Passing Gas is an excellent intro for both adults and kids on where the air you breathe comes from, and has a couple of funny surprises.
Whether you’re interested in the “climate change” debate, are a homeschooler, are a parent of a middle-school or high-school science-age student, or would simply like to know the answer to the question, I highly recommend the few minutes it will take to watch this.
As an ex-scientist, ex-oceanobiologist, I have to say I find the video’s conclusions extremely flawed. The facts are sound, the perspectives are not. Yes, there is a kind of uncertainty about the causes of global change, but caution has to prevail in such a matter. More importantly, the catch-22 argument about plant life in the end is total nonsense.
YES, plants do use CO2 to fuel photosynthesis, but that’s only one part of the argument. Plants do BREATHE too, that is take it O2 to fuel their metabolism, just as we do.
Very roughly:
PHOTOSYNTHESIS: use CO2 + light and chemical components to manufacture sugars (akin to what we do when we eat). Excreting mainly O2 in the case of plants. (In biochemistry: Calvin cycle)
BREATHING: use O2 to break down sugars to fuel the living being’s activity (growing, reproducing etc.) (Krebs cycle)
A plant without O2 will die as surely as us. This argument does not hold.
Not relevant to this, but veeeery interesting Tip email from you today. Once again, you have lit a lamp that shed a different light on my writing.
And I now have no interest in watching “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (either version of it.) 😀
Actually I’ve used this sequence of reactions as the basis for some of my terraforming stories. Essentially the idea is that there are plenty of planets with the pre-life chemistry, all the colonusts need to is seed them with algae from orbit, then wait: