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Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Viv Forbes: Don’t Break our Food Chain


Napoleon once said: “Only a foolish horse fights with his nose bag”.

But today we have many foolish people fighting their nose bag. They are weakening Earth’s food chain with a war on carbon.

Carbon is the building block of life. “Organic” means “containing carbon” and every bit of plant and animal life is built around the carbon atom.
Carbon enters Earth’s cycle of life via plants, which extract it from the rare and precious carbon dioxide plant-food in the atmosphere. Living things use this carbon, plus water, oxygen and minerals, to create the proteins, fats, carbohydrates and skeletons they need.

Plant growth responds quickly to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

However, today’s levels are far below those that sustained the abundant forests, grasslands, wetlands, herbivores and carnivores of past eras.

The biggest long term threat to abundant life on Earth is natural carbon sequestration, especially during the recurring cold dry eras when cooling oceans absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and growing ice sheets capture most of its water.

Nature is very efficient at carbon capture and burial. Enormous quantities of carbon and hydrogen have been removed from past atmospheres and buried under ancient sediments in extensive beds of coal, oil shale, limestone, marble, dolomite and magnesite, and in diffuse deposits of hydrocarbon liquids and gases. The result is that the carbon dioxide level in today’s atmosphere is not far above the minimum needed to sustain plant life (which is why nurserymen pump more carbon dioxide into their green-houses).

However, in a rare piece of environmental serendipity, man’s extraction and use of coal, oil, gas, limestone and dolomite for power generation, transport, aviation, steel, cement and fertilisers is recycling a tiny part of this storehouse of buried carbon. For example, for every tonne of coal burned, 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide plant food plus one tonne of fresh water is added to the atmosphere; and producing one tonne of cement releases about one tonne of carbon dioxide.


Every tonne of wheat grown needs a tonne of carbon dioxide to get its carbon, and other foods have similar needs. Carbon industries thus help to feed all of Earth’s plants and animals.

Industrial use of carbon-bearing mineral resources also recycles valuable trace elements like nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus which are present in variable amounts in coal, oil and carbonates. Any of these by-product gases can be toxic if concentrated in confined spaces, and all of man’s activities can pollute crowded cities, but in the open atmosphere, plant life often suffers because of a deficiency of these key nutrients.

Those waging a war on hydro-carbons and carbon dioxide are enemies of the biosphere. Their foolish policies like carbon taxes, emissions trading and “Carbon Capture and Burial” are denying essential nutrients to the food chain. The failed global warming forecasts show that these policies will have no effect on climate, but will reduce the atmospheric supply of food nutrients and fresh water for all life on Earth.

Life is a carbon cycle – don’t break the food chain.

For more information:


CSIRO: Rising Carbon Dioxide causes greening of the deserts - http://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2013/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2 The Biosphere is booming: CO2 is the Cause:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/08/surprise-earths-biosphere-is-booming-co2-the-cause/




 Should we celebrate CO2:  
http://www.thegwpf.com/28155/

4 comments:

mike said...

I couldn't agree more, but how do we get this message out to the general public when most of the media have a policy of not publishing anything against the political AGW propaganda. My local newspaper (Gisborne Herald) is one such organisation.

paul scott said...

Yes, its pretty scary all right. The hysteria seems to be growing rather than subsiding
Fudged data from IPCC is the starting point for Scientific analysis. Carbon is poison.
All opponents of the religious climate truth are heretics and must be shamed.
Some mad woman in Wellington is taking the Government to Court for not taxing us more for releasing the poison Carbon.
So Itold my Asian girlfriends they all better come to live with me in NZ, because the streets of Bangkok will melt and stick them on the pavement.
The sea will come in and drown them; It said so in the Bangkok Post.
And my daughter is freezing in Canada and can not understand why.

Brian said...

There is an unwritten rule that once bureaucracy/officialdom & political agendas have endorsed some idea; then to turn round and state publically that they have backed the wrong horse. Well that is damaging to such a degree, and to be labelled in Public office as making a mistake...totally criminal! and would not be countenanced in any shape or form.

Example The UK Board of Trade still refusing to alter their condemnation of Captain Lord of the Californian for his failure to rescue the survivors from the Titanic. When his ship was never in the vicinity.

The failure of the British & French to realise that the Ardennes was never a barrier to tanks and infantry, which resulted in Dunkirk, and the fall of France in 1940.

Even further back the failure to recognise that taxation (however slight) without representation in British America of 1777, would result in the formation of the United States.

But as History shows us it is littered with these examples, but never with resignations from the officials concerned in these questionable decisions.

Climate warming is another such, and the question which has to be asked of Greenpeace is very simple "HOW DO THEY KNOW? and how do they explain how life could exist and even evolve when CO2 was in such larger amounts on our planet?

Methinks in time these Greens will blush exceeding red indeed!
Brian

soundhill said...

Changes are moving much faster than in the past aeons, not giving the planetary ecosystem time to adjust.

ONE change is the rapid take up by the oceans of increased CO2 making them more acid. The little snails that salmon feed on are already getting deformed shells in some regions. Fishing livelihoods and high quality protein are being lost.