Re: Off Topic: NMD/Environment was: (Re: Ada and the NMD)

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3B97EEC5.B9109D9F@san.rr.com>, Darren New says...
>
>> > Err, do you have a cite for this? Everything I've read shows north
>> > america as being a net consumer of CO2, not a producer.
>
>> You must be joking, right?  What is it that consumes CO2 and what is it
>> turned into?
>
>Uh, forests? And it turns into wood?  Krebs cycle, anyone?  Where do you
>think the CO2 in petrochemicals came from in the first place?

We made that embarassingly silly argument at one of the later Kyoto meetings. It
turns out that its quite debatable whether this is true or not (later studies
say not). However, its also quite beside the point. When we first came to this
continent it was covered with forests, except for the Great Plains in the
middle, which was covered with bison. Forests covered the entire eastern
seaboard, which is now just one big city from Boston to DC. At the time, the
forests were just cleaing up all the CO2 the bison were putting out. We replaced
the bison with domesticated cattle, so there's no net gain there. We cut down a
lot of the forests, and are still not planting more than we are cutting, so
there's no net gain there. Then we industrialized and started pumping out
*extra* CO2 by the ton. Saying that these forests are cleaing up our new CO2,
when they were cleaning up other CO2 sources (that are still around) before we
ever got here is just plain silly.

Of course it may be true that they will grow faster and pick up the slack as CO2
levels rise. It may even be true that blue-green alge in the oceans will expand
to consume all the CO2 we could possibly pump out. But if our arguement is that
there is *no* problem, then we should just come out and say that, rather than
trying to hide behind this forest sillyness.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
          home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com