Global Warming Skeptics CoME HERE?

Question

1.488,000,000,000 Kg of CO2, compared to the 5,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg of Earth's mass equals

How would i do a smaller version of this experment to predict if the continues to happen how long would it for the earth to melt its for my science fair project

Answer 1

You can't do a real science project on it because global warming isn't science. Take a picture of a polar bear fishing in the water in the summer and then say the polar bear is drowning because of global warming. That's what global warming is all about now.

Answer 2

1.488 teragrams is the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere whereas 5.9 xonagrams is the mass of the Earth itself, both of which are separate entities. More important than the mass of either and more pertinent to your question is the speed at which this CO2 is going to affect the planet.

There will never be a point when the planet literally melts but there will be a time in the future when all the ice melts. It's happened on at least four occasions in the past as part of the planet's natural ice age cycles. It would almost certainly happen again even if humans weren't on the planet. In respect of natural cycles the next time when all the ice would melt (and stay melted for a long time) is probably 10 to 70 million years from now. It's a large range because there's many unpredictable factors involved.

Things are now different, our actions are causing the planet to warm at an accelerated rate and the primary culprits are the greenhouse gases. There isn't a linear relationship between GHG's in the atmopshere and rising temperatures and again, there are other factors involved. Additionally, we have no way of knowing what we'll be doing in the future - 50 years from now will our emissions have gone up, down, stayed the same...?

To apply any sort of timeframe means making some assumptions. We'll assume that GHG emissions continue as they are, there are no other mitigating circumstances and that nature doesn't play a role.

On that basis we would expect the entire planet to be free of ice, somewhere in the order of 8000 years from now. This may seem a long time but there's a couple of important things to take account of.

1) Whilst global warming is accelerating at the moment and will continue to do so for some time, it will (subject to the above assumptions) start slowing down in the future.

2) Antarctica is a massive volume of ice and even when the air temperature there exceeds the melting point of ice it will take a long time for all the ice to melt - simply because there's so much of it.

The problem you have in demonstrating this for a science fair project is one of scale. Things to do with Earth take a remarkably long time because it's so large. If the planet were smaller then the climate would change quicker. If you could scale it down to the size of a science fair project the timescales would in no way resemble reality (not without employing some Hollywood style technical wizardry).

Because of my job I frequently demonstrate lots of things to do with the climate and global warming. I have at my disposal the contents of several universities and the most advanced climate research facilities there are. I wouldn't even attempt to replicate a melting Earth, for that I'd resort to using computer generated images.

It's just a suggestion but maybe you could do some other project (if you have a choice in the matter).

PS - You asked the question of global warming skeptics. These are the people who question whether humans are having an impact on the climate.

Answer 3

Beaathe into a ballon.

Answer 4

This is meaningless. What exactly is your question.