20 years ago, in Antwerp [Zwinjdrecht] I took a photo of the sky at sunset. It was beautiful and criss-crossed with many contrails, which expand after the aeroplane has gone by forming a fine cloud.
Antwerp seems to be in the middle of a main skyway from everywhere to everywhere.
The sky was all contrail lines, [maybe 80%], and with the setting sun, was glorious.
I had helped our son do a school project [he was about 11] and we chose to describe how the greenhouse effect was preventing an ice age, which, if it came, would come really fast, like in about 3 years, and it would be precipitated by cloud cover and snow cover [which go together since clouds make snow].
Contrary to media and politician noise now, and rantings of scientifically illiterate newbies like Geode, the Greenhouse Effect hasn't been suddenly discovered. People have been watching and wondering for decades.
My guess is we are avoiding freezing, rather than heading into a calamitous runaway greenhouse effect. So far, with another two decades gone by, that seems to be the case as measured by actual data [such as how little the air temperature has increased and how little sea level has risen and how much ice has formed].
Desert expansion is a cooling driver and oscillation of greenery is, I think, the main driver of whether it's a glaciation or warm period. Stripping of CO2 from the air and permanent burying is another driving force for cooling, which is constant and has been going for a billion years. Earth is freezing and crystallizing. It is NOT in balance, contrary to popular myth, other than in the short term = over a period of a million years or so, it seems constant and in balance, but it isn't.
The ocean conveyors never stop working, carrying some of the oceanic sediment to permanent solid deposition, though plenty is recycled to power volcanoes which build land, or into the mantle to go around again or to float up into oil and gas traps or to leak out into the atmosphere.
3 billion years ago, Earth was a hot ball. It is gradually cooling. It has been doing it always. As part of the cooling process, it crystallizes, with iron collecting there, gold collecting somewhere else, coal ending up over there, silica piled up, salt in huge salt diapirs, oil in a big puddle in Saudi Arabia, and in vast bituminous deposits in the Orinoco basin.
It's true the CO2 trend is continuing to increase rapidly, which so far, means our anti-ice age efforts are paying off and it doesn't just leak out of the atmosphere faster than we can fill it up.
But, it is leaking out really quickly. Of all the CO2 we have put into the atmosphere, I think [Geode no doubt has the exact figure] only about a third is still in the atmosphere.
One can see how quickly CO2 is stripped out by how quickly CO2 levels drop when plants start gobbling it up each northern spring. It's FAST! Plants WANT CO2 and they go really flat out gobbling it when they get enough sun [and other requirements such as nutrients and water].
If we relax our efforts or are unable to keep up because of human population decline, which is a metaphysical certitude over the next century, CO2 will be rapidly stripped out and we'll be back where we started, with an ice age on the way.
Humans will have to move back to Africa. Fortunately, there's lots of room there and in India and Australia. The Sahara desert will bloom. Actually, there's lots of room everywhere. The silly Malthusian idea of humans covering Earth has turned out to be wrong. Most politicians are wondering how to keep human populations UP, not how to get them down.
They want lots of tax payers to pay their greedy pensions. They tried importing Moslems, but it turned out that Moslems don't want to be tax-paying serfs, and are more interested in sticking knives in the chests of Van Gogh and anyone else who thinks they aren't the superior beings with the One True Word.
Mqurice |
