A stable system requires only it's rate of changes to be balanced, two ponds of the same geometry connected will hold the same amount of water but water will constantly eddy back and forth between them, if we increase the size of one of the ponds, if we pour more water in, both ponds will deepen, to re-establish the same depth in pond A, we can expand the size of pond B, that there's a constant interchange of fluid between them changes nothing.



This is incorrect, utterly, totally wrong, in spite of being a factually true statement I do not see how you could have read the sections I wrote and not seen your error here, but I know you read them so you've got some mental breaker interrupting the circuit, so to speak. Remove preconceived notions and start with the most simplistic... a large airproof tank is created with nothing but atmosphere and moisture in it, say 50 pounds of this are carbon dioxide. The tank itself is made of transparent adamantium and moving things in and out is accomplished only by means of a handy teleporter. So we have a transparent tank full of nothing but water and air, and we teleport in a per-wieghed and measured pots with some seeds in it. The seeds germinate and grow, using carbon in the air, and we measure a direct drop off in CO2 obviously. Now, these specific plants will inevitably die but so long as plants live in our terrarium the CO2 in the air is permanently reduced. No we erect several other identical terrariums and in some we place crops which grow and decay quickly, in others those which grow slowly but have long lives, like trees, these will all have different C02 rates in the air, lower in the one with trees... this is effectively 'permanent' and don't focus on the use of the word 'permanent' as eternal here, rather as something which does not change without external disruption of the system, nothing is permanent in the former sense and the word may as well be discarded if one insists on using it that way.



I'm not sure while you're ALL CAPPING, it makes me think you're undergoing mental distress. Those equations in the last post rather explicitly stated what you just said above, except I'm think you're drawing some inaccurate conclusions from the 'any given time'



Again, I think here's the disconnect, it doesn't matter if you're bailing water with buckets that have a small holes in it them so long as you're refilling the buckets at a rate equal to our greater than their leakage rate, if I have sixty 1 gallon buckets that leak at a rate of 1 gallon an hour next to one pond, and sixty two gallon buckets that leak at a rate of 1 gallon an hour next to another equal sized pond, each draining back into their ponds, and two gentleman stand next to each refilling the emptiest bucket every minute, the gentleman with the one gallon bucket will always have an average of half a gallon per bucket in sixty buckets or 30 gallons of water removed from our pond, whereas the other gentleman will have an average of 1.5 gallons or 90 gallons out of the pond.... this means that someone could dump 60 whole gallons of water into that second pond and the water level in it would be equal to the first pond, even though leakage rate is the same and they have equal numbers of buckets... Trees are big buckets.






How the hell would a billion acres of apple orchards, planted in previously low 'green tonnage' locales like prairie or desert, not be a 'long term solution'? As long as you keep tending and harvesting it, whatever carbon is stored in that full grown orchard is out of play. Even just planting prairie grass on a desert and keeping livestock on it effectively permanently reduces atmospheric CO2 by their combined biomass amount plus whatever starts getting stored up in the humus they create, humus stores a lot of carbon. If we actually had cheaper desalinization, or people would relax about nuclear which is very well optimized for desalinization, we could setup soil layers with food or other marketable crops on more arid locations and easily deal with this carbon issue... fortunately rising populations will make this much easier to tackle.