And THAT is what is holding humankind back from acting appropriately to mitigate the consequences of our industrial actions.
The tail wagging the dog …
Me like “Wait till millions are displaced forcibly by nature” … dan sien ons wie “ry vir wie”.
I am not trying to save the world. I just want to grow an asparagus patch.
Asparagus grows for over thirty years, if I can use biochar when initially setting up the bed means I never have to add compost or rework the bed again.
I get to reap the harvest for the rest of my life. Yum yum.
Saving the world is just a consequence of my laziness, for which I’ll go to heaven (well-fed).
I have passed your idea on to my Dad, he has patches in the garden giving him “stress” as to why the plants are not growing.
By the way, another plus for biochar.
These days with the advent of GMOs. (Which is 99.9% of the dent maize and soya in ZA).
And at this point, I better expound on the origin of GMO crops in a nutshell. GMO means the crop has been engineered to survive herbicides, that will kill all other plants (read weeds, but really all non-GMO plants).
The thing that gardeners are finding is, that these GMO animal feeds that contain these herbicides go straight through an animal and come out the other side. Even then you can add that manure to your compost pile and the herbicide persists even though it has been composted.
Then you add, what has been conventionally thought of as the best compost available to your vegetables and they will all die. So unless you know the provenance of your compost, you will likely be poisoning your veggies today.
I can source dried aged feedlot manure at R80/ton. I can grow more dent maize and soya with it, this is why monoculture farmers still use it on their lands. It will save them on next year’s herbicide bill as well.
But, it’s lethal to the average diverse veggie patch, when it was once considered gold.
The herbicide does not survive the pyrolysis process of making charcoal.
Adding biochar to contaminated soil also has the added benefit of locking up these poisons and neutralizing them for long enough until their natural half-life decomposes them, akin to the craze of adding activated charcoal to your diet as a system cleanser.
Edit: I just reread this post. I think I have probably taken my retirement goal of becoming self-sufficient a bit too seriously, and it’s obvious I need to get out more.
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And there were several mass extinctions between life first forming in the sea and the appearance of mammals. These turn out to be resets. Something always survives. So I’m not worried about LIFE.
But I am a human, so I’d like to see them maintain the planet in a state that is good for their continued existence.
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So GMO and modern pesticides are very good for large scale farmers, not so good for subsistence farmers?
On a similar topic, the antiparasitic stuff (Doseermiddel in Afrikaans) we give to cattle has an effect on the dung beetles, and the dung beetles serve an important purpose in soil fertility. It is one reason why proper rotational grazing is so important. If you move the animals just short of the natural cycle of your parasites (mostly intestinal worms), you break the lifecycle of the parasite and you don’t need to use that stuff.
I would also say that feeding a ruminant grain is already a bit of a mistake. Their digestive system is best suited to grass and some legume hay.
Speaking of which… dung beetles are really amazing creatures. They absolutely know their sh*t.
I agree, however, silage from GMO crops is equally affected.
Hay although not GMO, is also affected as it is also sprayed with stuff to kill it before bailing.
GMO companies ( of which there are now remarkably few globally) are massive businesses producing seeds, but even bigger at producing poison.
Sigh …
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Here is another good video (again, brought by the almighty algorithm into my feed) about how the way we talk about the climate is important, and how one of the movies that started all this (Al Gore’s inconvenient truth) in many ways did the discussion a big disservice.
Al Gore, never really got my interest.
Articles like this do:
… and there are a lot of these reports coming in all over the world.
Me neither, since I have never been in the habit of (only) taking my opinions from those of celebrities/politicians. But of course, when you talk to people, a lot of them dismiss the entire discussion because of their dislike of Mr. Gore, and if you watch this video, and you realise how much he made it about himself… you sort of understand it.
Climate check: the melting of Swiss glaciers
Duncan and Helen Porter took the first photo, right, in 2009 and revisited this year. Composite: Duncan Porter
Photos taken by British tourists at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart are highlighting the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers. The first photo taken of Duncan Porter and his wife, Helen, in August 2009 shows the icy white of the Rhône glacier behind them. In the photo taken in August 2024, the blinding white of the original background has shrunk to reveal grey rock, with the once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, now a vast green lake.
“Not gonna lie, it made me cry,” Porter said in a viral post on X.
Stat of the day: Entire Earth vibrated for nine days after climate-triggered mega-tsunami
The study, which included UCL scientists, found that this movement of water was the cause of a mysterious, global vibration in the Earth which lasted for nine days and puzzled seismologists in September last year. Photograph: Soren Rysgaard/Danish Army/PA
A scientific investigation found the entire Earth vibrated for nine days in September 2023, after a landslide and mega-tsunami in Greenland triggered by the climate crisis. The scientists said it showed how global heating was already having planetary-scale impacts and that big landslides were possible in places previously believed to be stable.
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Read this earlier. Amazing event. The Youtube Modelling video is fantastic to listen to.
Interesting information here:
From here:
O gats …
Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year
The Amazon basin is experiencing a record-breaking drought – made worse by deforestation, global heating, and El Niño weather patterns Photograph: Jaqueline Lisboa/PA
The Earth’s ocean, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks together absorb about half of all human emissions – but last year, in an unexpected and alarming development, land and trees emitted almost as much CO2 as they removed from the atmosphere, scientists have said.
Preliminary findings by a global team of researchers found that in 2023 – the hottest year on record – the volume of carbon absorbed by land temporarily collapsed. Just one major tropical rainforest, the Congo basin, remained a powerful sink that removed more carbon than it released, as deforestation and global heating harmed the carbon storage capacity of other rainforests.
“We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September.
- What could this mean for global heating? A rapid collapse of carbon sinks has not been accounted for in most climate models. If it continues, it could mean rapid global heating even beyond what has been forecast.