I have spent a bit of time going through your posts! http://danika.blogdiario.com/1308326045/ ,i had a good read….

You sound confused. let me try to un-confuse you. The AGW brigade says that incoming solar energy warms the surface of the earth and that this heat is “trapped” by the CO2 in the atmosphere, acting like an enormous space blanket, keeping the earth warmer than it would otherwise be. This “trapping” and “space blanket” effect is IMPOSSIBLE. The earth is warmed by solar radiation and in turn warms the air above it. This warm air expands, and being less dense, rises. It also cools. Boyle’s law, which I am sure you learned in High School, outlines the relationship between the pressure, volume and temperature of a gas. You must have seen the same effect in reverse when you inflate the tires on your bicycle. on the upstroke the pump sucks in air and on the downstroke compresses it. You must have noticed that the barrel of your bicycle pump gets hot. It is a well known fact that air temperature decreases by about 1C for every thousand feet gain in altitude. And here we run into another scientific fact – the Second Law of Thermodynamics which can be stated as; heat cannot pass from one body to a hotter body. Heat can only run down a temperature gradient, and in the air that direction is upwards. Once the sun has set it is a different matter. The greenhouse gasses will delay the radiation of the earth’s heat to outer space, acting more like a sponge than a blanket.
If you look at the range of radiation wavelengths absorbed by water vapour and CO2, water vapour absorbs over a slightly larger range of wavelengths than CO2, though there is a large degree of overlap. Water vapour constitutes between 1% and 4% of the atmosphere and CO2 0.038%. Water vapour is responsible for about 90% of the heating effect and non-water vapour greenhouse gasses ( OK, CO2) for the other 10%. “Human activity”, SUV’s, factories, coal fired power stations etc dump about 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Natural sources on land and the oceans dump 550 billion tonnes into the atmosphere every year. (These sound like huge numbers but the whole atmosphere weighs in at 5 quadrillion tonnes.) So human activity is responsible for about 5% of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere every year. It has been estimated that global temperature rose 0.6C (+/- 0.2C) between 1880 and 2004. (And so it should. The world was emerging from the Little Ice Age, which ended around 1850.) You can try to calculate how much of this warming is due to human activity ( 5% of 10% of 0.6C) but you needn’t bother for two reasons; 1) there is a rule that you can’t calculate more significant figures after the decimal point than were present in the input. 2) the number you calculate will be smaller than the margin of error (+/- 0.2C ) The only conclusion you can reach is that human activity had no discernible effect on global warming between 1880 and 2004.
For more information go to the web site drroyspencer.com. Dr Spencer is Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Previously he was Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre where he and Dr John Christie received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their work on global temperature monitoring using satellites.

So I wanted to share an important integral slogan that I am slowly coming to share:

Things are getting worse, better, and are perfect.

Consider these paradoxical words, toss them around your thought processes, what do they mean to you, and let me know where they may lead you.

What would you most like us to feature or concentrate upon, for your trials shows in Toronto this upcoming month?

Will they be called Trials of Life or ought we to refer to them otherly? And what would you tell Toronto, if I were to get an interview quote from you?

Cheers and please respond fast: we this goes to press on Sunday!

Thanks for your time and inspiration: I too do school presentations for part of my living (I’m a hang glider pilot, focus on aviation and the link to science).

All the best, and leave a message by phone if easier 4165882396

Sbellerby@hotmail.com
Stephen

I am grateful that our conversation was open, and that we did listen to the other intently.

I’m also grateful that you’ve noted that Mr Davidson and myself were not deniying that global warming is occuring.

I look forward to seeing one of your environmental success stories that you believe in – hopefully in the near future.

Cheers,

Penny

I really appreciate your response, and I agree with you on the importance of promoting positive environmental success stories. There are plenty of them, and it’s a challenge I am willing to take. Much has been accomplished, but little celebrated.

I frequent the following website actually, and often link to it via friendfeed:

http://www.thingsaregood.com/

For now, we’ll have to agree to disagree on the cause of climate change; this divide between those who believe climate change is caused by humans, and those that don’t is a messy one. I’m not quite sure the best way to approach it at this point. But the conversation between us, and Mr. Davidson, has got me thinking about a number of things of which I’ll have to ponder for a while.

Thanks for your time and for sharing your thoughts and stories, much appreciated.

Last summer, I had an opportunity to visit the city that I grew up in, and I brought my bike to retrace some of my favorite rides, and even relive a little of my childhood. There was one ride that, as a kid in the seventies, I remembered that the air was different. It was close to a major road that was at the bottom of a ravine. The air used to be thick, and had the smell of car exhaust. Last summer, the air in the ravine was like that at the top of the ravine – not thick, and there was no exhaust/gasoline smell. I paused and watched the cars go by for a while. It wasn’t until later in the day when I came across a 70’s era car idling that I got the smell that I remembered from the ravine. That’s when it hit me that what had changed is that the cars today are almost all cleaner burning. So I’d have to say that we’re not treating the world the same as we did even 30 years ago, we have gone the right direction with at least one thing.

I’m curious about your comment on “preserve what is left of our resources…” Given that matter cannot be created or destroyed – that which is on this planet, came from this planet, and stays on this planet. So the matter is still here, it’s just been recombined.

Do you not agree that over the past century that we’ve improved? Stores now ask if I want my purchase in a bag or no. Shopping centers proudly display that they are powered by wind farms. Crickey – even with the advent of iTunes that the volume of plastic intended for CDs has dropped dramatically. Oh, and for my ride last summer, I crossed over the river, and for the first time, not only could I see the bottom of the river, but I could also see fish swimming – a testament as to just how much that river had been cleaned up!

I’m wondering how somebody who seems to be upbeat and cheery as you are in your shows, views the world with such doom and gloom regarding the environment. Especially when there are so many examples of things that we’re doing right (or at least better).People respond far more favorably to the good than they do the bad.

So I challenge you! Find a good environment story and promote it, (like my summer ride segment above) and you will find that you’ll have a lot more favorable comments on your Blog, and you’ll open the eyes to those that read your story and they’ll look to see where they might be able to apply the concepts from the good environmental storey to their corner of the world.

So what you’re saying is that we have nothing to worry about? Forget about climate change for a moment, perhaps a more important question to consider is whether we can go on treating our one and only earth the way we have over the last century and continue to expect her to provide endlessly. Do you not agree that we must change our ways to preserve what is left of our resources and adopt a more sustainable way of life that will ensure our great great grandchildren have the same natural luxuries we enjoy today (as in a clean lake to swim in with a view of old growth trees in the background, etc. etc.). Forget about climate change, contemplate our impact on our one and only source of life. Are you okay with our current direction?