Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (25146)	9/5/2009 3:17:19 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36918

Yes, and melting ice and desert reduction. <When you say your model shows that nothing much at all would happen up to 500 ppm do you mean in terms of rising temperature? > To me, it's a bit silly worrying about trivialities when a reglaciation is imminent. It's like telling children to wear a crash helmet while they ride their tricycles around the shore of Lake Taupo where they live. Lake Taupo is the lake in the Taupo caldera which is going to send 1000 km3 of pumice and phreatomagmatic catastrophe to the sky with very short or no notice. It's not like a shield volcano loaded with basalt and scoria which shakes, rumbles and carries on for days while the magma makes its way to the surface, then does a pretty if impressive fire fountaining with rivers or molten lava to take photos of. Taupo's caldera is a pumice zone which means there is a vast column of liquid going down to the magma chamber which, when the pressure above is reduced enough such as by the sun and moon being aligned when the water level in the lake is very low and a low air pressure zone goes by and that's just enough to turn a bit of liquid to gas phase, which raises the lake bed surface slightly, which displaces the water slightly sideways, which reduces the load a bit more, which allows a few more molecules of liquid to turn to gas which displaces more water, which reduces the pressure more which allows more liquid to turn to gas, which ... well, you get the picture. All of a sudden, there are umpty cubic kilometres of burning gases [organics igniting on contact with the atmosphere] soaring to the sky. The children with their crash helmets will not do any better than those without. There is a 1 in 10 chance of Taupo erupting in any 50 year period, in my current model. That by itself could put enough dust into the atmosphere to precipitate a reglaciation. Getting worked up about a bit more CO2 which will be less than a quarter of what was historically normal for hundreds of millions of years seems silly. Especially when the stripping of CO2 seems to have led to the ice age and we are better off with at least 400 ppm than with the homeopathic 280 ppm which was the result of plants suffering the tragedy of the commons - plants just had to battle for the last remnants of CO2 though they would be better to have come to an agreement on sharing the limited resources they had available. Mqurice