Carbon cannot be the cause of global warming. Sorry. If you look at Venus (which is significantly hotter than it "should" be) and compare it to Mars (which is where is should be temperature wise), you will see that both have the same amount of carbon in their atmosphere. If carbon caused global warming, both planets would be overheated. (Incidentally, both planets have way more carbon than earth could every hope to have in its atmosphere.)
Now, Venus does have large amounts of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, so I am open to believing that that contributes to global warming. Scientists are divided on the matter, but sulfur dioxide does cause acid rain. Not a good thing on any level.
This brings me to Jennifer's theory on global warming. Air conditioning. Yep. It's really a simple matter of physics. We want cooler indoor temperatures, so we artificially cool the inside of our homes with air conditioning. However, the heat from our homes has to go somewhere. We put it outside. Think about your refrigerator. It cools a small area but releases heat into your home. Then your air conditioner redistributes that heat outside. I have no idea if this is a neutral exchange (the amount of cold is proportionate to the amount of heat) or if we gain heat during the process, but either way it increases the outside temperature.
However, although people are more than willing to ruin our food supply to make ethanol and supposedly lower carbon emissions (it doesn't as I pointed out in a previous post), we are probably not willing to give up the A/C...
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