Reply #64: "Short term thinking for small minds" [View All]

[Solon]

Thats what I call it, people damn near never understand how many things effect them unless they are affected directly. Most of our food production in the United States is predicated on Temperate climates, climates that seem to be lacking in rain lately(Midwest drought). The rainforests of the equator, along with the supporting animals in them, provide a great deal of oxygen to the atmosphere. This is true of all forests of the world. Along with that, algae provides the rest, but how many of these organisms survive when we dump mercury, animal waste, and other toxins into the oceans? Basic chemistry here, oxygen combines with other elements all the time, the ONLY reason why we have free oxygen in our atmosphere at all is because of plants and algae, and many animals support the proliferation of plants as well. Destroy these ecosystems, and we destroy ourselves. Some are extremely delicate, having one or two species providing the "backbone" for the rest of the ecosystem.

Another example is permafrost, which serves the purpose of trapping billions of tons of methane, in a largely inert form. Now thanks to human influenced global climate change, this permafrost is melting, freeing these billions of tons of Methane, a greenhouse gas worse than C02, effecting every single biosystem on the planet.