The Biosphere Blog

Preamble After many (I wish I had logged) research and writing hours, 16, 000+ words, 70+ images and six posts later (seven including this one), I could easily end this little mini-series with the same sentence with which it began: TL;DR There’s… more »

Introduction Part 3 of what turned out to be a mini-series (! this wasn’t the intent!) covered the real reason behind Earth’s temperatures past and present — the Sun. This massive object is almost 99.9% of the total mass of the Solar System,… more »

Introduction Let us revisit Dr Soon, and two more slides from that brilliant talk. As with the previous posts, the screenshots below are direct links to the timestamp they were taken at, for people to view more detail if they wish. Please take the time… more »

Introduction Part 3 on the Sun and climate is coming — slowly! — but in the meantime I just had to include a snippet from this most timely two-year-old talk by Dr Willie Soon which came my way just recently (thanks Phil!). Dr Soon’s entire talk is… more »

Introduction There are four major spheres of Earth: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the lithosphere (land), and the biosphere (life). The vast bulk of ‘climate change’ science concerns fields within the first three, which are… more »

The Great Global Warming Swindle Documentary Breakdown This post is a breakdown of Martin Durkin’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which first aired on the UK’s Channel 4 on 8th March 2007. I chose this film for its broad… more »

TL;DR There’s no global warming spiralling out of control, and our climate is predominantly driven by the Sun. Preamble I didn’t really want to write any of this, to be honest. The whole subject of carbon dioxide (CO2) is… more »

Earth’s Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Concentrations Over Time The previous post covered the fall of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from 97% [970,000 parts per million (ppm)] 4.5 billion years ago, to around 0.4% (4,000 ppm) 500 million years… more »

Last week’s post on the stroma was a prelude to posts-to-come on the light-independent reactions of photosynthesis. These reactions are the Calvin Cycle, in which the inorganic carbon in carbon dioxide (CO2) is ‘fixed’ into organic… more »

Back Story These days it’s ‘just known’ that we/animals take in oxygen to survive (exhaling carbon dioxide as a waste product), while plants take in carbon dioxide to survive (releasing oxygen as a waste product). Yet right up into the… more »

In this little section on The Essentials For Life (As We Know It) so far, we’ve covered water, photosynthesis, and the nitrogen cycle, the last two being microbial in origin. This post brings these three essentials together in an essay that… more »

So far we’ve covered two essentials for life: water (for its flowing and carrying properties over a wide temperature range), and photosynthesis (for turning light energy into food which then flows up the food chain in an ecosystem). But no… more »

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, algae, cyanobacteria, and a few other bacterial species convert light energy into chemical energy, which is stored as a food source. Photosynthetic organisms thus produce their own food, and are called… more »

Did you know there is only one substance that absolutely must be available to all living things on planet Earth? It isn’t oxygen — while that’s essential for animals and for non-photosynthetic processes within a plant, it’s a poisonous… more »