Notes
1. Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Current Issues in Atmospheric Change Washington, D.C. National Academy Press, 1987 , 25-26. 2. It is usual to express the size of carbon movements and reservoirs in 109 tons of carbon GT carbon . Some authors, however, express carbon dioxide fluxes in GT of carbon dioxide. One GT of carbon dioxide contains 12 44 0.27 GT of carbon, or conversely 1 GT of carbon as carbon dioxide is the same as 3.67 GT of carbon dioxide. 3. There is both good ozone in...
Empirical Relationships Among Precipitation Temperature And Stream Runoff
To assess the effects on the United States' water resources of probable climatic change we used the empirical relationship found by Langbein et al. 1949 among mean annual precipitation, temperature, and runoff. This was based on representative data from 22 drainage basins in the conterminous United States. Their relation in Figure 11.1 gives the estimated annual runoff for different values of mean annual precipitations and weighted mean annual temperatures. The latter were computed for each...
Security Economic And Social Concerns
As the UN Report on the Relationship Between Disarmament and Development states The world can either continue to pursue the arms race with characteristic vigor or move consciously and with deliberate speed toward a more stable and balanced social and economic development within a more sustainable international economic and political order. It cannot do both. It must be acknowledged that the arms race and development are in a competitive relationship, particularly in terms of resources, but also...
The Global Carbon Balance Biotic Influences
The annual oscillation in the concentration of carbon dioxide observed in the Mauna Loa data of Figure 5.1 is the result of an annual shift in the metabolism of forests. Net photosynthesis dominates in summer and removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere respiration dominates in winter and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The oscillation is merely the net of two opposing processes that actually involve very much larger quantities of carbon. The total amount of carbon in the...
Changes In Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration In Historical Times
Remarkably, carbon dioxide was the first constituent of the earth's atmosphere to be identified. Joseph Black published the discovery during 1754 in a University of Edinburgh thesis. By 1870, quantitative measurements developed which compare in precision with today's measurements. Interpretation of early observations is made difficult not by inadequacies in analytical chemistry but because they were not undertaken to measure changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Sampling for this...
References
1. Hansen, J., I. Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, G. Russell, S. Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, and R Stone, 1988, Global climate changes as forecast by the GISS 3-D model, J. Geophys. Res. in press . 2. Hansen, J., A. Lacis, D. Rind, G. Russell, P. Stone, I. Fung, R. Ruedy, and J. Lerner, 1984, Climate sensitivity analysis of feedback mechanisms, Geophys. Mono., 29, 130-163. 3. Manabe, S., R. T. Wetherald, and R. J. Stauffer, 1981, Summer dryness due to an increase in atmospheric C02 concentration, Climate...
V Ramanathan
Since the dawn of the industrial era, several trace gases have been increasing in the atmosphere. Recent advances in chemical measurements have helped document the rate of increase of the trace gas concentrations. The concentrations continue to increase at significant rates as shown in Figure 16.1 for carbon dioxide C02 , methane CH4 , Testimony given in hearings before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate, One-hundredth Congress, first session, on the Greenhouse Effect...
Conference Statement
A joint UNEP WMO ICSU Conference was convened in Villach, Austria, from 9 to 15 October 1985, with scientists from 29 developed and developing countries, to assess the role of increased carbon dioxide and other radiatively active constituents of the atmosphere collectively known as greenhouse gases and aerosols on climate changes and associated impacts. The other greenhouse gases reinforce and accelerate the impact due to C02 alone. As a result of the increasing concentrations of greenhouse...
Rafe Pomerance
The greenhouse effect this term is part of the public vocabulary now. In just a few years, it has changed from a scientific curiosity to a major policy issue for industries and governments all over the world. Why How did a question of seemingly academic interest suddenly become the subject not only of headlines and talk shows, but of government hearings and international negotiations Simply put, the greenhouse effect is the process in which heat radiating from the earth's surface is trapped by...
Roger R Revelle and Paul E Waggoner
In this chapter we show that warmer air temperatures and a slight decrease in precipitation would probably severely reduce both the quantity and the quality of water resources in the western United States. Similar effects can be expected in many water-short regions elsewhere in the world. We have not attempted to estimate these, primarily because we do not know enough to be able to do so. But we hope that hydrologists of other countries will be stimulated by our calculations to investigate the...
James E Hansen
The earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. The global warming is now sufficiently large that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. This statement was presented to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on 23 June 1988. It is based largely on recent studies carried out by S. Lebedeff, D. Rind, I. Fung, A. Lacis, R. Ruedy, G. Russell, and R Stone at the NASA...
Global Warming The Issue Impacts Responses
Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to nuclear war. The Earth's atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented rate by pollutants resulting from human activities, inefficient and wasteful fossil fuel use and the effects of rapid population growth in many regions. These changes are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe. Toronto Conference statement, June 1988 This analogy...
Syukuro Manabe
I would like to focus my presentation on the large-scale changes in soil wetness. These changes, which may have profound agricultural and other implications, have received increased emphasis in research activities at various institutions in North America and Europe. I will discuss this issue based upon the results references 1 and 2 from the mathematical models of climate developed at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of NOAA. The mathematical model of climate used for this study is a...
Legal Aspects
The first steps in developing international law and practices to address pollution of the air have already been taken in the Trail Smelter arbitration of 1935 and 1938 Principle 21 of the 1972 Declaration of the UN Conference on the Environment the Economic Commission for Europe ECE Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution and its protocol Helsinki, 1985 for sulfur reductions, Part XII of the Law of the Sea Convention and the Vienna Convention for Protection of the Ozone Layer and...
Tropospheric Ozone
Most tropospheric ozone is produced photochemically in the atmosphere as a result of the oxidation of carbon monoxide, methane, or other hydrocarbons such as butane, acetylene, propane in the presence of nitrogen oxides NOx which act as catalysts. Any substantial increase in NOx emissions will increase the amount of ozone in the troposphere. Tropospheric ozone also increases as emissions of carbon monoxide or methane increase. There are indications that, as a result of industrialization,...
Causes Of Sea Level Rise
The worldwide average sea level depends primarily on a the shape and size of ocean basins, b the amount of water in the oceans, and c the average density of seawater. Subsidence, emergence, and other local factors can cause trends in relative sea level at particular locations to differ from trends in global sea level. Hays and Pitman 1973 analyzed fossil records and concluded that over the last 100 million years, changes in mid-ocean ridge systems have caused sea level to rise and fall over 300...