re: #83 Walter L. Newton

Then how do we find the right balance? I know this may sound silly, but I am honestly asking this… How do we balance out what is too much Co2 and what isn’t. Is there a point that there is not enough Co2 floating around and that causes some other problem… really, can it be a too much, not enough scenario? How do we balance out which parts of the globe should have less Co2, how do we isolate it, it’s not like the planet is divided into nice little parcels that we can manipulate, section by section?

There is no way to confine atmospheric CO2. However much there is, it’s going to be well mixed by the winds. As to “can there be too little”, yes, indeed. LONG term, that’s going to be a problem. Grass is a relatively recent biological phenomenon. How has grass come to be so successful? Grasses can get more CO2 out of a thinner atmospheric concentration than other plants, for the same biological “price”. Thus, in a CO2-impoverished world, they prosper.

As the sun warms, (time scale hundreds of millions of years), natural weathering accelerates and this draws CO2 out of the atmosphere, fixing it in limestone etc. Meanwhile, volcanoes recycle it at a constant or diminishing rate. World CO2 concentration is falling, from one billion-year epoch to the next, and it will eventually drop to a point that kills most non-grass plants.

This is a problem for the people of the distant future. They’ll have to move the planet gradually away from the sun to avert this. For now, our problem is too much CO2.