Food

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I fear this may be a bit simplistic, but if only for completeness ForumGarden ought to have a thread. People may not have paid enough attention so far.

Q. What is it that we eat?

A. What we eat is stuff that has been alive. We do not eat minerals. We eat stuff that grew and quite often ran around or maybe even swam or hid under rocks.

Q. What, then, eats minerals?

A. The things that eat minerals are, in general, green. You are not green, you do not eat minerals. Green things are plants. Plants do not eat things that were alive, they eat minerals.

This is the basis of the Carbon Cycle, which is actually awfully much more complicated and mostly involves non-living systems. The bit that involves living systems has Carbon (as carbon dioxide, a gas in the atmosphere) being converted by plants into more and more plants. Some of those plants are eaten by animals making more and more animals, some of whom eat animals, but all the carbon transfer up the food chain starts with plants taking carbon dioxide in and animals letting carbon dioxide out.

You, being an animal, take carbon in as food and get rid of it by breathing carbon dioxide out.

If the mass of plants drops so far that you can't get any carbon to eat, you will die.

If the plants have no suitable environment in which to grow, you will die.

Some plants live in the sea. If the sea gets too hot or too acidic then the plants in the sea will die.

Other plants grow on the land. If the land gets too hot or the growing conditions get too dry or too wet or too windy then the plants on the land will die.

Without those plants you will have nothing to eat. That's the nature of the Carbon Cycle as it relates to living systems.

Keeping things from getting too hot or too acidic or too dry or too wet or too windy involves not burning fossil fuels.

People have been exponentially burning more and more fossil fuels for a couple of hundred years now. Things are getting too hot and too acidic and too dry and too wet and too windy for plants to thrive, because the product of burning fossil fuels accumulates in the atmosphere year after year, faster than it can be taken back into the Carbon Cycle through the other non-living systems.

Unless we begin to claw back that excess atmospheric pollution we shall soon start dying in very large numbers, civilizations will collapse, naturally balanced systems will collapse, and it will all be entirely caused by human short-term greed and stupidity. We are on a precipice in danger of not regaining our balance and stepping back from it.

At the moment, the product of burning fossil fuels continues to increase in the atmosphere year on year. It is essential that it starts to fall instead, and yet nobody is even planning on how to make it fall. There is a plan on how to make it stop increasing by 2050 - 27 years from now - and even that plan is unconvincing. And by 2050 very large numbers of people will already have died because it got too hot and too acidic and too dry and too wet and too windy for plants to thrive. Very large numbers of people will already have starved.

This is a major problem, not just a financial inconvenience.

Some of us said all of this on this site fifteen years ago.

[Bryn Mawr]

And some on this site said, quite vociferously, that we were wrong.

I wonder what they’re saying now?

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"I'll have the McMassiveBurger, it's only the third out. With fries. Make that with two fries. And a Bud", or something equally incomprehensible.

Some people made a lifetime hobby out of seeing how many people they could browbeat across the Internet, I expect it made them feel powerful.