Maximizing Carbon Sequestration in Terrestrial Agroecosystems

Im a BM wrote:

IBdaMann wrote:

Im a BM wrote: Is "soil specialist" the proper title?

Yes. I don't recognize the clerical status of "High Priest Biogeochemical" or whatever your church calls him.

Im a BM wrote: I've never heard ANY scientist introduced as a "soil specialist",

... nor have I ever heard of any soil specialist introduced as "scientist."

Im a BM wrote: I've been at events with hundreds of others with scientific specialization related to soil, but if anyone ever called himself or anyone else a "soil specialist", I must have missed it.

I can imagine you missing the obvious on a daily basis.

Im a BM wrote:Randy performed and published more water quality investigations than soil specialization studies.

There you go, preaching about how sheer quantity of writing makes someone a deity, and then one post later, you lament how sheer quantity of writing makes Into the Night a demon.

Sheer quantity of writing is meaningless and you refer to it whenever you have no other point of substance to discuss in your need to create more meaningless quantity of writing.

Im a BM wrote: In terms of man hours performed, more of Randy's career was as a "water specialist".

Sheer quantity of writing ranks higher than quantity of manhours performed.

Im a BM wrote: He taught me all about evaporation.

Are you saying that even Dahlgren tried to teach you about evaporation. What do you think your problem is in learning the topic?

Im a BM wrote: On the other hand, "biogeochemist" is the title I most frequently heard Randy use to characterize his clerical position within the church, or that others used to address him within the church.

Im a BM wrote:You'd be surprised how many religious nutcases BELIEVE in biogeochemistry.

Nope. I am not surprised. None of them ever present any science either.

Im a BM wrote:They actually believe it is thettled thienth.

I trust that Patricio will continue to be wise enough to avoid posting anything that would enable you to DOX him.

Correction: I trust he will not post anything that forces YOU to facilitate him doxing HIMSELF. Such as a map, address, and photo of some home you suspect he might live in.

That is a genuine risk at this website.

That risk is why I abandoned the plan to invite other scientists to join me in discussion here.

And that advice still goes. LOOK but don't touch!

You don't have to be a member to view it all from a safe distance.

Perhaps some would be brave enough to do what Patricio is doing, but I would feel horrible if they joined at my invitation to discover what a scum IBdaMann is.

I am delighted to imagine that my fellow scientists out there somewhere are viewing all this, but I still discourage them from joining directly.

At least while the hazards remain.

My son was terrified that this punk was SERIOUS when he doxed... when I forced IBdaMann to help me dox MYSELF with my son's name, address, and photos of our apartment building.

I reposted some ugly clown videos today to ridicule IBdaMann. But my son was scared when HE saw them four years ago. He thought this psycho was actually dangerous to us, and for months after the doxing I did not post.

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:
(deleted "spam"... tee hee hee)

Really fascinating synthesis--the tannin-mycorrhizal loop is something I hadn't thought about as a unified system before. The idea that plants on nutrient-poor soils essentially "route around" the standard nitrogen cycle by keeping N in organic form the whole time, and that mycorrhizal fungi are the key that unlocks it without triggering the nitrification pathway--that's an elegant picture.

A few things I'm turning over:

The white sand rainforest example is almost counterintuitive at first--you'd expect warm, wet, well-drained conditions to chew through litter fast, but the tannin load flips that completely. Is that thick litter layer purely a function of tannin-mediated inhibition, or is it a feedback loop where the severe nutrient deficiency and low pH of the parent material have already filtered out the microbial communities capable of aggressive decomposition? I'm wondering how separable those variables actually are in practice.

On the cropping system side--when you mention facilitating crop-mycorrhizal associations, how realistic is that at scale given that most high-yield elite cultivars have been selected under saturating fertilizer regimes that suppress mycorrhizal dependency? If we are talking about arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) for typical row crops, is there breeding work being done to recover that functional trait, or is inoculation and soil management the more practical near-term path?

And the compost angle is interesting to me as maybe the lowest-friction entry point--altering the decomposition kinetics by complexing labile proteins before they can volatilize or leach. Are there scalable, high-tannin feedstocks available to producers that work well for this, or does sourcing create a major bottleneck compared to standard high-carbon amendments like straw or wood chips?
Thanks for laying this out--I learn a lot from posts like this.

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:
(deleted "spam"... tee hee hee)

Really fascinating synthesis--the tannin-mycorrhizal loop is something I hadn't thought about as a unified system before. The idea that plants on nutrient-poor soils essentially "route around" the standard nitrogen cycle by keeping N in organic form the whole time, and that mycorrhizal fungi are the key that unlocks it without triggering the nitrification pathway--that's an elegant picture.

A few things I'm turning over:

The white sand rainforest example is almost counterintuitive at first--you'd expect warm, wet, well-drained conditions to chew through litter fast, but the tannin load flips that completely. Is that thick litter layer purely a function of tannin-mediated inhibition, or is it a feedback loop where the severe nutrient deficiency and low pH of the parent material have already filtered out the microbial communities capable of aggressive decomposition? I'm wondering how separable those variables actually are in practice.

On the cropping system side--when you mention facilitating crop-mycorrhizal associations, how realistic is that at scale given that most high-yield elite cultivars have been selected under saturating fertilizer regimes that suppress mycorrhizal dependency? If we are talking about arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) for typical row crops, is there breeding work being done to recover that functional trait, or is inoculation and soil management the more practical near-term path?

And the compost angle is interesting to me as maybe the lowest-friction entry point--altering the decomposition kinetics by complexing labile proteins before they can volatilize or leach. Are there scalable, high-tannin feedstocks available to producers that work well for this, or does sourcing create a major bottleneck compared to standard high-carbon amendments like straw or wood chips?
Thanks for laying this out--I learn a lot from posts like this.

Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

I attended one mind-bending presentation and I regret that I don't remember the guy's name. He offered many examples of how future research could maximize the benefits of crop mycorrhizal associations. He even "went there" with the genetic engineering thing, and it made sense.

A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:
(deleted "spam"... tee hee hee)

Really fascinating synthesis--the tannin-mycorrhizal loop is something I hadn't thought about as a unified system before. The idea that plants on nutrient-poor soils essentially "route around" the standard nitrogen cycle by keeping N in organic form the whole time, and that mycorrhizal fungi are the key that unlocks it without triggering the nitrification pathway--that's an elegant picture.

A few things I'm turning over:

The white sand rainforest example is almost counterintuitive at first--you'd expect warm, wet, well-drained conditions to chew through litter fast, but the tannin load flips that completely. Is that thick litter layer purely a function of tannin-mediated inhibition, or is it a feedback loop where the severe nutrient deficiency and low pH of the parent material have already filtered out the microbial communities capable of aggressive decomposition? I'm wondering how separable those variables actually are in practice.

On the cropping system side--when you mention facilitating crop-mycorrhizal associations, how realistic is that at scale given that most high-yield elite cultivars have been selected under saturating fertilizer regimes that suppress mycorrhizal dependency? If we are talking about arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) for typical row crops, is there breeding work being done to recover that functional trait, or is inoculation and soil management the more practical near-term path?

And the compost angle is interesting to me as maybe the lowest-friction entry point--altering the decomposition kinetics by complexing labile proteins before they can volatilize or leach. Are there scalable, high-tannin feedstocks available to producers that work well for this, or does sourcing create a major bottleneck compared to standard high-carbon amendments like straw or wood chips?
Thanks for laying this out--I learn a lot from posts like this.

Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

I attended one mind-bending presentation and I regret that I don't remember the guy's name. He offered many examples of how future research could maximize the benefits of crop mycorrhizal associations. He even "went there" with the genetic engineering thing, and it made sense.

A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

Hey, you're not the only 'old guy' in this equation.

The Hans Jenny anecdote is remarkable--both the personal betrayal and the moral weight he carried afterward. That tension between "it worked amazingly well" and "look what we built" feels like a microcosm of the whole Green Revolution reckoning. He got to watch the soil organic matter drain out in real time.

The three-way symbiosis you describe with the ericaceous shrubs is the part I keep turning back over. What strikes me is the division of metabolic labor across three kingdoms--the plant supplies carbon, the fungus does the spatial prospecting and routing, and the bacterium provides the enzymatic heavy lifting it could never afford on its own. The fungus is essentially acting as a venture capitalist: here is the carbon, here is the target, now produce the chitinase. That kind of metabolic subcontracting seems like it should be extraordinarily fragile, but clearly, it's robust enough to dominate extreme environments.

On the protein-tannin complex as "on-demand fertilizer"--what is the effective timescale of stability we are talking about in a managed cropping context? You mentioned mean residence times of centuries for humic acids, but for a practical crop rotation, is the goal to carry nitrogen across a couple of seasons, or are we looking at building a multi-year, slow-release reservoir that eventually decouples the system from annual inputs entirely?

Regarding the older breeds and low-yielders--I take the logic, but I wonder if that yield gap is politically or economically survivable right now. Because modern cultivars have been selected for a high harvest index (putting everything into the grain/fruit) by outsourcing root architecture to synthetic N, recovering those below-ground traits means accepting less top-side yield. Is the more tractable near-term path threading it through intensive inoculation and soil management using current varieties, or is the biological yield penalty simply something we have to budget for if we want to stop the N2O leak?

Either way, I am deeply appreciative of your concept about getting back to nature--that beautiful, ancient underground loop that feeds plants with zero pollution. It's an incredibly elegant vision. I'm all for it.

Rest up--really appreciate you taking the time to map this all out.

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Patricio wrote:
Hey, you're not the only 'old guy' in this equation.

The Hans Jenny anecdote is remarkable--both the personal betrayal and the moral weight he carried afterward. That tension between "it worked amazingly well" and "look what we built" feels like a microcosm of the whole Green Revolution reckoning. He got to watch the soil organic matter drain out in real time.

Patricio wrote:
The three-way symbiosis you describe with the ericaceous shrubs is the part I keep turning back over. What strikes me is the division of metabolic labor across three kingdoms--the plant supplies carbon, the fungus does the spatial prospecting and routing, and the bacterium provides the enzymatic heavy lifting it could never afford on its own. The fungus is essentially acting as a venture capitalist: here is the carbon, here is the target, now produce the chitinase. That kind of metabolic subcontracting seems like it should be extraordinarily fragile, but clearly, it's robust enough to dominate extreme environments.

Patricio wrote:
On the protein-tannin complex as "on-demand fertilizer"--what is the effective timescale of stability we are talking about in a managed cropping context? You mentioned mean residence times of centuries for humic acids, but for a practical crop rotation, is the goal to carry nitrogen across a couple of seasons, or are we looking at building a multi-year, slow-release reservoir that eventually decouples the system from annual inputs entirely?

Patricio wrote:
Regarding the older breeds and low-yielders--I take the logic, but I wonder if that yield gap is politically or economically survivable right now. Because modern cultivars have been selected for a high harvest index (putting everything into the grain/fruit) by outsourcing root architecture to synthetic N, recovering those below-ground traits means accepting less top-side yield. Is the more tractable near-term path threading it through intensive inoculation and soil management using current varieties, or is the biological yield penalty simply something we have to budget for if we want to stop the N2O leak?

Patricio wrote:
Either way, I am deeply appreciative of your concept about getting back to nature--that beautiful, ancient underground loop that feeds plants with zero pollution. It's an incredibly elegant vision. I'm all for it.

Patricio wrote:
Rest up--really appreciate you taking the time to map this all out.

sealover wrote:
"We're substituting oil for soil"

sealover wrote:
Use of petrochemicals and fossil fuel energy drove the Green Revolution.

sealover wrote:
And then the Green Revolution resulted in greenhouse gas emissions that rival those of fossil fuel combustion.

sealover wrote:
If drainage of wetlands, such as the peatlands of Southeast Asia counts as part of the Green Revolution, than Green-Revolution greenhouse gas emissions already EXCEED those of fossil fuel combustion.

sealover wrote:
No, people don't want to have to pay higher prices for food. People may not want their tax dollars to subsidize more sustainable agriculture either.

sealover wrote:
One thing that struck me during my time as a Peace Corps volunteer was to see the difference between societies for what percentage of income went to food.

I grew up in a country where people paid a lot more for rent or mortgages than for food. More for cars than for food. We had the luxury of only needing to spend a small percentage of our total income just to eat.

Food WILL have to "cost" more, one way or another,

There are ways to ensure that it doesn't hit the poorest people the hardest.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Carbon is not organic.
There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

There is no such thing as 'soil chemotherapy'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer. Nitrogen is normally a gas.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

So he 'invented' something that has been used since WW2. Meh.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Having a good laugh?

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

No gas or vapor has the capability of warming the Earth.
You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always yeat.
You cannot warm a warmer object with a colder one.

Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Carbon is not organic.
Carbon is not carbon dioxide.
No gas or vapor is capable of warming the Earth. You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

Nitrogen is not organic.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Chitin is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Nitrous oxide is not a problem. Treat it with appropriate respect.
There is no such thing as a 'population bomb'.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot heat a warmer object with a colder one.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always heat.
You cannot reduce radiance and increase temperature at the same time.

sealover wrote:


I don't know if you saw my additional edit about Hans Jenny's advise to the younger generation.

What you wrote reminded me of an expression Randy Dahlgren taught me, that he heard elsewhere:

"We're substituting oil for soil"

Use of petrochemicals and fossil fuel energy drove the Green Revolution.

And then the Green Revolution resulted in greenhouse gas emissions that rival those of fossil fuel combustion.

If drainage of wetlands, such as the peatlands of Southeast Asia counts as part of the Green Revolution, than Green-Revolution greenhouse gas emissions already EXCEED those of fossil fuel combustion.

No, people don't want to have to pay higher prices for food. People may not want their tax dollars to subsidize more sustainable agriculture either.

One thing that struck me during my time as a Peace Corps volunteer was to see the difference between societies for what percentage of income went to food.

I grew up in a country where people paid a lot more for rent or mortgages than for food. More for cars than for food. We had the luxury of only needing to spend a small percentage of our total income just to eat.

Food WILL have to "cost" more, one way or another,

There are ways to ensure that it doesn't hit the poorest people the hardest.

Im a BM wrote:
For historical context, the Van Haber process has been in use since 1917, making it the Great World War, before anyone ever heard of "WW2". Soil injection of anhydrous ammonia was invented between the great wars, a "Roaring 20's" thing when Hans Jenny hypothesized that it should work.

The great "Malthusian" die off would have happened a couple of generations ago if the food supply hadn't increased beyond all predictions, thanks to the "Green Revolution". Thomas Malthus was the guy who in 1798 wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population". It used logical analysis of population versus food supply to predict that at some point one would outgrow the other. A "Malthusian crisis" or "Malthusian catastrophe" or just a good old mass famine die off was predicted to occur at least a generation before the year 2000.

So, that was another alarmist "hoax" we can just ignore.

We now understand that crop yields can be infinitely increased forever, and we will ALWAYS have enough food for EVERYONE, no matter how many of us.

Kind of like we now understand that petroleum constantly renews itself so we will never run out, because it forms magically deep in the Earth where it don't need no stinkin' dead organisms as a source of organic carbon.

And scientists PROVED the Earth couldn't POSSIBLY be more than 100,000 years old, and it's probably much younger.

And scientists PROVED that the great diversity of species on Earth did NOT arise from a single common ancestor more than 4000 million years ago. Evolution is just a "theory" that got "debunked".

As for "climate change", that NEVER happened. Not due to any influence of human activity. Not as part of any glaciation cycle. Because climate simply CANNOT change. Just like you CANNOT acidify an alkaline. Or something.

When Into the Night speaks, real scientists listen.

That's what I heard anyway. I wouldn't know. Because, as Into the Night will be happy to inform you, I am NOT a "scientist". Not his kind of "science", in any case.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Carbon is not organic.
There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

There is no such thing as 'soil chemotherapy'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer. Nitrogen is normally a gas.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

So he 'invented' something that has been used since WW2. Meh.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Having a good laugh?

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

No gas or vapor has the capability of warming the Earth.
You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always yeat.
You cannot warm a warmer object with a colder one.

Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Carbon is not organic.
Carbon is not carbon dioxide.
No gas or vapor is capable of warming the Earth. You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

Nitrogen is not organic.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Chitin is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Nitrous oxide is not a problem. Treat it with appropriate respect.
There is no such thing as a 'population bomb'.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot heat a warmer object with a colder one.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always heat.
You cannot reduce radiance and increase temperature at the same time.

Patricio wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
For historical context, the Van Haber process has been in use since 1917, making it the Great World War, before anyone ever heard of "WW2". Soil injection of anhydrous ammonia was invented between the great wars, a "Roaring 20's" thing when Hans Jenny hypothesized that it should work.

The great "Malthusian" die off would have happened a couple of generations ago if the food supply hadn't increased beyond all predictions, thanks to the "Green Revolution". Thomas Malthus was the guy who in 1798 wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population". It used logical analysis of population versus food supply to predict that at some point one would outgrow the other. A "Malthusian crisis" or "Malthusian catastrophe" or just a good old mass famine die off was predicted to occur at least a generation before the year 2000.

So, that was another alarmist "hoax" we can just ignore.

We now understand that crop yields can be infinitely increased forever, and we will ALWAYS have enough food for EVERYONE, no matter how many of us.

Kind of like we now understand that petroleum constantly renews itself so we will never run out, because it forms magically deep in the Earth where it don't need no stinkin' dead organisms as a source of organic carbon.

And scientists PROVED the Earth couldn't POSSIBLY be more than 100,000 years old, and it's probably much younger.

And scientists PROVED that the great diversity of species on Earth did NOT arise from a single common ancestor more than 4000 million years ago. Evolution is just a "theory" that got "debunked".

As for "climate change", that NEVER happened. Not due to any influence of human activity. Not as part of any glaciation cycle. Because climate simply CANNOT change. Just like you CANNOT acidify an alkaline. Or something.

When Into the Night speaks, real scientists listen.

That's what I heard anyway. I wouldn't know. Because, as Into the Night will be happy to inform you, I am NOT a "scientist". Not his kind of "science", in any case.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Carbon is not organic.
There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

There is no such thing as 'soil chemotherapy'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer. Nitrogen is normally a gas.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

So he 'invented' something that has been used since WW2. Meh.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Having a good laugh?

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

No gas or vapor has the capability of warming the Earth.
You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always yeat.
You cannot warm a warmer object with a colder one.

Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Carbon is not organic.
Carbon is not carbon dioxide.
No gas or vapor is capable of warming the Earth. You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

Nitrogen is not organic.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Chitin is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Nitrous oxide is not a problem. Treat it with appropriate respect.
There is no such thing as a 'population bomb'.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot heat a warmer object with a colder one.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always heat.
You cannot reduce radiance and increase temperature at the same time.

Why do some flies pretend to be gadflies?

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
For historical context, the Van Haber process has been in use since 1917, making it the Great World War, before anyone ever heard of "WW2". Soil injection of anhydrous ammonia was invented between the great wars, a "Roaring 20's" thing when Hans Jenny hypothesized that it should work.

The great "Malthusian" die off would have happened a couple of generations ago if the food supply hadn't increased beyond all predictions, thanks to the "Green Revolution". Thomas Malthus was the guy who in 1798 wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population". It used logical analysis of population versus food supply to predict that at some point one would outgrow the other. A "Malthusian crisis" or "Malthusian catastrophe" or just a good old mass famine die off was predicted to occur at least a generation before the year 2000.

So, that was another alarmist "hoax" we can just ignore.

We now understand that crop yields can be infinitely increased forever, and we will ALWAYS have enough food for EVERYONE, no matter how many of us.

Kind of like we now understand that petroleum constantly renews itself so we will never run out, because it forms magically deep in the Earth where it don't need no stinkin' dead organisms as a source of organic carbon.

And scientists PROVED the Earth couldn't POSSIBLY be more than 100,000 years old, and it's probably much younger.

And scientists PROVED that the great diversity of species on Earth did NOT arise from a single common ancestor more than 4000 million years ago. Evolution is just a "theory" that got "debunked".

As for "climate change", that NEVER happened. Not due to any influence of human activity. Not as part of any glaciation cycle. Because climate simply CANNOT change. Just like you CANNOT acidify an alkaline. Or something.

When Into the Night speaks, real scientists listen.

That's what I heard anyway. I wouldn't know. Because, as Into the Night will be happy to inform you, I am NOT a "scientist". Not his kind of "science", in any case.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Carbon is not organic.
There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

There is no such thing as 'soil chemotherapy'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer. Nitrogen is normally a gas.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

So he 'invented' something that has been used since WW2. Meh.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Having a good laugh?

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

No gas or vapor has the capability of warming the Earth.
You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always yeat.
You cannot warm a warmer object with a colder one.

Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Carbon is not organic.
Carbon is not carbon dioxide.
No gas or vapor is capable of warming the Earth. You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

Nitrogen is not organic.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Chitin is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Nitrous oxide is not a problem. Treat it with appropriate respect.
There is no such thing as a 'population bomb'.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot heat a warmer object with a colder one.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always heat.
You cannot reduce radiance and increase temperature at the same time.

Why do some flies pretend to be gadflies?

Perhaps to his credit, Into the Night is NOT asserting the the Earth is flat.

He does not deny all science.

There are so many kinds of "flies"...

As ITN loves to repeat hundreds of times, "Science is not concensus".

Therefore, he would dispute the truth of the bathroom wall science I saw.

It said, "Eat shit! A trillion flies can't be wrong."

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
For historical context, the Van Haber process has been in use since 1917, making it the Great World War, before anyone ever heard of "WW2". Soil injection of anhydrous ammonia was invented between the great wars, a "Roaring 20's" thing when Hans Jenny hypothesized that it should work.

The great "Malthusian" die off would have happened a couple of generations ago if the food supply hadn't increased beyond all predictions, thanks to the "Green Revolution". Thomas Malthus was the guy who in 1798 wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population". It used logical analysis of population versus food supply to predict that at some point one would outgrow the other. A "Malthusian crisis" or "Malthusian catastrophe" or just a good old mass famine die off was predicted to occur at least a generation before the year 2000.

So, that was another alarmist "hoax" we can just ignore.

We now understand that crop yields can be infinitely increased forever, and we will ALWAYS have enough food for EVERYONE, no matter how many of us.

Kind of like we now understand that petroleum constantly renews itself so we will never run out, because it forms magically deep in the Earth where it don't need no stinkin' dead organisms as a source of organic carbon.

And scientists PROVED the Earth couldn't POSSIBLY be more than 100,000 years old, and it's probably much younger.

And scientists PROVED that the great diversity of species on Earth did NOT arise from a single common ancestor more than 4000 million years ago. Evolution is just a "theory" that got "debunked".

As for "climate change", that NEVER happened. Not due to any influence of human activity. Not as part of any glaciation cycle. Because climate simply CANNOT change. Just like you CANNOT acidify an alkaline. Or something.

When Into the Night speaks, real scientists listen.

That's what I heard anyway. I wouldn't know. Because, as Into the Night will be happy to inform you, I am NOT a "scientist". Not his kind of "science", in any case.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Carbon is not organic.
There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

There is no such thing as 'soil chemotherapy'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer. Nitrogen is normally a gas.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

So he 'invented' something that has been used since WW2. Meh.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Having a good laugh?

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

No gas or vapor has the capability of warming the Earth.
You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always yeat.
You cannot warm a warmer object with a colder one.

Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Carbon is not organic.
Carbon is not carbon dioxide.
No gas or vapor is capable of warming the Earth. You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

Nitrogen is not organic.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Chitin is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Nitrous oxide is not a problem. Treat it with appropriate respect.
There is no such thing as a 'population bomb'.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot heat a warmer object with a colder one.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always heat.
You cannot reduce radiance and increase temperature at the same time.

Why do some flies pretend to be gadflies?

Perhaps to his credit, Into the Night is NOT asserting the the Earth is flat.

He does not deny all science.

There are so many kinds of "flies"...

As ITN loves to repeat hundreds of times, "Science is not concensus".

Therefore, he would dispute the truth of the bathroom wall science I saw.

It said, "Eat shit! A trillion flies can't be wrong."

Hah! Yes, I'm beginning to see the proverbial light about this forum.

Flies are bothersome, but a real gadfly is worth the sting.

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
For historical context, the Van Haber process has been in use since 1917, making it the Great World War, before anyone ever heard of "WW2". Soil injection of anhydrous ammonia was invented between the great wars, a "Roaring 20's" thing when Hans Jenny hypothesized that it should work.

The great "Malthusian" die off would have happened a couple of generations ago if the food supply hadn't increased beyond all predictions, thanks to the "Green Revolution". Thomas Malthus was the guy who in 1798 wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population". It used logical analysis of population versus food supply to predict that at some point one would outgrow the other. A "Malthusian crisis" or "Malthusian catastrophe" or just a good old mass famine die off was predicted to occur at least a generation before the year 2000.

So, that was another alarmist "hoax" we can just ignore.

We now understand that crop yields can be infinitely increased forever, and we will ALWAYS have enough food for EVERYONE, no matter how many of us.

Kind of like we now understand that petroleum constantly renews itself so we will never run out, because it forms magically deep in the Earth where it don't need no stinkin' dead organisms as a source of organic carbon.

And scientists PROVED the Earth couldn't POSSIBLY be more than 100,000 years old, and it's probably much younger.

And scientists PROVED that the great diversity of species on Earth did NOT arise from a single common ancestor more than 4000 million years ago. Evolution is just a "theory" that got "debunked".

As for "climate change", that NEVER happened. Not due to any influence of human activity. Not as part of any glaciation cycle. Because climate simply CANNOT change. Just like you CANNOT acidify an alkaline. Or something.

When Into the Night speaks, real scientists listen.

That's what I heard anyway. I wouldn't know. Because, as Into the Night will be happy to inform you, I am NOT a "scientist". Not his kind of "science", in any case.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Carbon is not organic.
There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

There is no such thing as 'soil chemotherapy'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer. Nitrogen is normally a gas.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

So he 'invented' something that has been used since WW2. Meh.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Having a good laugh?

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

No gas or vapor has the capability of warming the Earth.
You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always yeat.
You cannot warm a warmer object with a colder one.

Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Carbon is not organic.
Carbon is not carbon dioxide.
No gas or vapor is capable of warming the Earth. You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

Nitrogen is not organic.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Chitin is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Nitrous oxide is not a problem. Treat it with appropriate respect.
There is no such thing as a 'population bomb'.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot heat a warmer object with a colder one.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always heat.
You cannot reduce radiance and increase temperature at the same time.

Why do some flies pretend to be gadflies?

Perhaps to his credit, Into the Night is NOT asserting the the Earth is flat.

He does not deny all science.

There are so many kinds of "flies"...

As ITN loves to repeat hundreds of times, "Science is not concensus".

Therefore, he would dispute the truth of the bathroom wall science I saw.

It said, "Eat shit! A trillion flies can't be wrong."

Hah! Yes, I'm beginning to see the proverbial light about this forum.

Flies are bothersome, but a real gadfly is worth the sting.

If I were still as immature as I was fifty years ago, I would have responded to you with a needlessly defensive posture.

I would have been so intimidated by your writing skills, I would have felt compelled to dissect them with a microscope to magnify any flaws that might be found. I always had to be the smartest guy in the room. No exceptions.

Fortunately, I was not quite as handicapped this way when I got to begin my interactions with some of the world's most respected scientists.

I accepted that maybe I wasn't always the smartest guy in the room, and I could learn a lot from people who were (unbelievably) even smarter.

Sean Duffey, now deceased, was a BRILLIANT entomologist at UC Davis. By the time I met him, I was able to accept the fact of his genius without intimidation. And he knew his chemical ecology like no other in the world. We had very constructive and productive interactions around theory development. And I would always be left with this feeling of, wow, I just got to talk to a real genius.

I didn't have to belittle him in my mind to feel less inferior than I was.

I guess I'm still arrogant enough to believe there weren't too many like him, so much obviously smarter than myself that I would have to drop all pretention. I did get to know several of them... Hans Jenny, Gary Sposito... it's like being able to say I knew Darwin or Einstein as a friend and colleague. They weren't just a little bit smarter than me.

It is a bit different at climate-debate.com

But DAMN you're a talented writer! Puts me to shame.

I'm glad I'm past the part of my life when that would have intimidated me to the point that it would be a barrier.

I accept your story that you have no degrees in science, but the knowledge you display tells me you paid attention somewhere, you retained it, and you figured out how to apply it in multiple contexts.

Maybe you don't aspire to author science lessons, but as far as I can tell, you are doing it anyway. Very well written science lessons.

So, you are a much better writer than I am. But I probably know more science than you. Ha! Now, we're even!

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
For historical context, the Van Haber process has been in use since 1917, making it the Great World War, before anyone ever heard of "WW2". Soil injection of anhydrous ammonia was invented between the great wars, a "Roaring 20's" thing when Hans Jenny hypothesized that it should work.

The great "Malthusian" die off would have happened a couple of generations ago if the food supply hadn't increased beyond all predictions, thanks to the "Green Revolution". Thomas Malthus was the guy who in 1798 wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population". It used logical analysis of population versus food supply to predict that at some point one would outgrow the other. A "Malthusian crisis" or "Malthusian catastrophe" or just a good old mass famine die off was predicted to occur at least a generation before the year 2000.

So, that was another alarmist "hoax" we can just ignore.

We now understand that crop yields can be infinitely increased forever, and we will ALWAYS have enough food for EVERYONE, no matter how many of us.

Kind of like we now understand that petroleum constantly renews itself so we will never run out, because it forms magically deep in the Earth where it don't need no stinkin' dead organisms as a source of organic carbon.

And scientists PROVED the Earth couldn't POSSIBLY be more than 100,000 years old, and it's probably much younger.

And scientists PROVED that the great diversity of species on Earth did NOT arise from a single common ancestor more than 4000 million years ago. Evolution is just a "theory" that got "debunked".

As for "climate change", that NEVER happened. Not due to any influence of human activity. Not as part of any glaciation cycle. Because climate simply CANNOT change. Just like you CANNOT acidify an alkaline. Or something.

When Into the Night speaks, real scientists listen.

That's what I heard anyway. I wouldn't know. Because, as Into the Night will be happy to inform you, I am NOT a "scientist". Not his kind of "science", in any case.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Carbon is not organic.
There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

There is no such thing as 'soil chemotherapy'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer. Nitrogen is normally a gas.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

So he 'invented' something that has been used since WW2. Meh.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Having a good laugh?

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

No gas or vapor has the capability of warming the Earth.
You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always yeat.
You cannot warm a warmer object with a colder one.

Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Carbon is not organic.
Carbon is not carbon dioxide.
No gas or vapor is capable of warming the Earth. You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

Nitrogen is not organic.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Chitin is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Nitrous oxide is not a problem. Treat it with appropriate respect.
There is no such thing as a 'population bomb'.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot heat a warmer object with a colder one.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always heat.
You cannot reduce radiance and increase temperature at the same time.

Why do some flies pretend to be gadflies?

Perhaps to his credit, Into the Night is NOT asserting the the Earth is flat.

He does not deny all science.

There are so many kinds of "flies"...

As ITN loves to repeat hundreds of times, "Science is not concensus".

Therefore, he would dispute the truth of the bathroom wall science I saw.

It said, "Eat shit! A trillion flies can't be wrong."

Hah! Yes, I'm beginning to see the proverbial light about this forum.

Flies are bothersome, but a real gadfly is worth the sting.

If I were still as immature as I was fifty years ago, I would have responded to you with a needlessly defensive posture.

I would have been so intimidated by your writing skills, I would have felt compelled to dissect them with a microscope to magnify any flaws that might be found. I always had to be the smartest guy in the room. No exceptions.

Fortunately, I was not quite as handicapped this way when I got to begin my interactions with some of the world's most respected scientists.

I accepted that maybe I wasn't always the smartest guy in the room, and I could learn a lot from people who were (unbelievably) even smarter.

Sean Duffey, now deceased, was a BRILLIANT entomologist at UC Davis. By the time I met him, I was able to accept the fact of his genius without intimidation. And he knew his chemical ecology like no other in the world. We had very constructive and productive interactions around theory development. And I would always be left with this feeling of, wow, I just got to talk to a real genius.

I didn't have to belittle him in my mind to feel less inferior than I was.

I guess I'm still arrogant enough to believe there weren't too many like him, so much obviously smarter than myself that I would have to drop all pretention. I did get to know several of them... Hans Jenny, Gary Sposito... it's like being able to say I knew Darwin or Einstein as a friend and colleague. They weren't just a little bit smarter than me.

It is a bit different at climate-debate.com

But DAMN you're a talented writer! Puts me to shame.

I'm glad I'm past the part of my life when that would have intimidated me to the point that it would be a barrier.

I accept your story that you have no degrees in science, but the knowledge you display tells me you paid attention somewhere, you retained it, and you figured out how to apply it in multiple contexts.

Maybe you don't aspire to author science lessons, but as far as I can tell, you are doing it anyway. Very well written science lessons.

So, you are a much better writer than I am. But I probably know more science than you. Ha! Now, we're even!

No, I'm afraid the tower is still lopsided in your favor.

I envy you a lot more than you envy me. If I were a Ph.D. like you, I'd be writing books, lecturing, and working in the fascinating field of climate science. But without the credentials, opportunities in the field, and formal training, knowledge only takes you so far--mostly to arguing on debate forums (and no doubt there are huge gaps in my learning).

I'm 75, and the idea of getting a formal science degree now... what would be the point? It's simply too late.

For most of my life, my professions were photography and music. I'm a guitarist and pianist, and I compose Brazilian jazz. My degree was in liberal arts (I excelled in writing in my English classes, btw). Years ago, I wanted to be a lawyer, and that was the reason for the degree. But a few real lawyers talked me out of it, and truth be told, I was more drawn to the arts anyway.

Still, I've always loved science and read widely. Over the last couple of decades, I've developed a particular interest in climate science, thanks in part to Al Gore--though I've got a bone or two to pick with him about his film.

And by the way, don't sell yourself short. You write well, in my view. I'd read any book you've published.

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
For historical context, the Van Haber process has been in use since 1917, making it the Great World War, before anyone ever heard of "WW2". Soil injection of anhydrous ammonia was invented between the great wars, a "Roaring 20's" thing when Hans Jenny hypothesized that it should work.

The great "Malthusian" die off would have happened a couple of generations ago if the food supply hadn't increased beyond all predictions, thanks to the "Green Revolution". Thomas Malthus was the guy who in 1798 wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population". It used logical analysis of population versus food supply to predict that at some point one would outgrow the other. A "Malthusian crisis" or "Malthusian catastrophe" or just a good old mass famine die off was predicted to occur at least a generation before the year 2000.

So, that was another alarmist "hoax" we can just ignore.

We now understand that crop yields can be infinitely increased forever, and we will ALWAYS have enough food for EVERYONE, no matter how many of us.

Kind of like we now understand that petroleum constantly renews itself so we will never run out, because it forms magically deep in the Earth where it don't need no stinkin' dead organisms as a source of organic carbon.

And scientists PROVED the Earth couldn't POSSIBLY be more than 100,000 years old, and it's probably much younger.

And scientists PROVED that the great diversity of species on Earth did NOT arise from a single common ancestor more than 4000 million years ago. Evolution is just a "theory" that got "debunked".

As for "climate change", that NEVER happened. Not due to any influence of human activity. Not as part of any glaciation cycle. Because climate simply CANNOT change. Just like you CANNOT acidify an alkaline. Or something.

When Into the Night speaks, real scientists listen.

That's what I heard anyway. I wouldn't know. Because, as Into the Night will be happy to inform you, I am NOT a "scientist". Not his kind of "science", in any case.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Crop-mycorrhizal associations...

Perhaps the first thing to emphasize is that most of our crops already have at least one species of mycorrhizal fungi living in mutualist symbiotic association with the roots. In order to acquire enough nutrients from the soil, the plant feeds organic carbon to its fungal partner. This requires that photosynthate be allocated to the roots rather than the fruits we harvest. It takes a bite out of potential crop yield. It adds more organic carbon to the soil.

Carbon is not organic.
There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.

sealover wrote:
Starting about over a century ago, we began to use soil chemotherapy with applied nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop yields. It worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well! But it came with a cost.

There is no such thing as 'soil chemotherapy'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer. Nitrogen is normally a gas.

sealover wrote:
I had the incredible honor of knowing Dr. Hans Jenny as a friend and mentor at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Hans Jenny discovered that dry ammonia can be adsorbed to cation exchange sites on soil, to be retained there to fertilize crops. He became known as the soil scientist "friend of the farmer" in the corn belt.

So he 'invented' something that has been used since WW2. Meh.

sealover wrote:
We had a small, "sustainable agriculture" discussion group that Hans always attended. One day he told us the story, and it was fascinating. His major professor discouraged Hans from going forward with the anhydrous ammonia adsorption research, while the guy went out and got patent rights for himself. Hans never made a dime off his incredibly profitable discovery. But that was not the tale of woe. Hans had very mixed feelings about what he had accomplished. Soil organic matter content was diminishing as a result of his discovery. Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture had increased by orders of magnitude as a result of his discovery. And crop yield increases had more than kept pace with population increase as a result of his discovery.

Having a good laugh?

sealover wrote:
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas with about 300x as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule. Nitrous oxide is emitted as a by product when nitrifying bacteria oxidize ammonium to nitrate. Nitrous oxide is also emitted as a byproduct when nitrate reducing bacteria, under low oxygen conditions, transform nitrate to nitrogen gas or ammonium. I'll note here that dissimilatory reduction of nitrate to ammonium (DRNA) has been discovered to rival denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas in many ecosystems. Unlike denitrification in which the nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere as N2, DRNA turns nitrate back into ammonium to be held against leaching by adsorption to cation exchange sites.

No gas or vapor has the capability of warming the Earth.
You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always yeat.
You cannot warm a warmer object with a colder one.

Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.

sealover wrote:
Okay, crop mycorrhizal associations.. Hans Jenny himself pointed it out. We had deliberately been breeding crops that didn't allocate much or any photosynthate to feed mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. By spoon feeding them nitrogen fertilizer, they hardly needed any extensive fine roots, and they didn't need to pay any symbiotic fungi to help them get it. This resulted in a reduction of organic carbon input to the soil and a net loss of soil organic matter, manifest as emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So, step 1 would be to rediscover the breeds we used to use, which weren't such high yielders but didn't need to be provided with all the chemicals by humans. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are a great example. They knew how to make their own fertilizer from the atmosphere before Han Jenny's ammonia was ever available to them. They couldn't yield as much because so much photosynthate was allocated to the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria on their roots. But they put a lot more organic carbon back into the soil that way. With virtually no nitrous oxide emissions.

There is no such thing as 'photosynthate'.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Carbon is not organic.
Carbon is not carbon dioxide.
No gas or vapor is capable of warming the Earth. You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

sealover wrote:
A model that appeals to me personally occurred to me after meeting with Dr. David Read. He showed us the three-way-symbiosis between ericaceous shrubs, their mycorrhizal fungi, and the bacteria which live on the tips of the fungal hyphae. Fungi are chemical wizards, but bacteria have been at it for a lot longer. So, a fungi partnered with a bacteria that produces chitinase enzyme, a very expensive reagent for soil biochemistry. The bacteria can only make such and expensive enzyme because a fungus is feeding it organic carbon. The fungi only has organic carbon to give to the bacteria because the ericaceous plant is feeding organic carbon to the fungi. The plant wants nitrogen that is locked up in the chitin in the soil. Chitin is a nitrogen-containing organic compound that make arthropod exoskeleton and is a structural component in some fungi. It is very, very difficult to degrade chitin to get useful nitrogen out of it.

There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
In the three-way symbiosis, a monolayer of bacteria on the fungal hyphal tip puts out chitinase in the microsite where the fungi found some chitin. Prompted by the fungi - HERE is where you bacteria need to put out the enzyme. Released as dissolved organic nitrogen, the fungi sucks it up and passes it along to the plant, still in organic nitrogen form. No nitrogen loss and no nitrous oxide emissions. And also a virtual monopoly on the nitrogen supply. Almost nobody else can access that chitin nitrogen. It sits there stable in the soil, until released on demand by the three-way-symbiosis between three different kingdoms of organisms. This could be a model for fertilizing crops.

Nitrogen is not organic.
You cannot destroy nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
The nitrogen fertilizer can be a very recalcitrant organic form of nitrogen, such as chitin, or better still a protein-tannin complex. That nitrogen ain't goin' nowhere until the plant demands it. Competing weeds can't use it. It is not going to leach away or get lost to the atmosphere. It won't aggravate global warming with nitrous oxide emissions. "On demand" fertilizer that lasts for a very long time until it is needed. I mention protein-tannin complexes because they are at least as abundant as chitin in natural soils, and are something we can "synthesize" through composting. And Dr. David Read had already shown ericaceous plants were able to exploit nitrogen from protein-tannin complexes, with a litle help from their mycorrhizal partners, and no need for a bacteria.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Chitin is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

sealover wrote:
That's enough for now. This old guy gets tired fast.

belated edit: No, that wasn't enough. I left out the more important part of what Hans Jenny told us that day.

I asked him directly if he regretted what he had done, given the severity of the nitrous oxide emission problem in agriculture. He had a sad look and a moment of silence. It was clearly something he struggled with. Finally, he said that "no" he did not regret it. People needed food and Green Revolution agriculture had made food abundant enough to stave off that big "die off" they always warned about with the "population bomb". It WOULD have happened if crop yields hadn't been significantly boosted. But now it was up to us, the younger generation of scientists (I was still young back then) to find a better way to do it. And he had some very good ideas to help us get there.

Nitrous oxide is not a problem. Treat it with appropriate respect.
There is no such thing as a 'population bomb'.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.

You are still ignoring the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.
You cannot trap heat.
You cannot trap light.
You cannot heat a warmer object with a colder one.
You cannot trap thermal energy. There is always heat.
You cannot reduce radiance and increase temperature at the same time.

Why do some flies pretend to be gadflies?

Perhaps to his credit, Into the Night is NOT asserting the the Earth is flat.

He does not deny all science.

There are so many kinds of "flies"...

As ITN loves to repeat hundreds of times, "Science is not concensus".

Therefore, he would dispute the truth of the bathroom wall science I saw.

It said, "Eat shit! A trillion flies can't be wrong."

Hah! Yes, I'm beginning to see the proverbial light about this forum.

Flies are bothersome, but a real gadfly is worth the sting.

If I were still as immature as I was fifty years ago, I would have responded to you with a needlessly defensive posture.

I would have been so intimidated by your writing skills, I would have felt compelled to dissect them with a microscope to magnify any flaws that might be found. I always had to be the smartest guy in the room. No exceptions.

Fortunately, I was not quite as handicapped this way when I got to begin my interactions with some of the world's most respected scientists.

I accepted that maybe I wasn't always the smartest guy in the room, and I could learn a lot from people who were (unbelievably) even smarter.

Sean Duffey, now deceased, was a BRILLIANT entomologist at UC Davis. By the time I met him, I was able to accept the fact of his genius without intimidation. And he knew his chemical ecology like no other in the world. We had very constructive and productive interactions around theory development. And I would always be left with this feeling of, wow, I just got to talk to a real genius.

I didn't have to belittle him in my mind to feel less inferior than I was.

I guess I'm still arrogant enough to believe there weren't too many like him, so much obviously smarter than myself that I would have to drop all pretention. I did get to know several of them... Hans Jenny, Gary Sposito... it's like being able to say I knew Darwin or Einstein as a friend and colleague. They weren't just a little bit smarter than me.

It is a bit different at climate-debate.com

But DAMN you're a talented writer! Puts me to shame.

I'm glad I'm past the part of my life when that would have intimidated me to the point that it would be a barrier.

I accept your story that you have no degrees in science, but the knowledge you display tells me you paid attention somewhere, you retained it, and you figured out how to apply it in multiple contexts.

Maybe you don't aspire to author science lessons, but as far as I can tell, you are doing it anyway. Very well written science lessons.

So, you are a much better writer than I am. But I probably know more science than you. Ha! Now, we're even!

No, I'm afraid the tower is still lopsided in your favor.

I envy you a lot more than you envy me. If I were a Ph.D. like you, I'd be writing books, lecturing, and working in the fascinating field of climate science. But without the credentials, opportunities in the field, and formal training, knowledge only takes you so far--mostly to arguing on debate forums (and no doubt there are huge gaps in my learning).

I'm 75, and the idea of getting a formal science degree now... what would be the point? It's simply too late.

For most of my life, my professions were photography and music. I'm a guitarist and pianist, and I compose Brazilian jazz. My degree was in liberal arts (I excelled in writing in my English classes, btw). Years ago, I wanted to be a lawyer, and that was the reason for the degree. But a few real lawyers talked me out of it, and truth be told, I was more drawn to the arts anyway.

Still, I've always loved science and read widely. Over the last couple of decades, I've developed a particular interest in climate science, thanks in part to Al Gore--though I've got a bone or two to pick with him about his film.

And by the way, don't sell yourself short. You write well, in my view. I'd read any book you've published.

sealover wrote:They refuse to believe any source I cite or quote.

sealover wrote: I guess I had to get one last dig in at ITN.

sealover wrote: If I had to choose how to spend all available resources to address climate change and I were only given two choices - minimize GHG emissions associated with fossil fuel combustion or maximize GHG sequestration by natural or managed ecosystems, I know we can get ten times more bang for the buck going with the second choice.

Patricio wrote: I envy you a lot more than you envy me.

Patricio wrote: If I were a Ph.D. like you, I'd be writing books, lecturing, and working in the fascinating field of climate science.

Patricio wrote: But without the [religious titles], opportunities in the [church], only take you so far--mostly to [making myself look like an idiot] on debate forums (and no doubt there are huge gaps in my learning).

Patricio wrote:I'm 75

Patricio wrote:, and the idea of getting a formal science degree now... what would be the point?

Patricio wrote: For most of my life, my professions were photography and music. I'm a guitarist and pianist, and I compose Brazilian jazz. My degree was in liberal arts (I excelled in writing in my English classes, btw). Years ago, I wanted to be a lawyer, and that was the reason for the degree. But a few real lawyers talked me out of it, and truth be told, I was more drawn to the arts anyway.

Patricio wrote: Still, I've always loved science ... fiction ... and read widely.

Patricio wrote: Over the last couple of decades, I've developed a particular devotion to climate dogma, thanks in part to Al Gore

IBdaMann wrote:

Patricio wrote: I envy you a lot more than you envy me.

Who besides Robert's sock would envy Robert?

Patricio wrote: If I were a Ph.D. like you, I'd be writing books, lecturing, and working in the fascinating field of climate science.

Climate Science is a religious doctrine, not a "field."

Patricio wrote: But without the [religious titles], opportunities in the [church], only take you so far--mostly to [making myself look like an idiot] on debate forums (and no doubt there are huge gaps in my learning).

What ever convinced you that you were somehow a thienth geniuth?

Patricio wrote:I'm 75

No shit. Only your generation got hooked into the Global Warming scam. The younger generation isn't picling up the mantle of your faith, and as no one is willing to carry the torch, your religion is on its deathbed.

Patricio wrote:, and the idea of getting a formal science degree now... what would be the point?

... especially considering that you are already a thienth geniuth, any physics courses would be a waste of time and money, right? Besides, learning is too much work anyway, right? After all, you have people right here on Climate-Debate who could teach you everything you need to know, but that would only serve to threaten your faith, right?

Patricio wrote: For most of my life, my professions were photography and music. I'm a guitarist and pianist, and I compose Brazilian jazz. My degree was in liberal arts (I excelled in writing in my English classes, btw). Years ago, I wanted to be a lawyer, and that was the reason for the degree. But a few real lawyers talked me out of it, and truth be told, I was more drawn to the arts anyway.

I see you've covered everything necessary to become a thienth geniuth. There's nothing more that you need to learn.

Patricio wrote: Still, I've always loved science ... fiction ... and read widely.

Tell me about it. I bet you understand how dilithium crystals fold subspace.

Patricio wrote: Over the last couple of decades, I've developed a particular devotion to climate dogma, thanks in part to Al Gore

Well, you certainly are worshiping the right heroes. Good on you.

sealover wrote:

I would never have guessed you're even older than myself.

I'm still delighted by what happened when you spelled out exactly why the sea water chemistry assertions being made were just wrong, scientifically.

Such as the absurdity of nearly all the "is not a chemical" claims.

Into the Night is used to his "there is no such thing as.." (something that everyone with the most basic education knows to exist) being the last word.

I think the most recent such sentence that struck me was, "there is no such thing as biochemistry". Just wish it out of existence. Meaningless "buzzword".

They refuse to believe any source I cite or quote.

But then they got the same accurate information presented to them as a rebuttal that clearly identified where their specific assertions could be shown to be anti scientific and wrong.

The fact that it was the SAME correct information they had seen from me, it proved you must be my "sock". How ELSE could we converge on the same definition for the same basic term used by scientists? It's not like anyone could find them in a texbook or something. Science is not a textbook. Science is not a chemical. Science is not a lot of things and a lot of things are not chemicals.

I guess I had to get one last dig in at ITN.

Back to policy, though.

If I had to choose how to spend all available resources to address climate change and I were only given two choices - minimize GHG emissions associated with fossil fuel combustion or maximize GHG sequestration by natural or managed ecosystems, I know we can get ten times more bang for the buck going with the second choice. And people still get to drive their cars.

Patricio wrote: The sock puppet theory is my favorite.

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

I would never have guessed you're even older than myself.

I'm still delighted by what happened when you spelled out exactly why the sea water chemistry assertions being made were just wrong, scientifically.

Such as the absurdity of nearly all the "is not a chemical" claims.

Into the Night is used to his "there is no such thing as.." (something that everyone with the most basic education knows to exist) being the last word.

I think the most recent such sentence that struck me was, "there is no such thing as biochemistry". Just wish it out of existence. Meaningless "buzzword".

They refuse to believe any source I cite or quote.

But then they got the same accurate information presented to them as a rebuttal that clearly identified where their specific assertions could be shown to be anti scientific and wrong.

The fact that it was the SAME correct information they had seen from me, it proved you must be my "sock". How ELSE could we converge on the same definition for the same basic term used by scientists? It's not like anyone could find them in a texbook or something. Science is not a textbook. Science is not a chemical. Science is not a lot of things and a lot of things are not chemicals.

I guess I had to get one last dig in at ITN.

Back to policy, though.

If I had to choose how to spend all available resources to address climate change and I were only given two choices - minimize GHG emissions associated with fossil fuel combustion or maximize GHG sequestration by natural or managed ecosystems, I know we can get ten times more bang for the buck going with the second choice. And people still get to drive their cars.

The sock puppet theory is my favorite. We arrive at the same definition--you know, the ones that are actually in the textbooks--and the only possible conclusion is a conspiracy. How brilliant! How did we miss that?

And yes, "there is no such thing as biochemistry" is a sentence that should be bronzed -- as a monument to motivated ignorance. I swear, they repeat this "no such thing" line over and over, and it really does grind on the nerves. I suspect they do it intentionally, which would put them squarely in the "troll" category, wouldn't it? Hmmmm.

Your point about bang for the buck is hard to dismiss. Emissions reduction policy is politically brutal, economically disruptive, and moves at the speed of legislation and international negotiation -- which is to say, glacially (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of that word given what's happening to glaciers). Ecosystem restoration can begin tomorrow, is distributed, is often community-scalable, and has co-benefits -- biodiversity, water retention, soil fertility, coastal protection -- that emissions reduction simply doesn't.

So where do I land? Probably here: sequestration deserves a much larger share of resources and attention than it currently gets, you're almost certainly right about that. But I'd frame it as an essential complement rather than a superior alternative. The sink has to grow AND the source has to shrink, or we're in a losing race. The math simply doesn't balance if we keep pouring emissions into the atmosphere at our current rate while relying solely on nature to clean it up.
What's your read on the ceiling? What's the most credible upper bound you've seen for realistic additional sequestration capacity -- natural plus managed -- per year?

IBdaMann wrote:

Patricio wrote: The sock puppet theory is my favorite.

I figured it would be, after you changed it.

Either you are lying about your copy-pasting directly from AI, or you are Robert's sock. If you are not Robert's sock, then you are, in fact, simply copy-pasting from AI.

You can choose whichever one you wish and I'll go with that.

Patricio wrote:

IBdaMann wrote:

Patricio wrote: The sock puppet theory is my favorite.

I figured it would be, after you changed it.

Either you are lying about your copy-pasting directly from AI, or you are Robert's sock. If you are not Robert's sock, then you are, in fact, simply copy-pasting from AI.

You can choose whichever one you wish and I'll go with that.

Oh, I see, it's Door A or B, but of course, in your fantasyland, there are no other doors, just the ones YOU, and no one else, choose. How wonderful!

And what, you think I'm going to sit here and play your feeble mental game?

Well, I've got your A & B right here.

I edit my posts with an app, sometimes, sometimes not. The name of the app does not matter. Editing does not mean 'replace brain'. All writers use or employ editors, free or hired. No opinion I express is derived by anyone or anything other than yours truly.

Deal with it.

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

IBdaMann wrote:

Patricio wrote: The sock puppet theory is my favorite.

I figured it would be, after you changed it.

Either you are lying about your copy-pasting directly from AI, or you are Robert's sock. If you are not Robert's sock, then you are, in fact, simply copy-pasting from AI.

You can choose whichever one you wish and I'll go with that.

Oh, I see, it's Door A or B, but of course, in your fantasyland, there are no other doors, just the ones YOU, and no one else, choose. How wonderful!

And what, you think I'm going to sit here and play your feeble mental game?

Well, I've got your A & B right here.

I edit my posts with an app, sometimes, sometimes not. The name of the app does not matter. Editing does not mean 'replace brain'. All writers use or employ editors, free or hired. No opinion I express is derived by anyone or anything other than yours truly.

Deal with it.

Welcome back, Patricio.

It is likely that if you read my posts, you will see frequent errors in wording.

I do not use an editor app, I don't like to spend time proofreading, and I have dyslexia. I fail to notice where I left out crucial words in a sentence, and I sometimes literally can't see that I wrote the wrong word.

I figure that it's good enough for climate-debate.com

But it might make it weird reading some of my posts. Sometimes when I read them later, I notice sentences where I wrote the exact opposite word that I intended, or that the single most important word needed for the sense of the sentence is missing.

Usually it's too late to go back and "edit", and I stopped creating a whole new post just to put in corrections for dyslexia discovered after the fact.

To IBdaMann's point, when I read your first post I HOPED that you had authored it yourself, but thought maybe it was too good to be true.

I never imagined you were an AI bot, but I suspected that it might be material authored by someone else and cut and pasted by you.

Your subsequent posts, with specific replies to others, made it clear that you write your own stuff. And WELL!

If it makes IBdaMann and Into the Night feel better to imagine that you are my sock, who am I to deny them that? My socks write better than I do.

Patricio wrote: Oh, I see, it's Door A or B,

Patricio wrote:And what, you think I'm going to sit here and play your feeble mental game?

Patricio wrote:I edit my posts with an app, sometimes, sometimes not. The name of the app does not matter. Editing does not mean 'replace brain'.

Patricio wrote: All writers use or employ editors, free or hired.

Patricio wrote:No opinion I express is derived by anyone or anything other than yours truly.

Robert wrote:Your subsequent posts, with specific replies to others, made it clear that you write your own stuff. And WELL!

Robert wrote:If it makes IBdaMann and Into the Night feel better to imagine that you are my sock, who am I to deny them that?

IBdaMann wrote:

Robert wrote:Your subsequent posts, with specific replies to others, made it clear that you write your own stuff. And WELL!

Robert, why are you so desperate to have people believe that Patricio is not your sock?

Robert wrote:If it makes IBdaMann and Into the Night feel better to imagine that you are my sock, who am I to deny them that?

I can't speak for Into the Night, but I personally take no comfort in you having a third sock, and I still find it odd that you have conversations with yourself.


.

Robert wrote:Your subsequent posts, with specific replies to others, made it clear that you write your own stuff. And WELL!

Robert wrote:If it makes IBdaMann and Into the Night feel better to imagine that you are my sock, who am I to deny them that?

Im a BM wrote:
For historical context, the Van Haber process has been in use since 1917, making it the Great World War, before anyone ever heard of "WW2". Soil injection of anhydrous ammonia was invented between the great wars, a "Roaring 20's" thing when Hans Jenny hypothesized that it should work.

Im a BM wrote:
Kind of like we now understand that petroleum constantly renews itself so we will never run out, because it forms magically deep in the Earth where it don't need no stinkin' dead organisms as a source of organic carbon.

Im a BM wrote:
And scientists PROVED the Earth couldn't POSSIBLY be more than 100,000 years old, and it's probably much younger.

Im a BM wrote:
And scientists PROVED that the great diversity of species on Earth did NOT arise from a single common ancestor more than 4000 million years ago. Evolution is just a "theory" that got "debunked".

Im a BM wrote:
As for "climate change", that NEVER happened. Not due to any influence of human activity. Not as part of any glaciation cycle. Because climate simply CANNOT change. Just like you CANNOT acidify an alkaline. Or something.

Im a BM wrote:
When Into the Night speaks, real scientists listen.

That's what I heard anyway. I wouldn't know. Because, as Into the Night will be happy to inform you, I am NOT a "scientist". Not his kind of "science", in any case.

Patricio wrote:
"Substituting oil for soil" is devastating in its compression

Patricio wrote:
--it captures the whole substitution logic of industrial agriculture in four words.

Patricio wrote:
You traded a living, self-regenerating system for a extractive one, and called the yield numbers a success without putting the liability on the balance sheet.

Patricio wrote:
The peatland point hits hard. Southeast Asian peat drainage is one of those accounting sleights of hand that almost never makes it into the mainstream Green Revolution narrative--

Patricio wrote:
the carbon those systems had been accumulating for millennia gets treated as a free externality,

Patricio wrote:
and the yield gets booked as human ingenuity.

Patricio wrote:
If you fold that in, the math on "feeding the world" looks considerably darker.

Patricio wrote:
I didn't catch the Hans Jenny edit--I'll go back and look for it.

Patricio wrote:
On the food cost question: I think you've identified the sharpest political edge here. In wealthy countries, food is already so cheap as a share of income that even a modest price signal registers as an outrage. The political economy is almost perfectly inverted from what the biology requires. And the populations who actually spend 40 or 50 percent of income on food have the least leverage over how it's produced.

Patricio wrote:
The equity carve-out matters enormously though. If the transition costs can be absorbed at the top of the income distribution while protecting subsistence access at the bottom--through targeted subsidies, price supports, or direct transfers--the "food will cost more" argument loses most of its moral force as an objection.

Patricio wrote:
It becomes a distributional problem, which is at least a solvable one. Whether there's political will to treat it that way is another question entirely.

sealover wrote:
Sean Duffey, now deceased, was a BRILLIANT entomologist at UC Davis. By the time I met him, I was able to accept the fact of his genius without intimidation. And he knew his chemical ecology like no other in the world. We had very constructive and productive interactions around theory development. And I would always be left with this feeling of, wow, I just got to talk to a real genius.

sealover wrote:
Maybe you don't aspire to author science lessons, but as far as I can tell, you are doing it anyway. Very well written science lessons.

sealover wrote:
So, you are a much better writer than I am. But I probably know more science than you. Ha! Now, we're even!

sealover wrote:
I am reluctant to throw around numbers of grams of carbon per year per square meter, but they add up fast when you multiply them by square kilometers. And not all GHGs are equal. Taking out just one molecule of N2O provides cooling benefits of taking out 200-300 molecules of CO2. Taking out just one molecule of CH4 achieves what taking out 20-30 molecules of CO2 accomplishes.

sealover wrote:
Perhaps it is "cheating" but I would count measures that reduce the EMISSION of new N2O from soil as equivalent to sequestration of N2O from the atmosphere. Since my only other choice was to reduce fossil fuel combustion, and that doesn't reduce soil N2O emissions. These are the kind of calculations that make me generalize that you get 10x more bang for the buck.

sealover wrote:
One of the disturbing facts that's catching up is how much emissions of CH4 and N2O are increasing beyond expectations. I'm inspired by some of the work showing how we can reduce CH4 emissions from thawing tundra, even if we can't stop it from melting.

sealover wrote:
Restoration of wetlands transforms them from net CO2 emitters back to net CO2 sequesterers (I declare my new word to NOT be a "buzzword")

sealover wrote:
And back to acidification - any place we can get the system to generate carbonate ions, they can act as a CO2 "trap" to suck it out of the air. If sea water were pumped into a coastal desert, the immediate result would be to mobilize the hydroxides accumulated in the soil for immediate reaction with atmospheric CO2 to form carbonates in the soil. Those carbonates then sequester more atmospheric CO2 to become bicarbonates. Purely abiotic, spontaneous chemical reactions.

sealover wrote:
You could let that saltwater cesspool dry up and the bicarbonates remain in the soil. Or you could keep on irrigating with sea water to create a hypersaline saltwater wetland that will sequester CO2 via photosynthesis. Constant input of new sea water at a constant rate would result in some steady state of hypersalinity, as evaporation takes some off the top and groundwater or surface water flow to the sea takes extra salt back out to where it came from. With a high enough rate of sea water input, the steady state hypersalinity could be low enough for aquaculture. All the while it sucks CO2 out of the air and exports carbonate ions to the sea. As the constructed saltwater wetland accumulates organic carbon, it provides substrate for sulfate reduction in the low oxygen sediments to generate carbonate ions for export.

sealover wrote:
I've got a lot of mad scientist schemes for applied biogeochemistry, most of which would cost very little $ to implement.

sealover wrote:
Constructed wetlands have been used for more than 50 years to capture and remediate acid mine drainage. Passing that pH 0-3 acid mine drainage through a constructed wetland transforms it to neutral pH groundwater draining out of the new wetland. A constructed wetland in a coastal desert would have input water that is already at pH >8 and LOADED with sulfate. The submarine groundwater discharge flowing from it would have pH >8 with much higher carbonate ion concentration than sea water.

sealover wrote:
It's a different kind of "geoengineering"

sealover wrote:
Dr. Odum requested the meeting with me because I had been invited to speak at the University of Georgia, and he attended my 45 minute presentation. I used a lot of cartoons to present a very broad hypothesis about chemical ecology, evolutionary biology, the "extended" phenotype of plants as soil engineers, and the adaptive value of polyphenols in plant-litter-soil interactions. It included the fact that natural ecosystems maximize carbon sequestration and minimize emissions of N2O by selecting for plant communities with high polyphenol content on soils with high potential for leaching loss in humid climates.

sealover wrote:
I wish that he were still alive so I could tell the man who coined the term "ecosystem" that I am FINALLY taking his advice, thirty years later. And I realize that what was so "liberating" about my inability to download any prepared material to this website was that I simply omitted providing citations for my assertions. I was preparing first drafts of chapters for that book Dr. Odum told me to hurry up and write.

sealover wrote:
Patricio, if you were serious about your willingness to read such a thing, I think you would make an excellent editor, if not co author. Your writing skills would make me try to lure you into actually being co author and not just editor.

IBdaMann wrote:

Patricio wrote: Oh, I see, it's Door A or B,

Very good! It only took you three posts of explicitly telling you for you to catch on, which is pretty good for undereducated leftists who need, on average, 5.7 posts of correct answers repeated for them to grasp the high-level basics.

So pick one.

Patricio wrote:And what, you think I'm going to sit here and play your feeble mental game?

I am fully aware that you don't have any capacity for mental games.

Patricio wrote:I edit my posts with an app, sometimes, sometimes not. The name of the app does not matter. Editing does not mean 'replace brain'.

Editing does, in fact, mean 'replace brain' when you are copy-pasting directly from an AI assistant.

Patricio wrote: All writers use or employ editors, free or hired.

I don't. I do all my own writing.

Patricio wrote:No opinion I express is derived by anyone or anything other than yours truly.

False. You regurgitate strictly from AI or from Robert. Deal with it.

.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
I am reluctant to throw around numbers of grams of carbon per year per square meter, but they add up fast when you multiply them by square kilometers. And not all GHGs are equal. Taking out just one molecule of N2O provides cooling benefits of taking out 200-300 molecules of CO2. Taking out just one molecule of CH4 achieves what taking out 20-30 molecules of CO2 accomplishes.

Carbon is not a gas.
There is no such thing as a 'greenhouse gas'. You are ignoring the 1st law of thermodynamics again.

sealover wrote:
Perhaps it is "cheating" but I would count measures that reduce the EMISSION of new N2O from soil as equivalent to sequestration of N2O from the atmosphere. Since my only other choice was to reduce fossil fuel combustion, and that doesn't reduce soil N2O emissions. These are the kind of calculations that make me generalize that you get 10x more bang for the buck.

No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.
Fossils aren't used as fuel. They don't combust.

sealover wrote:
One of the disturbing facts that's catching up is how much emissions of CH4 and N2O are increasing beyond expectations. I'm inspired by some of the work showing how we can reduce CH4 emissions from thawing tundra, even if we can't stop it from melting.

The surface of tundra melts every summer, Robert. That's normal.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth. You are ignoring the 1st law of thermodynamics again.

You can't create energy out of nothing.

sealover wrote:
Restoration of wetlands transforms them from net CO2 emitters back to net CO2 sequesterers (I declare my new word to NOT be a "buzzword")

There is no such thing as 'CO2 sequesterers'.

sealover wrote:
And back to acidification - any place we can get the system to generate carbonate ions, they can act as a CO2 "trap" to suck it out of the air. If sea water were pumped into a coastal desert, the immediate result would be to mobilize the hydroxides accumulated in the soil for immediate reaction with atmospheric CO2 to form carbonates in the soil. Those carbonates then sequester more atmospheric CO2 to become bicarbonates. Purely abiotic, spontaneous chemical reactions.

You cannot acidify an alkaline.
Carbonate is not a chemical.
Hydroxide is not a chemical.
Bicarbonate is not a chemical.

sealover wrote:
You could let that saltwater cesspool dry up and the bicarbonates remain in the soil. Or you could keep on irrigating with sea water to create a hypersaline saltwater wetland that will sequester CO2 via photosynthesis. Constant input of new sea water at a constant rate would result in some steady state of hypersalinity, as evaporation takes some off the top and groundwater or surface water flow to the sea takes extra salt back out to where it came from. With a high enough rate of sea water input, the steady state hypersalinity could be low enough for aquaculture. All the while it sucks CO2 out of the air and exports carbonate ions to the sea. As the constructed saltwater wetland accumulates organic carbon, it provides substrate for sulfate reduction in the low oxygen sediments to generate carbonate ions for export.

Bicarbonate is not a chemical.
There is such thing as 'sequestering CO2'.
Seawater is not 'hypersalinity'.
Carbonate is not a chemical.
Sulfate is not a chemical.
Carbon is not organic.

sealover wrote:
I've got a lot of mad scientist schemes for applied biogeochemistry, most of which would cost very little $ to implement.

There is no such thing as 'biogeochemistry.

sealover wrote:
Constructed wetlands have been used for more than 50 years to capture and remediate acid mine drainage. Passing that pH 0-3 acid mine drainage through a constructed wetland transforms it to neutral pH groundwater draining out of the new wetland. A constructed wetland in a coastal desert would have input water that is already at pH >8 and LOADED with sulfate. The submarine groundwater discharge flowing from it would have pH >8 with much higher carbonate ion concentration than sea water.

What 'acid mine drainage'??
You still don't know what pH is.
Sulfate is not a chemical.
Water is scarce in a desert.
Submarines are groundwater.
Carbonate is not a chemical.

sealover wrote:
It's a different kind of "geoengineering"

There is no such thing as 'geoengineering'.

sealover wrote:
Dr. Odum requested the meeting with me because I had been invited to speak at the University of Georgia, and he attended my 45 minute presentation. I used a lot of cartoons to present a very broad hypothesis about chemical ecology, evolutionary biology, the "extended" phenotype of plants as soil engineers, and the adaptive value of polyphenols in plant-litter-soil interactions. It included the fact that natural ecosystems maximize carbon sequestration and minimize emissions of N2O by selecting for plant communities with high polyphenol content on soils with high potential for leaching loss in humid climates.

There is no such thing as 'chemical ecology'.
There is no such thing as 'evolutionary biology'.
Phenotype is not a chemical.
Polyphenol is not a chemical.
There is no such thing as an 'ecosystem'.
There is no such thing as 'carbon sequestration'.
There is no such thing as 'leaching loss'.

sealover wrote:
I wish that he were still alive so I could tell the man who coined the term "ecosystem" that I am FINALLY taking his advice, thirty years later. And I realize that what was so "liberating" about my inability to download any prepared material to this website was that I simply omitted providing citations for my assertions. I was preparing first drafts of chapters for that book Dr. Odum told me to hurry up and write.

There is no such thing as 'ecosystem'.

sealover wrote:
Patricio, if you were serious about your willingness to read such a thing, I think you would make an excellent editor, if not co author. Your writing skills would make me try to lure you into actually being co author and not just editor.

You can't even handle a forum system.
Your numerous buzzwords won't work in a book either.

sealover wrote:


Patricio, if you were serious about your willingness to read such a thing, I think you would make an excellent editor, if not co author. Your writing skills would make me try to lure you into actually being co author and not just editor.

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:


Patricio, if you were serious about your willingness to read such a thing, I think you would make an excellent editor, if not co author. Your writing skills would make me try to lure you into actually being co author and not just editor.

Sealover, I'll get back to you on your other points.

For now, let me say that I'm deeply flattered by the offer. Unfortunately, my health and life circumstances are such that I really cannot commit to an effort of that magnitude. Do write that book, and I'd certainly look forward to reading your manuscript once it's finished.

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:


Patricio, if you were serious about your willingness to read such a thing, I think you would make an excellent editor, if not co author. Your writing skills would make me try to lure you into actually being co author and not just editor.

Sealover, I'll get back to you on your other points.

For now, let me say that I'm deeply flattered by the offer. Unfortunately, my health and life circumstances are such that I really cannot commit to an effort of that magnitude. Do write that book, and I'd certainly look forward to reading your manuscript once it's finished.

Understood, and appreciated.

Honestly, reading your first post, I somehow pictured a young man not yet 30 years old. I imagined an aspiring science writer with a decades-long career path still ahead of him. Someone who could be encouraged to go back to school.

I suspect that the trolls will continue to insist that "there is no such thing as" Patricio as an actual independent human being whom I recently met.

Word games are vehicle for sustaining the "argument" in the climate debate, but mind pHuck games are the more emotionally rewarding activity they engage in.

Pretending that they taught YOU some point they initially denied to be true when you first presented it.

Pretending that YOU asserted something absurdly incorrect that was actually what THEY said.

"Don't try to deny your own posts" as they routinely deny their own, and NEVER provide even one actual example of you having done so.

Pretending that something definitive has happened to prove something which everyone can see.

IBdaMann either doesn't know how to read, or it is strictly mind pHucking when he pretends that I'm not really first author of any significant papers, or that chemistry isn't really something I am acknowledged as ever having mastered.

"There is no such thing.." The ultimate mind pHuck game.

According to the trolls, I was the only one in the conversation who was NOT really a "scientist".

"You deny science", "You don't even know what science is" "You think that.." "You believe.." and it isn't "debate", it's just mind pHucking word games.

And don't even get me started on their calling it "religion" to believe science.

Some people have too much free time on their hands and nothing better to do.

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:


Patricio, if you were serious about your willingness to read such a thing, I think you would make an excellent editor, if not co author. Your writing skills would make me try to lure you into actually being co author and not just editor.

Sealover, I'll get back to you on your other points.

For now, let me say that I'm deeply flattered by the offer. Unfortunately, my health and life circumstances are such that I really cannot commit to an effort of that magnitude. Do write that book, and I'd certainly look forward to reading your manuscript once it's finished.

Understood, and appreciated.

Honestly, reading your first post, I somehow pictured a young man not yet 30 years old. I imagined an aspiring science writer with a decades-long career path still ahead of him. Someone who could be encouraged to go back to school.

I suspect that the trolls will continue to insist that "there is no such thing as" Patricio as an actual independent human being whom I recently met.

Word games are vehicle for sustaining the "argument" in the climate debate, but mind pHuck games are the more emotionally rewarding activity they engage in.

Pretending that they taught YOU some point they initially denied to be true when you first presented it.

Pretending that YOU asserted something absurdly incorrect that was actually what THEY said.

"Don't try to deny your own posts" as they routinely deny their own, and NEVER provide even one actual example of you having done so.

Pretending that something definitive has happened to prove something which everyone can see.

IBdaMann either doesn't know how to read, or it is strictly mind pHucking when he pretends that I'm not really first author of any significant papers, or that chemistry isn't really something I am acknowledged as ever having mastered.

"There is no such thing.." The ultimate mind pHuck game.

According to the trolls, I was the only one in the conversation who was NOT really a "scientist".

"You deny science", "You don't even know what science is" "You think that.." "You believe.." and it isn't "debate", it's just mind pHucking word games.

And don't even get me started on their calling it "religion" to believe science.

Some people have too much free time on their hands and nothing better to do.

There's an old saying going back to BBSes and USENET of the 90s, "Don't Feed The Trolls'. I think I'm ready to head that advice. Trolls have no intention of sincere engagement on any subject, their only thing is trying to get a rise out of folks, and they often succeed, but feeding them only, well, there's a reason parks have a sign 'don't feed the Pidgeons' given than when you do, all you get is more Pidgeon sh*t for the park staff to clean up. It's no different with trolls.

Cheers, Patricio

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:


Patricio, if you were serious about your willingness to read such a thing, I think you would make an excellent editor, if not co author. Your writing skills would make me try to lure you into actually being co author and not just editor.

Sealover, I'll get back to you on your other points.

For now, let me say that I'm deeply flattered by the offer. Unfortunately, my health and life circumstances are such that I really cannot commit to an effort of that magnitude. Do write that book, and I'd certainly look forward to reading your manuscript once it's finished.

Understood, and appreciated.

Honestly, reading your first post, I somehow pictured a young man not yet 30 years old. I imagined an aspiring science writer with a decades-long career path still ahead of him. Someone who could be encouraged to go back to school.

I suspect that the trolls will continue to insist that "there is no such thing as" Patricio as an actual independent human being whom I recently met.

Word games are vehicle for sustaining the "argument" in the climate debate, but mind pHuck games are the more emotionally rewarding activity they engage in.

Pretending that they taught YOU some point they initially denied to be true when you first presented it.

Pretending that YOU asserted something absurdly incorrect that was actually what THEY said.

"Don't try to deny your own posts" as they routinely deny their own, and NEVER provide even one actual example of you having done so.

Pretending that something definitive has happened to prove something which everyone can see.

IBdaMann either doesn't know how to read, or it is strictly mind pHucking when he pretends that I'm not really first author of any significant papers, or that chemistry isn't really something I am acknowledged as ever having mastered.

"There is no such thing.." The ultimate mind pHuck game.

According to the trolls, I was the only one in the conversation who was NOT really a "scientist".

"You deny science", "You don't even know what science is" "You think that.." "You believe.." and it isn't "debate", it's just mind pHucking word games.

And don't even get me started on their calling it "religion" to believe science.

Some people have too much free time on their hands and nothing better to do.

There's an old saying going back to BBSes and USENET of the 90s, "Don't Feed The Trolls'. I think I'm ready to head that advice. Trolls have no intention of sincere engagement on any subject, their only thing is trying to get a rise out of folks, and they often succeed, but feeding them only, well, there's a reason parks have a sign 'don't feed the Pidgeons' given than when you do, all you get is more Pidgeon sh*t for the park staff to clean up. It's no different with trolls.

Cheers, Patricio

And what exactly are the local resident "experts in science" (as IBdaMann referred to them) hoping to accomplish with their debating skills?

The only goal is to be a troll.

Sing it with me!

The only goal is to be a troll
Here in this deep, dark rabbit hole
Exerting firmly their control
Their echo chamber on a roll
They suck the life out of your soul
Your patience pays a heavy toll
Rational reason plays no role
"You NOT engage them.." you've been told...