IN KING CANUT'S FOOTSTEPS

The 11^th¾century English (Danish-Viking) King Canut replaced direct plunder by a more efficiently administered and ruinous tax (Danegeld) imposed on the peasantry. He is also remembered for having the sea whipped with chains after it sank some of his ships in a storm. I propose that he be canonized for both deeds as the patron saint of the Holy Church of Watermelons [AtE Feb 90].

As the High Holy Holiday of Earth Day approaches, and as the politicians meet at international conferences to decide who is to perform what dance to gain favor with the Green Church, take a look at how much CO² production they might at best control¾ even if they had the totalitarian power of Bush's buddy Butcher Deng or of Honorary Citizen of Texas and receiver of the keys to the City of Washington, D.C., Nicolae Ceausescu (see Rathole in Fort Freedom).

The upper layers of the sea act both as absorber and releaser of CO²; the same is true of vegetation, which absorbs it in photosyn-thesis (day) and releases it in respiration (night). These two com-prise 96% (!) of the CO² sources on the earth. The approximate CO² production and elimination is given in an IAEA publication (1) based on US EPA and Dutch government figures:

So George Canut Bush, Margaret Canut Thatcher and the other followers of their patron saint have a tiny fraction of their countries' individual contributions to a total of 4% for the entire globe to play with in order to forestall an utterly unproven danger. And play they will, always in Canute style: more taxes, more regulations, more utterly wasted bribes to the Third World (to stop deforestation), and more CO² in the lecture halls and from the printing presses.

Now just for consistency, compare this with the production of methane, also a "greenhouse gas," whose effect on temperature is estimated by the greenhouse gurus at about 20%, and which is in-creasing almost as fast (1.1 ppmv/yr) as CO² (1.5 ppmv/yr). Its main sink is chemical reactions in the atmosphere (97%), the rest is taken up by microorganisms in the soil. Here the total natural sources (wetland, termites, oceans, wild animals, lakes, tundra) amount to only 43%, with the majority of sources (57%) man-caused: cattle (40-110 mt/y, 16%), biomass burning (15%), rice paddies (15%), natural gas and mining losses (11%).