Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDoc
If you pump co2 into your garage without a car running, the temperature isn't going to increase. A co2 container isn't hot to the touch because it has more co2 in it or not.
Humans are not adding to co2 levels. In a single day, 1 volcano and one area of the ocean, each.. release more co2 than all humans do in a year combined. The co2 being poured into the air didn't come from humans before and it's not coming from us now.
We have plenty of air/land mass left, human eyes have still not seen all of earth and we only live on like .05% of the planets land mass.
We aren't anything.. cows release more co2 than humans.
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Humans actually are adding to co2 levels. In fact, since the start of industrialization, co2 concentrations have gone up by ~30%. And they'd been stable for the past few thousand years or so before that.
In the past, there used to be a balance. The co2 a cow releases comes from the co2 absorbed from the air by the plants the cow has eaten. Volcanoes released co2, but plants absorbed it, died, and stored it in the ground. Etc.
The co2 humans now release comes from oil and coal that was slowly stored during hundreds of millions of years.
Now, while it's true that our co2 output is much smaller than that of natural sources (about 3% of the total), it's an external influence on a fairly balanced system.
Compare it to money. Let's say you have $1000 in your bank account, make $10 a day and spend $10 a day. Then, at some point, you start buying a $0.50 pack of gum a day extra - only 5% more than you were originally spending. After 6 years, your bank account will be empty.
And as an aside:
Cows don't have more of an effect than humans. What you're thinking of is the bit that was in the news about cows having a bigger effect than cars, and not because of co2, but because of methane. And, of course, we're responsible for there being that many cows out there.
As for volcanoes, humans are actually responsible for an output of about 125 times as much co2 as volcanoes.