Air?

Air

• 78% Nitrogen

• 21% Oxygen

• 0.93% Argon and other noble gases

• 0.04% carbon dioxide

• Variable amounts of water vapour

• Variable amounts of pollutant gases

Sulphur dioxide SO2

Produced by burning sulphur (or burning fossil fuels)

S(l) + O2(g) SO2(g)

In water

Dissolves to form sulphurous acid

SO2(g) + H2O(l) H2SO3(aq)

Carbon Dioxide

In water

Dissolves to form carbonic acid

CO2(g) + H2O (l) H2CO 3(aq)

pH 5.5

Oxides of nitrogen

Nitrogen is generally an unreactive gas, and needs fairly extreme conditions to get it to react with oxygen

Nitric oxide, NO

Lightning brings about the direct union of nitrogen and oxygen in the air to produce small amounts of nitric oxide, as does the high temperatures produced in car engines.

Nitric oxide, NO

It is a toxic air pollutant, often linked with asthma and allergic responses

Nitrogen dioxide, NO2

In the presence of excess oxygen, nitric oxide, NO, will be converted to nitrogen dioxide,NO2. Nitrogen Dioxide is a reddish brown, toxic gas at room temperature. NO2 condenses to a brown liquid, but freezes to a colourless solid.

Nitrogen dioxide, NO2

Nitrogen Dioxide has been used as a catalyst in certain oxidation reactions; as a nitrating agent for organic compounds; as an oxidizing agent; as a rocket fuel; and as a flour bleaching agent

Nitrous oxide, N2O

Formed when ammonium nitrate, NH4NO3, is heated. A colourless gas with a pleasing odour and sweet taste, is used as an anesthetic for minor operations, especially in dentistry.

You don’t need to know

about this!

Nitrous oxide, N2O

It is called laughing gas because of its intoxicating effect. It is alsowidely used as a propellant in aerosol cans of whipped cream!

Global Warming

The Sun

The sun emits electromagnetic waves (gamma X-rays, ultra-violet, visible light, infra-red, microwaves and radio waves) in all directions.

The earth

Some of these waves will reach the earth

Reflected

37% will be reflected by the earth’s atmosphere. This is called the earth’s albedo (0.37). (The moon’s albedo is 0.12)

40%

Absorbed

Some (13%) will be absorbed by clouds and the atmosphere

13%

Absorbed by the earth

Around 47% reaches the ground and is absorbed by the earth’s surface.

47%

Absorbed by the earth

47%Infrared

This absorbed solar energy is re-radiated at longer wavelengths (in the infrared region of the spectrum)

Absorbed

• Various gases in the atmosphere can absorb radiation at this longer wavelength.

C

O

O

C

H

H

H

HThey vibrate more (become hotter)

Greenhouse gases

• These gases are known as “Greenhouse” gases. They include carbon dioxide, methane and CFCs

C

O

O

C

H

H

H

H

Balance

There exists a balance between the energy absorbed by the earth (and its atmosphere) and the energy emitted.

Energy in Energy out

Balance

This means that normally the earth has a fairly constant average temperature (although there have been big changes over thousands of years)

Energy in Energy out

Balance

Without this normal “greenhouse effect” the earth would be too cold to live on.

Energy in Energy out

Bath balance

• It’s a bit like trying to add water to a bath with the plug hole open.

Bath balance

• The water reaches a certain level but no higher because the amount of water leaving eventually equals the amount entering

Bath balance

• The water reaches a certain level but no higher because the amount of water leaving eventually equals the amount entering

Energy entering the earth

Energy leaving the earth

Earth’s temperature

Greenhouse gases

• Most scientists believe that we are producing more of the gases that absorb the infra-red radiation, thus upsetting the balance and producing a higher equilibrium earth temperature.

Bath with the plug half in!

This is like trying to fill a bath, but now with the plug half covering the hole.

A new balance

• Eventually the water will reach a steady level again, but higher than before.

New HIGHER equilibrium temperature

What might happen?

What might happen?

• Polar ice caps melt

What might happen?

• Higher sea levels

What might happen?

• Flooding to low lying areas

What might happen?

• More extreme weather (heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes, torrential rain)

What might happen?

• Long term climate change

What might happen?

• Associated social problems (??)

Is global warming really happening?

Is global warming really happening?

YESThe vast majority of scientists believe the earth is getting warmer at a rate that is not caused by natural processes.

Are carbon dioxide levels increasing?

Are carbon dioxide levels increasing?

YESNo serious scientists argue against this.

Are increasing carbon dioxide levels causing the global

warming?

Are increasing carbon dioxide levels causing the global

warming?

Probably!Most scientists believe this to be true.

Global warming – a myth?

• A new ice age is due now, but you wont hear it from the green groups, who like to play on Western guilt about consumerism to make us believe in global warming.

• The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind. (Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, in International Wildlife, July 1975) The cooling has already killed thousands of people in poor nations... If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come about by the year 2000. (Lowe Ponte, The Cooling, 1976)

• As recently as January 1994, the supreme authority on matters environmental, Time magazine, wrote: The ice age cometh? Last week's big chill was a reminder that the Earth's climate can change at any time ... The last (ice age) ended 10,000 years ago; the next one— for there will be a next on—could start tens of thousands of years from now. Or tens of years. Or it may have already started.The scare about global cooling was always the same: unprecedented low temperatures; the coldest weather recorded; unusual floods and storms; a rapid shift in the world's climate towards an icy apocalypse. But now, the scare is about global warming. To convert from the first scare to the second, all you have to do is substitute "the coldest weather recorded" with "the warmest weather recorded". Replace the icicles hanging from oranges in California with melting glaciers on Mt Everest, and the shivering armadillos with sweltering polar bears. We were going to freeze but now we are going to fry.

YouTube - The Myth about Global Warming

Cool it – is global warming a myth?• Guardian Newspaper - October 17, 2007 9:17 AM

Cool It, the latest book from global warming sceptic Bjorn Lomborg, is out this month. And already his arguments - that many of the predicted effects of climate change, from melting icecaps to drought and flood, are "vastly exaggerated and emotional claims that are simply not founded in data" - have triggered heated debate.

Lomborg's decision to attack polar bears, the "poster animals" for climate change, drew criticism from international animal experts last weekend.

Lomborg says the story of the polar bears encapsulates the problems with many climate change scares: "Once you take a look at the supporting data the narrative falls apart," he writes.

Lomborg, an adjunct professor (ie not permanent) at Copenhagen business school, is no stranger to controversy. He made his name in 2001 with a book The Sceptical Environmentalist, which claimed that fears about man-made climate change were overstated. He faced accusations of scientific dishonesty and was attacked by environmental groups. In Cool It, Lomborg sets about exploding climate change "myths". He says it's too soon to say that Greenland's ice is melting fast and that threats of catastrophic sea-level rise, extreme weather, drought and flooding have all been over-hyped.

"We hear a lot from people who argue that we are heading for catastrophe. We also hear from those who maintain climate change is a hoax. Neither of these extremes is right. The Earth is warming, and we are causing it, but that is not the whole story. Predictions of impending disaster don't stack up."

YouTube - The Myth of Man made Global Warming

Blogger gets hot and bothered over Nasa's climate data error

• The Guardian • Thursday August 16 2007 • An amateur meteorologist in Canada has embarrassed Nasa scientists into

admitting that some of the data they used to show significant recent increases in global warming is flawed.

• As a result of Stephen McIntyre's calculations, climatologists at the Goddard Institute of Space Science in New York now accept that 1934 was historically the United States' hottest year since records began, not 1998 as they had claimed. It also turns out that five of the 10 warmest years on record in the US occurred before 1939, and only one is from the 21st century, raising questions over the statistics used in Al Gore's environmental film An Inconvenient Truth to highlight the faster pace of climate change.

• "They have managed it rather poorly," said Mr McIntyre, a prolific internet blogger from Toronto who pointed out the gaffe to Nasa in an email. He noticed that temperature deviation readings from numerous weather-recording stations around the US showed sudden and inexplicable leaps after 2000. He says the agency refused to share with him the complex methodology it uses to calculate trends from the data, then quietly changed statistics to rewrite history without explanation.

YouTube - The Global Warming MYTH!

• 1. There is no proof that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from human activity. Ice core records from the past 650,000 years show that temperature increases have preceded—not resulted from—increases in CO2 by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2. As the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapour is far, far more important than CO2. Dire predictions of future warming are based almost entirely on computer climate models, yet these models do not accurately understand the role or water vapor—and, in any case, water vapor is not within our control. The best evidence supporting natural causes of temperature fluctuations are the changes in cloudiness, which correspond strongly with regular variations in solar activity. The current warming is likely part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that’s been traced back almost a million years. It accounts for the Medieval Warm Period around 1100 A.D., when the Vikings settled Greenland and grew crops, and the Little Ice Age, from about 1400 to 1850 A.D., which brought severe winters and cold summers to Europe, with failed harvests, starvation, disease, and general misery.

YouTube - Global Warming - Doomsday Called Off (5/5)

Gore's climate film has scientific errors - judge

The Guardian Thursday October 11 2007 • Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, An

Inconvenient Truth, was yesterday criticised by a high court judge who highlighted what he said were "nine scientific errors" in the film.

• Mr Justice Barton yesterday said that while the film was "broadly accurate" in its presentation of climate change, he identified nine significant errors in the film, some of which, he said, had arisen in "the context of alarmism and exaggeration" to support the former US vice-president's views on climate change.

• The judge made his remarks when assessing a case brought by Stewart Dimmock, a Kent school governor and a member of a political group, the New party, who is opposed to a government plan to show the film in secondary schools.

• The judge ruled that the film can still be shown in schools, as part of a climate change resources pack, but only if it is accompanied by fresh guidance notes to balance Mr Gore's "one-sided" views. The "apocalyptic vision" presented in the film was not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change, he said.

YouTube - Will Ferrell playing George Bush

Polar earthquakes are nothing new, and don't foretell catastrophe

• The Guardian • Thursday September 13 2007 • Your article (Melting icecap triggering earthquakes, September 8) is misleading and

alarmist. As a climatologist/seismologist working on glacial seismic activity in the Jakobshavn glacier basin - precisely the area your reporter mentions - I know that local earthquakes (or glacial quakes) are actually fairly common in the area and have been for a long time.

• I also know that there is no evidence to suggest that these quakes "are happening far faster than ever anticipated" in the region, as Dr Corell of the global change programme at Washington's Heinz Centre is quoted as saying.

• Glacial earthquakes in Greenland have been monitored for decades using the global seismic network, and although their number has increased over the last five to six years - likely due to Arctic warming - in Jakobshavn their number has actually decreased since 1996, according to a recent report by G Ekström and V Tsai from Columbia University. However, because these scientists used sensors quite remote from the area, small quakes may have been missed in Jakobshavn, which is not as glacially quake-active as other studied areas in eastern and north-western Greenland.

• It is unfortunate that your article led with the falling-sky statement: "The Greenland icecap is melting so quickly that is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off." Actually, just the opposite seems to happen. As ice melting increases, the number and size of glacial quakes eventually decreases, since there is more water around to lubricate ice motions (quakes occur if there is enough friction to temporarily keep ice from sliding smoothly).

• · Jose Rial is professor of geophysics at the department of geological sciences, University of North Carolina

No warming• Nearly everyone believes that the earth is heating up. Is it? Probably not -- at least

there is no evidence that it is. Why then do so many believe in global warming? Because everybody says so. And that is the only position that is widely reported. Further, although there has been considerable coverage of the predicted consequences of climate changes, such things as harmful effects upon agriculture, the melting of polar ice caps, which will flood coastal areas and low lying islands, there has been little, if any, analysis of the economic consequences of proposed solutions. Temperature records taken in North America and Western Europe over the past 150 years show many ups and downs but no clear trend either toward warming or toward cooling. This is also borne out by analysis of 135 years of recorded temperatures of the sea surface taken by ships and ships' personnel. And, more recently, satellite data recording 24 hours of temperature readings from all over the globe reveal, at most, there has been a possible 0.30 centigrade temperature rise during 13 years, that is 1978 to 1991, of continuous satellite temperatures. Now, 0.30 centigrade is hardly anything anyone can perceive without very special instruments. Were the global warming-greenhouse theory borne out in nature, we should have experienced an increase from between 20 and 40 centigrade during the past 200 years. But this has not happened.

• Dr. Ray holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and 22 honorary degrees.

Global Warming – What do you think?

A warning!

A warning!

The hole in the ozone layer is caused by CFCs and is not connected to global warning. Please do not link these two

problems!

Just time for a dead dog

Just time for a dead dog

RIP

Poster!

• You are going to design a poster either

1.Warning about global warming and its consequences

Or

2. Saying that global warming is not happening and that it is a myth

Your poster has to include at least 3 facts, and be eye-catching