What's the story with carbon offsetting?

 

Al Gore's film crusade aimed at exposing the myths and misconceptions surrounding global warming's relentless march opens in Ireland this week and it won't make for comfortable viewing. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore says that the planet may be just a decade away from a point of no return, after which extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and deadly heat waves will permanently take hold.

 

While the predictions are dire, the man who would have been president (and may be president yet) remains convinced that there is still time to make a difference. He says we cannot just continue sleepwalking towards catastrophe and if the planet as we know it is to survive, then changes at a governmental, corporate and personal level are absolutely essential.

 

One of Gore's key messages is the need for individuals to take responsibility for the amount of carbon dioxide they produce and to do something about it. It is, he says, not hard for consumers to make a difference and becoming carbon neutral doesn't have to cost the earth.

 

Leading by example, An Inconvenient Truth is the "first carbon-neutral documentary" ever made. Its producers calculated the film's "carbon footprint" by working out how much energy was used to make and promote it including "all travel-, office- and accommodations-related emissions". They then paid $12 (€9.30) for each tonne of CO2 that was produced. The money is to be used to help build Native American- and farmer-owned renewable energy projects.

 

It is a simple way of lessening the damage wreaked on the environment. A carbon footprint measures the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity in units of carbon dioxide - an average person in the developed world will generate in the region 6,800 kg (15,000 pounds) of carbon pollutants annually. To counter that, carbon offsetters can be paid to develop alternative energies or plant trees to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

 

The Foo Fighters, Coldplay and Radiohead have all offset tour emissions by protecting forests while Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt among others have invested in trees as way of compensating for the oil their cars guzzle and the aviation fuel that is used in their globetrotting adventures.

 

Closer to home, some of Ireland's successful musicians are making efforts to lessen their own carbon footprint. "What we have done in the last year is to make our tours carbon neutral," says Brian Crosby from Bell X1. Through a site called http://www.carbonneutral.com, the band calculates the emissions from all the transport used while on tour and then they pay to plant the number of trees needed to offset that. It cost surprisingly little - the trees needed to clear the carbon from their most recent Irish tour cost not much more than €40, although Crosby points out there were very few flights involved. It is airline traffic that generates a vast amount of the CO2 that individuals are responsible for.

 

It isn't just bands and actors and one-time presidential hopefuls who are focusing attention on the need to become more carbon neutral. While it may sound like Montgomery Burns joining Greenpeace or Philip Morris sponsoring a lung cancer ward, British oil company BP last month unveiled a scheme aimed at helping drivers chart and then reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.

 

All ironies apart, under BP's initiative motorists will be able to calculate their annual CO2 emissions using the http://www.targetneutral.com website. An average car, driven 10,000 miles a year, will generate about four tons of CO2, enough to fill a medium-sized hot air balloon. To neutralise this amount of carbon emissions would cost about £20 (€30).

 

Critics say carbon neutrality is more about creating a feel-good factor than helping the environment. It can take a tree up to 100 years to capture 1,360 kg (3,000 pounds) of CO2 from the atmosphere - five trees would have to live for a century to take out all the CO2 generated by the average American in a year.

 

Many environmentalists quite reasonably point out that that the only real solution to climate change is for fossil-fuel burning to be stopped. This, they argue, will never happen if people and corporations believe it's okay to pollute as long as emissions are offset through a carbon neutral programme.

 

"Obviously people have to drive and have to fly and that's fine, but we should be more aware of the consequences of our actions," Brian Crosby says. "I'd like to see people booking flights online be shown information on the carbon emissions that will be produced by the flight and then have the option of paying a small sum of money to offset that."

 

He points out that an optional emissions tax would be no more than the airport taxes we currently take for granted. Crosby is not naive and accepts that carbon offsetting alone will not be enough to halt the environmental devastation predicted in An Inconvenient Truth. "Clearly carbon neutrality is not the solution to the problem but it is something positive that everyone can do," he says. "It is up to governments, particularly the US government, to do a lot more to tackle the climate change crisis. This is just a way for people who are concerned about the environment to make a difference, however small."

 

A return flight to Athens produces approximately 1 tonne of CO2, or roughly the same amount as driving a 1.4 litre car for three months.

 

The cost of offsetting the Athens flight through a tree-planting programme, via http://www.carbonneutral.com, is €4.35.

 

Heating, lighting and powering appliances in an average-sized three-bed detached house generates about 5.6 tonnes of CO2 a year.

 

Replacing a regular light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb uses 60 per cent less energy and will save about 136kgs of carbon dioxide a year.

 

Avoiding just 10 miles of driving every week eliminates about 227kgs of carbon dioxide emissions per person a year. And it's better for you.

 

Keep your car tuned and your tyres hard. Regular maintenance helps improve fuel efficiency and reduces emissions while properly inflated tyres should increase mileage by around 3 per cent.

 

By sticking on an extra jumper and turning the thermostat down two degrees in winter you could save about 0.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

 

A tree will absorb one tonne of CO2 in its lifespan.

 

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/pricewatch/2006/0911/1156791557944.html

One of Gore's key messages is the need for individuals to take responsibility for the amount of carbon dioxide they produce and to do something about it. It is, he says, not hard for consumers to make a difference and becoming carbon neutral doesn't have to cost the earth.

[...]

"Obviously people have to drive and have to fly and that's fine, but we should be more aware of the consequences of our actions," Brian Crosby says. "I'd like to see people booking flights online be shown information on the carbon emissions that will be produced by the flight and then have the option of paying a small sum of money to offset that."

 

He points out that an optional emissions tax would be no more than the airport taxes we currently take for granted. Crosby is not naive and accepts that carbon offsetting alone will not be enough to halt the environmental devastation predicted in An Inconvenient Truth. "Clearly carbon neutrality is not the solution to the problem but it is something positive that everyone can do," he says. "It is up to governments, particularly the US government, to do a lot more to tackle the climate change crisis. This is just a way for people who are concerned about the environment to make a difference, however small."

 

that's a reasonable approach in theory but to put it in to practice may be difficult to jump start but it's very necessary. charging a small fee for flight tickets is definitely do-able, and these little steps will do a lot for the next generations to come. for way too long, i think we have all lived casually with the threat of global warming that the real dangers will come hard and fast and we will react too little too late. this earth is afterall the only place we have and you'd think that just like our homes, we'd give a bit for thought for what's happening to our place but it's rarely on our radar of concern.

i have always felt a slight panic when it comes to this issue because it's so big for one person or a handful of celebrities, or even a small nation to fix. as a global nation we have never worked as one in anything, never fully united, always a this vs that system, always competing - the environment, one thing we all have in common and will affect everyone, may be the single most important thing to pull us all together to save ourselves.

 

i'm kinda looking forward to seeing this film...!

 

 

(what timing, right now on ABC's Enough Rope with Andrew Denton has Al Gore talking about this exact topic - a real eye opener)

Who'd have thought it? Al Gore says something intresting.

Al is way off on what he's preaching, its socialist environmentalism. I go by Scientific environmentalism instead which proves Al is way off.

Al is way off on what he's preaching, its socialist environmentalism. I go by Scientific environmentalism instead which proves Al is way off.

Al is way off on what he's preaching, its socialist environmentalism. I go by Scientific environmentalism instead which proves Al is way off.

 

Probably the best article I have read on this...

 

http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/11408/an-inconvenient-truth-sos-fr om-al-gore.html

 

 

An inconvenient truth: SOS from Al Gore.

 

BY PATRICK BEDARD, September 2006

 

 

He’s baack! Just when you thought the scolding was over and it was safe to pull your ear plugs out, Al Gore has a brand-new harangue going.

 

Actually, it’s the same old doomsday prediction he’s been peddling since he was a senator bucking to be President back in the ’90s, only this time it’s packaged as a 94-minute film. An Inconvenient Truth previewed at the Sundance Film Festival last January. “This is activist cinema at its very best,” said the official festival guide.

 

You can guess what activated him; his long-playing paranoia about global warming. He and the mainstream media say it’s a done deal. We’re toast.

 

“Be Worried. Be Very Worried,” blared the cover of Time in April. “Climate change isn’t some vague future problem — it’s already damaging the planet at an alarming pace. Here’s how it affects you, your kids, and their kids as well.”

 

This is, by the way, the same Time that was telling us as late as 1983 to be worried, very worried, that temperatures were descending into another era of “glaciation.”

 

Gore’s “inconvenient truth” is that — there’s no tactful way to say this — we gas-guzzling, SUV-flaunting, comfort-addicted humans, wallowing in our own self-indulgences, have screwed up the planet. We’ve hauled prodigious quantities of fossil fuels out of the ground where they belong, combusted them to release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the sky where it shouldn’t be, and now we’re going to burn for our sins.

 

This feverish sort of should-and-shouldn’t evangelism plays particularly well these days among those who are looking for something to believe that carries no obligation to sit in a church pew. Nature has left us no scripture, so Gore can preach it as he feels it. Faith, brother. Don’t even pretend to understand. Anyway, humans, except for the rare enlightened ones like Al Gore, are alien trespassers in nature.

 

Let’s not dispute the earth’s temperature. It’s warmer than it used to be. As an Iowa farm boy, I learned about the soil we tilled. Most of Iowa is flat, graded smooth by glaciers. The rocks we plowed up in the fields, or plowed around if they were big, were rounded in shape. The glacier tumbled them as it scraped along, and it ground their corners off.

 

The North American ice sheets reached their largest expanse about 18,000 years ago and then began to recede. Within 5000 years they had pulled back considerably but still reached south as far as central Ohio. After another thousand years, however, the U.S. was largely ice-free.

 

Needless to say, there have been no glaciers reported in Iowa as long as anyone can remember. It’s warmer now. And if it would just warm up a bit more, fewer Iowans would need to trot off to Florida, Texas, and Arizona during deepest winter.

 

The long absence of farm-belt glaciers confirms an inconvenient truth that Gore chooses to ignore. The warming of our planet started thousands of years before SUVs began adding their spew to the greenhouse. Indeed, the whole greenhouse theory of global warming goes wobbly if you just change one small assumption.

 

Logic and chemistry say all CO2 is the same, whether it blows out of a Porsche tailpipe or is exhaled from Al Gore’s lungs or wafts off my compost pile or the rotting of dead plants in the Atchafalaya swamp.

 

“Wrong,” say the greenhouse theorists. They maintain that man’s contribution to the greenhouse is different from nature’s, and that only man’s exhaustings count.

 

Let’s review the greenhouse theory of global warming. Our planet would be one more icy rock hurtling through space at an intolerable temperature were it not for our atmosphere. This thin layer of gases — about 95 percent of the molecules live within the lowest 15 miles — readily allows the sun’s heat in but resists its reradiation into space. Result: The earth is warmed.

 

The atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), argon (0.93 percent), and CO2 (0.04 percent). Many other gases are present in trace amounts. The lower atmosphere also contains varying amounts of water vapor, up to four percent by volume.

 

Nitrogen and oxygen are not greenhouse gases and have no warming influence. The greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto Protocol are each rated for warming potency. CO2, the warming gas that has activated Al Gore, has low warming potency, but its relatively high concentration makes it responsible for 72 percent of Kyoto warming. Methane (CH4, a.k.a. natural gas) is 21 times more potent than CO2, but because of its low concentration, it contributes only seven percent of that warming. Nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly of nature’s creation, is 310 times more potent than CO2. Again, low concentration keeps its warming effect down to 19 percent.

 

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans.

 

They like to point fingers at the U.S., which generated about 23 percent of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 in 2003, the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration. But this finger-pointing ignores yet another inconvenient truth about CO2. In fact, it’s a minor contributor to the greenhouse effect when water vapor is taken into consideration. All the greenhouse gases together, including CO2 and methane, produce less than two percent of the greenhouse effect, according to Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, by the way, is described by one source as “the most renowned climatologist in all the world.”

 

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

 

If everyone knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, why do Al Gore and so many others focus on CO2? Call it the politics of the possible. Water vapor is almost entirely natural. It’s beyond the reach of man’s screwdriver. But when the delegates of 189 countries met at Kyoto in December 1997 to discuss global climate change, they could hardly vote to do nothing. So instead, they agreed that the developed countries of the world would reduce emissions of six man-made greenhouse gases. At the top of the list is CO2, a trivial influence on global warming compared with water vapor, but unquestionably man’s largest contribution.

 

In deciding that it couldn’t reduce water vapor, Kyoto really decided that it couldn’t reduce global warning. But that’s an inconvenient truth that wouldn’t make much of a movie.

Al is way off on what he's preaching, its socialist environmentalism. I go by Scientific environmentalism instead which proves Al is way off.

 

Probably the best article I have read on this...

 

http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/11408/an-inconvenient-truth-sos-fr om-al-gore.html

 

 

An inconvenient truth: SOS from Al Gore.

 

BY PATRICK BEDARD, September 2006

 

 

He’s baack! Just when you thought the scolding was over and it was safe to pull your ear plugs out, Al Gore has a brand-new harangue going.

 

Actually, it’s the same old doomsday prediction he’s been peddling since he was a senator bucking to be President back in the ’90s, only this time it’s packaged as a 94-minute film. An Inconvenient Truth previewed at the Sundance Film Festival last January. “This is activist cinema at its very best,” said the official festival guide.

 

You can guess what activated him; his long-playing paranoia about global warming. He and the mainstream media say it’s a done deal. We’re toast.

 

“Be Worried. Be Very Worried,” blared the cover of Time in April. “Climate change isn’t some vague future problem — it’s already damaging the planet at an alarming pace. Here’s how it affects you, your kids, and their kids as well.”

 

This is, by the way, the same Time that was telling us as late as 1983 to be worried, very worried, that temperatures were descending into another era of “glaciation.”

 

Gore’s “inconvenient truth” is that — there’s no tactful way to say this — we gas-guzzling, SUV-flaunting, comfort-addicted humans, wallowing in our own self-indulgences, have screwed up the planet. We’ve hauled prodigious quantities of fossil fuels out of the ground where they belong, combusted them to release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the sky where it shouldn’t be, and now we’re going to burn for our sins.

 

This feverish sort of should-and-shouldn’t evangelism plays particularly well these days among those who are looking for something to believe that carries no obligation to sit in a church pew. Nature has left us no scripture, so Gore can preach it as he feels it. Faith, brother. Don’t even pretend to understand. Anyway, humans, except for the rare enlightened ones like Al Gore, are alien trespassers in nature.

 

Let’s not dispute the earth’s temperature. It’s warmer than it used to be. As an Iowa farm boy, I learned about the soil we tilled. Most of Iowa is flat, graded smooth by glaciers. The rocks we plowed up in the fields, or plowed around if they were big, were rounded in shape. The glacier tumbled them as it scraped along, and it ground their corners off.

 

The North American ice sheets reached their largest expanse about 18,000 years ago and then began to recede. Within 5000 years they had pulled back considerably but still reached south as far as central Ohio. After another thousand years, however, the U.S. was largely ice-free.

 

Needless to say, there have been no glaciers reported in Iowa as long as anyone can remember. It’s warmer now. And if it would just warm up a bit more, fewer Iowans would need to trot off to Florida, Texas, and Arizona during deepest winter.

 

The long absence of farm-belt glaciers confirms an inconvenient truth that Gore chooses to ignore. The warming of our planet started thousands of years before SUVs began adding their spew to the greenhouse. Indeed, the whole greenhouse theory of global warming goes wobbly if you just change one small assumption.

 

Logic and chemistry say all CO2 is the same, whether it blows out of a Porsche tailpipe or is exhaled from Al Gore’s lungs or wafts off my compost pile or the rotting of dead plants in the Atchafalaya swamp.

 

“Wrong,” say the greenhouse theorists. They maintain that man’s contribution to the greenhouse is different from nature’s, and that only man’s exhaustings count.

 

Let’s review the greenhouse theory of global warming. Our planet would be one more icy rock hurtling through space at an intolerable temperature were it not for our atmosphere. This thin layer of gases — about 95 percent of the molecules live within the lowest 15 miles — readily allows the sun’s heat in but resists its reradiation into space. Result: The earth is warmed.

 

The atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), argon (0.93 percent), and CO2 (0.04 percent). Many other gases are present in trace amounts. The lower atmosphere also contains varying amounts of water vapor, up to four percent by volume.

 

Nitrogen and oxygen are not greenhouse gases and have no warming influence. The greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto Protocol are each rated for warming potency. CO2, the warming gas that has activated Al Gore, has low warming potency, but its relatively high concentration makes it responsible for 72 percent of Kyoto warming. Methane (CH4, a.k.a. natural gas) is 21 times more potent than CO2, but because of its low concentration, it contributes only seven percent of that warming. Nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly of nature’s creation, is 310 times more potent than CO2. Again, low concentration keeps its warming effect down to 19 percent.

 

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans.

 

They like to point fingers at the U.S., which generated about 23 percent of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 in 2003, the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration. But this finger-pointing ignores yet another inconvenient truth about CO2. In fact, it’s a minor contributor to the greenhouse effect when water vapor is taken into consideration. All the greenhouse gases together, including CO2 and methane, produce less than two percent of the greenhouse effect, according to Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, by the way, is described by one source as “the most renowned climatologist in all the world.”

 

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

 

If everyone knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, why do Al Gore and so many others focus on CO2? Call it the politics of the possible. Water vapor is almost entirely natural. It’s beyond the reach of man’s screwdriver. But when the delegates of 189 countries met at Kyoto in December 1997 to discuss global climate change, they could hardly vote to do nothing. So instead, they agreed that the developed countries of the world would reduce emissions of six man-made greenhouse gases. At the top of the list is CO2, a trivial influence on global warming compared with water vapor, but unquestionably man’s largest contribution.

 

In deciding that it couldn’t reduce water vapor, Kyoto really decided that it couldn’t reduce global warning. But that’s an inconvenient truth that wouldn’t make much of a movie.

Al is way off on what he's preaching, its socialist environmentalism. I go by Scientific environmentalism instead which proves Al is way off.

 

Probably the best article I have read on this...

 

http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/11408/an-inconvenient-truth-sos-fr om-al-gore.html

 

 

An inconvenient truth: SOS from Al Gore.

 

BY PATRICK BEDARD, September 2006

 

 

He’s baack! Just when you thought the scolding was over and it was safe to pull your ear plugs out, Al Gore has a brand-new harangue going.

 

Actually, it’s the same old doomsday prediction he’s been peddling since he was a senator bucking to be President back in the ’90s, only this time it’s packaged as a 94-minute film. An Inconvenient Truth previewed at the Sundance Film Festival last January. “This is activist cinema at its very best,” said the official festival guide.

 

You can guess what activated him; his long-playing paranoia about global warming. He and the mainstream media say it’s a done deal. We’re toast.

 

“Be Worried. Be Very Worried,” blared the cover of Time in April. “Climate change isn’t some vague future problem — it’s already damaging the planet at an alarming pace. Here’s how it affects you, your kids, and their kids as well.”

 

This is, by the way, the same Time that was telling us as late as 1983 to be worried, very worried, that temperatures were descending into another era of “glaciation.”

 

Gore’s “inconvenient truth” is that — there’s no tactful way to say this — we gas-guzzling, SUV-flaunting, comfort-addicted humans, wallowing in our own self-indulgences, have screwed up the planet. We’ve hauled prodigious quantities of fossil fuels out of the ground where they belong, combusted them to release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the sky where it shouldn’t be, and now we’re going to burn for our sins.

 

This feverish sort of should-and-shouldn’t evangelism plays particularly well these days among those who are looking for something to believe that carries no obligation to sit in a church pew. Nature has left us no scripture, so Gore can preach it as he feels it. Faith, brother. Don’t even pretend to understand. Anyway, humans, except for the rare enlightened ones like Al Gore, are alien trespassers in nature.

 

Let’s not dispute the earth’s temperature. It’s warmer than it used to be. As an Iowa farm boy, I learned about the soil we tilled. Most of Iowa is flat, graded smooth by glaciers. The rocks we plowed up in the fields, or plowed around if they were big, were rounded in shape. The glacier tumbled them as it scraped along, and it ground their corners off.

 

The North American ice sheets reached their largest expanse about 18,000 years ago and then began to recede. Within 5000 years they had pulled back considerably but still reached south as far as central Ohio. After another thousand years, however, the U.S. was largely ice-free.

 

Needless to say, there have been no glaciers reported in Iowa as long as anyone can remember. It’s warmer now. And if it would just warm up a bit more, fewer Iowans would need to trot off to Florida, Texas, and Arizona during deepest winter.

 

The long absence of farm-belt glaciers confirms an inconvenient truth that Gore chooses to ignore. The warming of our planet started thousands of years before SUVs began adding their spew to the greenhouse. Indeed, the whole greenhouse theory of global warming goes wobbly if you just change one small assumption.

 

Logic and chemistry say all CO2 is the same, whether it blows out of a Porsche tailpipe or is exhaled from Al Gore’s lungs or wafts off my compost pile or the rotting of dead plants in the Atchafalaya swamp.

 

“Wrong,” say the greenhouse theorists. They maintain that man’s contribution to the greenhouse is different from nature’s, and that only man’s exhaustings count.

 

Let’s review the greenhouse theory of global warming. Our planet would be one more icy rock hurtling through space at an intolerable temperature were it not for our atmosphere. This thin layer of gases — about 95 percent of the molecules live within the lowest 15 miles — readily allows the sun’s heat in but resists its reradiation into space. Result: The earth is warmed.

 

The atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), argon (0.93 percent), and CO2 (0.04 percent). Many other gases are present in trace amounts. The lower atmosphere also contains varying amounts of water vapor, up to four percent by volume.

 

Nitrogen and oxygen are not greenhouse gases and have no warming influence. The greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto Protocol are each rated for warming potency. CO2, the warming gas that has activated Al Gore, has low warming potency, but its relatively high concentration makes it responsible for 72 percent of Kyoto warming. Methane (CH4, a.k.a. natural gas) is 21 times more potent than CO2, but because of its low concentration, it contributes only seven percent of that warming. Nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly of nature’s creation, is 310 times more potent than CO2. Again, low concentration keeps its warming effect down to 19 percent.

 

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans.

 

They like to point fingers at the U.S., which generated about 23 percent of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 in 2003, the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration. But this finger-pointing ignores yet another inconvenient truth about CO2. In fact, it’s a minor contributor to the greenhouse effect when water vapor is taken into consideration. All the greenhouse gases together, including CO2 and methane, produce less than two percent of the greenhouse effect, according to Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, by the way, is described by one source as “the most renowned climatologist in all the world.”

 

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

 

If everyone knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, why do Al Gore and so many others focus on CO2? Call it the politics of the possible. Water vapor is almost entirely natural. It’s beyond the reach of man’s screwdriver. But when the delegates of 189 countries met at Kyoto in December 1997 to discuss global climate change, they could hardly vote to do nothing. So instead, they agreed that the developed countries of the world would reduce emissions of six man-made greenhouse gases. At the top of the list is CO2, a trivial influence on global warming compared with water vapor, but unquestionably man’s largest contribution.

 

In deciding that it couldn’t reduce water vapor, Kyoto really decided that it couldn’t reduce global warning. But that’s an inconvenient truth that wouldn’t make much of a movie.

Ok sorry for that post, i tried posting it once but it didnt show up so i did it again and i guess it did but didnt show up, sorry.

:o damn!! 6x!! lol

I posted it and nothing showed up so i tried again and the samething happened....but it showed up later. weird.

that's a reasonable approach in theory but to put it in to practice may be difficult to jump start but it's very necessary. charging a small fee for flight tickets is definitely do-able' date=' and these little steps will do a lot for the next generations to come.[/quote']

Being a frothing at the mouth environmentalist myself, I'd rather not get on the plane at all if I had a choice, than pay for carbon off-setting. Heck, I'd pay for the carbon off-set and not get on the plane.

 

In fact that factoid about how a tree absorbs one tonne of CO2 during its lifespan. If you then burn the tree, you release the CO2 back into the atmosphere

Al is way off on what he's preaching' date=' its socialist environmentalism. I go by Scientific environmentalism instead which proves Al is way off.[/quote']

Rather than proving he's way off, it just shows another point of view.

 

I think I'll take the option that saves my bills and uses less fuel

Ill stick with science not socialism.

Global Warming is a myth, look over time and it will tell you the earth have warmed up and cooled down over tens of thousands of years, we are coming out of a mini ice-age, so the temperatures would be increasing.

Water levels are rising though, skin cancer's on the rise, seasons are changing quicker than they used to, fuel is getting more expensive and oil's slowly running out.

 

I rather like my Smart car

my problem is with the hole in the ozone, our MAN MADE toxins are destroying the ozone which protects us. No ozone, no life on earth.

 

 

Plus does the fact that the planet is warming at an unparalleled rate?? or the fact that it has NEVER been this hot before? each year, the record is broken

Global Warming is a myth' date=' look over time and it will tell you the earth have warmed up and cooled down over tens of thousands of years, we are coming out of a mini ice-age, so the temperatures would be increasing.[/quote']

 

Finally someone who knows what they are talking about!

my problem is with the hole in the ozone, our MAN MADE toxins are destroying the ozone which protects us. No ozone, no life on earth.

 

 

Plus does the fact that the planet is warming at an unparalleled rate?? or the fact that it has NEVER been this hot before? each year, the record is broken

 

 

Never this hot before? its been way hotter before! just not in the last few thousand years we are coming out of a ice age. But this is just the natural heating up of the earth.

Water levels are rising though, skin cancer's on the rise, seasons are changing quicker than they used to, fuel is getting more expensive and oil's slowly running out.

 

I rather like my Smart car

 

Nothing to do with humans. We may be depleting our oil, yes but the other things are caused by nature.

Either way we can sit around and say its natural or we can try something that'll help the planet.

 

Would be it possible to build something that take Carbon dioxide and turn it into Oxygen?

Either way we can sit around and say its natural or we can try something that'll help the planet.

 

Would be it possible to build something that take Carbon dioxide and turn it into Oxygen?

 

We cant, thats the thing. we arent causing this and we cant change it. Its the earth's natural process.

 

We wont have any real affect on the earth's climate, the earth is naturally doing this. We cannot stop it.

Either way we can sit around and say its natural or we can try something that'll help the planet.

 

Would be it possible to build something that take Carbon dioxide and turn it into Oxygen?

We can build better flood protection, lead more sustainable lives, stop pumping CO2 into the upper atmosphere with air-travel and tread the earth more lightly.

 

But alas, when carbon dioxide is created it releases energy which is used for heating and everything else. To reduce the carbon dioxide back into seperate carbon and oxygen you'd need to put energy into it. Something to do with the conservation of energy.

I love the way your all talking about carbon dioxide being the dangerous gas...

 

...Methane is a hell lot worse than Co2, yet you don't see people moaning about methane discharge from cows.

These guys dont listen to science, just socialism.