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How the World's Agricultural Boom Has Changed CO2 Cycles
An anonymous reader writes Every year levels of carbon dioxide drop in the summer as plants "inhale," and climb again as they exhale after the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. However, the last 50 years has seen the size of this swing has increase by as much as 50%, for reasons that aren't fully understood. A team of researchers may have the answer. They have shown that agricultural production, corn in particular, may generate up to 25% of the increase in this seasonal carbon cycle. "This study shows the power of modeling and data mining in addressing potential sources contributing to seasonal changes in carbon dioxide" program director for the National Science Foundation's Macro Systems Biology Program, who supported the research, Liz Blood says. "It points to the role of basic research in finding answers to complex problems."
How is this supposed to be a problem? The plants are sucking out more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while they are growing, then releasing as they decay. It's interesting that it is noticeable, and bravo for measuring it, but I don't see any troubles that this will cause.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
CO2 is the cause of global warming/climate change.
You know plants have a cycle of taking in and releasing CO2.
You know agriculture planting harvest lines up the cycle for a large amount plant matter.
You see a signal in your data.
I am shocked. /sarcasm
The political influence of big corn is killing us; HFCS, Corn for fuel instead of growing food, lack of biodiversity... we should be growing a fraction of the corn we do.
This is why Barry Soetoro (who frequented bath houses in Chicago) pushes for gaydom. It's all part of the agenda
I bet the corn husks are handy
The computer science community, for years, have lampooned the "models" generated by arm-chair coders who go by the tag of 'climate scientist'. Not only are they riddled with 'fudge factors', but they do not calculate percipitation or model the increased take up of vegetation. One would think that with over 10,000 years of agricultural experiements and findings that a group of people more aligned to green peace than to science, would consider modelling what our sisters on the other side of the great tree of life were doing with increased "plant food" in the air. I guess noone has been listening to Patrick Moore for a *very* long time...
let pipe water from up north down to the desert - and grow more crop
CO2 emissions increase in the northern hemisphere winter as everyone turns on their heaters. (which are powered by fossil fuels)
However, the last 50 years has seen the size of this swing has increase by as 50%, for reasons that aren't fully understood. "
The fact we've cut 40% of the worlds trees down in the past 100 years are nothing to do with this. What does NASA know anyway?
Who writes this stuff?
Plants producing net CO2 gain has to be the the most asinine thing I've ever read about Co2.
Contraindication: http://www.liebertpub.com/MCon...
Need Mercedes parts ?
If you and your family want to visit the Great Barrier Reef in coming decades I guess you'll have to reduce the amount of corn crops you're growing with which to flood the international markets in the name of reduced competition.
Since ethanol is really lousy when it comes to fuel mileage
http://www.roadandtrack.com/rt...
And Ethanol is causing farmers to switch to corn growth
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
Please - Keep supporting ethanol. I love paying higher prices in the grocery stores, polluting more, and supporting the people in charge fighting for it!
Brought to you by the Amalgamated Association of morons
http://www.threestooges.net/al...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Why not just end welfare that encourages pumping out babies by poor, uneducated people?
no worse than far-left reactionaries..plenty of dogmatism to go around.
"What it points to" is that we know slightly more than "fuck all" about the climate, so the cowboys who think we should get started on megaengineering projects because we think that they'll stave off or reverse global warming...should be thrown right into straitjackets.
-Styopa
Studies have shown that the paleo diet is the healthiest way for humans to eat. And we all know that the earth is overpopulated.
So what you are saying is we know we all should be eating mostly meat, and there's way too much meat on two legs wandering around.
HMM...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Climate Change Priests want to use their religion to reenact the holodomor on a global scale.
I'd run this through babelfish, but I can't work out what language it's supposed to be.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Or end welfare for big companies who pay minimum wage to their employees and then teach them how to claim food stamps and other government support?
You know, stop taxes being spent helping businesses rip people off.
With the drastic swings in CO2 emissions it's very likely - almost a certainty - that 75% of the world's population will perish by March 2015. The time to act is NOW!
Because that wouldn't actually reduce the number of babies, it would just make them poorer and less educated. We certainly do need to reduce the population, but there's no evidence to suggest that welfare programs, daycare, foodstamps, etc., are contributing to the birth rate. Even when the payouts of those programs are tied to the number of children that the recipients have. In fact there's some evidence for the opposite, that using welfare to alleviate some of the very worst effects of poverty can lower the birthrate.
Not enough though, clearly, welfare isn't the magic bullet that's going to bring the population down. Unfortunately, a lot of people use the fact that greater prosperity goes hand-in-hand with lower birth rates as an excuse to ignore the problem... I suspect that this is something that isn't going to be even widely acknowledged, let alone solved, until an awful lot of people have died violently.
They ignore it because its true, in most major industrialied wealthy nations the birthrate is below the replacement rate. This is true of the USA and its true of much of tradtionally defined western Europe. They populations are only growing because of people migrating to these places. They tend to be comming from less industrialized less wealthy places as a rule.
This wealth slowdown in reproduction is only a temporary effect. People who only take 0 or 1 children will die out in a few generations, while people who take 4+ children will grow exponentially. It just takes a while for genetics to catch up with the new environment.
"Kill all humans!"
More population requires more crops be grown which causes a disturbance in the CO2 cycle. It comes back to the same thing as almost all our other woes. Allowing people to reproduce irresponsably is our downfall. If we had half the population we now have we would have half the pollution, half the energy demands, half the urban sprawl, and half of just about every other problem that we currently face. No just why does the nation and the world avoid confronting the real cause of our woes? Big business needs buyers. If we engineer society to have less people we then have a society that consumes less. Business loves runaway irresponsible consumption. Or put in a more ancient way business loves money. And being that one can not serve two masters business has taken on money as their god and rejected morality and faith.
Slashdot seems to be straying from its "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters" by-line, and getting into the territory of "Envrionmentalist Appeasers." Of course there is more CO2 'exhaled' by plants in the northern hemisphere. There's more PLANTS in the northern hemisphere. If you wish to look at the real cause of global warming, look at the nuclear disarmament groups like Greenpeace. If they had stuck to "nuclear disarmament" - like "peace symbol" actually was designed to do (it's a combination of the semaphore signals for 'N' and 'D') - instead of railing against nuclear power in general, we wouldn't have a new coal fired power-plant coming on line every week.
Some stark raving trivia here folks:
- The amount of radiation released every 6 years by the world's coal-fired power-plants is equivalent in Curies/Grays/etc to the sum total of every single man-made nuclear reaction in history.
- A nuclear power plant, over its operation lifetime, generates as much radioactive waste (curie weight) as one coal fired power plant releases into the atmosphere in one year. It also does have the carbon, toxin, or blight footprint as a coal-fired plant.
- Nuclear half-lives mean just the OPPOSITE of what Greenpeace and other environmentalists tell you. A short half-life material is more dangerous than a long half-life material. Take a 1 Mole tube of Tritium (half-life 12 years), and a 1 mole tube of Plutonium 244 (half-life, 80 million years). Greenpeace logic will tell you that the Plutonium-244 is the big bad when it comes to radiation. Wrong. But Greenpeace made a ton of money off telling us that nuclear power is so horrible and dangerous.
In my opinion, Greenpeace has done 2, and only 2, things good for the United States: They convinced the NRC to require more stringent requirements for nuclear power. And they convinced people that "the solution to pollution is dilution" is a bad idea. That's it.
I've lived in a neighborhood where there were many women that made more babies with more fathers specifically to get more benefits. I have no doubt that eliminating welfare WOULD decrease the birthrate.
However... I agree, people aren't going to just stop making babies just because the money tap is turned off. There may be fewer but there would still be many. Those children would suffer greatly and it's not their fault their parents made bad decisions.
So... that's how the real world works liberal and conservative kiddies. There are NO easy answers and your ideologies are all bullshit!
Because we wouldn't want starving masses to revolt against the corporate-welfare-enriched 0.1% .. gotta keep peasants satiated with bread and circuses or they tend to revolt.
My other UID is three digits.
Because rightwingers are too stupid to figure out that if you allow companies to outsource most of their wagebill to the taxpayer then you are getting cheaper goods DESPITE the goods having a lower sticker-price. You're just paying the difference via a rather inefficient middle-man called the government.
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That's hardly true either. From my anecdotal evidence, people from large families have less then their parents. They might have a larger family, but they know the problems that occur with too many.
Cheap storage VM.
First, at what time of year are CO2 levels being measured for use in writing environmental research papers (and dictating policy)? Second, if corn is such a big contributor, then corn ethanol is adding to CO2 levels not reducing them. Third, by pissing away water on bait fish in California instead of allowing farms to grow CO2-inhaling crops (of plant types that aren't completely cut down each harvest), we are effectively adding to CO2 levels.
From my experience working in plenty of pro-Republican/GOP leaning retail stores, they're not the problem.
I've been invited to several churches by friends while living in Texas, Tennessee, and California. Many of the times I've gone, they're not preaching the gospel. They're talking about how to bypass and abuse the system. And then you realize that about 65% of that congregation is welfare-dependent, and that they're more than willing to drop tens of dollars out of that gov't cheese cheque towards that person just because 'Jesus told him how to make my ends meet.'
No, first we end religious welfare, then we end corporate welfare. A good chunk of the corporate welfare part is almost guaranteed to stem from the religious welfare part.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"It just takes a while for genetics to catch up with the new environment."
We've seen lizards of the same species evolve different reproductive systems (Australia, same lizard species, one does live birth, the other does eggs, genetically identical) within the span of 50 years.
Don't think evolution is cosmically slow. That's a HUGE mistake.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's easy...considering it doesnt exist.
Or were you simply unaware that throughout human history high birth rates have nearly always been assocaited with the segments of society made of up of poor and uneduated? Perhaps you also never heard of the phenomenon where as people make more money and achieve higher education levels, birth rates naturally fall?
It has nothing to do with welfare, and everything to do with societal stratification and peoples' economic health and well-being.
After all, if welfare were the cause, then why are birthrates in actual welfares states like Norway, Sweden, France, or just basically most of Europe, so low that they are below replacement levels? In fact, those countries are now actively encouraging people to have more babies.
So much for that theory, huh?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Nothing unusual at all, farmers have been growing more corn than ever before since it is more profitable (and exportable, i.e. China) than other crops.
Myth 1. Poor women have more children because of the "financial incentives" of welfare benefits.
Repeated studies show no correlation between benefit levels and women's choice to have children. (See, for example, Urban Institute Policy and Research Report, Fall/93.) States providing relatively higher benefits do not show higher birth rates among recipients.
In any case, welfare allowances are far too low to serve as any kind of "incentive": A mother on welfare can expect about $90 in additional AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) benefits if she has another child.
Furthermore, the real value of AFDC benefits, which do not rise with inflation, has fallen 37 percent during the last two decades (The Nation, 12/12/94). Birth rates among poor women have not dropped correspondingly.
http://fair.org/extra-online-a...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Its old, but largely still applicable.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Or perhaps admit that maybe contraceptives are a good thing after all?
The problem with both of you guys is that each of you hates the programs the other guy loves. That's how we end up stuck with both of them, and liberty and prosperity go by the wayside.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Because rightwingers are too stupid to figure out that if you allow companies to outsource most of their wagebill to the taxpayer then you are getting cheaper goods DESPITE the goods having a lower sticker-price. You're just paying the difference via a rather inefficient middle-man called the government.
Us stupid right wingers didn't ask Jonathan Gruber to draft an unsustainable health care bill. Nor did we ask the Federal government to raise food stamp access to multiple times above the poverty level. Maybe you're trolling but I think you meant "getting more expensive goods DESPITE the goods having a lower sticker price. You could possibly be right if there wasn't a deficit.
Studies have shown that the paleo diet is the healthiest way for humans to eat. And we all know that the earth is overpopulated.
So what you are saying is we know we all should be eating mostly meat, and there's way too much meat on two legs wandering around.
HMM...
As always, this topic has already been covered:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/
CAPTCHA: organic - ew...
If the scientists are on the EPA panel, heaven forbid the research is valid or even useful and can be discussed.
No, it's not slow, but it will take a few generations. After 4-5 generations, I bet you can already start to see the effect of increasing birth rates.
For some families that may be true. Other families will have different genes, and some of those genes will direct behaviour towards making larger families despite any problems. As long as the extra babies don't die, these genes will grow exponentially.
Grew corn all summer and it "inhaled" carbon dioxide...
then we sequestered the dead stalks instead of letting them rot on the ground and "exhale" carbon dioxide....
wouldn't that start reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
and if we sequestered it deep underground under enormous pressure for long periods of time, we'd create new oil...
I wonder how much of "Global Warming" is caused by taking samples during the peak of the annual cycle ?
Actually the typo was "aren't" instead of "are".
The goods at Wallmart are NOT cheaper than anywhere else, they cost the same or perhaps even MORE than elsewhere.
You just don't realise you're paying the difference because what Wallmart has done is to outsource most of their wagebil onto the wellfare system. By allowing Walmart to pay slave wages you aren't saving money on goods - you're just paying that money to the same people walmart would have paid it to - only you're doing it through the government instead of through walmart.
In the end - you're still the one paying it though and the only people who gain from this are the executives of walmart because on THEIR balance sheet a major cost has been removed.
The cost still exists - they've just externalized it onto to their customers through the tax system.
Externalities are ALWAYS market failures, they are one of the defining types of market failure. The market cannot accurately price things when part of the costs have been externalized which leads to inefficient economic outcomes.
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Ask not what plants can do with CO2, ask what CO2 can do to plants :)
I've been invited to several churches by friends while living in Texas, Tennessee, and California. Many of the times I've gone, they're not preaching the gospel. They're talking about how to bypass and abuse the system. And then you realize that about 65% of that congregation is welfare-dependent, and that they're more than willing to drop tens of dollars out of that gov't cheese cheque towards that person just because 'Jesus told him how to make my ends meet.'
Well, technically they're not being good stewards (per Christianity) in doing so, but legally they have probably jeopardized their "church" non-profit status as a result.
No, first we end religious welfare, then we end corporate welfare. A good chunk of the corporate welfare part is almost guaranteed to stem from the religious welfare part.
Funny thing is - the conservative right-wingers will typically take money if you make it available, but they don't typically want it made available as they'd rather not pay the higher taxes that cover it to start with. However, it's the liberal left-wingers that want the higher taxes and all the "free" money programs that everyone (especially the liberals) abuses. The right-wingers would prefer the "market" handle things instead; most will agree that some level of oversight is necessary when it comes to safety, etc but that it should still remain minimal; unlike the left-winger "you didn't build that" sentimentality.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I'm just glad I didn't fall for a troll. I'd expect a smart conservative to plant a subtle joke like that.
Your argument about external costs in welfare is hard to agree with when no one pays the full budget deficit anyway. If both progressives and conservatives agreed to a balanced budget and we agreed to a compromise on the size of the safety net and size of the military and then raised revenues to match expenditures then I'd agree this is a problem. I think inherently, progressives are worried that if Americans knew the total cost of these expanded welfare programs they wouldn't want them.
But progressives want it both ways. They want to complain that current minimum wage laws are putting people on welfare and then they want to raise welfare poverty level requirements to add more people. That seems like the bigger issue than poor people affording vegetables at Walmart.
The thing is - you can't act as if all costs are equal. At least you recognize that NEITHER side have actually done a balanced budget so you're not one of those who thinks Obama is a big spender (when in actual fact his deficit run-up is the lowest since Nixon) with a completely one-sided view.
But as I said, all costs aren't equal. Progressives are hugely in favour of cutting military spending - a LOT.
And that could solve the problem easily - without actually putting America at any risk. America right now has a military spending 13 times bigger than the next biggest, and 6 times bigger than the entire rest of the world COMBINED.
Nobody needs that.
Just the part of the military budget that goes to contractors - that's not barracks or feeding soldiers or even bullets and guns, just the part that's spent on contractors is 700 billion a year.
The total budget for social security is 70 billion.
One welfare-ish program, is about one TENTH of one part of the military budget.
Cut the military budget in half, you can have the same number of soldiers and the same level of military prowes (do you really think it makes a difference whether you buy 11 new aircraft carriers a year or 5 - when almost nobody else has even one ?) while at the same time paying for every welfare and safety net program you need without running up a deficit.
You may EVEN be able to do it without actually making the rich pay taxes (though you SHOULD anyway because nobody should get the benefits of living in a country without contributing to it's upkeep).
But show me one conservative who would even consider that ...
Now here's the real problem - America doesn't have a liberal party in government. The greens are liberal but they aren't on the hill, the democrats sure aren't progressive or liberal, they are center-right, the reps are just batshit insane.
The real problem America faces is that the 60% progressives in the population have no party actually representing them, Liberals don't vote democrat because democrats are liberal, they vote democrat because center-right is better than batshit insane.
And just how center right ? Compare actual policy and the following presidents were ALL more leftwing than Barack Obama:
Millard Filmore (refused to grant Utah statehood until governor Brigham Young created a welfare system).
Richard Nixon - created the EPA, supported welfare reform.
Ronald Reagan - argued for matching the capital gains tax to the income tax (basically he was trying to pass the Buffet rule 3 decades before Buffet was). Ran up a massive deficit.
Truman - tried to pass universal healthcare (and single-payer at that - which is a hell of a lot more liberal than Obama's version which made everybody a customer of an insurance company).
Gerald Ford - tried to pass Nixon's healthcare reforms but wasn't in power long enough to succeed.
Rooseveldt - the one who sent in the army to protect UNIONS from corporate thuggery and called for a second bill of rights that could have come right out of a democratic socialist country like Denmark.
Eisenhower - by a huge margin.
And ultimately - this is the wrong time for your suggestion. Despite what Austrian economists say - there's a reason they are a tiny fringe group in economics who get laughed at a lot. A recession, by definition, is CAUSED by a LACK of spending. Nobody spends, means nobody else has INCOME - so THEY don't spend either.
The only way OUT of a recession is for SOMEBODY to start spending - a LOT. And the only actor who can do that is the government.
Every government that tried austerity made their recessions worse, MUCH worse. The biggest economic problem in the USA today is that your government is underspending, massively. The stimulus package was no more than 40% of what economists were recommending.
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No idea where you got your facts. Your numbers are completely wrong. https://static.nationalpriorit...
Those are OMB numbers. The military budget is part of discretionary spending. Most the social programs are mandatory spending. We spend way more of our budget on social programs combined than the military.
https://static.nationalpriorit...
I'm not interested in arguing whether the balance is correct. Hopefully seeing the real numbers gives you a better insight that your idea of the budget is orders of magnitude wrong.
Russia has one aircraft carrier and China has at least one being refurbished from Russia. http://rt.com/news/china-super...
Since the 2014 election the only congressional representatives that are Democrats are Progressives. Greens, liberals, progressives, government unions all vote Democratic. The reason Congressional Democrat's voting record might look center right is because the absolute majority of America is center right. The modestly watered down progressive goal of government run Healthcare caused a huge repudiation of the Democrat's fortunes. America does not want progressive policies that's why Democrats in Congress can't push the ideas.
Ask the Weimar republic how spending out of a recession helps. Or better yet, we just had a huge stimulus. Did that get us out of a recession?
Now go ask an actual economist about the Weimar republic and they will tell you that not in Weimar nor anywhere else in HISTORY has spending in a recession EVER caused hyperinflation.
What DOES cause hyperinflation is severe social upheaval. Weimar republic had just come out of a massive civil war. Zimbabwe - just came out of massive unrest. Rome in Nero's time: just concluded a massive war while dealing with a famine caused by bad weather.
Spending in a recession does not, by itself, cause hyperinflation - I'm not saying it CAN'T but we have mathematical methods to work out how much you OUGHT to spend to get the results without causing problems.
Now consider that the MOST common cause of hyperinflation has nothing to do with monetary policy at all ! It's social inequality ! Yes, some of the worst cases of hyperinflation were caused by severe social inequality. A prime example would be the destruction of the Spanish economy right at the height of Spanish power.
The conquistadors were using slave labor and getting very, very rich in the New World- coming back and spending their fortunes the way sailors do - in giant short-bursts far apart.
So traders raised their prices to meet this high demand, which benefitted traders, and so OTHER traders raised prices since THOSE traders could afford it.
Very soon - traders and conquistadors were making fortunes, while everybody else were poor, but the prices were being set by the rich minority - pricing everything out of reach of almost the entire population.
A loaf of bread came to be about a week's average wages !
That's when the Spanish economy entirely collapsed because do you know what happens when people who work hard all week can't afford enough food for a week ? They stop working. What's the point of working hard if you aren't EVEN able to meet your basic needs ?It makes no economic sense. The opportunity cost of going to work is higher than the value of your wages.
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My bachelor's of science in economics from a reputable university qualifies me to say I know of which I speak.
Germany was suffering from the global recession just like every country but the socialist government chose Keynesian stimulus to try to save the economy. Social upheaval was already fomenting from the loss of jobs but hyperinflation contributed to the social upheaval. Hyperinflation is caused by loss of investor confidence. We use fiat currency based on the trust in value. Overspending decreases trust in a currency. Just look at Greece's woes based on overspending and lack of revenue. Greece's social upheaval was also partly due to a recession and overspending. In both these cases the roots are just the opposite order chain of events then you mentioned.
Anyway. I take the time to refute closed-system people saying things like stupid right wingers, not for your benefit, but for others reading it. If you're reduced to ad hominem attacks against 51% of the country then you're mind is made up, which is fine. Some kids, learning in public schools, have no idea about the bias in public. They might have no idea some people want the government to stop "helping." But since no one benefits from reading this you can have the last word. I won't argue anymore.
And Paul Krugman's PHD in economics qualifies him to say he knows better than you - and he is the one whom I was just citing.
And no, there isn't 51% conservatives in America, in fact you're a minority - which is why you struggle to win presidential elections.
You need to factor voter-turnout in. Several studies concluded that voter turnout among conservatives is over 80%, among liberals it is around 50% and thats in presidential elections where turnout is highest. In things like mid-terms, it's much lower.
More-over liberal voter turnout goes down MORE in things like midterms because very few liberals are retirees, indeed a large number of them are the very people who are affected by voter-suppression laws or simply such low-income earners that they literally CAN'T go vote because taking the time off work means starving that day.
If the USA made elections public holidays like every other civilized country on earth - the republicans would never win another election.
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