Primary Cause of Global Warming Discovered..a gelogist's view.

[Antaletriangle]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29086842/

Primary Cause of Global Warming Discovered, According to Dr. Peter L. Ward of Teton Tectonics

updated 5:03 p.m. ET Feb. 8, 2009
JACKSON, WY - Sulfur dioxide emitted from volcanoes and from burning fossil fuel is the primary initiator of global climate change, according to Dr. Peter L. Ward, a retired U.S. Geological Survey scientist who continues to study the earth and its environment through his own company, Teton Tectonics. "Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas compounding global warming, but it is not the initiator of climate change," according to Ward.

In a paper to be published this week, Ward concludes that sulfur dioxide emissions regulate the ability of the atmosphere to clean itself by oxidizing greenhouse gases. Sulfur dioxide reacts quickly with available oxidants, leaving few to react with other greenhouse gases. The primary oxidants, created by the effects of ultraviolet sunlight on ozone, are, like ozone, in limited supply.

Ward observed that the highest rates of global warming in the past 46,000 years occurred precisely when volcanoes were most active. "When very large volcanic eruptions occur every few months," Ward says, "rapid warming follows. Too much sulfur dioxide in a short period of time causes warming."


Large eruptions in the past 2000 years occurred once per century. Yet by 1962, human activities were putting as much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere every 1.7 years as one of these large eruptions. That was enough to cause world temperatures to climb rapidly.

Beginning in 1979, global efforts to reduce acid rain cut power-plant sulfur emissions 18% by 2000. By 2000, global temperature stopped increasing, a fact unexplained by current climate theories.

"By reducing acid rain, we accidentally reduced global warming," Ward said. "The problem now is that sulfur dioxide emissions are rapidly increasing again as new power plants come on line every week around the world. But we know how to reduce sulfur emissions both technically and politically. It is much easier to do than reducing carbon dioxide emissions."

Ward is holding a press conference at the Swissotel, Edelweiss Room, 323 E. Wacker Dr., Chicago on Wednesday, February 11 at 11 AM.

Ward's paper will be published in the next issue of "Thin Solid Films," a physics journal published by Elsevier Press, available online at www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00406090 (doi:10.1016/j.tsf.2009.01.005).

More details including Notes for Science Writers are found at Ward's website: www.tetontectonics.org.

Contact Peter Ward at 307-733-3664, cell 307-413-4055, or peward@wyoming.com. He will be available in Chicago February 11 though 15.


Peter Ward
307-733-3664
cell 307-413-4055
Email Contact

[Hermano]

A different view, but how does he explain the global warming on the other 8 planets? Richard Hoaghland and David Wilcock have quite a different opinion.

[Dantheman62]

Methane gas bubbles up from Siberian lakes at up to six times the rate previously thought as a result of global warming, a new study suggests. The result: more global warming.

As the planet warms, frozen ground called "permafrost" in high latitude-regions like Siberia and Alaska thaws out.

There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren't talking about.

An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists? Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at least twice before.

The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years.

The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on Earth.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/3647


And we've just recently discovered a lot of Methane gas on Mars, so you would think it would be on other planets as well.