Earth in a Lurch?

Seems everyone is going green at least on TV and in the media. Yes, everyone wants to save the planet as if it needed saving. Yet, humankind is a Johnny come-lately to the planetary party. If Earth had needed our help in its long history, somehow we wouldn’t have been here to contemplate the possibility.

Anyway, being carbon neutral is the new “in” thing to be. So much so, Disney has offered to plant a tree in your honor if you see their new movie, “Earth.” Maybe, they got some deal with a lumber company who’s planting trees anyway. Well, they never said your tree wouldn’t be cut down someday and turned into furniture. Sorry, to let that log out of the bag so to speak.

Al Gore of “The Incontinent Truth” fame is getting a statue in Tennessee. Since Gore is so stoic, nobody will be able to tell whether the statue is the real him or not. The statue is being erected because he received a Nobel Peace Prize for creating the current fervor of fossil fuel fear mongering. His book “Earth in the Balance,” claims that the planet teeters on the brink, and unless we give global government great power and Gore tons of money for his carbon credits, Earth will be totally doomed.

Hence, the reason why Disney is so interested in getting some trees planted. Why, if they don’t, we could all be “Gulp” gasping for air. Help! I can’t breathe. Well, not exactly. If trees provided all of the world’s oxygen, we’d have been all out of breath by now. Actually, much of the world’s oxygen comes from the oceans. Just another reason they cover 70% of the planet.

Scare stories written about the oceans becoming too acidic to support life are just pure bunk. Supposedly, as oceans absorb CO2, carbonic acid is formed. And if enough is created, the oceans will turn into the largest super sized soft drink putting essentially Seven Elevens out of business.

An economic, but not necessarily an ecological disaster it’d be in the making. But as CO2 accumulates in oceans, it doesn’t just stay there. Otherwise, oceans would have become the liquid part of a Happy Meal long ago. Just think, getting a drink at the beach would no longer require leaving the water.

Instead blame it all on stinking algae. No really, blame all of your life’s problems on this simple molecular plant, because without it you wouldn’t be here and such none of your problems. Algae are responsible for as much as 70% of atmospheric oxygen. So, plant algae not trees.

And like plants, which grow faster in more CO2, 6% faster in fact, Algae would probably grow better as well although some eco-warriors are actually attempting to seed the ocean with iron and silicic acid both principal components of algae. But these oceanic manipulators were disappointed because even though phytoplankton boomed they weren’t doomed to forever lock CO2 on the ocean’s bottom. Seems other creatures were too interested in eating them.

But CO2 must go somewhere, and the oceans are most likely the key. In the 1800’s, two volcanoes Krakatoa (1883) and Tambora (1815) were such large eruptions they temporarily changed the climate. Talk about catastrophic climate change. Tambora actually caused the “Year without a Summer.”

Mainly, it was the particulates released high into the atmosphere which reflected sunlight, but CO2 was released as well. While human emissions dwarf normal volcanic output by a factor of 150, volcanic emissions have been occurring far longer.

And, the oceans dwarf human emissions. At least that’s what Roy Spenser PhD in Meteorology, postulates. He believes that ocean warming accounts for 90% of the CO2 increase seen at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. From 1958, it went from 315 to 385 ppm. The rest came from the heavy breathing of star struck astronomers.

Then, there’s Larson-B, big Antarctic glacier, which collapsed in 2002 much quicker than anyone predicted, even faster than global warming could have caused. Lo and behold, an erupting undersea volcano was recently discovered in its “proximity.” Although no one is willing to make the great leap to say that Larson-B’s demise was not love from above but heat from beneath, volcanic activity could just answer that mystery.

But in a world of “scientifically driven crapola” where if it doesn’t fit the “lit”-any the media won’t acknowledge it, many scientists are careful to never buck politics. Obama claims he will return science to its rightful place. Obama wouldn’t know science if it bit him in the nose.

Science is an endeavor in pursuit of the truth. Obama, it’s nothing more than replacing one dogma with another. For science indicates that it’s not Earth in a balance. Instead it’s Earth that’s constantly balancing.