[Coral-List] reporting [CO2] to the public

[Judith Lang]

Regarding Bruce's suggestion, last month the Council of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) adopted an information statement on climate change that can be downloaded at: 
	http://ametsoc.org/policy/2012climatechange.html

Its explanation as to why climate is changing states includes the following:
"It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide. The most important of these over the long term is CO2, whose concentration in the atmosphere is rising principally as a result of fossil-fuel combustion and deforestation."

This is a much stronger affirmation of the human contribution to current climate change than was given most recently by the AMS in 2007.
 At least domestically for the US,  this potentially "a big deal," and it would appear that now is the perfect time for a petition requesting more realistic reporting by TV meteorologists!

Judy Lang

> On Sep 13, 2012, at 2:54 PM, BRUCE CARLSON wrote:

> Just a thought to toss out to everyone:  If a goal is to reduce atmospheric CO2, and if this ultimately requires participation of absolutely everyone, shouldn't everyone know what the concentration of CO2 is on a regular basis so we can all see how it is changing?  

> We in the science community all know how [CO2] is tracking over time, but how about the general public? If they can't see it or smell it, and if they don't read science reports, they can easily dismiss it as a non-existent problem.  Why shouldn't we, i.e., the science community, push to get TV weather reporters to routinely include a mention of global atmospheric CO2 concentration?  To go a step further, since NBC in the U.S. seems to be a leader in reporting changing weather trends in the daily news, why not get them to include CO2 tracking, perhaps on the Weather Channel, if not on the Nightly News? Maybe if the public starts to see how CO2 is changing over the long-run it will begin to sink in, especially as they/we all start correlating rising CO2 with the extreme changes in weather patterns.  

> Stock market data and trends are presented everyday to everyone everywhere.  Why not do the same with CO2 and let people see the data for themselves? 

> Bruce Carlson

> Honolulu