Originally Posted by
Ex FSO GRIFFO
I wonder just how much WW2 affected 'Global Warming / Climate Change'..??
ALL of those bombs and the effect, in both Europe and Asia, including the A & the H bombs, plus those used for 'testing' in the various world locations......
I would have thought that 'somebody' would have thought of that by now....
But.....
Well, they did. There's been research done on exactly that topic, comparing global temperatures, considering the effects of solar irradiance, pollution, weather patterns such as El Nino and volcanic events and so on. The temperature record actually shows a slight decline in temperatures over a few years following World War 2, which is believed to be due to the broad effects of smoke haze and increased sulphate aerosol atmospheric pollution, which has a cooling effect but a bunch of other negative impacts such as acid rain, and which in later decades was greatly reduced as governments legislated for reductions in those emissions.
In terms of total CO2 emissions though, for the entire 7 year period covering 1939-1945 the global CO2 emissions were calculated to be approximately 34 billion tons (US Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory figures). By comparison, the global CO2 emissions for 2018 alone were approximately 37 billion tons, so in one year last year there was more CO2 emitted globally than during the entire Second World War. The annual rate of CO2 emissions has gone up by a factor of more than 7 between the WW2 era you're looking at, and recent years.
p.s. I won't even mention the various world's volcanoes that spew forth every now and again........
Again, not something that climate researchers ignore. Forbes has an article that discusses this
How much CO2 does a single volcano emit , which has figures of approximately 645 million tons of CO2 emitted every year due to volcanic activity in various forms (volcanic eruptions, mid ocean tectonic ridge activity and a few other things that are technically volcanic activity, while not being the traditional idea of an erupting volcano). That sounds like a lot, until it is compared to calculated level of human CO2 emissions in the last year, being approximately 37 billion tons of CO2.
Their article looks at the CO2 emitted by some of the very large, infrequent eruptions that make the headlines and people are aware of, and to match the levels of CO2 currently produced by human activity each day they point out that "It would take three Mount St. Helens and one Mount Pinatubo eruption
every day to equal the amount that humanity is presently emitting.".
The US Geological Survey also discusses this here
Volcanoes can affect the Earth's climate , with similar figures and conclusions. In short, volcanoes produce CO2, however the global contribution of volcanic activity to atmospheric CO2 is around the 1% mark, give or take, depending on how various forms of volcanic activity are calculated and what year is used as the baseline for the human contribution. Basically, it's a myth that volcanoes produce more CO2 than human activity, the true figure is that humans produce approximately 100 times more in recent years.
Nor the fact that, in geological terms, we had an 'ice age' that is reported to have finished between 15K and 10K years ago, and the planet has been 'warming' ever since....
Thankfully....otherwise many of us (Nearly all of us?) would not be here...???
OVAH!
Again, this isn't a surprise to researchers. There's a fair bit of published work on this topic. Here's a reasonable read, published in Nature, a very highly regarded scientific journal, that looks at how the end of that last ice age was associated with increasing CO2 levels, with the temperature increasing following the rising CO2 levels.
Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation It doesn't contradict the existing observations of what is happening; quite the opposite in fact.