On Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:47:40 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


wrote in message
...
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

If I capture a sample of CO2 and send it to you, neither you nor any
chemist you can hire will be able to determine if it was ever
sequestered, much less where and when.

It's more sensible to think of this as an accounting problem, and in
fact responsible scientists do look at it in that way by defining
carbon sources and carbon sinks.

Carbon sources emit carbon into the atmosphere. Those include animal
respiration, combustion, and various other sources. Carbon can also be
released from polar ice and ocean water with change in temperature.

Carbon sinks remove carbon from the atmosphere. Those include
solution in ocean water and captivation in ice, photosynthesis,
formation of carbonic acid by rain, formation of seashells and
eggshells that are primarily calcium carbonate, etc etc. Loss of
rainforest constitutes a major loss of carbon sink.


If the amount of CO2 being emitted exceeds the amount being removed,
then the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increases. If the
concentration in the atmosphere is to be controlled, then it's
necessary to consider all sinks and all sources to find ways to get
and keep them in equilibrium.

This bookkeeping isn't difficult to understand, but politicans and
zeolots often seem to find the notion of "balance" incomprehensible.