Nations That Debate Coal Use Export It to Feed China’s Need

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/world/asia/22fossil.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Booming%20China%20coal&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 10:38 AM
Subject: re: Nations That Debate Coal Use Export It to Feed China’s Need
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   The world as we know it--the world in which dinosaurs and mammoths and humans evolved--was made possible in the Carboniferous era. Between about 350million and 290million years ago, gigatons of carbon were pulled out of the atmosphere by photosynthetic plants and sequestered ultimately as coal.  This raised the pH of our oceans and changed the climate of the planet.  With the Industrial Revolution, we began to undo this, pumping carbon from the fossil pool into our atmosphere. If we continue on this course, we will create a new, warmer more acidic world. Interesting life-forms will probably evolve to inhabit it, but humans are unlikely to survive to meet them.

Barry Levine