🚀 go-pugleaf

-From: len@math.nwu.edu (Len Evens)
-Subject: Re: averting doom
-Date: 5 Jan 93 00:21:23 GMT
-Organization: Dept of Math, Northwestern Univ

-> In article <JMC.92Dec29211051@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:
-> >from a U.P. story
-> >
-> >	     WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Life on Earth as we know it will
-> >     come to an end in 1,500 million years and the planet will
-> >     look more like its dusty, volcanic sister Venus in 2,500
-> >     million years, scientists said Wednesday.
-...
-Unfortunately, this may confuse people about the issue of global
-warming which is something which may radically affect human societies
-in the next several generations and which we may be able to do
-something about.

-Leonard Evens      len@math.nwu.edu      708-491-5537
-Dept. of Mathematics, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL 60208

The local "conservative" newspaper made this exact claim. All the complaints
made by those wicked liberals concerning CO2 emissions and the warming of
the Earth over the next 50-200 years are irrelevant, because the slow-acting
natural forces will cause CO2 levels to be seriously depleted over the
next 100-200 *million* years. :-)

Actually, I'm not as sure as some people about the exact extent of global
warming from current CO2 emissions, and I suspect that return to "natural"
CO2 levels might take as little as a century or two following cessation of
current emissions rates. But we *do* seem to be producing CO2 faster than
natural systems can absorb it at the moment, and trying to put trends that
act over hundreds of millions of years into the context of what will happen
over the next few centuries (dismissed as a "little blip") is silly.

Another factor to consider - the major mechanism proposed for CO2 absorption
is the biologically-controlled feedback mechanism that tends to regulate
temperatures by reducing the levels of the greenhouse gas CO2 as the sun
heats up (Tommy Mac would call it "Gaia"). If at some distant future time
humans were to override the natural system by introducing large quantities
of CO2 to keep the plants alive, they would also override the temperature
regulation feature - and in the absence of technical solutions like huge 
orbiting mirrors, the increased heat output of the sun together with the
increased CO2 levels would accelerate the heating process.

If humans are still around 50-100 million years from now and can't think
of any clever solutions with tens of millions of years to think about the
problem, that will be a truly pitiful state of affairs.

John Roberts
roberts@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov