T HE REAL CULPRITS OF GLOBAL WARMING

The main cause of global warming is thought to be the CO2 emissions that comes from
factories,automobiles and even computer servers but the fact is global warming is just not that simple a problem.Global warming is a non-linear equation that starts out with this nuts and bolts solution to a problem that has plagued the universe long before the dawn of man.The element CO2 is not only a greenhouse gas but is a major building block of life that is responsible for the world as we know it.CO2 is responsible for oxygen,food,and the wood we use to build our homes.Without CO2 there would be no mountains to climb and in many places no lakes to fish in.But the bottom line is the there is a rapid manmade production of this gas that readily dissolves in water ,particularly ocean water,and is responsible for increasing the temperature of this water thereby producing a more dangerous greenhouse gas called water vapor.Now about 75% of the earth is water and water vapor is controlled by the temperature or humidity in the atmosphere.The danger of water vapor as a greenhouse gas is its ability to hold heat and moisture for long periods of time and above dry lands as well as wet lands.There is a growing argument about how much a cloud weighs when compared to a Boeing 747.Some mathematicians did a study about the weight of clouds and concluded that the average cloud contains as much mass as ten thousand 747 airplanes and although its molecules are in a gaseous state and would not weigh anything, the volume of condensed water vapor or rain would weigh several thousand metric tons.Even more dangerous than water vapor is a greenhouse gas called methane. When you hear about the polar ice caps melting and the reindeer nearly starving from a lack of food the problem is methane emissions in the permafrost regions of the Artic Circle which have increased by almost 33% since 2003.While the
methane in the atmosphere is minute(.0002%) when compared to other greenhouse gases
the fact is that methane gas is 23 times stronger than CO2 and you don't need as much methane to produce the same results.Just 2% of global methane comes from the Artic region with the largest amounts at 33 metric tons seeping from the rice paddies of China and Southeast Asia.Over two thirds of the methane is manmade and basically it comes from the smelly decomposition of dead plants and animal waste where there is little oxygen and methane also comes from the burning of natural gas.A very large quantity of methane is trapped in the ocean sediments.The floor of the ocean ,with its rich deposits of methane clathrates is the perhaps the most dangerous threat to global warming.55 million years ago,a Global warming Earth Event occurred with the the release of methane gas from the sediments on the floors of the oceans.Please remember that it only takes 40 million tons of methane to produce the same amount of heat as a billion tons of CO2 and the estimated supply of methane gas in the ocean sediments is somewhere around ten trillion metric tons.If this gas was suddenly released from the ocean floor it would magnify the effects of global warming and heat the earth's atmosphere to almost inconceivable levels.Orbiting satellites are doing a wonderful job of monitoring the effects of global warming and I think it would be a good idea to keep monitoring this problem with satellite imagery and since they can detect methane on Mars and Titan the monitoring of chemical changes on earth could become a cottage industry.