More Junk Science from the fringe

Most of us can't really understand the phrase "carbon foot print", what do they mean when they say our fire place or driving released some tons of carbon, what are they talking of, we might do more to save the environment if we understood it just a little.  Perhaps you will get a rough idea from my tutorial.  Perhaps you'll get a good mark on the test.

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When I was in the 7th grade (mid 1960'a) my old science teacher told of an experiment going on while he was at university.  They wanted to figure out where the weight of a tree comes from.  A large tank was built, all the dirt was weighed that went in and a tree was planted .  The tree was growing in it's container, one day it would be pulled up and weighed, and the soil weighed again. Well, it had been years, they had yet to complete it so far as he knew though he thought he knew the outcome.  We all imagined (with his prompting I suspect) the dirt became wood and so it might weigh less, it made sense since we were often told wood rots and returns to dirt one day.  

Today I can tell you our imagined results had little to do with what happened.  What really happens is trees absorb only a few ounces of elements and minerals and carry them into its wood.  If we re-weigh the dirt in that container, it will be virtually the same volume and weight as before.  So where did the mass of the tree come from?  

Carbon, a constant on earth.  The volume of carbon does not change.  What changes is where the carbon is.  The danger to us, to the planets current life forms and our current form of agriculture lies in where that carbon goes, or where we are putting it.  

Carbon is the primary ingredient in plants and animals.  Now science knows the weight of that tree was about 90% carbon, 10% water,a few ounces of trace minerals and elements. The volume of the dirt it grew in did not change. If a storm blows down a big tree behind your house and you leave it lay, slowly over the years it molders away. The water and the carbon are released during the rot and insect activity, released into the atmosphere. The tons of carbon simply float away in the air.  Some minerals remain; bugs and microbes wallow in the humus and build a little soil there, but the weight of the tree, those tons, the carbon, it just floated off.  Now if the first winter after the tree fell, you had cut it up to burn it, those tons of carbon are released right then by the flame, immediately into the atmosphere.  If the storm that fell the tree had instead been a landslide and the tree had been covered deep under ground, these tons of carbon would not have made it into the atmosphere for a long time, perhaps centuries, perhaps it could have become oil or coal in millions of years.

When we dig up coal, oil, or natural gas, which were the trees meadows and animals of earlier biospheres and burn it in our car or power plant, we are taking that CO2 from one place on earth, deep underground, and shooting it immediately into the atmosphere, tons and tons of it all day every day.  Most of this ends up in the atmosphere, the thin layer of balanced thermal and light wave protection system only 1/1000^th as thick of the diameter of earth, where it disturbs that balance.   Remember, the volume of CO2 hasn't changed, only it’s location and concentration, creating a greenhouse of rising temperature and chemical reaction disaster at the earth’s surface such as ocean acidification.

The fact is, dirt does not become trees that become dirt again, ashes to ashes is not a true description of the natural world.  CO2 is taken in from the atmosphere by cell respiration of plants and resides there in forms that are useful and support the current biosphere.   Since the industrial revolution, 200 years now, we have been releasing ever-increasing volumes of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, at the same time clearing the earth of our best carbon storing plants.  Saving and replanting the worlds forests, low till farming, energy conservation and alternative energies are the only way to halt the migration of CO2 into dangerous locations. 

Better plant a tree now, carbon will build you a shade tree, tons and tons of shade.