Climate Policy

[eppie]

Some of the numbers are published by the DOE, here. Carbon Dioxide (with GWP=1) has a preindustrial concentration of 280 ppm, with a current concentration of 384 ppm, showing a net difference of 104 ppm. Of this 104 ppm, 15.3 ppm are from anthropogenic sources, and 88.7 ppm are from natural sources (e.g warming results in increased biologic activity which adds CO2 into the system.)

I am not sure that is true. A plant would over his whole lifetime have a 0 contribution to the CO2 concentration, that is if its whole carbon based 'skeleton' would decompose, if it doesn't it has a negative impact on CO2 concentrations. And especially because we are definitely having less plant biomass now than we had a few 1000 years ago this seems a bit strange to me.

So, even looking at it crudely, 15.3 / 384 = 3.98%, but the other gases while emitting in smaller amount have a higher GWP value. So, if you can accept (without counting water vapor) that CO2 accounts for about 55.33% of the warming potential, with CH4, N2O, O3, and all other trace gases contributing the other 44.67%. You can add the the column labeled "Increased radiative forcing" for yourself to see the relative ratios. According to research by S.M. Freidenreich and V. Ramaswamy, water vapor contributes roughly 95% of all global warming thus reducing the CO2 contribution to about .2%. Just by rough calculation from the published research at DOE, and NOAA. Here is another scientific viewpoint by Tim Patterson (oh, yes, another AGW scientist but as yet untarnished by oil money).

Watr vapour is passive in this equation. Water vapour concentrations in air depend on temperature, after that it is positive or negative feedback. This is because it is in a physical equilibrium, while CO2 is in a chemical equilibrium (or maybe there are huge stockpiles of dry ice on antarctica).


In all the percentages and values you mention be sure that you all use the same base temperature, so 0 K, or better an average global temperature of say, 1850. So when you would take 0 K as base than the 0.28 % contribution of CO2 might be right, but has no practical sense or use.