Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Of course the question about terrestrial crops completely ignores the fact that the world is about 70% ocean. In terms of the ability of plants to convert solar energy to carbon trapping, the ocean has always had far more impact than the land does. In the ocean the entire height of the water column that solar energy can reach is teeming with algae doing photosynthesis - and below that other forms of life feed on the detritus. The evolution and distribution of various forms of algae and plankton are far more important.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Actually hemp is maybe the most nutritious plant for human consumption. The seed has all the essential oils and more importantly it is one of the two (common?) plants that have all the essential amino acids, slightly less then soy 23% vs 25% protein) The leaves, I'd guess are like most greens, vitamin c, some a and lots of minerals and of course, roughage. With sunshine and a source of B12 you could live a long time on a hemp diet, longer then any other common crop and perhaps any plant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp#Nutrition
http://www.thenourishinggourmet.com/2009/03/hemp-seed-nutritional-value-and-thoughts.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism