From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Feb 04 2002 - 13:56:38 MST
On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Damien Raphael wrote:
> What's the basis for a default presumption that the Earth wouldn't be
> getting warmer?
Just because you put more CO2 into the atmosphere doesn't mean you
will get warmer automatically. You could (a) have a bloom in the
biosphere that can suck that CO2 right back down; (b) increased
temperature, increases evaporation, increases cloud cover, reflects
more sunlight back into space. This is different from Venus where
things got started very early on, evaporating any oceans, allowing
the UV light to split off the hydrogen, which is then lost to space
leaving behind a waterless planet. [I suppose this does raise
an interesting question -- what *are* the clouds on Venus made of?]
The climate modelers freely admit that their cloud models suck.
People tend to look at the down side of global warming -- the
up side is that there is a *lot* of land in Northern Russia
that suddenly becomes available for cultivation.
Robert
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