Sometimes someone brings up an argument in the comment section that’s interesting enough to deserve dissection. Not every argument people bring up against climate change is idiotic, some errors are understandable.
Here is an example:
Flat wrong. Total lie. Plant life thrives up to and beyond 12000ppm, higher than any known previous atmospheric levels. We know this because commercial greenhouses go to the cost of installation and management of risks for systems that boost it this high, to make their crops grow better.
I have some basic sympathy for this error. I wrote that our plant life is adapted to the level of CO2 it experienced during the Holocene. So how is it possible then, that we raise CO2 levels in greenhouses, to benefit from higher yields? Doesn’t that contradict the whole idea of agriculture suffering when CO2 concentrations increase? Can’t we just turn the whole planet into a giant greenhouse and watch our agricultural yields explode?
Well, to understand the error, you have to understand that in a greenhouse, human beings control basically every aspect of the environment. It’s basically the most capital intensive method of food production that we have. This allows plants to grow very rapidly, under conditions of high carbon dioxide. We create the perfect environment to use higher carbon dioxide concentrations to our own advantage. Consider some of the ways in which we intervene for our plants in a greenhouse:
-You regulate the temperatures, to avoid any extremes the plants can’t deal with.
-You protect the plants from harmful UV radiation, with the glass.
-You keep out any nasty insects that might want to eat your plants, through the physical barrier and by spraying pesticides.
-You keep out the weeds that might compete with your plants, through the physical barrier and by spraying pesticides.
You spray a bunch of fungicides so that no fungi threaten the plants in your greenhouse.
-You give the plant every nutrient when it needs, it has constant access to water, nitrogen and anything else it might need.
And so although the plant became more vulnerable, because it is focused on utilizing carbon dioxide to the detriment of everything else, it doesn’t suffer under the vulnerability, as we create the conditions in which it’s not confronted with the kind of threats it’s vulnerable to.
Take a look at how a plant becomes more vulnerable when exposed to higher CO2 concentrations and how you don’t see these circumstances in greenhouse plants.
-Temperature extremes. Plants become more vulnerable to freezing damage under higher CO2 concentrations. The same temperature causes more frost damage under high CO2 conditions as it does under low CO2 conditions. But in your greenhouse, they don’t experience such conditions of course, you make sure they don’t experience any cold.
-UV radiation. Some plants become more vulnerable to UV B radiation induced damage when you raise CO2 concentrations. You don’t notice this in the greenhouse, because it’s blocked by the glass.
-Pest predation. You generally don’t let pests into your greenhouse. That’s a good thing, because with more CO2, your plants generally produce more of the compounds insects like to eat and generally less of the nitrogen based compounds they use to produce alkaloids toxic to insects. Hence we see that insect predation increases. This is seen for tomatoes too, but it’s not a concern in your greenhouse, because you spray pesticides there.
-What about weeds? Well, this one is easy. You can just look at which plants evolved under low CO2 concentrations and which ones under higher CO2 concentrations. Almost all the plants that we use as staple crops are grasses that evolved to specialize in surviving under low CO2 concentrations. Some like Maize show the rare C4 carbon fixation mechanism, that allows them to capture CO2 even when atmospheric concentrations are very low. The advantages they have over weeds disappear as the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increases.
-Fungal predation. I personally think this is the biggest problem you will run into. Stem rust, one of the main pathogens for our wheat, becomes more damaging under higher CO2 concentrations.
-Nutrient availability. In your greenhouse, you tweak the nutrient mixture of your plants to make sure they get whatever they need to grow as fast as possible. But in the real world they run into nutrient limitations as you boost CO2 levels. Low phosphorus availability halves the effect of elevated CO2 on plant growth.
So I think I made my point clear: Elevated CO2 is generally great to boost plant growth in greenhouses, where you can tweak every other variable too, to make sure the plant can use the elevated CO2. It’s not so great in the real world, where your plants have to deal with climatic extremes, competition with insects, competition with other plants and competition for nutrients.
It’s kind of similar to how you could feed a chicken in a farm to become as fat as possible to boost your food production, if you don’t have to worry about the ability of the chickens and the rooster to defend themselves from birds of prey.
When you look at the 20th century, it’s clear that food production has so far benefited a lot from increased carbon dioxide concentrations. This doesn’t necessarily mean it will benefit from further increases in the future however. In addition, the benefits we’ve enjoyed from higher CO2 concentrations so far depend on the other successes we’ve had:
-We control the nutrient input, whatever the plants need is what they get from us.
-We spray a cocktail of pesticides, to make sure no weeds, fungi or insects can mess with our plants.
-We rapidly breed whatever disease-resistant variety we can find and spread it around the world.
-We spray fungicides for all the fungal pathogens.
In other words, whatever damage we have already done to our ability to engage in pre-industrial methods of agriculture, is currently being obscured by the industrial technology we’re using to boost food production!
Greenhouse production of food works great with higher CO2 concentrations, but it’s not very sustainable. Some of the Dutch greenhouses right now are sitting empty, they’re not growing tomatoes because the cost of energy is simply too high. Next year we will start to see the same problem for fertilizer, as the factories that produce it were shut down. Eventually we won’t be able to produce herbicides, pesticides and fungicides anymore either.
And then once you have to produce your food the way a medieval peasant had to produce it, you discover: Nature is not cooperating!
You will find yourself asking questions like:
Why do I have so many insects? Answer: Your winters don’t get cold enough anymore, so they don’t die in droves during winter.
What the fuck is happening to my wheat? Answer: It’s called stemrust, it spreads like wildfire if you don’t have the right resistant breed and pesticides available.
Why is my maize overgrown by weeds? Answer: As an efficient carbon utilizing C4 plant, Maize doesn’t benefit as much from higher CO2 concentrations as the weeds that surround it do.
Agriculture emerged in the Holocene, because the conditions for it were right. Now that the conditions are no longer right for agriculture, it will gradually start to die out again.
Perhaps you should have listened to the autistic (ZOMG!) Swedish girl after all.
Thanks for going to the effort of making a decent response to my comments, I can see you spent some time on it, and I respect that. That’s said:
While you bring up some academically interesting information, it all seems 100%, or very close to, irrelevant biased, handwaving distractions and diversions from what’s actually important, to allow you to maintain your assumed conclusions and avoid acknowledging the fact that plants, in general, very clearly DO prefer somewhat higher, often much higher, CO2 for maximised growth, and are very clearly NOT evolved for our ultra low levels.
Hint, instead of spending so much time and effort finding evasive ways to assume your conclusion, try looking, for instance, at what the average CO2 level was over of the evolutionary life of various trees and plants around today. Same for mammals. Same for humans starting from when we branched from chimps or something like that.
Perhaps post that at the top of your next “higher CO2 is bad” article to remind you of some *relevant context*.
For some more relevant context you’ve missed
– “frost damage”: I thought the earth was warming? Now we are worried about occasional frost damage in some species in some situations..up until their in-built epigenetics kicks in the higher CO2 antifrost adaptions that they *had to have evolved*, if your claimed problem is actually a problem, for those species to exist in this day and age, after an evolutionary history of nearly 100% higher CO2 levels until recently. Perhaps some context like “If CO2 rose to 10 times its current levels, the 0.1% of plants worldwide in vulnerable species and locations will be 20% more likely to suffer some temporary frostbite…more than counteracted by the far larger boost in overall plant life worldwide due to CO2 increases” might have made it more clear to you that you were reaching for excuses to keep pretending higher CO2 is bad…reaching so hard stretch Armstrong would be proud…
Similar context for all the other claims would show the same, unless we are talking extreme CO2 increases and concentrating on vulnerable species in Vulnerable habitats and ignoring all other species, epigenetic switches, and other quick adaptions in the plant genomes back to whatever technique they used to previously handle higher CO2.
Please throw out your emotional attachment to your conclusion, and actually treat this scientifically, by trying to prove your conjecture wrong (easily done), not finding mostly irrelevant but vaguely plausible excuses to keep holding on to it.
From a third party observer, it’s evident to me from noting your language use compared to Radagast’s that you are the one who’s guided more by emotion than by reason. You asked for arguments, Radagast provided them, and rather than reflect for some time on what’s argued, you threw out misunderstanding rebuttals and interject more emotional rhetoric into your comment.
Do you garden? Do you spend time in forests, swamps, valleys, bogs, deserts, riparian zones? Or do you spend time in front of a computer, in a house, with AC, with indoor plumbing, with glass windows, with websites that cater to your dreams?
Radagast isn’t evading your earlier comment about observing how greenhouses create conditions for higher concentrations of CO2 to maximize plant production. Radagast took that position head-on and then showed, with links (did you click any of them? Did you gather together the evidence that forms the context for the entirety of the argument —an activity a reasonable man with respect for conversation engages in?), that the problem with that line of response is that it narrowly focuses the cause for the “benefit” on a particular thing to the exclusion of the other contributing and interrelated factors. A greenhouse is not the world, it is not a “natural” ecosystem nor does it participate in the entirety of the many different interlocking ecosystems at play.
In fact, please note the analogy I’m making here with what Radagast has set up in this post. The same kind of short-sighted narrowed focus about how human technology creates maximizing conditions for human-mediated flourishing that produces a “greenhouse” is also present in thinking that mRNA gene therapies create maximizing conditions for human-mediated immunogenic flourishing. Radagast has been making arguments for some time that this approach completely misunderstands that humans are not simply a particular strand of DNA manifesting in a post-ape creature. Humans, instead, are *symbiotic* beings living in the flow of life with other organisms in interlocking relations that contemporary cultures guided by technocratic values wish to not only sever but destroy. A holobiont is a variety of approaches towards being alive finding common cause in working together. A greenhouse, far outside of the resilience a wild diversity of life sustains, is a fragile, energy-intensive microcosm that requires the extermination of so many different forms of life, following up these ecocides with mitigating technologies —and in the end, the very products resulting from all this technology greatly lack in an abundance of the phytonutrients and beneficial proteins the humans actually need. They, instead, reduce eating to “consumptive accumulation of calories” without regard for what else occurs.
Permaculture techniques within agriculture show much greater awareness of the various strands needed in sustaining and diversifying food webs. By encouraging the insects, the nematodes, the fungi, the bacteria, the isopods, the worms, &c &c, the permaculture farmer not only creates resilience in their crops but greater amounts of life-enhancing nutrients, overtime reducing their pollution, their harms, their labor costs, their struggle against the inevitable death we all must embrace as indispensable for life.
But, again, if you are not aware of how your emotionally grounded, ego-centric criticisms are unwittingly participating in the same kind of overall detrimental approach humans shooting up the masses with black magic genetics participate in, then you need to step far away from the magical box facilitating your participation in what was meant to be a conversation and get your hands into the dirt, the soil, the earth. You need to spend time with the creeping things, because they are truly the meek who shall inherit (what’s left of) the earth. The sterility within one’s mind is inversely proportional to the dark soil underneath one’s fingernails.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
It’s a mind-blowing experience, to notice that someone actually comprehends what I spend my time trying to convey to people.
Most of the time people just seem to read my blog to confirm what they already wish to believe. Then when they notice me explain the problems associated with rapidly changing our atmosphere, they get very upset.
I’m a country boy, spend my time in nature, not that it is at all relevant (ad him), and I have every right to call out abusive manipulative language, and insidious fallacious arguments with vehement passionate language, when the recipient refuses to stop being disrespectful and disingenuous.
Radagast has spent article after article mocking, belittling, strawmanning and gaslighting those of us who BOTHER to look at the basic underlying science that proves the GW claims absurdly unbelievably wrong, while throwing out endless distracting but irrelevant information, minor details that do not alter the underlying facts, all with another layer of mocking and gaslighting, to avoid going back to the very basics you HAVE to look at to scientifically address the GW claims:
-Is CO2 historically high, as claimed, due to humans? No, it is nearly extinction level event LOW, lowest in recorded geological history other than the most recent eyeblink of time
-Are sea levels rising more since industrialisation? No, they rose 100m very swiftly after the ice age 10kya, and have risen steadily since, at rates larger than today.
-Do plants and animals have a hard time with realistic levels CO2 might reach before oil and coal become scarce (say 1000 to 1500ppm, pulling some numbers out my ass)? No, plants and animals evolved in higher levels than that, for almost their entire evolutionary history, so MUST generally have adaptions to handle it, whether they take a little while to kick in or not, and most plants in particular LOVE higher CO2
-Are temperatures worldwide doing anything out of the ordinary in terms of rising? Absolutely not, they are astoundingly stable and mild, when looked at in comparison to relevant geological timeframes, with modern swings so small and minute as to be entirely lost and invisible in the sea of noise from undoubtedly natural variation, due to solar/other natural factors.
-Is the claim of CO2 as a greenhouse gas even scientifically reasonable as a major temperature changing factor? No, it is extremely dubious, since CO2 heating effects are well and truly saturated long before the 400ppm we are at, and we are discussing a 0.02% change in atmospheric makeup, replacing a tiny part of a gas mix that is already greenhouse causing with agas that is a tiny bit more greenhouse causing, meaning a far far less than 0.02% change in energy input, as compared to the DIRECT solar radiance variation of up to a full 1%, more than enough to directly account for the majority of (often mostly fraudulent) measured modern changes.
The ENTIRE basis of the GW scam is nonsense, yet radagast, who is quite clearly able and willing to think clearly, intelligently, insightfully, and outside any mainstream boxes on multiple issues relating to covid, vaccines, and various other topics (which is why I come here), seems totally blinded and unable to take of the blinkers to even look at the most basic foundations needed to scientifically answer the questions, instead rearranging the flowers in the vase in the tower in his collapsing castle made on sand.
Actually, it is relevant how one lives with nature, because the conversation —and that is what you want, isn’t it? to share in a fruitful conversation of mutual respect?— turns on what we think nature *is* and who *we are* within it. Are we above or below it? Are we alongside it, among it, or apart from it, beyond it? Here in the American South, I know plenty of country boys. Not all of them respect their place as natural beings, and not all of them know how appreciate the nature they take as outlet for their play, a distraction from the demands human economy and society places upon them, a parkland for both entertainment and development of resources. It isn’t “ad hominem” to question someone about how they interact with plants —are the plants alone? do they live without others? are they dependent and create dependencies in others?— when they are the ones making particular claims about what greenhouses demonstrate regarding the life of the world.
Sure, you are absolutely right to call out abusive or manipulative language in others. Sometimes it’s probably even very right to challenge the host who invites your discussion, without even wiping off one’s feet or taking off one’s shoes after entering, when the host is belittling, gaslighting, abusing. On that note, maybe you’re right that Radagast writes things in a way that make people who disagree with him feel belittled, gaslit, abused. Do you have an example of this, and can you identify how you understood that example to do this to you? A specific example with your specific reaction, how you took that kind of comment to be specific to *you*. But if you are speaking in generalities, and you are not saying that you felt gaslit, manipulated, abused but you can see how others would be, what motivates you to be the voice for those others?
Maybe none of that is important. Maybe it’s not important to stand by one’s claims and support them. Maybe it’s not important to model in one’s approach to conversation how to be respectful and challenging without gaslighting, manipulating, abusing others. Maybe, when you were criticizing Radagast for being emotional, you didn’t think you needed to control and discipline your own emotions —leave the purely logical approach to the Spockist kind of autists, and us country boys who get muddy and tick-bitten and climb chestnut trees will feel free to express ourselves however the fuck we want, right? Or maybe it is important to have a conversation, and maybe it is crucial to be in and through yourself what you want others to be with you.
That is to say, if you do not recognize there are large numbers of people who “deny climate change” who behave rudely, crudely, in stunning conformity with others whom they mimic even in the use of formulaic dismissive response, who do not present arguments or engage in conversation but use occasions to rehearse themselves in a mirror, then you’re not paying attention from a more aware perspective. The joke in the picture of all the folks with sunglasses is that these are people who likely call out liberals, leftists, antifa, wokeists as NPCs or “mass formation psychosis” or whatever else makes them chuckle and feel superior. Groupthink is not something restricted to people who support the dominant regime, because it is lonely and hard to be critical of any social movement seeking to sweep us up in righteous cause.
But really, I know I don’t have to tell you that. You are smart all on your own. But when you say “those of us who BOTHER to look at the basic underlying science” it signals something important. Namely, you place a lot of value on *your* ability to understand that science, and you place a lot of value in the research that took you away from the nature that makes you still a boy —in that anyone who has ardently and authentically lost themselves in the woods, in the desert, in the ocean, in the swamps, will come to understand how very *young* and *small* and *brutally helpless* they are amongst its Age, its Vastness, and its Indifference. All-capping ‘bother’ in that phrasing, combining it with your own formation of question-answer/call-response conversation as a revelation of scientific inference from observation, shows that this was more than simply the accumulation of knowledge but an act of will. If you are wrong about this, then you have not just gathered together wrong facts, but you have made a wrong and unsettling choice . . . —unless you are also someone who understands that learning is also overcoming the human tendency to think all the answers are all there is.
Are you familiar with Col. John Boyd? If not, I suggest you should start the process of familiarizing yourself with him. Clearly, from my diction and tendency to be verbose, I spent a lot of time in dusty libraries doing academic research that didn’t change much in the world (except motivated a good number of students to become exceptionally themselves, my only pride). But the one man who was able to take all that I had learned and condensed it for me in a quite comprehensive and immediate way was Boyd, and what a Great American Hero he is. At any rate, one thing I think folks should take away from Boyd is in understanding that you will never —never— have all of the answers, you will never have a Total and Complete theory for the reality around you, you will never reach the point where there are no more questions that change who and what you are within the world. Once you feel that you figured it all out, the inward turn towards mopping up the straggling and loose ends inevitably produces chaos, disorder, and disintegration —so either a person learns to lie about the paradoxes and inconsistencies (resulting in insufficient appraisal of one’s situation, thwarting both the observation and orientation phases of the oodaloop) or they learn to start stepping outwards past their comfort zones to see if they can “get” what they’re missing and why.
For example, you point out —and, take note, if you’re *actually* worried about who’s gaslighting whom— that Radagast is “quite clearly able and willing to think clearly, intelligently, insightfully, and outside any mainstream boxes on multiple issues” but on this topic —just this topic?— now “seems totally blinded and unable to take [off] the blinkers to even look at the most basic foundations needed to scientifically answer the questions.” Look at your language, here. First, the verb here is ‘seems’. That is not stating a reality; it is not stating an actual state of affairs. It is stating how something appears to you. But you do not post the specific statements, you do not highlight how it appears to you in a particular way. So, to avoid that, you next use the adverb ‘totally’ to describe a blindness and an inability. You excuse your lack of presentation of evidence by saying that it is a *totality* of appearances for you. Everywhere you look, all the observations you have, show this one thing: the guy’s blind and incapable. Incapable of what? Incapable of removing what you call ‘blinkers’ (probably not turn signals, but maybe the things they put on horses so that they won’t look aside and become distracted?), the things that have something to do with Radagast not looking at “the most basic foundations” for generating scientific answers.
Yet Radagast posted links to articles publicly available. Radagast adduces them towards making a case for his argument. This is how people engage in conversation, by providing context and further background for their claims about the larger world. They go beyond themselves to offer support, and they cite them so that others can see that support and evaluate it, criticize it, and respond in an engaging way.
You haven’t demonstrated that you’ve done that. You haven’t shown any citations for your claims or links for your background. You make claims, but then leave them there, without root, without soil, without rhizome, without groundwater, but have the audacity —and yet the contemporaneous Spirit so endemic to the Hararis and Schwabs and Gateses of the world who pave over the earth to build edifices and institutions and buildings— to talk about *foundations* and *bases*.
You don’t get it, yet? You don’t see yourself, do you? Lacking even this much awareness of what you are doing, why should anyone listen further to you, when the amount of time and effort and attention they have given to you already, to help you see where the man is coming from by showing you the ecosystem of his thinking and its correspondence to the things you *claim* are smart and likeable and approvable, is already for **nothing** since you do not even engage with those points but declare them irrelevant because they do not match you on the small playing field, the tiny green house of an idea, where you believe you’ve already scored a win?
You trod on the man’s flowers and stomp on his worms to beat your way to a point you think we didn’t hear the first time. And then you say afterwards that he’s intelligent and smart and insightful —except on this one thing where you disagree with him, and then he is *totally* wrong and *totally* blinded, because that is how he **seems** to you.
You say he’s gaslighting. I suggest you take the time, find the black and white movie, fall in love with Ingrid Berman as any virile man ought, and watch the movie all the way to the end. You will understand what it means to gaslight. You are not using this word correctly.
Personally, I don’t focus on carbon dioxide as indicative of human disruption of the planet, so it’s not like I fully agree with Radagast on this anyway.
But I recognize his frustration and his refusal to indulge in appeasing the emotional fragility of men who ought to know better about engaging in online comments. You can always just walk away. You can always just learn to laugh at yourself. You can always just open up and be patient.
You can always just ask questions like Socrates.
Wow, that is a very long winded, and superficially polite seeming way to say fuck you…I usually prefer, like most of nature, to make my “fuck you”s more immediate. The growl of a dog when you are overstepping your bounds, though I guess I can be long winded too: Someone tries writing yet another sarcastic article mockingly going on and on about “smart”, while referring to me and others on this blog, who disagree with his claims, whilst showing pictures of a *hand selected* matching demographic group in glasses, pretending the selection bias of the observer, in only choosing those easy targets, is what is causing the output homogeneity…and doubles down by addressing an entire post at me, without actually addressing the actual core issues I raised, I growl pretty fucking loudly.
You claim your question is not an ad hom, but it quite simply is:
We are discussing GW. Instead of the scientific facts, I now have to waste time explaining that I grew up in a forest, while visiting cities too, studying nature, science and anything and everything else that curiosity drew me to, which is just not relevant, and makes these replies much longer. The fact that the BASIC CORE science does not support radagasts claims, is (relevant).
Before you try to judge my character by my reactionary tone to being mocked, make a fucking counter argument to my position that makes sense, because you/radagast are standing on my toes, probably unknowingly, while claiming it’s ok to do so, so damn straight I will growl, so as to avoid having to *bite*.
GW is a scam, brought by the same ancient child raping pedo cult that brought us nearly every modern war, destructive social movement, poverty inducing political/financial structure, nature and human health destroying chemical, technological, medical, agricultural etc “advance”/disaster for centuries (including both the lab made covid and the deliberately sterilising and deadly “vaccine” gene therapies), all to known leaked plans of domination and control, and forced them upon us, often by hiding the versions of those things/technologies/social changes that were not harmful/so harmful and limiting us to versions that are.
It is currently the key part of the scam allowing the impoverishment and soon to be death of people all over the western world, issues radagast is passionate about.
I’m a strong believer that truth is far more important, and loving, than politeness, and one truth I am quite convinced of is that supposed politeness is often a *weapon* used to silence truth, usually by those in the politically correct, dominant, usually deadly/harmful stance against those they are knowingly or unknowingly crushing, and it actually harms both parties. “Oh, you are being forcefully and violently aggressed by virtue signalling fucks, and the armed pedorapist governments behind them, who are destroying the entire world because they won’t look at a basic fucking graph…and you aren’t perfectly, *serenely* calm about it? Opinions and arguments discarded..”.
It’s nonsense. We are adults. We can have a fiery discussion, as long as we genuinely constantly aim to come back to the actual scientific meat of it, and reach mutual understanding, and any disrespect is simply reflected noose. Radagast can passive aggressively mock me and others here (it is his blog after all), because his exposure to those aware of the lack of evidence for GW has left him with the strange impression that we all wear sunglasses and have short hair (nope and nope), and his emotional drive to help the environment has left him with half truths that leave him thinking only uninformed people could hold that position, and I can attempt to engage politely, then get ever more fiery and firm, as I respond (this has been a long running attempt to reach him/discussion/interaction, you are only seeing the end), because I don’t enjoy being belittled, this is an important discussion, in a way, and I give what I get, as a matter of principle: someone has the respect to debate in A TRULY respectful way, I will do same. Someone pulls out a bunch of disingenuous and disrespectful crap, I will return the favor in tone, though make sure I start by addressing the actual issues. Don’t like it? Don’t give it. It’s a lesson. Pay attention.
Next, I said “seems” because I am trying to understand his behaviors, from the limited information I have through his words on the blog, and am self aware of my projections upon him enough to at least try to state them accurately as such, not proclamations of absolute truth. I actually have a lot of respect for him in general, and a lot of exposure to blindness/ cognitive-dissonance in people I am or were friends with, that I consider intelligent, and the frustration in dealing with it is a challenge. This includes in my former self, on the many topics I have since realised I had been brainwashed and misled on… including this very topic.
Now, if you want to get into more specifics, as you request, and stop fluffing around with all this crap, I am quite happy to, but you will have to ask some get specific questions and keep it short, so I can respond in kind.
Why did I say gaslighting and strawmaning, for example? Because we are discussing GW, and CO2, and instead of directly addressing my point, that plants *evolved in and thrive in higher CO2*, and that humans also evolved in higher CO2, radagast wrote entire articles avoiding truly acknowledging that core truth, disingenuously mocking “dinosaur atmosphere lovers” (ignoring that higher CO2 was around long after them and all through mammalian and human evolution), and finding irrelevant, minor issues that some plants purportedly have with higher CO2, all while continuing using a mocking sarcastic tone that implies I/we are the uninformed ones.
Gaslighting, because he is either deliberately or subconsciously avoiding the actual issues while pretending it is us that are doing so, and strawmanning because the discussion is not about whether one particular strain of one particular plant in one particular location in one particular study had some minor issue with much higher CO2. The discussion is about whether plants (and animals) on GENERAL are better off at the 400ppm we are at now than the 200 we were approaching, and at the say 1000ppm we might return to at some point, or, as radagast claims, if they will be so massively harmed that food crops *in general*, not in isolation, will be disastrously and unsolvably destroyed, an absurd seeming claim, that he has not even begun to back up properly.
Why do I use the word seeming there? Because, as you mention, none of us know everything, and perhaps radagast is hiding his trump card: some actual *astoundingly solid* evidence that despite evolving in, and generally seeming to thrive in higher CO2, at the moment (with some very minor issues); all edible plants, not just our temporary current staples, will suddenly drop dead the minute we cross, say, 800ppm in uncontrolled or agriculturally relevant environments…or something like that
Who knows.
>GW is a scam, brought by the same ancient child raping pedo cult that brought us nearly every modern war, destructive social movement, poverty inducing political/financial structure, nature and human health destroying chemical, technological, medical, agricultural etc “advance”/disaster for centuries
When you have such an alternate view of reality, in which the whole world is governed by an ancient cult, then I don’t think there’s anything I can say that will change your mind.
Re “I think folks should take away from Boyd is in understanding that you will never —never— have all of the answers, you will never have a Total and Complete theory for the reality around you, you will never reach the point where there are no more questions that change who and what you are within the world”
Do you think the theory of The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room (see https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) comes close, or closest, to that objective?
B, if you felt that my comment was saying “Fuck you,” please understand that I reserve my Fuck Yous for people who harm me personally, my friends, or my loved ones, or the enemies I respect. Your words posted on the Internet do not harm me. And since I, an adult, am responsible for my own emotional responses, I don’t allow my ego to suffer harm from what others post. I work to remind my ego that it’s not who and what I am. As a long-time admirer of John Stuart Mill, I agree with his stance in On Liberty and encouraged many of my students to work through what he’s saying about the value of free and open discussion towards the empowering and strengthening of one’s own thoughts and ideas and actions. You are free to write how and what you like, to converse and share your ideas, and it is my responsibility to figure out how those affect me. If I were to choose to be insulted, harmed, threatened, then I also have to choose what then to do with those emotional responses. In my case, I’ll just walk away. I have more distracting things in my life to soothe my hurt feelings than to escalate towards telling someone to fuck off because of words transmitted to me on a website I’m choosing to view. Do you think you are not responsible for your own emotional responses? Do you need trigger warnings as the kids these days do?
Did someone actually step on your physical person, or is it just how that feels when you read things?
See, I notice that you twice mention emotional attachment regarding Radagast:
“Unfortunately, you have such an emotional attachment to this topic it has shut down your ability to think and have an actual discussion of the facts” —here, you make a claim about his reality.
“Please throw out your emotional attachment to your conclusion, and actually treat this scientifically…” —here, you issue an imperative about what to do with his emotions.
Maybe you have already forgotten what I initially said when I responded to your post. If so, you can scroll back and read it for yourself. Take a look at your own responses, and develop an alternative perspective on your contributions:
“Flat wrong. Total lie.”
—you said this in response to (your editing of) Radagast’s statement that “we are adapted for lower CO2…as is all plant and animal life.” If it is “flat wrong,” then how are there plants now? If this is a “total lie,” then do we see animals alive today or not? If you disagree so strenuously with the claim that life now is adapted to the conditions now, is it the case that you agree now that life is dying, dead, extinct? It’s a total lie, you’re saying, that life now is adapted to the conditions now. So the excluded truth from that claim must be . . . what? That everything now alive is actually now dead?
“Stop doubling down on your stupidity”
—is this abusive language? Is this growling, or is it directly an insult? You insult Radagast’s character by calling him a liar —someone who tells lies is a liar, right?— and you also insult him by calling him stupid. But you also say that you want to have a scientific discussion and people need to cut out with insulting people.
“Your entire post is based flat lies and unbacked dubious claims”
—all of it? Is it actually true and accurate to say the entire post is “based flat lies” (did you mean ‘biased’ [you’ve used that word in your comments] or did you mean ‘based on’ [which makes sense in the context]?) and “unbacked dubious claims”? Are the claims actually without backing? I see and have pointed out that Radagast links to other articles and references to support the claims he made, and in that post where you posted this comment I do see linked supports and graphical backing, so why do you assert falsely that the claims are unbacked? “Dubious” is probably accurate since you and others find the claims doubtful, but then this is also accurate about your own claims, too, if you are making “scientific” claims. There’s lots of room for doubt in scientific claims, because having doubts is part of what makes the defeasible reasoning process within the scientific method function —the other part being acting upon those doubts, which you allude to when you suggest Radagast needs to also work to prove himself wrong and when you describe your own intellectual journey of correcting your self.
“Secondly, all your “on a plane, heading to the ground, boohoo” change is deadly nonsense [sic] is egoic bullshit that is entirely ignorant of Earth climatic history”
— is “deadly nonsense” a scientifically verifiable claim capable of being proven wrong? is calling his analogy “egoic bullshit” abusive language, or even an accurate or precise description of how his analogy functions? and how does one even show that Radagast is “entirely ignorant of Earth climatic history” when Radagast is agreeing that there were higher concentrations of CO2 in previous epochs, hence the epithet “Dinosaur Atmosphere Enthusiast”?
“So massively that the “warming” you nutballs talk about is NOT VIAIBLE[sic] on graphs of temperature with scientifically relevant timescales”
—is calling him a ‘nutball’ abusive? is it itself a scientifically accurate description in a scientific conversation?
And while you take the time to tell others that they are not paying sufficient attention to your argument’s claims, you demonstrate that you are not immune to this here:
“While you bring up some academically interesting information, it all seems 100%, or very close to, irrelevant biased, handwaving distractions and diversions from what’s actually important, to allow you to maintain your assumed conclusions and avoid acknowledging the fact that plants, in general, very clearly DO prefer somewhat higher, often much higher, CO2 for maximised growth, and are very clearly NOT evolved for our ultra low levels.”
Rather than work through the argument Radagast makes, you declare it 100% irrelevant, biased, handwaving, distraction, diversion. You ignore how his argument works. You ignore what he is adducing and his reasoning, because, as you state it there, you want to talk about the one thing you think is “actually important.” Is he ignoring this point, though?
If you continue to maintain that he is ignoring your point, I guess you may have missed this
exchange from earlier:
“>Higher CO2 is almost certainly BETTER for life on Earth
“Yeah I actually have to agree with you here. The main problem is how to arrive at those higher CO2 concentrations without blowing everything up on the way there. That means a very slow and gradual increase of CO2, not the rapid increase we see today. But even so, you’re still trying to answer the wrong question.”
Do you see what I see? His words, those words, agreeing with what you wrote; it’s a place where you and he can meet, a start where both of you agree.
Perhaps you did miss that opportunity to start a conversation with someone who agrees with you.
So, I wasn’t saying “Fuck you” at all. My point was and has been and will continue to be that you are acting inconsistently with the moral standard you demand Radagast maintain for you, that your commenting behavior is stereotypical with what I’ve observed among people who are insecure with their intellectual capacity, and demonstrative of a lack of emotional discipline. You pretend you’re guided by Nous in this, but it’s evident you’re driven by Thymos. You want to have a scientific discussion, but you’re not participating in it as such. That you find it useful for us to think of you as an angry dog, a beast humans need to train and domesticate to harness their utility , is quite appropriate and self-chosen.
So it’s not solely about being impolite —though, politeness and respect, from the Southern culture I’m familiar with, go hand-in-hand— but it’s about how you do not measure your own standard against yourself. You do not love others the way you wish to be loved —or, is this is how you think conversations among lovers work, where your masochistic desire to be insulted finds agreement in the sadistic insults you find Radagast landing on you?
Or maybe it’s like that scene in They Live, where Nada has to beat up Frank to get him to wear the sunglasses, and you want Radagast to wear the sunglasses! “Put ’em on!” When he does, he won’t be the first sonuvabitch to wake up out of their dream.
But, if you are not wearing sunglasses and not like the other selfie-taking white people, if you do not find yourself reflected in or identify with the image presented of his detractors, then why do you feel insulted as though you are?
As I suggested before, it’s likely because you do not want to be categorized, mixed-in, lumped-with those whom you also find beneath you, but rather want to be treated as the very intelligent person you’ve told us that you are. You are beyond the Mensa requirements, you say, and took nearly a decade of schooling, and clearly take pride in your capacity to be outside the norm, since you also value that in others and make it a point to praise Radagast the same way. You and Gene B, who mirrors your writing and rhetorical style, both agree on that.
So when you open up and relate that you were brainwashed, we get a better insight into where you’re coming from. That humanzing allows us to better understand the person youare. You were duped and fooled, and it took a patient and aware professor to open you up to a reality that you now want others to share. So the thing is, it isn’t a waste of time to talk about your life, how you became different and adjusted your life experiences towards a renewed understanding. We can see that this is actually not just a scientific discussion. It is also an evangelical mission to rescue someone from supporting and maintaining a religious cult that seeks to destroy our lives for their own selfish gains, the ones who dangle an efficient and technologically superior civilization before us as a valuable prize while they thwart our overall human capacity to flourish with even better technology, even better ways to sustain our maximal growth. We might even be more free.
I said before, how one approaches and appreciates nature forms the background for what they say about it. Radagast hasn’t ignored your point. Radagast took up the particular claim you made about how plants love carbon dioxide as demonstrated by the commercial farming industry managing their risks, and set out to show that this narrow focus on what happens in a greenhouse obscures what happens as those plants grow with all that food. Here’s another analogy: what happens when you feed humans lots of food? They also grow, bigger and wider and taller. In fact, give them lots and lots of food and they get very large. You’ve seen this, right? It’s really good for people to get so much food we maximize their growth, and they LOVE and CRAVE food, don’t they?
But what also happens? All that additional mass becomes a breeding ground for a variety of other organisms, because humans are food for them too. Candida, bacteria, molds —it’s not difficult to find papers showing that viruses, including our new guest SARS-CoV-2, abound in the ample amounts of adipose found among the obese. If you feed plants to maximize their growth, you have also now created much more food for what predates on plants. Hence, this is why Radagast talked about the insects, the stemrust, the fungi: there are additional knock on effects that will follow. The greenhouse mitigates those by, as you said, managing those risks through a system, and Radagast goes through and talks about how each of those managements work: you block specific UV wavelengths, you apply pesticides to kill predators and competition, you control the temperature of the environment, &c &c. Outside of the greenhouse, the plants growing in abundance won’t have those risk management strategies.
For examples, what is your response to his point about the levels of phosphorous as they relate to elevated carbon dioxide levels? What about his point about plant production of alkaloids to defend against the insects during rapid elevation of carbon dioxide? The closest you come to addressing these points is to say that plants will respond by reasserting through epigenetic action those strategies they’ve previously employed —but where’s your own link for elucidating this? Where’s your citation to help support this claim of yours? Do people engaged in scientific discussions provide contextual background for their claims by citing previous studies, research, findings? If you did that research, because you bothered to do so, you can also link to that research that convinced you. It should still be there if it hasn’t yet been suppressed —like the technologies you say have been, which you could also link to as indicative of what people are up against.
So, I’ve found that people who engage in commercial farming on the majority do not appreciate how diversity in nature produces resilience. People who treat ecosystems as resources or parkland amusement do not discover how the interrelationships among species produce stability and endurance and adaptation. If you are informed —not through textbooks nor through academia, but through the lived, spiritual immersion in the transformation of all things into one another— then you will have that kind of background allowing you to appreciate where Radagast’s argument takes one. As I said earlier, Radagast is trying to show more and more of the Bigger Picture he sees as it relates to what happens when carbon dioxide increases —by also showing how that particular increase relates to all the other systemic changes that arise under the conditions and human strategies for this increase. These aren’t irrelevant or distractions. They are interconnected pieces.
When Arvind Damaria writes that we will have increased “BIOMASS” and a “cornucopia of plenty”, I go back to what Radagast is saying again: all the things that we eat are themselves food for things competing with us for that food, and if our only succesful strategy so far against them depends on petroleum, industrial toxins, and ecocide, then we are going to lose that competition (think also of Volterra’s paradox) and our civilization as it stands is going to collapse —as have all the other civilizations in the past and throughout the universe. After all, a civilization is itself an organism with a life cycle, and the human species has its lifecycle, too. Supercharging its growth has had other effects on its capacity to endure beyond maximizing its growth, and we are not even yet really talking about the spiritual aspects of what evolving life entails.
As I said, I don’t have an ideological commitment to the viewpoint that carbon dioxide increase is what’s wrong with the human destruction of the environment. You and I actually agree much more when it comes to all the particular harms obscured by this emphasis on carbon dioxide: we both agree that we need to talk about plastics and nanoparticles, we need to talk about endocrine disruption, we need to talk about the waste products of industrial manufacturing that were not in our environments ever before, and so on. It is likely not apparent to you, but I’ve paid attention to the arguments of “Dinosaur Atmosphere Enthusiasts” before on other websites (such as theautomaticearth, where they are the ones providing the patient and insightful and even humorous responses, and those who focus on carbon dioxide the shrill and emotionally driven and insulting responses) and found them persuasive. I don’t think any discussion of human effects on global ecosystems that excludes discussion of geoengineering and contemporary (or ancient!) technologies for weaponizing weather gets far towards conceiving just how much humans cause changes in climate, and minimizing these effects by saying that humans can never have as much influence as the Sun does (which is true, but then Lucifer also tells truths) is part of the occulting strategies needed to maintain this full spectrum dominance over yet another part of the human terrain.
So in conclusion you’re wrong that Radagast has been evading your point. You’re wrong that he’s ignoring it. As I showed above, he agrees with you: life has and does proliferate. But the question you haven’t addressed —and note that Radagast has consistently pointed to this, talked about it, and even made it clear in the comment I linked to— is whether that proliferation of life is going to be beneficial to the humans who will follow us. As he points out, if it is correct that petroleum is reaching or already has reached the point where the energy to extract it becomes prohibitive, we are not going to have the technologies, energy levels, and capital systems necessary to continue making as much food from the plants we currently select to feed us. We won’t have the fuel to carry them through market systems, the industrial base to refine them or prepare them for distribution, the fertilizers to maximize their production or the pesticides to manage the risks, certainly not at the scales we need. Not without traveling down the Harari —or Satanic/Ahrimanic pedophilic cult?— route of gene driving the entire ecosystem for human benefit alone. As he points out, the Dutch farming system that has worked so well now for political and economic reasons stalls. But rather than address his fact on this matter, you want to emphasize a point about carbon dioxide having been in abundance throughout the periods of evolution leading to our time previously, saying if we allowed the increases to occur, it won’t be as catastrophic for life in general: and he agrees with you here, but then asks: yet what will happen with our species?
Your answer to this question hasn’t appeared yet, but we get an inkling in your appeal to suppressed tech.
Thank you and others for taking the time to engage in an asynchronous conversation where we can take as much time as we need to respect one another, engage with one another, learn from one another, and share with one another in the redemption of the time that remains.
Radagast makes a good point about the importance of Phosphorus in the processing of CO2.
Given the importance of Phosphorus in metabolism. It isn’t surprising.
I come here to read your comments, the vast majority of which are excellent. Keep it up. You will never win but at least you fight the fight.
You must not be a very serious person. You missed the ENTIRE point of B’s prior post. Radagast claimed plants were adapted to low CO2, B claimed this was objectively false based on current greenhouses, Radagast essentially replied with a non-sequitur discussing random factoids regarding CO2 and plants under particular conditions, not addressing that his core point in the prior post – plants are not well-adapted to high CO2 was absolutely false.
Your follow on post below is a small novel, and is again full of numerous distractions and non-sequiturs (because you have no point to make here, and you are wrong).
Here are things Radagast wrote:
“This allows plants to grow very rapidly, under conditions of high carbon dioxide. We create the perfect environment to use higher carbon dioxide concentrations to our own advantage.”
—does this support your contention that Radagast said “plants are not well-adapted to high CO2”? how so, if so?
“So I think I made my point clear: Elevated CO2 is generally great to boost plant growth in greenhouses, where you can tweak every other variable too, to make sure the plant can use the elevated CO2. It’s not so great in the real world, where your plants have to deal with climatic extremes, competition with insects, competition with other plants and competition for nutrients.”
—does this support your claim that Radagast said “plants are not well-adapted to high CO2”? how so, if so?
“When you look at the 20th century, it’s clear that food production has so far benefited a lot from increased carbon dioxide concentrations.”
—does this support your contention that Radagast said “plants are not well-adapted to high CO2”? how so, if so?
“Agriculture emerged in the Holocene, because the conditions for it were right. Now that the conditions are no longer right for agriculture, it will gradually start to die out again.”
—does this support your contention that Radagast said “plants are not well-adapted to high CO2”? how so, if so?
“>Higher CO2 is almost certainly BETTER for life on Earth
Yeah I actually have to agree with you here. The main problem is how to arrive at those higher CO2 concentrations without blowing everything up on the way there. That means a very slow and gradual increase of CO2, not the rapid increase we see today.”
—does this support your contention that Radagast said “plants are not well-adapted to high CO2”? how so, if so?
What specific words and phrases lead you to contend that Radagast said that “plants are not well-adapted to high CO2”?
>try looking, for instance, at what the average CO2 level was over of the evolutionary life of various trees and plants around today.
We’re not interested in most plants.
We’re interested in:
-The plants that make up our staple crops.
Those are almost all cereal grains, which are plants that evolved in response to low CO2 concentrations.
Yes, the redwood trees and plenty of other plants enjoy higher CO2 concentrations, but are you going to eat a redwood tree? No, you’re not.
>frost damage”: I thought the earth was warming? Now we are worried about occasional frost damage in some species in some situations..up until their in-built epigenetics kicks in the higher CO2 antifrost adaptions that they *had to have evolved*,
We get episodes of unseasonal cold in places affected by destabilization of the jet streams, which allows arctic freezing temperatures to move into Europe in spring, when plants have already begun to grow leaves again.
>Similar context for all the other claims would show the same
Ok. I’ll be waiting for the evidence.
Any moment now…
We ARE interested in plants, because YOU made the false claim they were all adapted to low CO2 (stop dodging and man up to your errors fully), and by implication, that higher CO2 will be GENERALLY and UNAVOIDABLY bad for the ENTIRETY of human food production, a VERY dubious claim since higher CO2 has already led to a greening of the earth, and, as to your disingenuous misdirection towards supposedly non replaceable “Staples”: Cereals are absurdly unhealthy for humans (not that they have any issue with CO2 levels far higher than now, show me one decent study showing that CO2 of say 1000ppm will actually widely *kill* or greatly damage wheat, corn, rice, beans etc, rather than temporarily slightly hamper growth in some conditions), humans have CONSTANTLY adjusted what crops they consider Staples for all of human history, and there exist MANY Staples, most of which enjoy higher CO2, and, more importantly, since CO2 varies from 200ppm to 8000ppm ON IT’S OWN, the onus is on you to prove your implied assumptions that CO2, which has varied by itself for all of known history, is going to magically stay where it is, if we suddenly stop burning fossil fuels etc, and that this is somehow a good thing worth billions dying for (which they will if GW greenies continue to get their way)
I’ll give you another one: Methane. Please do show how the BILLION buffalo that used to roam the prairie put out significantly less methane than the cattle industry, and if by chance you find they did due to diet (eg, not being grain fed) then please explain why the solution to not to just stop feeding cattle grain (that makes them sick and makes their meat quite unhealthy anyway) and go back to grass fed livestock, as we should anyway?
“we aren’t going to eat a redwood tree”
Disingenuous nonsense. We both know full well that the MAJORITY of plants enjoy the higher CO2, so picking one particular tree specifically because it isn’t generally a food crop, and deliberately ignoring the majority of plants, many of which ARE food crops or potentially so, is deliberately fraudulent, I struggle to believe you could have accidentally made such a misleading choice of example.
“I’ll be waiting for evidence”
You are the one claiming higher CO2, which we KNOW is already causing plants *in general* to grow more worldwide, and is industrially used SPECIFICALLY to make plant crops grow better, is somehow going to be *generally and overall bad for food crops*. This is an absurd and outlandish claim, which you have tried to back with absurdly narrow and limited cases of negatives associated with higher CO2, while disingenuously and ridiculously ignoring the many and widespread advantages of it.
You make the ridiculous claim, you find the proof. Not isolated cases of minor issues. Proof that the GENERAL, PROVEN SITUATION that higher cO2 is benefitting plants, will somehow turn out to be ONLY beneficial to non food plants, and that the damage to food plants ACROSS THE BOARD will be significant enough to warrant concern
Brawndo is a metaphor for nitrogen fertilizer. “Natural gas, the cold mutilator. It’s got what plants crave!”
https://cyberthal.substack.com/p/brawndo-is-a-metaphor-for-nitrogen
“You will find yourself asking questions like:
Why do I have so many insects? Answer: Your winters don’t get cold enough anymore, so they don’t die in droves during winter.”
Ducks will solve a lot of those problems at least:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ehoxu9QY8
You raise valid points, but they don’t justify your very strong conclusion.
Plants – including edible plants – clearly can survive at any plausible CO2 level. Whether our current crops can be rapidly repurposed for such levels is another question, but it’s not in question that all our current crops are a result of artificial selection and not just luck that the climate of ~5000yr ago was right for them by accident (as you imply).
This is a qualitative problem with your argument, not just a minor one, because you purport to explain the biggest hole in the CAGW hypothesis – why the climate of ~1900 is specially optimal can only be altered at a net cost – which the mainstream propagandists don’t even touch. Instead, they try to distract attention away from this question (I think with good reason!).
>Plants – including edible plants – clearly can survive at any plausible CO2 level. Whether our current crops can be rapidly repurposed for such levels is another question, but it’s not in question that all our current crops are a result of artificial selection and not just luck that the climate of ~5000yr ago was right for them by accident (as you imply).
Plants can survive at very differing CO2 levels.
The problem is that the monoculture of crops that we grow to deliver us most of our calories will lose their competitive advantage against other organisms.
That’s the whole point I’m making, but it’s a point that most people don’t want to comprehend.
“monoculture of crops… competitive advantage”
No mainstream food crop I can think of has a competitive advantage. All get generally outcompeted by wild plants if not given specifically barren pre deforested ground and defended with poisons. Again, you are claiming things that are patently untrue and entirely irrelevant.
Do you even know how long the wheat we eat has been a staple? 50 years. That’s all. Modern dwarf wheat was GMOd using mutagens in the 70s, with disastrous (but very profitable)health effects like addictive opiate receptor binding hunger boosting activity, schizophrenic boosting neurochemical effects and even worse gut (and therefore general health) disrupting activity than previous shitty grains.
Your unstated and totally incorrect assumption/implication is that we have X Y and Z Staples and pretty much always have, but almost nothing we eat was a staple on most of the world only a few centuries ago, and most of the grain crops can be EASILY replaced with far healthier tubers etc, in terms of nutritional content. Sure the bread might not be as soft and glutinous, but is that worth decades of healthspan loss? Up to you.
Again, stop fluffing around with bullshit distractions and go back to the BASICS underlying your argument that conflict with what you are saying.
“When you have such an alternate” (accurate) “view of reality, I don’t think there is anything that could change your mind”
Firstly, that’s called ad hominem, will you kindly for the love of God address the actual point and stop with the fallacies and non sequiturs?
Secondly, FLAT WRONG. I have my alternate view on reality BECAUSE I’m willing and ABLE to DRASTICALLY change my mind on things when the evidence proves or strongly indicates that my previous position was incorrect. I WAS. A global warming cultist, then my University *Enviro-Chem professor* showed me the evidence showing it was, to put it mildly, complete bullshit, and I was willing to take that and look for myself, and confirm very thoroughly at this point, that he was in fact correct and I was in fact mistaken and, basically, part of a cult.
I know we are ruled by a pedo cult because for a long time I did not want to accept that, but the more I tried to prove it false, the more I found hard and disturbing evidence that at the top levels, human society uses blackmail, not cash, as currency, just like all criminal gangs do, and the worse the crime you are willing to commit (raping and murdering and eating babies is up there and a “staple” at the top levels), the more your gang “buy in cred” is worth.
Look up “blackmail inflation” and then really think about how it would have to work at the top levels of criminal government, and what systemic forces would align bad actors, and promote the worst of the worst to the top, you’ll start to figure out the disturbing conclusions and start to notice the evidence that gets leaked then covered up on a regular basis.
Go read up on the “Finders” case, or the dutroix affair, or any of the other WELL DOCUMENTED massive royalty and financial elite level pedorapist gangs that somehow get away with their crines despite massive evidence. Have a think about how nearly every person the Queen knighted, after a thorough MI6 background check, turned out to be a pedo, and not just that, a KNOWN pedo in connected fields at the time of the knighthood. Coincidence? Not a fucking chance.
Anyway either you have had a lightbulb go off and you are now off investigating this yourself, or you have written me off as look by this point, so either way, have a great day (none of my vehement language in previous posts is in any way intended as a personal attack upon you as a human being, and I thank you for the mostly outstanding work you do in this blog)
As a kook*
“The problem is that the monoculture of crops that we grow to deliver us most of our calories will lose their competitive advantage against other organisms.”
As I understand it crops (there is a variety of crops, even if it is less than the variety of non-crops!) already are outgrown by weeds which is why they are called weeds. Either one must work to remove the weeds (which is why farming used to be a hard job) or they have to be removed some other way, e.g. with chemicals.
Will our ability to use labor or machines to remove weeds go away?
Will our ability to develop selective poisons go away?
Will our ability go away to use crops that are already optimized for, say, a 25C area in an area that is currently 22C, in the event of +3C temperature change?
Finally, in the medium run, will our ability to continue breeding crops to adapt to changing conditions go away?
I can well imagine the mechanism you describe imposes some adaptation cost. Maybe adaptation costs that no one else thought about (but maybe not). But you did not support your conclusion of huge disaster.
Goats can be used to eat weeds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJBtmSR7Nnc
Likewise with other natural herbicides. Don’t think we cannot use herbivores to our service. And hence reduce the hard labor required.
BTW I hugely appreciate your blog. I don’t attack people I think are too biased to read my attacks or too dumb to respond to them (which is almost everyone).
Radagast, I do not understand why you keep on pushing GW. Your readers have already made up their mind either way. You are either preaching to the choir or trolling the non-believers.
I do believe that globalized industrial agriculture is bound to fail, btw, but GW will only be one of the many causes.
I thought it was an interesting post. Though I suppose for you that just makes me part of the “choir.”
Of course, all of his blog posts are interesting. But I do not get why he tries really hard to profile himself as a right-wing working class conservative, only to support Greta Thurnberg the next week.
There are two themes today:
– The world is going to the dogs because of global warming.
– The world is going to the dogs because of a corrupt cabal of blood-thirsty paedophiles who want to take away your freedoms.
Most people only believe one theme, and dismiss the other one as a hoax.
Only a few understand that both themes are true: the world is going to the dogs because of a corrupt cabal of blood-thirsty paedophiles who want to take away your freedoms *and* because of global warming.
Maybe Radagast should have two separate blogs to cater to those people who can only believe in one theme at a time. We’ll call one blog “Captain America” and the other one “Green Lantern”.
What’s happening is that the pie is shrinking (due to a combination of resource depletion and general environmental degradation, including – gasp – Climate Change) *and* the elites are trying to secure an ever-larger piece of the pie for themselves. These two things are not contradictory. In fact, you’d expect the former to lead to the latter.
I do think our host is being a bit too alarmist, though. There is a difference between “well, this really sucks” and “we’re all gonna DIIIIEEEE!”
I am definitely more alarmist than Radagast on many accounts.
Maybe the appearance of contradiction plays a role in awakening the reader from their dullness: rather than sleepwalking with a belief, one awakens into choice and higher understanding? Socrates makes this point with Glaucon in Republic VII, calling his attention to the summoners/provocatives, the “parakalounta”. Something that calls your attention, confuses or perplexes you, because it manifests in you contradictory perceptions: the finger that has both “longer than” and “shorter than” qualities makes you wonder, if you let it, how it can be both long and short at the same time —so you have to work out how and why rather than go about your thoughts automatically and without reasoning. These puzzles summon us from a slumber of dogmas, and if we so chose, could see “through” the seemingly divergent perceptions to the underlying reality of the eternal Radagast.
Figuring out why something appears inconsistent or contradictory leads us to resituating our relationship with it into the open space beyond, behind or before our perception of it. It is both empowering (because it gives us freedom and opportunity to question, reason, think, and act) and humbling (because it reveals how we had been without thought, immersed in opinions and driven by desire) at the same time, and isn’t that also interesting? How is thinking both empowering and humbling? Dialectic begins anew.
And so on, until you get to a myth or a drunk Alcibiades bursts in on us to confess unrequited love, a Callicles shows up and says it’s all a useless waste of time to think things through like children or dilletantes.
I do not understand a thing of your comment. But if you mean to say that the apparent contradiction in Radagast’s posts is pedagogical: I think he is wasting his time, people cannot be bettered.
Off Topic — but I wonder if Radagast could could offer comment on this:
https://joomi.substack.com/p/what-proteins-are-we-actually-getting
Our current GMO crops already require lots of fertiliser and harmful pesticides. They will always require these inputs. Maybe in a higher CO2 environment they require a little less fertiliser and a little more pesticide. So what? It doesn’t justify the pearl-clutching hysterics of the AGW proponents. Certainly not a good reason to destroy the CO2 based systems that currently sustain civilisation, for which there is no alternative. if people can get it into their heads that no amount of windmills + solar + tidal plugged into the grid will work from an engineering point of view. Maybe nuclear + Hydrogen, but that requires a H2 production & distribution infrastructure.
Whether CO2 causes any warming or not we can all agree is that there is be a greater amount of BIOMASS with higher CO2. That means more forested lands, more biodiversity, more fish on the sea, birds in the sky, insects, krill, plankton, fish, etc. etc. More lands for pasture, bigger herds of cattle and sheep. A cornucopia of plenty in other words.
Personally, I am happy to eat more fish, game, fruit/veg in greenhouses, and less grain. I think we can all agree humanity will be healthier as a result.
For me, the AGW crowd loses this argument. I think the viciousness and gaslighting in Rintrah’s attacks are a result of the cognitive dissonance from knowing he has lot the argument badly. Also explains the really passive aggressive disclaimer he makes people reply YES to. In capital letters, no less.
>Maybe in a higher CO2 environment they require a little less fertiliser and a little more pesticide.
Yeah there’s the thing. Your pesticides are all produced from fossil fuels, mostly oil. Future generations will not have oil available to them.
People do need to look into natural predators and particular plants that act like pesticides without the GMO garbage.
Ducks is one example I posted above.
Ducks is a very good slug and snail predator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baXSrl5Vmb0
Oh, we’ll have to do without fossil fuels, all right. There’s only a finite amount of that stuff in the ground, after all. It won’t disappear overnight, of course. What happens is that you are left with less and less stuff, and the stuff that remains is in less and less accessible places and is of poorer and poorer quality, which means that you have to expend more and more energy to obtain and convert the remaining stuff into something you can burn for fuel. After a while, the energy investment becomes greater than the energy return, at which point, you may as well leave the stuff in the ground. We’re not there yet, but we’re well on our way. At that point, you’re left with renewables, which can get some useful work done but will not support the industrial civilization. You can still have civilization, though.
(Sure, you can try nuclear. At best, that delays the inevitable by a few decades. Maybe. And then when those nuclear power plants are abandoned – as they will be, once no-one can afford to maintain them – you wind up with some nice little no-go zones…)
Actually, this is why I’m not quite so panicked about climate change. All those nightmare scenarios assume that we just merrily keep on burning fossil fuels at something like current rates forever (or at least for another century). But we won’t. There isn’t enough stuff in the ground for us to burn.
An interesting link for you:
https://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2022/10/02/zero-change-in-the-rate-of-sea-level-rise-for-all-of-recorded-history/