@Packless1 One point that people seem to forget is that the carbon cycle of all life on Earth is effectively a closed system. There is a fixed budget of carbon in the atmosphere, all the plants, and all the animals in the world. It's constantly moving around in a large complex cycle. No matter how the carbon from plants and animals gets shuffled around, there is no overall net gain or loss of carbon.
On the other hand, digging up carbon that's been trapped underground for millions of years and burning it adds a very significant net gain of carbon in that cycle. Sure the Earth has some VERY long-term cycles that would eventually reintroduce some carbon that had been trapped underground, but not all over the world all at once the way humans seem to be trying to achieve it.
This is my favorite visualization of the impact of human industrialization: https://xkcd.com/1732/. Even if it's not completely accurate, IMO the rate-of-change for the slope of that line at the very bottom gets the point across very clearly. It also points out that domestication of farm animals happened thousands of years before the warming really got started.
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@Packless1 One point that people seem to forget is that the carbon cycle of all life on Earth is effectively a closed system. There is a fixed budget of carbon in the atmosphere, all the plants, and all the animals in the world. It's constantly moving around in a large complex cycle. No matter how the carbon from plants and animals gets shuffled around, there is no overall net gain or loss of carbon.
On the other hand, digging up carbon that's been trapped underground for millions of years and burning it adds a very significant net gain of carbon in that cycle. Sure the Earth has some VERY long-term cycles that would eventually reintroduce some carbon that had been trapped underground, but not all over the world all at once the way humans seem to be trying to achieve it.
This is my favorite visualization of the impact of human industrialization: https://xkcd.com/1732/. Even if it's not completely accurate, IMO the rate-of-change for the slope of that line at the very bottom gets the point across very clearly. It also points out that domestication of farm animals happened thousands of years before the warming really got started.