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The article is about soil carbon. Without it there is not much excuse for active plant life to be had nor means to retain moisture. Here in Australia, soil carbon levels have dropped by up to half of pre-agricultural levels in many areas because of activities such as cultivation, stubble burning or removal and overgrazing. Worldwide, cultivated soils have maybe lost between 50 and 70 percent of their original carbon stock. A good place to start thinking about soil carbon and sustainable agriculture practices of a region is to monitor SOC (or SOM) -- Soil Organic Carbon -- levels in the soil. Here's what the journal 'Nature' says about carbon in soils: "The amount of C in soil represents a substantial portion of the carbon found in terrestrial ecosystems of the planet. Total C in terrestrial ecosystems is approximately 3170 gigatons (GT; 1 GT = 1 petagram = 1 billion metric tons). Of this amount, nearly 80% (2500 GT) is found in soil (Lal 2008). Soil carbon can be either organic (1550 GT) or inorganic carbon (950 GT). The latter consists of elemental carbon and carbonate materials such as calcite, dolomite, and gypsum (Lal 2004). The amount of carbon found in living plants and animals is comparatively small relative to that found in soil (560 GT). The soil carbon pool is approximately 3.1 times larger than the atmospheric pool of 800 GT (Oelkers & Cole 2008). Only the ocean has a larger carbon pool, at about 38,400 GT of C, mostly in inorganic forms (Houghton 2007)." https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/soil-carbon-storage-84223790/ As the GLW article points out, there is a perverted discussion being sponsored about the ecology of carbon as it is biased towards reductionism. dave riley On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 2:11 PM Ratbag Media <ratbagra...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/are-cow-farts-really-driving-climate-change > > "The debate about agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gases has been > perverted. Methane is not the important issue — nitrate fertilisers and > soil carbon loss are the important issues." > _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
