Hot Air on Global Warming

Reuters says [live link to same story] that, according to the UN's World Meteorological Organization, "[g]reenhouse gases blamed for global warming and climate change have reached their highest ever levels in the atmosphere." According to the article:

Carbon dioxide, which the WMO says accounts for 90 percent of warming over the past decade, is largely generated by human activity involving the burning of fossil fuels -- including in industry, transport and domestic heating.

and

Methane, generated by intensive farming and landfills as well as the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal and which accounts for around 20 percent of the greenhouse effect, has risen 155 percent in the modern age.

All this time, I thought that the gaseous form of the incredibly dangerous chemical dihydrogen monoxide was the number one culprit. And apparently I'm not alone in that apparent misconception, with Wikipedia attributing about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect to this nefarious chemical (not including that found in clouds), but only somewhere between 9-26% to its nearest competitor, carbon dioxide.

Of course, with 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water, it's sort of hard to blame atmospheric H2O on human activity. But nevermind that, with CO2 constituting 90% of the greenhouse gasses and CH4 another 20%, we're still giving it 110%. Go team!


I think this one is even better than the BBC story that I first ran across here about Greenland's glaciers retreating and exposing "for the first time in millions of years" such things as a ruined church last used in the 1400s marking the remains of a Viking farming civilization.