>As we
> heat up the atmosphere, the CO2 is released. (very big time release.)
What has made me terminally gloomy is that people are so slow to get it. The risks
of runaway warming are real, yet some of the very scientists who first announced
them have now sold the pass and begun to blithely and emptily talk about planting
eucalyptus trees. It is so obvious that this won't work (trees die off in a century
or so and re-release the carbon they very temporarily trapped, so the idea of
trapping carbon by reforestation is not only not a solution, it is an anti-solution
since all it does is make people more relaxed about driving around in SUVs) that
I've concluded that scientists who really understand the problem and know that there
is no hope, have simply sold out to First Use and taken the money to a playground in
the Bahamas, and who can blame them? I should be so lucky. Carbon sequestration
schems are merely an ephemeral madness. These schemes are the equivalent of the
desperate thoughts that go thru the mind of a person who sees his car is about to
crash into a wall and is helpless to prevent it.
The danger of runaway warming resides in (a) collapse of the polar ice sheets; (b)
collapse of methane hydrates, (c) collapse of carbon sinks in the frozen (now
rapidly thawing) tundra, because in these three sites are locked up astronomically
huge amounts of carbon; when they release it will be the equivalent of fifty million
nuclear world wars all at once, and the planet will fry. Probably it is already too
late to prevent this. Huge and irreversible avalanches of change have been set free
in the climate-ocean circulation processes. Planting trees is sticking plasters on
small pox sores. Only the most determined and relentless political pressure can hope
to have an effect and ONLY WE CAN DO IT.
NO-ONE ELSE CAN DO IT. ONLY WE CAN DO IT.
If I have some kind of residual faith in socialist ideas and mass movements it is
probably just the old man's psychic equivalent of sucking on a lolly, but I don't
know any other way that offers less illusory hope, except perhaps prayer. The deep
ecos are completely hopeless, politically speaking. Only the masses can change
things, only if there is the kind of eruption into history of the most submerged
masses of humanity as there was after 1914, and much more so, can we hope for real
change.
This is the historical context which makes me seriously doubt the pointfulness of
spending our energy rushing to the rescue of Noriega, Borodin etc.
Mark
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