New Mars Forums

Hi everyone,
OK, the above numbers are where I had got to in Terraforming Mars' atmosphere.  We had warmed the planet to out gas CO2 (further warming the planet) and then had dropped a lot of iceteroids to add N2 (and other sundry gases). 

One thing that the above atmosphere mix does not take into account is the amount of time it takes for all those rocks to be moved.  If it takes 200 years to get the N2 concentration up, then we have 200 years of warming and the CO2 concentration would rise higher than what I guessed above.  How much it would rise is very hard to say.  Likely there are huge amounts of CO2 clathrate on the planet but we won't see much of that freed until the temperature approaches 0 degrees C for at least part of the year at  40+ degrees latitude.

Also a lot of water has been dropped on the planet.  This will freeze out as ice and snow.  (Breaking up some dusty CC asteroids to darken the snow would be good but in the long run blowing Martian dust will dirty the snow naturally.) 

I have reached the point of outright guesses here but likely the CO2 level will have risen from 100 to 150 KPa (0.1 to 0.15 bars).  This will allow people to walk on Mars with out pressure suits.  We have enough N2 for nitrogen fixing plants but the land is too cold for much in the way of water OR planets.

Nickname has pointed out that high CO2 concentrations are toxic to some plants.  This is something I hope to find time to research more.  However there are some simple plants that can be used to increase the O2 concentration so it is not a complete show stopper.  We are also hurt by the high UV flux on the ground.

However, I think that we are reaching a wall.  We will need more big engineering to take us to the next level (adding enough O2 to the air to reduce ultra violet at ground level).  So I will assume that people keep pumping super greenhouse gases into the air and that bigger solettas are put up to warm the poles.  We will assume that at 50 degrees latitude we have summer temperatures over 0 degrees C.

We now have a lot of ice melting each summer.

Martian dirt outgased a couple percent O2 when it was warmed and got wet.  (The Viking experiments.)  Some think this was because of native Martian life, others postulated exotic soil chemistry.  (Altho no one has been able to come up with soils that mimic the effect so that hypothesis has some problems.)  In any case we will get some O2 for free as soon as we wet the soil.  With flowing water we should get some cyanobacteria living in pools or in lakes under a skim of ice.  O2 will now be pumped in small dribs and drabs to the air.

Now UV light breaks up O2.  The free O atoms combine with O2 to form ozone (O3) which block UV light.  Until we get a proper ozone layer high in the atmosphere O3 will be formed near the ground.  Ozone is highly reactive and will damage life, plastic domes, etc. 

I have found NO data that discusses how high the O2 level must be to 'use up' all the UV high in the atmosphere.  One thing to consider is that the Martian atmosphere will be deeper than Earth's air (Mars has a greater scale height).  As the ozone layer builds up it will likely form a far deeper layer than Earth, originally extending down to ground level.  The ozone will likely be quite dilute at ground level.  (I hope!)

As the O2 level increases, more and more of the ozone will appear high in the atmosphere.  The UV flux will drop on the surface and life will find things much easier, increasing the rate at which O2 is pumped into the air.

This will likely take 500 to 5,000 years.  Thruout this time, more CO2 will be leaking into the air as soils warm and clathrates melt.  Bacteria will be slowly freeing N2 from rock and soil and releasing it into the air.  Note that our new life is not likely lowering the CO2 level very much.  They draw down CO2 as they build their tissues but when they die and rot they release it back into the air.  To lower the CO2 level we must BURY the CO2.  That is the last big task for terraformers.

So at the end of stage 3, (perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 years after the first mirrors went over the poles) our atmosphere might look like:

Composition:
- CO2...300.0 mBar (or more?)
- N2........15.0 mBar
- Ar...........0.1 mBar ?
- O2..........1.0 mBar
- H2O........1.0 mBar

- Various trace gases ~0.01 mBar

- CF4.......0.0002 mBar
- C2F6.....0.0004 mBar
- C3F8.....0.0015 mBar
- C4F10....0.0001 mBar
- SF6........0.003 mBar
- NO2.......0.0001 mBar

Total: ~317.2 mBar.

(There is a LOT of guessing in the above.)

At this stage things are looking fairly bright.  Plants can start spreading naturally to large areas of the planet so the O2 level will likely start rising more quickly.  There is enough O2 for microscopic 'animals' and we are getting close to where crawling insects can live (except of course that the high CO2 level would smother them).  The ozone will act as a cold trap preserving the H2O on the planet.  The planet is wet enough that the super fine dust (fines) will start cementing together into less dangerous dust.  (The down side of this is that the snow will stay white longer which will cool the planet.)  The air will have enough O2 in it that simple low tech compressors will allow people to chemically separate enough O2 to live which will lower the cost of life support significantly.

Gradually, CO2 will be drawn down and buried.  (Peat moss anyone?) but to get a breathable atmosphere from this point, naturally, will take an estimated 100,000 years.  However, humans can deliberately bury carbon greatly speeding up the formation of a breathable mix of gases. 

Anyway, these essays show my best guess on the minimum effort and duration to get us to a 'stage 3' atmosphere. I see this taking an intensive 200 year effort at a start and another intensive effort around the 200 year mark to raise the temperature another 20 to 30 C once we have a reasonable amount of N2.  Thruout this period, people will have to keep adding super green house gases to maintain the warmth.  (That is why I like adding a lot of CF4 to the air.  It lasts so long that people might have time to recover from a period of relatively low tech with out the planet freezing on them.)

Note that this terraforming story does not require any scientific breakthrus and only some modest technological ones (to build the large space mirrors).  With scientific breakthrus, (e.g. UV resistant plants), it would only speed up the process.  Larger engineering efforts (e.g. many fusion bombs to melt water and free N2 and CO2 from the ground.) would also speed up this time line.

Warm regards, Rick.

Hi mjsimon.
  Welcome to the forum!  I had a bit of difficulty following your post.  Is Hb a standard abbreviation in biology?  Do we have any experience with successfully modifying hemoglobin or was this just theoretical?

  Your final point about small spheres that act as a CO2 trap if things get dangerous.  How would they discharge the CO2?  One way is that after they are filled, their surface changes somehow so that they will be simply flushed from the body.

  Thanks for the interesting post!

  Warm regards, Rick.

Hi Martin, everyone.
  I agree with you totally on this subject.  Oz would be a much more productive land if it had a few mountain ranges to cause rainfall.  Out of curiosity, I looked up the cost for cheap land fill.  Gravel costs range from $10.00 to $16.00 to $23.50 per tonne currently at a couple of web sites (Jan 2008).  (Much of this variation is how far the material is expected to be shipped.  I'll use the higher price below.)

  If we assume that the mountain range is 2000 meters high, 100 km long and has a base of 5000 meters (with a triangular cross section) this is:

volume = 0.5 ( 5,000m * 2,000m ) * 100,000m = 5E8 cubic meters.

Multiplying this by $23.50 gives us a very rough cost of: ~$1.2 E 10 or $12,000,000,000.  However, the cost is likely going to be at least 10 times that since we will want stronger materials than gravel, it will have to be dug up from somewhere and shipped to the correct location up hill.

Call it about half a trillion dollars if you include landscaping and some cement to hold it all together.  This does not include the price to buy all that land in the first place.

It would be nice if we had some way to get volcanoes to erupt where we want them.  Oz has quite poor soil, volcanic rock would bring up more Potassium, Phosphorus and other useful soil components.

I don't see this happening now but with fusion or fission there might be enough wealth to consider it.

Warm regards, Rick.

Hi folks,
  The odds are now better than 1 in 33.

New report on Mars crossing asteroid.

Warm regards, Rick.

Hi qraal, everyone.
  I've talked elsewhere about solving hard problems with Magical Nano Technology so I won't discuss it further here.  But I think it will be very hard to genetically engineer people to accept high CO2 levels.

  CO2 in the blood binds with the hemoglobin.  When it reaches the lungs it has air on the other side of the membrane with effectively zero partial pressure for CO2.  The gibbs free energy (a chemical measure of energy, entropy and probability) drives the CO2 across that barrier.  If you increase the CO2 level in the lungs, not only does the CO2 in the blood 'want' to stay there more, but the CO2 in the air starts binding with the red blood cells.

  Last, high CO2 concentrations decrease the blood PH that have a variety of bad effects.

  I've enjoyed a number of your posts qraal, but I think you are underestimating the difficulty of dealing with CO2.  One thing that I think would be useful is a cybernetic sense organ that tells people the CO2 level.  Wire it up to the pain center and people will instantly know if their is a dangerous level of CO2 building up in their air.

  Warm regards, Rick.

Hi Everyone,
  I've been putting some work on the Mars game over the X-mas holidays.  There have been a few changes.

  As time has gone by, I've added a lot more industries to the game.  (Most of these are the result of card play.)  They usually do not place counters on the game map.  This has had the unintended effect of making the map less important.  (It used to be that you could fight and STEAL other player's income.  Now, not so much.)  The exploration deck was always too thin so I've added a few more cards that expand mines or give bonuses to them.  (You dig a little bit deeper and 'WHOA!' mother load.)

  However, anytime you add cards to a deck it increases the randomness so I need to playtest these new changes.

  I've lowered the cost of gaining political control of regions.  This is good in that it adds more competition to the game.  But it has the unfortunate effect of sucking up people's money just when terraforming usually takes off.  No easy solution as I WANT more competition.

  Based on new studies, we need slightly more greenhouse gases to do the warming needed.  (About twice as much as I was using before.)  I've adjusted the table in the game and this also delays people wanting to put money into terraforming since it takes longer to get a payoff.

  There are now so many things to buy that people are getting a bit lost.  It is tough to decide when to invest in new forms of economic development.  For example, in my last test game people could have made a lot of money by buying a "Shipping Supplies to Luna / Asteroids" title deed.  People were so distracted by the other things that they are starting to miss good economic opportunities.  I'm wondering if this is a good thing or not.  I'm not going to worry about it for now as "games should allow people to make mistakes".

  The game can be played with 2 to 5 players.  I taught a new player and it took us 5 hours.  However, more players take longer.  I think that the rule would be something like: Time to Play = 4 hours + 0.5 hours / player.  This is not too bad.  However if it is: Time to Play = 3 hours + 1 hour / player it is not so good.  I need to play a couple of 5 player games to get a better feel for how long it takes to play bigger games.

  I've made a couple of shorter scenarios.  In one everyone plays for 5 to 8 turns and just tries to have the highest income at the end of the game.  In another you basically start half way thru the game (which ought to take 2 hours off the total time to play).

  I confess I'm getting a bit burnt out on the game.  It is getting harder to motivate myself to sit down and test it.  (Actually I was planning to do some work on it today but I'm finding it easier to write this post.)  :-)

  Warm regards, Rick.

If the asteroid hits Mars we have orbiters which can detect changes in the gas content of the planet.  I would be very curious to see what types of gases are released from the crater.  There are likely nitrates but how much?  There is likely carbonated waters but how deep? 

It would be a gigantic scientific boon.  Even if it just comes close it would get people thinking about Mars again.

Warm regards, Rick.

Mr Kalbfus,
I have read your posts, and you said:

A number of other times you have made blanket statements that trying to slow carbon dioxide build up / slow global warming would require excessive efforts and may well fail anyway.

I am asking you a specific question.  (For perhaps the fifth time.)  Would implementing the flex fuels plan that Robert Zubrin suggests, kill the USA economy?  If you can't answer this question, please don't bother to answer at all as I won't bother to reply to your posts again.

Rick

Does this single plant water an area the size of the American Bread Basket?  I would assume not.  Exactly how big is this farm that they water with this one plant?

Mr Kalbfus,
Straw man argument here.  You were the one saying how great it would be for refugees to go to Antarctica.  I think that if you look at ALL my posts in this thread and on the Global Warming thread, you will see me say that I think that _part_ (not all) of Greenland will lose its ice cap in the next 100 years.  I have explicitly said on more than one occasion that the Antarctic ice cap is showing no signs of melting any time soon.

Anyway, you have been talking a lot about rising water levels in this thread, not I.  I am concerned with more dangerous problems.  Big hint.  In a rational argument you are supposed to address points I actually make.

.........right.

Now, what exactly does this story about your imaginary movie contribute?  Besides allowing you to avoid having to deal with anything real, I mean.  Are you suggesting that I base my concerns on your imaginary movie?  Do you want me to invent my own imaginary movies?  If you want me to ignore you as not worthy of my time because of moronic straw man arguments, then you are well on your way here.

Ah.  The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has 3800 scientists who have contributed or reviewed the science in this report.

2007 IPCC Document

Incidentally, a number of scientists are very unhappy with this consensus paper because in order to get unanimity they had to water down the language to satisfy the Saudi Arabian scientists (also China & Russia). 

Saudi & Chinese Water Down Global Warming

A quote from this report:
As UK columnist George Monbiot writes in his column today : "Global warming scientists are under intense pressure to water down findings' and are then accused of silencing their critics."

There were a number of reports about  this but I picked this one because at the bottom of it, you can compare side by side the original draft and the censored draft that had been watered down to minimize the impact of the report.

For example:
The scientists wrote: "likely to be at high risk of irreversible extinction,"

was rewritten as: "there are projected to be major changes in ecosystem structure and species' ecological reactions."

So if you find the IPCC consensus report frightening, be assured, the document is UNDER-STATING the problem. 

Yes I do.  However, you freely use hyperbole.  Do you object when I do so as well to emphasize your tactics?

Ah, so we have agreement.  Europe's economy is growing faster than the USA's.  You did not mention this but can we also agree that their currency is doing better than the USA's? 

You feel that these facts are unimportant because the two situations are not identical.  (Ideally to make this a scientific experiment we would like Europe and the USA to be identical EXCEPT for their environmental policies.) 

Europe is handicapped by high taxes, high unemployment, strong regulations AND strong environmental policies.  The USA has none of these disadvantages.

However it could be hoped, that with all the advantages the USA enjoys, they would be able to moderate their output of green house gases and not have their economy 'killed'.  Apparently Europe, with all the disadvantages that you have enumerated, can have have strong environmental regulations and their economy has not been 'killed'.

Yes, that is why I brought it up.  My question was, would implementing his plan (which I think is far more practical than your electric highway plan)  'kill' the USA economy?

Carbon sequestration is nonsense.  We burn coal to get lots of energy.  Using up vast amounts of that energy to remove the CO2 defeats the whole purpose of the power plant in the first place.  One study looked at this, and concluded the best way to sequestrate the CO2 was to liquefy it and pump it to the ocean floor.  What a disaster.

You and I are in complete agreement here.

You have completely missed my point.  If your argument is that technology will save us, I was saying I would feel happier if technology was being aggressively funded.  But Bush has implemented an energy policy that seems to have been written by the House Saud and cut fusion funding to the bone.  Since the USA is the largest polluter of CO2 discussing USA policies is germane.

As for the private funding to produce fusion argument...

Fusion would be a gigantic economic boon.  Every time historically that cheaper power arrived, human freedoms and wealth increased.  And we are very close.  As I discussed above, the Lawson parameter has been increased 10,000 fold in the last 1/2 century.  If we can increase it just 3 more times we will have ignition and fusion power.  However, as we have reached the edge of success, funding has been cut to the point that the plant that will prove it can't be built.  It is an outrage.  If you think we should do nothing until industry funds it, then that is just 5 more or 15 more years of waste and CO2 being pumped into my air.
 

Solar Power Satillites are an economic impossibility.  See "Entering Space" By Robert Zubrin for why. 

Hydrogen powered cars are impossible because of:
- the energy cost to create the hydrogen,
- the difficulty of getting it to the gas stations,
- the dangerousness of putting it in vehicles that crash,
- the dangerousness of H2 vehicles in parking garages,
- the cost of the fuel cell engines that burn it,
- the catalyst poisoning that destroys the fuel cells that use it,
- the cost of the platinum fuel cells if mass produced will soar.

See "Energy Victory" by Robert Zubrin for more reasons why the "hydrogen economy" is impossible.

Your point on Greece not having a rich government is true.  But if sub Saharan Africa is so rich, why have they not reversed the growth of the Sahara?

I call them as I see them. 
The current USA fusion budget is ~250 million.  Who do I blame if not him and his government.

His government has stonewalled every effort to slow oil consumption.

His government sued California which introduced a law to stop pollution that was causing hundreds of deaths and thousands of asthma attacks every year.  Do you not think that it is strange that protecting the auto corporations "right to choose what to sell" had a higher priority than the health of the USA citizens that his government is supposed to protect?

Who Killed the Electric Car

As I said, it would be easy for you to create straw man arguments that fixing global warming would cost bla bla trillions.  The exact shape of your argument is "global warming would cause gigantic growth of the government".

I challenged you to answer the question: if we implement Robert Zubrin's plan in "Energy Victory" would this 'kill' the USA economy?  So, will implementing this policy cause gigantic growth of the USA government?

Rather than creating imaginary movies to shore up your arguments, and rattle on at great length about your unproven assumption that doing ANYTHING at all would result in giant growth of government, you could try answering my question.

Yet ANOTHER straw man argument.  First, leaders 1000 years ago could not kill off entire ecosystems and change the Earth's atmosphere.  Second, the whole, "George Bush won't look so bad when he is 1000 years away", argument is totally beside the point. 

This is the point.

Biggest Extinction Since Dinos.

National Geographic - The Sixth Extinction

Mr Kalbfus,

Very soon, I won't bother replying to your threads.  This is NOT because I think you are correct.  It is because it is obvious to me and everyone that you are wasting our time.  I suggest that if you want to be taken seriously, you learn to answer the points actually argued.

Rick

Hello Mr Kalbfus,
  If you really meant no insult by the chicken little comparison and you are serious about your suggestions and not just bringing them up to trivialize the problems, then you have my attention.

I think you would need many desalinization plants.  But let's say that taking sea water, boiling it, condensing the fresh water, pumping the fresh water up hill to the American bread basket and then moving it to individual fields takes only 10,000 times more energy than pumping water out of the aquifer.  This will make the American wheat cost more, wouldn't it?  If the agro-businesses can't be run for a profit they would shut down, wouldn't they?  With no irrigation, and the water table dozens of meters deeper than it historically was, this area would revert to a desert, wouldn't it? 

So whether it takes one desalinization plant or 100,000, I don't think this problem will be solved at the last minute.  I think that when that underground lake is gone then so will the American Bread Basket.

Furthermore, how much oil and gas will be burnt to boil and move all that water?  If we were making a giant push to fusion I would be less worried about the future, but look at what the Bush administration has done to fusion funding.  Look at what it did to the Electric Car!  Look what happened to the Magnetoplasmadynamic power plants and fission power plants.  I see no indication that we are going to dump oil any time soon.

As for the deserts, it is far easier to make a desert than to get rid of one.  How many deserts do you know of that human beings have reclaimed (perhaps with a desalinization plant).  If this map shows vast desert areas turning into grass lands, then I think it is HIGHLY optimistic. 

Greece was turned into a desert by over exploitation of its ecosystem.  (It used to be rich forest.)  The Greek government has tried for decades to reforest these lands but the soil is gone (erosion), the land is hot (which reduces local precipitation) and the country is poor (in part because it is a desert).  You might spend some time reviewing how easy Greece has had it, trying to improve its ecology.  And it has a desert with a fair bit of rain fall.

Actually I didn't look at it.  I think that the we will have huge problems long, LONG before the antarctic ice sheet melts.  But even assuming Antarctica was ice free what does that get us?  We make some reservations and dump refugees on a continent with no soil and something like 3 months of no sun.  Well, I guess that that solves the main problem of which countries are going to adopt all those refugees.  By the way, how many countries in the world welcomed large numbers of boat people?  How many countries took thousands of poor people from the Sudan famine?  These are microscopic refugee problems compared to the one you feel is so easily solved.

I am pretty sure that I have not suggested that we kill anyone.  I have suggested that we work to minimize adding even more carbon to the air.  But many people like to suggest that this noble goal is equivalent to:

-- Destroying the economy.
-- Living in the dark.
-- Beggaring ourselves.
-- Freezing in the Winter.
-- Killing ourselves.
-- Panicking.   etc.

Wildly exaggerating the costs of conservation / converting to cleaner energy, so as to make it easier to dismiss the debate, does not endear you to me.  In reply to either you or terraformer, I mentioned that Europe (which has very strong green political parties and environmental regulations with teeth) has an economy and currency that are growing faster than the USA.  I don't recall either of you commenting on this point.

Furthermore, US cars pollute so badly that they can no longer be sold in many parts of the world.  Fuel efficient cars are very important in poorer nations where the cost of gasoline is prohibitive.  This is an easy to understand example of where better conservation would help the US economy.  But I don't recall you discussing this point either.

So if you are going to say, that reducing carbon emissions will "kill ourselves" I don't buy it.  I am tired of these ridiculous, excessive claims of the impossibly high 'costs' coming from slowing our burning of ground carbon.  When people talk about reducing carbon emissions means we will huddle in the dark, they deserved to be challenged.  They should be asked to provide some shred of evidence rather than just verballing flinging impossibly high 'costs' into the mental arena.  Especially when Japan and Europe are examples that ecological victories do not 'beggar' their economies and make them 'shiver in the dark'.

So perhaps you could give statistics or some evidence on how many people will have to die?  Maybe a few, will be only maimed.

Now it would be easy for you to make some straw man argument where to stop all carbon emissions we would have to bla, bla, and this would cost the economy umpteen trillions of dollars per week.  To make things more solid, you could talk about the costs of adopting Robert Zubrin's plan here:

Excerpt Zubrin's Energy Plan

Wow.  This is poetry worthy of some thought I think.

Now when you say the Earth is 'dynamic and changing' what do you mean?  It sure sounds pretty.  Dynamic is good, it is cool.  We WANT things to be dynamic right?  And Stasis is BAD.

You might mean that the Earth has earthquakes and volcanoes and plate tectonics.  But we are not trying to stop that.  We can't.

You might mean the circulation of the North Atlantic conveyor belt.  We are doing our best to stop that all right.

You might mean the life forms and species, the whole ecosystems that make up the Earth and support us economically and biologically.  We are stopping those by habitat destruction and creating agricultural mono-cultures.  We are also stopping that by desertification.  You are right, we don't want to stop (or hurt) the Earth's ecosystems.  But we are.

So after thinking about your comment above, you are right.  I don't want to stop the dynamic Earth.  But I do want to stop (or at least slow) the unnatural build up of CO2 in our atmosphere.

Is this trying to say that since we are a natural product of Earth, that climate change is good???  There are many societies that have gone beyond their ecological carrying capacity.  They were natural products of Earth.  That did not make them happy with their folly.  Have you read "Collapse" by Jered Diamond?

Hmmm....  You are right.  Here in B.C. I am looking at the billions of dollars damage being done to our forests by the Pine Bore beetle.   But I am not looking at the positive ways that global warming has helped me.  (Actually, I can honestly not think of any right now but there may be some.)

However, there seems to be 10 or 50 or 1000 bad things that are associated with global warming for every good thing.  Why is this?  Perhaps it is because ecologies and societies have adjusted and evolved for current conditions.  The evils we know, so to speak.  If those conditions change (especially if they change quickly), there will be upheaval and death.

But I think that this is a BS argument in a lot of ways. 

First, we are getting reports of tropical parasites being seen in the southern USA and Europe where they have not been possible before.  We had a heat wave in Europe a couple summers ago that killed tens of thousands of people.    We are seeing birds that are having trouble feeding their young because the bugs they usually eat are out of sync with the birds migration patterns because spring is coming 3.5 weeks earlier than normal.  We are seeing fish stocks dying and being taken over with jelly fish and toxic algae.  Coral reefs are dying because the water is too warm.

We are seeing bad things happening now.  We see the possibility of truly terrible things.  Massive greenhouse temperatures by degassing oceans.  Hydrogen sulfide eruptions that will wipe out entire marine ecosystems.  (If the oceans die, we die.)  Vast droughts as mountain glaciers vanish.  Deserts spreading because a few degrees of temperature increase cause greatly increased drying of the soil and contributes to soil erosion.  Acid rain killing forests, lakes and leaching heavy metals into the water supply.

I think it is pretty ingenuous for you to say, "oh, people are not looking at the bright side".  Give me a break.   

Another thing, I am not trying to panic anyone.  (Panic must be a favorite word with you guys.)  I have seen someone who was panicked and I sincerely doubt that I could do that via remote control using only words and the internet.

You could say that I am trying to get people worried.  I am trying to get people thinking about the ecology.  I am trying to get people thinking about energy policy.  However, alarmists who panic people are easy to dismiss, right?  I bet that you will keep throwing that word 'panic' at me and hope some of it sticks.

As for the "drastic action that may not work anyway"...

Nice rhetoric.  In one phrase you again frame the argument in such a way that any change is drastic and upsetting.  And you cast doubts about the ability for us to succeed.  No evidence or facts, of course.

Now, it is far easier to prevent a disaster than clean up after it.  On one hand you are saying it will be simple to clean up this mess.  ("... with a desalinization plant...") and on the other hand any attempt to fix or even moderate the problem ahead of time is drastic and might not work.   I would suggest that you can't have it both ways.

If I may be so bold, let me summarize your arguments:
-- Global warming is likely not going to be a problem.
-- Any attempt to mitigate it will be disastrously expensive.
-- We can easily & cheaply fix anything that goes wrong.
-- Victims of all this (poor people else where) can go live in Antarctica or Siberia or make themselves not poor or, ...or something.
-- Major effects (such as ecosystem collapse, H2S eruptions, desertification, vast amounts of CO2 outgassing from the oceans) won't happen, or will be easy to fix if they do happen and discussing them is panic mongering in any case.

If you don't like my summary, could you please post your own?

My summary of arguments is:
-- Humans are causing the 6th large extinction event in the Earth's history.  The rates of extinctions are accelerating.
-- Human caused global warming is real and is causing problems already.
-- Global warming will cause this extinction event to get worse.
-- These disruptions will cause famine, plague war and death on a planet with a whole lot of guns.
-- Modest changes would be a significant help in slowing or moderating the above.

We could compare summaries, decide what we agree on or disagree on.  And then argue those points of disagreement with out ENDLESSLY repeating our arguments to the boredom of anyone reading these posts.

Repeating an argument endlessly is propaganda.  It's mental spam.  It just causes boredom.  And if people are bored with a subject then they will watch reruns of "Sex in the City" rather than thinking, right?

I have contempt for propagandists.  If you claim that your position is so strong, then from this post on, why not back it up?  I am more than willing to engage you in honorable combat of references and facts.

As a start, you could document how the environmental regulations are "killing" the Europeans.  That would go a long way towards shoring up a very weak point in your argument, namely that any change is too expensive.

I leave the above, for people to consider, with out further comment.

Rick

Hi Nickname, everyone.
  The link above is to a Canadian government study that talks about increasing productivity by adding CO2.  The relevant portions I've copied below:

This study is not talking about if they are using C3 or C4 plants.  (Likely C3 as I expect that most C4 plants are not usually found in greenhouses.)  But the effect that they refer to is the closing of the plant's stomata.  So cyanobacteria would not be affected by this.  I am also not convinced that 'primitive' plants such as Bryophites or mosses will be affected.  (In fact I have evidence that they would not be.) 

(I will round up references and edit them into this post later.)

Anyway, many thanks Nickname.  This is the first I've heard that some plants have a maximum CO2 level.

Warm regards, Rick.