Hi.

I am trying to make sense of the global warming "it is / it isn't" mess
(which seems very culturally driven) as do-it-yourself seems the only
way to cut through the chattering voices. My final intent is to place
an analysis on the web.

Right now I'm needing data to build an analysis about. Carbon, CO2 in
the atmosphere and world temperatures together seem to be the basis of
the issue. What else should I throw in? Solar radiation??

Anyhow, here is my bucket of Q's for the moment... please, if you can
answer with a link or reference to where the data comes from I would be
very glad.


1.On early Earth, before plant life oxygenated the atmosphere, what
was:
1.1 typical temp ranges,
1.2 % carbon-dioxide in atmosphere
1.3 total tonnage of carbon in atmosphere
1.4 what colour was the sky (my guess is grey + orange tint ??)

2.On Earth before Industrial revolution, what was:
2.1 typical temp ranges
2.2 % carbon-dioxide in atmosphere
2.3 total tonnage of carbon held in:
2.3.1 atmosphere
2.3.2 living things - on land (if possible split plant life, animal
life)
2.3.3 living things - in sea (if possible split plant life, animal
life)
2.3.4 sequestered as subterranean deposits e.g. oil, coal
2.3.5 sequestered as sea floor deposits e.g. methyl hydrates
2.3.6 any others (??)

3.On Earth present-day (last 50 years), what has been :
3.1 typical temp ranges
3.2 % carbon-dioxide in atmosphere
3.3 total tonnage of carbon held in:
3.3.1 atmosphere
3.3.2 living things - on land (if possible split plant life, animal
life)
3.3.3 living things - in sea (if possible split plant life, animal
life)
3.3.4 sequestered as subterranean deposits e.g. oil, coal
3.3.5 sequestered as sea floor deposits e.g. methyl hydrates
3.3.6 any others (??)


Your answers appreciated - esp. with provenance i.e. traceability to
recent study or accepted works.

Also, what was the coldest it has ever been - ever? And hottest ever?

Is there a history of world temperature (a full timeline) on the web
please?

Thank you one and all!

brodders

wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi.

I am trying to make sense of the global warming "it is / it isn't" mess
(which seems very culturally driven) as do-it-yourself seems the only
way to cut through the chattering voices.

I can't help you with the data, but here is a comment about the issue in
general:

The reason that there are all those chattering voices, is because there are
no definitive answers to those very questions. For the most part, the
answers have to be inferred from other information. That information is too
sparse, and has been interpreted in more than one way; hence the conflicting
chatter.

Good luck.

"Icebound" wrote in message
...

wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi.

I am trying to make sense of the global warming "it is / it isn't" mess
(which seems very culturally driven) as do-it-yourself seems the only
way to cut through the chattering voices.

I can't help you with the data, but here is a comment about the issue in
general:

The reason that there are all those chattering voices, is because there are
no definitive answers to those very questions. For the most part, the
answers have to be inferred from other information. That information is too
sparse, and has been interpreted in more than one way; hence the conflicting
chatter.

That is not entirely true. Enough information is known to make it quite
clear that global warming is happening and that it is mainly man made.
NB As CO2 levels rise, more of the warming will be due to that.

The oil and coal industries feel that it is their duty to argue that global
warming is not caused by them in order to protect their shareholders'
interests and their jobs. Automobile manufactures have a similar
outlook and drivers love their cars, so both will grasp at any straw,
or argument which attacks the concept of antropogenic global warming.

There are a few scientists who are willing or want to believe that all
their colleauges are wrong. Not only do they recieve funding from
the oil industry, they also achieve fame because they are unusual. The
fewer scientific sceptics there are, the more famous they become!

You asked when it was coldest. That was over 500,000,000 years
ago during Snowball Earth. But even the details of that are disputed.
http://ecosystems.wcp.muohio.edu/stu...cles/home.html
See the following page for links to answers to all your other questions;
http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/globalwarming.html

Cheers, Alastair.

"Icebound" wrote in message
...
The reason that there are all those chattering voices, is because there
are
no definitive answers to those very questions.

Undeniable Global Warming

By Naomi Oreskes
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page B07

Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific
disagreement about global climate change. It's time to lay that
misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that
Earth's climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason.
We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming
and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the
World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental
Program, the IPCC is charged with evaluating the state of climate science as
a basis for informed policy action. In its most recent assessment, the IPCC
states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that
Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities . .
.. are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents . . . that
absorb or scatter radiant energy. . . . [M]ost of the observed warming over
the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse
gas concentrations."

The IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years all major
scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears
directly on the matter have issued similar statements. A National Academy of
Sciences report begins unequivocally: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in
Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air
temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." The report
explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of
professional scientific thinking, and it answers yes. Others agree. The
American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science have all issued
statements concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is
compelling.

Despite recent allegations to the contrary, these statements from the
leadership of scientific societies and the IPCC accurately reflect the state
of the art in climate science research. The Institute for Scientific
Information keeps a database on published scientific articles, which my
research assistants and I used to answer that question with respect to
global climate change. We read 928 abstracts published in scientific
journals between 1993 and 2003 and listed in the database with the keywords
"global climate change." Seventy-five percent of the papers either
explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view. The remaining 25
percent dealt with other facets of the subject, taking no position on
whether current climate change is caused by human activity. None of the
papers disagreed with the consensus position. There have been arguments to
the contrary, but they are not to be found in scientific literature, which
is where scientific debates are properly adjudicated. There, the message is
clear and unambiguous.

To be sure, a handful of scientists have raised questions about the details
of climate models, about the accuracy of methods for evaluating past global
temperatures and about the wisdom of even attempting to predict the future.
But this is quibbling about the details. The basic picture is clear, and
some changes are already occurring. A new report by the Arctic Climate
Impact Assessment -- a consortium of eight countries, including Russia and
the United States -- now confirms that major changes are taking place in the
Arctic, affecting both human and non-human communities, as predicted by
climate models. This information was conveyed to the U.S. Senate last month
not by a radical environmentalist, as was recently alleged on the Web, but
by Robert Corell, a senior fellow of the American Meteorological Society and
former assistant director for geosciences at the National Science
Foundation.

So why does it seem as if there is major scientific disagreement? Because a
few noisy skeptics -- most of whom are not even scientists -- have generated
a lot of chatter in the mass media. At the National Press Club recently,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen dismissed
the consensus as "religious belief." To be sure, no scientific conclusion
can ever be proven, absolutely, but it is no more a "belief" to say that
Earth is heating up than it is to say that continents move, that germs cause
disease, that DNA carries hereditary information or that quarks are the
basic building blocks of subatomic matter. You can always find someone,
somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best available
science, and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.

The chatter of skeptics is distracting us from the real issue: how best to
respond to the threats that global warming presents.

The writer is an associate professor of history and director of the Program
in Science Studies at the University of California.