That was interesting, he covered a lot of ground with reasons for his opinions.
I would take issue with...
The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know”. The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities.
The Public doesn't have little use for scientists without answers or a preference for ones that do. The public doesn't talk to scientists or read their published papers. The
press talks to them, and talks to scholars who read those papers. We've seen too many examples of the headline not actually what the scientist intended, either by miscommunication or journalist sensationalism. The press is not completely to blame, the short attention span public, and under educated public, shares some blame too. Thinking is harrrrd. But the fact remains, the vast majority of us rely on the press.
He claims the astronomer Tommy Gold was a heretic because he discovered how ears work and was ignored because he didn't have the right credentials. But I wonder how many people, with or without credentials, have declared they had discovered something which was completely bogus.
Over a million papers are published in scientific journals each year, and as Stanford University professor John Ioannidis wrote in a now legendary paper published to PLoS Medicine in 2005, most of their findings are false.
Are you a qualified to be called a heretic only if you were right?
Consider the half of the land area of the earth that is not desert or ice-cap or city or road or parking-lot. This is the half of the land that is covered with soil and supports vegetation of one kind or another.
Some is desert growing little or nothing and a large hunk is agricultural, dedicated to growing specific crops.
If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil.
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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.
This is what the farmer does
not want. Unless he's growing potatoes or similar root crop, the crop(money) is in the plant above ground. Making the crop smaller and roots larger, redirects the nutrients the wrong way, and the nutrients(fertilizer) is a very big expense. His theory seems to be sound, but applying it to agricultural land to come up with one hundredth of an inch a year gain, is folly.
Then we'll have to change farming practices, you say. Didn't Mom tell you about the (.........) of children starving in (..........)? We produce enough to feed most of the world... if they could afford it. Lower production = Increased prices = dead people.
This is getting too damn long so I'll say he brings up a lot of things that we, meaning mankind's knowledge, just don't know, and may or may not be important down the road. OK, I agree all these things should be looked at, and with the recession sending tons of kids off to college while it blows over, there should be a sizeable pool of labor to do it. Of course somebody has to pay for all this investigation. Duh, the government? You're the government's sugar daddy. To do all that research without bankrupting you, they'd have to do something drastic like, I don't know, maybe not waging war all over the globe?
Either way, I think we should press on with things we do know will probably help, in addition to helping us toward renewable power. Often it only takes a nudge, before somebody figures out a way to make money off it and runs with the ball.
