Today's link:
The scale of the effect we have on the planet is yet to sink in, at the Sydney Morning Herald:
The rate at which heat is released from the earth - a measure of its natural ''metabolic'' rate - is about 44,000 billion watts, and reflects the average rate of energy used in moving all the continents, making all the mountains, the earthquakes and the volcanoes, in a process we call plate tectonics.
During the 20th century, it is estimated that a touch under 1000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide was emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and cement production. Now we are adding about 30 billion tonnes a year and the rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentrations is doubling about every 30 years.
To generate all that CO2 we annually consume more than 13 billion tonnes of coal, oil and natural gas as part of a global energy system that operates at a rate of some 16,000 billion watts. The human consumption rate is already more than one-third of the earth's natural heat-loss rate.
And with our energy use doubling every 34 years, we are on course to surpass the energy released by plate tectonics by about 2060.
I didn't know what the number of tons of coal, oil and natural gas we used per year was, but I knew it was very big. That, along with the huge increase in human population are the numbers which most cause me to believe that global warming makes sense as an explanation of rapidly warming temperature. I would like people who don't believe that human activities are responsible for global warming to explain whether they believe the scientists explanation that CO2 causes the earth's temperature to rise. If they do, then wouldn't all that CO2 generated from fossil fuels lead to warming? If not, then why don't they believe that higher concentrations of CO2 cause the earth to warm?
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