In this photo released by National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, marine debris of all
types and sources wash ashore on Laysan Island in
the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 2005.
(AP Photo/National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration)
I think a lot of people believe in global warming and think that the problems are going to occur many decades into the future. The sea level is rising slowly. At the current rate, the sea level will rise about 1 foot in the next 60 to 100 years. That will cause some coastal flooding, but will be tolerable.
How much should we pay now to prevent future global warming. If it takes 60 years for the big damage to occur, then the economic present value of that future cost is actually fairly small. For example, if you knew that it would cost $500 billion per year for future damage from global warming then you wouldn’t be justified in spending the same amount per year now to advert the damage. You would only be able to justify spending about $5 billion per year now assuming a discount rate of 7% per year. (Assumes you will double your investment about every 8 years. Also assumes the damage will only cost $500 billion per year which may be low. This articles purpose is not to estimate the future cost of global warming by to show how much current cost is affected by different warming scenarios.)
The above assumes that the damage from global warming is linear; i.e. it increases at a steady rate each year. The problem is that if we continue to increase the amount of carbon emissions, then global warming will increase at an exponential rate. That could bring us to a crisis much more rapidly. If the earth captures an increasing amount of energy from the sun, the ocean could warm up and expand at a faster rate. It might rise 1 foot in only 40 years. Now we should be spending more money each year to prevent a future cost. At 40 years, we should be investing about $16 billion per year now in my above example.
The worse case for global warming is that it works in more of a step function. When we reach a certain level of carbon in the atmosphere, the earth starts changing very rapidly to reach a new steady state. This could be caused by massive amounts of ice from Greenland and Antarctica suddenly melting into the ocean and the ocean level rising very rapidly.
It could also be caused by the release of more greenhouse gases due to raising temperatures. It was interesting to note the scientific study into carbon capture in the Arctic region. The study measured the amount of carbon trapped in 117 different northern permafrost sites to a depth of 1 meter. The stock of organic carbon was estimated to be 60% greater than previously believed. Permafrost covers about one fifth of the world’s land mass. If only the carbon in North America was released into the atmosphere, is would increase carbon levels by one sixth.
As temperatures rise, it is not given that all this carbon will be released as either methane or carbon dioxide. But it is worth watching. If global warming starts accelerating for any cause, then the amount of current investment we should make to combat climate change could also rise very fast. The prudent thing to do at this time is to develop the technology for renewable energy and start developing and implementing a plan to lower our annual carbon emissions.
Global warming time bomb trapped in Arctic soil: study
Comments
"Stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse gases below about 400 ppm of CO2 equivalent is required to keep the global temperature increase likely less than 2C above pre-industrial temperature." --Report of Working Group 1 of the IPCC, 2007, p. 828
We are over 500 ppm CO2 equivalent now. There is a very inexpensive simple way to immediately cool the Earth: just put a small amount of aerosol into the air to dim the sun. We won't be able to stop rapid ecosystem collapse without geoengineering.
I have a couple questions, also:
What if CO2 has nothing to do with Global Warming?
What if CO2 concentrations follow global temperatures as the Volstok ice core data shows?
What if humans could do nothing but adapt (as they have for all prior climate changes?
here's your wake-up call....not only is it not linear, it's not terrestrial too....
major global paradigm-shattering announcements & events soon!
the "Big Picture"...
3 part investigative report...These are NASA Deep-Space Probe & Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photos:
http://www.enterprisemission.com/_articles/05-14-2004_Interplanetary_Part_1/Interplanetary_1.htm
6 part report:
http://www.enterprisemission.com/moon1.htm
http://www.enterprisemission.com/catbox.htm
According to http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
the CO2 level is 2.14 PPM. It was 2.37 in 1987. I didn't see 500 PPM anyplace on the internet.
This article doesn't recognise the fact that the effect of carbon dioxide is not only non-linear, it's logarithmic. If it has any effect at all on temperature, we have already seen about 70% of it (0.8 degC over 150 years). Further increase in CO2 concentration will have little if any effect on temperature. This should be pretty obvious from the past 10 years where CO2 has increased 5%, yet temperature has, if anything, decreased.
I agree with the author, John Ryden. And scientists are beginning to focus more on such non-linear positive feedbacks that can take our initial greehouse warming and spiral it way up to a much warmer climate -- as what happened in the end Permian (tho from natural causes) when 90% of life on earth died. Only we are causing this much more rapidly. Scientists refer to this as hysteresis -- an extraordinary warming for a very long time (perhaps 100,000 years), well beyond the glacial/interglacial swings that have been happening for many many thousands of years.
The commentors here should take their theories over to http://www.RealClimate.org , hosted by top climate scientists, to get some acurate assessments of their ideas (most of which have been well refuted over & over again). But if you really want to know the scientific truths on our current anthropogenic global warming, and are open-minded, that's the place to go.
thank you nice i will help fix it
should i be scared of global warming
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