Hopefully Interesting

Apart from  the obvious , or course.  Once, when our planet was young, the atmosphere was very high in carbon dioxide.  Then photosynthesis evolved and the cyanobacteria that spread across the oceans turned most of that carbon dioxide into oxygen about two and a half billion years ago.  Modern complex life, like ourselves, loves oxygen but for the creatures at the time this was a huge problem since oxygen was toxic to them and most of them died.  Plus the interruption of the greenhouse effect combined with the dimmer sun we had back then to turn Earth into a giant snowball for a bit. But here we are billions of years later and carbon dioxide levels are increasing.  We should be worried about increasing temperatures but are there other reasons to worry?  For a very long time, compared to humanity, Earth's carbon dioxide levels were around 280 parts per million.  That's been going up recently and is now at 407 parts per million, a 45% increase. ...

One of the interesting discussions in  The Wizard and the Prophet  was what the wizards are trying to get up to next in terms of trying to increase food production.  One idea goes to the fundamentals of photosynthesis. The most important protein in photosynthesis is affectionately known as  RuBisCO  and makes up about half the protein in a leaf.  Photosynthesis seems to be pretty hard and so RuBisCO doesn't work as well as most other catalyst proteins.  It's supposed to grab the carbon in carbon dioxide from the air but frequently grabs plain oxygen instead.  I suppose it worked a lot better before the  Great Oxygen Catastrophe .  Some plants have versions that are a bit more selective but they work more slowly.  Some are faster but they mess up which to grab more frequently.  Biologists hoped they could improve RuBisCO but it seems that evolution did about as good a job as could be done. There are some plants, though, that...

I just recently finished The Wizard and the Prophet  by Charles C. Mann.  He'd previously written a book about the Columbian exchange I'd really liked, 1493, so I was ready to like this book too. It concerns the dueling ideals of two men regarding man's relationship with the environment.  The prophet of the title, William Vogt, believed that the world has a finite carrying capacity that humans had to respect and that we had to limit ourselves to what the Earth could sustain.  The wizard, Norman Borlaug, worked tirelessly to increase the yields of the crops that man depends on and allowed large new generations of people to grow up without the famine that had plagued their parents. Going through the book Mann seems to do an admirable job of looking at the lives of each; their successes and failures and the events that led them to be the people they were.  And the books makes a valiant effort to portray both fairly though, as you might expect, I end up sympathi...