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.”
###
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.
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Perhaps I don’t understand what “biomass” is, but this sounds like “natural” plant growth is good, “cultivated” plant growth is bad.
I are cornfused…
If you understood and bieved the rationale behind this paper, it would mean you are deluded and/or a nitwit.
Being cornfused by warmista jackassery is a badge of honor and a hallmark of intelligence.
Thanks, I’ll wear it proudly!
I think I like the word “jackassery” even better than “cornfused”!!
Coming from the same folks who encourage the destruction of the rain forest for ethanol and wood fires for third world poor instead of fossil fuels……..
+10
“You can think of the Earth like (sic) a battery that has been charged very slowly over billions of years,”
Or you can think of the Earth as a nuttery that has been filled with wackazoids.
Or you can think of the Earth as a gigantic 2-ball, circling the huge, hot 1-ball in the sky…
Or you can think of the Earth as a Rubik’s Cube, only spherical.
Or you can think of the Earth as a place where academics are allowed to act out their belief in magical thinking.
Or you can think of the Earth as a planet. Well, maybe not.
Stop! Stop! I’m choking from laughing! 🙂 Best comment for quite a while!
*what he said ^*
Declining biomass? These UGA guys are welcome to come mow my lawn. There’s some real world biomass for you.
“These laws [of thermodynamics] 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.”
—
There are laws stating the conservation of mass and energy alright, but there is no such law for the conservation of “biomass.” Indeed, photosynthesis is a very powerful mechanism for creating biomass entirely from abiotic precursors. The biomass of the plants found on earth at any given time dates back decades or centuries at the most, not “millions of years.”
Breathtaking balderdash.
Michael Palmer says: >”The biomass of the plants found on earth at any given time dates back decades or centuries at the most, not “millions of years.”
..
Except for the fact that Michael doesn’t think that the biomass that created all of the coal is a lot older than decades or centuries.
Most of the earth’s coal is in fact millions of years old.
Of course coal was created from biomass, but coal itself is not biomass. The currently extant plant biomass was not created from other biomass (with the exception of carnivorous plants, that is), but from abiotic substrates. Biomass can be converted to abiotic mass and back pretty freely. The whole idea of biomass conservation or limitation is silly.
Just about all of the coal formed during the carboniferous period, after plants developed the ability to synthesize lignin, and before any organisms developed the ability to digest it.
Plants during this age had multiple times more lignin, and every single bit of it stayed right where it fell for millions of years. And it’s presence inhibits decomposition of other organic material. Back then, plants had as much as a 20 to 1 ratio of bark to wood. Nowadays, it is rarely even as high as 1 to 4.
Once lignin digesting organisms evolved, coal formation became much more unlikely and was rare.
Lignin, with it multiple cross-linked polymer chains, which cannot be broken down by any single enzyme, even today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lignin_structure.svg
I encourage anyone interested to read up on lignin, it’s significance in soil formation and health, in the difficulty of creating biofuels from raw plant materials, and many other aspects of biochemistry and industry.
And the Carboniferous period is a fascinating time, and makes for some great reading as well.
Menicholas – interesting, didn’t know that. How about lignite? If I understand it correctly, it is a lot more recent than black coal, so presumably it would have formed in spite of microbial lignite breakdown activity.
Approaching half a billion years according to the meme. Coal, maybe. Methane, not so much. The isotopes tell the story. Coal is cruising with the vegetation in the negative mid twenties PDB. Ok. Natural gas (methane, etc.) averages negative sixty and up. Serious disconnect.
The one aspect of Thomas Gold’s hypothesis (oh, the irony) that has not been answered is mass balance. How do you account for more methane than could conceivably been produced from all the biomass that ever existed?
A weird and possibly interesting corollary: how you explain that current volcanic Carbon production estimated at the low tenths of a GtC per year (and seemingly low by paleo standards) when multiplied by, say, 4 billion years; yields more Carbon than we can imagine?
Balderdash is right. The idea that “the laws of thermodynamics” of physical systems can be extended, metaphorically, to the biomass of the Earth is fanciful: living things take in energy and utilize it to create increasingly complex phenomena, and new life; they are in a sense anti-entropic.
Remember, too, that a very large part of the Earth’s biomass is microscopic. From Wikipedia, article on ‘Biomass'”
I don’t think we’re in any danger of running out of it, unless we foolishly find a way to get rid of all the life-giving CO2.
/Mr Lynn
Even if we managed to deplete the biomass carbon as well as all fossil fuels and sequester it all as minerals (carbonates), we could still reclaim it, given an ample source of energy such as thorium fission or nuclear fusion. We could use that energy to convert abundant calcium carbonate to calcium silicate, releasing CO2 in the process, and leave it to the plants to convert that back into biomass.
I truly wonder what these people have been thinking. (Maybe I should go to the extreme of reading the actual paper, but I’m afraid it will be bad for my blood pressure.)
Be very fearful there are fools in high places.
Wow! Just wow! This paper is either satire or the authors are stupid beyond the ability of human imagination. Someone please archive this in case it disappears down the rabbit hole.
“we have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it’s exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it” I’m replace it with my garden.
so long as you have some CO2!
Water, CO2, sunlight, and seeds + a sprinkling of inorganic salts = biomass.
Just wow is right.
by their own concerns isn’t this a good thing? No more biomass energy (coal, oil) will stop the addition of the “pollutant” CO2.
Perhaps they missed this?
Recent reversal in loss of global terrestrial biomass. Yi Y. Liu et al. Nature Climate Change 5,
470–474, (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2581
“From 2003 onwards, forest in Russia and China expanded and tropical deforestation declined. Increased ABC associated with wetter conditions in the savannahs of northern Australia and southern Africa reversed global ‘aboveground biomass carbon’ (ABC) loss, leading to an overall gain, consistent with trends in the global carbon sink reported in recent studies’
In ‘Environment’: Despite Decades Of Deforestation, The Earth Is Getting Greener. March 31, 2015
at: http://www.iflscience.com/environment/despite-decades-deforestation-earth-getting-greener
I don’t see cause to be alarmed based on the vegetation index. The following paper described the reliability and validity of the various indices and helpfully indicates where changes up or down are not significant.
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rasmus_Fensholt/publication/223824867_Evaluation_of_earth_observation_based_long_term_vegetation_trends__Intercomparing_NDVI_time_series_trend_analysis_consistency_of_Sahel_from_AVHRR_GIMMS_Terra_MODIS_and_SPOT_VGT_data/links/0c9605375f15693d01000000.pdf
Fifty years ago this claim would have been dismissed out of hand with a gentle “poor old Dave, there he goes again”
Most of the deforestation is the result of bio-fuel sc@ms.
Regardless, pretty much every study done that examines the real world, has found that bio-mass has been increasing tremendously in recent decades.
Is it April the first?
I cant believe this is for real. The story as I understood it – the primative atmosphere was a huge reserve of Carbon stored as CO2. This atmospheric CO2 was not a polutant but a precondition for the evolution of a Carbon-based life forms. Those Carbon-based lifeforms (the biosphere) have over geological time been shifting the Carbon from the atmosphere into the ground – natural sequestration – every Carbon atom in coal oil gas limestone in the ground has come from the atmosphere by the power of photosynthesis as a result of natural processes. Pretty well every atom of Oxygen in the atmosphere is a waste product of that process. The real threat to the biosphere is not a surplus of CO2 but the declining amount of CO2 available to photosynthesisers.
At just 400 ppm we are sitting on the bottom edge of efficiency. If we really care about the biosphere the best thing we could do is put all that sequestered CO2 back in the atmosphere and make it available to photosynthesisers all over again.
This message is gradually getting out there. Keep the truth about CO2 foremost, front and centre.
The atmosphere and the biosphere need MORE of it not less!
I first used the phrase “Towards 700ppm” on the 350.org forum, stating that 350ppm was actually very close to “just survival” level for the biosphere !….. and promptly got banned. 🙂
(obviously, 700ppm is chosen as a counterpoint to 350ppm, we could actually do with an even higher level)
Now I use it wherever appropriate.
TOWARD 700ppm 🙂
CO2 – Greening the Planet.
Based on the trend since 2007, US energy consumption should be negative by 2045. Our growing population will be like an ever larger “battery”. Problem solved. Extrapolation is fun!
The technology fixes for this problem are already known. Ocean Iron Fertilization has been demonstrated to dramatically increase ocean biome productivity. Using algae in place of nitrogen fertilizer works for terrestrial applications. These are effective ways to accelerate biological productivity while returning some carbon back to the soil and oceans – to recharge the biomass battery – while also benefitting humanity.
Assuming their findings are accurate, the worst thing we could possibly do would be to take CO2 out of the cycle and sequester it underground.
ingenuity
http://weburbanist.com/2015/01/11/worlds-largest-indoor-farm-is-100-times-more-productive/
Nice link, AndyH, but they don’t seem to mention raised CO2 levels,
but they must be pumping the toxic pollutant in , in huge amounts
Actually fossil fuel usage — by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, enhancing the productivity of the planet and allowing us to meet human needs while reducing our dependence on living nature — has allowed the planet’s productivity to increase beyond what it was in pre-industrial times (according to the IPCC). In other words, the planet’s biomass today exceeds what it was in pre-industrial times. See the post, Have Fossil Fuels Diminished the World’s Sustainability and Resilience?, on WUWT.
So these folks should be cheering fossil fuels.
worrywartism: (1) find something to worry about (2) worry about it
The extra CO2 is just going to make all vegetation more productive and more productive and so on.
It is already having an impact on vegetation everywhere.
“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.”
I think somebody just discovered Peak Oil. I don’t think this is a novel new theory.
All along we’ve been dealing with the Children of the Corn.
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3074687513
“…people will be forced to return to life as hunter-gatherers.”
If all, or nearly all, of the biomass disappears what are hunter-gatherers going to hunt and gather?
They are going to gather stones, and they will use them to hunt each other. Until the world runs out of stones, that is.
Well, that scenario would quickly reduce the amount of “stupid” in the world.
What an idiocratic bogus metaphor.
Burning fossil fuels is not draining the battery.
More of the world is green today than it was 100’s of years ago.
The world is greening more- in the oceans and on land than it was 50 years ago.
“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….”
Gee wiz, haven’t they noticed that since the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere that the trees and plants are flourishing? Just look at your back yard in the last 10 to 20 years – it’s become overgrown. Trees are flourishing, and bushes, weeds, grass, you name it – they can’t see the “forest for the trees”. My old neighborhood is overgrown with plants…and so are all the other old neighborhoods of my youth…
United Nations Geography Institute Make a Startling Revelation!
C + O2 = CO2
This newly discovered Super Reaction depletes the Atmosphere of Oxygen at twice the mole of diatomic oxygen!
Director Niles Nilepute explains, ” We are Doomed …. DOOMED!” Director Nilepute shit in his trousers at the News Conference so he had to be relieved of duty, or dodo as we say, by his do do Officer, sub-Director Heils..
Ha ha
Dear John Schramski
If we don’t reverse this trend
Uhm… the trend was reversed a long time ago. We no longer cut down forests for fuel, what forests we do cut down we replant, and as for land cleared for agriculture, the very point of clearing it was to grow more effing biomass on it than it ever could otherwise which is why we don’t have to be hunter-gatherers anymore, we’ve wiped out starvation in all but the most mismanaged despotic regimes, and our biggest health problem is obesity.
we’ll eventually reach a point where the biomass battery discharges to a level at which Earth can no longer sustain us,” Schramski said.
Seriously? You think our population will grow so fast that one day we’ll just consume all the biomass out there?
show that the vast majority of losses come from deforestation,
Yeah, like when we “deforest” an area we don’t put something else in its place like a new forest or a farm? You really think we live in a world where we just deforest areas and walk away? What century was this study focused on?
hastened by the advent of large-scale mechanized farming and the need to feed a rapidly growing population.
Dopey, it was the large scale mechanized faring that resulted in a rapidly growing population. You didn’t notice that BEFORE large scale mechanized farming that human population growth was minimal and periodic famines were common? Again, what century was your study focused on?
As more biomass is destroyed, the planet has less stored energy, which it needs to maintain Earth’s complex food webs and biogeochemical balances.
D*amned fine reason to use fossil fuels instead of bio fuels then? Oh and better not extract too much energy from solar and wind, those are a big part of the biogeochemical balance you know. Don’t want to mess that up.
survival will become increasingly vulnerable to fluctuations, such as droughts, disease epidemics and social unrest
And what has history taught us about being resilient to those things? Well number one you need mechanized farming. Number two, you need reliable energy grid. We have the population we have BECAUSE we have those things, not DESPITE them!
we have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it’s exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it.”
I guess there is no sunshine in your dark and dismal world?
increased reliance on renewable energy will slow the steady march toward an uncertain future
All renewables are derived from the sunshine you just said doesn’t exist in your version of reality.
“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.”
Well gosh, you’ve made up a problem that doesn’t exist, and wring your hands in despair because you can find no solution to it. I know not what motivated you to write such a complete piece of drivel. Perhaps it is a hoax of some sort? A cruel joke? An ill timed April Fools prank? For if you are serious, I must recommend seeking out with haste, a large bucket of water with which to drench yourself as the flames are erupting from your pants in an explosive fashion.
Hopefully there aren’t too many more like you out there as my understanding is that water is a finite resource and there may not be enough of it out there to save you and your brethren.