On 2/8/07, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bob Miller wrote: > "clever"? Anthopomorhism again. No such thing exist. > It is not "self regulating". Don't be absurd, Bob. The ecosystem would not have survived 4.6 billion years if it weren't self regulating. That it is self-regulating is not even in doubt. The only thing in doubt is to what extent the system can stand abuse. > As we eliminate the particulate pollution problem > or even level it off we find/will find, it is suggested, > that this particle pollution has masked the far more > lethal problem of global warming from CO2. It regulates itself. The extra CO2 encourages the growth of plant life. The plant life absorbs the CO2 and cools the planet. Particulate pollution encourages rain clouds to form, which in turn cause rain and clean out the particulates and encourage plant growth.
Now you have acid rain encouraging plant growth. Great stuff.
All of this works as a system with feedback controls. The only question is how far you can go before the system goes unstable.
Life, in its bid to survive, adapts. Ecosystems develop by chance and the dictates of science. There is no cleverness, no feedback center, no plan, no Earth brain directing all this.
>The ecosystem that has lasted 4.6 billion years included > It is amazing how you can spin a story that is truly > apocalyptic in its account of a world run amok and talk > of clever balancing mechanisms. Oh, BS.
No BS is saying that there was an ecosystem 4.6 billion years ago. Ecosystems are formed by living things as they interact with their non living environment. The oldest thing we can identify on this Earth rock are 3.8 billion old rocks with no sign of life. That leaves .8 billion years of no ecosystem possible at least as far as we can know it so far. Then the best bet is that first life lived at the bottom of the oceans and though carbon based probably didn't use oxygen therefore no CO2 to bandy about. How to relate that ecosystem to the current ones is problematic. For example for a few billion years nothing much happened and then, possibly after one or the other of tens of millions of years in which the Earth was one total snowball, NO free ocean surface at all, some ecosystem, then we had a melt the end of which saw the oceans turn green with life, a super bloom of micro-organisms followed by ever higher level versions of this life form. Some ecosystem, well balanced, can see an invisible hand directing each little event all tied together in a neat understandable nothing. Life in its bid for survival tries to control its environment. The lifeless environment is not listening, it is not a partner, it could care less. It will extinguish us without knowing, it is unknowing. We are the highest form of that life and our purpose is to survive. We should do our best to understand and control the lifeless environment we inhabit. To do so the first thing we must do is get rid of the idea that some life force directs our existence. That the rocks that form our Earth are benevolent partners is some game with a happy ending. That is if a God exist he is not a director IMO. He may have set the rules and even be paying attention but he is not changing the rules on the fly. So far life has done an extraordinary job of surviving including getting thru those Earth snowball days. One of life's more recent experiments in survival was the development of a brain. We may see whether that was a good idea or just a blind alley sooner than we expect. Bob Miller
Bert
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