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CO2 is sparingly soluble in water. The colder the water, the more CO2 will dissolve. If you warm water with CO2 dissolved in it, the CO2 will leave solution and return to the atmosphere. A simple example of this phenomenon is to leave an open can of Coke or Pepsi in your car on a warm day for an hour or so - when you return, it will be as flat as shit from a tall cow as all the CO2 dissolved in it has left solution in the warm environment.

This fizzy drink example is wildly wrong. Fizzy drinks fizz because they are heavily supersaturated with CO2.

The CO2 that escapes in an hour or two from a fizzy drink is not in any sense equivalent to the equilibrium balances of CO2 concentration between sea and air.

Thought your response was rather harsh.

I don't suppose it will have caused any offence, but if it has I apologise.

Global deforestation rate slows

ROME, Italy (Reuters) -- An area of forest twice the size of Paris disappears every day although the rate of global deforestation has started to slow, according to a new United Nations report.

"Deforestation continues and it continues at an unacceptable rate, however there are signs of potential change," said Wulf Killmann, a forestry expert at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) which published the report.

The destruction of forests not only reduces habitat available for wildlife but also adds to the greenhouse effect because the carbon stored in trees is released into the atmosphere.

Deforestation accounts for 18 percent of the carbon dioxide produced each year, a significant proportion of the emissions scientists say are causing global warming which also poses risks to forests via increased fires and the spread of pests.

Demand for agricultural land is one of the main reasons that forests continue to be erased at the rate of 13 million hectares a year, an area about the size of England.

However, moves by some countries to replant forests has meant the annual net loss has dropped from around 9 million hectares in the 1990s to 7.3 million, according to the "State of the World's Forests 2007" report.

A huge tree planting programme in China, for example, more than offset large-scale deforestation in other parts of Asia such as Indonesia, to produce a net increase in the amount of forested land in the Asia-Pacific region during the first five years of the decade.

China's economic boom has driven demand for wood and the country has adopted a tree planting policy, not only to reduce its reliance on imported timber, but also for soil protection, especially in areas near the Gobi desert, Killmann said.

In Africa and Latin America, there are fewer positive signs.

Forested land in Latin America -- home to the Amazon -- fell to less than half of the continent's area. By 2005, forests were estimated at 47 percent of the total land, from 51 in 1990.

More than half of global deforestation in the period 2000-2005 happened in Africa, the report said, underlining its conclusion that poverty and war are major contributors to forest destruction.

Although economic growth often contributes to illegal logging, the FAO concluded that development was, on the whole, beneficial to forests as wealthier countries were more likely to establish conservation policies.

Citing the growth in forests in India and China, it concluded: "Economic development appears to be a necessary condition for deforestation to cease."

Where does the C from the reaction go?

Overall conclusions

The following concluding statement is not in the Fourth Assessment Report, but was agreed upon by the ISPM writers based on their review of the current evidence.

The Earth's climate is an extremely complex system and we must not understate the difficulties involved in analyzing it. Despite the many data limitations and uncertainties, knowledge of the climate system continues to advance based on improved and expanding data sets and improved understanding of meteorological and oceanographic mechanisms.

The climate in most places has undergone minor changes over the past 200 years, and the land-based surface temperature record of the past 100 years exhibits warming trends in many places. Measurement problems, including uneven sampling, missing data and local land-use changes, make interpretation of these trends difficult. Other, more stable data sets, such as satellite, radiosonde and ocean temperatures yield smaller warming trends. The actual climate change in many locations has been relatively small and within the range of known natural variability. There is no compelling evidence that dangerous or unprecedented
changes are underway.

The available data over the past century can be interpreted within the framework of a variety of hypotheses as to cause and mechanisms for the measured changes. The hypothesis that greenhouse gas emissions have produced or are capable of producing a significant warming of the Earth's climate since the start of the industrial era is credible, and merits continued attention. However, the hypothesis cannot be proven by formal theoretical arguments, and the available data allow the hypothesis to be credibly disputed.

Arguments for the hypothesis rely on computer simulations, which can never be decisive as supporting evidence. The computer models in use are not, by necessity, direct calculations of all basic physics but rely upon empirical approximations for many of the smaller scale processes of the oceans and atmosphere. They are tuned to produce a credible simulation
of current global climate statistics, but this does not guarantee reliability in future climate regimes. And there are enough degrees of freedom in tunable models that simulations cannot serve as supporting evidence for any one tuning scheme, such as that associated with a strong effect from greenhouse gases.

There is no evidence provided by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report that the uncertainty can be formally resolved from first principles, statistical hypothesis testing or modeling exercises. Consequently, there will remain an unavoidable element of uncertainty as to the extent that humans are contributing to future climate change, and indeed whether
or not such change is a good or bad thing.

Polar caps wane as Mars tries global warming

Global warming and melting polar ice caps are not just problems here on Earth. Mars is facing similar global changes, researchers say, with temperatures across the red planet rising by around 0.65 degrees over the last few decades.

The trigger for the changes on Mars are, however, totally different from those mechanisms controlling and influencing climate here on Earth. Researchers at the Carl Sagan centre in Mountain View, California, suggest that the planet's albedo, how much light it reflects, is a major factor in the warming.

Lori Fenton explains that current maps of the planet show it is much darker than it was in the late seventies, especially around the southern highlands.

Fenton explains that much of the lighter coloured dust that covers the planet has been swept aside by Martian dust devils, leaving the much darker bedrock exposed to the sun. This darker land holds the heat much more efficiently, warming the planet. in turn, this warming triggers stronger winds, exposing even more bedrock.

Phil Christensen, a planetary scientist at Arizona State, cautions against over-extrapolating from the data, however. He told Nature.com that it is unlikely that in 500 years time the Martian ice caps would be completely gone:

"They're looking at a piece of the cycle, other processes could turn this around to a place where the ice-caps start growing again. You can't take 10 years of data and extrapolate out to 1,000 years."

Christensen also cautions against drawing any parallels between the warming on Mars and on Earth. He said: "The more we learn about Mars, the more intuition it gives us about Earth, but the systems are fundamentally different."

Meanwhile, other researchers are sceptical about the scale of the change that Fenton has calculated, pointing out that different instruments measured the planet's albedo in the 70's and now.

The IPCC's main conclusion in its February report was that it was more than 90 percent probable that mankind was to blame for most global warming since 1950.

Ever heard of "reasonable doubt"......

As in - it is reasonable to expect that if we bombard the public with enough misleading facts then no doubt some of them will be accepted as fact.

Mankind to blame for global warming say scientists..................
The scientists said it was "very likely" -- or more than 90 percent probable -- that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the warming in the past 50 years.

This sort of thing realy PISSES ME OFF
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL0192328420070202


So WE ARE NOT "TO BLAME".....just "HIGHLY LIKELY".....or not as the case may be

In a statement, the animal rights group PETA expressed its dismay.

"A recent report published by the United Nations concludes that the meat industry is responsible for more global warming emissions than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world combined."

Project aims to extract dam methane

Scientists in Brazil have claimed that a major source of greenhouse gas emissions could be curbed by capturing and burning methane given off by large hydro-electric dams.

..............

The scientists estimate that worldwide the technique could prevent emissions equivalent to more than the total annual burning of fossil fuels in the UK

I thought trees also converted CO2 back to O2, this being a more significant anti-greenhouse system?
Where does the C from the reaction go?

It is sequestered in the tree growth - basic organic chemistry. It is then released again when the wood is burnt - since burning is oxidisation, the C gets the O2 added again to become CO2.

If the tree dies and rots, the C remains sequestered in the natural system until such time as it is released as CO2 or methane (generally)