Climate Change

Yeah, I been wondering about that, seems like, forever.
Instead of paying attention to thermostats and turning off lights,
rewire and computerize the entire house to do it for us “more efficiently.”

The problem was doing with a bit less was a total nonstarter for everyone with any money and they owned the mega phone. Instead of learning about our evolution and about Earth, we learned that he who dies with the most toys wins, we preached that too much is never enough and it permeated every aspect of our being and living.

Sad thing is that people have been acting like fools since forever. Consuming more is all that’s seemed to matter, since forever. Instead of two holes for water to rush through and flush, let’s build a hundred fifty dollar complicated pressured (constant maintenance requiring) unit to force water down the poop shoot faster.

Here’s a what if:
What if, when manufacturing really kicked in and people started noticing the down side of too much consumerism - namely too natural resource destruction and too much obsolete trash, etc.

Think of how different it would have been had we any incentive for being thoughtful towards Earth and the biosphere that is the only life support system we have? -

Tire manufactures, collecting their spent tires. Aren’t they the one’s in the best position to know how to reuse the raw materials.
All the way down the line, refrigerators, appliances - all these manufacturers are best placed to figure out repurposing options. Why not? All it would have taken was the desire - a little thoughtfulness to understand why it was important to tread lightly with our resources. A desire to do one’s part to nurture Earth - what did we choose ridiculing environment and disregarding the future.

We never accepted looking at the dark side of what all our affluence was doing to our natural biosphere, it was always all Hollywood, - any and all complainers were communists and all those horrors…

But all that belongs to things we should have taken more serious back in the '70s and '80s. We didn’t, now we start paying. GOP with their utterly ruthless avarice, Democrats lost in their good times, with presidents that didn’t have the sense to appreciate the forces conspiring - not knowing how to keep one’s picker in their pants, or being so self absorbed that the other forgets to nurture, let alone keep together the grassroots machine that his charisma created.

But, the sad truth is, we get the government we deserve and America never wanted any better.

Like blind sheep we followed GOP into an endless, self destructive war, after 9/11, that paved the way for the downfall we have witnessed these past decades.

Then, . . . we knew damned well what a monster that NY trump was, because the media had been force feeding us his disgusting life and attitudes. I mean his open history is one of a consummate free loader, low life and dishonorable, slimy as a human can be,
and a huge portion of this country embraced him with passion the left can’t muster for the life of 'em.

Oh but I digress.

Back on point. You’re right all the mega windmills in the world won’t do a thing for “saving” our biosphere.
Oh, and sure, the biosphere will survive, but over the next thousand plus years, while what we have wrought this past century and particularly half century, plays out.

It will certainly be battered to a feeble remnant of what it was back went I graduated high school. What’s utterly mind boggling, I’m 66, not 166 years old, we knew what we were doing. I never thought we’d chose to ignore for decade after decade of increasing warnings.

We all choose to delude ourselves, every chance we got. Now . . .

No, a lot of countries use Hemp for renewable biofuel. Not only does it save forests, 1 acre of hemp scrubs the equivalence of 20 acres of trees.

This does not result in an increase in CO2, but is merely a recycling of current airborne CO2

Whatever we do, we’d better do it quickly. I’m still against using hemp exclusively though, because I think that will do more harm than good. I’m not convinced that is the answer. I am convinced that wind and solar are the answer.

Did you notice the grief Bill Gates got for suggesting that vaccines would reduce birth rates? Those who howled against him didn’t bother to consider his reasoning; they just jumped on the rich white guy for saying out loud that the overpopulation in underdeveloped countries was a problem. What he meant was that with vaccines children would have a better chance of surviving and parents would learn that they wouldn’t need to have multiple children to be sure they had someone to take care of them in thier old age.

Not politically correct, Bill. You can’t say, or even think, that population levels are causing problems; if you do we’l cancel you.

That parents would learn and have fewer children is a nice idea, far short of suggesting that we should begin some sort of population control, but it would take at least two, and probably several, generations to actually reduce the birth rate. The climate change folks seem to believe we don’t have that long to do something.

Their idea of everyone consuming less and having less of a carbon footprint is flawed. If we cut our per capita environmental harm in half and double the population we will have gained nothing. Don’t be deluded. We are the problem.

Of course I agree with that. But those are long range plans with tremendous investments and require careful selection of areas for optimum production.

Hemp has no such problems. Take a thousand acres of some arid or farmland , run a plow and seeder and in 1 year you can harvest a commercial crop that has soaked up the equivalent of at least a thousand acres of forest. Result instead of 1000 acres of CO2 scrubbers you get 2000 acres, plus a lot of raw commercial goods.

So that’s were all the YouTube videos came from. No I didn’t notice that, but then I need to really limit my news intake, it’s a blood pressure, depression thing.

Ironically less kids and less consumption is the only hope for the future.

And like the big man in the movies always reminds us, we can do this the easy way or we’ll do it the hard way.

Between base public attitude and rampant brainwashing campaigns and religious delusion, it’s obvious we’ve chosen the hard way. We’re just too self-centered and smug to have the slightest clue of how hard it’s going to be, although our history and Earth’s story give us those answers.

Oooooooooooommmmmmmmmm

Well, Bill is correct. Overpopulation is our greatest threat. Apparently, you are not well informed about the exponential function.

Do yourself a favor and watch this excellent lecture by Prof. Emeritus Albert Bartlett, who warned a long time ago against ignorance of the consequence of the Exponential Function.

Quote;

“You are comprised of: 84 minerals, 23 Elements, and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells.
You have been built up from nothing but the spare parts of the Earth you have consumed, according to a set of instructions hidden in a double helix and small enough to be carried by (an egg) and a sperm. You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and rebuilt into our planet’s most complex living thing.
You are not living on Earth. You are Earth.” ~ Aubrey Marcus

Moreover, we are some 90% bacterial in numbers (not in mass). And if we count genes, we are about 1% human.

Hence the human biome is very much a product of the earth’s evolutionary processes.

That leaves the fires of Climate Change. What is to be done if those fires burn a crop of hemp?

It will only return the same amount of CO2 as it scrubbed from the air less the amount it fixed in the soil and is is used as a soil conditioner.

One of the benefits is that hemp does fix CO2 in the soil which is good for the growth of other crops.

Effect of Hemp Residue Management on Biological Soil Health Indicators

Abstract

Hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) has the potential to capture and
convert high amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) to
biomass through bio-sequestration. A potential use of hemp
biomass could be conversion to biochar for use as a soil health
amendment. Biochar amended soil has been documented to not
only increase carbon storage in soil but also mitigate
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions like CO2 and nitrous oxide
(N2O).

Biochar addition to soil has many benefits including
stimulation of specific soil microorganisms, soil enzymatic
activity, soil respiration which could lead to enhanced biological
activity and nutrient cycling or retention. However, limited
studies have reported the effect of hemp derived biochar on
biological soil health indicators.

The objective of this experiment is to conduct a laboratory incubation to investigate the effects of hemp biochar, hardwood biochar (pyrolysis temperature of > 800 ̊C) and hemp residue (representing a range of C:N ratio) on soil microbial population and enzyme activity. Soil samples (0-> 10 cm) was collected from two experimental locations in NC; namely NC A&T research farm, Greensboro and Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) small farm unit, Goldsboro representing different climatic conditions, soil characteristics, and soil management histories.

A 72-d laboratory incubation study was conducted at different moisture conditions and soils were destructively sampled on day 30 and 72 of the incubation experiment. Soil samples were then analyzed for biological soil health indicators i.e., enzyme activity and phospholipid fatty acid analysis (PLFA). Our preliminary results suggest that hemp residue with the lowest C:N ratio ~40 significantly stimulated soil enzyme activity in the first 30 d of the incubation experiment as compared to other amendments.
Effect of Hemp Residue Management on Biological Soil Health Indicators

Experience of past shows that it can be very fast. In France, migrants women have many children, their daughters bear no more children than the native ones.

In fact, two of the strongest incitements to have less children are welfare state and health system .

If you have a good welfare system, you don’t need many children to support you later. Crude but effective.

It has nothing to do with one country having more or less children but the global birthrate needs to remain at zero growth or the exponential function will keep the population growing at an ever increasing rate.

Think of this ; a 1% growth rate per year will yield a doubling of population in 70 years ( 1 generation) .
IOW, at 1% growth per yr. the current 7.75 billion today will increase to 15.50 billion people in just 70 years.!!!

If all countries had a good health and welfare systems, it would greatly help !

Now the matter is that the planet cannot support 7 000 000 000 of people with a standard of living equal to ours, even equal to the one of a poor European country.

We are in a catch 22, in fact.

As Prof. Albert Bartlett observed; It is the greatest dilemma mankind has ever faced.

In order to stop population growth, we must choose from the right hand table.

If we don’t, nature will do it for us.

Not many pleasant choices.

p.s. And now the ignorant fools want to outlaw abortion, adding to the growing population problem.

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How utterly absurd. The West and developing world including China all have stable or levelling populations. Because they choose all on the left apart from number 3 and choose numbers 2 & 3 from the right. China is in danger of a catastrophic population crash. Luckily for Europe with its aging, declining population Africa is going to explode as public health improves even as the birth rate declines. W. Europe will be black next century.

What? China in danger of a population crash? That country has 1/6 of the world’s population.

So you are in favor of population growth? If so, what growth rate do you think is appropriate?

That’s very misleading because it’s too simplistic and missing the details that put human bacterial populations into a more sober perspective, than the vague notion of germ cells migrating throughout our bodily tissues.

Where do most all of those 90% of bacterial live. I’ll give you a hint, on average every day you shed about a third of those living bacterial that make up your “biome”

How accurate is that 90%? Has anyone double checked?

Well, since you asked yes.

Published online 2016 Aug 19. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533

PMCID: PMC4991899

PMID: 27541692

Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body

Ron Sender,1 Shai Fuchs,2,¤* and Ron Milo1,*

Our analysis also updates the widely-cited 10:1 ratio, showing that the number of bacteria in the body is actually of the same order as the number of human cells, and their total mass is about 0.2 kg.

The diversity in locations where microbes reside in the body makes estimating their overall number daunting. Yet, once their quantitative distribution shows the dominance of the colon as discussed below, the problem becomes much simpler. The vast majority of the bacteria reside in the colon, with previous estimates of about 1014bacteria [2], followed by the skin, which is estimated to harbor ~1012 bacteria [9].

Colon (large intestine) 1011 400 (2) 1014
Dental plaque 1011 <10 1012
Ileum (lower small intestine) 108 400 (5) 1011
Saliva 109 <100 1011
Skin <1011 per m2 (3) 1.8 m2(4) 1011
Stomach 103–104 250 (5)–900 (6) 107
Duodenum and Jejunum (upper small intestine)

Those number didn’t translate very well, those are exponentials as in 10 to the 14th power, check the link for a clearer breakdown.

It’s absurd to think you can simply ignore, the reality unfolding within our biosphere and climate engine.

Mind you he gave hundreds of these talks …

Albert Allen Bartlett (March 21, 1923 – September 7, 2013)[2] was an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. As of July 2001 Professor Bartlett had lectured over 1,742 times since September, 1969 on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy .[3][4]
Bartlett regarded the word combination “sustainable growth” as an oxymoron, since even modest annual percentage population increases can represent exponential growth. Over time, huge changes will then occur. He therefore regarded human overpopulation as “The Greatest Challenge” facing humanity.

Back when the times were good and little adjustments would have paid cascading dividends - instead we’re facing cascading consequence of our general disregard and inability to reconcile ourselves with a plateauing of need for excess.

So what did we choose, rampant self-delusion.

So 1/6th stabilizing and even falling doesn’t matter? I’m in favour of the growth of equity above all, equality of outcome, utilitarianism. The growth rate has been mostly downward since the late 60s, almost completely so since the late 80s over 30 years ago. By the end of the decade it should be about zero and by 2040 declining. Germany absorbed a million people 6 years ago without missing a beat. It will need many millions more this century, as will all of W. Europe. Fifty million all round. Happy days.

Here is a different statistic from a reliable source.

What is the microbiome?

In any human body there are around 30 trillion human cells, but our microbiome is an estimated 39 trillion microbial cells including bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on and in us.

Due to their small size, these organisms make up only about 1-3 per cent of our body mass, but this belies the microbiome’s tremendous power and potential The British microbiome: how our guts can tell us more than our genes - BBC Science Focus Magazine

We have around 20-25,000 genes in each of our cells, but the human microbiome potentially holds 500 times more.

Moreover, the ability of microbes to evolve quickly, swap genes, multiply and adapt to changing circumstances give them – and us, their hosts – remarkable abilities that we’re only now beginning to fathom.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/microbes-in-our-ancestors-stomachs-helped-them-adapt-to-new-areas/

I don’t want to stray too far from the OP, but if you’re interested in the human biome watch this excellent lecture by Bonnie Bassler on “How bacteria talk”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXWurAmtf78)
This talk is a little outdated but the numbers are relatively correct and clearly demonstrates the human existential reliance on its bacterial symbionts.