Thursday, November 20, 2008

Cornell University: Global warming OVERESTIMATED

The truth continues trickling out. And gets ignored. For instance, take a look at Al Gore's fear blog and Obama's recent revoicing comments; they all keep pretending as if there's absolutely no reliable, contradictory evidence in existence that detracts from the theory of manmade climate change. This issue (it's not real science at all from the advocate's perspective) has become far too political and wealth-producing to simply go away based on any scientific and/or empirical reality.

Cornell Chronicle: Black carbon affects climate predictions:

A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions.

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As a result of global warming, soils are expected to release more carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, which, in turn, creates more warming. Climate models try to incorporate these increases of carbon dioxide from soils as the planet warms, but results vary greatly when realistic estimates of black carbon in soils are included in the predictions, the study found.

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By entering realistic estimates of stocks of black carbon in soil from two Australian savannas into a computer model that calculates carbon dioxide release from soil, the researchers found that carbon dioxide emissions from soils were reduced by about 20 percent over 100 years, as compared with simulations that did not take black carbon's long shelf life into account.

The findings are significant because soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact.

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