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What If We Burned All The World's Fossil Fuels?

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auntblabby
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12 Aug 2018, 5:28 am

^^^I wonder what good, in the grand scheme of things, those little blighters do?



kokopelli
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12 Aug 2018, 12:43 pm

auntblabby wrote:
^^^I wonder what good, in the grand scheme of things, those little blighters do?


They probably help get rid of vegetative matter.

When I was a kid, I was very fascinated by ants. I used to stand there and watch them and got bit frequently.

Sixty years ago at a church picnic when I was about two or three years old, I sat down in an ant bed to watch the ants. I got so many bites that day that they took me to the emergency room to be checked out. The last time someone asked me about that was only about five or ten years ago!



kokopelli
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12 Aug 2018, 12:53 pm

I've been tempted to try this out:



auntblabby
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12 Aug 2018, 10:03 pm

^^^that is fascinating :idea: would you say ants were a hobby of yours?



naturalplastic
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12 Aug 2018, 11:29 pm

auntblabby wrote:
^^^I wonder what good, in the grand scheme of things, those little blighters do?


Eat plants, and scavenge dead animals and in general work the biomass back into the soil for renewal.

Ants are pretty obvious in their role in the machinery of the woods that you may hike in. Theyre not like say: blood sucking ticks, that are less obvious in what role they play in the ecology.

Some ants farm by raising crops of fungus that grow on the leaves they gather. Other ants are cowboys that herd aphids. And you have predatory ants. A junior highschool buddy from Costa Rica told me about the army ants in his country that would march through the woods in long columns by the thousands devouring everything in their path, and about how he would....drip lighter fluid along the columns and set the whole army of ants on fire. I guess that's how they get their kicks in Central America. :lol:



auntblabby
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12 Aug 2018, 11:37 pm

well the, skeeters surely can't have any real utility.



Vonu
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13 Aug 2018, 3:56 pm

Spiderpig wrote:
We won't burn all of them, but we will burn all the ones that can be extracted profitably. To know the consequences, just wait and see.


The consequences so far is that we keep going back to dry holes that aren't dry anymore, as they would remain if they were just small deposits of dead dinosaurs.
One has to wonder how long we will have to deal with the political ramifications of science driven by people's paychecks instead of the actual data.



Vonu
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13 Aug 2018, 3:58 pm

auntblabby wrote:
well the, skeeters surely can't have any real utility.


Mosquitos are the ultimate proof that life's number one purpose is reproduction.



kokopelli
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13 Aug 2018, 5:13 pm

Vonu wrote:
Spiderpig wrote:
We won't burn all of them, but we will burn all the ones that can be extracted profitably. To know the consequences, just wait and see.


The consequences so far is that we keep going back to dry holes that aren't dry anymore, as they would remain if they were just small deposits of dead dinosaurs.
One has to wonder how long we will have to deal with the political ramifications of science driven by people's paychecks instead of the actual data.


It should be obvious that over time we have increased our ability to get more oil or gas from a well with more modern techniques.

It's difficult to imagine a dry hole becoming less dry. A dry hole, after all, is a hole that never produced anything. You probably mean a well that is no longer producing. Such a well would normally be capped. I assume that it would be cheaper to drill a new well than to try to get through the cap.



Mythos
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13 Aug 2018, 11:32 pm

We won't, because we'll either be dead from our new lovely Venus like planet or extinct in the midst of thermonuclear war before then.



Spiderpig
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14 Aug 2018, 4:35 pm

Vonu wrote:
The consequences so far is that we keep going back to dry holes that aren't dry anymore, as they would remain if they were just small deposits of dead dinosaurs.


Those are the actions. For the consequences, we’ll have to wait and see.

Vonu wrote:
One has to wonder how long we will have to deal with the political ramifications of science driven by people's paychecks instead of the actual data.


I wonder what you’re implying. That oil is actually renewable at a non-negligible rate compared with consumption? That would require our well-established understanding of how it formed to be false, in addition to an alternate, many orders of magnitude faster process no hint of which has ever been observed. Or do you mean that reserves are simply much bigger than we know? Well, the funny thing is that even if both hypotheses were true, with our nice habit of increasing consumption in a roughly exponential (in the strict mathematical sense, i.e., taking approximately the same time to double it over and over again) fashion over time, they still wouldn’t last that long.


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