You're about to get me going... some mod better lock this. Here's a few things to think about in the meantime.
* How can electricity be the answer when cheap electric power is blocked on every side?

* Converting half the hydrocarbon power vehicles to electric only would mean tripling the grid infrastructure which is ALSO blocked on every side by the same government agency as touts electricity

*Every form of life on this planet is carbon based. This planet teems with lifeforms. The most stable form of carbon in gaseous form is CO2.
Yet the atmosphere is only 400 parts per million CO2.
Go to the bank.. buy $100 worth of pennies. lay all those on your kitchen table. Now take four pennies from those and lay them to the side. That is how much CO2 our air carries.


*Now.. if the standard form of decay on this planet is oxidization. ..Meaning Oxygen combines with the base structural element to form a stable transitional molecule.. where is all the missing CO2? Granted organic matter MOSTLY transitions to methane, because there's a lot of hydrogen availble from that universal solvent, water....There is STILL a helluva lot of carbon missing. Wonder where it is? MAYBE explains why when things get warmer they get greener?

* I saw a paper once where the long term average temp rise in the US over the last fifty years EXACTLY TRACKED the increase in usage of energy of all types and forms.
- What did we learned about matter conversion to energy in HS?
All energy used ultimately ends up as heat.
Whether it comes from a windmill, a nuke plant or coal.
Picture gazillions of little heat absorbers all around us. They take heat we radiate, absorb it and re-radiate it in every direction. Most is caught by the next little ball which in turn re- radiates in every direction. And so on.
Thus CO2 appears to hold on to heat.
This CAN be easily proved with a bell jar and a light.

BUT we dont live in a ****ing bell jar, we live on a big ball. Stand on the flat surface of our big ball and look STRAIGHT OUT. What are you looking at?
SPACE
ALL heat produced on the surface of this ball ends up in space. PERIOD

 

A couple of places; firstly, most of a dead organism's carbon does not decay into gas, but the vast majority recombines with other elements to form organic compounds in soil (this is how most of our fossil fuels are formed); as for gaseous carbon, much of it is respirated by plant life, which absorbs the carbon and releases oxygen.

All heat theoretically would radiate into space eventually. But two things. The first thing is, radiation - particularly into space - is incredibly inefficient and takes an excessively long time. The second thing is, that in order to radiate into space, the heat must first get to the outer layers of the atmosphere.

Now the simple fact is, carbon dioxide retains heat; and the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more heat it is capable of retaining. The Earth of course produces a lot of heat; and while the majority does radiate into space, some is retained for a shorter or longer period by the atmosphere before it gets there. And the more heat retained by the atmosphere, the higher the surface temps.

It is possible for an atmosphere's heat retention ability to increase to a point which would become problematic. Surface temperatures on the planet Venus very simply demonstrate that the theory of this mechanism is completely sound. It's not a wild guess - Venus is there, conditions on its surface and in its atmosphere are well-known and can't be ignored.

 

Can't really argue with that.

 

Pettyfog, I agree with you 100%. I'm no treehugger. Maybe I should have re-phrased that:

 

....
You bit into that BS? This is a classic case of astroturf science! That ANYONE would use that example proves they either dont know WTF they are talking about or they are selling snake oil to hicks. It's not surprising it's still on Gore's talking points.

I can explain it exactly.. do you REALLY want me to?
Hint one: Where is Venus compared to Earth from the sun
Hint two: Guess what the average temp is, there, at an altitude where pressure is equal to earth sea level.
Hint three: See if you can find any case of somebody making that argument in front of an audience containing Fluid Dynamics engineering students

Understand here.. CO2 IS a greenhouse gas, ALL skeptics with any sense accept that. We dont accept the extent of the effect. And we dont accept the concept that Earth is a fragile thing. Time and again it's adjusted to much more catastrophic things than this.
Of course, you accept what authoritative people tell you.. but you need to look and question.

Like where IS 'the money' in this. Dont say 'Big Oil' because big oil doesnt give a ****.. they find a way whatever the cause of the moment. All they have to do is donate and support the right campaigns.

Look.. you seem to be inquisitive on this at the least. I suggest if you dont want to read WUWT, you at least read some skeptical warmist blogs:

Like Judith Curry and Roger Pielke Sr

These are REAL CLIMATE SCIENTISTS who object to what goes on in the name of AGW and btw have a good relationship with the leading skeptics.

__________________________________________________ __________________________

Here's a daydream moment:
"So you think you're smarter than Al Gore?...."

Hell, no.. he's gotten rich as hell. He's WAY richer than Dubya. I'm poor.

".. So how about we set up a little debate without notes between you and Mr Gore."

Oh, please, Br'er Fox!Dont throw me in that Briar Patch!As if..

 

Closer. Which of course means that it's surface should be hotter - on the side facing the sun. Mercury, for instance, is extremely hot during the day (not quite 430 degrees C). However, it falls to over 100 below zero on the night side, because all that heat just re-radiates back into space with only the slightest wisp of a gas atmosphere that is incapable of retaining any heat. We could expect Venus to be much the same (perhaps not so hot during the day since it is further from the sun than Mercury); yet Venus is actually hotter than Mercury despite being twice as far from the sun, at more than 460 C consistently across the planet's surface. Temperatures do drop on the night side, close to around Mercury's daytime surface temps. But that's it; and all this heat retention is directly and unquestionably the result of Venus's CO2 atmosphere.

This just proves the point further. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the denser it becomes, and the higher up you have to go to find a pressure equal to Earth's current sea level pressure. It's great if the temperature is a balmy 70 degrees where the barometer reads a comfortable 29.92 inches; but that's not going to help you much if that region is 3 or 4 miles up in the atmosphere. Unless you want to build sky cities like in that Star trek or whatever (which I have to admit would be pretty cool, but would make taking long road trips in my Jimmy difficult...unless I mod it with wings and rocket boosters and this whole tangent is just getting more awesome).

Uh....42?

The Earth isn't the concern; it's a big rock and doesn't care how hot or cold it gets or what its atmosphere is made of. The problem is life, which is a little more fragile and has proven susceptible to quitting over little changes. The largest of the several mass die-offs in Earth's history (the Permian) was precipitated by a 6-degree-C average global temperature increase associated with an increase in atmospheric CO2 that wasn't exactly instantaneous, but merely faster than life could adapt to keep up with. It didn't kill all life; but it did kill a whole lot of it - most of it by far. As in, more than 90%.*

We almost didn't make it.

Yeah yeah, Al Gore's scary movie, REAL climate scientists, blah blah blah. Never saw the movie myself; I find the whole politicking part of it distasteful. If you want to argue that global warming isn't happening now because these numbers or those numbers were fixed or fudged or somebody was bought off or whatever I'm not going to stop you - I don't keep up with all that; you may or may not be right, I don't know. And don't think my using Venus as an demonstration of what CO2 in an atmosphere does means I think humans could ever turn the Earth into another Venus - that's not really possible. But I know science, and if you're going to argue that global warming cannot happen and so forth, I will correct you because that's wrong. Your asking where "all the carbon is" when its well known that the vast majority of it is retained in life, the oceans, and the Earth itself seems to suggest an unfamiliarity with geology. Global warming can not only happen, but has happened in Earth's history before and has been linked to mass extinctions; Venus's atmosphere is as hot as it is because of all the CO2 in its atmosphere - these are just facts, facts that don't care about oscars or who the president is or whether you buy a Hummer or a Chevy Volt. They were established long before "AGW" even became a topic of interest; so to say that people who "accept" them are just cowing to authority or political pressure or whatnot isn't going to fly.

 

Alright, this thread has wildly sped off the original topic of the 2013 TrailBlazer Concept Photo.

Take it to PM guys.