COWBOYS AND INDIANS
                    (C)1997 Alan M. Schwartz

The Greenhouse Effect is guilt-edged Environmentalist pogrom.  
Anthropogenic carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels increases 
its atmospheric concentration by 1.5 ppm/year from a 1997 level 
of 366 ppm.  Colossal natural sources of carbon dioxide such as 
volcanism, sea floor spreading, and aerobic metabolism dwarfing 
societies' contributions are ignored.  The problem is that folks 
who predict gloom and doom via massive parameterized (finagle-
factored) computer simulations to many nugatory decimal places 
have misplaced some hundreds of gigagrams of elemental carbon.

We know almost to the ton how much coal, natural gas, and oil is 
burned annually.  Empirical measurement plus carbon isotope 
ratios pin geological and biological additions.  The carbon cycle 
spreadsheet does not balance.  About 10% of human contribution 
vanishes without a trace.  It is like losing the New York World 
Trade Center a few times each year, or a mountain.

The oceans could be dissolving it, but not nearly enough as 
reflected in pH and unbound carbon dioxide content.  Assumed 
global warming pushes the tree line up and north.  The added 
thousands of square miles of vegetation could not perform nearly 
enough photosynthesis.  The only large scale sponge for carbon 
dioxide is chemical weathering of rock.

Carbon dioxide in rainwater reversibly hydrates to carbonic acid.  
Carbonic acid reacts with insoluble calcium carbonate (limestone, 
marble) to form soluble calcium bicarbonate, washing down to the 
sea to be reformed as seashells, skeletons, and coral.  All we 
need to solve our prickly planetary carbon dioxide disappearance 
problem is a tremendous, stupendous square mileage of exposed 
limestone and carbonate-containing sedimentary rock which has 
been ignored by geologists for the past 200 years.

The Tibetan Plateau will do nicely by both location and politics.  
As India crashes into Asia it pushes up and fragments an immense 
volume of what was ocean floor sediment.  The average height of 
the Tibetan Plateau is three miles and rising.  The seaward side 
is heir to incessant precipitation as the jet stream is kicked 
upside its head by the huge protrusion.  The Alps and the Andes 
are also multiple mile-high sea sediment mountains bursting with 
reactive carbonates.  The fun starts when we run the numbers. 

Each gram of atmospheric elemental carbon washes out as 13.5 
grams of solubilized calcium bicarbonate.  The carbon mountain 
which goes missing each year erodes 13 mountains worth of the 
Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau (the rock is not explicitly 
missed on any given square foot - there is lots of real estate).  
Shaving down a cancerously growing counterweight wobbling Earths' 
rotation at the interface of India and Tibet is not a bad thing.

The continental plate that is India pushes inexorably northward 
into Asia.  Chemical weathering and erosion continuously eat away 
at the formidable area of the growing three mile high pile of 
rock at the interface.  Brobdingnagian mass so lofted could have 
nasty effects upon the Earth's rotation unless progressively 
pared.  In the absence of anthropogenic carbon dioxide additions 
the atmosphere would be scrubbed of carbon dioxide.  Agriculture 
and forests would be smacked hard as plants gasped for a 
dwindling concentration of carbon dioxide.  Vast windows to 
ground infrared radiation would open in the atmosphere, plunging 
the entire planet into an intractable ice age.

How close are we to a terrestrial deep freeze?  As a solid block 
of rock erodes it fragments and the surface area of its substance 
increases:  A one meter cubed block has a surface area of six 
square meters.  Fragment it into millimeter cubic sand and get 
6000 square meters of reactive surface.  We burn barely enough 
fossil fuel to keep pace with the geometrically expanding Tibetan 
hunger for carbonated rainwater.  If we slacken even a trifle we 
cause Gaia to freeze solid as every green plant suffers horribly.

Environmentalist cowboys would have First World civilization 
gelded, branded, and put out to pasture.  Third World slash and 
burn agriculture, cooking fires, and squalid human existence are 
celebrated as being ineffably ethnically cute, and contribute 23% 
of all carbon released into the atmosphere by man - 1.6 petagrams 
of the seven petagram annual total (Science 277(5330) 1205 
(1997)).  Eco-priests would thrust us into a 14th century miasma 
of de facto energy thrift, which amazingly would increase the 
problem manyfold.  Let's slash and burn Kansas.

We are balanced upon a knife edge.  As the Himalayas and the 
Tibetan Plateau are unstoppably dissected by weathering a vast 
extraction of atmospheric carbon dioxide explosively yawns open 
and breathes deeply.  It does not exhale.  Religion is notable 
for conjuring tragedy and then offering more of the same to cure 
it.  The Greenhouse Effect is a multi-level marketing eco-scam.  
Do not buy into it.