Starving Plant Life


In my last post, Boogie-man Gas, I talked about CO2 and the controversies surrounding this trace gas.  I also pointed out to evidence that CO2 has been a beneficial gas, and not the pollutant that most people think it is.

Still, with headlines such as these (Scientists call for action to tackle CO2 levels,[1] and New Milestone for CO2 Levels: Mauna Loa Observatory Records 400 PPM [2]), it makes me wonder if the scientific process has somehow broken down when one group of scientists state unequivocally that CO2 will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, killing all living things with excessive heat, while another group states, also just as vehemently, that a lack of CO2 will cause plants (and therefore, animals) to die, and usher in a new ice age which will freeze everything for hundreds of thousands of years.

Do these scientists even bother to read each others’ hypotheses and studies, or do they all just argue for the sake of argument’s sake?  Is CO2 really bad for us, or is it crucial for our existence?

As a Taoist, I have a feeling it’s somewhere in between the two extremes, but although I may stake my claim as a Taoist, I certainly cannot stake my claim as a scientist because I have not yet earned my lab coat.  So I did the next best thing.  I donned on my Questioning Hat and transformed myself into my alter-ego, the mystical, all-knowing, Blonde Tao Witch.


I do this, not because I am strange (OK, I am a little strange, but not as strange as you think), but because I have found out something important about my mental processes.  By temporarily donning on this hat, I suspend my normal daily rational thinking brain for awhile as I explore other ideas and options without the urge to shoot them down and stomp them into the ground for daring to challenge what I hold as the shining truth.

So then, to my alter-ego, I posed the following two questions having to do with CO2’s properties:

  • What is the controversy surrounding the heat absorbency property of CO2?  Why is it not tracking properly with temperature changes of Earth?
  • What is the controversy behind CO2’s role in photosynthesis?  Is there too much CO2 in there air, or is there a lack of CO2 in the air?

I’m going to tackle the heat absorbency property of CO2 first, as that is basic high school chemistry and fairly straightforward to describe.  Most of the energy from the sun is emitted in wavelengths shorter than 4,000 nanometers (.000004 meters).  Earth absorbs some of the heat from the Sun and then reflects some of it back as light and the rest as heat.

Even though CO2 doesn’t absorb heat energy from the sun because solar wavelengths are too short for it to absorb, it does absorb some of the heat energy released from Earth.  It can do so because once Earth has absorbed the Sun’s energy, in the process of internalizing the energy, she changes its wavelength.  The heat energy released from the earth is discharged in wavelengths longer than 4,000 nanometers, which allows CO2 to absorb energy that falls within that mid-infrared range of 10,600 nanometers.

When a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbs Earth heat energy, it goes into an excited unstable state and can only become stable again by releasing its absorbed energy.  Some of this released energy returns to Earth and some is expelled out into space.  Unfortunately, carbon dioxide allows the entire range of Solar wavelengths into Earth’s atmosphere, but only allows the range of Earth wavelengths that it can absorb (10,600 nm), back out again.  This causes a build-up of the infrared wavelengths that are less than 10,600 nm, thereby causing the Earth to retain more and more of the sun’s warmth.  At some point, this warmth is expected to exceed that temperature which is able to support life.

I’m going to pause at this point and continue onward with photosynthesis.


The process of photosynthesis is fairly straight forward.  Plants get their food from sunlight by chemically altering carbon dioxide and water to convert that sunlight to storable chemical energies.  They give off oxygen as a waste product, and with good reason—oxygen is a highly toxic mutagenic gas that causes oxidation of various metals.  Interestingly enough, animals have evolved to utilize this waste product, and even to require it to maintain the combustion engine that make up all animal life, both above and below the water.  (As an aside, even as I ponder over this simple chemical loop, I can’t help but notice that we use this flammable gas to burn away our brief existence, cell by cell, until we can no longer keep up the pace of cell-burn versus cell-production.  Once we can no longer keep apace with the burn-rate, we simply die).

In essence, animals (including humans) complete the loop of life, taking in the poisonous oxygen, converting it, and then releasing the life-giving carbon dioxide so that plants can live.  Plants need us to live just as much as we need them to breathe.  Without carbon dioxide, plants cannot continue their process of photosynthesis.

Why then, is there so much discrepancy and divergency of opinion in something as basic as the effects of CO2 on the Earth and its denizens?  Isn’t there solid evidence that green plants need CO2 for the processing of photosynthesis?  Shouldn’t we at least try to figure out how much CO2 plants really need before we try to remove what we think are unnecessary and excessive amounts of CO2 from the air?  That just seems to me to be prudent, but who am I to suggest something this obvious?

Lucky for me, I don’t have to figure this part out.  There are already studies that have been done by several groups of researchers, and they found that there are three most likely causes of plant death:  insect-infestations and disease, lack of water, and carbon-dioxide starvation. [3]

This is my opinion on these three causes of plant death.

Insect attacks and disease are natural occurrences that have been going on for as long as there has been life on Earth.  It is part of the cycle of life and cannot, therefore, be considered a tragic occurrence in any way shape or form.  It is one of the ways that evolution is able to work its magic, picking and choosing the life forms that can best adapt to its ever-changing environment.

The lack of water occurs in cyclical fashion throughout Earth’s billions of years of existence due to the cyclical nature of ice ages.  Simply put—when it is cold, all the water is locked up in the polar caps and the glaciers, causing a lack of water everywhere else.  During these dry cold spells, there is more land which is exposed to dry air because there is less water to cover it.

When the relatively short interglacials come around again, everything warms back up and the ice melts, releasing its cache of water and causing low-lying areas that had previously been above water to become submerged.  It also allows for arid, dessert areas to become green and wet and fertile (ergo parts of north east Africa and Mesopotamia).  This is also a normal Earth cycle and not some horrible tragedy that is about to befall humanity.  Over and over again, Earth’s message has always been clear.  Don’t live on sand bars and don’t live near coastlines as those are the areas in flux each time she goes through her cycles.

Last on that list is carbon-dioxide starvation.

Say what?


Did I read that right?  Are our trees starving for CO2?   If the amount of CO2 that we humans have been recklessly spewing into the air all these decades is not enough for trees to grow, what then is enough?

Interestingly enough, botanists already have the answer to this question.



At this point, we don’t really have to worry about reaching that toxic 2,000 ppm.  As of May 2013, CO2 levels almost reached the 400 ppm (parts per million) mark [2].  That’s higher than it has been in a very long time, but from the plant’s perspective, it’s nothing to write home about.  In fact, according to H. Leighton Steward, plant life on Earth is actually close to starving.

At Current CO2 Concentrations, Plants are Close to Starving.  Acting in concert, the several phenomena described in the preceding subsections, as well as other phenomena possibly yet unknown, typically allow the growth-enhancing effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment to be expressed in the face of severe resource deficiencies.  But what happens in the case of “carbon starvation,” when the air is deficient in CO2?

Because CO2 is the basic “food” of essentially all plants, the more of it there is in the air, the bigger and better they grow; and as the air’s CO2 content declines, so too do plant growth rates decline.  And when a critically-low CO2 concentration is ultimately reached, starving plants lacking sufficient CO2 – like starving people lacking sufficient food – actually die, as indicated in the figure below, where plant death occurs when dry weight production falls to zero. [5]

I wasn’t sure I read him correctly because I have been told all my life that CO2 was TOO ABUNDANT in the atmosphere.  And yet, here is this scientist saying that the plants growing on Earth are dying because they are starving for CO2.  Indeed, it is also the reason why people add extra CO2 into commercial greenhouses—because they know that plants need more CO2 for maximum production.  There is even a term for it.  It’s called CO2 fertilization. [6]


Picture on the right: Empirical Data. Growth of 21-day-old rice and S. viridis seedlings at different ambient CO2 concentrations ranging from 30 to 800 parts per million. NOTE: The very last set of pots on the extreme right is out of sequence. They are for 390 ppm, while the next to last pots are for 800 ppm.

Graph on the left:  Modeled Data:  Modeled changes in CO2 assimilation rate in response to changes in leaf intercellular CO2partial pressure for C3 and C4 photosynthesis and for a hypothetical C4 rice. Curves 1, 2, and 4 have Rubisco levels typically found in a C4 leaf (10 μmol m−2 catalytic Rubisco sites). Curve 3 shows a typical response for C3 leaves with three times the Rubisco level of C4 leaves. Curve 1 shows the response of a C4 leaf with C4 Rubisco kinetic properties. Curve 2 models how a C4 leaf with C3 Rubisco kinetic properties would respond (a hypothetical C4 rice with C3 Rubisco kinetics). The comparison of these two curves shows the increase in CO2 assimilation rate achieved with C4 compared with C3 Rubisco kinetic properties within a functional C4 mechanism. Arrows to curves 1 and 3 show intercellular CO2 partial pressures typical at current ambient CO2 partial pressures for C4 and C3photosynthesis. To generate the curves, model equations were taken from (11) and comparative Rubisco kinetic constants from (12). (B) [Reference numbers per source.]


While I do appreciate the serious efforts of all scientists to find ways of maintaining the Earth in liveable conditions for its seven-plus billion denizens, I am not convinced that CO2 is the driving factor behind global climate change because, unfortunately for us, historical data regarding global temperatures that scientists were able to extract from tree rings and ice cores doesn’t match up with computer model predictions.  I say ‘unfortunate’ because if it was as simple as removing CO2, we would be able to figure out how to fix the situation sooner rather than later.  Sadly, from everything that I have read, including all the data points that I have been able to gather from scientists of all fields, I am starting to believe that global climate change it is NOT something that is fixable by human intervention and it is NOT tied to the rise and fall of CO2 at all.

Global climate change, from what I am able to gather, is directly affected by several great heavenly cycles of the solar system.  Some of these cycles are Earth-related and others are Solar cycles which impact Earth due to her dependence on the Sun for radiant energy.  When these cycles overlap, we get major global climate change.  I wrote about one of those cycles in a previous post, Winter In July.  That post talked about Earth’s precession, and although it is an important cycle, it is not the only one that Earth has.  There are other cycles, and they all impact global climate and temperature in varying degrees.  I will go into the other Earth cycles in my next few postings, and then I will get into the Solar cycles and how that affects us.

1.  Scientists call for action to tackle CO2 levels

2.  New Milestone for CO2 Levels: Mauna Loa Observatory Records 400 PPM

3.  New Studies Point to ‘Carbon Starvation’ as a Cause for Tree Mortality

4.  Carbon Dioxide Enrichment Methods


6.  Growing Greener Tomatoes:  First US Greenhouse with Onsite CO2 Fertilization


The Sun’s About to Flip!


OK, so I’ve been a bit of a nut case lately, constantly harping on about the sun and its magnetic situation and how unstable it is.  Well, there’s a reason for this.  NASA is confirming my recent suspicions on the Sun’s volatility.  This is what they are saying:



But before everyone panics, let me hasten to add that we’ve lived through many of these already.  In fact, it is a normal cycle for the sun.  We would be worried if it didn’t reverse itself.


After the reversal, we should see less and less activity until it reaches its solar minimum, which does affect the Earth, but again, there’s no need to panic.  We went through the last one in 2002 and hardly anybody even noticed that it happened at all.

1.  The Sun’s Magnetic Field Is About to Flip


Ocean Heat—Hot Surfer Dudes vs. Scientists


(Continued from The Heat is On—Barely)

The Oceans are supposed to be getting hotter, says climate scientists.

Last I checked, however, the hottest things in (and on) the oceans are the surfer dudes with their tanned bodies and their muscular physiques.  This is the reason why my home is within driving proximity to Santa Cruz, home to some of the most amazing species of hot surfing dudes to have ever graced the planet Earth.  Perhaps some of those surfer dudes are scientists.  One never knows what level of intelligence lurks beneath a handsome physique.

Ahem.  To get back on topic—according to scientists, the ocean has more than just surfer dudes to use as a heating implement.  (Well—ok…they didn’t say anything about the surfer dudes, but they did say that it is warming.)  Let’s try this again.

According to a recent study in Geophysical Research Letters, the ocean captures heat and traps it under oceanic levels below 700 meters. [1]  Kevin Trenberth with the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research stated that:  “Increasingly in the past decade, more of that heat has been dumped at levels below 700 meters, where most previous analyses stop. About 30 percent has gone below 700 meters in depth.  This is fairly new, it is not there throughout the record.” [2]

Since I am not a scientist, I am naturally full of questions about this sort of thing.  For instance, how did the deep waters get warm but the surface water stayed cool?  What is the mechanism that allows for the heat to sink downwards past 700 meters?  So let’s say the heat found a way to go down into the deep end of the pool, why wouldn’t it just simply bubble back up?  After all, heat’s natural propensity is to find a way to rise, even if it has to erupt through some weak spot which could theoretically come from the expansion and contraction of water itself.  If warm water expands and cold water contracts, wouldn’t the body of cooler water above contract to the point where it exposes holes where the warm water could bubble back up?  This brings me to another question.

Kevin Trenberth says “This is fairly new, it is not there throughout the record.”  I am seriously curious as to why it has never occurred before now.  Why is it a ‘fairly new’ thing?  Hasn’t the sun always been shining and providing warmth?  Hasn’t the ocean always been rolling onto the golden shores?  Why would the oceans suddenly start absorbing the heat, while at the same time, something is acting to prevent the release of said heat trapped below 2000 meters (hidden beyond our sensors), all within the last couple of decades or so?

Why did I say (hidden beyond our sensors)?  According to the article [2] “Trenberth, along with Magdalena Balmaseda and Erland Källén with the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, discovered the missing heat with the help of the Argo observation program. Argo is a global array of thousands of floating devices that measure temperatures across the oceans.”

So—how does one go about measuring something below 700 meters with floating devices?  Wouldn’t floating devices measure surface temperatures?  Wouldn’t they have to deploy submersibles to measure temperatures below 700 meters?  Our best submarines can go down to that level, and have surely been doing so for awhile now, so any data as to actual temperature fluctuations at or below that depth has to have already been collected for at least as long as we’ve had submarines.  Why are we now just finding out about the heat collected below that depth?   What am I missing here?

Eh.  What do I know?  I’m just a blonde Taobabe.

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(…to be continued)

1.  Detection of an Observed 135 year Ocean Temperature Change from Limited Data

2.  Scientists Find the Missing Heat of Global Warming 700 Meters Below the Sea. 

The Heat is On—Barely


Hey y’all.  It’s the hottest part of summer and smack dab in the middle of another Solar Maximum (five years in, to be exact).  Best you be bustin’ out the popsicles and the coconut sun tan lotion now before your chance is gone.  I say that because this solar maximum isn’t all that maxed-out.  As a matter of fact, it’s really puny when you compare it with other Solar Maximums in the past.

The cycle is fairly simple.  Every eleven years, we start off with low solar activity, which gradually builds up so that by midpoint, roughly around the fifth or sixth year, we see high solar activity, which then tapers off and the cycle ends with another span of low activity.  The highs and lows vary cycle by cycle, but they always come.

The cycle we are currently living through is Cycle 24, not because there has ever only been twenty-four cycles but because modern astronomers have only been monitoring sun cycles since 1755, and we had to start the count somewhere.  Prior to that, ancient astronomers had been monitoring celestial movements using state-of-the-art stone tools, but what they know and how they figured it out is another post for another day.  This post is only concerned with this most recent cycle.

How is a cycle determined?  Does some big wig announcer on national television decides one day that it would be a good time to announce to the world that a new Solar Maximum has started?  Fortunately, this is not the case.  It begins with a simple reversed-polarity sunspot.  It may be only a fraction of a second in length, but that is all that it takes.  Back on January 4, 2008, a reversed-polarity sunspot was observed by scientists, which heralded in the start of a new cycle, Solar Cycle 24.  I remember reading about it at the time and was intensely curious as to what (if any) untoward happenings would occur.  Well, other than the huge financial crash of 2008, not much else has happened since then, even despite the comings and goings of December 21, 2012.

To get back to the matter, there is still time for something to occur, if anything is going to occur.  We are only five years into this cycle, and by rights. there should be some activity.  As I noted in my previous posts (There’s a Black Spot on the Sun Today, and She Blows Hot and Cold), there is plenty of action—just not as many as there should be, and certainly not as BIG.

How much activity and how big should there be?  To get averages, we have to go back to previous cycles and compare/contrast the differences.  Here’s what past cycles show:


Compared to cycles 21, 22, and 23, this one is a midget.  It is seriously under-performing when compared with its past siblings.  But that’s not a fair assessment because it may just be that the Sun happened to have gone through three periods of fairly strong Solar Maximums.  We need to take a look at Cycle 24 in comparison with the weaker cycles to get an idea of where on the puny scale it lands.

To risk sounding like I am comparing penises, here is the comparison chart for the small guys of the Solar Maximum world.  (Note that the biggest peak of this graph below does not even reach 100 whereas the chart above has peaks that go past 160.)

similarcycles So now we have a more even playing field.  Of all the short guys, our very own Cycle 24 barely holds his own alongside Cycle 12 and Cycle 14.  In fact, scientists are hoping that we will have some sort of a revival and bump up at the last minute, just like Cycles 16 and 12 did.  But so far, no cigar, as this cycle rolls towards its inevitable demise.  Five more years and it’s back down to a Solar Minimum again, which means minimal sunspots and minimal magnetic influences that will hit Earth.

So how does this Solar Cycle 24 affect Earth (and us)?  That’s a question that even the angels barely dare to tread on.

(Continue to Ocean Heat—Hot Surfer Dudes vs. Scientists)

Graphs taken from

Ancient Drowned Cities of the World

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Yonaguni-Jima, Japan











Lord Krishna’s City, Dvārakā, India



gulf of cambay







The Vishnu Purana also mentions the submersion of Dvārakā, stating:




Cuban Sunken City













The Moon Does Not Lie

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In a previous post, I talked about Something Very Dark Out There.  In this post, I will detail the reasons for the existence of that very dark entity, as whispered to us all by the Moon—and as we all know, the moon may wax and wane, but she does not lie.

I am a happy-go-lucky Taobabe.  I go prancing through the seasons, joyful when spring and summer arrive and slightly melancholic when autumn and winter descend upon my reality.  My emotions are fleeting, as are the seasons, because I am aware that they are cyclical and will return upon the completion of the cycle of their movements.  I move with a rhythm all my own, but one that ties with the tides and the winds.  Since the tides are affected by the Moon and the winds are affected by the Sun; it follows then that I dance to the rhythm of the Sun and the Moon.

The Sun and the Moon are but two small cycles within our galaxy.  They dance and twirl with their own individual rhythm, spinning and cavorting with their various partners, bowing and whirling, hurtling through space.  The Moon’s partner is the Earth.  The Earth’s partner is the Sun.  The Sun’s partner is an as-yet-unnamed celestial entity.  The only thing we know for certain is that this entity must also obey the laws of the universe.  This means that as long as we take the laws of the universe into accordance, we will be able to understand and pinpoint the location of the sun’s dance partner.

There are a few things we do know:
1.  The Moon’s speed as it races around the Earth is 1.022 km/sec.[1]
2.  The Earth’s speed as it circles around the Sun is 29.8 km/sec.[2]
3.  The Sun’s speed as it twirls around its partner is 430 km/sec, as susggested by astrophysicist Reg Cahill.[3]

The only speed we have not yet calculated is the Sun’s parther’s speed because we still have not yet identified the Sun’s partner.  This mysterious partner is somewhere in the distance still, but the dance step is taking the partner back to the Sun, as dance steps must.  It won’t be long before we will know for certain what this partner looks like.

To understand the peculiarities of this mysterious Solar partner, we have to look at our own Moon.  The moon is an ancient being with peculiarities of its own.  It shines above us at night, stirring the ebb and flow of the tides that are necessary to renew life cycles.  It dances to the rhythm that the Earth dances to, but since the Earth also dances to the Sun’s rhythm, it also shows the Sun’s rhythm.  In this manner, it acts as a silent witness to an eternal love affair that the sun has with its counterpart.

Being a silent witness however, does not mean it cannot give testimony.  It only means we have to figure out how to read its silent message.  Here is what it has been saying throughout the ages.

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…the Moon does not lie. Its movement is exact and acts like a witness to the Earth’s motion. The only way the Sun can appear to move around the Earth, and be confirmed by lunar data, is because the Earth is spinning on its axis. Likewise, the only way the Earth’s axis can appear to precess or wobble relative to inertial space, and not wobble relative to the Sun as confirmed by lunar data, is if the solar system (the reference frame that contains the Sun and Earth) is curving through space. Furthermore, the only way the solar system can be curving through space at a rate of 50 arc seconds per year, is if it were gravitationally affected by another very large mass: a companion star. ~ Binary Research Institute[3]

To determine the probability of fact however, we need more than one point of reference.  As solid an indicator as the Moon is, we still need more corroborative points of references.  In comes a Serbian geophysicist and astronomer named Milutin Milanković who gave us the Milankovitch Cycles back in 1934 which was detailed in his book Celestial Mechanics[4] as well as a further detailed analysis of the cycles in his paper New Results of the Astronomic Theory of Climate Changes in 1938.[5]

The Milankovitch Cycles have been mathematically determined by studying past global climate changes over millions of years. One of the causes in climate change is precession of the equinoxes, which has a period of approximately 25,772 years, over millions of years.[6]  If we use Milankovitch Cycles and combine it with the binary cycle, we have a consistent match of records.  This means that our global climate change is directly tied to the dance pattern of our Sun and its partner, the heretofore mysterious entity which waltzes in and out of the Sun’s reach once every 22,772 years.

We are still technically within an ice age since we still have ice sheets which cover the north and south poles of our planet, but from all indications, we are rapidly moving out of this ice age and entering an Interglacial Age, that period which falls in between two ice ages.  These cycles go round and round, without fail.  When we take all this into account, we can delve back into the past to ascertain what has occurred and why it occurred.  We can also take this into the future and predict what will happen next.

I love mysteries, don’t you?

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1.  Moon

2.  Earth

3.  Binary Research Institute

4.  Celestial Mechanics.  Milutin Milankovic.  1934.

5.  New Results of the Astronomic Theory of Climate Changes.  Milutin Milankovic.  1938.

6.  Precession of the Equinoxes