One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas.
So before we all congratulate ourselves for having him on our side, we have to understand what he is saying. While he doesn't necessarily agree with most freepers (I happen to believe, more or less, in Anthropogenic Global Warming), he DOES believe, like I do and the rest of us, that its mostly a political sham. He has a very interesting take on the matter, saying its a LAND MANAGEMENT problem, and solution. Get this:
Greenhouse experiments show that many plants growing in an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide react by increasing their root-to-shoot ratio. This means that the plants put more of their growth into roots and less into stems and leaves. A change in this direction is to be expected, because the plants have to maintain a balance between the leaves collecting carbon from the air and the roots collecting mineral nutrients from the soil. The enriched atmosphere tilts the balance so that the plants need less leaf-area and more root-area. Now consider what happens to the roots and shoots when the growing season is over, when the leaves fall and the plants die. The new-grown biomass decays and is eaten by fungi or microbes. Some of it returns to the atmosphere and some of it is converted into topsoil. On the average, more of the above-ground growth will return to the atmosphere and more of the below-ground growth will become topsoil. So the plants with increased root-to-shoot ratio will cause an increased transfer of carbon from the atmosphere into topsoil.
I love this! More CO2, more roots; more roots, more carbon into topsoil, OUT of the atmosphere. Whats this? Mother Earth, REGULATING herself?! This is great!
I agree with you, Paradox, that there is, more or less, something going on in the atmosphere related to human activity. But what FD points out with such spectacular brilliance is that it’s a) unpredictable, b) not necessarily very bad or even all bad, and c) closely tied in with natural cycles that we do not understand at all.
I also agree with you about how interesting is his notion of land management. I’ve thought all along that the secret is in the sea (as in “give me a tanker full of iron and I’ll give you an ice age”). This focus on topsoil is a very interesting perspective.
And what he said about ice ages is absolutely and unarguably true. It’s one of the few things we know with certainty about earth’s long-term climate: that ice ages are cyclical, that warm periods are short, and that we are at the far distant end of the current warm period.
Are we fending off an ice age? In the hoot-mind of the OwlGore, is that a bad thing?
(And of course there’s much more to all this. Mars is undergoing warming? What about THAT? That’s a whole ‘nother issue!)
((I’m definitely buying the book.))
A little warming, we can live with. But a new ice age would really suck. :-)