Global Warming Is Not Going Away 

Global Warming's Sources and Sinks

The diagram below shows the world's carbon flows into and out of the atmosphere as carbon dioxide in metric billions of tons.  As you can see, vegetation on land and the ocean's water naturally remove some of the carbon dioxide from the air.  As you can also see, man's ability to add carbon dioxide to the air is overwhelming nature's ability to remove it, leaving an accumulating excess in the air of about 12 billion tons per year (Red Bar).  It is estimated that since man first began to overwhelm nature's ability to remove all of man's CO2 from the air about 1 trillion tons of extra CO2 have accumulated in the air. 

The stacked bar chart on the right shows man's major CO2 sources (the fossil fuels) and how nature is dealing with it (CO2 sinks).  The author got the coal, natural gas, and oil CO2 source amounts from the gray CO2 waste bins on this IPCC diagram   pdf   United States only  Deforestation by subtracting fossil fuels.

Bottom Line: An additional 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide is accumulating in air every year (Red Bar).

How CO2 changes the air.

How Global Warming's fossil fuel emissions changes the air. 

TRACE AMOUNTS of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) have the most impact.
TRACE AMOUNTS of CH4 (Methane) have even more impact. 

The upper curve (right) shows what adding increasing amounts of CO2 to the air does to the air's ability to allow infrared heat to pass through it.  "Radiative Heat Flux, in Watts per square meter" - think of a heat lamp (the sun) shining on a area about the size of a card table on spherical Planet Earth.  Planet Earth's surface has about 510 trillion square meters. 

With no CO2 in the air, 250 watts of heat will pass from the earth's surface into the extreme cold of space, thereby cooling Planet Earth.  It is thought that with no CO2 at all in the atmosphere, Planet Earth's average temperature would be about zero degrees Fahrenheit.  

With a CO2 concentration of about 300 parts per million (below), the air acts like a thicker blanket, allowing only about 230 watts of heat to pass through and Planet Earth's average temperature is just right for growing lots of food and living a good life. 

As you can see from the CO2 diagram (below) made by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we are now approaching almost 400 parts of CO2 per million parts of air and the air is now retaining about two additional watts of heat per square meter of Planet Earth's surface than it did before Global Warming began.  (2 watts - i.e., going from about 230 watts to 228 watts of heat transmission [flux] on the above right diagram) 

This has happened before many times in the past, always producing major unpleasant changes in the planet's climate. 

Returning to the chart above, natural gas is methane.  By going from coal  to natural gas, we have graduated from playing with gunpowder to playing with dynamite.

 (Somebody better make sure Obama understands this.)

How CO2 changes Planet Earth's climates.

What the CO2 change in the air has done to Planet Earth

"The Climate Trap" is Melvin J. Visser's attempt to describe the beyond Hollywood disaster that awaits us when we cross the methane hydrate tipping point.

It has only been during the last recent stable temperature period that man could stop living like a hunter-gatherer animal, become a farmer, and create comfortable civilizations.  (Click to enlarge.) 

(Left) Annual minimum Arctic Ice Volume. 

The climate at the age of dinosaurs, when most coal and oil was formed, was a "Super-Greenhouse" that had CO2 levels around 800 parts per million.  There was no ice, you could swim at the poles.  Lack of polar ice caused the ocean currents to stop circulating, this caused the oceans to become anoxic (without oxygen) in which decay could not happen.  Such a non-rotting environment will form coal and oil from the organic matter that sinks into it.  Over geologic time, underwater pools of organic matter became coal fields, oil fields, and trapped natural gas.  Burning fossil fuels completes the halted decay process and the carbon returns to the air to eventually bring another super-greenhouse.  We are on track to make another super-greenhouse in perhaps 100 years.  A carbon cycle that takes nature millions of years, mechanized man can bring about in only hundreds.

We will never stop Global Warming

What will the result be if we manage to end the growth of Global Warming?

We will never stop Global Warming because there are over a trillion tons of excess man-made CO2 in the air already and mankind will never stop burning fossil fuels completely. 

Even if we could end all Global Warming fires tomorrow, the effects of Global Warming would hang around for hundreds of years because, as the "Sources and Sinks" chart (above) shows, nature can remove only about 10 billion tons of excess CO2 per year from the air and stash it away in the ground.

(Right) IPCC diagram showing what would happen if we could reduce Global Warming by various amounts.  "1.0" represents where we are today.  Notice you have to end about 75% of Global Warming just to "Flat Line." 

Notice also Global Warming is now increasing much more rapidly because, in part, the world stopped building nuclear power plants in the late 1980s and began building extremely large "mega" coal burning power plants instead.
(Diagram from IPCC "Q&A" web site.) (Author's arrow and note.)

(Left) How much carbon is thought to be stashed away in Planet Earth's dirt.  It is thought that man can place as much as 4,275 GtC into the atmosphere by burning. 

There is more than a little possibility that if things get much warmer, nature will join in by releasing huge amounts of 20 times more powerful methane now trapped in the arctic tundra and the methane hydrates trapped in the cold ocean depths. 

Weirdly, that would put us back into the climate of the dinosaurs - which was when coal, oil, and natural gas was formed.

(Right) Another study showing how much the world will heat and how long it would stay hot for different amounts of Giga Tons of Carbon (GtC) in the air.  It is thought we are at about 1,075 GtC now.

How Likely Is a Runaway Greenhouse Effect on Earth .pdf 

The best we can do is to take a big bite out of Global Warming to reduce its harm.

This is why many say "Energy supply is more important than Climate Change."
Every country in the world will need far more energy just to stay even under the stresses of Climate Change.