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

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (261800)	11/22/2005 7:36:12 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1571808

"So do meteors and it gives rise to new species on the next cycle." Ones large enough to do that deed are rare in the extreme. In another decade or two, we can do something about that. In fact, we could develop something now that could do the job. Most people wouldn't like it, though. The trick is to keep things from happening on a human scale. Unfortunately, with the warming of ocean bottom water, we are toying with changing things on a teenager's scale. Clathrates are something to be very concerned about. Abruptly dumping that amount of methane is definitely contra-indicated. That could cause a 10 degree C or more increase in temperatures over a timespan on the order of years. And that kind of increase would trigger bog drying, which would dump a large amount of CO2, on the order of what we already have in atmosphere. This isn't just a hypothetical, there are a couple of global extinctions that look like they started this way. Sure, there are mechanisms, but even they can get stuck at top dead center. Like the times when the earth froze solid. All the mechanisms were shut down, and it requires an external event to kick things over again. If we ever got into a runaway greenhouse effect, there probably isn't a good way out of that that isn't on the scale of hundreds of millions of years. Without water, lots of things go wrong.

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (261800)	11/23/2005 12:20:44 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571808

Although no one can be certain we are the cause or what action we should take or what's economically feasible, it's something we should continue to monitor. Current models suggest continual monitoring ain't good enough. Worst case we will adapt as long as the changes happen over long periods (more than a few human generations). I don't believe the world will act until irrefutable evidence is upon us and then it may be too late to do anything but adapt. I also believe a planet as old as ours that has gone through such changes many times has a mechanism to regulate that we do not yet understand - or we'd still be too warm or covered in ice. Probably God will intercede.