Carbon Irony

We are all carbon based life forms - you, me, birds, lobsters, zebra and bees. It's ironic then that carbon has come to represent one of our most pressing planetary issues. You see in it's dioxide form it's a by product of life. Our planet must be able to metabolize it or we overload the system and bad things start to happen. The system self corrects to eliminate all the deposits ( we are these deposits in this sense) in various ways including dropping it into the oceans and ground. Nothing new here, except that it appears we had a pretty profound misunderstanding of how that takes place it seems in the sea.

I read an interesting article in a recent Economist about the work of Dr. Jiao Nianzhi and his work to find out more about AAPB's (aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophic bacteria). Check out the Economist here if you want to read it yourself. Anyway, my one sentence summary for those not inclined to get a science brain cramp is this: there appears to be another planetary level layer at work in how carbon is removed from earth and this guy has found it and is investigating it.

Hmmm. Kind of makes you think doesn't it ? Global warming and the arguments it creates on all sides develop quite a lot of heat (that one is free for you). And yet there appear to be entire aspects of the system that we don't yet understand. How about we funnel our energies into figuring this thing out, then decide - with all the right information - what needs to be done.

Thank you Dr. Nianzhi as sometimes we need to be reminded that we should always ask what it is that we don't know before jumping to conclusions.