Maurice,
I really do think that your "theory on ice ages" is brilliant and I also believe it to be original, for I have never heard it before in its entirety until I read your posting of it here some years ago. And it has to be true, at least to some extent. I got out a college chemistry text and tried to get a handle on the amount of carbon "entombed" in carbonaceous rock like calcium carbonate (CaCO3) and it is a bunch.
You know though, I DID hear on some PBS documentary about the immediate grave dangers of "global warming" some years ago, the point being made that acid rain caused by coal emissions would liberate lots of additional C02 due to rainfall landing on bare rock causing rapid TEOTWAWKI due to rapid global warming. Even acid rain landing on limestone buildings was mentioned. I believe this documentary was broadcast in the early 1990's and was your usual leftie "handwringing" and doomful production of the "Frontline" variety.
There is a powerful political dimension to the whole concept of global warming and for that reason much of the argument is suspect. I have leftie cousins (journalism majors and the like) who don't understand math well enough to balance a checkbook yet they have been feverent advocates of the theory, prone to spouting all sorts of terminology they in no way understand, for many years. They, and many others, have been well indoctrinated.
But heck Maurice, you are right. The earth is a one way trip to becoming a sterile iceball and the loss of greenhouse gasses has to be the reason. I don't have the numbers handy but the C02 concentration of 2000 PPM and more back in the Jurassic period. There was a period though, I think 300 million years ago during the late carboniferous with reduced C02 levels and the world's first ice ages. Wonder what the explanation for that might be?
Another thing: predicting something like the weather on the earth hundreds or thousands of years from now or better yet, to try to perdict the result of relatively small actions by mankind upon the earth's weather in the distant future is just not possible. There are just too many unknowns. Here we are bolting through space and in irregular orbit around Sol, with old Sol being plenty irregular himself. We don't even know what causes pole shifts or when we will have the next one.
I know from engineering work that even in an ideal engineering environment, even when you have infinitely variable control of a whole host of variables, and are able to monitor the process in a multitude of ways, that even then often cause and effect is difficult to establish, especially for anything subtle. To model the earth's weather with any degree of certitude over the long term is just not possible now, maybe never.
Slagle |
