Global warming. It's not worth the risk

Sometimes the heart can flip to a fibrillation cycle. A fibrillation cycle is where the heart beats very rapidly but does not pump blood. Sometimes it happens for medical reasons, and sometimes for no definable reason. The heart can be kicked back into a “normal” beat with an electric defibrillation device. If not, the patient dies.

Has anyone not seen a medical drama where the doctors crowd around a patient lying on an operating table? Someone shouts “clear” and the patient bounces up and down on the table because he/she has been given a rather large electric shock. That is a defibrillation machine at work.

Our weather system seems to have flipped cycles more than once, and there is nothing to say it won't do it again.

Carbon absorption cycle

If our weather system does do the metrological equivalent of fibrillating what will it be like? We don't know, but we can look at what the earth must have been like when fossil fuels where formed. This is also difficult because there are several theories about how fossil fuels where formed, but they come from fossils somehow. This was a carbon absorption cycle.

The favorite, and most likely, begins with oxygen depleted seas with dead creatures sinking to the bottom. No oxygen means acid. So we would begin with still, stagnant seas devoid of life. There have been recent occurrences where normal seas currents have stopped flowing for short periods. If they stop completely and become still and stagnant we would be in real trouble.

The poles have a major influence on keeping the oceans aerated so if the currents stop flowing aerated seas from the poles would not spread oxygen through the sea systems. That would mean acid seas, sea life dying and sinking to the bottom of the seas to begin their transition into oil.

That would also mean that when it rained it would rain acid. The follow on to that would be no fresh water. We must have fresh water to survive. Desalination would not be any good, that only removes salt. This new world is beginning to look like a very unhealthy place to live.

To reach the stage I have described so far would take one event and one event only: the ocean currents to stop flowing. That is a real possibility with what we know about the effects of global warming. Melting ice caps take away the mechanics that cause seas to flow to the poles, sink to the bottom, and then flow out again on the bottom to rise at the equator.

Our atmosphere does the opposite. It flows to the poles at high level, sinks and flow outwards as winds at low level, to rise again at the equator. It the winds stop blowing and the seas stop moving we can say good bye to the weather system as we know it. Our chaotic weather system will flip to another chaotic system that is unlikely to be conducive to human life. We could all end up as a barrel of oil.

Economic factors

The events I have described may not happen. The weather system may not flip over to a dead sea system. In which case there will be an economic cost in avoiding an event that was not going to happen anyway. The up side to that is that we will all live in a cleaner healthier world and we will never know if it would have happened or not. If it does flip it will not take years, it will happen as an event.

If we do nothing and the weather patterns do flip over the economic factors will not matter because there will not be an economy. If any of us do survive we will not be worrying about the stock market.

It comes down to risk management. What is the risk against the cost? My vote is that the risks are far too high to worry about the cost, and that the number one economic goal throughout the world should be to combat global warming and make this a clean and healthy planet. The weather system may not flip over to another system, but we need to make certain it doesn’t.