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Your main source for oxygen would be... what, if there were no vegetation and oceans and sun in existence for the purpose of photosynthesis?
No, the biological "purpose" of photosynthesis is strictly to synthesize sugars to be used for energy by the same photosynthetic organism. In other words, it's to convert light energy to chemical energy. Oxygen is a waste product. Photosynthetic organisms don't care (and are unable to care) about/what happens to the oxygen they produce. Aerobic organisms (ones that use diatomic oxygen to produce energy) were able to develop since photosynthetic organisms increased the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere. The biological reason they developed was because aerobic biochemical pathways are generally more efficient than anaerobic biochemical pathways.
Meanwhile, stars (that includes the Sun) don't exist to beam light to the chloroplasts of plants on Earth. The sun doesn't care (and is unable to care) about what happens to the energy it generates. And once the star dies, so will life that remains on the planet.
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Originally Posted by DRob4JC
I will amend my statement about "sustaining each other" - in that we don't sustain the water, plants, sun, etc... but they do sustain us.
You're getting closer to some truths. The Earth's orientation relative to our solar system's star allowed for much of the planet to have liquid water at its surface for much of its history (but not all of it). Organisms (alive and/or extinct) that we study today were able to develop thanks to the organic (chemically speaking) soup that was able to come together thanks to water existing in a liquid state on the planet.
These pieces (stars, planets, water molecules, organisms) of the cosmos don't exist intrinsically to serve the purpose of anything. That doesn't mean that things in the universe aren't connected to each other (in fact, everything in the cosmos is connected, in some respect).
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Originally Posted by DRob4JC
Biblically speaking, the vegetation was created before humans and animals, as well as the sunlight, and the water... everything humans needed to sustain themselves was put in place before humans were created. And again, it is not by accident or evolutionary process, but by design.
So, obviously, humans weren't "created" -- but let me speak on your the bolded text. It can so easily be falsifiable if you think about it for a few seconds. What happens if, tomorrow, a meteor large enough slams into the Earth and causes a cataclysm? It happened before, where 75% of life on Earth went extinct because of it. You claim there is a solution or something already "put in place" for the humans species to utilize to prevent its extinction by this meteor that will strike tomorrow. So what is it? And it's apparently something that humans 50 years ago, 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago could have utilized.
For decades, we’ve been pumping billions of tons of harmful greenhouse gases into the air, and for decades plants have been obligingly sucking it back out again. In fact, a good 45% of the carbon dioxide we emit is absorbed back into the biosphere by the world's vegetation and oceans.
... Between 2002 and 2014, plants appeared to have upped their game, pulling more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than in previous decades.
... The experts were puzzled. Human activity was still polluting the air, but the amount of man-made carbon that lingered there appeared to be in decline. “That portion that stays in the atmosphere – that’s called the airborne fraction," said Trevor Keenan, co-author of the report, "and that has reduced by about 20% over the last 15 years.”
Experts can't figure it out.
Later in the article, they claim people will be polluting faster, and plants will not be able to keep up. How do they know? Because they obviously do not have a clue about what the vegetation is doing now.
And of course, they mention that "climate change" is still happening... They have no clue.
Umm depending on plants we are removing at alarming rates world wide and algae that is dying off due to pollution is not exactly smart. Oh and climate change is happening, the only real debate is how much mankind has to do with it.
This is a total aside in a whacky thread in case anyone is actually interested in real science--there are an estimated 10^31 total viral particles on Earth, which would be more than 100 million more times the amount of stars in the universe. The ocean contains a massive sink of viruses--1L of ocean water has over 100 billion viruses in it. It is believe that ocean viruses may turn over as much as 150 gigatons of carbon per year—more than 30 times the standing abundance of carbon in marine plankton.
When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, the water becomes more acidic and the ocean’s pH (a measure of how acidic or basic the ocean is) drops. Even though the ocean is immense, enough carbon dioxide can have a major impact. In the past 200 years alone, ocean water has become 30 percent more acidic—faster than any known change in ocean chemistry in the last 50 million years.
Perhaps you just don't like sites that tell the facts about the effects of global warming, or maybe you think you are smarter than the many thousands of scientists that are actually studying the subject.
The Ph of the ocean averages around 8.3 ish. There isn't enough acid product to pour into the ocean if we tried to make it acidic. All we can do, if we work very hard for millions of years is maybe slightly reduce the alkalinity of the oceans by less than a few fractions of a Ph.
You aren't acidifying an alkaline when adding acid unless it becomes acid or can become acid based on what you are adding, you can only make oceans less alkaline. Apparently NASA and friends launched a satellite to measure ocean acid levels - New Satellite Maps Reveal Global Ocean Alkalinity | Geography, Geophysics | Sci-News.com any scientist will tell you the ocean is alkaline, measuring the acidic quality of the ocean will always be meaningless, it isn't and never can be an acid.
The use of acid is to scare people, most don't know what a base or alkaline means.
Our oceans are very alkaline, aside from an occasional shellfish spot in an estuary, they always will be. There isn't enough acidic compound in the world to turn the oceans acid. The best you could do is to make the oceans less alkaline, and that would take million and millions of years to be noticeable. Coral reefs are just fine, check recent data, coral produces acid around themselves to protect from the alkaline ocean. The coral is acidic, making oceans acidic while not possible, would be helpful to coral reefs.
Scientists have known for a long time that there is a carbon cycle, it is not some giant mystery like the OP seems to think.
The problem is balance, in the time from the start of human civilization leading up to the industrial revolution the system was in relative balance. That simply means that a near equal amount of Co2 was produced as was consumed.
Post industrial revolution human activity has slightly altered the balance so that each year slightly more Co2 is produced than consumed, which adds up over time. The majority of Co2 is still produced by natural forces, the problem is ~6% of the output is now produced by burning sequestered carbon based fuel that would have otherwise remained sealed in the Earth's crust. That ~6% is enough to tilt the balance of the cycle. The evidence of this is both the atmospheric concentration of Co2 is going up (>400ppm now) AND we know what the isotopic signature of Co2 produced by human burning of fossil fuel is, and the percentage of the atmospheric Co2 that matches that signature is also going up.
All of this should be fairly obvious, if I have a bucket with a hole in it that drains 1 liter of water per second and a hose pumping 1 liter of water per second into the bucket, the bucket never overflows. If I increase the hose's output by 6%, after a while the bucket will overflow.
And before people start jumping down my throat for simply laying out the science, I do not think this problem is going to be solved by knee jerk abandoning fossil fuels or legislating them out of existence.
Umm depending on plants we are removing at alarming rates world wide and algae that is dying off due to pollution is not exactly smart. Oh and climate change is happening, the only real debate is how much mankind has to do with it.
It's cold in south Texas today... climate change just happened.
Another term needs to be used for whatever you are talking about. Global warming didn't make the cut over the long haul.
The whole cycle that is in play... we produce carbon dioxide, and plants absorb it... the plants produce oxygen and we take that in... that is straight from God. No man created that. It wasn't some random act of explosive creation. The scientists were able to see the process and explain it, but God implemented it.
Climate change isn't a good argument for creationism, it doesn't necessarily matter who or what created the universe, you may have and believe in your faith but your fate can be guided by another hand and God cannot or will not change it. We, as an intelligent species may not have the ultimate understanding of our sciences that God has, but if He created the sciences, then He will allow them to determine our fate. Physics and mechanics are at play, the balance of nature and our environment has existed for millions of years, the earth has experienced transitions throughout it's history from ice ages to warming. The problem with your theory that plants can balance the carbon surplus is the interference by man. For millions of years the oceans and plants have been able to sequester carbon dioxide through natural evolution, but today, and over the past few hundred years, man has simultaneously released sequestered CO2 (oil, coal, wood) and at the same time defoliated large swaths of land, especially in the tropics where it is most efficient. At the same time, we're probably going through a warming cycle that began tens of thousands of years ago. Rather than wait and pray for God to save us, what if He created us with the wisdom of a parent? What if part of His plan was to give us the intelligence to learn to save ourselves?
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They have no clue.
