The Biosphere Blog

Here is a typical young tree as it would arrive: Not exactly much to look at is there?! And sometimes it may sit there like that for days or weeks, looking like a lifeless stick. It is quite understandable that people become anxious when there are no… more »

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 »

The Spermatophytes The spermatophytes are the seed-producing plants, of which there are two groups: the Gymnospermae which produce cones and exposed seeds, and the Angiospermae which produce flowers and seed enclosed by fruits. Gymnospermae… 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 »

Below is a photo of a Chico taken by Kim Sau, who has kindly given permission to use it: This tree is a perfect size to use as an exercise in identifying both the graft and all four branch types of a jujube tree, so let us begin! (Please consider this… 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 »

Photosynthesis can be broken down into the light-dependent reactions (covered earlier here), and the light-independent reactions which will be covered in this section. It is well worth getting up to speed on the light-dependent reactions first before… more »

Photosynthesis can be broken down into the light-dependent reactions (which this entire section will cover), and the light-independent reactions (covered in the next section). Both occur within the chloroplasts of cyanobacteria, plants, and algae. Fig.… more »

(This article was originally posted here on The Wollongong Nursery Blog.) First published here 7th March 2023. Backstory I first heard of biochar maybe back in the early 2000s. It sounded really, really interesting, but I was somewhat put off by the… 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 »