dragondog4: But i can't get my head around the carbon dioxide. I am uncertain of where your coming from.
dragondog4: But remember Bourbon. What was the ratio Of human Population to Natural resources Back then at those levels of CO2.
Why was there so much CO2 back then.
One of the reasons the world recovered was because of the vast amounts of natural resources that were available to bring our CO2 levels down.
Okay, the easiest way to explain it is if you can imagine the world sitting in a sealed container. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out. In this sealed container, the TOTAL amount of carbon on the planet cannot change. What can change is where the carbon is located. Some of the carbon is sitting under the ground, in the form of coal, oil and natural gas. Some of it is in trees and other vegetation, some is in animals and in people, some is in the oceans and the rest is in the atmosphere as Carbon Dioxide.
We take the coal, oil and gas out of the ground and burn it. The waste, Carbon Dioxide, is pumped into the atmosphere. There is less carbon in the ground now and more in the atmosphere, but the total amount of carbon remains the same.
We had high levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere in the past because for whatever reason, there was less in the ground and more at the surface of the planet.
Sure, trees do absorb CO2, but so does all vegetation AND, more importantly, so do the oceans. Think about the amount of trees that have been cut down and we still haven't run out of Oxygen. The reason that we aren't choking to death today is because the oceans absorb huge amounts of Carbon Dioxide and release the Oxygen. They are the world's great carbon sink. Plankton and algae consume immense quantities of CO2.
I don't know if you have the same in New Zealand... but in Australia the new catch phrase is "Carbon Sequestration", where they want to clean up coal fired power stations by capturing the carbon emissions and pumping them underground where they will be contained and stored.
Carbon sequestration is also a naturally occuring process, albeit a very slow one, in which all the coal, oil and natural gas reserves were created. It was this process, and not the world's natural resources to human population ratio, that ultimately brought down the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Remember that the amount of Carbon on Earth does not change, only where it is located changes.
Carbon Dioxide is vital in the growth cycle of all vegetation. If anything, having a slighly higher level of CO2 in the atmosphere can only benefit plant life.
The current level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is about 383 parts per million. Apparently the level in 1800 was about 280 parts per million. So as you can see, with all the carbon we have been burning over the last 200 years, we haven't even managed to double the tiny amount that was there without us burning anything. And personally, I fail to see how a roughly 35% increase in such a small component of our atmosphere would have such a dramatic impact on global temperatures. I am far more inclined to believe that the warming is just a natural Earth cycle.
dragondog4: The current NZ policies say they want to (From here on in) Become one for one. For every tree you cut down. You replace it somewhere with another one.
This idea of planting new trees to replace the ones you cut down looks great on paper, but it isn't going to address the real problem caused by deforestation, that of habitat loss. Putting some new trees in the middle of a barren paddock isn't going to replace the eco-system that has been destroyed by cutting down the forest.
A far better policy would be that if you want to cut down a tree, you have to grow it first!
It's a complex world we live in... and sometimes political decisions are made for political reasons, not sensible reasons!