"Jim Wilkins" wrote in message
...
On Jul 25, 7:59 am, " wrote:
On Jul 25, 2:47 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:





This is different carbon?

Yeah, this is VERY different carbon. When you sequester vast amounts of
it
underground, for millions of years, and then release large quantities of
that carbon over a couple of hundred years, you wind up increasing the
CO2
content of the atmosphere.

When you sequester carbon via photosynthesis (the source of all of our
food), and re-release it in a cycle of a few years, at most -- unless
you
eat trees -- you don't have any significant effect. The effect is
steady-state, in which you have small amounts of carbon tied up over a
short
period of time and then re-release it.

You have an engineering background, Don. Don't play dumb. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress

Don is not playing stupid. He is just pointing out that a molecule of
CO2 does not know if it was released in a cycle of a few years or
hundreds of years. So it makes no difference in how the CO2 was
released into the atmosphere. It is faulty logic. I too have an
engineering background. The effect of releasing a lb. of CO2 into the
atmosphere is the same regardless of where it came from.

Dan

The carbon in plant tissue will reenter the atmosphere one way or
another, either you eat or burn it or it decomposes.

Exactly. So human respiration, or any living thing's respiration, doesn't
matter in terms of atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle, whether humans, or
bacteria, or fungi are the ones that re-release the short-term sequestered
carbon.

When you burn fossil fuel, you're restoring levels of atmospheric CO2 that
existed millions of years ago. I'll leave it to the post-doctoral
climate-science fellows here on the newsgroup to argue what that means g,
but the point at issue is whether human respiration has anything to do with
CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It does not.

--
Ed Huntress