The attempt to reduce GHGs, energy use and water consumption are all laudable, I'm just afraid that all savings will simply translate into higher production and Saskatchewan will still find itself without water.

I'm amused at how the unknowing public has become convinced that CO2 is a mortal danger to the planet. It
accounts for less than 1% of the greenhouse gases and is treated like it were plutonium. Amazing what a little
brainwashing and a hysterical moving picture from Hollywood can acomplish. But then, look what Goebbels did to convince the Germans that the Jews were the root of all their problems. Perhaps someone could tell me why all those climatology models differ so much in their predictions? I thought I heard some guy claim they all
were in agreement. Sure they are. Their predictions only differ by some 400%. In the 1980's these same climatologists were predicting a new ice age. Now the dietary scientists are scaring everyone about trans fat not that many years after it was promoted by the same scientists as the solution to the problems of saturated fat. It's really getting hilarious waiting for the next big fear to motivate this world's fools into rushing to do something else really dumb.

If they had any biomass nearby, I would gasify it into SNG for the heat energy required. At least that would be CO2 neutral.

This is not just about Global Warming, there are other important issues too. What about fish stocks and marine food chain? Deforestation causes erosion that silts up streams, and hamper fish spawning.
_Another point is the longer hillsides stay relatively bare, the more soil, sand, dirt, and organic material is washed off. This soil took years, decades, centuries to reach the pooint that it could support a temperate rain forest. Even inland in drier alpine, or temperate areas, this is still true.
_Yet another point is water resources. Bitumen production and upgrade is water intensive. Parts of western Canada are semi arid. The long winters help disguise this with snowmelt, but there is only a certain amount of water. This resource is needed for cities, and farms, not to mention downstream farther north and east.

Anti-global-warming crackpots...

To Kent B. - I agree with you! Pizmo is most likely making money on the GHG global warming scare/lie just like big ole Al G. and Billy C. are now. Why is it that these two guys didn’t do anything about GHG emissions when they be in el office for 8yrs? Al and Bill both own SUVs and AL doesn't even buy renewable power for any of his homes or farm. Anyway, global warming has to true because Pizmo saw it on his computer screen and computer models are always right? LOL

It's heartening to see so many crackpot illiterates making such strong cases. Nice work.

CO2 in atmosphere – all of it, natural and antropogenic combined, is responsible for only about 2% of natural GHG effect of Earth atmosphere. The rest is mostly due to water vapor and clouds.

I see, so your proposition is that we shouldn't worry about CO2, since we have all this water vapor that keeps the Earth from turning into a block of ice.

This of course has nothing to do with the subject, which is the increase in temperature of the planet and the rate of that increase, all of which directly correlate with increases in CO2 levels that are the result of anthropogenic emissions.

I really don't understand why you would come to a forum where educated people congregate and try to pass off these simple shell games.

Pizmo:

This is quite primitive theory. In fact, every computer model predicting run-away GW because of increase of antropogenic CO2 get their dramatic results because they suppose that water vapor will multiply GHG effect of CO2 increase by factor of three or four. This represents unstable equilibrium of cooling/heating factors, which is not possible. Any credible climate model supposes negative feed-back in response of forcing of one of the factors. Other vice Earth would be chunk of ice or melted lava globe long time ago. All run-away computer models failed dramatically to predict or even explain documented climate trends when extrapolated beyond their initial calibration intervals. There are ample researches on the subject, some of them I posted on my previous posts.

Hola Andrey,

I checked out the second link since it seemed to the point, and unfortunately, the author seems to have conveniently misplaced a citation for an initial, and critical piece of information.

Although estimates of the contribution from water vapor vary widely, most sources place it between 90 and 95% of the warming effect

Everything else is cited, but this isn't, and doesn't agree with similar peer reviewed papers like Ramanathan and Coakley, Rev. Geophys and Space Phys., 16 465 (1978), which stated the impact of carbon dioxide would be roughly 25% alone, and 9% as it stands due to overlapping absorption.

Ultimately, this is really about whether carbon dioxide output is worth risking our current, relatively stable climate since no one knows precisely what will happen. Since most human activities are based around climate, screwing with it isn't a good idea, and we've been lucky so far considering how little we know. But our luck may run out, so it's better to be safe than sorry imo.

Andrey:

When you state the 1,2, and 5% contributions, are you referring to anthropomorphic carbon dioxide, or total carbon dioxide? If you are referring to total carbon dioxide, what papers come to these conclusions? I as because the 1,2 or 5% figure seems plausible for anthropomorphic carbon dioxide, but not for all carbon dioxide, at least from what I've read.

If you take the proportion of the increase in ppm of carbon dioxide, and compare that to the total impact of carbon dioxide (~9%). It appears that humans contribute a little less than 2% of the greenhouse effect via carbon dioxide. Which, interestingly enough, is about the same as the increase in average global temperature seen as well (.6C increase from an average of 33C).

pizmo and others:

Andrey's statement that "CO2 accounts for less than 2% of the Global Warming Effect" and that "water vapor accounts for the remaining 98%" is totally supported by this paper (URL reference below) by Richard Lindzen, a well known MIT scientist, Professor of Meteorology and expert in atmospheric models.

NB - This paper was written in 1990, so some portions may be dated, but the "98% of GHG effect is caused by water vapor" is evidently an established scientific fact that is understood and accepted by atmospheric scientists.

TITLE: Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus by Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

QUOTE 1
The main absorbers of infrared in the atmosphere are water vapor and clouds. Even if all other greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) were to disappear, we would still be left with over 98 percent of the current greenhouse effect.

QUOTE 2
What is really going on is schematically illustrated in Figure 1. The surface of the Earth is cooled in large measure by air currents (in various forms including deep clouds) that carry heat upward and poleward. One consequence of this picture is that it is the greenhouse gases well above the Earth's surface that are of primary importance in determining the temperature of the Earth. That is especially important for water vapor, whose density decreases by about a factor of 1,000 between the surface and ten kilometers above the surface. Another consequence is that one cannot even calculate the temperature of the Earth without models that accurately reproduce the motions of the atmosphere. Indeed, present models have large errors here--on the order of 50 percent. Not surprisingly, those models are unable to calculate correctly either the present average temperature of the Earth or the temperature ranges from the equator to the poles. Rather, the models are adjusted or "tuned'' to get those quantities approximately right.

QUOTE 3
More important, the climate is a complex system where it is impossible for all other internal factors to remain constant. In present models those other factors amplify the effects of increasing carbon dioxide and lead to predictions of warming in the neighborhood of four to five degrees centigrade. Internal processes within the climate system that change in response to warming in such a manner as to amplify the response are known as positive feedbacks. Internal processes that diminish the response are known as negative feedbacks. The most important positive feedback in current models is due to water vapor. In all current models upper tropospheric (five to twelve kilometers) water vapor--the major greenhouse gas--increases as surface temperatures increase. Without that feedback, no current model would predict warming in excess of 1.7 degrees centigrade--regardless of any other factors. Unfortunately, the way current models handle factors such as clouds and water vapor is disturbingly arbitrary. In many instances the underlying physics is simply not known. In other instances there are identifiable errors. Even computational errors play a major role. Indeed, there is compelling evidence for all the known feedback factors to actually be negative. In that case, we would expect the warming response to carbon dioxide doubling alone to be diminished.

READ THE ENTIRE PAPER AT:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html

Go to www.cato.org and search on Lindzen for access to many other items by Prof. Lindzen, including a July 2006 piece written for the WSJ entitled:
Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong.
There's no "consensus" on global warming.
BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Sunday, July 2, 2006