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Arter reading your comment I was envisioning a world that emitted no carbon. It made me wonder if the pendulum could possibly swing so far in the other directi
by DougN7 8y ago
Arter reading your comment I was envisioning a world that emitted no carbon. It made me wonder if the pendulum could possibly swing so far in the other direction that plants could start suffocating. Certainly not something we need to worry about now, but we humans aren’t great at avoiding unintended consequences.
- sunir 8y agoZero carbon from human energy production doesn’t arrest the natural carbon cycle. Plants will continue as plants. The problem is we are literally digging carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere, thereby increasing the amount of atmospheric carbon over time.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y agoThe answer is somewhere between “no” and “what??” . As but one factor, dying plants would release CO2. The total amount of carbon in the atmosphere is (was) at equilibrium.
- DougN7 8y agoOf course. I shouldn’t comment so early in the morning :(
- gus_massa 8y agoYou [1] emit CO2 from the food you eat, so absolute zero CO2 emission is impossible. There are also emission from volcanos. For a somewhat similar scenario, you can read about the Carboniferous period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous . Essentially, the plants invented the wood but nobody know how to eat it, so the dead plants accumulated sequestering a lot of CO2. So the CO2 concentration dropped and the O2 concentration skyrocket. As a side effect, the high O2 concentration allowed bugs to became giant. (It ended when fungus learned how to eat wood.) [1] And all the other animal, fungus and even plants. And also bacteria and archaea.