So this is a part of the environmental mechanisms connected to global desertification, oceanic acidification and global warming that the conventional media has done little to educate the public about. That is that there is a natural carbon cycle of which carbon dioxide and methane are a normal part of our ecosystem's normal cycles. And that there is the release of long sequestered carbon, from fossil fuels, that is not a normal part of our ecosystem's cycles.

    It starts with photosynthesis, when plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugar(food). This process mainly uses atmospheric carbon dioxide and ground water to produce sugar and as waste products it releases oxygen. When we as humans then consume plants for their sugars, our normal cellular respiration breaks down the sugar releasing the carbon as carbon dioxide, which we exhale back into the air. This is part of the normal carbon cycle, by normal I mean that the natural environment has a host of mechanisms to keep this balanced and moving through a cycle.

    As a secondary process to the normal carbon cycle, some of the carbon is utilized in cellular compounds that will decompose with the cell. A fair deal of this carbon will return to the atmosphere as well, via decomposition. But some small bit of it might be trapped underground, sequestered, and leave the cycle. Which is good, because this slow loss of carbon is offset by volcanic activity which occasionally releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane(among other compounds) into the atmosphere.

This is the way things should happen.

    Unfortunately the way things happen now with fossil fuels is that all the carbon that has slowly been sequestered over hundreds of millions of years is now being released very rapidly into the atmosphere. This is “Out of Cycle” carbon, and it is really bad.

“Why,” you ask, “is it so bad if there are all these natural systems to turn carbon and water into sugars?”

    It's bad, because it upsets the balance. Previous to the use of fossil fuels the earth had achieved a sort of long term parity with the amount of carbon released from volcanism and the amount of carbon sequestered by the ecological carbon cycle. The earths systems simply do not have the capacity to deal with so much “Out of Cycle” carbon emissions, they are simply overwhelmed. To compound the problem we, as modern humans, have been destroying the environment at an amazing rate, and in so doing destroying the very buffers that would normally attempt to counteract a rise in carbon. So by dumping so much “Out of Cycle” carbon in the atmosphere, and then destroying the natural systems that utilize and sequester that carbon, we are accelerating two types of impending global catastrophes, global warming and global desertification.

    In the last three decades we have just begun to pay the relatively small early costs for hundreds of years of this practice. I think it is unlikely that we as a people will be able to avoid paying higher costs in the future, but as individuals, there may be something you can do to insulate yourself from the impact of these costs.