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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (124345)	9/21/2000 1:39:24 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1572963

Cutting greenhouse gases. While a laudable goal in theory, the practice is very difficult. The problem is that as the climate warms, many of these gases are given off in increasing amounts through natural processes. So short of paving over vast areas, there isn't a lot to be done. Sure, you can cut down the number of cows, bovine farts are a source of methane, and you can try to do something about garbage dumps, but wetlands, bogs and other areas of natural anaerobic decay are not so easy to control without destroying them. And while the developers may like the idea, eliminating these things will cause other problems. As far as industrial sources, well SOx is controlled for other reasons and there just isn't that much methane being released by industrial processes (to name two). One novel idea I liked was the dumping of iron compounds, chiefly iron chloride in iron deficit areas of the ocean. Because the iron is crucial for the production of chlorophyll, it stimulates the growth of phytoplankton, which are large sinks for CO2 naturally anyway. The implications of doing this on a large scale has not been studied, the energy balance would shift because there would be surface heating due to light being absorbed in the upper layers of the ocean(chlorophyll is not particularly efficient). Changing the surface temperature of the water can have wide ranging effects, just look what La Nina and El Nino do to our weather, for example. Okay, so that is a dumb idea...