Posted on 01/07/2011 10:37:57 AM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON (AFP) – An international team of researchers has found that the atmosphere's ability to cleanse itself of pollutants and other greenhouse gases, except carbon dioxide, is generally stable.
The study, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, comes amid a fierce debate over whether, as some experts believe, the atmosphere's self-cleaning ability was fragile and sensitive to environmental changes.
The research team, which was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), measured levels in the atmosphere of hydroxyl radicals, which play a key role in atmospheric chemistry.
Levels of the agent only fluctuated a few percentage points from one year to the next, not 25 percent as some studies had estimated, the researchers found.
"The new hydroxyl measurements give researchers a broad view of the 'oxidizing' or self-cleaning capacity of the atmosphere," said Stephen Montzka, the study's lead author, a research chemist at the Global Monitoring Division of NOAA's Boulder, Colorado laboratory.
"Now we know that the atmosphere's ability to rid itself of many pollutants is generally well buffered or stable... This fundamental property of the atmosphere was one we hadn't been able to confirm before."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
add to the mix of news on the ‘green’ side of things
Ping.
Well.... duh
Like we didn’t already know that nature has its own way of achieving equilibrium.
Stupidity runs rampant in this administration.
Want to bring “excessive” CO2 levels down... simply plant more trees.
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Yesterday we learned that the great Pacific Garbage Patch really isn’t as big as hyped by media, today we learn that the “atmosphere’s ability to rid itself of many pollutants is generally well buffered or stable”. Huh. Imagine that, the planet isn’t broken as easily as some imagine.
From a NOAA press release:
NOAA-led Research Team Takes Measure of the Variability of the Atmosphere’s Self-Cleaning Capacity
And they are including Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant.....
I sense the Goal Post changing slightly!
Maybe the EPA wanted this....
It's 'the hottest year on record', as long as you don't take its temperature (Hansen again )
They are still not listening to Piers Corbyn
yes, they seem to be moving them around a bit....
why, pray tell, would all this pollution only affect CO2 levels in the atmosphere?
Nature is bigger than man-it will do what it will do.
blame it on hydroxyl radicals
amazing we’ve survived this long.. 8-o
-excerpt-
The radical is central to the chemistry of the atmosphere. It is involved in the formation and breakdown of surface-level ozone, a lung- and crop-damaging pollutant. It also reacts with and destroys the powerful greenhouse gas methane and air pollutants including hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. However, hydroxyl radicals do not remove carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or chlorofluorocarbons.
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I think I had a radical moment once. Who do I sue?
Well,...we can’t have anything destroy CO2 ...many research grants depend on that being out there and increasing...../s
Climate Craziness of the week: a basic science question for NYT reporter Justin Gillis
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Readers please note the story I ran earlier: NOAA: “the atmosphere’s self-cleaning capacity is rather stable”
This story talks about the ability of hydroxyl radicals in the free atmosphere to break down pollutants, and how there seems to be a stability in the levels globally, something understood for the first time. All good news.
Now read what this New York Times reporter, Assistant Business Editor Justin Gillis, bemoans in his story here:
A Steady Dose of Atmospheric Detergent
He writes:
Unfortunately, the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is not one of those broken down by the hydroxyl radical.
Zounds!
Mr. Gillis, let’s say such a thing magically did occur naturally, or someone creates a synthetic catalyst that performs the job and releases enough of it into the atmosphere in some geoengineering scheme to start dissipating CO2 in the atmosphere.
If you can answer these questions, you might then understand why I am giving your statement the high praise of this regular feature.
This WUWT post on CO2 has a clue for you. I offer it as a path to enlightenment.
While you are at it, you might also like to address this story you did on sea level rise:
B>The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide
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I recast Willis’ first graph as a bar chart to make the concept easier to understand to the layman:
Lo and behold, the first 20 ppm accounts for over half of the heating effect to the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm, by which time carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. One thing to bear in mind is that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 got down to 180 ppm during the glacial periods of the ice age the Earth is currently in (the Holocene is an interglacial in the ice age that started three million years ago).
Plant growth shuts down at 150 ppm, so the Earth was within 30 ppm of disaster. Terrestrial life came close to being wiped out by a lack of CO2 in the atmosphere. If plants were doing climate science instead of us humans, they would have a different opinion about what is a dangerous carbon dioxide level.
Gotta be some good stuff in the comments to the article linked at post #17.
436 Responses to The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide
These idiots still haven’t figure out that plants take care of the CO2, not the atmosphere?
Don’t you learn that in elementary school?
Brook + Readfearn / Monckton + Plimer
Climate Sensitivity -- Brisbane Institute --
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