I seem to recall that pollution was either going to block the sun's
rays and cool the planet, or trap heat and warm it. Do we have a
winner yet? Are we sure?
Wasn't there a time when Earth's atmosphere wasn't oxygen, and
bacteria were the dominant life forms? Too bad there wasn't anyone
around to decry the climate change that ended that state of affairs.
Or the one at the end of the Cretaceous. Wait, wasn't there a big
change before that? Cambrian? Pre-Cambrian? Another mass extinction.
Another abundance of dead life forms. Could we go so far as to say
that climate change is a constant, and that any and all life forms
contribute their bit, but the change is going to happen?
I could be misremembering, but wasn't it a surfeit of bacteria that
hastened the change to an oxygen atmosphere, thus giving evolution
another kick up the ladder? Perhaps a surfeit of humans will cause
something similar. After all, it can be argued that the way things are
now is not exactly the best state of planetary affairs. Hell, who's to
say humanity is the bee's knees? Is our hubris so great that we think
we deserve to live more than those pre-pre-Cambrian bacteria?
Will Australia become the new Antarctica, and Antarctica the New Eden?
--Bob "The End is Fear" Whitmire
www.bwp33.com
On Mar 3, 2009, at 10:12 PM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
> Yer...reminds me of the one about how pollution in the atmosphere
> would act as a barrier to excess heating - or was that it would trap
> heat and forestall global cooling.
--
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