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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (18801)	12/22/2007 1:37:34 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36921

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. The only slight problem here is that plants will not in fact suck out the human increased CO2. Which is why I'm belaboring you. Plants only sequester carbon if new forests are growing, or areas which were not filled with plant life are filled with new plant life. Once the forests reach maturity, or the new areas are filled with plants, they again become carbon neutral. Details...

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (18801)	12/22/2007 2:26:40 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

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. You seem to hop between the very short scale (annual cycles) and very long scales (ice ages, or even 100's million years) at your convenience. I would never claim that the CO2 is in balance on the timespan of ice ages or longer. I accept the temp/CO2 data from ice cores with no problem. One can clearly run an FFT on that data and look at the resulting frequency spectrum. But sans humans digging up and burning buried carbon, or major land use changes, or major volcanism developing, there is an approximate balance on the time span of centuries.