Now I think we can all agree that global warming is taking place... at least I hope we can all agree... the planet is getting warmer, but that is precisely the debate, is it due to natural trends (throughout the earths history, there has been numerous warming and cooling trends), human induced (through the release of greenhouse gases) or both...
A recent article I read from national geopragphic puts some interesting new things to light... methane is a known greenhouse gas, and there are plants that produce methane as a biproduct
apparently, satellite images show large pools of methane over areas such as rainforests, undeveloped lands that should have no signs of methane pollution... and yet there are these pockets with high methane concentrations... scientists used to believe that methane was only produced by plants in low oxygen environments, but now researchers have shown that many species of plants produce methane during normal respiration, and believe that up to 30% of the annual methan input to the atmosphere may be derived from plants...
What does this mean??? well it may help explain why, in the distant, distant past, the earth has exerienced warming and cooling trends over gradual time scales.... but what is also means is that there is another bit of scientific "evidence" that conservatives can use to twist around the global warming debate, which is bad... now the article I linked to above doesn't give too much detail, as it is national geographic, and I haven't had a chance to read the actual peer reviewed journal article... it is quite conceivable that rainforest plants are producing a bunch of methane... but livestock also produces a ton of methane, and many of the earths rainforests are being destroyed for cattle land... that could be a significant contributing factor to these methane pools... who knows, but this is terrible news for environmentalists bc it gives these big business, big oil jerks ammo to say look, trees produce greenhouse gases so we arent doing anything wrong... and thats a problem... we should not even still be debating about global warming, but we are bc those guys have the money to fight all conventional wisdom... and its terrible... but definitely check out the article and make your own judgements...
No comments:
Post a Comment