Marine Life on a Warming Planet

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/opinion/marine-life-on-a-warming-planet.html?_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 7:07 AM
Subject: re: Marine Life on a Warming Planet
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

     While it is urgent that the world "reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide", that cannot be enough. Even if we were miraculously to reduce worldwide industrial emissions to zero there would still remain the burden of carbon dioxide that we have pumped into our atmosphere and oceans since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.  If Earth is to remain inhabitable, we have to capture and sequester that carbon.  The only technology at hand that can do this is photosynthesis. Worldwide, minute by minute and year by year, photosynthetic plants strip twenty times as much carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and oceans as ALL human activities contribute. In time, of course, this carbon is reliberated when that plant material is burned or digested. What we have to do is take some of that plant material out of the carbon cycle as biochar.

   It is in our power today to start repairing our atmosphere and oceans. If we don't, there may be no future generation to blame us for our failure. 

Barry Haskell Levine