Some bacteria eat crude oil. (Most crude oil isn’t former dinosaurs, but former bacteria, especially all the oil found at the bottom of the sea, microbes washed off the land, into rivers, out to sea.) A billionaire (Tom Steyer?) funds the engineering of a bacterium with a better appetite for oil, buys oil wells, injects the bacteria, which eventually migrate to neighboring fields.
One of the many alternate proposals for dealing with the Deepwater Horizon spill was nothing, that dispersants do more damage than the oil itself, that waiting for bacteria to digest it naturally was the better tactic.
The old late night news show Overnight (Lloyd Dobyns, Linda Ellerbee) reported on work to develop a bacterium to clean up oil spills. They included a primitive cartoon of the bacterium eating a bunch of spilled oil, getting gigantic, eating an oil tanker.
Wanna explain how a bacteria eating oil is a solution to global warming? Seems to be a solution to oil spills. Don’t know about Steyer but this NOAA article seems to imply they are natural bacterium.
Global warming…is not a problem man needs to take on. Its the natural course the planet has been through many times over.
All this talk of Global Warming and what we need to do about it was a cute tactic invented by politicians to bilk the public out of more money, (its working by the way)…by blaming what the planet is doing naturally… Real Cute… sorry not buyin it.
The earth will flick man off its back like fleas one day…and it wont remember what impact we had whatsoever… Think of what “just” one million years means to man made objects…and the earth is celebrating its 4 point something BILLION year birthday at some point in time…that is “thousands of millions of years”. We are nothing in the terms of impact to this planet… Sure man can definitely Sh&^ where he eats pretty well…but planetary climate effect of man? You must be joking… even nuclear radiation will be a non mention in terms of millions of years.
I’m all for not polluting the planet and imho should have never been done…not even a little bit. Thus far man has done a tidy job at crapping where he eats and lives but while past and current pollution created by man is abhorrent to me…and could have been easily avoided were it not for short sighted greed over money… There is no action that can be taken by humans that will alter what the planet is going to do…on its own…naturally…the way it has Lord knows how many times in the past…to think we can change this…or need to put the onus upon the population is absolutely ridiculous.
Better practices sure…but they could and should have been implemented long long ago… Dont start pointing the finger at the population for utilizing the only infrastructure greedy corporations put into place…that’s cute…it really is…and you can keep it.
“Buy our product you will make me rich beyond measure”… oh wait you bought and used my product…you’re a horrible human being and you need to pay for damages… again… Cute… nice try.
No, it was a trend noticed by scientists studying the Earth’s climate. If anything, many politicians have been pushing back on it. Notice too that carbon dioxide is at the highest level in the last 800,000 years. That’s a fact, btw. The carbon dioxide level is measured from dissolved air in Antarctic ice.
Read the graph in the link. The average over the last 800,000 years is about 225 parts per million (ppm), while the maximum not including recent history is 300 ppm. The carbon dioxide level now is about 408 ppm. Cutting to 75% of the current level is a good goal, IMO. That’s just me, not the experts, and anything less is a good thing.
I do hear you @jtsanders Do you know what the earth thinks of 800,000 years? It laughs at that time frame… and it laughed all the while carbon dioxide went up and down many factors above the amount you are claiming at the highest point.
The earth is BILLIONS of years old… Its climate fluctuates… good luck controlling that. This is all a measure of BS’ing people into thinking that they are directly responsible for this…and that we need to do something about it. Again…good luck with all that…let me know how it works out for ya. This entire thing stinks to high heaven of trying to make people pay…for man…Sh*&ing where he eats…when we had nothing to do with it as a population at large.
We should have never got so involved and controlled by oil… it should have been used as a tool not a crutch. Who is to blame for that? When that answer is clear…send them the bill for the CO2 in the atmosphere and task them with reducing it…for humanity’s sake…not the planet’s…because the planet doesnt care and wont notice in a couple mil…
I suggest you do some research on that…Try actual science publications. Global warming is a MAJOR problem that needs to be addressed. Yes the world has gone through changes, but the changes we’re seeing now are man made. This isn’t even debated among scientists anymore. The debate is what can we do about it and what will happen if we don’t.
I got this! We’re doing it now. The virus is shutting down everything that is warming the planet. Chances are we’ll trigger an ice age if this goes on too long.
They are natural, but they aren’t hungry enough. Perhaps engineering their genes will create one that runs wild.
Neither is the coronavirus, nor was smallpox. The earth certainly won’t mind. Our descendants will mind, when the places hot now become truly uninhabitable (for humans), the effort it takes to grow food and cotton increases hugely. It’s a matter of spending now to avoid greater expenses in the future. The first farmers ruined the land they cultivated, then abandoned it. They can still do that today, and it’s cheaper until they’ve exhausted the topsoil, more expensive over times longer than that. It’s analogous to maintenance - it’s cheaper to keep your car in good repair than it is to wait for a breakdown.
350
We’ve only been around a million.
It’s probably too low for many organisms. We’ve evolved in a period of 200-300 ppm. Had we evolved in a period of 500 we’d be good with that. Give us a few thousand generations and we’ll evolve to be happy with 1,000.
Lets just say we never use oil for fuel again. That does not mean we don’t need oil to maintain a modern civilization.
There are thousands of products made from petroleum products that are essential to modern life.
Fertilizers made from natural gas without which a large portion of the planet would starve. Of course, the elevated CO2 helps crop yields as well and may be what is keeping the 7.8 billion people on the planet fed as it is.
Be darn tough to make good tires for your bicycle without oil not to mention lubricate it.
I didn’t see this until this evening. It had only the loosest relationship to fuel from the beginning. I know it’s slower around here, and I hate to shut things down. Please try to keep it a) on-topic and b) civil.
I just want to know if the auto and aircraft makers will take into account when the magnetic poles switch again. All the onboard compass will be wrong. Think of the confusion and chaos that will cause.
That would be terrible! Somebody strictly following their car’s GPS navigation system could drive right into a lake or something… oh wait… never mind. CSA
Reading “The Prince” might give some insight into the success of a national leader. It is quite apparent that having a national enemy will largely bring most citizens to support their leaders and what better national enemy than one that has no army and is largely financed by the opposition party’s seeming ignorance. Fighting the climate/environment war is much less bloody and will never require a draft or a cemetery. And from my pragmatic point of view the legacy of cleaning up streams and rivers and the air would seem to be a grand accomplishment. Of course I developed a great aversion to real war and hope we have leadership capable of keeping US and the world peacefully fighting O2 attacks and not ICBMs.
This renaming process is currently happening at the Wichita Eisenhower International Airport. Runways 1L/19R, 1R/19L (these refer to parallel runways, the R and L stand for “left” and “right”) and 14/32 will be changed to 2L/20R, 2R/20L, and 15/33. This is the first time the runways will be renamed since 1954.
