***Ice Age and Carbon Cycle Rant*** AJ, By real worries I mean big enough to cause decimation of the human economic system over the next 100 years. By decimation, I mean the old-style meaning of a reduction in the number of troops by 10% [but here I mean a reduction in the world's economic output over the next 100 years by 10%].
I've already abandoned sea level living and owning of assets near sea level. Increasing numbers of people will avoid buying property in Venice, Los Angeles and Tokyo. When they get wind of a real rise in sea level, rather than the conjecture we have at present, they'll be a bit more serious.
So over a period of decades, the buildings nearest the sea will be reduced in economic value. But they deteriorate anyway over a period of 20 years and are up for major renovation after 50 years so they have pretty much run their economic life. So has the sewerage, roading, water pipes and town planning which originally saw them built the way they were.
There is heaps of agricultural land, especially since the world's population is going to collapse over the next 100 years as women decide to have few children and get serious payment for agreeing to do so. By 2099, there will be half the number of people there are now. Well, give or take a few. I won't be here. You won't. Our children won't. Our generation had none, one, two or maybe three children. Our children will have none one or maybe two. [Yes, I know, I have four and India is breeding like bunnies and little details like that]. Their children will have none or one or none or average 1.2.
Check out Japan and OECD countries for what will happen. Africa is stable and in the midst of an AIDS disaster [according to a doctor I was talking to recently]. China has finished their baby boom [twenty years ago]. India is swarming but the birth rate is declining - though their numbers will soar for a couple of decades if they can sustain themselves.
So, we all just move inland as the tide gently rises.
Yes indeed, user pays is my creed. Polluters especially. But some evidence that a CO2 emitter is indeed a polluter is not clear to me. They might be a rescuer as far as I can tell, by forestalling an ice age.
The Malaria mosquito is not the Xenophobese, but the Anophelese
lawestvector.org
konops.imbb.forth.gr
Hurricanes are no worry when we live a little inland. They don't do much damage to modern life. Shanty towns get wrecked, but those have low value. A good economic life will enable the shanty towns to be replaced by nice reinforced concrete which won't blow over.
The sequestered carbon is in stupendously huge quantities. It hides out in shale oils, heavy crudes, normal crudes, gas, limestone, coal. It is buried in trillions of tons of ocean sediment. A little is in actively living life and the ecosystem.
Try as we might, we will never release more than an infinitesimal fraction of the carbon. That which we do release, the damn plants and rest of the food chain gobbles up and dumps in the ocean, and elsewhere. They are emptying the atmosphere of CO2 as fast as we can fill it up.
The more we do, the faster they work. The living population will rise. Plants will need to struggle less to get the CO2 they crave. Plants used to have a really pleasant CO2 rich environment but they kept putting out O2 and competing for the small remaining amount of CO2.
Luckily for them, little beasties noticed this oxygen and figured that they could get some energy by EATING the plants and breathing the oxygen. That is a high-energy action-packed way of life and the whole tumult of beastery began, leading to you and me.
No more waiting around for the sun to shine and the odd molecule of CO2 to run into leaves. We just chase after some yummy C containing tucker, swill it down with some O2 and hey presto, we are off and running some more.
Happy too for the plants because this beastery had to breathe out CO2 as the waste product. So harmony was restored, with CO2 out, O2 out, sunshine in staying more or less in balance.
But, unfortunately, there were Carbon sinks all over the place. Seashells and bones turned to limestone and formed the White Cliffs of Dover and caves for speleologists around the world. cavepage.magna.com.au
[I notice phallactites in that picture!]
This is fun???!!http://www.cavepage.magna.com.au/cave/wetneck.jpg
There are some nice photos there too for people with a decent Web connection.
Plants were buried and turned to coal. Sea life died and sank, turning to ocean sediment and feeding oil fields and volcanoes after being subducted under the continents. The volcanoes recycle the C, but not much of it.
But wait! Along came BP Oil and Toyota! Hooray. The oil was dragged out and burned. Releasing the C once again to live a happy life instead of staying forever in a subterranean tomb.
If only we could get more carbon out! But we can't, so we'll just have to be satisfied with a good effort, which conveniently is also economically productive.
Figure out the C in the atmosphere and the oil consumption per year and you'll see how puny our effort is.
Ice Age theory some other time! But in brief, as plant life recedes and advances and ice sheets recede and advance, we get ice-ages and interludes. We are due for a cooling, not a heating! If we don't like a tide rise, we will really dislike what would be a very fast ice-age onset. The Winn theory goes that an ice-age can flip into gear in the space of 5 years! As the snow cover grows, the reflection increases and the process accelerates very quickly as the plant cover and sea are iced over.
But all that is trivial compared with the sudden tide rise from an incoming solar system missile!
Mqurice |
