Check out this guy's PV

[Herm]

Sure all that carbon was at one time an "input," but we can't afford to have it all freed. Fossil carbon needs to stay where it is if we want a world that we can live in.

The vast majority of that carbon is locked up as limestone rock, once it gets recycled into the mantle it releases the CO2 but luckily it takes a while to do so. Oil and coal fields, if not isolated by rock, will eventually degrade into methane and leak into the atmosphere.. bugs just love eating all that free energy. All fossil remains eventually get back into circulation, we just speed it up a bit, probably a tiny bit in the scope of things.

 

[tbleakne]

The total carbon on planet Earth is constant, but where it is makes a huge difference to the climate. The atmosphere contains a tiny, tiny fraction of the total carbon, but the CO2 in the upper atmosphere is all that counts for global average temperature.

The chemical form of the carbon is also important. When a cow eats grass, some of the carbon she digests comes out as methane, which has a large green-house effect, but she neither creates nor destroys carbon. In a few years oxidation converts methane to CO2.

Carbon can move between reservoirs on time-scales ranging from decades (humans) to 10s of millions of years (continental drift). Trees extract carbon from atmosphere over decades as they grow, but eventually they die and some of their carbon is released. We can see the small annual ripples in atmospheric CO2 as the planet moves through the seasons.

Surface carbon:
atmosphere
land biosphere
shallow ocean, lakes
Surface carbon contains a fixed fraction of C14 isotope because is in frequent contact with the cosmic-ray process that creates C14 from N2 in the atmosphere.

Deep ocean
A much larger reservoir than the atmosphere, but CO2 concentrations change little for 200-1000 years. The ocean is presently absorbing about 25% of the human-generated atmospheric CO2, but this process is slowing. If humans left the planet tomorrow, it would take about 1,000 years for the oceans to restore the atmospheric CO2 level to the pre-industrial level.

Geologic carbon
Primarily limestone, a very large reservoir. Buried carbon (fossil fuel) can be distinguished from surface carbon because it has lost all of its C14 to radioactive decay. As continents move, mountains form, erosion rates change, and volcanos erupt, geologic carbon can be released, but this change is only significant over tens of millions of years. During the dinosaur era atmospheric CO2 concentration was 20 times higher than now, and there was no ice even at the poles.

Human activity (fossil fuel extraction + deforestation) is raising the atmospheric CO2 much faster than natural processes. Plants and animals can move to higher altitudes and higher latitudes, but eventually they will run out of room, and the change is too fast for many life forms to adapt by evolution.

 

[davewill]

...All fossil remains eventually get back into circulation, we just speed it up a bit, probably a tiny bit in the scope of things.

I see. I'll be leaving the thread now. There's obviously no common ground for conversation left.

 

[LEAFfan]

Harberger's installation will power not only his lighting, electronics and air conditioning, but also systems that would traditionally be juiced with natural gas. The thin film will heat all the water for the home and run the forced-air heating system as well as the clothes dryer and oven

In stead of natural gas? hoy vey - what a waste.

A waste? No way! It's a waste to use natural gas OR any non-renewable natural resource when you can use solar or any other renewable resource. Not only that, but with all the natural gas explosions in CA, he's really smart to get rid of it!