The Drought Thread Pt. 2 (merged)

[Cabrone]

Actually oceanic phytoplankton aree the 'lungs of the planet', ocean covers 70% of the surface and about 30% of the earth surface receiving sunlight at any one time is ocean. Continental forests are worth a lot, but as for being the lungs, well they hardly rate as being the bronchial tubues!

I would imagine that if the rainforest goes, the atmosphere will be burdened with even more CO2. This in turn will mean that more CO2 is absorbed by the oceans thus raising acidity levels. In turn this may start to kill off the phytoplankton thus depeleting this major carbon sink? Double whammy.

I've read a few times on other forums that as we are putting a tiny % of CO2 into the atmosphere what's all the fuss about? The way that I see it is that we are tampering with the atmosphere and putting changes into place that we will not be able to stop. Positive feedback loops will amplify our initially small addition of CO2 and before you know it the climate is out of control. It's like pouring sugar into your petrol tank, really easy to do but once you've done it the car is screwed and you are going to have to make a huge effort to get it back to working condition.

Can't someone get it through to the heads of the people that run this crazy show that it's better not to pour the damn sugar into that tank in the first place?

[Dukat_Reloaded]

The Amazon will be cut down, it's just a matter of time. India & China are demanding more burger meat and agricultural everyday, it is a great fertile land that is constantly being explotied and it's all forsale.

Web Page Name

[katkinkate]

I don't mean to get into an envronmental debate....I just wanna know at what percentage is human life not possible. Right now oxygen is roughly 20% of the atmosphere, and the amazon provides roughly 20% of that. If the amazon goes to desert within a few years or gets completely cut down, can we survive on roughly 16% oxygen? 10%?

Is this post a joke???? The %oxygen in the atmosphere is not proportional to the rate of photosynthesis. It's a standing mass of gas which is slowly added to and subtracted from by photosynthesis and respiration/combustion. The turnover time is about 100,000 years. Killing the Amazon would be awful but would have no significant effect on %oxygen for millenia.

Syncline is exactly right. There would be no appreciable effect on the oxygen levels by the loss of the Amazon forrests.

But there would be another very serious consequence. The equatorial rainforests aren't the lungs of the planet, they are the airconditioners of the planet. Removing all that tree cover exposes the soil to the equatorial sun, thus heating it up. That would result in much of the surviving vegetation becoming heat-stressed and maybe dying out in the local area, but it also adds an enormous amount of heat energy to the admosphere.

At the moment the rain forest is keeping the ground cooler and the clouds that cover the area for most of the day are reflecting much of the sunlight back into space. Without the forest and the resulting rain clouds, all the energy will be absorbed by the ground and heat up the air above it, thus adding another heat source to all those we already are guilty of.

[Heineken]

(Are you serious, Tyler, or just kidding?)

Looks as though buying rainforest land and just letting it be is no longer a solution, since the main threat now seems to be climate-related.

Global warming is like an invisible, omnipresent, omnipotent hand.

[Madpaddy]

Why should any of this news surprise us anymore. I grew up in a very small village in the west of Ireland. The main road ran outside my house. Everyday, the other boys and I would gather on the main road, set up goalpsots with our jumpers and kick ball. Every 10 minutes or so we would hear a car coming and move to one side before starting our game again.

Moving on 20 years, the same road runs past the house where my parents still live. There is a constant stream of traffic to the thousands of new houses built on the once fertile farmland. The woods where we used to play has been replaced by 2,3 and 4 bed houses called "Bluebell Wood" in honour of the wood that was destroyed. I weep that PO didn't come 20 years ago when there was so much that could have been saved.

Dublin in the Rare Old Times

Raised on songs and stories, heroes of renown.
Are the passing tales and glories, that once was Dublin town.
The hallowed halls and houses, the haunting children's rhymes.
That once was Dublin city in the rare old times.

Ring a ring a Rosie, as the light declines,
I remember Dublin city in the rare old times

My name it is Sean Dempsey, as Dublin as can be
Born hard and late in Pimlico, in a house that ceased to be.
By trade I was a cooper, lost out to redundancy.
Like my house that fell to progress, my trade's a memory.

And I courted Peggy Dignan, as pretty as you please,
A rogue and child of Mary, from the rebel Liberties.
I lost her to a student chap, with skin as black as coal.
When he took her off to Birmingham, she took away my soul.

Ring a ring a Rosie, as the light declines,
I remember Dublin city in the rare old times

The years have made me bitter, tha gargle dims my brain,
'cause Dublin keeps on changing, and nothing seems the same.
The Pillar and the Met have gone,
the Royale long since pulled down,
As the great unyielding concrete, makes a city of my town.

Ring a ring a Rosie, as the light declines,
I remember Dublin city in the rare old times

Fare thee well sweet Anna Liffey,
I can no longer stay,
And watch the new glass cages, that spring up along the Quay.
My mind's too full of memories, too old to hear new chimes,
I'm part of what was Dublin, in the rare old times.

Ring a ring a Rosie, as the light declines,
I remember Dublin city in the rare old times

[Tyler_JC]

(Are you serious, Tyler, or just kidding?)

Looks as though buying rainforest land and just letting it be is no longer a solution, since the main threat now seems to be climate-related.

Global warming is like an invisible, omnipresent, omnipotent hand.

Of course I'm kidding.

That sneaky bastard hasn't sent me a dime!

...no...I didn't buy any rainforest land and I don't plan on doing it any time soon.

[Heineken]

There is a constant stream of traffic to the thousands of new houses built on the once fertile farmland. The woods where we used to play has been replaced by 2,3 and 4 bed houses called "Bluebell Wood" in honour of the wood that was destroyed. I weep that PO didn't come 20 years ago when there was so much that could have been saved.

I spent several teenage years in a highrise apartment about halfway between Baltimore and Washington; this was in the early 1970s. The building was surrounded by woods, fields, and an 18-hole golf course. I spent many happy hours exploring the rich "biology" of the area, and playing golf. Then one day all this open land was sold to developers. The woods were knocked down, the golf course was demolished, and the small lakes were drained. Then they built thousands of ugly "garden" apartments on the red, bleeding land, and named the whole thing "Woodlake." Now the whole place is a vast slum.

This insane process has been going on relentlessly worldwide and is another reason why we're fucked.

[Madpaddy]

I hear you Heineken,

Is it that hard for people to grasp, that our whole economy is based on the rate at which we can pull finite resources out of the ground and that we are condemning generations as yet unborn to lives of absolute misery. It reminds me of that film the Downfall which portrays Hitlers last days in the Berlin bunker. As the red army close to within metres of the bunker, Hitler is still moving fictitious divisions and armies around the operations map. As the last tree is cut down in Amazonia, some prick will be figuring out how to turn a profit making coffee tables out of Jaguar bones.

[Heineken]

Good analogy, madpaddy. There is something very much of the Goetterdaemmerung playing in the air of the early 21st century.

Don't forget Hitler's "secret weapons"---algae fuel, solar-power paint, etc. Just read any Lorenzo post.

I was a very angry young man when they crushed those woods under their 40-ton bulldozers. What I couldn't understand was why nobody else seemed to care.

This mystery continues for me to this day. So rare are the madpaddies and heinekens.

[joewp]

This mystery continues for me to this day. So rare are the madpaddies and heinekens.

It's no mystery to me. I tried to wake up my town to the evils of growth and destruction of natural areas and I got shouted down by the growth machine, i.e. the New Jersey political system. Most of the sheeple are resigned to the "fact" that we have to have growth and the powers that be don't like them hearing something else.

From now on, I keep my mouth shut and go about my business preparing. Screw them.

[gg3]

I've seen similar, as a kid watching the woods dwindle under development pressure. And in my own way at the time, tried to say and do something about it.

Bottom line here is: it's all about overpopulation. In the past 40 years, the US population has nearly doubled. All of those people have to go somewhere, aside from to hell in handbaskets. Ditto for other countries.

You want to turn back all this evil shit, the place to start is by supporting any and all policies that reduce population. Not just reduce population growth, but reduce population in the absolute numbers: fewer humans than in the past.

And the longer we wait before taking decisive action, the greater the likelihood of nature taking decisive action whether we like it or not.

[Heineken]

Alas, controlling population is both the single most effective measure and also the most difficult to achieve. As a species, we will never control our population voluntarily.

[grabby]

I vote for lungs, in with the bad, out with the good.

once a rainforest is cut down it can never recover, because the rain will wash all the soil away, where the huge trees used to absorb all the water.

once the soil is gone and the balance is gone, no more rainforest ever, you just can't replant it.

[coyote]

What I couldn't understand was why nobody else seemed to care.

I will never cease to be shocked by that. I mentioned to my family that I try to run the air conditioner as little as possible, if at all. My brother-in-law asked me why. I blinked, then told him I was trying to not waste energy, and to pollute less. The looks I got from my family will stay with me for a while. Apparently one of their neighbors actually mentioned to them that they might run their air conditioning less, as it is related to climate (I like the guy without ever having met him). I listened to them give him quite a verbal trouncing over dinner, as if he were the most idiotic, selfish and rude person they'd ever met. They know about global warming -- how could you not at this point -- but they are completely unable to make the connection between that and their own way of life. The sad irony is that the more they run their air conditioner, the more they will need it...

[Heineken]

Well said, coyote. This general inability of people to make the connection between their personal lives and the big picture is one of the key reasons why I'm a doomer.

Most people will make the necessary changes only under duress, and by the time the duress arrives, it'll be too late.

It's probably already too late.

[rwwff]

I was a very angry young man when they crushed those woods under their 40-ton bulldozers. What I couldn't understand was why nobody else seemed to care.

I'm really hating the fact that I'm having an empathic moment with you. Saw a similar thing at a similar age, and I was heart broken for months.

All I pay attention to now is my land and my trees. Hurts too much to look elsewhere.

[rwwff]

Crushing steel rolling
Broken wood resting in snow
Liquid stone, Earth's seal.

[Mastodon]

Alas, controlling population is both the single most effective measure and also the most difficult to achieve. As a species, we will never control our population voluntarily.

We have done it in the past, read some of Sheila Newhams (sp?) papers from Aussie about various Island cultures, there a a few covered in Collapse as well (Diamond) Many interesting methods from infanticide to the old favourites such as war, some even had ritualised suicides for the excess young men wherein they took the big canoe trip into the wild blue. Much of the cultural structure was shaped by the need for population control.

When the limits to your existence are plain to see (living on a small island) then everyone knows that too many people is bad news. Today we have been convinced by neoliberal economics that the world is in fact infinite. Breaking news the world is spherical in shape thus very finite in deed!!

[Heineken]

I was a very angry young man when they crushed those woods under their 40-ton bulldozers. What I couldn't understand was why nobody else seemed to care.

I'm really hating the fact that I'm having an empathic moment with you. Saw a similar thing at a similar age, and I was heart broken for months.

All I pay attention to now is my land and my trees. Hurts too much to look elsewhere.

Good for you, rwwff. I have pretty much the same approach---hunker down on my farm and treat the place with deep respect. Alas, the world's problems can still penetrate, through the very atmosphere.

[Heineken]

Alas, controlling population is both the single most effective measure and also the most difficult to achieve. As a species, we will never control our population voluntarily.

We have done it in the past, read some of Sheila Newhams (sp?) papers from Aussie about various Island cultures, there a a few covered in Collapse as well (Diamond) Many interesting methods from infanticide to the old favourites such as war, some even had ritualised suicides for the excess young men wherein they took the big canoe trip into the wild blue. Much of the cultural structure was shaped by the need for population control.

I guess I meant that, as a global species, we will never voluntarily control our numbers. On small islands where cause and effect are apparent even to the average individual, yes, it can happen.