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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (31900)	6/8/2002 5:26:13 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

...what's PaO2? Protactium Dioxide? ktf-split.hr Or is it... The level of oxygen actually dissolved in the blood?? mtsinai.org Either way... I would agree that CO2 IS a poison, because too much of it cause blood acidosis, which effectively amounts to altering the PH level of your blood and making it more "acid" (hence the term acidosis). And Carbon Monoxide is a poison because the blood absorbs it more readily than pure oxygen, displacing oxygen in the bloodstream. But let's face some facts here... It's not just CO2 which causes ice ages. Methane is 10 times the greenhouse gas that CO2 is, and there are vast quantities of it frozen in the ocean bottoms. Many have theorized that ice ages have formed when the sudden release of vast quantities of these "hydrates" through volcanic or tectonic forces, rapidly heating the planet and thus creating the conditions for interrupting the ocean currents in such a way that natural oceanic convections are interrupted and temperatures rapidly drop in the northern and southern latitudes. Many have also stated that should the ice caps melt the oceans would rise tremendously, but I believe that common sense dictates otherwise. With the exception of higher elevations of the Antarctic continent, the ice caps are ALREADY floating on top of the oceans and displacing ocean levels. The melting of the northern icecap would merely be a transition from a solid to a liquid state for all of that water, causing little additional rise in sea levels. polarmistexp.com A good portion of Antarctica would be submerged were all of its ice to melt. Thus the displacement of the oceans caused by Antarctic has already occurred for that ice already lying beneath current sea level. And personally, the equatorial regions would have to be a living hell, and desertified before we ever saw all the ice on the polar caps actually melt completely. The data collected thus far indicate an elongate basin, named the Wilkes Subglacial Basin, several hundred meters below sea level and parallel to and west of the Transantarctic Mountains of Victoria Land, in east Antarctica. The Polar Basin extends from the South Pole toward Queen Maud Land. In Wilkes Land, deep embayments with small rises penetrate from the coast at longitude 145 deg and 115 deg. In those embayments preglacial shorelines would have extended many hundreds of kilometers into the present continent. A bedrock high above 3,000 m (9,842 ft) is centered at the Gamburtsev Mountains, near the Pole of Inaccessibility. In the rest of east Antarctica the bedrock topography ranges from about 1,000 m (3,280 ft) above to slightly below sea level. In contrast, much of the bedrock surface of west Antarctica is between sea level and -1,000 m (-3,280 ft), and depressions almost 3,000 m (9,840 ft) below sea level are known. In ranges where rock-surface elevations are between 1,000 and 3,000 m (3,281 and 9,842 ft), mountain peaks protrude above the ice surface. Most notable are the ranges in Marie Byrd Land and Eights Coast and the irregular ridge that extends from the Horlick Mountains through the Ellsworth Mountains to the Antarctic Peninsula. The highest point in Antarctica is Vinson Massif (5,140 m/16,863 ft) in the Sentinel Range. The weight of ice has depressed the land by an average of 560 m (1,838 ft), roughly 0.28 times the average thickness of ice (2,000 m/6,562 ft). If the ice were removed, the land would rise until most of east Antarctica was above sea level, but west Antarctica would consist largely of a shallow sea. Hawk

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (31900)	6/8/2002 6:18:14 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Rats...dat's me. The Hawk's second guess was right. PaO2/PaCO2 is the partial pressure of (whichever) gas in arterial blood, expressed in mm of mercury. COPD is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, what folks used to call chronic bronchitis and emphysema, only now lumped together. These people often no longer respond to CO2 as a respiratory stimulus. The chemical driving force ( as opposed to the brain's neural driving centers) becomes oxygen. If we give too much, respirations slow down, CO2 starts to go up, to the point where it is a depressant, and voila, Houston, we have a big problem. Hawk is right about the changes with pH, but that is a different story. (Gets even more confusing when you realize that the body can begin to go into anaerobic metabolism when oxygen isn't available, causing a further decrease in pH, from the lactic acid). Short term, the CO2 changes will do you in faster than the pH. Let's not even get into fat people. (Obesity is, among other things, a restrictive lung disease...ya can't take a deep breath,cuz there is not enuf room to expand your lungs.) Oh, hell, we're there. Ugh, so eventually, they chronically underventilate, build up CO2, have blood levels which look very much like a COPDer. Lots of times develop obstructive sleep apnea, from too much bulk and the uvula dropping down, etc. The old name for all this was Pickwickian Syndrome, after Joe, the Fat Boy in Dicken's "Pickwick Papers". As for water, air gets humidified when it goes into yer lungs, usually in the nose, but in my case the mouth. Temperature dependent...47mm Hg at body temp. (Theroretically, at whatever altitude the barometric pressure is 47, gaseous water would replace everything else in yer lungs, and you then get those scenes in the space movies where they begin to bubble theirs elves out of their mouths.) There you have it; 16 weeks of respiratory physiology in 90 seconds. Rats... dat's me