Thanks for that link Hugh. It confirms my theory that Earth has been gradually dying as the carbon has been stripped out of the ecosphere and buried in permanent cemeteries of coal, oil, gas, shale, heavy crudes and limestone.
As Earth was dying, it was getting colder until it started having vast and long-lasting glaciations on regular basis.
Humans have come along in the nick of time with the brains and technology to dig up all that carbon and bring it back to life. Okay, not ALL that carbon. Just a small fraction of it, but enough to forestall the next glaciation, if we are lucky. I am not convinced we are out of the woods. Indeed, we should be planting woods across the Sahara, Australia and other deserts to green the place up and boost the ecosphere.
I didn't realize how recently the carbon depletion process was happening.
<When the earth was in its infancy, some four-and-a half billion years ago, it is believed that the atmosphere was predominantly composed of carbon dioxide, which would have put its CO2 concentration, in terms of the units most commonly used today, at something on the order of 1,000,000 ppm. Ever since, however, the CO2 content of the air - in the mean - has been dropping. By 500 million years ago, in fact, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration is estimated to have fallen to only 20 times more than it is today, or something on the order of 7500 ppm; and by 300 million years ago, it had declined to close to the air's current CO2 concentration of 370 ppm, after which it rose to about five times where it now stands at 220 million years before present (Berner 1990, 1992, 1993, 1997; Kasting 1993). Then, during the middle Eocene, some 43 million years ago, the atmospheric CO2 concentration is estimated to have dropped to a mean value of approximately 385 ppm (Pearson and Palmer, 1999); while between 25 to 9 million years ago, it is believed to have varied between 180 and 290 ppm (Pagani et al., 1999). This latter concentration range is essentially the same range over which the air's CO2 concentration oscillated during the 100,000-year glacial cycles of the past 420,000 years (Fischer et al., 1999; Petit et al., 1999). With the inception of the Industrial Revolution, however, the air's CO2 content once again began an upward surge that has now taken it to the 370 ppm level, with the promise of significantly higher values still to come. >
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