OTOH, plants (i.e. trees) can live for hundreds of years, they are self-replicating, they extract their own minerals from the ground, require very little energy input to put in place, play an crucial role in the water cycle [1], reduce the albedo effect [2], cool the air [3], provide a habitat for a multitude of species, and bring joy to our hearts.
Oh, I almost forgot, they also fix carbon! And they do all this for free, the only thing you have to do is, you know, not cut them down.
I would say that's a pretty good deal.
[1] https://sustainablefootprint.org/nederlands-trees-and-the-wa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo#Trees [3] https://www.epa.gov/heatislands/using-trees-and-vegetation-r...
I suspect this is soon to change.... With CO2 levels around 280 ppm, the biggest challenge for many plants is finding a carbon atom - in fact, many plants grow just as fast under just 10% brightness sunlight.
Now that CO2 is up at 420 ppm, it's far easier to find carbon, so now the evolutionary race will be on to collect more sunlight and grow faster. And plants have done this before, ~20 million years ago, so somewhere there are probably some recessive genes just waiting for their moment to shine again, and natural selection will make them spread like wildfire.
It is though. Or if you like, it's transforming carbon from "in the ground" to "not in the ground", which is fundamentally the only thing that matters, since you're adding to a closed system.
The point I was making is that cash crop farming is not a self-contained system even if the earth as a whole mostly is. (Much) more carbon goes into its production than comes out in the crop. Most of that takes the form of operating machinery, but there's also the production of fertilizers, and also the incremental loss of carbon in topsoil through tillage and erosion.
I am singling out maize (and, well, soy) because the scale of it is absolutely crazy; also on the whole most of the product isn't for direct human consumption (animal feed and ethanol). (Also BTW I work on software for running machinery which operates in those fields.)
Anyways, this is intrinsic to farming, which is an extractive process. The question is how to more smartly manage it in the long run.
- 40% goes to ethanol production
- 40% goes to livestock feed
- rest is human consumption and misc industrial uses
Source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr...
> Do you have a source on that?
It's not solar radiation forcing that has made things relatively cooler, but it is cooler than 20M years ago. Of course, we could actually reach those temperatures again soon.
https://environmental-geology-dev.pressbooks.tru.ca/chapter/...
See fig 3.1.2.
"The present rate of solar warming is about 8% every billion years. That’s 0.008% every million years or 0.0000008% every century."
For example, wood is a great food resource for fungi, but it took millions of years for wood-eating fungi to evolve after wood.
Trees and stuff will be far slower, yes.
When there's a big shock, specialists have a harder time, and generalist species have an edge. So, when an ecosystem is destabilized or totally transformed, generalists tend to take over. The thing about generalists is that they adapt to new environments quickly. Once they live stably in a new environment long enough, they begin to adapt to it more stably, and specialize, leading to new speciation.
Songbirds are a great example of this; they exploded out of Australia some 40 million years ago, spread everywhere, and then specialized like crazy into their new environments. They likely out-competed a lot of pre-existing local species as they spread out. Humans are also a great example - we spread everywhere as successful generalists, and started the process of biologically specializing in our new environments without fully speciating. In the case of humans, we know pretty precisely about the wave of megafauna extinctions that accompanied our spread.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/history-of-geology/http...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#Historic_e...
Wild mammal biomass is estimated to be about 83% lower due to humans. Reduction in biomass isn't exactly synonymous with extinction, but they aren't totally unrelated either.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-ra...
Most trees probably grew in swampy areas and the water they fell into would have been lower in oxygen. The material would have built up in the water and mud.
Atmospheric CO2 levels in the pre-tree era 400 Myears ago was something like above 6000ppm, compared to 280ppm in the pre-industrial era. Even burning coal formed during this time like mad, 90% of the atmospheric CO2 is still just gone.
ie. Your data and the prior comment aren't necc. in conflict.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning).
About 85 percent of Earth’s ice-free lands is covered by vegetation. The area covered by all the green leaves on Earth is equal to, on average, 32 percent of Earth’s total surface area - oceans, lands and permanent ice sheets combined.
https://bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...
https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/greenhouse-carbon-...
This isn't new knowledge. We've known this for over 100 years.
"An increase in ambient CO2 to 800-1000 ppm can increase yield of C3 plants up to 40 to 100 percent and C4 plants by 10 to 25 percent while keeping other inputs at an optimum level."
In our current breadbaskets plants are going to be losing a chunk of the day in the middle of the growing season when it is too hot to photosynthesize on a regular basis, and the tradeoffs of what land is desertified and what land is defrosted is unlikely to be a net gain. The gains from increased CO2 are starting from in a hole and I'm not expecting to break even, let alone see faster or greater biomass on average, let alone at the rate we see in experiments using our current climate and future CO2 levels.
Yellow corn literally does not come to full harvest if there are too many cloudy days. This happens once a decade maybe. It needs a growing season longer, and with more light than we have here.
Just 300km further south, in Ontario, this is not a problem.
(Bear in mind that the days shorten fast as fall approaches here)
Bi-colour corn can get two crops.
My point is, we already... without genetic engineering, just by selective breeding, get wild variations in growth rate, and yields, and harvest times... with just a decade or two of selective breeding work!
And my second point is, the most fertile land is going to become usable, if temps continue to rise. All that bog in Northern Canada.
We just need crops suited to shorter growing seasons, and very long days at equinox.
Canada is already mostly farmland. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
Also, while I did bring up agriculture and it's fair to point out that it's going to get better over the next thousand years, agriculture is only about 2% of the Earth's plant biomass. While the rest of the biomass will be affected by the heat and benefit from the CO2, unless we start engineering the phytoplankton and the forests and all the other plants around us, it's not going to benefit from it.
Re: Canada's gain, there is a lot of land between 50 and 70 degrees north. The questions are (a) how much land in the north are we trading for how much land in the south? and (b) how does the productivity of the northern land compare to the productivity lost in the southern land?
But not to tailor crops, for areas that are currently permafrost.
There are billions of acres of permafrost bogs/peat in Northern Canada. They are even a concern, for as they thaw, they offgas.
Think of these areas as you would think of coal, in terms of CO2 being released.
But! That peat and bog is immensely fertile. If, outside of the growing season length issues, warmer temperatures come, then that is very, very rich, fertile farmland.
But we need specially tailored crops, which would never be created otherwise.
I know these models are not that mich related, but when we can't look at the wheather of tomorrow, I question the precision of a model looking 1000 years into the future a bit. It will get warmer, for sure. But _how much_ is IMHO subject to interpretation.
You say you know these models aren't that much related, but you still question the precision based on weather models. So do you, or do you not think they are much related?
If you throw a marble into a pit I can't easily predict which path it will take, but I can tell you where it will end up with which likelihood.
That ... Is pseudoscience. And elsewhere is the big greening earth lie big oil was peddling circa year 2000.
The level of idiocy and denialism is incredibly depressing
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=542535...
Remember that photosynthesis is a two stroke process. Fixing carbon tends to happen at night, so both sides are subject to optimization, and the day side has way more variation (seasonal etc) so you can't just say "RuBisCo sucks so PSI/II must be very suboptimal".
The dirt has necessary trace elements, but the carbon? That's all from CO2.
You can't have DNA without phosphorus, for example, and many plants can't make nitrogen from air. Don't get me started on magnesium (needed for chlorophyll)
element %, dry wt.
oxygen 45
carbon 44
hydrogen 6.3
nitrogen 1.3
silicon 1.2
potassium 0.9
calcium 0.25
phosphorus 0.16
magnesium 0.16
sulfur 0.15
chlorine 0.15
aluminum 0.11
sodium 0.03
iron 0.009
manganese 0.006
zinc 0.003
boron 0.001
copper 0.0005
molybdenum 0.0001
> Be aware that elemental concentrations in plant tissue can vary widely for a given crop depending on the stage of growth and environmental conditions and for different crops, yet plants can still appear normal and healthy. For some elements the range of sufficiency is wide and for others the range is narrow. A good deal of caution needs to be exercised in diagnosing mineral deficiencies based only on plant tissue analysis.
Appreciate the cite though.
That's important for farming, not that important when discussing the makeup of plants overall.
Useful sampling for crops is usually done post harvest, since that's the output and what we actually care about. Even after harvest, crops will change depending on the conditions endured during processing and shipment.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/indigenous-maize-who-owns-the...
It is wild that this is a thing.
We stopped doing this and moved to artificial fertilizers in the 20th century because it vastly improved crop yields, and is cheaper.
This species of corn has weird roots halfway up which drip goop down on the ground. The goop contains nitrogen fixing bacteria from the soil which pull nitrogen out of the air to fertilize the soil.
It is massively different from what you say. It would vastly reduce farm runoff while increasing yields. All facts contained within the article.
Also it is corn, and not beans...? Beans is used in crop rotation in service of corn harvests. What if all of a sudden you don't have to rotate crops?
This is a big deal. Don't pooh-pooh it.
I'm pooh-pooh'ing the idea because this isn't any more practical than rotating beans to restore a field was. These microbes don't fix nitrogen anywhere fast enough to supply acceptable yields. You end up with fields giving out 3-4x less end product with this strategy vs. using artificial fertilizer. You're not going to feed the worlds population with replenishing crops.
Being a plant is, locally, a winner-takes-all market.
So there is a very strong incentive for carbon-efficiency.