One of the most sensitive topics today is that of global warming and its effects on the human environment. It seems there are several different camps each one blaming the others for what could be either a real or imagined change in climate. I say real or imagined because recently we have discovered a lot of the data related to climate is either destroyed missing or manipulated to produce results more suitable to its users.
Through all this there is one salient thing I'm almost certain we can all agree upon is we are burning through our resources faster than we are able to replenish them.
In many cases those resources are finite and cannot be restored.
One of the first concepts that needs to be understood is that both oxygen and carbon make up the serious part of our planet i.e. all of lifeforms currently existing and those that came before. Without carbon and oxygen there can be no life on this planet.
The size of this planet shrinks under the unrelenting expansion of the human population and the tremendous impact that growth puts on plants animals atmosphere and sequestered carbon (oil gas wood). We are consuming and converting these materials at a rate far beyond our abilities to replenish them or have nature do that same thing for us.
We must learn to maximize the use of these products while at the same time curbing our ever-increasing population to balance with our abilities to survive without further changes.
One of the proposals that simply cannot work is that of converting the fertile land that we currently use to produce food supplies into sources of alcohol to supplement the current automobile engines. Here again we have a limited number of acres of farmland available today without further destroying the natural forests that give us the ability to sequester and store carbon from CO2 for centuries. They are mother nature's carbon filters.
Forests
Guinness Book of Records, states that an average two million hectares are disappearing every year, double the annual loss in the 1980s. ... The idea that replacing these forests with grassland is the equvalent of a natural forest is astounding and sadly, not true.
Even one of the fastest-growing, quickest-sequestering trees that sprout up today would require 50 years or more to absorb the carbon emitted by burning a single cord (128 cubic feet) of wood (about the amount in a foot-thick 40-foot-long log). With slower growers, we’re talking a century or so. The twin morals of this story are: 1) Be sure to turn your heat down to 55 or lower when you’re out of the house or asleep, and 2) Beware of exaggerated promises about carbon offsets.
As we force the planet to produce more and more food crops for humans and domestic animals we destroy the planets' ability to deal with the mounting CO2 levels that these forests used to control by sequestration.
In addition, a population of 2 1/2 billion with predictions of 5 to 6,000,000,000 in the next generation there is little likelihood that there'll be a scrap of forest remaining is not under cultivation and every square inch of this planet will have a human life form dependent on it for survival.
Common sense would tell you this can't work.
Often overlooked is the fact that those of us that live north of the 49th parallel i.e Canada and most parts of Russia ,europe,Manchuria ets. are dependent on oil reserves currently to protect us from the severe climate that we have endured for centuries. It becomes a question of whether or not we should all pack our belongings to move further south and closer to the equator to avoid the use of fossil fuels or should we attempt to reduce our dependency on these two products with innovation and perhaps a few too maximizing those energy resources by virtue of more efficient vehicles of transportation.
One thing is certain, at this juncture we cannot all move closer to the equator There is simply not enough water or sustainable growth in that area to feed cloth, water and shelter the people currently living on this planet.
We quite obviously need the northern climates to produce an abundance of cereal crops as well as root crops for our sustenance .This is undeniable it will not go away, Doubling the population of the planet will simply exacerbate the situation.
I strongly disagree with the Al Gore camp that merely taxing individuals for corporate profits will do anything concrete to slow or halt the population explosion that will most assurdly destroy the planet far in advance of even the most bizzarre predictions of global warming.
For further reading check this:
http://www.co2science.org/CarbonSequestration/Vol4.php
No comments:
Post a Comment