Global Warming, A Result From The War To Lower Carbon Concentrations
A global effort to reduce CO2 emissions places the planet at risk for expanding desertification and is nothing short of a war on Earth’s forests, grasslands, and ecosystem.
The recent trend of CO2 concentration from 300ppm to above 400ppm has resulted in mass hysteria and eccentric efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
This completely ignores Earth’s history, and interprets data to mean something completely different. Alternatively, “In the big picture, 400 ppm is a low-to-middling concentration of CO2 for the planet Earth… the ancient atmosphere happened to be rich with about 7,000 ppm of carbon dioxide” (Yale School of the Environment, 2017).
Modern history has been plagued by large deficits in C02 levels, contributing to desertification by starving out trees and vegetation. Multiplying the annual carbon consumption needed by a mature tree, 48lbs (U.S. Forestry Service, 2019), by approximately 3.04 trillion trees, our forests alone need almost twice the current global Carbon Dioxide emissions of 37.12 billion metric tons (Statista 2021) to mature properly through photosynthesis.
Adding to that deficit, 7.5 billion acres of grassland sequestering .8lbs of CO2 per acre, needs an additional 6.7 trillion pounds of Carbon to maintain its health (Grassland and Carbon Management. June, 2017).
Considering annual sequestering of corn and soybeans to be an additional 8.5 trillion lbs. of carbon, not including all other crops, peat/mosses, seaweed and ocean plants, or by the natural weathering of stone layers, the global deficit of Carbon is roughly 72.65 billion pounds annually.
The global shortage of Carbon (CO2) emissions is catastrophic for the world’s ecosystem and is caused by a decline in volcanic activity, human suppression of widespread wildfires, and the modern vegetation landscape.
????????????While there has been an increase in recent volcanic activity reporting, the Smithsonian Institute says that there has not been an increase in active volcanoes, rather, a decrease. “The heightened reporting of eruptions noticeably accelerated the discovery of new volcanoes. The list has continued to grow, with several important volcanic regions such as New Zealand, Alaska, and Hawaii being unrepresented until the last 250 years” (Global Volcanism Program, 2023). Early Volcanic Eruptions at Yellowstone dwarf late eruptions, just one of them being 2,500 times larger than Mt St. Helens in 1980. An absence of large magnitude volcanoes significantly reduces C02 concentrations in modern history and are diluted further by a lack of widespread wildfires.
????????????Wildfires are critical to Earth’s ecosystem, and are even required for some of the planet’s regeneration such as the conifer forest seed that needs heat before they can sprout. In 2020 global wildfires contributed 1.76 tons of C02 (World Economic Forum, 2021), a deep decline from estimated historical fires. Not only were fires much more widespread as they were not extinguished by man, they happened much more often. In the Western USA for example, “We use sedimentary charcoal accumulation rates to construct long-term variations in fire during the past 3,000 y in the American West and compare this record to independent fire-history data from historical records and fire scars. There has been a slight decline in burning over the past 3,000 y, with the lowest levels attained during the 20th century and during the Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1400–1700 CE [Common Era]).” (PNAS). The deficit of forest fires directly reduces naturally occurring C02 in our atmosphere, directly resulting from human suppression.
????????????In addition to natural phenomena and the human suppression of wildfires, a drastic change of our vegetation landscape creates further deficits in global C02 concentrations. Vast grasslands have been transformed into farmland, replacing grasses that sequester 1,000 lbs. of C02 per acre into corn that sequesters nearly half its weight in C02, or 16,000 lbs. per acre (AGWeb, 2018). The modern vegetation landscape significantly consumes more C02 and directly results in massive deficits, hardly impacted by the carbon emitted by equipment during the farming operation.
????????????The global reduction of Carbon (CO2) concentration caused by a decline in volcanic activity, suppressed widespread wildfires, and the modern vegetation landscape, contribute to a catastrophic deficit in C02 emissions to the tune of 76.25 pounds annually. While we may not want to see more volcanoes (as if we had any control over that), Civilization should rethink the war on Carbon Emissions through allowing more natural wildfires, and complimenting offsets of the modern vegetation to make room for healthy vegetation and to prevent the wasting of the planet’s landscape.
?-Nathanael Schultz, 2023
References
领英推荐
Yale School of the Environment, Nicola Jones, (January 26, 2017). How the World Passed a Carbon Threshold and Why It Matters. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-the-world-passed-a-carbon-threshold-400ppm-and-why-it-matters
?
Global Volcanism Program, (2023). [Database] Volcanoes of the World (v. 5.0.3; 1 Mar 2023). Distributed by Smithsonian Institution, compiled by Venzke, E. https://doi.org/10.5479/si.GVP.VOTW5-2022.5.0
?
Joanna Mounce Stancil, The Power of One Tree. (Jun 03, 2019). ?U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Forest Service, https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-very-air-we-breathe#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Arbor%20Day,and%20release%20oxygen%20in%20exchange.
Ian Tiseo, Annual global emissions of carbon dioxide 1940-2021, Feb 6, 2023
?
Ontl, T.; Janowiak, M. (2017). Grassland and Carbon Management. (June, 2017). U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Climate Change Resource Center.?https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/grassland-carbon-management
?
World Economic Forum, (Dec 10, 2021). This is how much carbon wildfires have emitted this year.
Long-term perspective on wildfires in the Wester USA. PNAS https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112839109.
?
Chris Bennett, (June 4th, 2018). Corn’s Carbon Cowboy Busts Outstanding Yields. AGWeb, https://www.agweb.com/news/crops/crop-production/corns-carbon-cowboy-busts-outstanding-yields