As COVID and, thankfully, Dr. Fauci slowly recede from the U.S. headlines, the left is busily preparing its next freedom- and prosperity-destroying crisis.  This one will be climate change (erstwhile global warming), the crisis one can't escape or deny.  After all, there's no vaccine against that demonic molecule and destroyer of planets, carbon dioxide (CO2).  But is that really true?

What happens when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) meets seawater?  The answer is enormously important because the atmosphere and our oceans are so enormous.  The answer has two parts: 1) it dissolves in the water, and 2) it is transformed into rock — in fact, limestone (think White Cliffs of Dover here).

This answer offers enormous hope and optimism to a world that has been ground down and utterly depressed by a dystopian climatological future brought to us by the progressive, socialist left (and all that depression was before COVID).

The actual equation/chemical reaction is shown below:

The beauty of the process is that the reaction is driven to the right by the precipitation of its end products, calcium and magnesium carbonates, AKA limestone.  In other words, one titanic chemical sink exists in our oceans to suck and scrub CO2 out of our atmosphere.  No one ever told you about this?  Surprised?

A woke chemist associate acknowledged the truth of the reaction to me but then said we'd need enormous fountains spraying ocean water into the skies to increase the surface area for CO2 absorption.  He apparently felt good about the incalculable cost of such fountains until I mentioned one word: hurricanes.  It seems God thought of this issue ahead of him.  (You go, God.)  These goliath storms yearly increase the contact of seawater with the atmosphere by a trillion times.  Cost free.  And natural.

Some may also note that the above reaction generates two hydrogen ions (acid) and, having noted this, would jump to say that this natural process, when augmented by human-generated CO2, will poison our oceans.  This mindlessly ignores the gargantuan buffering capacity of our oceans, a capacity that neutralizes acid day after day, year after year, millennium after millennium.  All life would have ceased millions of years ago in the incredible vulcanism of the earth's past (now there's some CO2 generation) were this true.  (Nerd warning here — it also ignores the anions left behind by those inconvenient magnesium and calcium cations.)

I often think the Politburo in Beijing (a rather humorless bunch if ever there was one) goes to bed each night laughing itself to sleep after watching CNN — or, for that matter, PBS.  It must be true, side-splitting laughter over the sheer stupidity and myopia of the American and Western academic, media, and political elites, all endlessly clamoring for the West's deindustrialization.  I've heard that one official even keeps a framed lithograph in his bedroom of lemmings jumping off a cliff.  Lenin must still be chuckling endlessly in his grave over his insightful observation about useful idiots — and he didn't live long enough to see Gore and Kerry.

When I reflect on the sheer lunacy of the woke-ism of some of my neighbors and relatives in these times, I often am tempted to say to them, "You broke it (the West), you own it," and then to just sit back and watch the hell they've called into being.  But then I think of my child who will inherit the incalculable mess they would bequeath her to live her life.  And that is what generates in me, and millions like me, a ferocity they weren't counting on.  Game on.

Image: The White Cliffs of Dover by Immanuel Giel (with added text by A. Widburg).  CC BY-SA 3.0.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.