Which country produces the most Carbon?
Water is the stuff of life, too, but if you drink too much, too fast you die.
When 60 million bison were roaming the planet, they were roaming on native prairie, which is one of the most effective carbon sinks known to man. Now 99% of the tallgrass prairie, 60-80 percent of the midgrass prairie, and 40-60% of the shortgrass prairie have been plowed up, paved over, or otherwise destroyed. Pavement is not a carbon sink and farm fields are carbon sources. It is therefore ridiculous to claim that the farts of 60 million bison roaming intact native prairie would have the same effect as the farts of 60 million cattle fattening in feedlots (bare dirt is not a carbon sink either) on corn shipped in from across the county (releasing more carbon), or even across the country.
Moreover, the conversion of prairie to plowland following the destruction of the bison was one of the factors that raised atmospheric CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels of about 275-280 ppm in the mid 18th century to about 300 ppm in 1900.
Finally, volcanoes produce a typical min-max range of 65-319 million tons of CO2 per year, depending on the level of activity, compared to approximately 30 billion tons of CO2 per year from fossil fuel burning.
Volcanoes were major drivers of climate change at several points in the distant past, but that was during periods of much greater activity, as well as other significant differences, and the results, from a human perspective, were not necessarily pretty. They're one of the suspects in the biggest mass extinction ever, which wiped out 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates, and contributed to CO2 levels of about 1800 ppm in the Jurassic, a period in which much of what is now the continental United States was under water because there were no ice caps to speak of and sea levels were dramatically higher.
So, wrong on all counts. Next?
- fit2dayposted 13 years ago
0
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