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Hot Water, Hot Earth
Calopteryx notes a New Scientist article on the discovery of "supercritical" water emerging from a vent in the Atlantic Ocean at 407 deg. C (765 deg. F). One of its discoverers actually said, "It's water, but not as we know it"; it's the hottest water ever found on earth. The cause seems to be a huge bubble of magma beneath the ocean floor, 3 km below the sea surface. Meanwhile Nymz shares a journal entry on a hot spot on land: a 2-acre patch in Ventura county, in California, that has heated up to 433 deg. C (812 deg. F). Here geologists blame buried hydrocarbons burning as they get access to air through cracks in the ground. That high temperature was measured a foot below the ground surface.
You do realize that there's a difference between the roles of natural cycles, and millions of people burning hydrocarbons right?
Perhaps I should explain. If I put a 100 pound weight on one side of scale and 100 pounds of gold on the other the scale should stay balanced right? I mean assuming this is scale is working like a scale should. Now suppose I put just one ounce of gold extra on the scale. It's just one ounce of gold right? Compared to the 100 pounds that's like a shaving. Shouldn't make much difference, but now the scale's off balance.
That's what's going on in the world. Sure all these natural cycles are inputs. And what we humans do may be dwarfed by the natural cycles. But the natural cycles were more or less balanced (at least on a human time scale). In the past hundred years or so we've added quite a bit of extra input to one side of the scale. What we've added is minuscule compared to the natural cycles, but remember this is a balance that we're monkeying with. And the stakes are high enough that we might want to err on the side of caution.
what a bullshit notion, that nature or the earth is in balance. The earth has been far, far hotter and far far colder and far, far wetter and far, far drier in the past. Even the Sahara dessert was heavily vegetated not even 12,000 years ago. The oceans have been rising since the last ice age.