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

To: neolib who wrote (18790)	12/21/2007 11:21:41 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36921

Sorry Neo, I can see how you would misunderstand that comment and the rest associated with it - though I suspect you have snipped a little bit to squeeze it into your prejudices. As I have tediously explained a few times now, I was not under any illusion that CO2 would drop at the average rate that it drops let alone the steepest rate [which is a LOT more than the average rate and you definitely shouldn't have got that idea which you also mentioned]. My point was that plants really do get stuck into CO2 in a big way and drain the atmosphere quickly. Yes, of course most of it comes back next year as is pretty obvious from even a slightly casual glance at the graphs of CO2. It doesn't take a mathematics professor to see that. You must have an very great misunderstanding of my understanding if you think I would think that the decrease would just continue. Which seems very odd given how much I have written and which you can't possibly have read even superficially for you to have got such a wonky idea. The evidence, to repeat it yet again, which is probably silly as you obviously don't want to understand it, is that a large proportion of the CO2 that people have put into the atmosphere has been stripped out. That demonstrates the rate at which plants would cut CO2 back to the "natural" or "background" CO2 level if people stopped producing it. You did correctly understand that by "natural" or "background" I didn't mean that there is some fixed level of CO2 which would exist if people weren't producing a lot. You did understand that there is a balance of all the other non-human variables at any particular time. That balance can shift a LOT, from 2000 ppm to 200 ppm, depending on what's going on. Most likely, it's somewhere around 270 ppm right now. My point is that plants would quickly suck the surplus out [not at the maximum rate or even the average during the CO2 reduction phase each year]. But it would certainly be a LOT quicker than your 100+ year idea. You are plain wrong on the "balance" of carbon in the "carbon cycle". There is a cycle, but there is a very huge drain in the form of deposition of carbon at the bottom of the ocean in the sediment which goes into permanent storage. A lot is recycled by way of volcanoes, but a lot isn't. A vast amount is in limestone, shale, Athabasca, Orinoco, coal and other graveyards such as oil and gas fields. Gaia is NOT balanced. Gaia is suicidal. Gaia, since life began, has been stripping carbon from the ecosphere and you don't need to be a mathematics professor to see that trend in the CO2 graphs from the cambrian to now. Misunderstanding what I write will just leave you misunderstanding what's going on. You'll think you have "out-debated" an obvious ignoramus when you are really just making up something to debate. So you'll retain your false ideas. It's funny that even when I explain that you have misunderstood what I meant, you insist that what I meant was something different. The person doing the explaining is the one best positioned to know what they think. If they don't explain it well or intelligibly, that doesn't mean the misinterpreted idea is the correct one. I still think it was intelligible if somebody actually WANTED to understand the meaning of the words. Mqurice PS: Maybe Gaia knows something we don't, such as the sun's output is heading for an increase and that Gaia had better remove a lot of carbon and put it in deep storage, which cools Earth into an ice age, but at least retains some life and is ready for the heating sun which will blast the ice away when it happens, making Earth a balmy place again with a habitable Antarctica, Northern Canada, Russia, Alaska and Greenland.