12/3/2002

 

 

                                                                                               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sir,

                        With regard to some of the latest off-the-cuff inflammatory statements made by the tediously controversial Prof. Philip Stott on today’s programme.

 

On March 31 1864  John Bennet Lawes of Rothamsted gave a long lecture to the Royal Dublin Society: “On the Chemistry of the Feeding of Animals for the Production of Meat and Manure”.  Lawes - whose  agricultural experiments continue at Rothamsted to this day - despite being a manufacturer of superphosphate fertiliser (and largely responsible for its introduction), nevertheless remained concerned that organic matter must be returned to the soil in the form of manure. Even if the animals themselves were not profitable to produce for sale, the fattening of them returned important fertility to the soil which would otherwise become exhausted.

 

This paper is quoted in “John Lawes of Rothamsted: ‘Pioneer of Science Farming and Industry’’ by George Vaughan Dyke  - a book produced to celebrate, in 1993, 150y of agricultural experimentation at Rothamsted.

 

Your ‘Meretricious Professor of  Smug Contrarianism’ aka Philip Stott, who contends that: “The myth of global warming was invented in 1988”, should be interested to note Lawes’ concern that:

 

“Were it not for such compensations, by the increase of man and other animals on the surface of the earth (if it could take place at all), by the enormous quantities of carbonic acid evolved into the atmosphere from the combustion of coal and from other sources, and by the gradual destruction of forests, which are the chief natural agents for restoring the balance, the purity of the atmosphere would become affected.  But the grasses, which supply so large a proportion of the food of beasts, and the cereals and the other plants of the same great family, which supply food to man in almost every climate, serve to re-use the carbon given into the atmosphere in the form of carbonic acid.  It may seem at first sight strange that the humble grasses, and the corn crops, reaching only a few feet from the surface of the ground, should be able to take up more carbonic acid, and evolve more oxygen, over an acre of land than an acre covered with forest trees.”

 

In a later paper in the Philosophical Magazine in 1881 Lawes further developed these ideas and provided estimates of the amount of CO₂ produced by the burning of coal, “from imported products used as food or for combustion” and “from the products of our own soil.”

 

It is quite clear from the above that the concerns about CO₂ emissions changing the atmosphere unless careful measures were taken to prevent it - the basis of  Stott’s “global warming myth” - have been around for at least 124 years prior to the date given in Stott’s smug aside, and that calculations were even then being carried out to begin to determine its effects, as they are today with infinitely more advanced technology to help.

 

It is somewhat ironic that, despite Lawes’ concerns about the importance of mixed agriculture and ‘organic’ (as in humus conserving) manures for the conservation of the atmosphere, his proof of the efficacy of artificial fertilisers led to the blanket use that created the ‘green revolution’ which has impoverished the vast proportion of the world’s soils and released billions of tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere.  Exactly the opposite of what he had intended!

 

It seems that, whatever the warnings of the best scientific brains of the day, then as now, greed and short term economic gain always prevail to the eventual detriment of us all.  No doubt previous generations of  irresponsible contrarians like Stott have seen to it that the concerns of Lawes and many others have always been ignored until it is too late and the damage has been done.

 

What a shame that the ‘contrarianophile’ BBC always goes out of its way to provide a pulpit for the minority views of oddballs like Stott, and so helps to prolong the damage we are inflicting on the planet and on ourselves.

 

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An interesting modern addendum to Lawes’ comes in Graham Harvey’s recent: ‘The Forgiveness of Nature’.  Here he notes that there are about 15m km² of the earth’s surface under the plough; that fertile soils contain about 400 tons of organic matter in the top 30cm of each hectare of land, but that soils under continuous cultivation contain less than 1% of organic matter.  A minute or two with the calculator gives the estimate of around 600,000,000,000 (600 ‘billion’) tons of organic matter in the world’s cultivated soils, having largely been ‘liberated to the atmosphere’ as a result of the ‘green revolution’ of intensive agriculture.  Far from preserving the grasslands that Lawes warned might be essential for our survival we have ploughed them all up - releasing even the millennia of locked up fertility from the vast US prairies just to provide the ‘cheap’ grain that has caused many of the ‘collapses’ of  UK agriculture over the last 150 years!

 

Harvey goes on to speculate that as the total CO₂ released annually from the burning of fossil fuels amounts to less than ½% of the carbon locked up in soil organic matter, returning to “sound husbandry in agriculture would end global warming without the need for motoring cuts”.  Perhaps your programme might like to get Harvey in to discuss this?

 

The Rothamsted establishment is now - once again ironically ignoring the warnings - championing the experiments in GM crops which Stott is determined to force upon us, just as irresponsibly as the ‘green revolution’ pesticides and fertilisers were forced upon us to such devastating effect on the world’s soils.  I cannot help but feel that Lawes would have been highly alarmed by such cavalier behaviour from those professing to be his scientific descendants, and by the long term damage that has resulted from his own work despite his warnings.

 

On the Tues. 12^th March programme, Prof. Stott went on to say that he was worried about the effect that the escape of comparatively few farmed salmon would have on the wild stock, yet earlier in the programme he had scoffed at the concerns of those who warned of the effects of the billions of GM pollen grains released from even the ‘test’ sites for crops! (Not to mention the ‘bodily escaped’ whole plants that can be viewed growing in profusion along road verges and on waste ground all over the country, and whose numbers would obviously be swelled and intermingled with similarly spread GM versions once these are ‘released’ - I can clearly foresee blanket spraying of our already sadly impoverished roadside verges in attempts to destroy the evidence of the spread of the GM escapees and their hybrids.)

 

If the BBC wants ‘Home Planet’ to be the respectably balanced and scientifically sound series that is merited by the seriousness of the issues discussed, you would do well to get rid of the irritatingly flippant and inconsistent Prof. Stott and replace him with someone who is prepared to give a more orthodox and thoughtfully considered view.  Why do you confine an award winning expert like Harvey to merely advising on ‘the Archers’ while giving air time to the dangerously cavalier views of the likes of Stott?

                       

 

Sincerely,

Steve Hawkins.