In order to continue to exist and to prosper, life on Earth needs one more trick, the one thing that not one of the marvelous inventions of all the eons past had ever been able to accomplish. There has to be some way,somehow, to wrench the locked carbon up out of the earth, to throw it back into the air.
We are that way. We make the keys that unlock the carbon from the stone and return it to the world. We are the solution to the impending extinction of life and this is the most important story ever heard.
Forrest Bishop
July 2016
The Solution to the Ice Age Extinctions
[H/T to Rolf.—Joe]
That sound you just heard was leftie heads exploding.
Who is this guy? Any scientific background at all?
The statement sounds really cool, but if he had any knowledge of geological processes and history, he’d not have made that statement. Past mass extinctions, which made the K-T extinction look smallish in comparison, have been attributed to outpourings of CO2 and other gases from flood basalt eruptions like the Siberian traps, which covered a few hundred thousand square miles and occurred over hundreds of millions of years. The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which wiped out about 96% of the earth’s marine species, has been possibly attributed to a methane hydrate emission event. In short, there are several ways to liberate massive amounts of locked up carbon – and humans are barely capable of doing this at a tiny scale, comparatively.
Let’s not get all fuzzy on pop-science proclamations, even if they sound good to our side. Bad science is still bad science.
Mike
Perhaps he’s being hyperbolic. But that fact is that humans are actively seeking out carbon deposits in the ground for very good economic reasons, and putting them into the air for plants to use as “food” is a nearly unavoidable side-effect. The k-t extinction event didn’t have all three types of photosynthesis around in plants then, IIRC. Methane hydrate is somewhat different than CO2.
Not disputing CO2 vs other carbon sources – just saying that there are natural geological processes capable of liberating carbon.
Interesting that there is currently plenty of research going into carbon sequestration, to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it back up.
Democrats hate plants, and so they hate life. It’s consistent with everything else they do and want to do.
However, we’re somewhat missing the point if we believe that authroitarians are interested in much of anything beyond their own power and ill-gotten wealth.
All the other stuff is part of the ruse.
He bungled the C3/C4 story. C3 are and always have been dominant because they can function at lower levels of heat and light. 95% of all plants are C3. C4 is 1% with the rest being CAM. C4 plants are dormant for most of the year except at low latitudes. C4 accounts for a bit less than 25% of global NPP, but happens to include some important human crops such as maize and cane. Other crops – wheat, rice, ots, barley, etc. etc. are C3. Most grasses are C3.
Where C4 has an advantage is in low CO2 situations. It has a more efficient pathway so it doesn’t have to breathe so hard in thin air. That’s why it also loses less water, but is not as efficient as CAM plants. In higher CO2 situations C3 plants breathe easy and lose less water too, but they still get sluggish if it gets hot