Spike Jones wrote:
>
> I guess the folks that wrote that ad wont like my idea for soaking up
> some of that baaaad CO2: by rerouting water from the Columbia out
> to the grassy western U.S. plains to grow vast forests out there. Seems
> like all we really need is water in the west to do that. Currently
> we are throwing all that good fresh water into the sea. Wouldnt that
> work, assuming there really is too much CO2?
You do have problems with the ground geology, Spike. The primary problem
is that the ground is relatively porous and water seeps through rather
quickly down to the aquifer, where most of the fresh water in the
western US plains runs. Once that water hits the limestone, the trees
can't get at it.
> In fact, it seems if we
> put our minds to it, we could figure out a way to store enough water
> inland to lower sea levels enough to simultaneously take the pressure
> off the Holland, Venice and the island nations that built on low land
> to start with, and raise the global temperature at the same time, to
> salvage some of that good Siberian land the commies are wasting
> currently.
I'm at this point relatively convinced that the Caspian basin functions
as a reservoir to take up losses in the Greenland Ice cap long enough to
allow the cycle to reverse itself without raising sea levels enough to
significantly undermine most of the Greenland cap OR the less stable of
the two Antarctic caps. Granted that we'd need to see some record of
this flooding, but I think it's interesting to note that the Black Sea
basin served a similar function when it was flooded at the end of the
last ice age, thus preventing further warming.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:39:57 MDT