First of all carbon dioxide is necessary for life on earth. It helps keep us warmer so crops and humans can live and provides carbon for plants to grow making use of the carbon dioxide. Bush/Cheney doubled the yearly atmospheric USA increase in carbon dioxide emissions by going heavily to coal production of energy by ignoring the effects of pollution.
I have concluded that the Climate Scientists including Gore have made the explanation of global warming too simplistic. It is hard for Americans to understand how such a small temperature increase causes a change in our weather.
We underestimate the capability of Americans to understand things and give them too little information in politics in sound bites including global warming, how our government really runs including global warming, wars, healthcare, and provide historical backgrounds on how things were before government intervened for Medicare, Social Security, and Regulation of Banks and Wall Street. We can go to the Entertainment Industry to make these lessons enjoyable.
Instead of talking about the wonder of computer models and data refined to the point of incomprehensibility, give a simple explanation how weather is influenced by what happens mainly due to the direction of wind, temperature of the ocean currents, and why small changes in temperature have an enormous effect on these factors on our weather.
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/topnav/materials/listbytype/Catch_the_Wind.html (high school audience videos.) Also note that most of the effects occur at or near the equator and the North and South pole where the atmosphere is thinner and subject to more sun but is normally reflected by the glaciers and sea ice there.
Also other factors also influence temperature such as Distance from the sun, pollution, shield of carbon dioxide and oil chemicals warms, sulfur in the atmosphere cools as from sulfur in coal and volcanoes which have a huge effects on cooling and resulted in cooling during the Clinton administration and throughout our earth's history. Only a large release of carbon dioxide from our oceans about 12,000 or so years ago led to significant warming of the earth allowing mankind to thrive. Just stopping the airplane flights after 9/11 caused a clearing of our pollution from planes and increased the average temperature by one degree F!
Wikipedia: ... Venus ... The CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongestgreenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures of over 460 °C (860 °F).[32] This makes Venus's surface hotter than Mercury's which has a minimum surface temperature of -220 °C (minus 364 F) and maximum surface temperature of 420 °C, (788 F)[33]even though Venus is nearly twice Mercury's distance from the Sun and thus receives only 25% of Mercury's solar irradiance.
Studies have suggested that several billion years ago Venus's atmosphere was much more like Earth's than it is now, and that there were probably substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere.[34] ...
Above the dense CO2 layer are thick clouds consisting mainly of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid droplets.[36][37] These clouds reflect about 60% of the sunlight that falls on them back into space, and prevent the direct observation of Venus's surface in visible light. The permanent cloud cover means that although Venus is closer than Earth to the Sun, the Venusian surface is not as well lit. In the absence of the greenhouse effect caused by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the temperature at the surface of Venus would be quite similar to that on Earth. Strong 300 km/h winds at the cloud tops circle the planet about every four to five earth days.[38] ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Atmosphere_and_climate
Jim Kawakami, December 8, 2009, posted at http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
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