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.