7 ms·

>increased amount of CO2 in the air as a result of anthropogenic activity Couple of questions because I'm curious... What percentage of the 0.04% CO2 in Earth

>increased amount of CO2 in the air as a result of anthropogenic activity Couple of questions because I'm curious... What percentage of the 0.04% CO2 in Earth's atmosphere do humans contribute? Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth?

kragen 5y ago
Being 100% certain of anything is insanity; it implies that literally no amount of evidence could change your mind, while a rational mind is always open to revising its beliefs when new evidence becomes available. Religious faith and psychosis can "absolutely prove 100%". Science and reason can't.
scotty79 5y ago
> What percentage of the 0.04% CO2 in Earth's atmosphere do humans contribute? Since CO2 ppm nearly doubled since pre-industrial times then humans are responsible for nearly half of the CO2 in the atmosphere. > Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth? Yes, for reasonable definitions of "proven 100%".
padobson 5y ago
Uh oh, these questions smell like climate heresy Edit: for those struggling with the irony, my comment is pro-questions and pro-heresy. Let's not attack people for asking questions
- scarygliders 5y ago
  What's heretical about asking honest straightforward questions?
  - MauranKilom 5y ago
    The phrasing of the question is odd and hints at rhetoric instead of curiosity as intention. What if it's only 99.99% sure that CO2 is the reason for climate change? What about 90%? No need to act until we bring that up to 100%? What's with the fixation on 0.04% as a number? Things can't have huge impact unless numbers are also big? I don't want to offend, but that's honestly third grade mentality. There's surprise about small things having little impact, and then there's denial hidden as feigned curiosity. Especially when the answers are directly available from much more credible sources than random internet posters. Compare with: "Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that the lead comprising 0.03% [hypothetically - for reference, this is 100000x the FDA limit] of our food intake is the main culprit/control knob which controls brain development?" No, it actually isn't the "main" control knob. And our bodies are also complex with many feedback loops. And no study will ever reach p = 0. And it's a really small number. And yet we have made "extremely huge decisions" regarding what fuels we allow, what tests food have to undergo etc...
    - mr_mitm 5y ago
      The fixation on the 0.04% is particularly confusing, as the other 99.96% of the atmosphere is mostly completely transparent to the relevant frequencies. Going by volume or ppm is wrong when all we care about is the absorption factor. Greenhouse gases don't absorb less infrared radiation by adding transparent nitrogen, even though it would reduce the greenhouse gas concentration.
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    > What's heretical about asking honest straightforward questions? This is a loaded question ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question ), since it implies that this question-asking is honest and straightforward. On the contrary, it seems like OP is "jaqing off" ( https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions ); unless, of course, they can absolutely prove 100% that they're acting in good faith.
    - useragent86 5y ago
      Can you absolutely prove 100% that you're acting in good faith?
      - chriswarbo 5y ago
        Nope, but that's no matter, since whether or not I am acting in good faith is logically independent of whether OP is jaqing off (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque ). In contrast, OP's hunch about the climate emergency either not existing because the concentration of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere is "small" (according to some unspecified criteria), and/or fixing itself due to plant growth, run counter to the consensus position of the world scientific community, and hence the burden of proof is on OP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) It was their choice to raise that burden to the unachievable height of '100% absolute proof' :)
- ysavir 5y ago
  Doesn't matter which side of the fence you fall on, it's good practice to validate the conclusions--and to continue doing so regularly. Please don't discourage people from asking for the data and the facts, no matter what your perspective is.
  - ForHackernews 5y ago
    Just curious, could somebody explain to me quickly here how computers work, starting from transistors? It seems implausible to me that tiny electrical circuits could be used to produce logical operations. I'm really just asking an honest question, and it's always healthy to revisit the evidence especially when you're making a big claim like "sand does maths".
    - petermcneeley 5y ago
      https://www.tindie.com/products/codecorrect/basic-logic-gates-using-transistors-learning-kit/ https://www.tindie.com/products/codecorrect/basic-logic-gate... And then https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/
Joeri 5y ago
The IPCC reports describe the answers to those questions very thoroughly, no point in rehashing that here.
- scarygliders 5y ago
  Does the IPCC conclusively prove with 100% certainty that the fraction of the 0.04% of CO2 comprising Earth's atmosphere humans contribute is the main thing which affects the Earth's climate(s)?
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    Yes. It's settled science. CO2 is not the only gas that matters, but it's the major one and most of the feedback loops are not in our favour. Read some of the technical reports, they're not that hard to understand.
    - mrfusion 5y ago
      Settled science is an oxymoron.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        You don't think it's settled science that water is H2O?
        kragen 5y ago
        In the 01960s and 01970s it seemed like it might sometimes polymerize, which might have implied that it's always somewhat polymerized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater but after 12 years of research this turned out to be wrong. If someone got similar experimental results today, while taking more care to prevent the contamination that gave rise to the original results, and did it under different conditions that hadn't been intensively investigated during the original polywater period, it would definitely merit further investigation. In 01988 Jacques Benveniste did some experiments which seemed to show some sort of chemical alteration of water in the presence of antibodies, though it didn't show up with the usual spectroscopic techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory which were published in Nature. Replication attempts were made by several teams. They failed, so Benveniste was wrong. So I wouldn't say it's "settled science" that water is H2O. When contrary evidence pops up, chemists investigate it and find out what's wrong with it; they don't just dismiss it. That would be unscientific. We could also quibble about the meaning of "H2O", though perhaps this is less interesting. For example, although it's only about 0.1 ppm, a part of any sample of water exists in the form of free hydronium (H3O+) and hydroxyl (OH-) ions, not H2O. Because this is an equilibrium, you can't just remove the ions to get pure H2O; they come right back. This self-ionization is responsible for significant aspects of water's behavior, including the formation of streamers that limit the storage time of water-dielectric capacitors, and the particular way acid-base chemistry works in water. Natural water also contains about 155 ppm DOH and D2O, though this can be removed, and it's arguable that this is within the meaning of "H2O" anyway. And the water molecules in liquid water or ice form a continuous hydrogen-bonded network, though this was not known until 01920; to some extent it's just a matter of convention rather than objective fact that we consider those bonds to be "intermolecular", making water H2O rather than an (H2O)n polymer; we consider the weaker hydrogen bonds between DNA strands to make DNA a single molecule rather than two intertwined molecules. (The polywater affair, however, posited the formation of a covalent water polymer.)
jiggyjace 5y ago
I think it was around 1 gigaton of CO2 caused by humans for every 40 gigatons of CO2 caused naturally, which is about 2.5% of total CO2 emissions every year.
- scarygliders 5y ago
  Thanks, so that's 2.5% of 0.04%, right? Has it been proven that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main factor which affects Earth's climate(s)? I'm asking, because 0.04% of something seems like a particularly small fraction to have such a dramatic effect on a whole planet's weather and climate. Especially in a non-linear dynamic and chaotic - hence very difficult to predict - system like Earth's weather and climate system. In my opinion it is important to ask these questions because some extremely huge decisions ride on them.
  - ajnin 5y ago
    Natural emissions are balanced by natural sinks, so that the balance is close to zero, while human emissions are not balanced by anything. The actual variation of CO2 levels in the atmosphere is almost exclusively due to human emissions tipping the equilibrium. The effect of CO2 on the climate is old science, it goes back to the 19th century, it seems a little bit insincere to ask this kind of question, if you had actual interest you would have found the answer very easily already.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Water vapor is the #1 greenhouse gas but that is a closed system. We aren’t making (much) more water. Now, we could potentially make many more clouds. For instance, container ships could be required to have fuel additives or “salt lofters”that promote cloud seeding and marine cloud brightening.
    - usefulcat 5y ago
      We aren't directly putting more water vapor into the atmosphere, but a warmer atmosphere can hold more water and (I would think) would also increase the overall rate of evaporation. Regarding the greenhouse effect of water vapor, I don't know whether what matters is the average relative humidity or the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. For our sake I hope it's the former.
diego_moita 5y ago
> Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth? Yes and no. It has been proven (for more than 200 years) that CO2 increases heat retention, even when present in small amounts. It has also been proven that CO2 is not the only one doing that (methane has an effect even far greater than CO2, for the same amount).
goohle 5y ago
1) 0.024% 2) 100% of what?
theroqwpeo 5y ago
> Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth? Could you share some scientific facts that you believe to be 100% proven? Would help to determine what your yard stick is here...
- dsizzle 5y ago
  I somehow don't think this person is a Popperian!
merpnderp 5y ago
The papers accepted by the IPCC put the confidence between 95-100%, or what they label was "Extremely likely", for Humanity's contribution to CO2 being the dominate driver of climate change.
NotAnOtter 5y ago
"Carbon emissions" is a collection of gasses, one of which is CO2. It's pretty common to equate the damage different gases do to CO2 and refer to it as "Carbon", which then get's messy when people paraphrase and leave out some context. For example Methane does something like 80x more damage than CO2 by weight, so it said a ton of Methane is "80 tons of carbon" And Science doesn't work by "Absolutely 100% proving" anything. Bayesian statistics which underpins almost all of modern science lets us take highly educated guesses with communicable confidence in that guess. So stop looking for "100% absolute proof" to be convinced, you won't get it.
lamontcg 5y ago
> Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth? Aside from the hyperbole, pretty much yeah. Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't important when considering the greenhouse effect since they're diatomic molecules with tighter absorption bands and don't have the broad bands in the IR so that 99.96% of the atmosphere just doesn't matter (Argon is monoatomic which is even more dismissable. H2O matters but gas-vs-droplets is complicated and took decades to sort out). It is all the rest of it that matters. And for example, satellite measurements of the absorption bands in the atmosphere show that CO2 absorption has been widening which explains the satellite observed reduction in IR emission from the Earth which explains warming as an imbalance in the heat budget of the entire planet. The increase in CO2 coming from humans is also established via analysing the isotopes of carbon in the CO2 in the atmosphere and we can see that it is coming from carbon that we dig up out of the ground (protected from cosmic ray radiation) vs. the CO2 that was in the atmosphere. We can also measure that only about half the carbon we emit stays in the atmosphere, while the other half does get captured by the natural carbon cycle. But that's enough to disturb the balance. Small deviations in the budget add up over time. And these questions are very, very basic. We wouldn't be discussing climate change if scientists didn't have the answers more or less nailed down. More information and a massive amount of references can be found at skepticalscience.com I'd also recommend Ruddiman's undergraduate text on climate: https://www.amazon.com/William-F-Ruddiman-Earths-Climate/dp/B008UBS9CM https://www.amazon.com/William-F-Ruddiman-Earths-Climate/dp/... Although for $287 for the paperback, maybe rip it off on libgen. I think back when I bought the first edition it was $80 which seemed steep. Fuck science publishers, seriously.

kragen 5y ago

Being 100% certain of anything is insanity; it implies that literally no amount of evidence could change your mind, while a rational mind is always open to revising its beliefs when new evidence becomes available. Religious faith and psychosis can "absolutely prove 100%". Science and reason can't.

scotty79 5y ago

> What percentage of the 0.04% CO2 in Earth's atmosphere do humans contribute? Since CO2 ppm nearly doubled since pre-industrial times then humans are responsible for nearly half of the CO2 in the atmosphere. > Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth? Yes, for reasonable definitions of "proven 100%".

padobson 5y ago

Uh oh, these questions smell like climate heresy Edit: for those struggling with the irony, my comment is pro-questions and pro-heresy. Let's not attack people for asking questions

scarygliders 5y ago
What's heretical about asking honest straightforward questions?
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  The phrasing of the question is odd and hints at rhetoric instead of curiosity as intention. What if it's only 99.99% sure that CO2 is the reason for climate change? What about 90%? No need to act until we bring that up to 100%? What's with the fixation on 0.04% as a number? Things can't have huge impact unless numbers are also big? I don't want to offend, but that's honestly third grade mentality. There's surprise about small things having little impact, and then there's denial hidden as feigned curiosity. Especially when the answers are directly available from much more credible sources than random internet posters. Compare with: "Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that the lead comprising 0.03% [hypothetically - for reference, this is 100000x the FDA limit] of our food intake is the main culprit/control knob which controls brain development?" No, it actually isn't the "main" control knob. And our bodies are also complex with many feedback loops. And no study will ever reach p = 0. And it's a really small number. And yet we have made "extremely huge decisions" regarding what fuels we allow, what tests food have to undergo etc...
  - mr_mitm 5y ago
    The fixation on the 0.04% is particularly confusing, as the other 99.96% of the atmosphere is mostly completely transparent to the relevant frequencies. Going by volume or ppm is wrong when all we care about is the absorption factor. Greenhouse gases don't absorb less infrared radiation by adding transparent nitrogen, even though it would reduce the greenhouse gas concentration.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  > What's heretical about asking honest straightforward questions? This is a loaded question ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question ), since it implies that this question-asking is honest and straightforward. On the contrary, it seems like OP is "jaqing off" ( https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions ); unless, of course, they can absolutely prove 100% that they're acting in good faith.
  - useragent86 5y ago
    Can you absolutely prove 100% that you're acting in good faith?
    - chriswarbo 5y ago
      Nope, but that's no matter, since whether or not I am acting in good faith is logically independent of whether OP is jaqing off (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque ). In contrast, OP's hunch about the climate emergency either not existing because the concentration of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere is "small" (according to some unspecified criteria), and/or fixing itself due to plant growth, run counter to the consensus position of the world scientific community, and hence the burden of proof is on OP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) It was their choice to raise that burden to the unachievable height of '100% absolute proof' :)
ysavir 5y ago
Doesn't matter which side of the fence you fall on, it's good practice to validate the conclusions--and to continue doing so regularly. Please don't discourage people from asking for the data and the facts, no matter what your perspective is.
- ForHackernews 5y ago
  Just curious, could somebody explain to me quickly here how computers work, starting from transistors? It seems implausible to me that tiny electrical circuits could be used to produce logical operations. I'm really just asking an honest question, and it's always healthy to revisit the evidence especially when you're making a big claim like "sand does maths".
  - petermcneeley 5y ago
    https://www.tindie.com/products/codecorrect/basic-logic-gates-using-transistors-learning-kit/ https://www.tindie.com/products/codecorrect/basic-logic-gate... And then https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/

Joeri 5y ago

The IPCC reports describe the answers to those questions very thoroughly, no point in rehashing that here.

scarygliders 5y ago
Does the IPCC conclusively prove with 100% certainty that the fraction of the 0.04% of CO2 comprising Earth's atmosphere humans contribute is the main thing which affects the Earth's climate(s)?
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  Yes. It's settled science. CO2 is not the only gas that matters, but it's the major one and most of the feedback loops are not in our favour. Read some of the technical reports, they're not that hard to understand.
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    Settled science is an oxymoron.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      You don't think it's settled science that water is H2O?
      - kragen 5y ago
        In the 01960s and 01970s it seemed like it might sometimes polymerize, which might have implied that it's always somewhat polymerized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater but after 12 years of research this turned out to be wrong. If someone got similar experimental results today, while taking more care to prevent the contamination that gave rise to the original results, and did it under different conditions that hadn't been intensively investigated during the original polywater period, it would definitely merit further investigation. In 01988 Jacques Benveniste did some experiments which seemed to show some sort of chemical alteration of water in the presence of antibodies, though it didn't show up with the usual spectroscopic techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory which were published in Nature. Replication attempts were made by several teams. They failed, so Benveniste was wrong. So I wouldn't say it's "settled science" that water is H2O. When contrary evidence pops up, chemists investigate it and find out what's wrong with it; they don't just dismiss it. That would be unscientific. We could also quibble about the meaning of "H2O", though perhaps this is less interesting. For example, although it's only about 0.1 ppm, a part of any sample of water exists in the form of free hydronium (H3O+) and hydroxyl (OH-) ions, not H2O. Because this is an equilibrium, you can't just remove the ions to get pure H2O; they come right back. This self-ionization is responsible for significant aspects of water's behavior, including the formation of streamers that limit the storage time of water-dielectric capacitors, and the particular way acid-base chemistry works in water. Natural water also contains about 155 ppm DOH and D2O, though this can be removed, and it's arguable that this is within the meaning of "H2O" anyway. And the water molecules in liquid water or ice form a continuous hydrogen-bonded network, though this was not known until 01920; to some extent it's just a matter of convention rather than objective fact that we consider those bonds to be "intermolecular", making water H2O rather than an (H2O)n polymer; we consider the weaker hydrogen bonds between DNA strands to make DNA a single molecule rather than two intertwined molecules. (The polywater affair, however, posited the formation of a covalent water polymer.)

jiggyjace 5y ago

I think it was around 1 gigaton of CO2 caused by humans for every 40 gigatons of CO2 caused naturally, which is about 2.5% of total CO2 emissions every year.

scarygliders 5y ago
Thanks, so that's 2.5% of 0.04%, right? Has it been proven that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main factor which affects Earth's climate(s)? I'm asking, because 0.04% of something seems like a particularly small fraction to have such a dramatic effect on a whole planet's weather and climate. Especially in a non-linear dynamic and chaotic - hence very difficult to predict - system like Earth's weather and climate system. In my opinion it is important to ask these questions because some extremely huge decisions ride on them.
- ajnin 5y ago
  Natural emissions are balanced by natural sinks, so that the balance is close to zero, while human emissions are not balanced by anything. The actual variation of CO2 levels in the atmosphere is almost exclusively due to human emissions tipping the equilibrium. The effect of CO2 on the climate is old science, it goes back to the 19th century, it seems a little bit insincere to ask this kind of question, if you had actual interest you would have found the answer very easily already.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Water vapor is the #1 greenhouse gas but that is a closed system. We aren’t making (much) more water. Now, we could potentially make many more clouds. For instance, container ships could be required to have fuel additives or “salt lofters”that promote cloud seeding and marine cloud brightening.
  - usefulcat 5y ago
    We aren't directly putting more water vapor into the atmosphere, but a warmer atmosphere can hold more water and (I would think) would also increase the overall rate of evaporation. Regarding the greenhouse effect of water vapor, I don't know whether what matters is the average relative humidity or the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. For our sake I hope it's the former.

diego_moita 5y ago

> Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth? Yes and no. It has been proven (for more than 200 years) that CO2 increases heat retention, even when present in small amounts. It has also been proven that CO2 is not the only one doing that (methane has an effect even far greater than CO2, for the same amount).

goohle 5y ago

1) 0.024% 2) 100% of what?

theroqwpeo 5y ago

> Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth? Could you share some scientific facts that you believe to be 100% proven? Would help to determine what your yard stick is here...

dsizzle 5y ago
I somehow don't think this person is a Popperian!

merpnderp 5y ago

The papers accepted by the IPCC put the confidence between 95-100%, or what they label was "Extremely likely", for Humanity's contribution to CO2 being the dominate driver of climate change.

NotAnOtter 5y ago

"Carbon emissions" is a collection of gasses, one of which is CO2. It's pretty common to equate the damage different gases do to CO2 and refer to it as "Carbon", which then get's messy when people paraphrase and leave out some context. For example Methane does something like 80x more damage than CO2 by weight, so it said a ton of Methane is "80 tons of carbon" And Science doesn't work by "Absolutely 100% proving" anything. Bayesian statistics which underpins almost all of modern science lets us take highly educated guesses with communicable confidence in that guess. So stop looking for "100% absolute proof" to be convinced, you won't get it.

lamontcg 5y ago

> Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth? Aside from the hyperbole, pretty much yeah. Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't important when considering the greenhouse effect since they're diatomic molecules with tighter absorption bands and don't have the broad bands in the IR so that 99.96% of the atmosphere just doesn't matter (Argon is monoatomic which is even more dismissable. H2O matters but gas-vs-droplets is complicated and took decades to sort out). It is all the rest of it that matters. And for example, satellite measurements of the absorption bands in the atmosphere show that CO2 absorption has been widening which explains the satellite observed reduction in IR emission from the Earth which explains warming as an imbalance in the heat budget of the entire planet. The increase in CO2 coming from humans is also established via analysing the isotopes of carbon in the CO2 in the atmosphere and we can see that it is coming from carbon that we dig up out of the ground (protected from cosmic ray radiation) vs. the CO2 that was in the atmosphere. We can also measure that only about half the carbon we emit stays in the atmosphere, while the other half does get captured by the natural carbon cycle. But that's enough to disturb the balance. Small deviations in the budget add up over time. And these questions are very, very basic. We wouldn't be discussing climate change if scientists didn't have the answers more or less nailed down. More information and a massive amount of references can be found at skepticalscience.com I'd also recommend Ruddiman's undergraduate text on climate: https://www.amazon.com/William-F-Ruddiman-Earths-Climate/dp/B008UBS9CM https://www.amazon.com/William-F-Ruddiman-Earths-Climate/dp/... Although for $287 for the paperback, maybe rip it off on libgen. I think back when I bought the first edition it was $80 which seemed steep. Fuck science publishers, seriously.