Oxygen Depletion

In addition to the natural forces at work "out there", wee have a lot of man-made junk going on right here. We have no control over what our sun will do, how unseen asteroids or brown dwarfs may impact us down the road. But what goes on here on this planet called Earth definitely comes under our stewardship responsibilities. And we're slowly (Al Gore might say fast) cutting off our oxygen supply. Oxygen depletion is critical to our life!



We have a 21% oxygen mix in our atmosphere and if that were to drop to 14%, we'd simply lose consciousness and at an 11%, we die! Conversely, our atmosphere has a low CO2 mix of0.038%. Not much, eh? If that was to increase to just 2.5-3.0%% we'd die (depending upon how long such a situation existed.



We humanoids have two lungs and in like fashion so does the earth.



The earth breathes in CO2 and exhales the vital oxygen that we need to sustain out life. One of those lungs are our plants, trees, shrubs, and grasses. The process through which they covnert bad stuff into good stuff is called PHOTOSYNTHENSIS.



The other lung is the ocean and it transfers the bad stuff to the good stuff through a process called PHYTOPLANKTON.



The bad news is that we're poisoning both lungs. We're cutting down our rain forests, we're destroying our landscape so we can put in houses, and shopping centers, and we're generally poisoning the rest with various fertilizers. And, we're pollluting our oceans and killing off the plankton that's needed to perform the work of converting CO2 into oxygen. In fact we've got a couple of total KILL ZONES where nothing lives such as the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland.



The mouth of the Mississippi is now seeing a seasonal dead zone and the water off the Florida peninsula are producing less and less fishing opportunities. Hello America! Hello world! This is no golden world that we're creating.



We're fast approaching a tipping point from which they will be no return, no opportunity to turn things around and when that comes it will be fast- much faster than we imagine. The canaries are beginning to die. The 2003 European heat wave went largely unnoticed here in America. More than 14,000 died as a result of the heat wave. That's 5x the number of people killed in the Twin Towers tragedy.



We have a two-edged sword being swung our way: from without and from within- both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. We have some control over the former. I suggest we begin taking a serious look-see at what needs to be and the sooner the better. The latter factor bears watching and monitoring, but that and prayer is about all I can suggest.