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

To: neolib who wrote (18824)	12/22/2007 2:40:06 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

<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.> It depends what we are talking about. If we want to consider what might happen if we get to 1000 ppm CO2, we should look to what actually DID happen at such levels and whether they ever existed. That's a much better bet than some computer model somebody has dreamed up. I think Earth has a better chance of modeling Earth than does somebody in a room with a computer. If we want to see what's happening now, we look at current absorption rates of CO2. That tells us what's happening right now. No, there is not: <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. > When a glaciation comes, you will find a sudden imbalance. When the glaciation gave up several thousand years ago [and is still in the process of giving up], there was a shift in the balance as deserts grew [Sahara] and plants ranged further north and south. Over a few centuries, there haven't been major changes, but that's not saying things are in balance any more than the stock market is "in balance" if a share price is staying fairly constant for a year or four. The underlying pressures can be building and then whammo! The change happens. On the balance, we have already got proof that there is not balance. As mentioned in my previous post, CO2 that humans have produced has been enthusiastically stripped out of the atmosphere. So we even have information on the rate at which the atmosphere removes it and it's a LOT faster than measured in centuries. If humans stopped producing CO2 now, the 380 ppm level would drop to 350 ppm well before 2100. Mqurice