Greetings. I just got back from a bike ride. I changed shirts, but this is fresh in my mind. I don't want to lose my train of thought.

So I'm going to talk today about the Carbon Pulse, featured in our little animated movie, The Great Simplification.

We are all alive during a few hundred year period out of the

300,000 years that our species has been Homo sapiens, where we are drawing down ancient carbon

10 to 20 million times faster than it was sequestered.

We don't think about it, we don't talk about it.

But what is the carbon pulse and what is the shape of the carbon pulse viewed from a long-term perspective or from a couple hundred year perspective, is the shape a preordained

conclusion or can the shape be changed? That's what I'd like to speculate on today.

So the carbon is in concentrated form. Oil and gas, which were algae, phytoplankton

diatoms in ancient seas and oceans that died, went to the bottom, and over millions, tens of

millions of years were with heat and pressure,

were condensed and refined into oil and gas, which we find in reservoirs around the world.

Coal was biomass from a carboniferous period period hundreds of millions of years ago.

That was trees and dinosaurs, some, mostly trees and plants that were also condensed into carbon.

And so we have been since the mid-19th century

pulling up this ancient carbon,

which is incredibly powerful and adding it to the rise

of the machines and humans to do things

that humans used to do manually or with draft animals.

Before I talk about the current carbon pulse, let me briefly talk about previous carbon pulses

on Earth and how they came about and what happened.

This graph shows many of the mini and mass extinctions in the last 300 million years.

...