Episode #094: Carbon Dioxide is Plant FOOD! Defending Graham Hancock! Climate Controllers?

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New to report. Anything to report? No? You guys have nothing? Since we last recorded, you guys' lives have been just so dull and uninteresting that there's nothing to say or report? Pretty much. I took the trash out. Well, we're gratified to hear that, Kyle. Well, and... We're going to get a full hour and 44 minutes, Randall. Yeah, so I'd appreciate it if you guys would just keep your mouth shut, not say anything this time. Just... No, no. Speak forth. Please. We're here to listen to you, man. Let's have it. Give us the details. Hmm, gosh. Well, I'm still reeling from some things we're going to have to be talking about sooner rather than later. Ah. Reeling. Yep. Yeah, reeling. Feeling some reeling. I'm feeling some reeling. Yeah, good. It's a good feeling. But... Hmm. Yeah, kind of looping even. So, yeah. But, yeah, we're going to do our every other week live podcast with Randall. If we can, and do some Q&A and have more guests this year and get into some more current topics, things that are happening right then, tours and events that are going on, a lot happening in 2023. And we're wanting to stick more in the recorded podcast, the numbered podcast here with info straight from the professor himself. So, yeah, I'm all for digging right into these climate change proxies, tusks, whatever we're going to do. But, yeah, they only started keeping records like 150 years ago. So, all this stuff that they say is, you know, the worst on record is really not that far back into Earth history. So, I don't trust much of it at all. I tell you, Brad, we've got so much here to debunk that idea that what's happening right now is unprecedented, that it's almost a little bit overwhelming. But I thought we'd start by kind of getting into learning about the culprit here in all of this, the one that's getting such a bad rap, which is carbon dioxide. So, one of the things in the studies, you know, especially when our technological abilities to monitor carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have improved, one of the things that kind of showed up there in the data was the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide, there was a discrepancy between the amount of carbon dioxide being generated through industrial activities and the amount of carbon dioxide being measured in the actual atmosphere to the extent that about half that carbon dioxide was missing. So, this came to be referred to as the missing sink, the carbon sink, because they weren't quite sure where it was going. Where is this, you know, 3 or 4 or 5 billion tons of carbon going, gigatons of carbon, not billions, gigatons of carbon. So, we talked about this before, you know, looking at the graphs and the studies of the distribution of carbon dioxide throughout all the sinks. Now, when we talk about sinks, we're talking about the atmosphere. Well, we're talking about, no, I think for purpose of sink, we're talking about something that will sequester the carbon dioxide. So, we would look at the ocean as a sink, the plant life, the biosphere is a sink, the soil is a sink, the carbonate rocks are the biggest sink of all. And we did look at a graphic where we saw that the storage in the atmosphere, we'll call it a storage, a storeroom, a storehouse of the carbon dioxide rather than a sink, might be a little bit more accurate. But the storage in the atmosphere, around 750 to 755 or 760 gigatons per year, per year, okay? Now, if we look at volcanoes, how much is volcanoes putting out? Well, they're putting out about a tenth of a gigaton. So, that's not enough to dramatically affect the concentration in the atmosphere on a general rule averaged over time. But there are points in Earth history where there has been concentrated episodes of volcanism. And if those volcanoes, the climatic effects of those volcanic eruptions, which essentially would mean increasing the opacity of the atmosphere and then decreasing the amount of heat, bringing on, say, let's say, like a little ice age kind of a thing, a volcanic little ice age, where you're going to have a lot of die-off in the biosphere just because of that, because of the lack of sunlight, the drop in temperature, and so on. Well, now you've diminished some of the plant life that would be taking up that carbon. So, it's kind of like there's almost like an internal response built into nature's system that the carbon dioxide could then increase in the atmosphere, increasing the pressure, making more available to plants and help the recovery of the atmosphere in the wake of a large volcanic eruption. But there's going to be a period of time there where the amount of carbon dioxide coming out is going to increase, along with the various sulfur components and so on, that is cooling the atmosphere. So, the volcanoes generally don't contribute much to the ambient concentration on a year-to-year basis. But when you have episodes of concentrated volcanism, then it can have a significant output of carbon dioxide, which is actually a good thing because it helps to counter the cooling effects that are the other consequences of large-scale volcanic episodes. Then you have the soil storage, which is about 1,580 gigatons, roughly. Let me see. I've got two sources here, two graphics. One of them gives the soil at, yeah, one of them gives it at 1,500 gigatons, and the other one gives it at 1,580. So, they're, you know, in the ballpark. Fossil fuel storage, about 4,000 gigatons. Now, these are older. There's probably more than that. If I had updated this, but this is literally like from 20 years ago, these graphics, back when I was first studying this stuff as an academic interest. I was going through textbooks about basically, you know, environmental. This was actually from a book called Environmental Sciences, Earth is a Living Planet, which came out in 2003. So, yeah, exactly 20 years ago. So, the numbers might be a little bit off, but overall, they're in the ballpark close enough to make the point. So, 1,500 gigatons in the soil, 4,000 gigatons in fossil fuels. And I'm guessing fossil fuel discoveries since then have increased that amount, but I haven't gotten the latest data. Storage in the land plants, about 610 gigatons. Okay, now this was the estimate then of 120 years ago. So, now, oceanic storage in shallow ocean waters, get this, 39,000 gigatons in the oceans. So, that is huge, 39,000 gigatons in the ocean compared to, for example, what did we say, burning of fossil fuels, about 6 gigatons. That's 7 to 8 gigatons per year. But the biggest, most significant storage of all is the rocks. And we see here that the rocks, which are basically marine rocks, sedimentary rocks, because, you know, you've got the ocean water and you've got the plankton and the single-cell creatures, the foraminifers, and all of the benthic forms taking up that carbon dioxide and forming casts and shells and things. They die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, they pile up, and they eventually lithify into carbonate rocks, mostly limestones, right? So, the amount of carbonate rocks is 100 million gigatons. 100 million gigatons. So, that's a hell of a lot of carbon that's locked up in those rocks. Now, how did that carbon get in the rocks? It all had to pass through the atmosphere, ultimately on its way into those sedimentary rocks. It had to pass from the atmosphere into the ocean, from the ocean into the creatures, the living creatures, and from the living creatures into the limestone rocks. But it all came through the atmosphere. 100 million gigatons processed through the atmosphere. Most of it taken up by the ocean, but a significant amount of it taken up by the land plants. Now, due to weathering and erosion, it's giving here, on one of the graphics, 0.6 gigatons per year. And the other one, let's see, it's not giving an exact amount. It is saying that photosynthesis of land plants, it's estimating it's taking up 560 gigatons per year. But the significant thing here is this, 100 million gigatons means just an incredible amount of carbon dioxide has been processed through. Now, what you've got to understand here is that the plants are taking up the carbon dioxide in copious amounts. I'm going to read here from an article that was very interesting about before carbon dioxide became contaminated by all kinds of political agendas, okay? But when you think about it, that 100 million gigatons, that's an awful lot of carbon. If all that carbon is being taken up, if it's being taken up in the various sinks, there's a lifespan, a term of time in which it is sequestered in that sink, right? Ocean, it's regurgitating. Because if the climate of the Earth warms up, Earth out, oceans outgas and start dumping their carbon dioxide load back into the atmosphere. If the climate cools down, so does the ocean after a certain lag period. The cooling waters begin to suck out the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So now what will happen is the oceans will start sucking during these cool periods, and then the atmosphere can become depleted, right? So the question is, or the insight here is that if the atmospheric carbon dioxide was not continuously being replenished, the oceans would suck the atmosphere completely void of carbon dioxide. And there goes, that's the end of the biosphere. So there are processes that replenish that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And as long as they're in balance, the sequestering, the taking up of the carbon dioxide, and the replenishing of the carbon dioxide are in balance, we're okay. As long as that doesn't go, say, below 180 parts per million. Because now you're getting right to the bottom of the concentration at which the biosphere, the plants cannot, there's not enough. The plants become starved. Between 180 and 150 parts per million, you're now having the shutting down of the biosphere. When you hit 150 parts per million, there's very few plants now that can subsist on 150 million parts per million of carbon dioxide. The atmosphere, the plants are now starving to death, basically, is what it is. Kyle, you wanted to say something. I did. I was just thinking about, say, in the depths of the ice age, when sea levels are like 400 feet lower. Yeah. So you've got this cold situation, so it sucks up all the CO2. But then that water freezes and forms these giant ice sheets that are also sequestered from being cold first. They've pulled all this CO2 out. Now they get frozen, and then it's just locked in until, obviously, it warms up and then dumps all that water back into the ocean. Then it can outgas again. So I'm just thinking about that in terms of, in the depths of the ice age, how much lower the atmospheric CO2 concentration must have been. Oh, it was dangerously low. Dangerously low. Dangerously low. Yeah, like 180 parts per million. It was like right at the threshold. And it's a good thing that there were sources that were replenishing the amount in the atmosphere, and that would make a very interesting study. And probably some of the same sources that are, of course, the same sources that are operating today, but not necessarily in the same volumes or concentrations. But what were the sources? I don't know. Well, volcanism is one, right? Well, yeah, volcanism is one. I'm just saying I don't know the exact proportion of the different sources. And there was, of course, plant life. I mean, you know, the equatorial regions and the lower latitude regions, they weren't glaciers. Well, they had mountain glaciers. Right. But there was still extensive forests. In fact, even Siberia was a fairly rich biome with a high degree of biological productivity, enough to support huge herds of Pleistocene megafauna. But so there was carbon dioxide coming from somewhere. But with the cooling, I mean, that's what would have drawn down the atmosphere of carbon dioxide to as low as it got, 180 parts per million. And then it slowly increased to 100 parts per million and was up to 280 parts, pretty much right at the threshold of the Industrial Revolution, which is still a very low in the context of the long history of life on Earth of, say, 600 million years back to the Cambrian. Well, yeah, 280 parts per million is still very, very low compared to most of Earth's history when carbon dioxide has been measured into thousands of parts per million. So even now, now, like, as these glaciers and stuff are melting, if they are, like, if there's, I don't know where it stands at this point, but I know that the modern, you know, science is telling us that the glaciers are all melting and all that water is still continuously dumping into the ocean. Well, that's going to be unlocking a bunch of CO2 itself. It doesn't even have to be, you know, gas guzzling cars and all that kind of stuff, you know. It's coming from the ice, right? Well, yeah, but what did you have to look like is the net balance of ice globally. That's what I'm, you know. And if you look at Antarctica, the data I've been looking at recently doesn't suggest, you know, that West Antarctica apparently has been shrinking, but East Antarctica has been growing. So it's kind of offset the shrinking of one side by growing on the other side. Well, I think probably there's also a difference in sea ice and then ice from precipitation. Like, the precipitated ice shouldn't have CO2 in it, I don't think. Right? Or would it? Well, yeah, it would. I would, yeah. I think it's still drawn in just like the ocean. Yeah, because there's CO2 in the ice cores. I mean, that's one of the ways of determining carbon dioxide proxies is that it's CO2 that's trapped in ice, in bubbles, in ice cores. However, there are some questions about that process that are worth examining. And whether the bubbles really, truly are representative of the average concentration for the entire planet. I mean, think of it this way. You've got a core, an ice core that's maybe, what, five or six inches in diameter, right? It's hundreds of meters long. And it's from a very single point on the surface of the Earth for that ice core. Right. You're drawing up this long hundreds of meters core, right? You're counting the layers. And initially, in the upper parts of the cores, you can actually count visibly the layers. As you get lower, you have to do, I don't know the exact method that's used, but it's in electrical conductivity. You can actually differentiate the layers through the studies of the electrical conductivity of the layers. It'll be something interesting to look in to see exactly how that's done. But you can differentiate the layers, even in the lower parts of the core. Okay. Now, in that, there's bubbles, right? Those bubbles contain air, and then the air presumably is a snapshot of the air that was around the bubble at the time it became enclosed, right? Kyle and I are chuckling at the idea of this bubble. That the bubble is the atmosphere. I mean, it seems logical, except that we also know that in certain places, you know, if it's been enclosed for a long time, the air gets, it can, it doesn't change? Yeah, it goes, kind of goes bad or whatever. So, I don't know. Well, there is. And see, that's where the question comes in. Are there actual chemical changes to the composition of the air in those bubbles? And the answer is very likely. Yeah, under 100,000 years of sitting in that ice, I mean. Yeah, under pressure. And that's important as well. Also, the fact that there's, there can be porosity in the ice, and there can be water moving through the ice. There is also the problem of contamination of the ice just through the drilling process itself. But so, when you think about it, is it a reasonable extrapolation to take, you know, let's say from 150, 200, 500 meters down, and you pull out a bubble, and you look at the constituent gases in that bubble, and then assume from that that that's a signature of the concentration of gases throughout the entire global atmosphere at the time. It's like one weather station. Yes, that's right. Like one weather station. And so, I think it's fair to question the process and the assumptions that are made. Now, we can look at that. That would make a very interesting episode, a podcast episode, and I have quite a bit of data on it, actually, when we could look into it. The whole process of coring those ice, sampling the ice cores, and then measuring the amount of constituent gases. There's also the problem that there's a lag between the snowfall and the point at which, because when it's still snow, of course, the air can circulate all throughout. It's not forming sealed-off bubbles. That happens under a certain level of pressure. So, you've got this phase change area in there from the surface, which is freshly fallen snow, down to where it's actual glacial ice. And that in-between part is called FIRN, F-I-R-N. Now, where in that process of the creation of FIRN is the bubble actually sealed off and then segregated from the atmosphere? Because that's important, too. And it might be anywhere from 50 to 100 years between the time the snow falls and the time it becomes glacial ice. Are you looking up FIRN, Kyle? I am, yes. Great. What does it say? Dictionary on Google says granular snow, especially on the upper part of a glacier where it has not yet been compressed into ice. Well, there we go. Well, there you go. So, apparently, I did know what I was talking about. I guess so. Says the internet. All right. So, let's... Let me ask you a question there before you get going again, then. What effect would this low concentration of CO2 then, at the end of the ice age, affect all the wildfires? Would that change anything, make it more volatile, less volatile, easier to burn, you know, continent-wide? Well, I think that would depend on the amount of oxygen. Oxygen, yeah. That's a good question. I'm going to have to think about that. Would a different... The question is, is would 100 parts per million, basically, which was the difference between ice age and industrial revolution. Okay. Industrial revolution is essentially when we were able to start actually taking samples of the atmosphere and measuring directly the concentrations of gases in those samples that had been taken directly from the atmosphere. I don't know when we first were able to do that. Probably in the early 1800s, maybe earlier. But it would have been somewhere around the dawn of the industrial revolution. So, what you'd have to do is, I guess, then rely on direct sampling and then, because, like, you know, the monitors that we've got now, like the ones in Hawaii that we get all the data from, that's direct sampling of the atmosphere, right? Earlier than that, we've got to rely on the proxy. And basically, there's two proxies, which is, well, there's more than those, but the two primary proxies are ice cores and fossil leaves. Because the apertures in fossil leaves are a direct function of how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, right? As you increase the amount of carbon dioxide, the stomata, which is the apertures through which the air is drawn, the carbon dioxide, it's the mouths feeding the plants, they shrink down, right? So, at the same time, they're shrinking down because of the increase. In other words, they don't, what happens is when the carbon dioxide diminishes into a rare, more rarefied, the stomata open up to try to get more of that carbon dioxide, get more process, more air to extract more carbon dioxide from that air. As you increase the concentration in the atmosphere, the stomata then flows down, which has the beneficial result that evapotranspiration takes place through the stomata. So, now when you close that down, what that does, it reduces the amount of moisture released to the atmosphere. So, it has a really good effect in that now the plants are retaining more moisture as a result of the increase in carbon dioxide. We're going to get into that. So, that was where I was going to go. Did that make the plants, the foliage, the whatever weaker or more combustible or, yeah? Ah, I see. Okay, yeah. Well, it seems plausible. You know, so then it would burn faster or, yeah, just. Yeah, because dry plants are going to be much more combustible fuel for fires. Absolutely. So, that's a great thought. In fact, that's one of the best thoughts you've had here in the whole series, I think, Brad. I'm going to have to think more about that. Well, yeah, because it would make sense. I hold a lot of them in, you know. It's okay, Brad. We're going to. It never happens at a good time. The pipe bursts at midnight. The heater quits on the coldest night. Suddenly, you're overwhelmed. That's when HomeServe is here. For $4.99 a month, you're never alone. Just call their 24-7 hotline and the local pro is on the way. Trusted by millions, HomeServe delivers peace of mind when you need it most. For plans starting at just $4.99 a month, go to HomeServe.com. That's HomeServe.com. Not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $1,199 a month your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs. So, the idea of a missing carbon sink began showing up in the scientific literature in the early to mid-1980s after several decades of air sampling and analysis. So, the first program of atmospheric sampling, the very first one of atmospheric sampling, well, let's see, the program of it. Okay, in the scientific literature, well, there were actually earlier ones, but I think this is what basically what they're saying here is that NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, actually began sampling programs that have been ongoing since then. Of course, there were random and sporadic samplings much earlier, but they weren't really part of a huge database of ongoing samplings like we've had since the 80s, particularly. But the first modern program by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was 68. And they collected their air samples in Pyrex blasts and then would analyze the contents and archive the findings. And so, initially, there were only two sampling sites. But between 1971 and 1978, the number was expanded to six when NOAA launched the Geophysical Monitoring for Climate Change, which was the GMCC program. And then in 1978, the Department of Energy started a program with the intention of looking at the longer-term consequences of increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations. And one of the goals of this research was the development of models to determine the partitioning of fossil fuel-derived CO2 throughout the three principal reservoirs. Again, ocean, atmosphere, biosphere. Not counting the lithosphere. Not counting those limestone rocks. Because when you're talking about oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere, you're talking about a constant circulation throughout all three reservoirs, right, that's ongoing. Once it gets into that limestone rocks, it's taken out of that process and locked down for potentially hundreds of millions of years. Now, what's going to release that from the rocks? Probably, you know, processes of plate tectonics, where you might be grinding up the lithosphere at converging plates, and that would release carbon dioxide. We said through volcanism, one mechanism that I think might be very significant would be major impacts into oceanic basins that could release huge amounts of carbon dioxide that would ordinarily be locked up in those limestone rocks. What about, like, acid rain or something on limestone, do you think? Because that's going to break down the limestone? Well, yeah, yeah, because, yes, it can. Now, you would have to change the pH of the ocean considerably, I think, to have a noticeable effect. Has the ocean changed to that level? I don't know. I haven't looked at that question, but it's an interesting question. I was thinking just raining down on limestone bedrock, you know, that's exposed. Well, when you look at the entire volume of limestone rock compared to what's exposed on the surface, the ratio is hugely offset. So the idea then was the term partitioning. So we say partitioned amongst these three reservoirs, the ocean, the atmosphere, and the biosphere, right? So by 1982, there was a total of 23 sampling sites. And the samples were collected weekly and then sent to the laboratory, the GMCC laboratory, which was located in Boulder, Colorado. And we're not going to get into all of this, but you can if anybody wants to read. There was a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 1985, Global Atmospheric CO2 Distribution and Variations from 1968 to 1982, NOAA slash GMCC CO2 Plask Sample Data. I'm sure everybody's going to be rushing out to get that paper. Slide number. So then in 1992, we have an article which appears in the Australian Journal of Botany, which I'm sure you guys have all read. And the authors Taylor and Lloyd described their analysis of global patterns of carbon sequestration. Ah, Taylor and Lloyd. Taylor and Lloyd. Yes. Taylor and Lloyd. Yes, of course. Yes, Taylor and Lloyd. Yes. So their calculations, and they did some of the early model runs, indicated, quote, the possibility that a significant net CO2 uptake, a CO2 fertilizing effect may be occurring in tropical rainforests, effectively accounting for much of the missing sink. Now, let's see. So, okay, so in the aftermath of the first program, the GMCC, after five years of sampling, three scientists from NOAA, NASA, and Lamont Doherty Theological Observatory performed an analysis on the air samples collected from 1981 through 1987. Published the results in the journal Science in 1990. By this time, it had become well established that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was increasing. However, as the authors of the paper comment, and I quote, after 30 years of measurement in the atmosphere and the oceans, the global atmospheric CO2 budget is still surprisingly uncertain. They acknowledge the contribution of fossil fuel combustion on the observed increase in atmospheric concentrations, but point out that the measured rise was only about half of the fossil fuel-derived contribution. In estimating the fate of this missing carbon, they point out that the uptake of CO2 attributed to the ocean was estimated to be between 26 and 44 percent of fossil CO2. So, disinclined to believe the ocean was consuming that much, they speculated that there must be a substantial, but as of yet unidentified, terrestrial sink. In conclusion, the authors comment that, quote, our analysis thus suggests that there must be a terrestrial sink at temperate latitudes to balance the carbon budget. The mechanism of this carbon sink is unknown. Its magnitude appears to be as large as 2.0 to 3.4 gigatons of carbon per year. Given that the total anthropogenic contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere is in the order of 6 gigatons, although it's more now since this was written, it is obvious that half of it is missing in action, so to speak. So that raised this whole question of, well, where is that carbon going? And I think the couple of things now that we're going to see where it's going, some of it's going into the ocean, but a whole lot of it is being taken up by the biosphere. And because of this increased amount of biospheric uptake of carbon dioxide, there is an actual discernible effect. All right, and we're going to get to that. So then that's why we segue into the 1992 article in the Australian Journal of Botany by Taylor and Lloyd. And it was they who pointed out the possibility of a significant net CO2 uptake causing a fertilization effect. And they're pointing out that it may be occurring in tropical rainforests, and it is this increased uptake by the biosphere that might be accounting for the missing sink. So then in 1995, we've got five scientists with NOAA and the Department of Geological Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder published a study in France, and the results of a study of weekly air samples taken from a global network of 43 stations analyzed at the Stable Isotope Laboratory at the Institute of Arctic and Alpen Research. These samples were measured for concentrations of carbon-13, a stable isotope of carbon. In the words of the abstract to their paper published in the journal Science, the concentrations and the isotope ratios of carbon-13, carbon-12 in atmospheric carbon dioxide, quote, can be used to quantify the net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the oceans and the terrestrial plants. So without getting into the details of the procedure, the result of their analysis is essentially that, quote, a strong biospheric sink was found in the temperate, temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in 1992 and 1993, the magnitude of which is at least half that. Of the global fossil fuel burning emissions for those years. So think about that. So in those years, between 1992, at least half of the fossil fuel contributed carbon dioxide to the atmosphere was being taken up by the biosphere in the temperate latitudes. Now, that's the temperate latitudes. The earlier study was talking about the tropical latitudes. How much is being taken up by the tropical latitudes? So what's becoming apparent is that as the amount of carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel consumption, so is the uptake of carbon dioxide by the biosphere. Makes sense. Yes. So studies continued on the terrestrial carbon cycle through the 1990s, and by the turn of the millennium, the problem of the missing carbon had still not been resolved, although progress was being made in determining the proportions attributed to the ocean and to the land biosphere. And I'm going to skip over some of the work. Interesting stuff. This was, by the way, a large, this was published in Science, the one I just quoted from 1995, a large northern hemisphere terrestrial CO2 sink indicated by the carbon-13, carbon-12 ratio in the atmospheric CO2. Another one that was a really good, interesting study about that was the O2, or ozone balance of the atmosphere, a tool for studying the fate of fossil fuel CO2, and I'm not going to get into that. But the point was is that they were able to use the difference, okay, the difference between fossil fuel input and accumulation today as in the past is attributable to the CO2 uptake by the oceans and by the growth of the land biosphere. So here we learned several things. We learned that in addition to fossil fuel combustion, carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere through biomass burning. So we've got that. Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by biomass burning. So we can assume from that, I would think we could assume safely that if there's large-scale biomass burning, this is going to inject a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Enough to affect the greenhouse gas? Well, that would be an interesting question. We are informed that the rise in carbon dioxide based solely on anthropogenic emission could be occurring at 3.5 parts per million per year. The measured increase, however, is only 1.5 parts per million per year. So in other words, the difference between that is between 3.5 parts per million and 1.5 parts per million, well, that's, you know, that's 2 parts per million that's being taken up by the biosphere. In this study, it was found that only 42.8% of total anthropogenic emissions of CO2 was actually residing in the atmosphere. The remaining 57.2% was and is being sequestered on land and in the oceans by natural processes. So then there were other studies. 2000, global carbon sinks and their variability inferred from atmospheric ozone and delta carbon-13. Won't get into that, but it's just ways that, proxy ways, I guess you could say, of determining where this carbon dioxide, how, once it's put into the atmosphere, how does it get distributed between those three reservoirs? That became the primary question. So we have a bunch of interesting stuff, but here, we're moving on here. So we've established that nature has the ability to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the global atmosphere. It is this uptake of CO2 that removes at least half the amount that is being emitted through fossil fuel combustion. Whatever the exact distribution of CO2 into the various things, terrestrial and oceanic, it is clear that a substantial portion of it is being consumed by the biosphere in the process of photosynthesis. It is also apparent to many researchers that, if not continuously replenished, the ocean alone would quickly sequester so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that it would severely affect photosynthetic processes. Many workers in the field have, over the years, commented on the paucity or scarcity of CO2 in the atmosphere and the positive role it plays in biological processing. So here's a few examples. This was from T.C. Chamberlain, one of the, sort of the, near the end of the 19th century, he was one of the godfathers of geology, T.C. Chamberlain. In fact, it was T.C. Chamberlain that first, was the first on record to notice the strand lines in the Lake Missoula basin that were then referenced by J.T. Pardee in 1910 when he wrote his first paper on Lake Missoula. He made reference to the strand lines and T.C. Chamberlain's speculation that those strand lines were the result of a huge lake and it must have been held in by an ice dam somewhere to the west. That was T.C. Chamberlain's speculation. In the 19th century, J.T. Pardee picked up on that in 1910. So this is the same T.C. Chamberlain writing here that I'm going to quote from. And this was in the Journal of Geology, published in the year 1898. And the title of the article by Chamberlain is The Influence of Great Epochs of Limestone Formation Upon the Constitution of the Atmosphere. And here begins the quote. The virtues of carbon dioxide are in inverse ratio to the sinister reputation which the, which, quote, a little knowledge, unquote, and a narrow homocentric point of view have given it. That's an interesting, very insightful perspective, right? As a constituent of the atmosphere, it is as necessary to the maintenance of life as oxygen because it is the food of plants. And they, in turn, are the food of animals. Its peculiar competency to retain the heat of the sun renders it a decisive factor in the maintenance of that measurable constancy and geniality of temperature upon which the existence of life depends. It is a leading agency in the disintegration of crystalline rock and is a necessary factor in other geological changes. It is the essential link in a chain of vital processes which involve all the constituents of the atmosphere. It is the least chemical constituent of a mixture that determines the amount of reaction. A loss of nitrogen or oxygen equal to 0.0003 of the atmosphere would doubtless be wholly inconsequential, right? A loss of oxygen or nitrogen equal to 0.0003, right, of the atmosphere would doubtly be wholly inconsequential. However, the amount, that amount of loss of carbon dioxide would be fatal to life, would be fatal to life and to many important geological processes. So here in this quote, Chamberlain is pointing out the fact that even a minuscule delivery decline in the relative concentration of atmospheric CO2 would have serious consequences for global plant life. So 64 years after T.C. Chamberlain's remarks on the importance of carbon dioxide to life, soil, carbon dioxide to life, soil scientist A.G. Norman, who extensively studied the relationship between photosynthesis and carbon dioxide, published dozens of papers in the 1930s through the 1960s. So in a 1962 article published in the journal American Scientist, he commented on the vitally important role of CO2 in global biological processes. That's what he says. It is somewhat unfortunate that we have allowed the phrase plant nutrients to mean those inorganic elements that are essential for plant growth because this causes us to forget the real substances from which the bulk of the stuff of plants is synthesized. The chemical engineer of whom we spoke earlier might be a little taken aback at being told that his only raw materials would be carbon dioxide and water. If one added, however, that the carbon dioxide would be available only at concentrations of three parts in 10,000 by volume diluted with an excess of nitrogen and oxygen, he might appear troubled because to him that would mean the handling of vast quantities of air to extract the carbon dioxide needed. But the plant can do this. Let us not underestimate the stupendous quantities of carbon dioxide that are incorporated into vegetation. Figures of the order of 15 billion tons annually have been quoted for incorporation into terrestrial plants, not counting the ocean. Perhaps one-thirtieth to one-fifty of this may be accounted for by economic crops or plants used by man. Even the last figure for crop plants exceeds several-fold the yearly carbon dioxide output of all industrial operations on Earth. He goes on to say, perhaps it is easier to grasp figures based on an acre. To grow a good field of corn, which will yield 100 bushels, about 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are needed. And that provides about 5,500 pounds for the organic structures of the crop. During the growing season, therefore, the corn plants on one acre must deplete an enormous volume of air to meet their needs for carbon dioxide. No less than 21,000 tons of air are needed to supply 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. This is a startling calculation because it points up the astonishing ability of plants to do what an engineer might describe as processing these many tons of air to recover and utilize about two and a half tons of carbon. So, since he wrote this, the amount in the atmosphere has increased from three to slightly over four parts per million in the atmosphere. 300 to 400 parts per million? Yes, it's increased from 300 roughly. Because here, this would have been, what did I say this year was? This was 1962, so it was just probably like around 325 parts per million in 62. So, that's how much it's increased. And do you think that entire increase is anthropogenic or? I think some of it certainly is. I think there are other factors, yes. But I think that that's a significant part of it, at least. Okay. So, so what's the other side of the issue? The one that manages to be neglected in most mainstream discussions of climate change, which is the positive effect of carbon dioxide in critical biological processes. As pointed out, in the work of T.C. Chamberlain and A.G. Norman, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is very low relative to its importance for the health of the biosphere because of its fundamental role in photosynthesis. Reduce the amount of carbon dioxide by even a small amount and plant life suffers. Enhance the entire chain of life. So, if we decrease, we know there's a negative effect. It begins to cause literal starvation of the biosphere. But what about the increase? Okay. So, there are a lot of studies that would suggest the consequence of an increase in atmospheric concentration. Okay. So, studies going back decades have demonstrated conclusively that carbon dioxide is indispensable to a healthy biosphere and having remarkable effects on plants of all types. So, going back to the 1600s in the city of Brussels, Jean-Baptiste Van Helmont planted a five-pound willow tree in a container in which he placed 200 pounds of soil. For five years, Van Helmont carefully monitored the amount of water provided and at the end of five years, the tree weighed over 169 pounds. But the soil was diminished in weight by only two ounces. While some of this increased tree mass was a result of small quantities of mineral nutrients supplied by the soil, two horticultural scientists referencing the work of Van Helmont in 1964 remarked, and I quote, more forcibly, it should remind us that the primary nutrient from which the bulk of the plant originates is the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So think about that. So he planted this tree. The tree comes from the air. Yeah. The tree ate the air and after five years, it weighed over 169 pounds. So it built that tree. That tree was built. The plant had this innate ability to build this tree by eating air and extracting the carbon dioxide from it. So the United States Department of Agriculture has, since its inception, published annual summaries of research and work relevant to agriculture. So they published the Experiment Station Record for 1904-1905. and in there, there was a translation of the experimental work of M. E. Demoussi, originally published in France in 1904. So in the early 20th century, Demoussi performed an experiment in France demonstrating the effects of carbon dioxide on a variety of plants. So here's the quote discussing the work of this guy in 1904. The results of the author's investigations in growing lettuce in an atmosphere enriched in carbon dioxide have been questioned as being too limited to permittive generalizations. The author has, therefore, repeated his experiments with 16 species of plants representing a wide range of families. Duplicate series were grown, one in normal atmosphere containing about three parts carbon dioxide in 10,000. The other series in an atmosphere enriched daily by about five times the normal quantity of carbon dioxide. The experiments were continued for about two months, after which several portions of the plants were weighed. Among the species studied were polius, lettuce, geraniums, centauri, mint, tobacco, balsam, fuchsias, et cetera. In all except the fuchsias, there was a decided increase in the weight of the plants, the amount averaging to over 60% increase over the control group. That's at 1,500 parts per million? Is that what he's doing? Yeah. Yeah. So now, in two months, with the enriched carbon dioxide, have added over a 60% increase in the weight of the plants, the mass of the plants. Clearly, I was running my experiment too low. I was doing 1,200. in addition to geraniums, begonias, mints, and et cetera were hastened in their flowering and flowered more abundantly in the atmosphere enriched in carbon dioxide than was the case with the plants grown under normal condition. So this was published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture experiment station record and then if anybody's really interested, we could put these, if our people are interested, I could put all of the original references online or something. So the control group of plants was exposed to the ambient concentration at that time measuring about 300 parts per million. The experimental group was exposed to five times that amount or about 1,500 parts per million. The end of two months, the average increase in the weights of the various species of plants exposed to CO2 enrichment as compared with the control groups was over 60%. In other words, the plants responded exuberantly to the increase in their food supply and thrived strikingly. So there are many, many studies that show increases in plant mass, productivity, resistance to disease, all kinds of things with increased carbon dioxide enrichment. Makes them more drought resistant, cold hardy, all those things. Yeah. So turning to the experimental work of agronomists Whitwer and Rob, we will consider their seminal 1964 study, carbon dioxide enrichment of greenhouse atmospheres for food crop production. So this report describes a series of experiments that went from 1962 to 1963 at the plant science greenhouses at Michigan State University with a variety of crops grown in containers. So here's a quote from that paper. The great demand of green plants for carbon dioxide suggests that levels of this gas in the ambient air of a heavy crop stand and particularly in enclosed greenhouse atmospheres might become sufficiently depleted, might become so sufficiently depleted that plant growth is reduced. Alternatively, carbon dioxide levels in plant growing atmospheres maintain substantially above the normal should favor growth. And so it was at that point that commercial greenhouses began ramping up the concentration of carbon dioxide up to a thousand parts per million. The authors go on to describe the results of experiments in in the tank culture of algae, which could be an analog for the oceans, in which it was found that quote, it is possible to increase by as much as 50 to 100 percent or more the rate of photosynthesis under natural conditions by carbon dioxide fertilization. In fact, carefully controlled experiments, the results of which for many plant species have now accumulated show that neither the normal carbon dioxide concentration of the air nor this gas in water is sufficient for saturating photosynthesis in moderate or strong light. In other words, they're saying that it's too low, that in other words, there's a significant potential for an up crease in photosynthesis if you increase the amount of carbon dioxide. The authors are here pointing out that normal carbon dioxide amounts in both air and water are not sufficient for maximizing photosynthesis. In other words, the plants could readily consume a great deal more carbon dioxide than they presently are under ambient conditions. That is, the amount in the air is not sufficient at present to quote, unquote, saturate photosynthesis. There's an important implication here. From this perspective, one could surmise that the world's plants might actually under current conditions be suffering from a carbon dioxide deficit. And then what we're going to do here, I've got, I'm going to do some share screen, a couple of share screen here to show some of the experiments that they did on food crops. Yeah, before you do that, let's take a break. We're right at an hour. Let's do. Then we can jump into those graphics. Afterward. Yeah, man. Okay. Sounds good. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you are drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload. No more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process, so you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're back. Cosmographia, back from the break. I don't think we have any announcements just yet, but where else are we going, Randall? What's going on here? Well, we have the Cumberland, the Upper Cumberland tour coming up in March. So that's not too far off, so that's going to be spectacular. It's going to be very northern part of Tennessee and Kentucky. Lots of gorges, waterfalls, cataracts, rock arches, even an impact crater. Yeah, important thing. Get the newsletter. One just came out the other day. All the latest from Randall and the tours and events he's involved with, the latest scientific papers he's reading. He'll do a quick summary. And they've got a brand new format for 2023. So yeah, Randallcarlson.com slash newsletter. Always the links are in the description. So that's the best thing to do. We've upgraded the newsletter format. Thanks to Laura, primarily, I think, our social media, and now website administrator who's taking over that duty. Oh, creative director expands. Creative director, yes. So thank you to Laura. Yep. Stepping it up. Uh, yeah. So back to the, yeah. Oh, well, the last thing I'll say, yeah, last week in March, check it out. Check on how tube and Randallcarlson.com and you'll find out the info. There's going to be some amazing sites. I think of the trifecta of the Cumberland Plateau region, the, this one, I think will be sort of the climax in terms of, I mean, one of the places we're going to visit has the greatest concentration of rock arches east of the Mississippi. In fact, I think it's the second greatest concentration of rock arches in America. after arches national park, what I've heard also, which is an amazing, we did that my first time on one of our, which trip was that one of our recent 21, I think was ring of 21. Yeah. I was blown away by that whole landscape there because you guys were on that, right? No, we didn't go to arches. Don't think so. I've been real close. So, I mean, we we've been in Moab before, but right there. Yeah. Yeah. It was an impressive, it was impressive. Yeah, I'd like to see it. And I'm really looking forward to this, this tour. And, you know, so we're going to be exploring, again, this really interesting landscape and how this landscape was formed. And we're staying in a really awesome place. we've got, we've kind of got the whole place reserved for our group, which is going to be great. We got good food planned. It's going to be a really fun time. It's going to be saturated learning. Then there's going to be some optional stuff that, find out more. Even if you don't think you can make it go online, just you can find out what you're missing. Are we into lots of limestone up there still? I know the mammoth caves and a lot of the cave systems in Kentucky are through the limestone. Like out about near those guys in Texas. Yeah. A lot of limestone. And I think we're going to be seeing evidence of some serious catastrophic floods. No doubt. That are not directly from glacial meltwater, which needs to be factored into any speculation about cause of mega floods. One thing to say you got a mega flood that's, you know, meltwater discharging from the glaciers. What about mega floods that are in valleys that were not headed on glaciers that can only be receiving their volume of water from hot, you know, highly augmented rainfall? And can those events, flooding events, be correlated? To what extent can you correlate these flood events, say, on a continental basis? That's kind of the next study that needs to be undertaken. And in some of the commentary on some of the really mindless commentary on ancient apocalypse, some of the discussions about the floods are just, you read this stuff and these supposed experts don't know an effing thing about paleohydrology. I might have to just digress for a minute. Let me see if I have it here. This one guy, it was so awful that it was a joke. It was almost funny. Let me see if I got it handy. I'll rip him a new one. Oh, we're going to. Yeah, we're absolutely going to. We're going to completely go this fraud, this coordinated fraud. It really is a coordinated fraud. It has to be. There's no way it cannot be a coordinated fraud because all of these critics and experts attacking Graham are using the same terminology, the same phrases, the same ideas, and you know, you got to go, okay, like I've had to have read nine or ten of the attacks from various archaeologists and experts and critics and skeptics and so on, and they're basically, it's transparently obvious that they're all reading, if not from the same script, at least from the same talking point. And once you go into that and you break it down, you begin to see that the, that it just, obviously you have ten different people watching the series and concluding independently that it's secretly promoting white supremacy and racism. Really? What is the chances of that? But once you go into it and break it down, you know, the whole thing begins to just unravel and you begin to see it for what it is. It's a, it's a gigantic fraud that shows these people are desperately afraid of anything that'll challenge their narrative of ancient history for whatever reason. And that's an important reason, I think, to actually go into and explore. Here, I'm going to, this is, this is a quote from my professor Nunn, um, who's one of the, the people attacking, uh, Graham here over this, um, is that a real name or a pseudo online name? No, I think it's N-U-N-N, none. He's a real guy here. This is, oh, I don't know what site is this. This is the, uh, oh, the news. Let's see. Oh, what is this? Oh, this is abc.net. Okay, abc.net, right? How many people can you find that support his viewpoint? None. So here's, here's what he says. Uh, we get past the racist advanced civilization myth, uh, debunking Hancock's claims, uh, subheading here, and then, of course, you read it. It doesn't debunk anything. Um, it, so, um, here's what Professor Nunn has to say. This is quoting him. And this is really all there is to it, in case you guys were wondering. When there was, quote, when there was a devastating flood locally, it was natural for the memories of that to be preserved in people's oral traditions, and it was natural when the next flood came and the next flood came for the history of flooding to be exaggerated over time so that the stories would remain memorable. Professor Nunn says, ancient societies didn't have the advantage of the modern-day connected world where people hear about natural disasters affecting other parts of the globe in real time. The great flood myth is a convenient tool Hancock uses to put all his evidence out of reek. That was according to another Professor McCoy. Um, but yeah, you can see here, like, you know, so, so, in this guy, Professor Nunn, his whole take of the flood is it's just nothing more than local floods that have been exaggerated, but the same people that are saying, oh, well, Graham is demeaning the indigenous peoples by trying to say, oh, it was white Europeans or white whoever, Caucasians that came there and taught them agriculture and architecture and math and astronomy, et cetera, et cetera, are the ones who are saying that they really just, they were, they were so naive and so constricted in their view of things that they took a local flood, exaggerated it after the next one and then exaggerated it further and eventually it became a whole world destroying flood. That's, that's his, that's this guy, Professor Nunn's take on paleohydrology. I mean, it's, it's laughably ridiculous. The problem is you've got all of these zombies out there have been educated in government schools for, for 12 to 15 to 20 years. They believe that shit. And they think, oh, this is an expert. Yeah. Yeah. That's. Anyhow. Yeah. The, the claim, I think we said this before, the claim is that, you know, Graham is somehow being racist or belittling these people's, these indigenous people's achievements while at the same time they're belittling the indigenous people's stories, right? That's weird. Yeah. Yes. They're like this whole flood thing is just, they just were making it up. That's right. That's basically the gist of what he's saying. Yeah. These, these dumb naive people. Yeah. You know, believed, oh, that this local flood gets grown, exaggerated, you know, and now it's the whole world destroyed. Yeah. They're lying. Right. These, these ancient people were just a bunch of liars. Right. Exaggerators. And you're racist if you think they were telling the truth. Yeah. And so this guy is being quoted now as an expert on, on paleohydrology essentially. Right. No, I'm sorry. This guy from that, from that remark there. I mean, that's just, I mean, that's something that somebody would have said a hundred years ago and it would have been ridiculous then. It's even more ridiculous now because in 2023, you know, anybody who's educated scientifically should know that mega scale floods, gigantic hundreds of millions, even billions of cubic feet per second really are part of the history of this planet and part of the human history on this planet. Yeah. So who is the one here being dismissive of indigenous tradition? It's this guy. Yeah. It's just the whole thing that, the whole reaction to that is just really, it shows me what these agendas, these slimy agendas. And I think we could go through and I think I will do this. I'm going to put together a critique of the critics to show how ridiculous their, their whole, because when you look at it, there's nothing there. It begins to just unravel into nothing. Once you take a hard look at what they're actually saying, the experts, you know, who are these experts? So you've got an expert archaeologist who's, who's maybe dug in a certain area. Let's say he's dug in, you know, like the one guy, Dibble, Iron Age Greece. So he may be very knowledgeable about a certain period of time in Ice Age Greece. That does not confer on him, upon him, some omniscience that he can go ahead, go, you know, at that point and say, well, you know, we already know everything that was going on back then in that period that Graham was talking about. That's what he says. We already know. Like, we already know. And he even states, this one guy, the British guy, this Dibble, he also states, well, I'm the real archaeologist. Who are you going to believe? But here's the thing. They keep saying and making reference to, oh, the experts have debunked. Well, let's be clear on something. Graham Hancock is a highly accomplished scholar. He's a very intelligent man. He's visited how many? Ninety? Hundred countries over more than 30 years looking at this stuff? He has visited a whole spectrum of different kinds of sites, from archaeological sites to paleontological sites to geological sites. He's visited ancient ruins. He's visited remains. He's written huge books with three, four hundred or more references in them, all which he has read and digested. So that's thousands of papers and references that he's pulled together dealing with this subject matter. He's met with real experts. He's probably engaged and interviewed well over a hundred archaeologists, geologists, astronomers, et cetera, et cetera, to collect this information together. He's been focused upon the younger Dryas. He's been focused upon those things that occurred during that transition from Pleistocene to Holocene in great detail. Now, here's what these idiots from the illiberal left, and because all of this criticism, let's be clear, it's coming from the left. It's coming from the Democratic Party. In fact, it's even, if you go to the website of some of these guys, like Hoops, perfect example. You go to his website, archaeology website, every third entry that he's got is something, you know, great about what the Democrats are doing. So he's clearly a Democrat. Everyone, you have The Guardian, you have Slate, you have Politico, all of these coming from the liberal left. The defenses, you see, ironically, are coming from the right. The Daily Caller has got a great defense of Graham's work, and that's where you see the coming from, which is very interesting because the divisions are lining up according to the political agendas and affiliations, which raises to me enormous question. Why is the liberal left so afraid of what Graham has to present? But back to my central point, you can't tell me that any of these guys, when you say, oh, the experts have debunked Graham's theory, and they constantly call it a theory, he does not present it as a theory. You know the difference between a theory and a hypothesis, right? We've talked about that. What he's doing is proposing an hypothesis that needs to be explored, investigated, and questioned, for which we need more data. I've read his works. I've watched enough of the series now to say, he says, well, maybe this happened. You know, perhaps, he uses the word perhaps quite a bit. This is not a theory. Why is everybody consistently using the word theory, when if they're trained in science, they should know, damn good and well, it's not a theory, unless it's a talking point. Use the word theory. Use the terminology white supremacist. One of the critics said, oh, I watched the first few minutes of one episode. I have to admit, I watched an episode or something, but at least I was playing a game. That was what she said. I was playing a game while I was watching, right? So then she goes on to say, but, you know, it's the white supremacist, it's racist, it's conspiracy mongering. And I'm like, okay, now how the hell do you know that if you didn't even watch it? Where do you come up with a white supremacist? Show me an example in there. What they do is they invoke Ignatius Donnelly, and I've got a few things to say about that, but not tonight. I'll pull up the quote to show how they completely twist and pervert Ignatius Donnelly's work to try to paint him as the source of Graham's ideas, and that Donnelly was clearly a racist, never mind when he lived and the entire society of that time, because that's what they do. They'll always take it out of context. It's, what do they call it, presentism? That we look at the lens of the past, we look at the past according to the lens of our current values, and yeah, I mean, there's so much we could get into there, the difference between now and 1883 when Donnelly published his books and the preceding decade or two when he was doing the research, but Donnelly was one of the first people who reported the fact that indigenous populations themselves, their own stories and myths indicated that they had interactions with people, not only Caucasian, but black as well, in the new world, okay, and he quotes that. He has quotes showing the evidence of that. That's conveniently ignored because I don't think any of these people have actually read Ignatius Donnelly. They're just being told, racist Donnelly was a racist, so, you know, use Donnelly as your reference. Don't say a word, oh, because you don't find almost nothing at all about Plato himself or the two dialogues when they get into their dismiss, you know, dismissing Atlanta. Oh, that was debunked. Atlantis was debunked. They say that over and over again. Where was it debunked? Show me. Show me where it was debunked. I spent eight hours putting together a video series about that showing, no, nothing has been debunked. But to get back to the point, you know, we've got this, what appears to be talking point that these people are reading from because they're all using the same terminology. So my question is, is what's the source of this and why are they so afraid of an alternate view of prehistory? Well, as long as you keep in mind that, you know, it's always the same when you get fascist, totalitarian, Marxist controls, the first thing they want to do is they want to seize the narrative of history. You see that over and over again, whether it's Mao or Stalin or Hitler, Pol Pot, whoever it is, you take control of the narrative of history. That's very important. And that's what they're attempting to do here. And they see what Graham is doing as a threat to that their ability to take over, to take control of the narrative of history. And, and yeah, but it's not going to work. It's backfiring. For one, the fact that they're so afraid of, of Graham's ideas is, uh, evidence. The fact that they know somewhere on some level that they're just pushing a bunch of bullshit, that they built a house of cards. And if Graham's ideas of what happened 12,000, 13,000 years ago are so dangerous to use their terminology, it means it's dangerous to their concocted narrative of history that they're trying to push off on the rest of us. That's how I see it. Anyhow. All right. After all that. Well said. Well said. All right. As the only Democrat in this crowd, I have to speak up. No, no, no. You don't have to say anything because we're going to go on to this, but let me say this. I'll say one last thing. The Democrat that you became years ago, that's not the Democratic Party anymore, Mike. It's not. It's just like, you know, my mother-in-law realized that just before she passed away. She'd been a lifelong Democrat. She even made the comment, you know, well, the Democrats aren't the Democratic Party that I was part of 30 and 40 years ago, 50 years ago. They're not the Democratic Party when I voted for George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. They're not that Democratic Party anymore. Now, so we can come back to this discussion sometime. I don't think you're, you are a real, you're a true Democrat, Mike. You are not these posturing Democrats that we have today. And it doesn't matter whether you like Trump or not, because disliking Trump is not the measure of your liberalism. Anyhow, organism. Let's get back to organisms. We can, we could cut that out and post that as a Randall rant. Well, it is a fact, Mike, it is a fact. I will retract my statement that we have no announcements. Announcements done. Well, how we got into that is because we were talking about, I was talking about mega flood sculpted landscapes on the Cumberland Plateau. Right. So from there, I went over and I, I quoted that ridiculous comment from Professor Nunn about ancient beliefs about mega floods, as if there weren't real mega floods that were preserved in their memories and traditions. Mega floods that could, well, we, then we have the quote recently in one of the, our episodes about planetary scale movement of water. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Apparently Professor Nunn is completely oblivious to that planetary scale movement of water and what that would imply for cultural history of the human species on earth. So anyhow, uh, back to the subject at hand, carbon dioxide. But it is a fact, Mike, that the critics to every extent that I have researched, the critics, it's all a hundred percent been from left wing media, take it for what it's worth. I don't know what you can, you know, you can interpret that any way you want, but clearly the guardian is left wing media, political left wing media, CNN, MSNBC, right down the line, mainstream media, left wing media is where you're seeing these ridiculous attacks coming from. And nothing have I seen coming from the other side, but that's the that's a whole nother topic we should dive into because it's important has implications way beyond Graham's work. The final point that I will make is this after all of that research and effort that Graham has put into this that I was discussing, he is the effing expert, okay, on catastrophism and what it could have had, the effects it could have had across a broad range of possibilities, uh, in terms of cultural, in terms of geological terms, environmental, all in terms of mythological, all of this stuff, again, a highly intelligent man, a scholar of exceptional attainment. And he's going to be just dismissed by these people and they're going to bring in, Oh, some expert. And you know who they bring in as an expert, Jason Calavito, that guy who's being quote, like, really? Is that a joke? Like, like this guy knows more about this stuff than Graham does? Are you kidding me? Anyhow. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you're drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload. No more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process, so you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Can I... Please. ...derail this a little more? I'm just curious what Mike's comment is. Oh. I think you should say what you want to say, Mike. That's just my opinion. It's not my show, though. Yeah. Okay. Well, at this point, my comment just gotten sort of lost. Sorry, Mike. It's okay. My comment was, Mike, I don't think... Look, I don't put you in the same camp as the blue and green and purple-haired, skin-pierced, woke people. See, to me, that's what I see going on on that side, and I don't see you as part of that. Well, I'm pretty liberal, and I'm much more liberal than you guys realized. That's what I've been afraid of now for... But we're still friends, and we can disagree, honestly, but that's not what this is about. Regarding the antipathy to Graham, even Graham says he's not an expert. Graham says he's a journalist. No, no, no. He doesn't say he's an archaeologist. That's different than... Because he is. That's the point I was just trying to make. He is the expert. But Graham, the primary claim that Graham continues to make is he's a journalist. He's a reporter. Even in the TV series that he had, the recent Netflix series, Graham said, I'm a journalist. I'm an explorer. I'm a writer. He gathers the facts and goes where they... Where they lead. Where they lead. He has become an expert in a lot of areas, and he's certainly gained expertise in certain areas, but he makes no claim to be an archaeologist. He's not trained in these areas, but what he is is he claims to be a writer, a journalist, an author who's gathering facts, and he needs to be taken seriously on that level because these people who come after him are lacking the professional credentials. He's never claimed to have those credentials. He's simply raising an interesting question that I think that anybody who, you know, your favorite topic is to go back to the scab lands and the massive flood that occurred in the great Northwest. That, to me, raises one question. If there were floods that scoured the country clean down to bedrock, left this layer of fine silt, the luss, the char, and all the other stuff, that basically wiped the slate clean, what was there before? We don't know. You know? Thank you, Mike. You can ask a legitimate question to say, okay, if humans as we currently exist, homo sapiens sapiens, have been around for hundreds of thousands of years in the current physical form, our brain is just as good as it ever was. You know, theoretically, it was as good back then as it is now, right? Wasn't that a talking head song? But who knows what civilizations might have existed? We don't know because the people asked, the archaeologists asked, where's the record? Where's the trash? Well, maybe it's buried under 400 feet of silt on the coast, the old coastlines on the continental shell. We don't know. You know? There we go. Maybe it's buried under deep sea. These are honest questions that need to be asked and answered but without derision. The people who start going after all this, they've got their careers invested, they've got their lives invested in their particular theories and their fields. Now they're going to react defensively. They're going to poo-poo Graham. But like I said, Graham's just asking a question and it's an interesting question. If it weren't an interesting question, it wouldn't have attracted the readers he has and the viewers he has on his Netflix series. His Netflix series within a day of posting was like number two on Netflix. Yeah. You know? These are questions that interest people and he's asked, I think that, I watched the entire series. There were a few places where I think he strayed into some weird territory, questionable evidence, but on the whole, the series asked to me some very legitimate questions. But again, the central point, Graham is a journalist. He claims to be a journalist. He claims to be a researcher, not an expert in all this. But he is asking a real question. Was, you know, if we have no evidence, why is there no evidence? Why is there no evidence of anything beyond a certain point in history? Well, so you're asking, yeah, and so what you're saying is essentially, I agree with that. I mean, he's, more than anything, he's asking questions. But, all science begins with asking questions, doesn't it? the point I was trying to make is that he, you know, there, you could, the way you partition science, I mean, look, you might have somebody who's very, very, very knowledgeable about, look, there are, for example, you know, in North Georgia, around here, there are archaeologists that have devoted decades to excavating and reconstructing civil war battle. Sure. Now, who's going to, obviously, yeah, these guys are going to be the expert on figuring out, you know, what kind of ammunition they were using, what they were eating, you know, during all of this, how long they occupied a particular, right? That doesn't necessarily confer upon them the authority to make, you know, broad-based sweeping statements about what may or may not have been going on in a completely different environment in a completely different time. So, the experts, my point about Graham is, you left one word out, you say, well, he doesn't, you know, I had to correct, I think, your terminology to reflect that he doesn't say he's an archaeologist, but when you look at his knowledge, like I pointed out, he's a highly intelligent man and he's a, he's a very accomplished scholar and you need to include that word in your description of him. He is a journalist, yes, he is a reporter, yes, he's an investigative reporter, but he is a scholar of no mean attainment. That needs to be factored in and on top of that, he's an extremely intelligent man and he's on a quest for the truth and he really is looking for the truth of the man. in the perspective of ancient civilizations, yes, somebody like an archaeologist that is looking at a particular deposit and excavating and a trench and reconstructing the life ways of a given culture at a given time, yeah, they're going to be experts on that. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be experts on the broad range of questions that Graham is asking. And when it comes to that broad range of questions, I would say absolutely a man of his level of intelligence and scholarship who's been looking at something like this for over three decades, he absolutely is an expert and he should be treated as an expert and respected as an expert because I can tell you what, the critics of him that are supposed, also claim to be journalists, they have not traveled the world multiple times and visited 90 or 100 countries and interviewed perhaps hundreds of knowledgeable people about the subjects in question and read thousands upon thousands of scientific papers that he has read. They haven't done that. So how the hell are they being put forward as the experts? It's bullshit. Well, because... Just call it for what it is. It's bullshit. We've discussed this before. The whole credentialed academia and the credentialed world, the pros, versus guys like Graham who are not credentialed, who don't come from that milieu. It's... Well, credentialed just means you've gone through an academic program. But basically, what you're talking about is the establishment in particular fields versus upstarts like Graham raising questions. Now, you know, you've overlaid politics on top of this and, like I said, as a Democrat, as a liberal, I can tell you there are probably a lot of liberals out there and Democrats who watch that series and have read Graham's books. They're not all fire-breathing right wingers. Oh, I agree. And by having read commentary, I know some of them are. I think it's wrong to overlay politics on this. Wait, wait. Who's breathing fire? I'm not the one overlaying politics. It's these clowns. They're the ones who are dragging in racism, conspiracy theories, and white supremacy. They're the ones who are dragging in politics. Well, you know, when you, when there are people who will drag racism into everything, you know, stop being a liberal for a minute and just realize that this is, this is not something that you just... You brought it up. I think those publications that you brought up, Randall, sought that kind of person out for these articles. That's really what it seems like. Sure, you know, they went and asked for a reaction. They went... Yeah. They wanted that. Yes. They wanted that. Yeah, exactly. Well... They wanted that kind of response so they looked for people who would write them. Why would they want that kind of response? I don't... Yeah. That's a bigger story. Well, see, that's where I think it gets into politics. Yeah. And, you know, we've also discussed this idea of these people with credentials and people getting... Some time ago, some months ago, I mentioned that in journalism in particular, there's a problem with what, at the time, I call competence. People get over their skis in areas in journalism. There are a lot of reporters, a lot of writers who will take on topics in which they have some expertise, but they don't have, for example, like the broad expertise. They haven't traveled, like you said about Graham. Graham's been there. He's looked. He's formulated some ideas. But they're reading his work and they're reacting to his work on the limited basis of their experience, okay? They haven't done what he's done. It's... These people have a limited competence, a different competence than Graham does. Graham has more competence and experience in these areas. People get over their skis in areas where talking about things they shouldn't be talking about, writing about things they have no real depth of knowledge about. It's common in journalism for people to go beyond their areas of competence and get embroiled in these things. And some people, frankly, just like to stir shit. You know, it's... I'll throw in on that that don't underestimate the role of jealousy. Well, there's that. Yeah. Stuff like that. That's like... That's true. That's it. That's in there. I haven't written a book. I haven't gotten to travel the world. I haven't gotten the world's attention on what I'm doing, so I'm going to fight this guy. Yeah. You know, this guy's grit getting all this publicity and these book deals and these TV deals that I'm not getting. Yeah. He must be wrong. So there's some of that. Yeah, but my point, and I agree with that, but there's a third thing that I think you're maybe downplaying the significance of, and that is the thing that I've seen now, and I'm guessing you have not read 10 or 12 of the critiques line by line. I have not. I've not read all the critiques. If you do that, you will realize. I saw a couple of the critiques, and I just wrote them off as, well, you know, that's typical. Well, see, I didn't write them off as typical, because I looked at it and I thought, these are atypical. Why? Because you've got, clearly, all of the critics are hammering the same irrelevant points, the same made-up stuff. I mean, there's nowhere where you can construe or conclude that Graham is promoting white supremacy. Nowhere. There's nothing to indicate that he's secretly or on any other level promoting white supremacy, but then why is every single critic bringing that up, invariably? Because it's... No, no, because they're all reading from the same fucking script, and you've got to ask why. No, there's no master conspiracy, there's no master script. There we go. There we go. There's no... There's a meme. There is, however, a meme, and what happens in journalism, like in everything else, there are memes, there are fashions, there are trends that come and go, and once a meme gets started, people latch on to it. Okay, that's my point. Where does it get started? Where did that get started? Where did it get started that Graham... Okay, you don't. I'm asking that question. You're saying you don't know, and you're dismissing that. And I'm saying that that is the most relevant factor here, the fact that somewhere that meme got started, and everybody's gratuitously buying into it and perpetrating it, even though it's total bullshit, it's a fraud, and it's a lie. It sounds to me like you're trying to sugarcoat what they're doing by saying, oh, well, that's typical... No, what I'm saying is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You know, with all the naysaying, the implications of racism, Graham's work will stand on its own for good or ill. Okay? It's like reading the Flamers on your website. I told you when you started doing posting stuff on the web, your web page, whatever, I said, don't read the comments. Just do not do it because you'll get into these internet fights. The Flamers do it just for the aggravation. And these people are the same kind of thing. They just get paid more and they're in print. Okay? So you're saying then essentially that these representatives of mainstream media really are no better or different than Flamers. Everybody's got an asshole and like assholes, everybody's entitled to their opinion. Okay? Everybody's got... Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got at least one. Graham is also on the left. It's weird that he's being... You know, it's interesting that he's being attacked by the left. He's definitely a liberal himself. He's a lefty who's being attacked by his own people. He's a liberal with strong libertarian leaning. Yeah, he's very libertarian, but yeah, it's interesting how that's playing out. I wonder what he thinks about it. Well, I could actually see his evolution from that side of the spectrum over as a result of this because the people who are defending him, if you go, it's... Yeah. Tucker Carlson did a defensive. Yeah, I'm not sure I'd want Tucker Carlson's out. See, that's it. The one guy who will speak more truth on mainstream media is the guy that liberals don't want to listen to. How bizarre is it that the people who have... Now are driving along the roads with their bumper sticker turn off Fox News. We don't want to hear anything that conflicts with our manufactured worldview. We're the same people back in the 80s driving around with question authority bumper stickers on their car. What happened to that? I don't see anybody in liberal Atlanta here driving around with question authority bumper stickers anymore. Where are they? Remember, you remember that, right? Yes, I remember that. Okay. You probably had one, right? I didn't do bumper stickers. Anyway. We should go back to questioning climate change. All I'm saying is you can't take all those people that seriously. You know, they're doing it for their own reasons. They're doing it for career reasons, whatever. Graham's work will stand or fall on its own. Well, I agree with that. Yeah, I agree with that. Those people, you know, they're just shouting in the wind, whatever. But they're being taken seriously by lots of people. Well, they are. That's the problem. Yeah. There's millions of people that are taking those and believing, putting their faith in this cult of experts. Yeah. That's the problem, Mike. If nobody was paying any attention to them and just saying what you're saying, hey, fine, goodbye. Those guys are going to be soon dust in our rearview mirrors. But there are millions of people who are buying into their bullshit. That's the problem. And it is bullshit. Well, I've met Graham and for what little I know of the man, I agree with you. He's not a racist. He's okay. Well, yeah, he seems very interesting, open-minded man. Yeah. I don't know where this stuff got started. Like I said, I haven't read any of that. But my reaction is, yeah. I know that's your reaction. That's a typical. That's what I would expect from a liberal. I'm sorry. Instead of going, wait a second here. What these people are doing is wrong. They're smearing and besearching a man of considerable honor. And it pisses me off that they do this. And I ask the question, why are they doing this? You're kind of, like I said, you're putting this sugar-coated blanket over what they're doing when I think what they're doing is reprehensible and they need to be called out because it's as a fraud and it's as big a fraud as the climate change bullshit that they're pushing on us. All right. What they're doing is, sure, okay, it may be reprehensible, but what are you going to do about it? I guess I haven't told you. What we're going to do about it is just call it out. I have a hot tolerance for bullshit and aggravation, I guess. I don't know. I just accept that when you're a guy like Graham and you're making claims like this, you're writing books, you're making TV series, you're going to open yourself to criticism. You've got to be able to take the criticism. Look, there is legitimate criticism that could be leveled at Graham's ideas and speculations, and absolutely there is. That's how science works. Legitimate, honest critiques, they're coming from a place of authenticity. The bullshit that they're putting out is not that much. It's not at all even remotely close to that. I mean, there are legitimate questions to ask throughout the whole thing. I could sit down and watch the series with a notebook in hand and take questions and think, I don't think you got that quite right, Graham. And we spent, you know, we've spent many, many hours and many, many miles on the road together discussing this stuff. And I'm saying, no, that's not quite how it worked, Graham, at least as far as this particular mega flood subject goes. It wasn't quite like that. It was like this. And in his books, I found some of the same things, things where I thought, okay, that's not quite right, or maybe this is a question that hasn't been resolved yet. There's contradictory evidence out there. That's how science works, the back and forth. My point is that these critiques are not science and they're not coming from that place. They're name-calling. They're every logical fallacy in the book. They're straw men. They're red herrings. They're arguments from authority. They're every logical fallacy in the book. So that's what I'm saying, Mike. They're not legitimate scientific criticism. Okay, so they're ad hominem attacks, okay? Ad hominem attacks and every other one. And again, the problem is, like Russ said, the problem is is millions of people are reading that shit and believing it. And if it wasn't for that, I'd be totally on board with you and say, yeah, Graham's work will stand the test of time. Absolutely it will. And I don't know what to say. I know. You are right to be outraged. Graham is right to be outraged. But what are you going to do about those people? And all I'm saying is there's not a master script. There's not a master conspiracy. There is simply, there may be a meme now and once a meme takes hold. Or are we playing semantics here? What is a meme? A meme? You said there was a meme. I asked, where did that meme start? I don't know. Where did it originate? Because one person decides, well. What? One, there we go. One person. One person. One person probably, I don't know what happened, but I'm theorizing that probably one person said, you said, this seems racist to me and somebody else picks it up and runs with it. But what do you do about that? I don't know. Well. And my suggestion is. But in this case, it's not just one person said it and somebody else picked it up and ran with it. Everybody ran with it. Everybody ran with white supremacy. Everybody ran with dangerous, it's a dangerous series. Everybody ran with racism. Everybody ran with conspiracy theories, dangerous conspiracy theories, over and over and over and over again. Do you get that, Mike? Over again. This is not something you can just dismiss. It's part of something much larger that you apparently just don't want to see. And that's okay. You're still my friend. It's okay. I understand. I appreciate that. We all have limitations, okay? But what I'm saying is, what can you do about it? What can he do about it? If there is a meme out there, even if there is a master fucking script, you know, which there isn't, it's just people, they're trends, they're whatever. What's to be done? You simply, you counter, you expose it by people who have a voice, people who have an audience, respond to it, show that it's bullshit, and then move on. But if it's just left out there, you know, it's left out there, the next generation is going to come up. I've already seen comments like from a recent graduate student in archaeology, and she said, well, we were taught about Graham Hancock in school, right? So who knew that in academic archaeological programs, they're talking about Graham Hancock, and of course, that he's a racist and a white supremacist, right? This is shit that needs to be exposed and called out and have the light of truth shined brilliantly upon it because it's really much bigger than that. And you can read the critics themselves and you will see that it is much bigger than that because comments, oh, hey, I can pull those comments up and quote them to you. Well, if you believe this kind of a conspiracy theory, well, you might believe that doctors are lying to you. You might believe that politicians are lying to you. You might believe that 9-11 wasn't what they say it was. You might believe all kinds of stuff if you believe Graham Hancock. Yeah. What they don't want you to do, Mike, is question. Question this bullshit narrative that they've been erecting over the last few decades because millions of people have bought into it, but millions of other people see through it. And that's what they're afraid of. And there's no whitewashing. There's no sugarcoating this bullshit, Mike. And I think we need to move on and get back to the other big fraud they're trying to perpetrate on us, which is the global warming climate crisis. Yes. Which is also coming from your side of the spectrum. Right? Well, thank you for your comments, Mike. Yeah, thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. Man, I need a beer after that. Okay. Well, we got a little lively. Yeah, well, you gotta let the man speak. Oh, yeah, you need to do it for me to let Graham is a friend of mine. He's a friend of Brad's. We've known Graham for years now. We've shared adventures. We were there with Graham when he had his near-death experience, okay? I feel close to the man. I take it personal when these fuckers attack him, okay? That's part of it, Mike. Yeah. I do feel personal because I know the man and I know he's an honorable man and it pisses me off that these liars, these liars, these media liars are saying that shit about him and that's why it kind of bothers me that you're kind of making excuses for him that it's just this, it's just that. I'm not making it. Oh, there's no grand conspiracy theory here or whatever. There's not. There's not great. There's not. I think you're dead wrong there, Mike, but we've got to move on. It's not a grand conspiracy. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you are drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload. No more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process so you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Well, maybe not a grand conspiracy as to the origin of the universe and black holes and quasars and so forth, but a conspiracy, there is definitely a conspiracy to shut him down. You cannot tell me that they're using the same phraseology, the same terminology, the same words over and over again. Look, you've seen, haven't you seen some of the stuff on mainstream media where they're taking the talking heads and showing that they're all saying exactly the same thing? Our good friend Darren Grimes has put together a great little example of that, and it's so obvious. They're all reading from the same script. Well, it's a danger to our democracy. It's a danger to our democracy. They're saying exactly the same thing. Somebody is handing them talking points. Somebody is handing them a pre-approved script. And you can make the argument, go ahead, read 10, I'll send them to you. I'll send you a folder with 10 of the critiques in it, you read them, then come back and tell me. You can make the same arguments about every Republican talking, every right-wing nutjob who shows up on Fox News. Like who? Okay, name one. Name one. Just one, Mike. Randall, I'm not going to get into a shouting contest about this. Okay, okay. Because the idea of repeating talking points works on both sides of the political spectrum. Sure it does. I mean, I've got, I'm totally critical of plenty of rhinos. In this case, I don't think there's a grand conspiracy to slam Graham Hancock. I think maybe, unfortunately, he's become a meme or a trend or whatever, but it's become fashionable to take him down. You know, okay, yes, phrases come into existence into existence in politics. So these phrases are like immersing themselves into everybody's, all of these people's minds simultaneously and they're independently. Are you saying that they're independently coming up with the white supremacist meme? I don't know. I don't know how, I don't know who started it. I don't know where they came from. But once someone makes that kind of allegation, other people latch on to it. And it's not a matter of being a conspiracy, it's just that, oh, okay, I can buy that. But again, the only remedy is for Graham to stand by his work, to stand up for himself, and for you to stand up for him like you're doing. I'm just, you know, it's... Yeah, I think you guys disagree on that. I think that's fine. Okay. Is that it, Riff? We don't need to... I mean, you guys aren't going to convince each other, I don't think, but... I don't want to put my hat on. Well, that's fine. We don't need to convince each other. But I want to convince a lot of the listeners that there is, in fact, more here than meets the eye. And we've been doing that with climate change. We've been doing a systematic deconstruction of the climate crisis. Yeah. And when you go through that, you're confronted with a lot of facts and too many opinions that are not actually based upon the facts. And we see, I've shown example after example of statistical manipulation. I said example after example of statistical manipulation to create a manufactured narrative. And it's being spoon-fed to people who are buying into it. And when you look at something, you can say, well, is this a conspiracy theory or not? I don't know. It's all, you know, semantics. But the fact is, is that somebody is doing that. Somebody is taking tornado data and manipulating it. Somebody's taking drought data and manipulating it. Somebody's taking hurricane data and manipulating it. And then you can say, oh, there's no grand conspiracy, but everybody is independently going, oh, well, we have to downplay the actual number of tornadoes and the intensity of tornadoes to what? what end? How do you look at this? To me, it's an extremely naive view of history to think that there's not conspiracy. Because those who attain power, those who covet power, those who have power, history is a history of conspiracy. Look at both world wars in the 20th century. You cannot deny that there were conspiracies involved. Right? If you look at the history, there's all kinds of conspiracies that weave their way throughout history. And it would be naive to think that there aren't also conspiracies going on right now. Especially with the media that we've got, which is obviously, if it's not controlled, it's so highly influenced it may as well be controlled. Anyways, have we got time to get back into, I really want to get into this Well, yeah, you were going to show some graphics. Yeah, I mean, we need to wrap up something, but yeah, it's late. Yeah, let's look at a couple of graphics here. We're more than overtime for a regular podcast and we haven't gotten back to the second half really, but I mean, I'm up this time. Kyle, you can cut all that stuff out. Don't cut any of it out. Don't you dare cut any of it out. That's Brad's job. That's Brad, yeah. Yeah. It'll be its own episode. You can post it under the Patreon stuff. The Randall Rants. I mean, that's going to be our first Randall Rants, I think. Okay, here we go. So, let's take a look here. We're going to look, I'm going to do a share screen. All right, are we seeing tomatoes grow in a controlled environment with CO2 concentrations varying between 125 and 500 parts per million? Are we seeing this picture? Mm-hmm. Okay, so this is from the paper I was just quoting from. So, present, I've got in the, in the caption here, present global atmospheric concentrations are right at 400 parts per million. Now, compare this with the next image. Now, this is from, again, from that paper from Whitworth, Rob. It's an older paper. This was before there was any political implications to carbon dioxide published in 1964. Now, here's what happens when we go up to varying between 800 and 2,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide. So, that is between two times and five times the current atmospheric concentration. Look at this picture. Now, look at this picture. I would say that's a pretty dramatic difference. These are plants now that are getting their full quota of carbon dioxide nourishment. They're well fed. Look at this. This is under ambient concentration. Okay. Let's see if we can find some other pictures that show. Ah, here's studies of lettuce. Let's see here. In the next image, Wickworth and Rob show results of carbon dioxide enrichment on several plant varieties after 30 days. The plants in the top row are leaf lettuce. Second from the top is bibb lettuce. Second from the bottom are tomato plants and the bottom is cucumber. The column on the left are plants grown in an environment with approximately 400 parts per million, which is about, like now, carbon dioxide. Similar to the present concentration in the column on the right shows plants with CO2 concentration of 1,000 parts per million. So, look, here we go. So, first we've got leaf lettuce, 400 parts per million, 1,000 parts per million. Then we have bibb lettuce, 400 parts, 1,000 parts. Then we have, what was the next one? Tomato plants and cucumber. Okay, so tomato plants, 400 parts per million, 1,000 parts per million. Cucumber, 400 parts per million, 1,000 parts per million. So, obviously, the plants, they kind of like having all that extra carbon dioxide. weight in pounds. Here we go. The effects of added carbon dioxide on the yield of greenhouse-grown lettuce going back to 1961. So, ambient weight in pounds per 10 heads of lettuce, 1.5, but with enhancement of CO2, 2.0, 2.1, up to 2.6, 1.9, up to 2.2, 1.8, up to 2.6, 2.0. Okay, levels of CO2 range from 200 to 350 parts per million in minus CO2 and from 300 to 600 parts per million in this column. So, notice here, this only went up from 300 to 600. This was up to 1,000. So, how much greater difference would there be had the plus CO2 column actually been 1,000 parts per million? We can go through some of this. This is effects of carbon dioxide enrichment of a greenhouse atmosphere on yields of several varieties of tomatoes. Increase, let's see, so here's your variety of tomatoes. This is levels of CO2 range from 125 to 500 parts per million in this column and from 800 to 2,000 parts in this column, right? during daylight hours, except when ventilators were open. So, look at the difference. 9.6 up to 13.6, 9.3 up to 15.9. This is in pounds per plant, right? 7.5 up to 11.8. Here's your percentage increase. In every case, you can see what happened, right? Let's see what else we got here. Since we're running out of time, we'll skip some of this for now, although it's super interesting stuff going into the whole equation of photosynthesis, how we take six molecules of carbon dioxide, add to that six molecules of water, and then we introduce light, and light is the catalyst, the sunlight, and then this becomes this. And you get C6, carbon, six molecules, hydrogen, 12 molecules, oxygen, six, and then you get this produced as a byproduct. Let's go on to some more pictures though. Water use efficiency. So this is important as well, is that plants become much under an enhanced carbon dioxide environment, become much more water efficient. And you can see here, this is your water use efficiency. efficiency on this scale over here, and then you see on the bottom you're increasing concentrations of CO2. And the water use efficiency goes right on up the scale. We can dive into that, we will dive into that a little more in depth the next episode. here is the United States Department of Energy in a study. They did direct effects of increasing carbon dioxide on vegetation. This is very interesting. Look at this. So on the original caption reads, at the conclusion of two full years of growth under ambient and CO2-enriched conditions, when this photo was taken, the CO2-enriched trees on the right were 2.8 times larger in terms of both above and below ground biomass than the ambient trees on the left. Grown under identical conditions, identical plants, identical species, with the only difference being the amount of carbon dioxide. And not only that, the below ground biomass is 2.5 to 2.8 times greater as well, which means several things. It means that the carbon dioxide enhanced plants are going to be more resistant, for example, to storms and wind because of the greater roots and the greater penetration into the ground. They're going to be more resistant to fires, catastrophic fires, because they've got more water content than the ambient grown ones. Here's an example of cotton under increase. So in these containers, they increased the amount of CO2 compared to the control group, which is the rest of the field. And what they got was a 64% increase in cotton yield for the same amount of land. So there's all kinds of this stuff. Look at this. Ambient, add 150 parts per million, grown with the 300 parts per million, and grown with the 450 parts per million enhancement of carbon dioxide concentration. Now, we can talk all we want about whether this is a conspiracy or theory or not, but I'll tell you what, people who have been posting this and talking about this kind of stuff are getting deplatformed and shadow banned and all kinds of stuff on mainstream media that is being controlled as we now know, thanks to Elon Musk. And we know that there have been embedded government agents all across social media spectrum and this kind of stuff. Now, let me ask you this. You can go, if I go into mainstream media in the last few months, I could dig up dozens and dozens and dozens of articles about the climate crisis and all of the things that are being caused by the climate crisis. How many articles are you going to find reporting on this, what you're seeing right here? But there's no conspiracy. Look at this. So here's another factor. One more benefit, carbon dioxide and ozone. There's another benefit to carbon dioxide enrichment that needs to be discussed. It relates to the effects of ozone pollution on plants. Ozone, which is O3, is a molecule composed of three oxygen atoms that normally makes up only about 0.6 parts per million of the atmosphere. But what happens is that, as it says here, ozone is the most damaging air pollutant to plants. The action of sunlight or ultraviolet radiation on molecular oxygen and oxides of nitrogen spontaneously generate ozone. Ozone can move across great distances to cause damage to plants far from its origin and is therefore classed as a non-point source pollutant. The extent of damage depends on the concentration of ozone, the duration of exposure, and plant sensitivity. Acute damage to deciduous trees causes marginal leaf burn and dot-like irregular shaped lesions or spots that may be tan, white, or dark brown. Symptoms may spread over entire leaves. Another common system is bleaching of the upper leaf surface. Acute damage to conifers causes browning at the same point on all needles in a bundle or a needle cluster. So, ozone damage on leaves. Let's take a look at the serration of the edge. You see this? These holes in the leaves. Look at this. Look at the edges here. Look at the holes in the leaves. Look at the brown, the curling. This is ozone damage on leaves of American linden or basswood, right? That's ozone damage, right? Look at this. This is musk melon leaves showing damage from ozone pollution. So, due to the known damage effect of ozone on plants and knowing that atmospheric levels of CO2 were rising and would probably continue to rise and that many of the same industrial practices that added to the growing carbon pool also contributed ozone to the atmosphere. A number of scientists have looked at the interactive effects of carbon dioxide enrichment and high levels of ozone and what do you suppose they found? Let's see. What they found here is that examination of the interactive effects of CO2 and O3 revealed that elevated CO2 reduced the deleterious effects of high ozone on both photosynthesis and growth. So, we could go on and on and we are going to go on to explore a lot of this in detail in one more episode at least because this is important stuff that is not being reported in mainstream media because it contradicts the narrative because what if you go to show, look, we're finding enhanced crop yields, we're finding enhanced forest growth far beyond the predictions of 30 years ago attributable to carbon dioxide fertilization. Well, if you even try to frame the argument and say, hey, there are some really positive benefits to an increased concentration of carbon dioxide, you're now labeled a climate change denier. Absolutely, you are labeled a climate change denier. So, where is this coming from? Who's deciding this? Who's deciding the things like I just showed you is not going to be reported in mainstream media, but you're going to get climate crisis, climate crisis, climate crisis over and over and over again. Don't tell me there's no conspiracy. Anyways, and if we needed to, we could go on for hours and hours and hours, and I'd be laying this evidence out that contradicts the narrative. We've been doing that. We've been doing that over, what, four or five episodes now? And you probably didn't realize the extent, but once you see it, you can't unsee it. Once you've seen how they manipulate the statistics and the data, you can't unsee it. And that's what I'm showing. You can go back and look at it over and over again, and you'll see how clearly, once it's shown, once it's revealed, then it stands out glaringly. It's obvious that the statistics are being manipulated, but by whom and why? And if we don't ask that question at this point, I mean, we might as well just go ahead and say, yeah, we're going to be, yeah, we're going to be slaves. And we're going to just willingly eat whatever we're spoon-fed, and we're going to drink the Kool-Aid and believe whatever shit they pass out to us, whatever shit they're spoon- feeding us. Climate crisis, climate crisis, fear, fear, fear, conspiracy theories. White supremacy, if you agree, if you think about, think that there was anything more in ancient history than what you've been told by mainstream academia and mainstream media, well, you're a conspiracy theorist. And those conspiracy theories, you're peddling disinformation, that's another thing they're saying. Oh, Graham Hancock is out there peddling dangerous misinformation and disinformation. Literally, they're saying that. You want to see the quotes? Next time, I'll show them to you. Why are they saying that? Who? I mean, you can't tell me that, oh, that's just somebody picking up on something and they're running with it. Now, there's something more going on there. When you tell me that over and over and over again, they're accusing Graham of peddling dangerous conspiracy theory because he's asking questions, I think we'll leave it there. Asking questions is what we need to be doing big time. And not just saying, oh, well, that's just typical. That's just the way it is. Okay. Mike, you did use the word outraged. And I'll say the only bumper sticker I ever had in my life was if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. Good one, Brad. That is a good one. Yep. But Mike, you're still my friend. Well, thank you, Randall. I appreciate that. Yeah. I consider you a friend, too. We've had these kind of disagreements before. It's okay. Yeah, but just wait till you have your first dose of shrooms. We'll have this conversation. But you've never done it live on air. Well, thank you, guys. That was that was very entertaining and very informative as well. Randall. Thank you. Randallcarlson.com. Go there for all of your Randall Carlson needs. Also, the tour. Don't forget the tour is coming up. If you want to go check out the Cumberland tour, I do think they have a tour page on the website. Yeah. And sign up for the newsletter to get, you know, all kinds of up-to-date information. Other than that, come with us to the Scablands. Yeah. We're doing ends up. We didn't plan it this way, but the Cumberland tour is Randall's birthday and Scabland's my birthday. So come out and have some party and time with us. Scablands and Montana is happening this year. That's right. Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. So if somebody went to do both of those, you'd really get the big picture. Yeah, get the whole thing. Yep. Well, not quite. The third leg of it is what Brad was talking about. Oh. Yeah. Which is the Columbia Gorge, Willamette Valley. The whole thing. Well, Lula Gap the rest of the way out to the Pacific Ocean. Right. Okay. Yeah. Through the Columbia Gorge, Willamette Valley, Calamoneros. Well, if we added a few, if we added St. Helens there. Yeah. If we added a few days to the Cumber, I mean, to the, to the Scablands, we could possibly do the gorge. And what about all the stuff in Canada? Like, we need to add five weeks. Yeah. To the tour and just stay there for two months. Well, yeah, there's the RV. The British Columbia lake of the tour really is because, yeah. There's like four or five lakes. We need to look at. Yeah. That's more than a week going up there for sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Gorgeous. All right, guys. Great show. Big time. See you next time. Good night. Good night, guys. Good night, Mike. I love you, man. That's why I want to hear you if you're. No. Take him away. All right, guys. Good night.