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Comment by parksy | Hacker News Reader

No for sure I'm strongly of the mind that greenhouse gases do their job in creating a greenhouse, which increases temperature over time (which means more energy in the global system, which means everything from stronger storms to longer droughts...)

As a layperson I've read about the Vostok cores and understand how closely correlated CO2 concentrations and dust are as proxies for global temperature. Also I've read up on how phytoplankton essentially are the reason we have oxygen to breathe, so there are risks like ocean acidification that could kill us all regardless of temperature.

If some of those little buggers can give us an out or at least give us a longer grace period to sort our stuff out, I want in.

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Anything that needs carbon in its metabolism will, naturally, use what's available.

Biological systems are tricky, though. If you dump a huge amount of fruit into a forest, the animals will eat it and grow in number; then, so will their predators. Animals who don't eat the fruit but are eaten by the predators will be in a bad spot. That leads to consequences all over the food web. Plus, dumping large amounts every year also changes the soil chemistry and changes what grows there.

Similarly, higher CO2 decreases water pH (more acidic) and can cause fast-growing algae to bloom (which decreases light penetration to the water beneath, and the algae may produce toxins).

Even when high-level equilibria are reached (which they eventually would, one way or another), they won't necessarily be the same or come pleasantly.

(edit: but I almost forgot - it would be mindblowing if it turned out the Earth was somehow tuned to bring itself back to some average. The millions of different chemical combinations and seasonal variations all mediated by the ecosystem - which seems rather fragile but what if it was brutally rigid. I guess it's had a couple of billion years to gear itself up?)

It basically already is tuned to maintain an average, just as a buffer solution can oppose changes in pH. It maintains a temperature level above what we'd otherwise expect, and our unnatural oxygen atmosphere.

If we do nothing, it is unlikely to run away, but it will take rather longer than a human timescale to put it back to a comfortable level, and there could be a lot of damage over the next century.

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