Talk:Carbon cycle re-balancing

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[edit] Proposed deletion

I think Plumbago had a point about the first version of this text, and am sorry I did not get to comment or improve it before it was deleted. But I disagree about this version: I think its OK and would like to leave it in place to give others an opportunity to comment. 'Woolly' is not a definitive criticism of a concept: freedom, truth and justice could also be labelled 'woolly' - and one could argue that re-balancing the carbon cycle is of comparable importance to the prosperity of the human race. I believe 're-balancing the carbon cycle' is a much better defined concept than 'sustainability' and would argue that both concepts belong more to the social sciences than the natural sciences. Greendale4.

Hi Greendale4. Sorry that you missed the first deletion of this article. It was actually dealt with and deleted much more efficiently than I thought it would be.

Regarding the current article, my complaint about it being "woolly" is really down to this concept of "rebalancing". To me, "rebalancing" sounds like adjusting CO₂ fluxes until they balance. In reality it's not a balancing act, it's simply a reduction in fluxes period. True, one can consider trying to trap carbon in trees, etc. as being an a means of decreasing atmospheric CO₂ without decreasing emissions, but it's not something that's seriously considered as a major player in controlling atmospheric concentrations (as far as I'm aware). As your own examples illustrate, controlling emissions is the name of the game.

On your other point about sustainability, I agree that a lot of rubbish is spouted on this subject, with activities being claimed as "sustainable" that are anything but (e.g. I just heard on the news some natural gas company describing extraction in Indonesia as "sustainable"). However, to me sustainability is a pretty straightforward concept : can I do what I'm doing now for an indefinite period of time? Rebalancing, by contrast, isn't so simple. Not least because (again) it implies adjusting fluxes when reducing emissions is what's going to happen.

If you can improve the article along the lines I'm suggesting above, please do. At the moment I'm still not convinced that it's a coherent concept. I think carbon cycle issues are covered much better elsewhere, and less confusingly. Still, I'm happy to engage on this one. I may post a mention of this article over at carbon cycle to see if we can get more interest here.

Cheers, --Plumbago 21:58, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for a thoughtful comment. Not knowing about CO2 fluxes, I am not liable to this interpretation of the term. What seems important to me about carbon cycle re-balancing is its usefulness as a label for group environmental policies. It both groups them together and explains why they matter. The scientific content of the entry was not intended to make a contribution to the subject. It was written to summarise the context for a group of policies. I hope that I and others will find time to explain the policy group which comes under this heading. They can also be described as 'green' policies but detaches them from their justification. Re 'Sustainable development', I like your definition much better than the always-quoted and always-meaningless Bruntland definition (do the 'needs' of our generation or future generations include an MPV for each family member?). But one often hears policies described as 'unsustainable' because the speaker wants them to cease when they have no relationship whatsoever to how long they could be continued, or indeed to any facts from the social or natural sciences. Greendale4. 7 June.

If "carbon cycle rebalancing" is a phrase being used by some identifable groups/individuals to brand some group of policies then there's justfication for an article explaining this as a phrase, similar to contraction and convergence or Clean Development Mechanism. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a phrase that has any significant usage. A quick google pulled up Wikipedia articles as the top few entries, including deleted articles. As with all Wikipedia articles, you need to cite some sources to back it up. That lone web page isn't really sufficient.

On the details of the article, I think the present text is scientifically dubious. I don't like that list of reservoirs; the biosphere intersects the ocean, land and atmosphere; the Earth is the whole shebang, surely, probably mean lithosphere. Also, since when has the carbon cycle been in balance? If you define balance as being no change in the reservoir sizes over time, then there's probably never been balance to rebalance, no?

Of course, these details aren't really the issue, the question is whether the phrase has enough usage to justify an entry. I suggest it doesn't. Deditos 12:37, 8 June 2006 (UTC).