Environmentalists have used "greening" as a proxy for the process of improving our environment ... but what is happening ... have you noticed? ... is there seems to be a real increase in the verdant vegetation in our fields and forests. In his famous discourse on global warming, Princeton Professor of Physics Emeritus, Freeman Dyson, said that the world's vegetation has been long living on a "starvation diet of carbon dioxide". This meager diet of CO2 in our atmosphere got as low as 36 parts per million (that's 0.0036%) at its low. Now it is closer to 0.004% and one can almost here our shrubs and trees licking their lips and burping.
Not that this current level is a bacchanalian feast because hundreds of million years ago (the Carboniferous Period) CO2 got as high as 0.04% (400 parts per million). Even nurserymen today pump equivalent or higher levels of CO2 into their greenhouses to enhance the plant growth there. So we see, boys and girls, that our Industrial Age can be viewed as a great benefit to our plants as we are clearly helping them grow and stay healthy. Our plants are gobbling up the carbon dioxide we are producing almost as fast as we can pump it out ... possibly why Al Gore's bugaboo "global warming" has defied the computer models of 97% of our environmental scientists. They seem to have forgotten about ol' Mother Earth's feedback mechanisms.
Perhaps our environmentalists might wake up soon and start loving CO2, like I do, for all the good that it does in "the greening of America."
2 comments:
It's also been much wetter this year than in past years.
Rain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for our current lushness ...
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