"that's the best kook logic I've seen this week; that some CO2 is not same as other CO2 based upon it's source..."
It is a difficult concept. But let me try to explain. Take the simple case. You eat a plant. The carbon in that plant comes from the atmosphere. When you metabolize that plant, what carbon you don't keep either gets excreted as feces or is released back into the atmosphere as CO2. Now if you eliminate in your backyard, sooner or later those feces get either consumed by your dog or oxidize into the atmosphere. At some point, however, all of it winds back up in the atmosphere so a plant can convert it to carbohydrates again. So the system is sort of closed. However, if you take fossil carbon and start consuming it, then the plants you might have eaten are still there, carrying their load of carbon that either gets eaten or oxidized into CO2 when the plant dies or gets caught in a fire. So, you are adding more carbon into the system than there was before. Now being the smart guy you are, you realize that the carbon in the coal and likely the oil was in the atmosphere, cycling through the Great Wheel of Life sometime in the past. That is true. But Mother Nature had taken that carbon off the Great Ferris Wheel and had locked it away. This she did slowly, over a great period of time. That was ok, she also was adding some more carbon to the system via volcanoes. And the CO2 content was higher way back when men road around on brontosauruses(brontosauri?). Since you are now eating coal faster than new coal is made, we will ignore the whole oil thing because there are those who believe that oil isn't from fossil sources and that complicates things, the total carbon riding on the Great Wheel of Life is larger than it was before.
Hope that helps. |
