Global warming Wackiest theory EVAH ! - "Ants Can Save Earth From Global Warming".(NDtv).
Ants may be cooling the Earth by helping trap carbon dioxide from the environment, a new study has claimed.
A long-term experiment tracking the ants' effects on soil suggests they cooled Earth's climate as their numbers grew.
"Ants are changing the environment," said lead study author Ronald Dorn, from the Arizona State University in Tempe.
Certain ant species "weather" minerals in order to secrete calcium carbonate - better known as limestone. The process traps and removes a tiny bit of carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere, Dorn said.
This ant limestone factory is a small-scale version of the massive planetary-cooling process that takes place in the oceans, known as carbon sequestration, 'Live Science' reported.
Dorn discovered that ants were powerful weathering agents by tracking the breakdown of basalt sand.
His experiment shows that ants appear to break down the minerals 50 to 300 times faster than sand left undisturbed on bare ground.
According to Dorn, the ants may be scavenging calcium and magnesium from the minerals and using these elements to make limestone.
In the process, the insects may trap carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, in the rock, the report said.Hmmm...It's true the lunatics are running the Asylum.
CO2 change, and therefore human activity, does not cause global warming. The reason is that terrestrial radiation absorbed by CO2 is immediately thermalized, i.e. the absorbed energy is handed over to other atmospheric molecules which outnumber CO2 2500 to 1.
ReplyDeleteBut this leaves the question of what actually does drive average global temperature change.
Two primary drivers of average global temperature have been identified. A simple equation, using only them, very accurately explains the reported up and down measurements since before 1900. The coefficient of determination, R2>0.9 (correlation coefficient = 0.95). The equation provides credible estimates back to the low temperatures of the Little Ice Age (1610). The current trend is down.
R2 = 0.9049 considering only sunspots and ocean cycles.
R2 = 0.9061 considering sunspots, ocean cycles and CO2 change.
The tiny difference in R2, whether considering CO2 or not, corroborates that CO2 change has no significant effect on climate.
The coefficients of determination are a measure of how accurately the calculated average global temperatures compare with measured. R2 > 0.9 is very accurate.
The calculations use data since before 1900 which are official, accepted as valid and are publicly available.
Solar cycle duration or magnitude, considered separately, fail to correlate but their combination, expressed as the time-integral of solar cycle anomalies, gives excellent correlation. A solar cycle anomaly is the difference between the sunspot number for a year and an average sunspot number for many years.
Everything not explicitly considered (such as the 0.09 K s.d. random uncertainty in reported annual measured temperature anomalies, aerosols, CO2, other non-condensing ghg, volcanoes, ice change, etc.) must find room in the unexplained 9.51%.
The method, equation, data sources, history (hind cast to 1610) and predictions (through 2037) are provided at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com and references.