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Has Plant Life Reached Its Limits?
hessian writes with this news from the New York Times: "Since 2000, Dr. [Steven] Running and his colleagues have monitored how much plant growth covers terra firma, using two NASA satellites in the agency's Earth Observing System. After they crunched the numbers, combining the current monitoring system's data with satellite observations dating back to 1982, they noticed that terrestrial plant growth, also known as net primary production, remained relatively constant. Over the course of three decades, the observed plant growth on dry land has been about 53.6 petagrams of carbon each year, Dr. Running writes in the article. This suggests that plants' overall productivity — including the corn that humans grow and the trees people log for paper products — is changing little now, no matter how mankind tries to boost it, he said."
I dont think there will be any actual planetary limits on crop production, just the matter of understading all of variables and how they interact.
What we're trying to do is grow SPECIFIC plants that are useful to people. We have never cared much if at all that what we are really doing is converting areas that grow one kind of plant to grow another kind of plant. If we were trying to increase primary production, no doubt we could do that, but we would be up against the same things that limit agriculture now: mainly water availability. But if you built a lot of greenhouses and water recycling systems we could probably increase primary production substantially.
... no matter how much plant matter humans harvest for various reasons, the Earth is able to replenish it to its maximum level.
1. Figure out how to harness nuclear fusion for practically free energy.
2. Desalinate seawater and pump it into the deserts.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Hemp!!!! .....
Better than corn.
Produces more
Clothing,
Fuel,
Meds,
Air,
And many other uses...
But they made it illegal because there is now way to make a profit off WEED!!!!
...Start killing humans, letting their property go fallow and consumed by nature once again.
Doesn't get any simpler than that.
The MidEast represents instructive activities of man over 10-20 thousand years.
Farming started between Turkey and Iraq of today, the fertile crescent, but land salting and rainfall reductions reduced that output. About 10,000 years ago the inland valleys of Egypt were incredibly productive, but later rainfall reductions then reduced that to desert.
Hence, natural rainfall changes altered growth a lot.
Man induced changes in that same region has caused vegetation to increase in one spot where there is economic incentive to figure out how to grow plants in marginal lands. Israel. They have developed techniques to make it work. Other peoples in the area haven't been as diligent.
Overall, maybe it is merely the cost-benefit ratio that determines whether mankind develops marginal lands.
I think you should ask Romney directly; instead of branching out, just go for the root of the matter.
Although honestly, I think he's more of a fungus than a plant...
Plant life has existed on land for 450 million years, which is plenty of time to reach an equilibrium where the total mass is no longer growing. It's actually a relief that human impact on the environment doesn't appreciably alter this equilibrium on the time frame of a few decades. Why is anyone surprised that there is a finite limit and that it is not subject to increase?
There are huge areas where very poor people are living on subsistence agriculture in small plots that are not very productive, especially in Africa and the backwaters of India and China.
Eventually these small plots will be joined into huge efficient and more productive farms with GPS-optimized fertilization and irrigation.
All it would really take is true land ownership rights by the current farmers (many countries do not allow their poor farmers to own the land, its ownership is governmental or transfers are highly restricted), as well as some investment in infrastructure. The first would allow farmers to sell their small plots into larger farms, and the second would make it worth the investment in the large farms to be able to bring the produce out effectively.
More development of service or manufacturing jobs would also be needed to absorb many of the current farm workers, as the larger efficient farms would be more automated and need fewer workers.
What can 30 years of observation tell about billions of years of plant life?
I, for one, think plant life will be there for a long time after humanity. Util it gets swallowed by the red giant sun.
Everyone here seems to be adding their own opinions none of which are suggested or demonstrated in the article. The basis for the conversation is that the green revolution should have made it possible for us to increase the green biomass. What we're seeing is that the green we grow is offset by wild green that grows less and the total green biomass remains constant. This isn't to say it will remain constant for any arbitrary length of time.
So this tells us we can grow one 2500 sequoia, or a similar mass of corn or wheat or soybeans in any given year. We also know that the tropical forests are under assault and because the wealth if tropical forests tend to be in their canopy and not their soul, a cleared area results in erosion and growing desertification. It will be interesting to see in 10 years when we can begin to see what the legacy of slash and burn forest clearing is doing to the Tropical places on earth. Add to that heat stress and drought and we will be seeing new and interesting changes.
Quantity of plant life does equal quality of plant life, much less diversity of plant life. Simply saying we have "X" isn't that terribly helpful without context.
So I'll provide some context and let's put a twist on this story which is being spun for political gain. In the year 1980 we had 4,453,831,714 people (the study starts in 1982 but close enough) In just 30 years the world's population grew 6,848,932,929.
In other words, we have grown the population of the world by 50% in thirty years and we still kept just as much plant life. Job well done with planting things to compensate for a growing population! We don't need to change a thing, we doing everything right. Neither answer is right of course, they are both ways of spinning a set of meaningless facts.
Point of the matter is that any given set of statistics can be twisted for a given political agenda with ease. The only thing this study does is show how easily meaningless data can be slanted for gain political purposes when the data is without merit. All it does is measure quantity without context. Might as well say a ranchers supports incredible wildlife, there's 200 cows and a dozen field mice.
A 30 year peephole seems rather negligible in the greater context. Exactly what agenda are you trying to push with this article by claiming plant growth has reached its limit?
Anyone who has battled kudzu will find this report rather hard to believe.
Three Squirrels
Did anybody notice that this leveling off of plant biomass is *despite* the enormous amounts of energy spent on irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides, aka the Green Revolution, and industrial food production?
Oh and most of that energy is produced from fossil fuels. *That* is why we're way beyond the Earth's carrying capacity, why world food production is slacking, prices are rising and we see food riots.
And I didn't even mention global warming (yet, heh.)
Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRLg8No0RVQ.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
More plant growth is largely a simple input/output problem, because plant life is already highly-evolved and adapted to make effective use of the available resources. To get more plant growth you throw more of whatever the limiting resources are: phosphates, nitrates, water, CO2, land area (which builds in things like sunlight). Increasing the availability of these resources is costly, and, therefore, so is increasing plant growth. Unless you just want to fix a lot of CO2 (in which case the oceans, which were not part of this study, may be a better bet) you would actually prefer to limit your augmentation of natural plant growth. What you desire is high efficiency fields, where loss due to pests and drought is minimal, where most of the energy of the plant is invested in producing your desired food product rather than in fighting with weeds, etc., and therefore, where less resources need to be invested to produce the same output. The alternative would be to just grow so many plants that you get what you want out of it regardless of massive crop loss, but that is simply not the best solution. (And, of course, the effect on net plant growth is balances by the fact you are often displacing other plants for the purpose.)
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
The "terrestrial plant growth" of the article takes into account both the wild and that from agriculture.
We can raise the "terrestrial plant growth" by allocating more land surface to the human agriculture (human agriculture can use resources -land, water, e.t.c.- more effectively), or just use the resources already allocated to human agriculture more efficient (there is still huge potential for that).
Betteridge's Law of Headlines
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Earth reached its carrying capacity for plant life several hundred million years ago. Mankind is not going to increase or decrease that. Mankind doesn't even know how to begin to control the total biomass. The earth is on an energy budget dictated by the sun.
I was going to reply to the parent to your comment but then I saw this and decided I had to kill two birds.
The Earth's energy budget is only one part of the equation. A lot of that energy budget is not being used to grow plants, and some of what isn't probably could be. The other major parts of the equation are human influence and CO2. Plants are mostly made out of carbon and virtually all of the carbon they're made from comes from the air. If you increase global CO2 then you can, in theory, make more plants. However, humans don't seem to be interested in increasing global plant mass, not as a species anyway. It's clearly desirable; you can mitigate (or even solve) the carbon problem, and there is continuous ongoing demand for plant products.
Now, I hope you will forgive me if I address a point of the parent.
[by Genda (560240)] What we're seeing is that the green we grow is offset by wild green that grows less and the total green biomass remains constant. This isn't to say it will remain constant for any arbitrary length of time.
So this tells us we can grow one 2500 sequoia, or a similar mass of corn or wheat or soybeans in any given year
No, that tells us that we do grow x amount of biomass per year, not that we can grow x amount. Humanity's primary goal is not the production of more biomass, so we don't know how much we're capable of producing. This does not in fact tell us anything about anything.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And all along we were bombarded with propaganda that mankind was destroying plants everywhere at a rapid pace. Now we find out that it has not changed at all. Somebody has been lying. Why?
....to populate the place, and it is now only reaching its limits.
This is good news for "mankind" there be plenty of life left in her yet.
Limits To Growth has never been proven wrong. This lie, originally created by Economists, has been told, and retold, and retold again, and I see it again in that Reason article, which I just read. Same lies! Try this: Go out and buy the original 1973 Limits to Growth book. Read it and look at the numbers. Now get CURRENT data on the same items. Compare. You will find that they match strikingly well.
The anti-Limits to Growth hatchet jobs tend to use the same lies. The standard approach, which is REPEATED in that lame Reason article, is to deliberately misinterpret LTG as predicting stuff it never said, then 'proving' that misinterpretation wrong. It's the standard 'Straw Man' argument, and that wretched Reason article does it AGAIN.
To repeat myself: go out and buy the original 1973 Limits to Growth book, or any of the more recent ones. Read it and look at the numbers. Now get HISTORICAL data on the same items. Compare. You will find that they match strikingly well. Nothing in Limits to Growth has been proven wrong, that is a FALSE MEME that represents a triumph of Disinformation.
... no matter how much plant matter humans harvest for various reasons, the Earth is able to replenish it to its maximum level.
Nope, the universe does not work that way, no matter how much we would like it to be so. You seem lack a basic understanding of ecological carrying capacity. When any species transgresses the carrying capacity of an ecosystem, it permanently reduces the carrying capacity of that ecosystem. This is basic Biology. The Reindeer of St. Matthew Island illustrate this point very well. In the future, please learn the basics of the topic before spouting off your (un) scientific opinion.
You aren't the sharpest tool in the shed, are you?
Is this weirdly worded word vomit actually saying:
"In spite of the fear mongering about rainforests, other tree, and other vegitation being removed for development, Plant life is still the same?"
Because all this tells me is we just set a goal for maximum carbon output... 53.6 B metric tons.
In 2008 we were putting out about 30B metric tons but it was rising sharply. It's easy to see how fears of global warming arise. I know plants consume more in high carbon environments, but I doubt they consume any and all increase in carbon over what we call "normal".
Mod parent up!
LTG is more applicable than ever with Peak Everything looming (or already here, for some values of "Everything".)
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The Anthropocene, the Be All That Human Can and Ever Be Is Not.
The Anthropocene, the GORE Vision (Cable Televison) is Blinded.
The Anthropocene, the MOST IMPORTANT Geologic EON of Earth Does Not Exist.
The Anthropocene, ... Well ... I was just sitting on the toilette and I did do a big Shit. After which I whipped my asshole with some paper, then looked at the shit smear on the paper. This IS the Anthropocene ... I quickly plunked the paper and Anthropocene smear into the bowl and flushed it down the drain.
A supreme vision of the true meaning the Anthropocene, of the Mr. James E. Hamsen and the Mr. Mark Serreze.
8D
In 1972, the Limits researchers estimated known global oil reserves at 455 billion barrels.
Since this book isn't freely available online, and not within a reasonable time's distance away from me, how about you go open your copy, and tell us the actual figure that the book lists (since you claim it's not this 455 million barrels number).
Then go onto Wikipedia, and tell us the actual production to date.
But even this misses the point of the article: A higher price will cause supply to go up, and demand to go down. This is called the law of supply and demand, maybe you've heard of it.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
I see that your huffy reply contains a citation to a book which isn't readily at hand, and angry denunciation of those who debunked the book you're telling us to go and read. How about actually citing some data which we can readily consult ourselves?
Neither are you.
Nature seeks an equilibrium, we're the ones that insist on spreading like viruses. The point is there are factors that when we plant more crops it tends to remove the resources needed for native plants. Look up Global Dimming and you'll find nature is also compensating for increased CO2 with more cloud cover moderating the amount of light reaching the Earth limiting the warming. Unfortunately it also reduces the light plants have available reducing the overall amount of green plants. This trend has been recorded since the early 60s so any satellite data would be after the dimming began. It's a combination of jet contrails, particles from industrial pollution and water vapor from warming oceans. Nature is really good at compensating for errors but reducing plant life is one of the variables which would help limit the most damaging factor, the number of humans alive today. If we continue on as we are now part of the balancing act will be droughts and flooding to wipe out the excess homo sapiens screwing up the environment. Yes people in the first world will ride it out but in the third world they may die in the billions due to what we do in the first world.
Well, if you were ever to come up with evidence for your assertions, that would be interesting.
The observation was that total plant life is not increasing. How does that imply a limit? What factors indicate that plant life should be increasing?
During the recent global recession, many people's incomes have remained stagnant, or decreased. Does that mean those people have reached the limit of their income potential?
The same authors wrote another book a few years ago. In the second book they claimed that the basic mathematical approach of LImits To Growth was right (or at least useful), but some of the exact predictions had to be corrected.
But actually I don't think that Limits To Growth aimed to make very precise predictions. After all the authors made a point of showing several different scenarios. Instead they presented a new way of modelling economic development. That was a nice step forward for humankind.
Wikipedia has a world map of projected effect of global warming on in agricultural yield. It looks like most of the northern hemisphere will gain from global warming, whereas the southern hemisphere will lose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Projected_impact_of_climate_change_on_agricultural_yields_by_the_2080s,_compared_to_2003_levels_(Cline,_2007).png
I would love to see then data from the article on a map so i can compare.
I think this may be a first, in which the conservatives among us (I'm TheGoodNamesWereGone, but I'm posting as AC because I moderated) might have won.
No, folks, plant life hasn't reached a pinnacle. If CO2 levels are going up then that means plants breathe better. Global warming means more moisture in the air. Plants grow better. We're making plants *thrive*.
We'll soon find out.
When I purchase the Sony Biogen 7000, I'll create millions of new species of plants and loose them upon the world.
We'll see about those putative limits.
Nice argumentation, man! And it fits to ANY discussion about ANY topic! Did you elaborate it all yourself? Can I copy it? Please put it under CC license!
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
Obviously those satellites neglected to fly over my garden. Despite my continuous fight, kudzu, weed (not the smokable one) and other wild plants (and even trees) are invading it more and more.
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
There's two problems in applying the law of supply and demand to oil:
1) The largest possible supply is limited. After all, there's just a limited amount of oil in the crust, and it will only be replaced at geological time scales (if ever - it's entirely possible that the specific conditions that originally resulted in oil formation won't be repeated again). There's another limit related to net energy oil extraction - that is, a point where extracting a barrel of oil requires more energy than said barrel will produce when burned. So yes, the supply (total extracted oil) will go up, but only asymptotically growing towards a limit, rather than towards infinity. That also means that there's a third limit: the point where the curve showing total extracted oil starts to flatten, meaning that the rate of extraction starts to slow, also known as peak oil.
2) The lowest possible demand is effectively limited, at least if we want to not die. We need to move stuff around, power agriculture, power industry, and power our homes. Homes and factories can be connected to the power grid, so we could in theory power them with nuclear power, but transportation can't. Current batteries have nowhere near the energy densities or safety where they could replace oil as a mobile energy source, and even if they did, we simply do not have the economic resources to replace old vehicles and do the necessary grid upgrades to power hundreds of millions of electric cars in the economic chaos caused by an oil price shock.
Basically, the law of supply and demand only works on luxury goods (you can live without) whose supply can be easily scaled by anyone who wishes to enter the field (no cartels controlling a significant chunk of the supply, barriers of entry or natural limits). None of these is true for oil, thus it won't obey the law of supply and demand except accidentally.
But of course a website using a slogan "Free minds and free markets" would have every incentive to pretend otherwise, since all solutions basically come down, at the very least, to government manipulating the price of oil to ensure a slow, steady increase to allow adaptation rather than a sudden "price wall" the economy would crash headfirst against.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I think Genghis Khan demonstrated a way to boost plant production. I'm sure the black plague also had similar effects.
So has it reached it's limits? Nah. Remove all animal life forms and plant diseases, then you'll see it reach it's limits.
On a planet of finite size, there are always limits. Earth cannot support unlimited humans, unlimited plants, unlimited anything. The total mass of the earth is 5.96 × 10^24 kg. Divide that by the mass of a single human (or plant, or bacterium, etc.) and you will get a huge (but finite) number that is **WILDLY** greater than the actual maximum supportable number.
So let's please stop talking about how there is no limit to Earth's capacity. ok?
The sad fact is that the starving billions support the few millions enthusiastically, or at least tolerate them. Otherwise this could not go on for long.
When you're armed and confronted by a crowd that's not, with less bullets than the crowd, the trick is to pick off the first ones to attack, and let them know that this is how you will procede. The crowd is confronted with the fact that, though they might be able to overwhelm you after losing a few, leading the attack means getting hurt or dead. Even if an attack starts at all the crowd will usually run out of leaders before you run out of bullets.
This works just as well when the ones with the guns are jackbooted thugs and the ones with the numbers are the downtrodden masses.
This is why gun bans for the general population are popular with despotic regimes. It's also why adding gun control to an otherwise non-despotic (or not-very-despotic) legal system is usually followed by despotism within a couple decades.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There are many planetary boundaries.
Rockstrom et al estimate global water use is already over the 4,300 km3 estimated global replenishment rate. If only 600 GT of additional carbon are sequestered in biomass (including forests, algae and other biofuels and so on) there will not be enough water for agriculture even using intensive means because of the water sequestered with the carbon. Green tech won't change this because building a sustainable energy system will release enough greenhouse gases to raise the global mean surface temp 2.0 C (Myhrvold and Caldeira) which will in turn decrease food production by at least 40%. (Rockstom et al). CO2e is another limit. Known carbon reserves on the market are about 2900 GT but we'll heat the planet 2 C for every 500 GT we burn. Exxon alone spends $100 million a day looking for more. There are now at least nine planetary boundaries reasonable quantified beyond which lie great risk of global catastrophe. We have exceed 3 of them already.
Search John Rockstrom - Planetary Boundaries.
on google scholar.
"...Who sits upon our skies How deep do you see When you spy into our lives?"
nt
Play Command HQ online
we just need to produce some more co2 to feed them. problem solved.... you're welcome :)
You don't come across "problems" applying supply and demand any more than you come across "problems" applying Newton's laws of gravitation to the Earth's revolution around the sun, or "problems" when calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Supply and demand is a provable scientific law.
You've got it down that the cost of continuing to develop these resources will increase. This is called... the law of increasing marginal cost. We go after the cheapest resources first, then the more expensive ones. It's related to the law of decreasing marginal utility.
How much energy gets used up in the extraction of oil has nothing at all to do with how much energy is in the oil itself. Different forms of energy have different marginal utilities. We don't heat homes on any large scale with electricity, and we don't power computers on any large scale with hydrocarbons. Different devices are better suited for using different energy sources. It very well may use more energy to get out of the ground, however that doesn't mean it's not efficient . Note that it takes more oil to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than the corn ethanol itself provides!
As the cost of extracting oil goes up, as it takes more and more external resources to pump, the price will go up. As the price goes up, consumption necessarily must go down in proportion to other products, because it will start taking up more and more of people's incomes. This is called income elasticity
At the point when gasoline is $50/gallon, we'll start looking for electric cars. For some people, electricity is already more efficient (remember not all forms of energy have equal utility for different uses). Also at $50/gallon, It'll become profitable to do ridiculous things to get at this oil, for the benefit of the remaining few people who still depend on oil more than any other form of energy (this is that law of decreasing marginal utility, when gas is at $50/gal, it will only go to the very most urgent of uses).
You don't ever "run out" of oil. Grab a stupid econ 101 textbook and learn the rest why.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
... to others who have had their brains removed.
You don't... actually believe that the law of supply and demand is in any way comparable to physics or geometry, right? Then again, you compared it to Newton's gravity laws (which are incorrect) so perhaps you do.
True but irrelevant, as the main use of oil is as an energy source, and if you need to burn more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon out of the ground you're making a net loss, no matter how much oil costs.
So what is it that I'm supposed to note? That you just wasted oil to get a smaller quantify of inferior fuel, thus hastening the onset of peak oil? I do presume that you meant to use that ethanol for fuel rather than drinking, given the context of this conversation.
As it happens, the most common sources of electric power are coal, oil and gas.
It takes energy (and thus oil) to manufacture and transport goods, which is means that their price goes up as the price of oil goes up. The price of everything goes up, since you simply can't expand or even maintain production and distribution without energy, so there's less stuff for people to compete over. This, of course, leads to an economic collapse and eventually mass death when the amount of production per person falls below the level of being able to satisfy actual physical needs.
At the point when gasoline is $50/gallon, the chances are you're dead. If you aren't, you aren't looking at electric cars because nobody can move the raw materials to the factory or the finished good to the consumer. Or generate the electricity to run the things, for that matter.
Electricity is a way to transport energy, not produce it. It needs to be generated, and thus doesn't really help here.
Only if the infrastructure necessary to support either this need or those ridiculous things - such as a large and varied manufacturing base - still exists, which is unlikely. Also, again, if you need more oil for those ridiculous things than you extract with them, you're running a loss no matter what the price of oil is.
Many civilizations have collapsed due to resource scarcity, for reasons outlined above. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics./p>
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You don't... actually believe that the law of supply and demand is in any way comparable to physics or geometry, right? Then again, you compared it to Newton's gravity laws (which are incorrect) so perhaps you do.
You're about as foolish to deny evolution as you are to deny the basic laws of economics. And at least evolution is only a theory, you can actually prove the laws of supply and demand the same way you go about proving the Pythagorean theorem. You note that people prefer one outcome to another (this is the definition of cost, and our axiom in this law). You then construct a plot of how many people would be willing to trade at what price. It's mathematically necessary that as price goes up, demand goes down and supply goes up.
True but irrelevant, as the main use of oil is as an energy source, and if you need to burn more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon out of the ground you're making a net loss, no matter how much oil costs.
If this were true then you would turn something called a loss. You can't use up more wealth than you put out, and remain profitable. (By definition! Unless of course, you're getting subsidized or similarly, though this doesn't fall within the economist's definition of profit, unlike the accountant's definition.)
This, of course, leads to an economic collapse and eventually mass death when the amount of production per person falls below the level of being able to satisfy actual physical needs.
An "economic collapse" is not the same thing as "restructuring of capital resources in response to a change in demand". Sudden changes in demand that mis-matches our capital structure (and debt) is what a recession is. We tend to recover from those relatively quickly when allowed. And you do understand that the price will go up gradually, right? It's not like we wake up one day and boom, $50/gal gas. We choose oil because it's the cheapest, in comparison to all the other things we could use. That doesn't mean the slightest that we need it for any particular end, it just means it makes our lives that much more livable.
Many civilizations have collapsed due to resource scarcity, for reasons outlined above. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics.
Um, welcome to economics, which means the study of scarcity (after all, what does it mean to say "I want to economize my electricity usage"). We're saying we do not consume resources at the same rate until we suddenly run out, instead, we start migrating away as the price increases. Some people will prefer oil squirting up out of the ground in Texas to solar-power electric lighting. Those same people will prefer electric to oil that has to be dug up a mile below the Ocean (which is much more costly). Your argument is about as stupid as saying the laws of geometry trump the laws of architecture. What?
Protip: Don't try lecturing an economist on the causes of the fall of Rome.
Again, consult your local Economics textbook for more help. It shouldn't be my job to correct all your misunderstandings for you. Here's a good one for you (free, too): http://mises.org/books/econforrealpeople.pdf
Wonder what the public key field is for?