There is only one goddess Gaia and Al Gore is her only prophet...

[kandrathe]

There is no such accumulation. Everything gets eaten, and is eventually swept back up to the surface as krill and other animals, to serve as food for whales and small fish (which get eaten in turn).

If that statement were true, then we would have no problem in the first place. Where do you think kerogen (type I) comes from? I guess we'd still be burning coal from other types of kerogen deposits, but you get the gist. Not everything gets eaten, lots of stuff gets buried under the rain of waste, sediments, ash, and dead organisms from above.

Of particular interest to me was this statement I found in describing the formation of various kerogens; "Most of the biomass that eventually becomes petroleum is contributed by the bacteria and protists that decompose the primary matter, not the primary matter itself. However, the lignin in this kerogen decomposes to form phenolic compounds that are toxic to bacteria and protists. Without this extra input, it will only become methane and/or coal."

Meaning that the decomposition process is what produces the lipids which can accumulate into kerogen in the first place.

The only way to really lower CO2 levels is to take lots of it *out* of natural cycles. Having it temporary in some invisible part of a cycle doesn't help.

What? Unless we send it into orbit, it's in the natural cycle. Of course it helps to sequester carbon however long in whatever form we can. In fact, the more invisible and especially long term processes like those of deep oceans would help immensely.

It took extreme circumstances (providing rapid enclosure of vegetable material, before it had the chance to rot, on a very large scale) to produce coal and oil. This took away CO2, and allowed for other natural circumstances. At the moment, we are almost finished bringing those deposits back into our environment, recreating the 'comfortable' warm earth from long ago. And we did it in a few years, not millions. Aren't we good?

I don't think with the masses of oil we've found that it could have been rapidly produced. Anoxic? Yes. Earth was warmer, but then again the moon was twice as close. Who knows what the sun was doing at that time? Also, we are finished bring the easiest stuff out, but I would hazard to state that most petroleum and pseudo-petroleum minerals that ever existed are left untouched. Theorizing that our release of carbon from its former sequestration will return the earth to a very warm wet place is wild speculation at best. It's a possibility, just as it might be that we'd all experience warmer winters, and slightly warmer wetter summers. This is not necessarily a bad change if it results in our needing less fuel in winter months, and better growing conditions for our crops. However, its a cosmic crap shoot, where the consequences of being wrong are dire indeed. Of course, most people believe that global warming wiped out New Orleans, rather than human stupidity. I expect they will over-react in fear as they've always done until our populations are once again decimated and those that remain will begin overpopulating the planet once again.