The Domesday Book, Chapter VI

From our Australian correspondent:
"Umm....any chance of a rant that isn't about us all being doomed?"

Not much. But you can do what everyone else is doing. Pretend there is no problem. Pretend there is plenty of food to go around and pretend that the commercial I have been seeing on TV.....a little girl smiling and saying that there is 250 years of coal left so why worry....isn't propaganda.

Oh sure, there is plenty of coal left. High sulphur coal. When it burns and the Sulpfur Dioxide (SO3) mixes with water vapor (H2O), like it does around the volcano I live on, it turns to something else. What happens when SO3 dissolves in H2O? Anyone?

"You get acid. Acid rain. Another thing they're trying to deny the existence of."

Very good! The compound which is formed is Sulphurous acid, H2SO3. The reaction goes like this: SO2+H2O==>H2SO3 which is a weak, unstable dibasic acid. Now the point becomes why are we concerned with that? So what? So this: Without going into the chemistry, the bottom line is that Sulphurous acid solution is slowly oxidised by atmospheric oxygen to Sulphuric acid. So Carbon Dioxide and Sulphuric acid. Sound familiar? Think Venus.

Venus is THE runaway greenhouse effect poster child. The temperature and pressure of the atmosphere decrease with height, so water vapor rises in the atmosphere and encounters conditions that should cause it to condense back into liquid water and fall back to the surface. Rain.

On Earth the ozone layer prevents ultraviolet light from destroying water in our atmosphere. Our water is recycled through the atmosphere and most of it returns to earth. On Venus, there is no LONGER an ozone layer, and the atmosphere isn't opaque to ultraviolet light. This allows ultraviolet light to destroy water because, as water rises in Venus' atmosphere, UV light dissociates it into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The hydrogen is much lighter than the water molecule was so it easily escapes Venus' atmosphere. The water will usually quickly recombine with a carbon or carbon monoxide molecule to form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Venus' atmosphere is:

* CO2: 96.5%
* N2: 3.5%
* SO2: 0.015%

Heavy water, which is composed of one oxygen, one hydrogen, and one deuterium (a proton and one neutron), cannot reach the requisite height as easily. If it does, it can still be dissociated just like normal water, but this happens at a much slower rate. Thus, a measurement of how much deuterium compared with how much hydrogen today shows that Venus has much more deuterium in its atmosphere for each hydrogen atom than Earth does. This is the strongest evidence that Venus has lost a massive amount of water in its history.

Like we will. But probably not for quite a while.

I'm not a pessimist nor can I predict the future. I simply see what is going on and try to extrapolate it a few years.

"I know everything you've been saying in these rants is unfortunately true."

I believe it is, but there are many people who disagree.

"Is there absolutely no way to delay the inevitable though? None at all? Nothing anyone can do?"

Not in my opinion. Humans shit in their own nests because there have always been plenty of new nesting sites, and there still are. There is plenty of pristine land left, but 50 SQUARE MILES if it is turning into desert every day. In addition, our memories are short. Great grandpa is dead so we cannot directly compare his experiences with our own. So we cannot see ourselves sinking into oblivion.

But there isn't plenty of energy left and there isn't any way to feed more people than we have on a long-term basis without burning a lot of energy to produce artificial crops and artificial herds of animals to eat. We have almost completely depleted the oceans of fish since 1950 and I must make the point one more time that ALL life on earth that relates to us is controlled by a very tiny band of sea and air. I estimate it at fifteen meters thick, extending about 8 meters above and below sea level. If the balance of life is disrupted anywhere within that zone, biotic life will simply cease to exist.

In the natural scheme of things every organism competes with every other organism for food, living space and reproduction rights. Evolution allows random mutations to push up out of the status quo and continue pushing until they run out of food or living space. That's why dinosaurs got so big and that's why they ruled for millions of years. Until they ran out of food...or air. Then they all died. (this is not a treatise on the causality of major extinctions, so we will not postulate on the reasons they occurred....suffice it to say they did and left a fossil record.)

Humans started out with an opposable thumb. We don't have the best eyesight in the animal kingdom by far. Birds, the descendants of warm-blooded dinosaurs do. But then we did something no other terrestrial animal did. We started growing bigger brains faster than bigger bodies. It was exactly what no one could have predicted because it was an entirely new evolutionary strategy and it was too successful. It ruined the balance of nature. We broke out of millions of years of slow change punctuated by sudden global disasters into an organism that could, for the first time, create our own global disaster.

And we are not going to stop and think what we are doing until we have done it. We can't. The very recipe for our evolutionary success, which is 'breed 'till you bleed' precludes us from changing the reason we were successful in the first place. We got here by killing everything that got in our way and it is our destiny to meet that same doom. We have such a strong genetic imperative to breed that some people even try to breed with members of their own sex. I am absolutely NOT anti-gay. I am merely pointing out that the genetic imperative to breed is still there no matter what your orientation and there is nothing wrong with it.

But advocating an "Abstinence until you are twenty-one" policy is not only extremely stupid, it creates more serious psychological problems than just handing out a couple of condoms to your sons and daughters before they go on a date.

Just like the obviously ridiculous policy of Catholic priests not being allowed to have sexual relations with women after GOD specifically invented sex between a man and a woman. That's not right. It's not even wrong. It just promotes a priesthood full of kiddy-diddlers. Even if you are one of the superstitious fools who believes in a huge invisible pal in the clouds you know that isn't right. Hey dummies, GOD's ONLY job is to kill everything which ever lived. Your soul is no good to Him while you are still using it.