From the the “Children won’t know what weeds are (h/t to Dr. David Viner) and the we must make more CO2 to save the plants” department, comes this out of left field.
From the University of Georgia: Continued destruction of Earth’s plant life places humans in jeopardy, says UGA research
Athens, Ga. – Unless humans slow the destruction of Earth’s declining supply of plant life, civilization like it is now may become completely unsustainable, according to a paper published recently by University of Georgia researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“You can think of the Earth like a battery that has been charged very slowly over billions of years,” said the study’s lead author, John Schramski, an associate professor in UGA’s College of Engineering. “The sun’s energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels, but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished.”
Earth was once a barren landscape devoid of life, he explained, and it was only after billions of years that simple organisms evolved the ability to transform the sun’s light into energy. This eventually led to an explosion of plant and animal life that bathed the planet with lush forests and extraordinarily diverse ecosystems.
The study’s calculations are grounded in the fundamental principles of thermodynamics, a branch of physics concerned with the relationship between heat and mechanical energy. Chemical energy is stored in plants, or biomass, which is used for food and fuel, but which is also destroyed to make room for agriculture and expanding cities.
Scientists estimate that the Earth contained approximately 1,000 billion tons of carbon in living biomass 2,000 years ago. Since that time, humans have reduced that amount by almost half. It is estimated that just over 10 percent of that biomass was destroyed in just the last century.
“If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll eventually reach a point where the biomass battery discharges to a level at which Earth can no longer sustain us,” Schramski said.
Working with James H. Brown from the University of New Mexico, Schramski and UGA’s David Gattie, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, show that the vast majority of losses come from deforestation, hastened by the advent of large-scale mechanized farming and the need to feed a rapidly growing population. As more biomass is destroyed, the planet has less stored energy, which it needs to maintain Earth’s complex food webs and biogeochemical balances.
“As the planet becomes less hospitable and more people depend on fewer available energy options, their standard of living and very survival will become increasingly vulnerable to fluctuations, such as droughts, disease epidemics and social unrest,” Schramski said.
If human beings do not go extinct, and biomass drops below sustainable thresholds, the population will decline drastically, and people will be forced to return to life as hunter-gatherers or simple horticulturalists, according to the paper.
“I’m not an ardent environmentalist; my training and my scientific work are rooted in thermodynamics,” Schramski said. “These laws are absolute and incontrovertible; we have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it’s exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it.”
Schramski and his collaborators are hopeful that recognition of the importance of biomass, elimination of its destruction and increased reliance on renewable energy will slow the steady march toward an uncertain future, but the measures required to stop that progression may have to be drastic.
“I call myself a realistic optimist,” Schramski said. “I’ve gone through these numbers countless times looking for some kind of mitigating factor that suggests we’re wrong, but I haven’t found it.”
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The study, on “Human Domination of the Biosphere: Rapid Discharge of the Earth-Space Battery Foretells the Future of Humankind,” will be available online at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/recent the week of July 13.
Meanwhile, apparently unnoticed by these researchers, Earth’s Biosphere is booming (thanks to all that added CO2 from the industrial revolution).
Science at work.
They forget that this planet was made as a paradise for blue green algae. They had the place to themselves for billions of years, they thought there was a never ending supply of iron in the oceans to absorb their waste products, how wrong can you be. We are the blue greens nightmare scenario, an intelligent, industrialised culture that thrives on their excrement but treats them as toxic and worthy of annihilation. We are the monsters.
………..koo koo ka choo
To John Schramski:
You can think of the federal budget like a battery that is constantly being charged with billions of dollars from taxpayers each year. The money is stored in the treasury but greedy universities keep coming up with nefarious ways to drain it much faster than it can be replenished – as you did.
If this Prof. considers the Earth a battery, then it’s constantly being recharge by radioactive elements below and the sun above. The “electrolytes” stay in the system.
Most deforestation results in a different plant being grown. Oil palms in Asia and sugar cane in Brazil to give 2 examples. While that’s not wonderful, where’s the discharge? Burning fossil fuels perhaps but the released CO2 increases plant growth. We’re @400 ppm now while the ideal amount for plants is 1200ppm based on what greenhouses use to encourage production.
I would also think, based on oxygen production alone that the oceans account for almost all living plant biomass on the planet. Of course we are doing our best to strip fish life to nothing. Gotta fix that issue real soon.
I have the deepest respect for thermodynamics. It’s the hardest subject in Engineering studies, but this report as seen here is just lame.
That’s “Electoralites” that remain in the system. No real effective way (legally) to rid of those bums.
“Unless humans slow the destruction of Earth’s declining supply of plant life, civilization like it is now may become completely unsustainable”
“Scientists estimate that the Earth contained approximately 1,000 billion tons of carbon in living biomass 2,000 years ago. Since that time, humans have reduced that amount by almost half. It is estimated that just over 10 percent of that biomass was destroyed in just the last century.”
Declining supply of plant life? Reduced living biomass? Where do these scientists live? Modern agriculture practices probably produce more living biomass than that estimated to exist 2,000 years ago.
jayhd, these guys have never ever heard of GMOs or genetically modified foods.
When push comes to shove we can just make all of our food out of the rocks, just like Mother Gaia does. No real need to have biomass to make food; they just make it out of the rocks so we can do that too.
g
The US has more forestland today than in 1900. That’s what happens when you produce energy from fossil fuels instead of using the forests for firewood. Apply this solution to third-world countries, and the total biomass of the world will increase.
Biomass Battery… ain’t that a cropper-top! Makes you think of all those times your old batteries let you down. Great sales pitch though.
Great subliminal overpop scare too. This one is a pessimist’s feast of negativity.
The alarmists sit around thinking of new and different ways CO2 could possibly harm the planet, concoct a theory/story, then get it published by the ever ready MSM. All it has to do is include one of the words “carbon dioxide, sustainability, global warming, or climate change” and it’s home free. Some nut case in the UK is comparing climate change to nuclear war….and the MSM was glad to spread the news. The recent study that says there’s a possibility of an ice age like period from 2030 t0 2050 barely received lip service.
Somebody can correct me if I’m wrong but I understood that the biomass of the “kingdom” of animals that depend solely on the energy of deep sea vents is greater than the other two kingdoms combined. Photosynthesis not necessary there and lots of carbon based life. So how does that fit in to the thermodynamic model?
What?
When they talk about biomass, do they mean forests? Forests had to be cleared to make way for land usable for agriculture. Without reducing the biomass you could not increase food production nor population.
Are we to return to foraging?
After I die, I want to be reborn as an eschatologist. Again and again. Ok, my first 10,000 reincarnations will end in disappointment as the end of times didn’t happen but, eventually, either by fire or ice or impacting lump of dead rock or, horror of horrors, a weed-free lawn, the end of the world will prove that my predictions and predilections of imminent demise were spot on.
Of course, I could take the easy route to fame and fortune, despite the consequent depressive angst, overt media exposure and tear-stained cheeks, and become a climate scientist or, indeed, anyone with academic credentials in those modern branches of fundatropic ‘sciences’ whose parasitic indulgences at the public teat has increased monotonically but, and this may sound paradoxical, at an hyperbolic rate.
Or, I may just come back as Billy-Boy or Micky-Man!
Monsanto can put in your weed free lawn tomorrow. I have several neighbors in my area that already have Astroturf lawns.
““If we don’t reverse this trend,”
Umm we have already started to reverse the trend. There is an increase of some 15-20% (can’t remember the actual number) in the worlds biosphere because we have increased the atmospheric CO2 level from the just survival level of 300ppm.
If we want the planet to flourish, and we want to feed the world’s increasing population, we MUST continue to increase the aCO2 percentage..
Towards 700ppm + !!!
“Towards 700ppm + !!!”
Love that thought, Andy, but that’s one h*ck of a task.
If we were the big players in CO2 production we could do it, albeit, at enormous cost!
When it comes to combining elemental Carbon with Oxygen we’re just junior partners, according to the IPPC, and outvoted by Moma Gaia shareholders by 20 to 30 times.
Fortunately, despite our ultra expensive ‘sustainable green-solutions’ efforts to contribute even less than our current measly 3-5% CO2 contribution to the biosphere than natural sources, the ‘simple’ physics (once the sums are done) of manufacture and distribution do help boost the figures despite being the antithesis of what they were designed to do.
The third-world with its demands of energy parity with ourselves and its selfish insistence on eradicating indigenous poverty, infant mortality and economic misery is taking a route towards your 700ppm and onwards by factoring pragmatic economic and engineering issues above first-world emotional touchy-feely stuff.
I, like you, Andy look forward to a world where, again, the important things in life are those that actually matter, not just flatter!
The recently accelerated ‘End-is-Nigh’ stuff has brought me to an axiom that I have enlarged on in other threads. Human caused mega disaster has been forecast over the last few centuries or so [Malthus 1798: “An Essay on the Principle of Population” had us buried in horse manure because of expanding cities, Jevons – 1865- “The Coal Question” – the end of the industrial revolution because of running out of coal, “Limits to Growth” – 1950s and 70s and up to today, and all this pre Paris last shot production, which is a crescendo of insanity.
The Axiom: This and countless other doom scenarios NEVER came to pass. I don’t think it bold to say it is AXIOMATIC THAT EXTREME PREDICTIONS OF HUMAN CAUSED DOOM CANNOT COME TRUE because they leave out the overpowering dynamic ingenuity of humankind in their thinking. Unconstrained by this first order principal component, their thoughts (and heartfelt concerns) soar through the roof of reality. Nature only has a lock on the possibility of World ending disaster. A planet in which life has been an unbroken constant for over 2 billion years has seen far worse than anything we could concoct (bombing Hiroshima: radiation there returned to background levels in one year). Stupidity is our most dangerous weapon as far as human economies and civilization are concerned – we can’t surrender to it. But even if we did, we would eventually come back again.
Eh, do the math, for God’s sake.
See Global Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions:
Now, 90% of “almost half” of “1,000 billion tons of carbon in living biomass 2,000 years ago” is certainly more than that.
That is, preindustrial carbon emissions were larger than industrial ones. Weird &. likely untrue.
The laws of thermodynamics have nothing whatsoever to do with how plants grow. They simply say cold things can’t heat hot things (like the cold atmosphere can’t heat the warm surface of the Earth). This charlatanism is beyond a joke
But ‘thermodynamics’ sounds so much more sciencey than ‘Gaia angry.’
I’m so confused right now.
Then you are eminently qualified to be a professor at UGA.
They claim to have met the enemy and it is us!
Well you know what they say; Military planning works really well up to the time that you first engage the enemy !!
Sustainable energy to save biosphere
Solution: Use geologically stored solar energy (aka coal) to reduce pressure on biosphere while increasing plant food (aka CO2) to relieve pressure on biosphere. Then develop cost effective sustainable fuels and power from non-bio resources. e.g., dedicated large scale solar and nuclear power to fuel and electricity.
““The sun’s energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels, but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished.””
If we are draining it faster than it is coming in, the Earth must be cooling. 🙂
Hmm, a biomass battery. Is that when you poke a strip of copper and aluminium into a lemon?
This thermodynamics professor must have swallowed the red pill, not the blue one.
The Sahara used to be lush. It isn’t now. It has nothing to do with humans.
So ‘Silent Running’ was actually prescient rather than being the most irrational dumb SF movie of all time? 🙂
I can’t do better than to quote what I read…..
Get more CO2 into the atmosphere.
For one, the plants are starving for it: “The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide abundance in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would not be able to grow.”
Vaclav Smil: ENERGY AT THE CROSSROADS: GLOBAL PERSPECITVES AND UNCERTAINTIES, MIT Press, 2003
Secondly, the whole fable of man-made global warming (AGW) is in any case a political and intellectual fraud, as in http://tinyurl.com/q4rtmvf
Thirdly, AGW is, further, not allowed by THE FOUR LAWS WITHOUT WHICH NOTHING WHATSOEVER THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE THAT HAPPENS, HAPPENS as in http://tinyurl.com/pvzva68 and their corollary as in http://tinyurl.com/ot2hlp4
…..and to draw attention to this video:
I am amazed that plant life survives let alone flourishes on a trace gas. The biomass of plants far exceeds animals yet we work with about 20% O2 whereas plants get just 4% CO2. From where I’m sitting I see one 45# border collie, a massive maple, 0aks and a pine forest. Gaia must be unhappy with the inbalance.
Max
4% no! CO2 represents 0.04% by volume of the atmosphere
“the vast majority of losses come from deforestation, hastened by the advent of large-scale mechanized farming”
But if only 10 percent of the biomass loss occurred in the past 100 years, how did the other 90 percent get destroyed? Did they have large-scaled mechanized farming before the 20th Century? Besides, don’t farms produce biomass? And won’t an increase in CO2 help increase biomass? It appears to be a self-correcting problem. If there was more biomass during the Roman Warm Period, perhaps it was because of the warmer climate and the release of CO2 by warming oceans. Just a thought.
I just looked for the original – not there yet.
Wasn’t expecting to learn anything, but curious about the very first “sciency” “research” paper I’ve ever seen written in the first person???!!!
When these “scientists” do “science”, it is laughable. But they also teach. Wait for their students to become professors. The future is bright indeed.
did you for get the /sarc?