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Earth's Carbon
          
           To understand carbon dioxide, global warming and man's role in it we need to model Earth's carbon.  We can best do that with an inventory of the element alone rather than the oxide as carbon exists in several molecular forms with each having a different relative amount of the element.  
          In the top section of the model we show the amounts of carbon in the atmosphere, where it is the familiar dioxide. At the lowest levels of the atmosphere and in the soil it is found as carbohydrates, starch and cellulose in green plants.  Below soil, in deep earth, it is found as hydrocarbons in oil, gas, coal, tar sands and shales.  And, we deal with the amounts that change locations every year for the recent period for which data exists and because the modern era has more bearing on us than the distant past or future.

          These figures are largely from "The Carbon Dioxide Question" by George M. Woodwell in the Scientific American publication "Energy and Environment," 1980 edition.  We have translated his figures, originally in grams, to "gigatons," billions of tons as this has become the common unit of discussion in the controversy and we express the quantities exponentially.  Note that 10^9 means 1 followed by nine zeros or one billion, 1,000,000,000, prefix "giga."  This is a huge quantity, but the important points will be how these change and what will it mean?
The Atmosphere

1978 Atmosphere - 700 x 10^9 tons   
         2007          "        -  847 x 10^9  "
          
 Contributions and Losses
 From man - 5 x 10^9 tons/yr    
Forest decay - 6 x 10^9 tons/yr
Respiration - 50 x 10^9 tons/yr
                  Other Sources -  7 x 10^9 tons/yr
                  The Seas -  2.5 x 10^9 tons/yr
                  Photosynthesis - -50 x 10^9 tons/yr
                The Surface, Soil to ten feet.

       Vegetation - 827 X 10^9 tons             

        Humus  - 3000 X 10^9 tons                        		           The Sea - above 100 feet

  Marine Life - 2 x 10^9 tons
  Dissolved Organics - 30 x 10^9 tons
                      Deep Subsoil - Inactive

     Fossil Fuels - 5,000 x 10^9 tons 		       Below Thermocline - cold water

Dissolved Organics - 3000 x 10^9 tons

Deep Ocean 38,000,000 x 10^9 tons
     Below 5,000 ft. - no known carbon    Ocean Bottom Sediments - 16,000 feet

Carbonates - 20,000,000 x 10^9 tons

A Serious Question
        The above translation from grams to tons is from the only source of its kind we have been able to find and there is a problem.  The amount of carbon in the 1978 atmosphere is wrong for 2007 given man's activity and an unidentified source here noted as "Other Sources."  A calculation in the next paragraph deals with it.  We salvage the data for today by assuming the additional carbon in the system has all come from fossil fuel, the sea and vegetation, splitting unknown production in the ratio they exist to account for the differences.  This is a technique may not be appropriate, but it seemed reasonable to us.

         Earth is a sphere with a surface area found by 4pi x r^2 and is 2.02 x 10^8 mi^2.  Every square foot of air has about a long, or metric, ton of air on it and each square mile is 5280 ft^2 so we find  each square mile has 2.7 x 10^7 tons of air on it.  The total weight, or mass in metric tons of air is 5.45 x 10^15 tons by (mass per mi^2) x (miles^2) and this translates to 5.45 x 10^6 gigatons of air.               
          This air is now 0.00038 carbon dioxide or 3429 gigatons of CO2 which is 27.2% carbon or 847 gigatons of carbon having grown by 147 gigatons in the 29 years since the data were compiled in 1978.  The mean annual addition has been 5.44 gigatons and that is in good agreement with the literature. But, this outcome has been interpreted strangely:

          According to James Hansen, Ph.D., Director of NASA's Goddard Space Laboratory at Columbia University, man-made CO2 in the air remains for 500 years.  While these figures show a net gain we believe the gain is due to the natural absorbers or "sinks," acting normally rather than their being a significant difference between CO2's coming from nature or man's burning fossil fuels.

          The early 19th idea that man-made chemicals were different from "natural" atoms and molecules has been shown to be false in many experiments and demonstrations.  We do not believe in Vitalism, intelligent control of molecules by tiny pilots or Divine Intervention in chemistry.
          
          It would appear all of the man-made CO2 has gone into the biome as the only part of it that is tracked very carefully has increased by an amount consistent with the new CO2 in the air.  It appears the biome has adapted to the increased supply.  Crop yields are increasing by 0.3% per part per million of CO2 increase which correlates well with the increase.

          The atmosphere has the smallest part of Earth's carbon compared to the lands and seas.  It took only a very small part of the existing elemental carbon to make the 12% CO2 atmosphere of early Earth.  Today the sum total of carbon around and in the planet is 5.8 x 10^16 tons of which the atmosphere has 0.0012%.  Any natural event severely disrupting carbon now at rest in the seas, soil as carbonates and fossil hydrocarbons could render our atmosphere unbreathable. However, given the amount of time this planet has been at rest the chance of any such event coming from within seems remote unless time has been working against us, "winding the joy buzzer."

         The catastrophe would most likely have to be a storm of volcanos around the "Ring of Fire" surrounding the Pacific Ocean.  It is thought that such a cataclysm gave our atmosphere the 12% carbon dioxide atmosphere it had 1.5 billion years ago. That brought on the age of green plants as a result of nature playing with every combination of matter and energy in eons of time.
The Mysteries
            We know that more CO2 is getting into the air than we can account for with known plant and animal respiration, decay and natural processes.  The most likely source is the seas as we have a marine CO2 cycle of phytoplankon that is both immense and hard to track.  However, these process only take place in the top 100 feet of seas that have an average depth of 16,000 feet.
   
          Below 100 feet seawater is very cold, usually at four Celsius degrees, the temperature where water is most dense.  Seawater at this temperature dissolves CO2 readily and while some escapes to the upper layer at the "thermocline" boundry it seems that an equal amount enters the lower levels for no net change.

           At the beginning of the 20th century the atmosphere had 280 ppm, parts per million, of CO2 and at the end of that century it had 380 ppm, a gain of one ppm per year.  Where the atmosphere has a mass of 5.45 x 10^15 tons every "ppm" would be  5.45 x 10^9 ton, and man has been making almost exactly that same number of tons per year since the mid-20th century with nature adding another 180 x 10^9 tons so much new CO2 is coming from somewhere not yet identified by science.  It seems highly likely that the source is the sea as it is the only source big enough to account for the huge difference and hard eoungh to track that the question could continue without answer.

           Man can tolerate up to 15,000 ppm of CO2 so at the rate of gaining one ppm per year we have 14,620 years left before we find ourselves in an atmosphere we cannot breathe.  Although, it would happen so slowly we would likely adapt and produce a new species of man more like a green plant than not.  Could it be that our destiny is to be green, not have an alimentary canal with our only needs sunlight and water plus a few minerals?  With nature doing every possible experiment over infinite time nothing is too bizarre.