Thinking Out Loud...

One of the reasons that I love my job is the thinking environment that we honor and foster - to a point.  I mean, we do discuss a range of topics that are not all work-related.  You could put it in the Proverbs category of "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." 

The results of this open discussion are that sometimes my mind gets changed by another's perspective.  It results in better products and often, better individuals...

So, I have some open ended questions...  ...I still have my persuasions, inclinations, intuitions too.  But I wonder about a couple of things...

1) Carbon Emmisions, Carbon Footprints and "Global Warming"...  I don't pretend to give any credibility to much of the crowd's hype on this.  However...

I recently purchased a "dinosaur" book.  This book, along with all but a tiny few exceptions, explains the existence and habits of these amazing lizards through the lens of evolution, which makes it hard to know where to stop and start believing.  I take the liberty of calling them lizards only because the very difinition of Dinosaur is "great lizard".  It turns out that there are a lot of fossils that were not great lizards - and were not included in this huge book.  Just a leafy perusal of this coffee table tome will leave you wondering at the massive quantities and sizes of "successful" species that once roamed the earth.  Add to that the vast amount of other, non-dino flora and fauna and the mass of life is staggering.

In the Great Flood all that life-tissue was buried, crushed, heated, decomposed, mineralized, fossilized or petrified and that carbon was rather suddenly removed from the "carbon cycle".  We have been digging and pumping and refining it from coal or crude or other into useful sources of energy and thus, we now suffer a daily assault on our sanity regarding our "carbon footprint".

Neverminding the frauds and the greedy shamen that profit from the fear-mongering about it, is there any truth to it?  You can see where I am going with this - I think it is a fair question.  There is no doubt, some element of truth in the most believable lies, is there not?

I wondered about this, so I consulted Google...  ...and it turns out that my suspicions (based on the chemistry classes we took in highschool) were correct.  The mass of carbon on Earth is the same today as it was yesterday - unless it is shot into space.  That is, the carbon that makes up the tissues of life, that takes on its many forms is not in a state of greater quantity than before - instead, it is just in a different form.  So, what was once in the ground as fertilizer, or CO2 that was exhaled from some animal becomes the source of existence for a tree.  That is the "natural" part anyway...

The "unnatural" part of the "carbon cycle" is the removal of crude and coal, etc. from the ground to burn, which adds more CO and CO2 to the air.  But is it really that unnatural?  After all, it was all on the Earth at some point in time...  ...If it indeed causes "Global Warming", is it really catastrophic on all accounts?

It also opens up a world of questions about Ice Ages after the Flood.  There are conflicting ideas about how the atmosphere works too - Most today say that CO2 in the atmosphere causes higher tempuratures due to an insulating effect.  I suppose that may be right. 

I remember that they use to monger fear in us from "Nuclear Winter" too.  So, on the one hand they say heat is retained, at other times, heat is reflected back to space and we are kept cooler.  (There are many examples of the latter with volcanic erruptions... ...some of which resulted in years of continental drought.)  Could particulate polution then serve a purpose as well?

What about Polar Bears?  What about penguins?  Well, if you are an evolutionary advocate, then you would fear the extinction of these species - and logically, you should be looking for new mutations to emerge as well - but we don't hear that last one much.

I just wonder... ...it would seem that with more CO2 the flora would be more prolific and help the balance.  I don't know how the oceans work here - just that massive amount of carbon are stored there as well...  ...as a "steward" I believe I should ask these questions - even if I am dubious of the scandal it has become.

I just have this nagging feeling that there is an answer in the balances of the Earth's systems.  No computer can model it - yet.  No scientist has been able to wrap his mind around it all - solar cycles, water cycles, current cycles, wind cycles, carbon cycles, vegetation cycles, and the Earth's orit (proximity to the sun) and unicycles.  sorry.

I seriously want to understand this.  I think that the complexity and the resiliance is awesome. 

and I wonder if anyone is working on a synthetic photosynthesis yet?  It seems to me that if we could be half as efficient at making energy as any common lilly, then we would have a lot of energy answers...  ...I can see someone sending me a link to some You Tube video now...  ...it will probably turn out that I can make one of those to run my car or some such thing...  I always think of these things AFTER someone else figured it out.  Ugh.

Post Edit: +5 minutes...  LOL - I should search stuff before I post...  ..but this is surprisingly recent... ..huge in my book, but still not big enough to power anything we could use.

Photosynthesis in a lab...