gw quiz #3 the next question in our how-to-spot-a-global-warming-whacko series: if most of the greenhouse effect comes from the oceans, why is atmospheric co2 such an issue? i like the dam analogy. if you've ever played in a creek as a kid you've tried to build a dam. they leak. but they hold back enough water that you get a bit of a pool. which gets deeper until it spills over the pile of rocks and sticks your imagination calls a dam. it's very similar with the greenhouse effect. ocean water slows down the escape of low frequency heat. so the heat accumulates. until it reaches temperatures that get over the dam. co2 just happens to absorb frequencies right at the top of our dam. effectively making it higher. here's a pretty picture of the earth's spectrum taken from mars. the co2 absorption thing is a clearly visible bite taken right out of the middle of the earth's spectrum. it's also plain to see that the most co2 can do is to push the peak of the earth's spectrum from one side of its absorption range to the other. let me restate that. if something were to push earth's temperature peak up to the bottom of the co2 range, then co2 will push it up much further. like some 25 C in the worst worst case. which i think is where all the chicken-little-sky-is-falling stuff comes from. however, something else has to raise earth's temperature quite a bit before we get the big kick. which i think is where all the head-in-the-sand stuff comes from. any rise in earth's temperature will be amplified by atmospheric co2. ie radiation that shifts into the co2 range is shifted out the other side. hotter. and the more co2 the more efficient this amplification will be. 'course any cooling of the earth will also be likewise amplified. which is probably the origins of the more-extreme-weather claims. ie hotter hots and colder colds.  ¶ 8:00 AM