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


To: Moominoid who wrote (22058)9/7/2007 1:39:40 PM
From: Maurice Winn  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 218151
 
Moom, a few million humans running around bare bum with stone axes or even bronze or iron ones didn't have much effect on the climate 5,000 years ago while a bunch of them huddled around the Nile, avoiding crocociles as much as they could. econ161.berkeley.edu There's a graph of historical populations.

True, humans were also chasing buffalo, kangaroos and living in some caves in France and filling China. But they weren't driving around in SUVs.

They burned what trees they could but other than that, they were just another primate.

Locusts can breed faster than rabbits and can also defoliate ground quickly. Ants, termites and other things are small but do a big job. Humans were not a big deal in the environment.

Even 200 years ago, forests were the rule rather than the exception. Humans scratched out a subsistence in river valleys. I think we have been progressing towards the return of the ice age and it's only in the last 100 years that perhaps that will change [though I don't fancy our chances].

<you have some unrealistic ideas about what levels of carbon dioxide and methane make sense to have in the atmosphere.>

How come it's my ideas which are unrealistic and not yours? Greenhouse Effect religionists usually say "Whatever 'nature' says is the right level is what I think the right level is". My experience of nature is that it wants me dead rather than alive, although paradoxically it produced me [as a food source it seems, unless I can dominate nature, which is obviously what nature had planned for me, or perhaps the word is dichotomously]. So what natures says is a good idea is NOT necessarily what I think is a good idea.

The Greenhouse Effecters consider only the background CO2 levels over the last few thousand years. I say let's take a broader look, over a few hundred million years to see what's been going on.

What has been going on is suicidal Gaia! I do NOT want to be dependent on a suicidal "mother". It's time for people to grow up, leave home, and think for themselves instead of leaving "nature" to do the thinking for them.

Getting some of the graveyard hydrocarbons back to life is a good start. We haven't achieved much of that and it doesn't seem likely we will. The population bust is coming in 2037 and the technological revolution continues apace. People will get tired of working to feed an oil habit. It's not like cigarettes, booze or heroin, which can hook them and keep them coming back for more, at great cost. People don't jump for joy when they get pull in for another hit of gasoline.

I think 500 ppm is a nice round number which is a good start. If we can get there, we could evaluate the situation and see if things are looking better. I'm not advocating a vast planetary project to get levels back to 1,500 ppm. That is simply not achievable. The faster we put CO2 into the atmosphere, the faster it drains out.

Notice in the CO2 graphs, even though the rate of CO2 production has doubled, the rate of increase in the atmosphere has not. It's soaking back into the oceans and plants at an increasing rate.

Look at CO2 levels plunge each season - that's how quickly it is extracted from the atmosphere when plants and oceans are gobbling it up. When we stop filling it, our efforts will be quickly consumed.

Mqurice