Quote:
Originally Posted by Tango three
The Earth has been seriously de-forested, the large forests (example the vast costal Redwood forests that dominated the western United States) acted as CO2 dumps, filtering huge quantities of the "greenhouse gas" and exchanging it for O2.
How then has man's extensive logging not significantly contributed to warming but from the other direction?
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The contribution to warming by CO2 itself is pretty negligible; the primary greenhouse gas is water vapor. Those who advocate antropogenic global warming theorize a small increase in CO2 causes a larger increase in water vapor, and in turn, warms the atmosphere through second and third order effects. The problem for AGW advocates is that planetary temperatures have plateaued for 15+ years now (depending on how you time average the series) despite the continued pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere. That CO2 in the atmosphere has increased isn't really being questioned by the AGW skeptics; what's open to debate is what the consequences will be.
AGW advocates have made claims wildly out of proportion to what has actually occurred. Some of them, like Lovelock in the referenced article, are admitting they were wrong or at least dramatically overpredicted the risks. Others (like IPCC) seem to want to go down with the ship.