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February 5, 2009

Gore and the Senate go further out of balance

Topics: Global Warming, Political News and commentaries

It's getting hard to know who's wackier, Al Gore or the U.S. Senate.

Al Gore's new argument for why carbon dioxide is the global warming boogeyman - is indeed out of this world, and the Senate is buying into it.

Testifying last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with yet another one of his infamous slide shows, Al Gore observed that the carbon dioxide (CO2) in Venus' atmosphere supercharges the second-planet-from-the-sun's greenhouse effect resulting in surface temperatures of about 870 degrees Fahrenheit. Gore added that it's not Venus' proximity to the Sun that makes the planet much warmer than the Earth because Mercury, which is even closer to the Sun, is cooler than Venus. Based on this rationale, then, Gore warned that we need to stop emitting CO2 into our own atmosphere.

Incredibly, not a Senator on the Committee questioned -- much less burst into outright laughter at -- Gore's absurd point. In fact, each Senator who spoke at the hearing, including Republicans, offered little but fawning praise for Al Gore. It's hard to know whether the hearing's lovefest was simply an example of the Senate's exaggerated sense of collegiality, appalling ignorance and gullibility about environmental science, or fear of appearing to be less green than Gore.

It is true that atmospheric CO2 warms both Venus and the Earth, but that's about where the CO2 commonality between the two planets ends. While the Venusian atmosphere is 97 percent CO2 (970,000 parts per million), the Earth's atmosphere is only 0.038 percent CO2 (380 parts per million). So the Venusian atmosphere's CO2 level is more than 2,557 times greater than the Earth's. And since the CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is increasing by only about 2 parts per million annually, our planet is hardly being Venus-ized.

Read it all, here...

Posted by Hyscience at February 5, 2009 7:40 AM

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