M is for Mankind, While there seems to be two schools of thought on mankind and the planet.

        The one most talked about now is that mankind is a kind of parasite on the planet, and if we wish to survive we need to clean up our act and undo just about everything that puts the planet's life at risk, quickly! The second school of thought is that mankind is just one species on the planet and we are not able to really affect the planet in any significant way as the planet is just too large to make any truly lasting change to how the planet operates! Both of these views hold the belief that if mankind does die out as a species we would be no more than a curve in the planet's direction (or a bump in the road) and mankind would simply be forgotten and go the same way as the dodo bird, and time would heal the planet. Neither of these views is correct. And both views if acted upon incorrectly, will cause major harm to both mankind and all life on the planet!                                                                                                                                                                         Where does that leave us, history has proven both that mankind can and has, altered the course of the planet's future, since the start of agriculture going back thousands of years, not just since the industrial revolution and our use of fossil fuels. And that in some ways we have been a parasite on the planet, taken and not repairing all of the damage that we have done, especially concerning the oceans of the planet. Both agriculture and the use of fossil fuels are responsible for keeping the planet from entering the next and never-ending ice age. If you have not read "Life cycle of a planet by Daniel James Kadavy" then you may not understand the last statement, so you need to go to my blog site https://lifecycleofaplanet.blogspot.com   For those who have, I explain why there is only one way forward to undo, not what mankind has done to the planet, but what life has done, since it's very beginning, over 3 billion years of carbon sequestration, with now over 99.9% of what at one time was the amount of available carbon now locked away from the very life that needs it.                                                                                                                                                        The Earth has supported a vast array of life that by that, very life, nature has had to constantly continue to adapt, to ever-changing atmospheric pressures, its gases, and their levels. C3 plants which are now the most common type of plant life on the planet needs around 150 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to survive, and yet at the start of and during the ice-ages, levels would drop down to around 180 parts per million just barely enough to support C3 plant life. As the ocean levels fell, and the carbon dioxide that had been stored in these water was released back into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels rose to the point where the temperatures of the planet slowly rose enough to put pressure on how much ice was being staged on the planet but the sunlight reflecting ability of ice off-set much of the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere until a tipping point was reached and ice started to recede at a faster pace than when it was first started being increased sometimes 100,000 years earlier. The new levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were high enough that continuing carbon sequestration did not cause another ice age to start for around 10,000 years. During that 10,000 years at a rate of 7 gigatonnes of carbon sequestration per year that equals 70,000 gigatonnes stored away from life's ability to use it. With less than 50,000 gigatonnes of available carbon estimated to be left on the planet, it is easy to see, what the outcome would be if the planet would enter into another ice age at this or any other period in the future! Thank you, Dan I can be reached at 402-890-7946 my G-mail is daniel.kadavy212@gmail.com This only works if you tell others!

    Mankind has never even considered that our planet would have been uninhabitable by mankind for almost the whole length of time that there has been abundant life on Earth! Yet life has always found a way to live with the ever-changing conditions that life itself creates! Abundant life is believed to have started on the planet, mainly if not only, in the great waters of the planet around 3.5 billion years ago with almost "NO" oxygen in the atmosphere at all! For another 1.2 billion years oxygen would have poisoned the life that was. Once those same plants that could not live on a world with oxygen were what created oxygen as a by-product of their own respiration. They took carbon dioxide and used the energy either from the sun or energy from the internal heat of the planet to live, and as all living things do, they discarded that which they could not use as waste. They used the carbon and gave off the oxygen, and in doing so decided their own fate millions of years in the future! They also consumed so much of the planet's atmosphere which had been almost completely made up of carbon dioxide and many times denser than our present atmosphere, that several times in the distant past the Earth is believed to have frozen over, again only the release of some of the sequestered carbon by plate tectonics and the resulting volcanism did the planet again start to warm-up!

    None of these processes are short-term events, they all take millions of years to occur, but radically changing the types of life that could exist over great periods of time.