If the climate starts to cool, are we all going to have to start emitting more CO2 to keep the climate stable?

Question

Bob, Another question, in the IPCC first report, they showed the Medival warm period as warmer than it is now. Are you suggesting the IPCC's report was seriously flawed?

Answer 1

That's what everyone was told to do in the 70's when the "scientists" all said the planet was going into an ice age.

Just goes to show how stupid the whole global warming/cooling junk science thing is.

What a total waste of time and money. We could've used that money to help starving people in Africa instead of line the pockets of bozo's like Al-gore. What a shame.

Answer 2

No.

Without our intervention the climate was reasonably stable for the last 2000 years. See this graph (10 peer reviewed studies, showing the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age):

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png

What we need to do is reduce CO2 back to the level it was 100 years ago, about 280ppm, the highest level nature routinely reaches. That will take many years and a lot of hard work. And there is absolutely no danger of cooling while we achieve that. But then we can let nature take over again. It was doing an excellent job:

"We humans have built a remarkable socioeconomic system during perhaps the only time when it could be built, when climate was sufficiently stable to allow us to develop the agricultural infrastructure required to maintain an advanced society.

If the Earth came with an operating manual, the chapter on climate might begin with a caveat that the system has been adjusted at the factory for optimum comfort, so don't touch the dials."

EDIT - I'm suggesting that science moves on, and data gets better. To look at the first IPCC report when the 4th is available makes no sense to a scientist.

Answer 3

Response to: 1st answer: an incorrect hypothesis from 40 YEARS AGO doesn't disprove the usefullness of an entire science.

Response to: 2nd answer: Correct, the Earth has survived for billions of years without humans. Nobody (at least no one in the main stream) is predicting the Earth will die! A big reason that climate change is such a threat is that our civilization strongly considers climate when it chooses the locatoin of its settlements. If the Mississippi dries up... bad news for all those cities on the Mississippi. That's just an example, and as of yet climate models are unable to predict specific regional events like that, but you can see how changes in our climate could really hurt our quality of life.

To the main question, I'm sure if significant global cooling was predicted, some people would suggest that. Unfortunately, the climate is a bit more complex than that. It would depend on what's causing the cooling as different forcings could cool the planet in different ways. If the cause of the cooling was a drop in CO2 levels, then adding CO2 to the atmosphere would seem like a plausible solution!

Answer 4

That depends. Why do you propose that the climate would start to cool? Are you talking about a cooling as rapid as the current warming, or a slow and natural cooling?

If for some reason there were a rapid cooling that we wanted to avoid then yes, one way to counteract the cooling would be to increase greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, that could come back to bite us if the cooling naturally stopped and reversed.

That's why it's important to understand not just how much the climate is changing, but why it's changing. Climate scientists have determined that the current warming is happening dangerously rapidly, and that it's mostly due to human greenhouse gas emissions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

Answer 5

No, The Earth's heating a cooling is a natural thing. The Earth has survived for 4.6 billion years without human interaction. Yes, there have been times of ice ages and cooler things, but this is not from a drop in CO2. The causes of Ice Ages are usually from catastrophic incidents that occured without warning. I would suggest you look into "snowball earth" if you want to know about some theorys about why the earth gets ice ages

If you want to know what would happen if there was too much CO2, look at information on the planet Venus.

Think of it this way, A change in temperature does not mean there was a change in CO2, but a change in CO2 would probably mean a change in temperature.


Hope that helped

Answer 6

If the climate starts to cool...

It's going to be a long time before this happens. There's two components to global warming - the natural part and the manmade part.

I mentioned in one of my answers to an earlier question of yours that the natural warming and cooling is governed by a series of cycles and that being cyclical they're predictable.

As it stands at the moment, the natural cycles are causing a very slight cooling but this is only a short term. The longer term outlook is one of warming with some short spells of cooling thrown in. It's a continuation of the natural climate patterns that have been ongoing for 10,000 years (since the end of the last 'ice age'). Even if humans weren't on the planet it would be in the middle of a long-term slight warming trend.

The other component is the anthropogenic or human one. We know that the greenhouse gases we emit into the atmopshere are causing the planet to warm up, this is something that can very easily be demonstrated (you could do it yourself at home with a simple experiment). For the foreseeable future it's inconceiveable that we'll significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Whilst we may manage some reduction it certainly won't be enough to stop anthropogenic global warming, that would require a reduction so drastic that we'd have to sacrifice much of our modern technology and everything that goes with it. I think it's safe to say that's not going to happen.

On this basis we'll be contrinbuting to global warming for quite some time yet.

An often overlooked fact about the greenhouse gases is that once they're up in the atmosphere they stay there for a long time and that the contribution they make to global wrming varies over time. Water vapour has a residency period of 4 to 12 days but the manmade gases have much longer lifespans. Methane for example stays in the atmopshere for 10 to 12 years after which time it is oxidised into carbon dioxide and contributes to warming in this manner. CO2 has a residency period of 115 years, most other greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, thousands in some cases.

What this means is that even if we stopped all greenhouse emissions, those that are already in the atmopshere will keep on warming the planet and it would be 60 to 80 years before a state of equilibrium was reached.

So, at the very least we can look forward to another 60 years of warming (with occasional cooling spells) but in reality I think it's more likely to be at least 120 years, quite possibly much longer.

The climate could cool but it would be for other reasons. Volcanoes for example emit sulphur dioxide, the reflective property of this gas means that incoming solar radiation (heat from the Sun) is reflected back into space before it reaches us. Following major volcanic events the planet cools for a few years. It last did this in the early 90's after Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991. Presently we have no way of predicting volcanoes, if there were to be a particularly active few decades we could see global temperatures falling.

We may again inadvertently cause cooling, we did this in the mid 20th century through massive emissions of sulphur dioxide from factories and houses. Since then acts have been passed to control emissions of many pollutants including SO2. It's unlikely to happen again.

One final point concerning stability of the climate. Our climate is dynamic, it's always in a state of flux, if it's not warming then it's cooling. There's no such thing really as a stable climate.

Answer 7

No because cooling is a sure sign that global warming is real. If this happens, we will need to place more controls on people and energy, stop people from driving and breathing, and tax the hell out of the population.

Only these actions can save us from ourselves.

Answer 8

the biggest stabilizer is wetlands