514 Why is Carbon-based life cycle, and the carbon cycle, so misunderstood not just by the average person but by Scientists as well?

     Part of the reason is that when everyone on the planet wakes up every morning, what do they see? Pretty much exactly what they expect to see!  Even weather personalities are getting better at getting the weather fairly accurately. Scientists now can tell us what life was like for much of the time that carbon-based life has been on the planet, even down to how long ago life started, around 3,500,000,000 years ago (3.5 billion years). That is indeed a really fantastic ability, that took hundreds of years and thousands of scientists to put all of that information together!

      Scientists have unveiled so many mysteries, that it seems that it will only be a matter of time before Earth's past will be fully understood! We now understand what causes, mountains, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, and typhoons to develop, for eclipses to occur even hundreds of years into the future. Scientists can calculate if an asteroid will hit or miss Earth Years in advance if we can spot it in time!

      So how can Scientists possibly be wrong about the 'Carbon Cycle"? Well, it is that getting up every morning and knowing what to expect. Life has continued on Earth forever, so how can the carbon cycle be anything but perfect? I mean you can not destroy carbon, only fusion or fission can do that, meaning that there is exactly as much carbon on the planet now as there was when carbon-based life first started! Absolutely Correct! But how is that carbon stored, when carbon-based life first started it was as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the great waters of the planet, making Earth's atmosphere much like the Planet Venus's atmosphere is now. The difference is that Earth has had carbon-based life on it for 3.5 billion years and because Venus's atmosphere still has much of its carbon dioxide, except for that lost to space by the Sun's Solar Winds, we can be fairly sure that there has never been massive amount of any carbon-based life on Venus! But on Earth that has been completely different. The very day that Carbon-based life started on Earth, the sequestration of that carbon began, for bacteria that now help recycle that carbon had not been available! 

      No matter what we say, we do not want to be the absolutely only responsible caretakers of the only place humanity will ever be able to call "home" Earth! Every child, both wishes to be free of parental control yet still has to have someone else ultimately in charge! And if the "Carbon Cycle" that 'holy grail" of continuous life on Earth is not perfect, where does that leave us?

Scientists are well aware of both major and minor extinction events in Earth's past, and they have tried their best to assign causation to each of these events, too much Oxygen, too much volcanic activity, Milankovitch Cycles, high acidity content, the only one that they got 100% right is the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs! Every other cause has been the ever slowly changing levels of gases in Earth's atmosphere! 

       Let's talk about the largest mistake that Scientists have made, as a cause for the creation of the latest set of ice-ages on the planet that started only around 2.5 million years ago. Milankovitch Cycles, named after Milutin Milankovitch, a brilliant mathematician, and astronomer who did all of the calculations that resulted from Earth's three different movements around the Sun that affected the different amounts of energy that Earth would receive from the Sun over timeframes of upwards of 100,000 years. At that time, almost a hundred years ago, scientists decided that Milankovitch had uncovered why ice-ages would come and go based on his calculations. Milankovitch did not believe that himself, but as more and more Scientists started patting him on his back for his great achievement, it gave him recognition so seldom that either mathematicians or astronomers received. It also came with a platform from which to speak.

       Almost 50 years ago, in the 1970s's Scientists revisited Milankovitch calculations, and determined that the Cycles named after him did indeed "paced" ice-ages but did "NOT" cause them! What that means is that when Earth is receiving the most amount of energy from the Sun, then carbon dioxide levels had to drop to around 180 parts per million, for another ice-age to start, but when Earth was receiving the least amount of Energy from the Sun then another ice-age would start when carbon dioxide levels were still around 200 parts per million in Earth's atmosphere. Yet here we are 50 years later and the current Climate Change Scientists have once again put forth Milankovitch cycles as the reason behind the current set of glaciation periods on the planet, which started around 2.5 million years ago. Why you ask, because it must be something completely out of our control, prior to humanity's use of fossil fuels as an energy source, otherwise it explains why the latest inter-glacier period of approximately 13,500 years is around 3,500 years longer than it should be!

      Where do we go from here if naturally occurring carbon sequestration is greater than our planet's still somewhat active plate tectonics can return, then without a species on the planet that can balance removal with replacement all life would be forced into another "Snowball Earth Event". Could Earth actually survive another such event? the last one ended around 500,000,000 years ago after lasting for around 300,000,000 years! Even if it could, what difference would it make to mankind?

     https://lifecycleofaplanet.blogspot.com   Dan Kadavy 402-890-7946