Again, the models
do not factor in many of the underwater pehenomena that involve CO2 or heating. This is not so much because they don't want to, it is because they don't have reliable data on the extent of these influencing factors. If powers that be want to make a decision to action based on what data they have, and they can muster the political power to do so, then so it goes.
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Originally Posted by livescience
Humans “are having a strong effect on global geochemical cycles, but it does not compare at all to the advent of oxygenic photosynthesis,” said Katrina Edwards, a geo-microbiologist at the University of Southern California (USC). “That was a catastrophic environmental change that occurred before 2.2 billion years ago [which] wreaked its full wrath on the Earth system.”
Edwards studies another way life impacts the planet in largely unseen ways. She focuses on how microbes living on the murky ocean floor transform minerals through a kind of underwater alchemy. For example, microbes facilitate a chemical process called oxidation, whereby oxygen in sea water combines with magma oozing up from the ocean floor to change, for example, one form of iron into another.
“These [microbes] are completely off radar in terms of global biogeochemical cycles,” Edwards told LiveScience. "We don't consider them as part of the Earth system right now in our calculation about what's going on, and we don't consider them in terms of how the Earth system will move forward into the future."
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