Well, okay Hawk, there might have been an event such as all the Great Lakes emptying in a big flood which temporarily disrupted things in a big way, but that didn't change the trends.
When the Mediterranean broke open to the Atlantic, that must have been a big impact too for a while. Maybe that would have been a bigger effect than the lake flooding out as it's a very BIG body of water. But even the Mediterranean creation would have been a transient effect, causing a temporary lowering of sea levels until the melting ice topped up the oceans again [depending on which order things happened].
My point is that carbon has been buried for eons and eons, stripped out of the ecosphere, in limestone, oil, gas and coal deposits. There is a LOT of it. We are simply putting it back where it was. That doesn't seem likely to turn Earth into a runaway cauldron and a steamy copy of Venus.
Also, my other main point, is that there didn't used to be ice ages, then they began. They run in cycles, with ice-age being the normal rule, with warm interregnums being relatively brief, of the order of 10,000 years, which we have already enjoyed in the current warm period.
I think the onset of ice ages was due to the carbon being stripped out and the Earth entered a carbon-depleted era which meant the ecosphere didn't have enough grunt to keep the place warm.
Right now, we have gone from a period of temperate tropics at the end of the last ice age, when Egypt was a pleasant land and the Sahara was much smaller if even existing [I'm making this part up so take it with a grain of salt - actually, I'm making it all up, so this is all just a hypothesis].
The plants and animals had been gaining ground during the last ice age in what had previously been desert. As they gained ground, they warmed the place up again, filling the big equatorial regions with life, and green [which absorbs a lot more energy than reflective desert]. The ice started retreating as the warmth increased.
But the deserts gradually increased shrinking the zone for plants and animals again. The reflective deserts cool the place down. That causes cloud, which reflects and drops snow, which reflects. All of a sudden, the snow, cloud and deserts combine to form a big mirror and wham, into another damn ice-age we go.
That's how the ice-age cycle really works.
We can turn the ice-ages off by digging up carbon and turning it to CO2 and by covering deserts in crops for fuel and photovoltaics for electricity. We can dig up limestone to make concrete roads everywhere [which we'd make dark-coloured]. Superconducting levitated and propelled, electronically and photonically controlled vehicles would zoom people all over the land masses quickly [1000 kph], safely, cheaply, cleanly and conveniently.
Mqurice |
