the Himalayas and in the sea) is about 200 million tons per year. We're producing 35 times that amount (7000 million tons) of excess CO2 every year. Your arguments have all been shown to be inconsequential by the 2000+ scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Reply: Oh, and while we're at it, fresh water is pumping into the North Atlantic so fast that within twenty years we're likely to severely slow or even begin halting the North Atlantic thermohaline current that brings heat to Europe and the Northeastern US seaboard. (Here's a story from the recent American Academy for the Advancement of Science Annual meeting where this shocking and very disturbing information was confirmed. (http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/83/i12/8312globalwarming.html)