Another similar myth is that the air we breathe comes from trees.
2/3 of the air we breath also comes from plankton.
Trees are mostly net zero in regards to oxygen. What they release during their lifetime they take back when they die and decay.
2/3 of the air we breath also comes from plankton.
Trees are mostly net zero in regards to oxygen. What they release during their lifetime they take back when they die and decay.
If there are more trees, there's more oxygen.
Sure, if a tree dies this is eventually reverted but it also makes room for a new tree (unless humanity claims the land).
E.g. see [1] "The growth of these forests removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to a surplus of oxygen."
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/carbonife...
There is an open question of why atmospheric O2 has been relatively stable (varied by a factor of several) in the Phanerozoic. This may just be anthropic selection: if it ever fell too far, higher life would have been wiped out, and we wouldn't be here. This has implications for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence: it might be that most life-bearing worlds suffocate themselves before ETs can evolve.
For the record, the "memory" if you want to call it like this, would be the (unoxidized) carbon buried underground and/or segregated in the plants body.
> Oxygen leaks out when rocks are eroded and weathered..
which is what I reinforced.
?
Perhaps not the best metaphor.
Status quo is students being told the Sun is yellow, from preK on through to the most common intro astronomy college textbooks, with only a few of them getting an "oops, nope, our bad" decades later, in astronomy graduate school discussion of common misconceptions in astronomy education. We've known Sun color for a century, had detailed limb darkening and tint numbers for decades, and now years of intensive effort on stellar atmospheres in support of occultation and exoplanet work. Also years of hemispherical-camera daytime-sky surveys. And science education content manages to remain decoupled from all of that.
A startup pivoted from supporting learning of English in Japan, because the market there turned out to be for performance on English proficiency exams, not for English fluency. And a teacher remarked that it seemed the societal objective was English accessibility for work, while avoiding the fluency which could contaminate culture. Similarly, an truly excellent briefing on biology would necessarily be pervasively steeped in evolution... and thus be less than entirely welcome in the US. Not that Europe or Russia, or China, India, or Brasil, have incentivized its creation either. It seems neither the science research nor science education communities are set up to pursue it.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Larimore+Vision+2020
First, the universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "venerable institutions" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they ... [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 429 (1981), J.S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, p. 350. (1988) ). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters.
The state devised a second educational strategy in order to prevent such a calamity from occurring. According to Mill, the "elementary schools for children of the working classes" were given the task of ensuring that the poor would continue to accept docilely their dismal station in life. It was very easy for the state to force the public schools to assume this role. It did so simply by failing malignantly to allocate sufficient funds for the operations of what Mill identified contemptuously as "places called schools" (J.S. Mill, Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, p.200; emphasis in original).
See: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599
I've discussed this earlier and in more depth here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...