Carbon Entropy:

The western world has for the past 175 years fueled what we call the Industrial Revolution by burning carbon fuels. Until recently the resulting carbon dioxide was considered harmless. This is no longer the case. We now realize that the truly massive amounts of carbon dioxide we have produced as a side product to the heat necessary to run the engines of industry can make changes to the climate of the whole planet. Scientists are convinced of this fact even though the lay public is only recently becoming aware of these facts. Indeed some world leaders elected to ignore the problem and there have been some who say global warming is not occurring.

Entropy is the process whereby things tend to their lowest state of energy. Entropy explains why balls roll down hill. The reason is because the ball at the bottom of the hill has less potential energy than it did at the top of the hill. When you burn carbon you get two things: energy in the form of heat and carbon dioxide which has a lower energy state than carbon itself. The oxide part comes from atmospheric oxygen. So what we have done is to combine carbon with oxygen to yield carbon dioxide and heat. Simple enough and we as a race have used fire to warm us and to cook our food all the way back to prehistoric times. But the key fact is that we did not burn massive amounts of carbon. This balance began to shift as soon as our requirement for energy to drive our machines became large.

All things in nature tend to run down. Carbon burns and balls roll down hill. The only way we can reverse carbon entropy is by using living things called plants. Plants you see take carbon from the atmosphere and by using chlorophyll change the carbon into part of their cell structure. Interestingly enough the process uses energy and carbon dioxide to make cellulose and liberate oxygen to the atmosphere. This is functionally the reverse of burning carbon. With the proper engineering of simple plants like algae the output of this process can be modified. That is to say things other than cellulose can be made by these plants.

Our race has only in the past 15 years made enough progress in genetic engineering to modify plant structure. Currently this effort has been to make plants more disease resistant. As our knowledge of genetic modification becomes more extensive we should be able to have better control over plants and how to establish living factories to terra form the planet Earth. The alternative is of course that a large portion of the race perishes on a world that has significantly less land area due to the rise in sea levels. We are the dominate life form on this planet and it is about time we grew up and began to take care of the planet we all call home.