Climate Policy

[kandrathe]

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.

This is not true. Where does peat come from? Unless you want to consider a plants life span to be millions of years. Then, due to natural processes the carbons can be released sometimes after thousands or millions of years. I'm not even sure what happens to biomass that falls to the bottom of deep oceans. At the end of the last ice age at 18000 and 13000 years ago changes in the environment released over 600 Gt of CO2 into the atmosphere in two large burps (the equivalent of our current rate over 100 years).

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.

How is this true? I think you assume it is true, but while we have less forests I'm not sure we have less biomass. If this were true, wouldn't we see a decrease in O2 levels?

Water vapor is passive in this equation. Water vapor 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 measuring the "green house effect", you need to measure the impact of both water vapor, as well as other GHG's in absorbing and dissipating heat, as well as clouds (and other albedo sources) in both insulting the ground and reflecting radiation away. It has been a big mistake in this whole debate not to attempt to understand this highly complex system. Even solar flares with increases in ionizing radiation may have a temporary effect in increasing the atmospheres albedo effect.

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.

Right. I'm just trying to make the point that CO2 is probably not as important as everyone seems to think it is, but I don't have any issues with transforming away from fossil fuels for other reasons (e.g. limited resource, pollution, renewable sources are available, etc.).