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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (10350)	3/12/2007 11:34:22 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

PB, you have hit the jackpot for me. Thank you for that graph. It's the one I have been discussing for decades, but have never bothered to find because I didn't think it was as serious as it seems to be. I mean the one showing the decline of CO2 from Cambrian times to now. I have ranted on and on and on about how Earth is NOT in balance but has been always on a freezing and crystallizing path to coldness and limited living room. I didn't realize how much that process was underway and how close to end-times we are. The Global Warming, Greenhouse Effect, Climate Change doomsters have got it not just wrong, but horribly wrong. I thought we were perhaps reversing global cooling by our CO2 emission efforts. Now I think we are farting against thunder, or pissing in the ocean to use a less vulgar phrase. If that graph you gave is correct, CO2 has been stripped out of the atmosphere almost completely. The part that is cheering is that during the Carboniferous era, CO2 levels got as low as they are now then there was a big warming again and rise of CO2 levels back up towards normal levels of about 1,500 ppm in the Mesozoic era. But we shouldn't be too relaxed about that, because over those 300 million years, the stripping of carbon from the biosphere/ecosphere has been continuing apace, with vast deposits of carbon into permanent graves of coal, shale, oil, gas, bitumen and don't forget limestone, which holds stupendously huge amounts of carbon around the world, all of which was once upon a time alive and kicking. Some is recycled, such as that in the White Cliffs of Dover and that dissolved from limestone caves. But the Nullarbor Plain in Australia is one monstrous stash of limestone which is NOT being recycled any time soon. Earth is freezing. Slowly, but surely, relentlessly. I don't mean just water, but huge separation and crystallization processes. I had thought that the CO2 we are putting back into business would reverse the problem and avoid another plunge into glaciation. I now doubt that we can achieve that. The graph is too big and too certain. I should buy land in Australia and the Sahara desert [and other zero-value equatorial regions]. When a couple of billion people want to relocate towards the equator, I want to offer them excellent facilities. My theory is that a change to an ice age is not a gradual process, but a flip as snow and ice cover and cloud cover cause a single year transition into a glaciation by reflecting so much heat back out that the cooling process gets into a feedback loop of more snow causing more cloud and more reflection and more cooling and more cloud and more snow and next thing you know there isn't a northern summer at all and snow is on the ground year round. As green is buried, heat absorption rapidly decreases and reflection increases. It's not just amusing, but hilarious that Al Gore, following the tradition of politicians, and the mob, following the tradition of mobs, get things completely wrong. It's real Alice in Wonderland stuff. Unfortunately, making it somewhat unfunny, is that I am stuck INSIDE the monkey cage, with no bars between me and the chimpoids panicking about Global Warming. They are trying to stop the best bet we have of avoiding an early freeze-up. Maybe your graphs are joke graphs and I should check their veracity. I am not holding my breath. Mqurice

To: maceng2 who wrote (10350)	3/13/2007 12:08:04 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 36917

PB, continuing on the CO2 depletion issue. The Mesozoic replenishment of CO2 to pre Carboniferous era levels was no doubt due to umpty peta trillions of beasts and beastesses inhaling oxygen which the carboniferous era produced in vast quantities and exhaling of CO2, which the beasts and beastesses got from eating the greenery and woodery. When there were no plant eaters, the CO2 level was reduced as plants gobbled it up and it was deposited into vast coal fields. It went nearly to zero as the plant world fought over diminishing CO2 resources and there was nobody to breathe it back out again. Once bugs and stuff got wind of the feast of plants available and figured out how to eat them, it was a whole new game. From then on it was all-out war among plants for CO2, water, and light and beastly types who wanted to eat the plants. Later on, beastly beasties decided it was easier to leave the plant eating to others, and to eat those who did the hard work of plant eating, which was also more delicious than eating plants all day, with their nasty toxins. Plants developed chemical warfare to fight off the beastly hordes. There's a vast array of toxins in plants. With the advent of beasties, carbon was deposited not just in coal, and subducted by tectonic processes into oil and gas, but in limestone which formed from bones, shells, teeth, horns and stuff which beasties had needed and plants didn't. Everyone was working to strip carbon out of the ecosphere. Talk about large scale tragedy of the commons. And nobody could resist the tragedy because if one didn't have a shell, one got eaten. If one didn't have bones, one could be a worm or octopus with survival precarious - chasing antelope would be out of the question. Though parasitic worms could earn a living and octopus found a way of life hiding among rocks. Humans have obviously arrived just in time to see the dying of the life and to find a way of reversing it. Or better still, creating the next phase of sentience which is extrasomatic and manifest in cyberspace. Soon to be wireless and jumbled in with the rest of sentience in the microwave background radiation of the cosmos. Gaia was certainly cunning to produce us at the last minute, just in time to see the problem and make a freedom leap. Mqurice

To: maceng2 who wrote (10350)	3/14/2007 8:12:06 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

PB, I still haven't checked those graphs. Do you think we can take them as being reasonably accurate? I enjoy looking at them. Today I went to the Melbourne museum and happened upon life and geological era in which they happened [the detail of which I'd long forgotten] which fitted nicely with that graph [and my theories on life's interaction with the atmosphere, tectonic activity and stripping of the ecosphere of carbon]. The dominant theme I get from those graphs is the constant decline of CO2, other than during the carboniferous era when it plummeted to near-zero before going back up over 1000 ppm for the dinosaur era. Another interesting thing is the constant average temperature of about 22 degrees, but with plunges down into chilliness which I suppose were ice eras. I note we are currently in a severe CO2 deficit situation and also in a low temperature time. Hence the ice age, which is currently [and I believe only temporarily] on vacation, so we are enjoying some warmth [though New Zealand usually misses out on that happy circumstance]. I think we should aim at 1000 ppm CO2. I really can't get worried at current levels and am sure that increasing CO2 is a good thing. If we get over 1000 ppm and start heading for 1500 ppm, we should probably think more carefully about what's going on [and for the low cost involved, might as well be keeping a very close eye on matters anyway]. I don't see why everyone is so worried. In the past, I have been worrier number one about environmental harm, while nearly everyone else has been blissfully uncaring. Now, suddenly, it seems cult hysteria has broken out and every man and his dog is panicking about something with which I can't see a problem. My worries proved to be well-founded, such as lead in petrol, muck in Manukau Harbour, carcinogens here there and everywhere, dietary contamination and inadequacy, diesel particulates, benzene in petrol. Mqurice