tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32931256.post3175716148022490585..comments2024-03-22T05:20:44.167-07:00Comments on The Disaffected Lib: And So It GoesThe Mound of Soundhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09023839743772372922noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32931256.post-1105360634965449922015-08-12T12:52:09.790-07:002015-08-12T12:52:09.790-07:00Chris Hedges and people like him have it down. Man...Chris Hedges and people like him have it down. Many of us know it and where all this havoc is going and where it is arriving and what it is doing. All good and down. Now what?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32931256.post-42829739696352038302015-08-10T12:05:07.136-07:002015-08-10T12:05:07.136-07:00I have a copy of Ward's book, Neil, and it mak...I have a copy of Ward's book, Neil, and it makes for grim reading. This is the seminal paragraph from it in which he describes how oceans go from generating oxygen to producing hydrogen sulfide:<br /><br />"First, the world warms over short intervals of time because of a sudden increase of carbon dioxide and methane... The warmer world affects the ocean circulation systems and disrupts the position of the conveyer currents. Bottom waters begin to have warm, low-oxygen water dumped into them. Warming continues, and the decrease of equator-to-pole temperature differences reduces ocean winds and surface currents to a near standstill. Mixing of oxygenated surface waters with the deeper, and volumetrically increasing, low-oxygen bottom waters decreases, causing ever-shallower water to change from oxygenated to anoxic. Finally, the bottom water is at depths were light can penetrate, the combination of low oxygen and light allows green sulfur bacteria to expand in numbers and fill the low-oxygen shallows. They live amid other bacteria that produce toxic amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and the flux of this gas into the atmosphere is as much as 2,000 times what it is today. The gas rises into the high atmosphere, where it breaks down the ozone layer, and the subsequent increase in ultraviolet radi8ation from the sun kills much of the photosynthetic green plant phytoplankton. On its way up into the sky, the hydrogen sulfide also kills some plant and animal life, and the combination of high heat and hydrogen sulfide creates a mass extinction on land. These are the greenhouse extinctions."The Mound of Soundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09023839743772372922noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32931256.post-30116630885255480762015-08-10T11:04:35.774-07:002015-08-10T11:04:35.774-07:00When I was a kid, I lived in a new development in ...When I was a kid, I lived in a new development in the south end of Oshawa, Ontario, that was a few blocks north of the shoreline of Lake Ontario. One memory I have of the place was that in the summer months there would often be large algae blooms just off of the gravel beaches that were often so thick and unpleasant that swimming was impossible. These blooms were often accompanied by sizable fish kills due to the low oxygen content of the water, and inevitably due to wave action the whole nasty mess would be pushed up on to the beach to rot. To say that the stench of these thick mats - sometimes up to a foot deep - of rotting algae and fish was absolutely vile does that word injustice, and the smell could easily carry all the way up to our house, making going outdoors a chore instead of a nice aspect of summer. I don't know how the people whose homes were atop the bluffs just above those fouled beaches could ever stand it.<br /><br />Some years later, when I was living in the south end of Oakville for a time, there was a particularly nasty algae bloom in the lake that fouled the beaches very badly. The smell alone had both me and my sister retching and dry heaving for a couple days.<br /><br />I remember reading paleontologist Peter Ward's "Under A Green Sky" a couple of years ago and how he discussed the role that massive oceanic algae blooms during periods of global warming in the Earth's past led to increased toxicity and acidification of the ocean's which then led to cataclysmic feedback changes to the atmosphere itself. Maybe that's what we're starting to see again now.<br /><br />Maybe our planet has had enough of us...<br /><br /><br />M.ThinkingManNeilhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10233707013338083180noreply@blogger.com