mister_monster on Nostr: So I feel like chiming in a little bit here, looks like a fun conversation. The ...
So I feel like chiming in a little bit here, looks like a fun conversation.
The limiting factor for surface greening is not CO2. It is bioavailable nitrogen, essentially ammonia production. A lot of people don't know this, but human beings produce 50% of the bioavailable nitrogen on the planet industrially via the haber-bosch process. Nitrogen fixing bacteria produce the rest. Human beings are a global keystone species.
Plants love CO2, it's true. And water. People think of plants as growing from the ground, this isn't true. Plants get the nitrogen and minerals from the ground, for the rest, they crystalize out of thin air. 99% of the mass of a plant is carbon dioxide and water, both of which come from the air.
If you create a ton of carbon dioxide (or, more accurately, release sequestered carbon dioxide back into the carbon cycle, that's what fossil fuels are, carbon that was sequestered over the eons) you get greening, *if bioavailable nitrogen production can keep up*.
This is, of course, a fantastic development for life on earth, because it increases total biomass, and the side effect of greening is that more carbon is trapped in the biomass part of the carbon cycle at once, it's a self modulating system.
On to the warming... Where does the heat come from? It doesn't come from carbon dioxide. It comes from the sun. The idea goes, more carbon dioxide increases the radiation that gets trapped on the surface, that radiation undergoes entropy, becomes heat, warms the surface. The details of how that happens, photons striking molecules and causing them to vibrate and release a longer wavelength photon, are important to understand.
It is impossible to truly understand this warming phenomenon without understanding albedo and black body radiation. Every object in the universe has a temperature and a glow on the electromagnetic spectrum. They're all bombarding each other with that radiation. That radiation excites the molecules in the object. It is one giant interconnected system. It's feedback loops all the way down. That's why nothing in the universe is at absolute zero naturally.
Any static object getting hit with radiation, say, a planet orbiting a star, is radiating that exact same amount of energy. It is reflecting some (and reflection isn't simple bouncing, again, the details about photons striking molecules is important to understand), some is absorbing and bouncing around and inducing new photons to be created at lower wavelengths, some molecules don't interact with some wavelengths and interact with others, some compositions of bodies are translucent to some wavelengths and not others, but all in all, a body radiates exactly how much it receives. If you could see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and could watch Venus for example transit the sun, you wouldn't see a black spot, you'd see a redder but equally bright spot, like a disc of colored glass.
A *non static* body, that is, one who's composition is changing, will experience this as well, except that during the duration of the compositional change, depending on that change, it will glow slightly less than or slightly more than the radiation hitting it. Glowing less means it's getting hotter, glowing more means it is getting colder. And, eventually it will get back to the original state when the composition change is complete, glowing the same as what's hitting it. The steady state temperature of any body is purely a function of the amount of radiation it receives, and the amount it receives is purely a function of the size of it's silhouette, the distance from the radiating body and the luminescence of that body. It is only during those interim compositional changes that the temperature may go up or down for a short time.
It is possible for the composition of a body to be influenced by this interim temperature change. It can increase the change that increases the temperature more, what you'd call a runaway greenhouse effect, or it can cause compositional change that increases it's reflectivity, which would be a self correcting feedback loop. One defining factor of a living system is the latter. A system that doesn't self correct won't live very long. The increased greening and therefore reflectivity, the compounding further uptake of the darkening agent, in our case, carbon dioxide, reducing the darkening effect, both serve to mediate this process.
So, in short, nothing to worry about globally with carbon dioxide. The warming is mediated on short, human lifespan scale timelines all by itself because of the self correcting nature of a living biome and the equilibrium seeking nature of the phenomenon of albedo.
Agriculture... Does more green mean changes in agriculture? Does it mean needing new breeds of cows in Texas? Yes, short term and fast changes can have catastrophic effects for some specimens on the serface, even if globally the picture looks good. But what you see when you look at it is not that these changes are catastrophic, you see the opposite. Cows, no matter where they live, like grass. More grass equals more cows. Healthier ones too.
Water cycle instability... I honestly don't know why anyone believes this. Warmer surface means higher absolute humidity, approaching the limit of maximum relative humidity always. A warmer world is a wetter world, all around. It increases the fresh water available on land. Yes, this can mean floods. That's bad. But again, this only occurs during the period of composition change and is not a permanent or long term effect.
I can talk about sea level rise as well, but you didn't really ask about that, so maybe next time. Moral of the story though, global warming is real, is largely caused by fossil fuel production, and does have impact. It is basically impossible though for those impacts to be catastrophic to earth or the human species. If you wan to help mitigate it, encourage production of ammonia fertilizer. We have real problems that are much larger, like topsoil erosion (which greening helps mitigate BTW), attendant mineral loss in agricultural products, unstudied chemical products contaminating every corner of the globe to disastrous effect. Carbon dioxide is nothing more than a distraction from those real problems.
The limiting factor for surface greening is not CO2. It is bioavailable nitrogen, essentially ammonia production. A lot of people don't know this, but human beings produce 50% of the bioavailable nitrogen on the planet industrially via the haber-bosch process. Nitrogen fixing bacteria produce the rest. Human beings are a global keystone species.
Plants love CO2, it's true. And water. People think of plants as growing from the ground, this isn't true. Plants get the nitrogen and minerals from the ground, for the rest, they crystalize out of thin air. 99% of the mass of a plant is carbon dioxide and water, both of which come from the air.
If you create a ton of carbon dioxide (or, more accurately, release sequestered carbon dioxide back into the carbon cycle, that's what fossil fuels are, carbon that was sequestered over the eons) you get greening, *if bioavailable nitrogen production can keep up*.
This is, of course, a fantastic development for life on earth, because it increases total biomass, and the side effect of greening is that more carbon is trapped in the biomass part of the carbon cycle at once, it's a self modulating system.
On to the warming... Where does the heat come from? It doesn't come from carbon dioxide. It comes from the sun. The idea goes, more carbon dioxide increases the radiation that gets trapped on the surface, that radiation undergoes entropy, becomes heat, warms the surface. The details of how that happens, photons striking molecules and causing them to vibrate and release a longer wavelength photon, are important to understand.
It is impossible to truly understand this warming phenomenon without understanding albedo and black body radiation. Every object in the universe has a temperature and a glow on the electromagnetic spectrum. They're all bombarding each other with that radiation. That radiation excites the molecules in the object. It is one giant interconnected system. It's feedback loops all the way down. That's why nothing in the universe is at absolute zero naturally.
Any static object getting hit with radiation, say, a planet orbiting a star, is radiating that exact same amount of energy. It is reflecting some (and reflection isn't simple bouncing, again, the details about photons striking molecules is important to understand), some is absorbing and bouncing around and inducing new photons to be created at lower wavelengths, some molecules don't interact with some wavelengths and interact with others, some compositions of bodies are translucent to some wavelengths and not others, but all in all, a body radiates exactly how much it receives. If you could see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and could watch Venus for example transit the sun, you wouldn't see a black spot, you'd see a redder but equally bright spot, like a disc of colored glass.
A *non static* body, that is, one who's composition is changing, will experience this as well, except that during the duration of the compositional change, depending on that change, it will glow slightly less than or slightly more than the radiation hitting it. Glowing less means it's getting hotter, glowing more means it is getting colder. And, eventually it will get back to the original state when the composition change is complete, glowing the same as what's hitting it. The steady state temperature of any body is purely a function of the amount of radiation it receives, and the amount it receives is purely a function of the size of it's silhouette, the distance from the radiating body and the luminescence of that body. It is only during those interim compositional changes that the temperature may go up or down for a short time.
It is possible for the composition of a body to be influenced by this interim temperature change. It can increase the change that increases the temperature more, what you'd call a runaway greenhouse effect, or it can cause compositional change that increases it's reflectivity, which would be a self correcting feedback loop. One defining factor of a living system is the latter. A system that doesn't self correct won't live very long. The increased greening and therefore reflectivity, the compounding further uptake of the darkening agent, in our case, carbon dioxide, reducing the darkening effect, both serve to mediate this process.
So, in short, nothing to worry about globally with carbon dioxide. The warming is mediated on short, human lifespan scale timelines all by itself because of the self correcting nature of a living biome and the equilibrium seeking nature of the phenomenon of albedo.
Agriculture... Does more green mean changes in agriculture? Does it mean needing new breeds of cows in Texas? Yes, short term and fast changes can have catastrophic effects for some specimens on the serface, even if globally the picture looks good. But what you see when you look at it is not that these changes are catastrophic, you see the opposite. Cows, no matter where they live, like grass. More grass equals more cows. Healthier ones too.
Water cycle instability... I honestly don't know why anyone believes this. Warmer surface means higher absolute humidity, approaching the limit of maximum relative humidity always. A warmer world is a wetter world, all around. It increases the fresh water available on land. Yes, this can mean floods. That's bad. But again, this only occurs during the period of composition change and is not a permanent or long term effect.
I can talk about sea level rise as well, but you didn't really ask about that, so maybe next time. Moral of the story though, global warming is real, is largely caused by fossil fuel production, and does have impact. It is basically impossible though for those impacts to be catastrophic to earth or the human species. If you wan to help mitigate it, encourage production of ammonia fertilizer. We have real problems that are much larger, like topsoil erosion (which greening helps mitigate BTW), attendant mineral loss in agricultural products, unstudied chemical products contaminating every corner of the globe to disastrous effect. Carbon dioxide is nothing more than a distraction from those real problems.