Postby EricTheFred » Fri Jun 27, 2008 12:02 pm
[quote="ChristianKitsune (post: 1239617)"]*siiigh*
Do you know how much "pollution" (I don't know what else to call the gasses and material that come out ^^]
Your prof needs to retake Rhetoric. This argument contains a serious fallacy that renders it illegitimate.
The problem is, nobody shut down the volcanos when they started burning fossil fuel. What you have now is artificial emissions + natural emissions. You prof's reasoning is based upon artifical emissions in contrast to natural emissions, which is not the case at issue. The tectonic emissions of which he speaks and the other natural processes have always (at least for the last 50 million years) been balanced by other natural process which returned that carbon back into the Earth. It has never been a one-way street. The difference today is, we are putting carbon into the atmosphere without removing an equal amount. To put it simpler, it isn't the amount of the total that is the problem, it is the amount of the change.
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere, no matter what your politics instruct you to believe, is 100 PPM higher than it was in 1882. In that year, it was 284 PPM. This last November it was 384 PPM, a level never before measured, not in life or in the preserved atmospheric samples found in polar ice.
There is now 35 percent more CO2 in the air than there was in 1882. And there has not been a 35 percent increase in tectonic activity in the intervening time. The only CO2 release mechanism that has been significantly different in the last 125 years than in the previous several hundred centuries is the rate at which fossil fuel is burnt.
Even more significantly, the ice record clearly shows that the CO2 level has not been above 300 ppm for at least five thousand centuries prior to the 20th century. We can't talk about before that, because nobody has figured out a way to measure CO2 levels as accurately going back farther than the ice record extends. But during the clearly recorded period, it generally declined, with occasional small upward excursions, until the 20th century, when it very sharply began a spike upward of a magnitude never before seen in human history.
These are real numbers, not political opinions. They are not 'manipulated' or 'spun'. They are not liberal or conservative. They are raw data.
The majority opinion based upon less accurate means about the time prior to a half-million years ago, is that the C02 level was near a thousand PPM in the Jurassic, dropped dramatically around 50 million years ago (initiating the ice age cycle) Yes you will find a lot of geologists with differing opinions about this, because there is a lot of interpretation required on the available data for this time period.
But, if you meet a scientist who argues the number for less than a half-million years, I would very much like to know first why he thinks the raw data must be thrown out, before I am going to listen to anything else he has to say. Because, unless he has a very good reason for denying evidence that most of the scientific world has tested and agreed is accurate, I would have to suspect he has allowed his politics to over-rule his scientific discipline.
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May He cause His face to shine upon you.
May He lift up His countenance and grant you peace.
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