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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (22108)9/8/2007 11:10:47 AM
From: Slagle  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 218155
 
Maurice,
Your "Suicidal Gaia" theory is fantastic. And it is so true, irrefutably true, seems to me. And you do a great job framing your position, with respect to carbon based life (that would be us) a carbonaceous rock formation is a cemetery, a graveyard. And of course, the trend of mineralization is progressive with the ocean floor everywhere accumulating and entombing inorganic carbon continuously. Once upon a time this material was environmental carbon, capable of participating in the life cycle. Now, to liberate this carbon from its mineral state so it is once again available to living things will require the application of a vast amount of external energy, energy we don't have.

Like you say, Gaia is on a one way trip to becoming a frozen ice ball unless we figure out some way to stall or reverse the process. But right now we may be in a warming trend and this may continue for some time, just like happened during the previous interglacial warm period, which just ended an instant ago, measured in geologic time. And if so sea levels will rise and may places will go under water, including where I live here in Florida, fifty miles inland and fifty feet above sea level, just like happened here in my yard during the last interglacial. In fact, here in my location, the inundation was so recent that the yard is comoposed of beach sand and full of sea shells, not even fossilized yet. Little surf clams here are just as fresh and shiny like they came out of the gulf yesterday. A mile from here is an old beach line, with dunes. And I am fifty miles inland and sitting on a formation that is as stable as any in the world.

The great problem for the world, I think, is that when the seas begins to encroach upon beachfront McMansions and other places in the path of the waves that there will be a great cry from those facing the surf for the world to "do something". Never mind that those affected could fix the problem in an hour or less by getting up and moving fifty miles inland, to higher ground.

The danger is that the world could wind up looking like a giant Holland, with dikes and moats facing the waters on every landmass and the rest of our energies devoted to a vast and destructive "carbon sequestration" effort.

Maurice, you have made the case that a big problem with a gold money standard is that the world would devote an inordinate amount of effort to digging up the ground everywhere to get at the gold. Well, you may be right about that too, but seems to me that the response to the "global warming" hoax has the capacity to be much more destructive.

You know, fossil fuel is a rarity in nature, that is why it is expensive and why wars are fought over it. But limestone is not rare, it is nearly everywhere and the amount of carbon contained therein is vastly more than that in fossil fuels. In fact, if all the fossil fuel everywhere is combusted the amount of carbon liberated would be an insignificant amount compared to the carbon contained in other fossil formations, those formations having been created at about the same time and by the same sorts of processes that laid down the fossil fuel deposits.
Slagle








To: Maurice Winn who wrote (22108)9/8/2007 7:53:16 PM
From: Moominoid  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 218155
 
Land clearing was the main effect especially the effect on increasing methane levels rather than CO2. You don't want to believe it or read the recent research but the system is very sensitive to the concentration of these gases from my reading (and modeling). This is the kind of evidence that suggests exactly that, whether changes in the last 10000 years in CH4 and CO2 or the last several hundred thousand years over the ice age cycles or the long 250 million year cycle. We don't want to go back to what the "natural level" of these gases are because we'd likely head into an ice age. And we don't want to go very far above here either.