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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Moominoid who wrote (22024)	9/6/2007 1:19:24 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218131

David, there you go again with the cycles. Yes, there is a cycle built in, but it's like the cycle in a perpetual motion machine, each time around, there are losses. Permanent losses. When do you think the carbon in the limestone in the Nullarbor plains will be chirping in the trees again? Earth's crust is a LOT bigger than it was 2 billion years ago. When limestone, coal, shale and bituminous deposits are bured in graveyards, some are recycled by erosion, but much or maybe even most, is not. Limestone is dissolved by rain, especially acid rain, which is another good thing people do [joking there as I'm not aware of good things that SO2 in air does and am not convinced that dissolving limestone, especially limestone buildings, is such a great idea, though I dare say the fish like it for availability of calcium. My work has also showed how people have helped prevent a recurrence of the ice age. I haven't heard of Ruddiman. Our efforts are puny. Not only have people taken 100 years to move CO2 levels to less than 400 parts per million in air, we have put a LOT of effort into doing so. The cost has been huge. Hordes of people have spent their lives in the oil, coal and gas industries over that century and we have barely made CO2 levels increase. We haven't even doubled them from their previous really low levels. In just a couple of decades we raised lead levels from near zero to toxic levels so that nearly everyone was brain poisoned and suffered actual harm. Some a lot more than others. THAT was NOT a puny effort. Before we get CO2 to 500 ppm, the human population is going to drop and technology will make what we do more efficient, so our CO2 production efforts per person will falter. People don't want to spend their lives working to pay for burning of carbon. They'd rather click around in cyberspace, watch a movie, go for a walk etc. They'd rather have insulation than spend a lot of money on heating air. They prefer a powerful little car to a money-guzzling monster. They fly on 777s and Airbus 380s to burn fuel more efficiently so they don't have to pay so much to fly north for the winter [from New Zealand]. We can't depend on people to keep their puny CO2 efforts going and they won't. Sure, the last century saw a reasonable effort, but that was with gushers of oil, inefficient industrial revolution technology and burgeoning numbers of people. Gaia measures things on a longer time scale than one century. People will NOT be able to keep the effort up for centuries. Even at the current high rate of burning, CO2 won't get to 500 ppm for the best part of another century. 500 ppm is barely breathable for plants. They like it up around 1,500 ppm, where they used to have it until their tragedy of the commons individual grabbing of whatever CO2 was available crashed CO2 levels down to asphyxiation rates. For eons, plants depended on animals [including all those micro ones] to turn the O2 they excreted [funny that people call CO2 a pollutant and plants call O2 a pollutant] back into CO2. But those animals had to eat plants to do it. As you know [I guess], there are losses in such cycling systems. As I explained, carbon is stripped out of the biosphere and buried in vast graveyards of limestone, shale, heavy crudes, gas and coal. I know SUV drivers and rich people zooming around in their Cessna Citations feel anything BUT puny. But let's see how they are going in only 50 years. I expect most of them will be dead and buried, with their bones perhaps turning to limestone in some landfill. The more considerate of them will be cremated so plants can get their carbon back [people eat a lot of plants in their lifetime - and if they eat cattle or fish, those animals had to eat plants to make the meat the people eat]. People have got to put in another million years or so before we can be considered unpuny. Angor Wat was a big deal in its heyday. But the jungles soon took over and in another million years, there won't be much to see. Maybe some rocks and fossilized bones buried in the sediment layers of the day. People have adapted to the weather where they live, but they can move. Godwits move a LOT. It's not a big deal for humans to migrate. Look at migration over the last 100 years for example. We have moved all over the place. Yes, people have built roads in Sweden, which was covered in kilometres of ice not so long ago. They can drive south if the ice age recurs. No big deal. Roads are only designed to last 20 years before they need a revamp. Buildings don't often last 100 years [and certainly not with a LOT of expense in renovating them]. Everyone in the world could move to Africa and it wouldn't be a big deal. Or, if it's getting warmer, they could move away from the heat towards northern Canada. Climate changes. So far, what people have done [with CO2] has been a good thing. Puny, but good. Plants love it. Farmers like it. Hungry people like it as food costs go down. The climate is NOT balanced. People should stop saying that. It is never in equilibrium. A hurricane is a manifestation of lack of balance. Tectonic processes are relentless and unstoppable. Every day, peta trillions of lives end on the ocean floor, turning to sedimentary layers, stripping the ecosphere and the climate of CO2. Mqurice