Socialized Health Care in the USA

[kandrathe]

There is no doubt about global warming and the negative economic impact it will have. What climatologists and other scientists are trying to figure out now is how much we contribute to it. Not to gather proof for accusations, but to establish how much we could do to reverse it, by reducing CO2 emissions and such. If they find we have little to do with it, we are in for some big problems. Otoh, if they find we have (partly) caused it ourselves, we know we can do something about it.

The alarmists should also acknowledge that human contribution to the global levels of CO2 are minute in comparison to the entire global carbon cycle. My view is that there are many natural processes which keep the atmospheric composition in equilibrium although they do fluctuate between extremes over geological time scales. Atmospheric CO2 has been shown to have increased by about 100ppm over the last 100 years, from about 280 ppm to 390 ppm now, and it seems to have done so very linearly.

The largest sink of atmospheric CO2 is the ocean which sequesters carbon (carbonic acid) within sea water, over time, corals , mollusks, and other sea life use these carbonates, but also release CO2 as they fix carbon molecules. As the ocean temperature increases, its ability to contain CO2 decreases which may result in a vast increase in atmospheric CO2, unless there is another process that compensates. I suspect that there is also a process that benefits from the increase in ocean acidity, possible increasing the availability of calcium, and other minerals.

Another process is that at great depth, CO2 condenses and forms icy hydrates on the ocean floor thus freeing sea water (esp. when extra calcium is present) to bond with more atmospheric CO2. Algaes and land based plants, have a non-linear increase in photosynthesis efficiency in the presence of greater ppm's of CO2 (up to about 1%, or 10,000 ppm which as you pointed out is toxic to animal life). Plants also seems to grow denser structures when in the presence of higher CO2 levels resulting in up to double the fixation of carbon. Anyway, the point being here that I don't believe that we fully understand the capacity for nature to use and transform CO2.

Suppose astronomers find out there is a comet heading for earth, and they actually manage to convince everyone they are not just saying it for funding. Would we look the other way, saying that we didn't do it?

There is a difference between saying "will hit Earth" and "might hit Earth". A higher level of uncertainty would lead people to desire to conserve their resources and efforts to prevent an unlikely scenario. Of course, there will always be a percentage who don't care about the costs at all. My view is 1) whether we cause it or not and we are pretty certain it is a real danger, then we should do something about it, and 2) whatever we do to our environment we should also plan to undo.