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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: A.J. Mullen who wrote (7711)	11/21/2006 5:40:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12246

Yay! We have agreement on the key issue: <We can't assume that anthropomorphic CO2 will be automatically and equally balanced by sequestration due to enhancement of plant-growth. We know that hasn't happened since we started burning fossil fuels. > What is still to be figured out is what we need to do about it, if anything. I think I recall a graph of CO2 levels showing an inflection in the graph which if extrapolated would be a peak in level not far higher than where we are. One way or another, there will be a peak. What matters is whether that peak happens for reasons which we will not like and which might even make us dead. Peak CO2 is more important than Peak Oil. Peak Oil will happen, in my theory on Life The Universe and Everything, when Peak People happens [or very close to it], which I expect to be in the next couple of decades. Or by March if H5N1 suddenly becomes popular, which seems unlikely since it hasn't gained ground much in recent weeks. So far, I think we have done a good thing getting the CO2 levels up, helping prevent return of the ice age, for a little while anyway [long enough for you and me]. We agree on this too: <I do know that the climate has changed quickly in the past. To me that suggests it is not globally stable. In this case I mean global over all parameters as well as over the whole earth. I'd rather we didn't discover how far we can perturb the climate before it flips into another regime> I like it the way things are. I do NOT want warming, or cooling. I consider cooling is the big risk, still. We have got icebergs invading right now, running up onto beaches in NZ! Unseen since the last ice age as far as I know. It's cold too. We have had winter non-stop through into the beginnings of summer. In 1987, or maybe 1988, I was helping Tarken [aged 11 or 12] with a school project at Antwerp International School. I suggested climate and how Earth suddenly flips into an ice age because of snow cover and cloud cover causing rapid cooling, combined with extended deserts which are cold things [plants are warm, light coloured dirt is cold at night and reflects light by day] I thought that 10 years was plenty to swing into a full-blown ice age with snow cover not going away in summer. Maybe I was first with the "fast change climate" idea. Until then, I'd ever only heard of geological time for processes to happen, including climatic ones. Maybe he and I should have put in for a Nobel Prize. I think warming processes are much slower, requiring plants to gradually invade deserts and icy regions, with 4 km deep glaciers to melt taking a long time. I think plants create a boom-bust life cycle, gradually taking over, which finally makes it too warm, which makes deserts, which causes cooling to get a grip, which results in snow cover at high latitudes, which reflects heat, which causes sea level drop, more deserts, in a complex feedback loop. No, I didn't have sophisticated models. We can adjust to gradual warming and sea level rise. We can't adjust to an ice age over 5 or 10 years - not in a nice way anyway. All we need to do right now is move taxes from good things like QCOM technology, and other cyberspace investments, to commons hazards like carbon importation. Tariffs are better than general taxes as the border is the definition of a country and that's where taxes should be collected, to fund defence of the border, anti-pollution of the global commons, and workforce protection against enslaved foreigners. Oil tariffs cut payments to Saudi Arabian Islamic Jihad for example. They would have to sell their oil to the next highest bidder. Mqurice