DEEPLY SHOCKING NEWS ON C02 EMISSIONS

Climate scientists have long feared that the oceans, which have been soaking up vast amounts of the carbon-dioxide that we have been pumping into the atmosphere, would reach the point where they had taken all they could take, and would start spitting it back. They would change from carbon-sinks to carbon-sources, and global-overheating would therefore accelerate. Now that process has begun, as the BBC World Service reports--forty years ahead of 'schedule.' This is the
Times' report on the same research findings. And the Guardian's, which is perhaps the best of the three. Australia's Courier Mail makes clearest the fact that the former sink is now a source, that the planet's ability to soak up our stupidity is coming to an end.

The Southern Ocean, the ocean that surrounds the Antarctic, accounts for 15% of the absorption, so the change is signicant. The fear is that all the world's oceans are not far behind in choking on our 9.2 billion tonnes per year of CO2 sewage. Other carbon-sinks also have the potential to turn to carbon-sources, or at very least cease to be sinks. Forests can absorb only so much (see the sidebar stories at the BBC site given above).

As this blog has often warned, things are going to get much worse much faster than the official line would have us believe. We are well past the point of no return. The most we can hope for now is to knock the top off the worst of the effects of this global Black Stuff insanity.

Meanwhile, from the Homer Simpson kingdom of General (which has made more planet-trashing machines than anyone else) there has been an announcement that a million fuel-cell vehicles might be rolling off their production-lines after 2012. That is the very same GM that a few years ago was boasting that it would have a million FCVs coming off those same mythical production-lines by 2010. Nice to see such planet-friendly honesty spilling from the honest mouths of honest-to-goodness peace-criminals.