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To: Moominoid who wrote (49175)	4/30/2004 2:44:14 PM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

My experience re MQ and Greenhouse effect etc is that he knows it all. You could just as well try to turn/realign Cheops pyramid.

To: Moominoid who wrote (49175)	4/30/2004 2:44:50 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi Moom. Google found plenty on Ruddiman's ideas on the effects of human agriculture thanks. It's pretty obvious that people have released a LOT of CO2 over the millennia. In New Zealand for example, there is a lot of farmland which used to be forest. But on the other hand, there are a lot of wooden houses that used to be trees. On the third hand, there has been a lot of newsprint buried in landfill which has produced a lot of methane, which in some landfills is now collected and used to generate electricity. On the fourth hand, people have been lighting fires for 100,000 years and a lot of them, for cooking, keeping warm, providing light and scaring tigers and stuff away. Maybe the invention of fire was the main human technology and that ended the last ice age. When there was a lot of wood, people would have been very enthusiastic fire makers. It's almost instinctive to light a big fire and hang around it at night, staring into the embers. The ice ages have been increasing in length [I think they have] as the ecosphere has been gradually fizzling out due to the continuous burial of carbon in permanent graves of coal seams, oil and gas fields, shale and bituminous sands and of course, limestone, which stores a lot of carbon, not to mention calcium, which is essential to life. While Ruddiman is right that people have been producing methane and CO2 for a long time, the oceans have been soaking CO2 in forever. Microbeasties have been eating the algae and other plant material in the oceans forever too. Bigger beasties have been eating them. Blue whales scoff tons of krill. There's a vast food chain in the oceans, ending with hagfish at the bottom, feeding on carcasses. But hagfish don't eat all that falls down. Bones for example, sink and stay. They are not recycled by the oceanic ecosphere. They are stripped from the ocean and dumped in kilometre deep sedimentary layers which are carted across the ocean floor by tectonic action and subducted under continents or scraped off into flysch wedges adjacent to continents. I suppose you've heard of the White Cliffs of Dover. That's one example of limestone not being permanently buried, but eroded into the ocean where at least some of it will feed the food chain, though most surely sinks straight to the bottom for burial in another marine deposit. There are huge limestone deposits buried around the world. Some have water flowing through them and are gradually redissolved, such as the Waitomo Caves limestone, but relatively little of limestone escapes. Mostly, it stays buried. My guess is that the two big things humans have done is burn wood for 100,000 years and in the past century, burn oil, gas and coal deposits. The first probably ended the last ice age and the second has prevented the onset of the next. But all along, the oceanic sediment has been collecting vast amounts of carbon into its gravitational black hole. Some to be recycled as volcanic gases, or during limestone dissolving, but most to be permanently buried. People have done a good job of keeping it warm. We do NOT want another ice-age and they come of fast. I guess about 5 years and we'd be in it. It's a cusp process, not a long, gradual change. That's because snow cover and cloud reflect a LOT of light from the sun. We only need late and early snowfalls and increased cloud cover to cool things a lot. Once it flips over into cold, the next winter, the snow will really get going. The third summer would see little summer. The fourth none. The fifth would see year around snow, which would work its way south, rapidly covering the huge land masses near the arctic [Russia, Canada]. Greenland is still covered, having still not escaped the last ice age. That's my theory anyway. Mqurice