nobody_special
member
Somebody who is smart or an apostrophisicist or something can probably tell me..........Where did all this carbon come from that is making up all this extra CO2?
Like when the dinosaurs were wading around in the primevil muck and eating those giant ferns that got trodden down into the tar pits and smashed and crushed and turned into petroleum and diamonds and coal and all like that.
Where did the extra carbon come from? At one time all this evil CO2 that is making the sea levels go up and penguins (they don't taste that good anyway) lose their habitat was floating around some where.
Did we have like a giant pure carbon meteroite smack into the earth?
No, the carbon has always been here... but not always in the form of CO2. There is a huge amount of carbon locked up in the lithosphere. For example, volcanoes can spew a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, as magma often has high concentrations of gas in solution. (This CO2 emission mechanism is balanced by another CO2-removing mechanism though.)
See this.
Limestone has a huge carbon content; a substantial portion of that carbon was probably once atmospheric CO2.
Perhaps ~2-3 billion years ago, before there was much (or any) life on the planet, it is believed that a large fraction of the atmosphere was CO2 and the planet was much hotter than it is now. The CO2 was transformed into carbonates (limestone), and gaseous oxygen (O2) was produced by cyanobacteria (and later by plants).
Read more here.
It is the height of vanity, hubris to think that us dumb a$$ed humans are so all powerful that we can change the climate of the earth.
Not at all. Indeed, I'd be surprised if nearly 7 billion humans did not have a significant impact on the climate.