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Also interesting to note: the heavy use of nitrogen fertiliser is also one of the reasons for the biodiversity crisis. Which according to some is a problem just
by stinos 5y ago
Also interesting to note: the heavy use of nitrogen fertiliser is also one of the reasons for the biodiversity crisis. Which according to some is a problem just as serious as the climate crisis, but is much less reported on in global media. Basic principle for the operation: plants which thrive well on nitrogen (think fast-growing grasses, nettles, ...) get an advantage over other plants (typically slower growing long-living flowering plants) because the fertiliser doesn't simply stay in the location where it gets applied. More uniform vegetation then produces the typical chain reaction (simplified): less insects, less food for birds, less birds, ... So tackling the problem mentioned in the article could have a positive influence both on climate and biodiversity.
- hkt 5y agoIt is also worth shouting out the fact that healthy biospheres sequester carbon..
- TeMPOraL 5y agoOnly when growing. Stable biosphere is carbon neutral.
- hkt 5y agoNot so. Stable biospheres continuously deposit carbon in the soil.
- sokoloff 5y agoYou just repeated your assertion from the prior comment. Maybe you’re right, but introducing additional data, information, or argument is more helpful to the discussion than just saying “Yuh-huh”
- hkt 5y agoI honestly thought this was so established as to be obvious. I was mistaken, so, sorry. Here's a link that talks about how plants deposit carbon into the soil: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/9/685/237929 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/9/685/237929 The key line would be this, from a cursory reading: "Long-term (millennia) C sequestration can be achieved when C from aboveground biomass transfers to the roots and enters the pool of SOC or SIC (hereafter SC, for soil C)." Obviously there's more context, but this is why old growth forests are huge carbon sinks: because they have undergone the process of sequestering carbon into the soil uninterrupted for such a long time. Again, apologies for taking the above for granted. Maybe it is less well known than I thought.
- sokoloff 5y agoThanks. I’ll have a read this weekend. I am among the people who assumed that over a hundred year period the overwhelming majority of carbon taken into plants was released back as CO2 through consumption, combustion, and decomposition (and that very little was permanently deposited into the soil).
- TeMPOraL 5y agoThanks for the link, I'll look at it too. I'm also in the group of people who assumed almost everything the plants sequester gets quickly recovered by other plants and organisms, and is part of the growth-sequester/decompose-release cycle.
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoRemember the post-decomposition "soil" is extremely carbon rich.
- warvariuc 5y agoSimilar logic applies to the case when we would use laser robots to get rid of weeds. It's artificial selection. Are you suggesting we should stop fighting weeds/insects to get better crops?
- alephnil 5y agoThose robots at least stop at the boundary of the field, unlike fertilizer and pesticides, that run off to the surrounding environment. Such robots are mostly on a prototype stage, and not applied widely in agriculture today, so they are a possible problem of tomorrow rather than a present problem. Fertilizer run off is very much a present problem. Also, the robots will typically replace a combination of herbicides and manual labor. It is not like farmers let the weed grow freely today. As such they may be an improvement over current practices.
- postingawayonhn 5y agoIt's hard to imagine what kind of evolutionary paths would be available to avoid robot weed killers? All I can think of is mimicking the crop that has been planted in the field.
- rex_lupi 5y agoan evolutionary arms-race will follow resulting in conscient weed-killer robots
- dredmorbius 5y agoMimicry is a very prevalent evolutionary phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimicry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimicry
- nmca 5y agoThey will evolve these [0] and it will be fascinating. [0] https://iotsecurity.engin.umich.edu/physical-adversarial-examples-for-object-detectors/ https://iotsecurity.engin.umich.edu/physical-adversarial-exa...
- southerntofu 5y agoYou described the problem well, but missed another part of the problem, which is that mechanized monoculture usually turns over the soil, destructing the humus in the process, which is home to all sorts of micro-organic life and helps prevent the soil from turning into a desert (as we see happening now across the world where mechanized/chemical monocultures have been around for decades). At least that's my understanding from the little i read about permaculture, but i have no specific knowledge of that field so please correct me if something is off.
- stinos 5y agoYes, I just wanted to briefly highlight one specific problem (fertilizer), but indeed there are many more problems leading to the biodiversity crisis; soil turning being just another piece of the puzzle. And the way it gets typcially used in agro-industry does in turn have even more negative consequences then what you mention (which as far as I'm aware is correct); erosion for instance is getting a serious problem in some places. Combined with heavy sustained percipation in areas which don't usually see that (also as a result of climate change) it can lead to the complete topsoil just flooding away. And then more fertilizer is needed to make the land useful again, while the part which flooded away is fertlizing/polluting downstream areas. And so on, and so on. There's quite a lot of these chains/cycles all contrbuting to, in the most pessimistic view, a man-made complete downgrade of the whole planet.