this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
57 points (89.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43857 readers
1836 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why would I have to bury it?
When plants break down they release CO2. It needs to never decompose to remove carbon dioxide.
How come the same doesn't apply to animals and oxygen?
https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/app/uploads/sites/17/2020/06/carbon-cycle-1024x1024.jpg
The issue is that we have artificially accelerated the return of carbon to the cycle by burning coal and oil.
Because we breathe in O2 and breathe out CO2. The Oxygen is attaching to Carbon and leaving our body with every breath.
This is the opposite of plants, which breathe in CO2 and breathe out O2, storing that Carbon.
That said, I'm sure we also release a lot of CO2 when we decompose. Worst of both worlds, really.
That's what I mean. If mishandling a plant's death is bad for us, then handling an animal's death in the same way should be good for us, right?
Unfortunately not. While animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, both plants and animals release essentially the components upon death and decay, and these components, mostly carbon dioxide, are already overly represented due to fossil fuels consumption.
Considering the Earth has been around for a billion or so years, I can't understand how these two circumstances combined haven't turned Earth into a one gas system by now. I'm not a global warming skeptic, but this part just seems off.
Until we started burning fuels, it balanced itself. What we call fossil fuels is literally the buried carbon of life that came before. The stuff the natural process already dealt with once before. We brought it back, and now it all has to be reprocessed and put back in the ground or deep ocean where we got it or there's no balance in the system and it will take very long times for natural processes to bring it back to normal levels, maybe never.
Imagine a full bath tub with the drain open and the water running., Water is flowing in and out at an even rate, meaning the tub is draining but stays pretty much full. Now imagine somebody took the drain pipe and routed it back into the tub. Now the drain has to deal with that water again, and the new water coming through the tap.