A timely climate response. You’d have to have marbels in your head to attack flowers to save the planet.
Murry W Rhodes (C) 2023 An independent researcher. A lover of the planet and life on it with a work and study history including outback yaka, physics, geology, archaeology, history and music as you will see. At the moment I’m in a tropical Eden volunteering as much time as I can to help heal biodiversity in scarred ecosystems and selling shirts, music and images to help me afford to do more of the volunteer stuff. The products and music here and at my website are for sale and every sale helps. www.muzduz.com
In response to Craig Kelly’s 28 May 2023 post regarding folks on Twitter throwing orange powder around at a flower show in protest to extracting fossil fuels from out of the ground. 25 May 2023
OK. whichever side of the climate fence you reside on there’s stuff in the science of it that many are simply not aware of. It’s about longer natural cycles and systems that are not immediately obvious because they occur on geological time scales and all geology is, is quite simply chemical transitions with energy considerations and mineral formations that result. Confused? OK, I’ll simplify the language. This stuff is not part of the climate change debate because it’s not Hollywood nor immediately scary but it might be of interest to some folks because it’s a long-term climate thing.
You all know how our fossil fuels become fossil fuels right? Dead flora and fauna accumulated and slowly cooked below ground then we dig it up and turn the carbon back into Co2. If you know this then that’s cool it means you also probably know about plate tectonics and when two plates collide that one goes over the top of the other subducts. So the top stuff becomes hills and mountains and the bottom stuff gets forced down into the hotter and higher pressure cauldron of the planet.
Chemistry loves cauldrons because it is where energy transitions can really change stuff up at the molecular level. In terms of fossil fuels and other natural carbon deposits, these subduction zones and other thermal gradient regions under pressure change the relationship that the carbon has within the matrix of its structure. Sorry, too sciency? OK, do you know what marble rock is?… Yes but not really? There’s a link to it at the bottom of this article if want to learn more.
If I may, here’s a little musical and theoretical creation of planet formation. It’s for your children. For all our children.
The carbon in marble once belonged to some living things made of carbon stuff that became a fossil and then that fossil rock got buried and cooked at a particular temperature and pressure over time and it transitioned through several rock types and into marble. Then as stuff moved around we found some of it and started using it for building buildings and furniture and stuff. Nice huh? Rock that doesn’t burn easily and is laced with different minerals and crystals and swirls that make it look cool when polished.
Now try to burn that rock and get that carbon out of the rock to return it to the natural life cycle. You can’t. In a lab you might but in nature? Well OK, there’s a way to break it down with acids back into Co2 but no, as far as life on this planet is concerned the bulk of this marbelised carbon is trapped away from the life cycle forever.
Forever being for as long as life might have a practical purpose for that carbon. I’m using marble as the example but, rocks are rocks and carbon trapped in rocks means that it is no longer available to participate in life. The sodden things. I find it funny how the biblical Adam was said to have come from a rock and today’s science agrees, perhaps not specifically about a bloke named Adam but carbonaceous life and rocks in general. Ha. Our common ancestor was a rock.
This permanent trapping of carbon is one of the variables discussed with regard to the reduction in the extremity of climate change peaks. In other words, the Earth is getting cooler and peaks of the warmer climate transitions are getting smaller. Space is a very cold place and although the sun produces some radiant heat, without the elements susceptible to converting the cold radiation into thermal radiation and then insulating the process the planet freezes.
Without carbon in our atmosphere, we don’t get to exist. Plants don’t photosynthesise, the sugars and carbon bonds of nature don’t get produced and we just don’t exist. OK for you super smarties out there, chemosynthesis might somehow produce some rudimentary carbons for making a few sugars and building stuff for flesh but in general, life sucks without carbon.
So if we can do this planet’s life a favour and extract any carbon that might otherwise be permanently removed from the biome and climate cycles then we might help the planet’s biome last a little longer. Life on Earth was never a forever thing. If you think otherwise then that’s cool but our sun is just a big old boiling caldron and we’re just a momentary spittle from its hot pot and we are still warm on the inside. You can see how other hot spittles of sun goo have cooled to become barren wastelands and so that too is the fate of this planet. The Carbon stuff and water stuff and Nitrogen stuff and lots of other chemical stuff that prolong this biome all play their crucial parts. Carbon is just one of them.
So although we are making a darned mess of how we use fossil fuels, burning them is about releasing these carbons out from their temporarily trapped materials which is probably a better long-term thing for life than having those carbons get trapped away permanently from the carbon-based life cycles. It is the science of it and if you don’t believe it that’s cool.
Take care. Kind regards and don’t forget to pop into the gift shop before you leave. :)