Guest essay by Eric Worrall
This is the only climate technology which really frightens me.
This scientist thinks she has the key to curb climate change: super plants
Adam Popescu in La Jolla, California
Tue 16 Apr 2019 20.00 AESTDr Joanne Chory hopes that genetic modifications to enhance plants’ natural carbon-fixing traits could play a key role – but knows that time is short, for her and the planet
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She is now working to design plants capable of storing even more carbon dioxide in their roots. Her Ideal Plant project uses gene editing – via traditional horticulture and Crispr – to do so. On a large scale, this could suck enough carbon out of the atmosphere to slow down climate change.
This concept basically splices the genes of regular crops and everyday plants like beans, corn and cotton, with a new compound that makes them absorb more carbon. Their roots then transfer it to the soil to keep it there.
This approach essentially supercharges what nature already does.
“I get worked up when I talk about the project,” Chory tells me in an office at the Salk Institute, a revered bio research campus at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in southern California. Her desk is full of posies, awards, family photos and framed magazine covers from science journals. “We have to find a way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and I think plants are the only way to do that affordably,” Chory says.
“I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders,” she says, letting out a laugh. “It is a lot of pressure.”…
Developing these Ideal Plants is step one in the Harnessing Plants Initiative, which amplifies root systems and production of suberin – which is essentially cork, or the rind on your cantaloupe, the magic key to plants holding more of that carbon – before transferring these genetic traits to row and cover crops. Given the right resources, and funding, prototypes of each crop are expected to be ready in the next five years.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/16/super-plants-climate-change-joanne-chory-carbon-dioxide
Why do I think this technology is so frightening?
Back in the depths of the last ice age, CO2 levels dropped so low the world almost ended.
Despite wild claims by some climate scientists, it seems extraordinarily unlikely we have broken the 2.6 million year old Quaternary Glaciation pattern of hundred thousand year ice ages interrupted by brief interglacials lasting 10-20 thousand years.
No civilisation lasts forever. No interglacial lasts forever. One day the ice will return. If the ice returns when human civilisation is at an ebb, civilisation could collapse.
But regardless of what happens to people, wild variants of “super plants” with enhanced CO2 absorbing capabilities might survive. Cover crops, already resilient to winter conditions, with genetically enhanced CO2 absorbing capabilities and unnaturally strong root systems, might cope really well with the onslaught of the next ice age.
Perhaps wild descendants of the “ideal plants” will survive well enough to keep drawing down CO2 levels, even lower than during the last glacial maximum.
The stupidity never ceases to end with these green lunatics…
Plant carbon in the soil becomes carbon for fungi and bacteria, which act to decay the plant matter and release CO2 and methane.
It makes for richer soil as a circulating system, nothing more.
Any hopes or fears on this matter are preposterous.
the people doing CRISPR have admitted it is NOT perfect and “unintended” gene strands appeared ie some humans died in trials of the supposedly perfected techniques. plant and animals so engineerd wont be any diferent. and the the soil biota etc have that to contend with and you’d be praying that they didnt alter too.
and outcrossing is always a high risk as already happened with prior gmo crapcrops.
weight of the world on her shoulders?
Id have her tied n shackled in jail to keep her and her like away from the lab bench.
“I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders,” she says
Well then, wake up from your self-induced climate nightmare and get on with life.
Of course, she won’t because it makes her feel really important. If her desk is full of selfies photos and her awards, she clear is an attention seeker who needs the attention.
Like most of the save the world brigade, it puts meaning into their lives over which they ( rightly ) feel they have lost all control.
A desk full of awards … an unusual expression of modesty?
I wonder how the “NON GMO” crowd will react to the news of GMO crops that have the ability to reduce their equally feared CO2?
Dr Joanne Chory sayith:
Sounds like a winner to me, given the fact that, to wit:
A potato is 79% water, 17% carbohydrates and 2% protein,
A sugar beet is 75% water, 20% sugar and 5% pulp.
“YUP”, just splice the genes of potatoes and/or sugar beets into the bean plants and them bean roots would then transfer all that carbon into the soil along with all that nitrogen.
But don’t plant any corn in that patch of GMO beans because the corn is likely to “suck up” that sequestered carbon along with that sequestered nitrogen.
If GMO food crops are considered unacceptable due to their “Frankenstein” reputation by the ignoratti, why aren’t they equally alarmed by this abomination, which doesn’t seem to have any benefit to its creators.
Please document your claim that humans have died during trials of GMO crops.
I think I remember seeing that in The Little Shop Of Horrors when the SIUE drama department put it on some years ago.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1012514_little_shop_of_horrors
Yup – vewy scawy predictions from anti-climate alarmists are just as foolish as those from climate alarmists.
Hey, when the next glaciation period is in full force, society as we know it will not survive. Billions of humans will not survive. It is unavoidable – that’s what happens when ice sheets 2 km thick cover the northern 2/3 of North America, Europe, and Asia. We will be long gone by then, of course.
All humans can do is adapt when it happens … but human society as we know it will be a vastly smaller population, and the transition will be in fact very terrible. Super plants won’t matter.
And besides, the carbon never goes anywhere .. it is always within the biosphere and the oceans, it will not and cannot just disappear, and the world will never “end” until our sun turns into a red giant and consumes the entire inner ring of our solar system.
I wonder if Mexico will want to build a wall to keep the Glaciation Refugees of Northern America (USA, Canada) out??
“….that’s what happens when ice sheets 2 km thick cover the northern 2/3 of North America, Europe, and Asia. We will be long gone by then”
Who do you mean by “we”? Presumably, millions, if not billions will survive in the Southern hemisphere. Indeed, as the ice sheet gradually develops, there’ll be a mass exodus from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, which won’t be without turmoil ……..
We as in those humans alive today.
Humanity won’t be eradicated by the next glaciation, any more than humanity was eradicated by the previous two dozen glaciations. But not at a population of 7 to 8 billion. The transition will see massive translocation, massive starvation, massive economic dislocation, probably lots of warfighting over increasingly scarce resources of all kinds.
In any case, most of the world’s arable and habitable lands are located in the northern hemisphere that will be under the 2 km thick ice sheet for the next 80 to 100 K years. It would not be difficult to imagine a human population collapse down to the tens of millions from today’s billions. Very rough lifespan for all involved.
And it is inevitable.
“which act to decay the plant matter and release”
At best there might be a 25 {?} year period of net sequestering.
These ideas are like people playing “dodge ball” rather than chess,
no thinking, just react.
25 years will likely be the remainder of HER life
The big question is how good these hyped up plants are at working at low CO2 concentrations. They might just fail and die. Remember C4 plants evolved to be able to thrive in a low CO2 world, while C3 plants suffered. There is no mention of which plants are being altered here. It is important to also consider that a plant that hyper fixes CO2 might not work well when forced to idle under low CO2.
I drove a souped up Camaro many years ago and the engine only ran well when it was accelerating. It sounded like a junk pile when idling and shook the whole car.
Plants like horsetails are leftovers from the Carboniferous period, which was awash in high oxygen levels. They’d thrive. Ferns might return to their ancestral states, too, and become large and almost woody like alethoptera. But trees like oaks and maples and willows didn’t come along until much, much later.
“the Carboniferous period, which was awash in high oxygen levels”
As a matter of fact the Carboniferous was the only previous interval when CO2 was about as low as now.
Carboniferous period oxygen levels:
Mean atmospheric O2 content over period duration c. 32.3 vol % (162 % of modern level)
Mean atmospheric CO2 level: 800ppm
So genetic modification to create golden rice to combat millions of cases of blindness and death of children in the third world is bad, according to the radical greens…
… but genetic modification to create monster plants to suck life-giving CO2 out of the atmosphere is good?
Eric is correct when he wrote:
“Back in the depths of the last ice age, CO2 levels dropped so low the world almost ended.”
More correctly:
“Back in the depths of the last ice age, CO2 levels dropped so low that terrestrial life on Earth almost ended.”
The radical greens keep trying to place humanity on a collision course with oblivion.
I personally don’t think that is such a great idea. I like humanity – at least most of them.
Regards, Allan
Has anyone asked this bright idea person if she knows about and understands the consequence of low CO2? Like, for example, dragonflies ratcheting up into meganeura (griffinfly), with jaws strong enough to bite through her skin – that sort of thing. There are descendants still around of those oversize centipedes Arthroneura, which grew up to 8.5 feet long. There are photos of SE Asian 3 footers. They bite. Don’t make good pets. Bugs have a different respiratory system, you know.
Why is it that these Frankenstein clones always think they know better than Mother Nature what is good for the world?
Carboniferous period oxygen levels:
Mean atmospheric O2 content over period duration c. 32.3 vol % (162 % of modern level)
I don’t think humans as a species would do very well at that level. Inhaling excessively oxygen levels of oxygen leads to serious medical issues.
Anyone want the Big Bugs like Meganeura (griffinfly – giant dragonfly) and Arthroneura (8.5 foot centipede) back on the planet? Yeah, me neither.
Instead of CAGW we need to fear CAES
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Extinction by Scientist. It is not the planet that is in trouble it is Homo Sapien.
Those of us living in the US below the Mason Dixon line know that kudzu was imported to solve a problem. (Erosion if I recall correctly.)
(For those of you not living in the South, the big problem now is how to get rid of kudzu.)
Goats!
Problem is goats that have been eating a lot of kudzu taste really bad.
Yup, this idea is scary and George Daddis’s Kudzu reference that follows is very appropriate. So, how do we control this additional CO2 removal once the modified species are let out of the gate? Sure, we may be able to set the plant’s temperature preference. And, we could keep it a hybrid with no reproductive capacity except manual propagation but overshooting the amount of removal desired could lead to the Kudzu Syndrome (and, mind you, any CO2 removal brings the prospect of reduced food production which is not good for our growing world population). Very scary.
plants thrive with an increase in CO2, just what idiocy does this woman have in mind, the destruction of the planet?
Embrace it, people. I, for one, am ready to serve my plant overlords.
All praise the Salad God!
See the Dr. Who episode “The Seeds of Doom” featuring everybody’s favorite herb the Krynoid! “On most planets the animals eat the vegetation. On planets where the Krynoid gets established, the vegetation eats the animals.”
Come on Eric, now this is over the top. Evolution means useless features like carbon storing genes will die out in wild varieties.
This doesn’t have an effing effect on anything, but it is good if environmentalists stop fearing gmo so badly.
“Evolution means useless features like carbon storing genes will die out in wild varieties.”
That is not a useless feature. The plant will see that as a plus and will incorporate it in its evolution. Storing more carbon is useful as it helps in photosynthesis. There are 50000 plant species that are edible, but we rely on only about 150 major ones for nourishment and just 3 make up 2/3 of the world’s calories, wheat corn and rice. Add in barley and you have 3/4 of the world’s grain market. If all of our domestic grains are sucking up too much carbon, the rest of the plants will starve along with them when levels get too low. This idea MUST be stopped.
Eric, Alan
I really don’t see anything to worry about at all here. Unless you are one of those folk who gets apoplexy when they contemplate the idea of GM plants per se. The chances of creating a crop that will run amok and change the course of evolution is very remote. Nature’s lab has trillions of clinical trials going on all the time.
But I agree, bioengineering the amount of CO2 is not a worthwhile objective, even were it practical.
c3 plants self limit their CO2 gathering and basically find themselves gasping for breath once they’ve competitively sucked the available CO2 down to levels unusable to their method of photosynthesis.. C4 and CAM photosynthesizing plants have no such limits and can take CO2 down to zero.. however their metabolism is much slower and they can’t compete with V3’s.
Now add something new.. something that CAN suck it all down, good by nearby C3’s..
Mars , Venus and Earth all started out near as we can tell with 95% CO2, Mars and Venus are still at near 95% CO2. Earths greedy little plants have us down to 0.04%. you think one group with a new pathway advantage would politely stop at some point? Trillions of tons of coal beneath our feet .. tens of kilometer deep seams which once stood above ground in Wall-E style rubbish piles of accumulated dead biomass -piles tens of kilometers high are testament to plants ability to go for broke.
No, I’m with Eric, this should be something that should make us very very nervous.
On the other hand, these might do well for terraforming!
Corn is C4. With farmers help it competes extremely well!
Sooner or later one of the geoforming, climate engineering, Triffid sowing wack jobs is going to be let of the leash and actually do something. So many B grade sci fi movie plots all just waiting for enough stupidity and $ to align so they can become real. She does have an oddly Dr Stran.gelove look about her
Triffids? Make sure you have sunglasses with you!!!
Dr Joanne Chory, who appears quite enchanted with Global Warming/Climate Change, would like to introduce her own version of the Day of the Triffids, in an attempt to overcome an imaginary crisis in her own mind.
Well funded stupidity …”The Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative to combat climate change using plants, led by Professor Joanne Chory, executive director of the Harnessing Plants Initiative, will receive funding of more than $35 million from over 10 individuals and organizations through The Audacious Project, a highly competitive program housed at TED, the nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading. The collective commitments represent one of the largest gifts to a single project in the Institute’s history.”
A better solution for sequestering carbon in the soil. Fertilize the bush doze in a greenie, or a warmist.
This sounds like a self-extinguishing experiment using the planet for the test. Take the CO2 out of the atmosphere which plants require and permantly fix it in the soil. Not enough CO2 and eventually not many plants. Lots of ice though. Brilliant.
And there won’t any grains to make whiskey to go with the ice.
Further proof the smart people aren’t always wise people.
She is neither. She is dangerous.
“I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders,” she says, letting out a laugh. “It is a lot of pressure.”
Self inflicted? Just let plants do what they do best, they certainly don’t need any help from us.
I see another scare coming: Climate Change causes senility in scientists.
So left-wing nutjobs have stumbled into another possible solution to the fermi paradox. We’ll have to add a new “virtue signaling” term to the drake equation
More efficient plants are not a bad thing.
efficiency for food and fodder can be achieved naturally though hybrids are one hit wonders anyway. this extra woodiness would be pretty stupid re managing fodder that animals would want or derive nutrition from if theyre tougher and less digestible, never minding other unforseen events. if the plants are woody then what are the once edible seeds ie of the beans going to be like to try n eat for humans too?
theres a bumper sticker on a car in town
“save the planet-plant a greenie”
Those plants will become extinct when global temperatures will decrease which will induce a natural decrease in CO2 concentrations.
Needless to say that in the meantime they will have decimated the other plants and contribute to devastate crops where CO2 is not massively injected in greenhouses to make up for the eco disaster caused by Dr Joanne Chory.
The main question is :
– how can such an idiotic and dangerous project be subsidized ?
There is a reason for hope though :
– Nature seems to be strongly idiot-proof.
Based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change that we are experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. The plants that she hopes to develop cannot possible have any effect on climate.
This project is stupid. CO2 is gas of life on Earth. Without it, no O2, no plants, no trees, no human beeings, no animals, no WUWT, no stupid alarmistes…..
We need CO2 and 405 ppm is not enough : we need more CO2 in the atmosphere.
This project is stupid. CO2 is gas of life on Earth. Without it, no O2, no plants, no trees, no human beeings, no animals, no WUWT, no stupid alarmistes… We need CO2 and 405 ppm is not enough : we need more CO2 in the atmosphere.
If you could at the same time biologically engineer the proposal with a gene that the plant dies below 400ppm Co2 it could be a winner
Jo Nova has a much better solution to combat climate change – fix the broken computer models that are forecasting it.
Sorry Sweetness, there are no free lunches round here – here being= Planet Earth
In part I’d venture why Golden Rice** appears to be such a fail.
If there are no (longer the) raw materials within your soil to create Vitamins A thro Z in your crop, no amount of scientific cleverness will put it there
Thus how CO2 is not our Current Problem – legions of supposedly scientific yet uneducated fools like this are.
As the saying goes, Beware ‘Stupid People’, especially when they occur in large number
**The main part being how Golden Rice Seed is soooo generously made available to growers at ‘Cost Price’
That’s cosy – *who* determines the Cost Price and how?
the plants DO produce Vit A carrots being the most famous but many others and fruits. however its outright poverty thats the sole cause. if you cant buy anything bar tiny bits of rice or white corn in africa(seen to be better cos its white like white bread ie rich people eat that so we want it too) then solve the poverty or misguided food choices above all.
Don’t worry. She will be haunded out of her job by greenies for daring to suggest her GM crops could be a good thing. Every greeny knows GM stuff is from the devil himself.
I do hope though that she adds the capacity to produce grape-like fruits. Then, after the critters have sucked all carbondioxide out of the atmosphere we would at least have a decent drink and can die happy.
Plus the fermentation to make the wine from the grapes would add carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, thus saving the Earth. Grow more grapes, drink more wine!!!!!!!!
Zuiderwijk, without enough carbon in general, grapes will not produce enough sugar to make a good wine. A good wine requires, sunshine, rain, fertile soil and room for the vines to breathe. Wine is an alcohol, which has a carbon-based structure, whether’s fresh from the pressings or mise en bouteille a few years later, and the alcohol comes from sugar in the grapes and vines. No CO2 means no fat, juicy, sugar-filled grapes = no wine.
Now I want bread, cheese, and a sunny spot on the veranda.
How much carbon could this actually capture, even if all crops on earth used these genes ?
Probably very little because they would be devoting not enough time and energy to all the other activities that they need to do in order to compete successfully with other plants and predators/diseases.
There seems to be a common misconception that several billion years of evolution has produced organisms that are somehow unfit for their environment, just waiting for humans to come along and make the perfect organism with a little tweak here and there. If it was long-term benefical to be fixing more carbon than needed, then something would probably already be doing it.
Some grasses exude into the soil 50% of the plant sap they produce via photosynthesis. They do that to encourage arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus growth.
It’s a very beneficial symbiosis as the fungus works hard to increase the quality of the soil, but it is also a slow process. It takes 10 years at a minimum to increase soil health meaningfully.
Annual plants apparently didn’t evolve a trait that takes a decade (10 generations) to pay off.
Gene splicing that trait from perennial grasses to annual crops could have a massive impact.
She carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. It’s called megalomania, methinks.
Most fears of GM organisms are vastly exaggerated because they are actually less well equiped to persist in the natural environment.
The real world is the school of very very hard knocks which selects out variations with no real benefits to the organism. Also think what would happen to domesticated animals without humans to maintain their cosseted lifestyles. They could neither feed themselves adequately nor protect themselves from predators and disease. Some of them probably couldn’t even reproduce without human help.
they may in some cases fall over. however most manage to keep seeding the seeds however are a devils bag of genes all over the shop.
and then theres UNapproved supposedly destroyed crops like canadian unis Triffid flax…which is found globally contaminating flaxseed.
some do all too well , canola on roadsides here in Aus from dropped seed in transportation are a REAL problem. trial crop of it in tasmania were still coming up after 12+yrs of supposed eradication
Arrogant dingbats. Please someone stop this deranged scientist before she causes actual harm
What’s the bets the 3rd world gets used to test these plants, just like these nutcases use the 3rd world to test all sorts of eco catastrophe things that actually kill many
Who says crime doesn’t pay?
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/biotech/story/2019-04-16/salk-institute-gets-35-million-to-develop-plants-to-combat-global-warming
C’mon – maybe a few of you over there could write to her ? Politely?
chory@salk.edu
You never know, she might be capable of doing something that is actually useful.
Maybe not. People are usually incapable of coming up with arguments against the gmo better than Eric’s, and Eric’s arguments were weak to start with. Targeting people just annoys them and gets some bad reputation for us.
This is not a dangerous idea, only useless.