Premise:  Publicity for the “How did this happen?” inquiry as popular culture magazines will have this question and want such a feature.
 

How It Happened
©2006 by Adrian Vance

 The Story of SCAF

          I was a sophomore in high school, taking my first course in biology.  We were to draw a cross-section of a leaf from a prepared slide, “…and pay particular attention to the stomata,” said teacher John Carlock, “…they’re “C” shaped with an open side to the air.  They’re like the pores in your skin.”

          I could not believe how well organized the leaf looked.  It was made out of what appeared to be hollow blue bricks.  The blue came from a stain applied after the leaf was sliced in a machine with the leaf frozen in a block of wax.  The process fascinated me.  The stomata were all on the lower sides of the leaves.  They were one cell thick in the form of a letter “C” with the open side down as if the letter were on its' side.  It was a real design.

We were to make drawings and I could do that first drawing again today from memory.  I was that impressed.  I had dabbled with toy microscopes as a kid, but this was the real thing with a professionally prepared slide.  I was looking into a new world.  I must have had some kind of an inkling of what this would mean 55 years later; so clear is my recollection.

After a bumpy college career, interrupted by a year in a business that failed, I decided to become a science teacher thanks to the Sputnik panic and Admiral G. Hyman Rickover’s books.  Science teachers were in very short supply.   Teaching was a career that the young women I knew thought was honorable and I was ready.  In those days if you wanted sex you had to get married.  There was no other way.   I had most of the requirements needing only a few education courses and enough hours to add up to the 132 required for a BS.

I had entered college not knowing what I wanted to do and took courses in what I liked, chemistry, physics and biology.  It drove my father nuts that I would not declare a major and set a goal.  After nightly dinner table lectures on “The Great Depression” my father felt he had failed me when I graduated from high school “without a compass.” 

I did not know what I wanted to do in life.  What I had taken prepared me to be a walking high school science department.  And, thanks to Admiral Rickover in my senior year had school Superintendents on my doorstep offering me jobs as I was the only one in my graduating class prepared across the field.  I could do the job of the two science teachers small high schools had to hire and then try to figure out how to keep them busy three or four of their other periods.  I could save them at least one salary, maybe two, and do a far better job in all likelihood.

        While teaching I had married, acquired property with plants to tend and bring into the house as little plants in pots, transferring them to bigger growing pots.  This aquainted me with  "potting soil" which I learned was different from regular soil in that it had humus, decaying organic matter in it that was very good for young plants.  No one could tell me what it was about this stuff that made it so special so I speculated it had to be the carbon dioxide from decaying organic matter and that the plant was absorbing it in the roots!  I had not read this anywhere and talking about with gardening people drew blank looks so I put it away as another curious, but unimportant fact of the kind I seemed to have so many.

          When the “global warming” issue first appeared in the 60’s the big concern was for the amount of water vapor nuclear reactors would output to the atmosphere.  The few science writers expressing concern on this issue had labeled water vapor the principle greenhouse gas as had been determined originally by John Tyndall in 1857.

          In the 1970’s Dr. Steven Schneider, a “hunk” Ph.D. from Stanford, gave testimony to the House science committee that we were going into an ice age.  I saw a television clip of that session and noticed two things:  The hall was full of women cranking crossed legs bobbing high heels like bait.  And, the committee was asleep.  What could they do about Dr. Schneider’s mile high glacier bulldozing the Middle West again?  Put a license plate on it?  They did what all politicians do when given something they could not regulate or tax: they ignored it.

          Ten years after Dr. Schneider and his friends faded away we were cast into the first energy crisis by the smartest man to be President according to Jimmy Carter with his claimed 174 IQ.  This was the first time I had real doubt about the man in the White House.  He had interesting ideas, but all were more expensive than feasible so we continued to guzzle oil in spite of the first talk of the Hubble Curve indicating oil production had peaked.

          By default America’s energy policy has been, “Get it cheaper.”   Most of the high quality crude was coming from the Middle East so we gave Israel $10 billion per year to do our dirty work, as well as keep them alive while we played “friends” with Saudi royal family with mixed results.

          Meanwhile in America groups calling themselves “environmentalists” ran roughshod over politicians, media and school people from kindergarten on up.  Their ideas were a mix of some good, some doubtful and some insane.  Among the good ideas were those to stop poisoning streams, isolate and sequester metallic poisons from mining, drilling and manufacturing. Among the insane are don't drill in an Artic wasteland.  Keep it "pristine."  

        The caribou visit Anwar once a year for a few weeks.  That they like our oil pipelines and hang out under them where the grass grows better thanks to the extra heat is never mentioned.   But the big one for all the "greens" is to blow up all the dams because of sucker fish!  It is a 'trash" fish many have been trying to get rid of for a long time.  The only saving grace for them is that they are herbivores that other fish eat.

          Government set standards for metals like arsenic so high science could not confirm them, and then fixed allowable levels such that a person would have to live 1,000 years to be affected.  Carry a good thing too far and it becomes a bad thing.  We ingest lots of poisons, but most are in such low concentrations they do nothing to us.  Very high degrees of capturing such elements are prohibitively expensive which means nothing is done.  But, the worst of it was that some scientists came up with ideas that were simply wrong.

          By this time I had left the classroom to produce educational films and filmstrips for all the leading publishing companies in education.  I was a leading free lance producer in that business for 20 years.  Most of the work is research and writing so my education continued through my working life.  I found myself having to deal with many strange ideas.

          “Carbon dioxide is the principle greenhouse gas,” is wrong.  Water vapor is a far more significant heat wave capturing gas by a factor of nearly one thousand when everything is considered.  (See:  The Science of Global Warming)

“Man makes most of the offending carbon dioxide.”  Wrong, man makes 3.22% of all carbon dioxide produced on this planet.  The United States makes only ¼ of that, 0.8% and cutting us per the Kyoto treaty would only reduce the total of CO2 produced by 0.4%, but ruin the American economy twice as badly as did the Great Depression.

We have an angry minority that wants to bring America down because they’re not in charge or making more money than anyone else.  This effete corps of egomaniacs believes they’re smarter than everyone and entitled to lead as “an aristocracy of the intelligentsia.”  So inconsistent are their beliefs they hate the Bush family, but deify the Kennedys.  Both are wealthy, one made their money in bootlegging while the other did it in banking and oil.  They hated Ronald Reagan, but loved Bill Clinton while everything they brag about Clinton was either the product of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” or the Republican controlled Congress as the House determines spending per the Constitution.  President Clinton signed 70% of The Contract With America into law and a Republican controlled House wrote every one of his budjets.

Meanwhile back in the library, on the internet and in my home lab I was reading, searching, expeerimenting and writing about global warming.  I soon found the school market wants nothing questioning the anthropogenic hypothesis.  They were falling in lock step with the “man did it!” “America is evil,.” gangs.  But, I knew carbon dioxide was the principle gas needed by green plants and had read of growing trees, gourmet food and flowers in CO2 enriched atmospheres in Europe and the United States.  (See:  CO2 Enriched Air)

I also knew plant materials like wood and fabric ages could be told from the amount of carbon 14 radioactivity they contain.  The only way they could get it was from air where it is made by cosmic rays or nuclear bomb radiation.  Fossilized carbon has no C14.  Plants were not absorbing carbon from the earth.  Where 44% of all plant matter was coming from the air it must be processing a lot of air and my mind flashed back to that little “stomata” thing!  It seemed unbelievable and ridiculous.

I could not understand how this worked until I looked up the solubility of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide.  They were: 2.33, 3.16 and 171.3 milliliters per 100 milliliters of water respectively.  CO2 was 54 times more soluble in water than oxygen and 74 times more soluble than nitrogen. All the plant needed to do was get its sap in contact with air and the much-needed CO2 would be selected by solubility.  “Simple, practical and no moving parts,” I thought.  “But, ridiculous!” considering how much carbon dioxide the plants need.  I calculated that plants needed to process thousands of pounds of air for every pound of carbon in the plant and one pound of carbon would only make a bit over two pounds of sugar, starch, cellulose or wood.

Knowing that plants took in nitrogen for proteins and minerals through ground water I wondered about that as a path for carbon dioxide, but did not do any experiments at that time as there appeared no reason to do them.  This all just became more  odd facts for my personal archive.

When carbon sequestration became an issue and ideas of pumping it into wells or the seabed I saw the whole picture in a flash.  There was an obvious answer to the question, “What to do with all the carbon dioxide?  Get it back to the plants.”  Talk of putting it in old mines, caves or depleted oil fields, use it to recover oil remaining in old, pumped out fields, put it in the sea floor was ridiculous when I could see an immediate use for it as plant food that would also reduce water consumption.

Will it work?  To answer that question I bought two Diffenbacia maculata plants giving one nothing but distilled water and the other plain soda water.  Bingo, the soda watered plant grew better than the distilled watered plant and transpired at 20% less water in the process and this was from an open pot so the real difference was much higher!

I first thought the way to go would mean delivering carbon dioxide to plants as soda water.  It soon became clear that was a bad idea because carbon dioxide is not very soluble in water, the product carbonic acid is very unstable and water is in short supply in many areas.  Especially is it in short supply in the areas where we could put dry lands into use if we could reduce water consumption.

I was aware of deep or sub-soil plowing when I was young in the middle-west and proposed using it to inject the carbon dioxide into the moist soil at a depth of 18 inches.  Dispensing carbon dioxide with a sub-soil plow seemed the solution, but how much water would there be waiting for the gas?  Reading and some work with a shovel showed me that a foot below the surface even poor soil had 10% water and the literature says that going deeper will show up to 30% water so the water needed would be there.

After I defined a system I did a patent search on it with the string “carbon dioxide fertilizer” with the automatic ANDing Google system.

        There were patents on capturing tractor or water pump engine exhaust to make “fertilizer,” but they always focused on oxides of nitrogen.  Carbon dioxide was consistently overlooked in spite of being the most important component in plant physiology.  But, the most important error was in correlating plants and animals.  Animal pores do not have an intake function as do plants.  What plants take in is more important than what they exhaust unlike animals cooled by pores.

There were cases of carbon dioxide generated in greenhouses to enhance flower and gourmet foodstuff production with claims for a 30% improvement.  And, there were many examples of carbon dioxide enhanced atmosphere experiments with small trees and the remarkable results they obtained, but there were few tests with food crops.

Our principle food crop is corn and it is a “C4” plant.  Photosynthesis takes two chemical reaction paths in nature.  One is called “C3” and the other “C4.”  The C3 plants are most of the plants, trees and all such wide leaf species.  The C4 plants are grasses and grains all of which prefer warm climates and have been noted as not responsive to carbon dioxide enhancement, but recent tests showed this is not the case and that C4 plants do respond to increased carbon dioxide just like C3 plants.

Was this the level of plant research?  Could something so basic be wrongly interpreted?  This cast the entire area in doubt in my mind.  I had no idea why this confusion or misinformation had been part of the literature for so many years, but then why has climate science ignored the role of water vapor in the atmosphere? 

I realized the CO2 needed by the plant to make sugars, starches and wood could be acquired through the roots with carbon dioxide injected into the soil.   The gas and consequent acid would lower the soil pH by forming insoluble carbonates with the metal ions poisoning the soil recovering it for agriculture as well as permanently sequestering the outlawed CO2.

The carbonic acid solution would migrate by diffusion to be absorbed by any plant’s roots.  It would be interpreted as filling the need and cause stomata to be closed much of the time.  In my tests stomata were closed up to 30% of the time and conserve about that amount of water.  On finding that 70% of all water is used by agriculture I knew I had something earth-shaking as the subsoil use of carbon dioxide would release 21% of all water now in our economy to be used by people instead of farms!

I later realized that if we could supply all of the carbon dioxide with subsoil systems and reduce the number of stomata on the plants we could cut the use of water by green plants by up to 96% because all the carbon they needed could be delivered in four percent of the water now used!  All that we would need would be new varieties of plants with many less stomata.  These plants would be genetically engineered to have the stomatal patterns of cacti, succulents or bromeliads.

All of these new plants would be entirely dependent on man to supply the needed carbon dioxide underground.  They would never escape to become “Frankenplants” in the manner of horror science fiction films.  Any that would find themselves away from the CO2 maintained fields would soon die from the lack of carbon dioxide.

It is clear to me that we are at the beginning of a new era in agriculture.  One where man and his machines are greater participants in the process, with greater responsibilities and better outcomes.  We are going to recover lands long lost to low water occurrence and the presence of alkali earths.  I envision vast fields of wheat where Mesquite used to be with two or three crops per year without irrigation.  It is a new world.

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