By Tom Kimmel
Well, that last week’s introduction to this complex subject was almost too exciting for me to handle, particularly as I had a temporal incongruity in the middle of it all. We will keep wading through, but first a digression about Tall Grass Prairies. The Midwest was full of Tall Grass and Short Grass prairies back in olden times. Locally we have two good examples of the Tall Grass ones—the oldest was established years ago over at the entrance coming into Fernwood, which is on Rangeline Road just a couple of miles north of Buchanan and always worth the trip. My friend, Max Medley, collected the seeds for Big Bluestem for that planting, and possibly several of the other grasses. And a more recent one, which is on the several acres around the base of the very high (tall) WAUS FM radio station antenna tower which is more or less at the eastern edge of the Andrews campus. You can drive down Kephart Lane about a third of the way and turn left on Timberland until it ends at Hillcrest Drive which is one of the entrances to the campus and you are right there. Places are available to pull off the road and walk over to the prairie. The late Dennis Woodland was the instigator. He had tried establishing a prairie once before over by the new science hall and that did not work out so well when someone tried to do the annual burn of the prairie. Burning every fall is standard prairie procedure as it kills annual weed seeds and also woody shrubs and trees. They do not try to do that anymore, so do not worry.
The dominant grass here is Big Bluestem Andropogon gerardii. You will note where the other common name—turkeyfoot—comes from by looking at the seed head. Prairies are a combination of grasses and forbs. By definition, a forb is a “non-woody herbaceous flowering plant that is not a grass, sedge, or rush.” By the radio tower the main forb appears to be rudbeckia, black eyed susan. Another tall grass is Panicum virgatum, Switch Grass and this comes in many colors from a grey-green to a reddish green. It has the most potential for making a lot of pounds of cellulose more per acre than about any other plant, once the selections are made. Another tall grass is Sorghastrum nutans which used to be called Indian nut grass until the sensitive woke people took over academia and decided that anything with the name ‘Indian’ in it was bad because the indigenous peoples of the new world were labelled that by Columbus (another really bad person for discovering the new world and starting the whole colonizing business, which is very bad, as Karl Marx explained) because he was headed for the real South Asian India when he ran ashore on the New World. We do not want to offend these sensitive peoples so it is now called Prairie Grass in our price list. The fourth tall grass prairie grass is Little Bluestem, Schizachyrium scoparium. It does not sound right to have some thing with ‘Little’ in the name be in the tall grass prairie. I am just repeating what I read.
The really tall prairie forbs are all Silphiums—Compass Plant, laciniatum, Prairie Dock, terebinthina, Cup Plant, perfoliatum, and Rosin Weed, integrifolium. I only grow Cup Plant and it gets about ten feet tall. All have long blooming yellow flowers. About half of the blooming perennials sold in garden centers these days started out being native prairie plants, and then selections were made—called cultivars and sometimes nativars. Somewhere in my research on this subject, there was a number mentioned of the tons of grass roots per acre in a native grass prairie, and it was a lot and was ten times the weight of roots from annual plants such as corn. The roots go down many feet and some of them rot and then that makes the twelve feet of good rich black topsoil common here in the Midwest. And that is our nature nugget of the day.
Over the years I have read a great deal about geology and recommend highly John McPhee’s series on geology as he is the best writer ever and very good at doing research. Besides that, I have met people who follow the short chronology for the earth that is Biblically based and those who follow the long chronology, which is the standard scientific one that includes continental drift, glaciation, evolution of all living things, and geotectonics that make mountains go up, followed by erosion that brings them down. I suggest that both sides are normal well-meaning people, that neither are sinners nor saints, that both have put some intellectual effort and purpose into their studies. Accusing one side or the other of being either dumb or evil is not necessary. In fact, I think that most people can get through life quite nicely without going to all the work of resolving the scientific/Biblical geologic dichotomy. Those who want to study both can do so. Those who want to raise their children without them being exposed to whichever other side they think is the other side, are in for a very difficult and disappointing life. Sooner or later every person will grow up and get exposed and then come to their own conclusions. The most that a parent can hope for is for their children to respect them for intellectual honesty. Any parent who tries to fool their children is in for a long and lonely life.
My purpose in writing this book review is not to either convert someone or to dissuade someone, but merely to do a good book review as this book is full of more information than I have found in any one book in years. If you do not like what I say, then try to keep in mind that I did not write the book, I merely purchased it. Here is a little background and then we will return to the book and its scientific presentation. The short chronology people follow, more or less, the work of the Irish archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) who spent years studying the Biblical account and he came up with the calculation that creation began on October 23, 4004 BC, specifically, near nightfall preceding that day. If you google “Institute of Creation Research”, you will find a lengthy and sympathetic viewpoint of Ussher as a scholar. He certainly put the effort into his research.
I googled this subject and there are all kinds of websites on the subject. One of them is by Larry Pierce, and he says: “The age of the earth is one of the most contentious issues in the creation/evolution debate.” I can understand why some of you may wonder what a smart person, such as I am, doing trying to make sense of this subject. And before the founding of the Medo-Persian Empire secular history does not supply us with any reliable dates. “For events before this time, Ussher relied solely on data from the Bible to erect his historical framework. He chose the death of King Nebuchadnezzar as a reliable date upon which to anchor all the earlier biblical dates.” He worked meticulously backward from there. Ussher used the chronologies in the Hebrew texts of Genesis 5 and 11 and his detailed calculations cover over 100 pages in the original document. “After consulting astronomical tables, he picked the first Sunday on or after the autumnal equinox to begin the year 4004 BC. There is further discussion about reconciling the Julian, the English, and the Gregorian calendars.
And so we can see where the short-time view of world history and pre-history came from and, hopefully, conclude that believers or followers of that chronology are honest and well-meaning people. I do not get paid enough to make any bald statement about what is right and what is wrong although I may drop a hint or two as to what one finds while looking at the geological record.
And then, if you want to know where the Seventh-day Adventists get most of their information from, you need to research George McCready Price (1870-1963) who was a Canadian creationist and teacher and a geologist of sorts, largely self-taught. He “argued that true science involves deriving absolute truths by inductive syllogism from known truths.” You have to give him credit for trying. I have not read his books as they are very expensive on the used book market. More or less, he posited that the geological record was a result of the Noahtic Flood—thus meaning that the universal and cataclysmic flood moved a great deal of dirt and soil and rocks around burying things in ecological zones. This meant that plants and animals that lived in the bottom of the ocean were buried underneath those things living in swamps and then those in grasslands and then on top of mountains. There is a causal relationship between ecological zones by elevation and the geological record that follows evolutionary progression of plants and animals.
For this to work, there cannot be any in situ growing of plants or animals in the geological record. Also, he assumed that the evolutionists were suffering from confirmation bias and thus would look at the geological record as supporting evolution theory. And, concomitantly, if a person studied the geological record from his viewpoint, they would find support for the short biblical chronology and its Noahtic Flood.
Anyhow, we were trying to describe carbon and specifically carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. First of all, we need to define the term, ‘Greenhouse’, which is never done in this book. It is a glass glazed building which lets light in as glass is transparent to shortwave (ultraviolet) radiation in the form of light from the sun. Back in olden times, before plastics were invented, the only transparent substance in common use was glass. Therefore, when anyone wanted to grow plants inside in the winter and had some way of heating the building, with a fire or a fire making steam, it had to be glazed with glass. And glass is completely transparent to short wave light, so it comes through and then hits dirt on the ground or leaves on plants that are growing in the dirt on the ground and gets absorbed as heat. Now then, heat is infrared long wave radiation and it gets re-radiated back up toward space.
Strictly coincidentally, glass does not allow infrared light waves to pass easily through it. Glass absorbs the heat and re-radiates it in the infrared range, meaning heat. When this light hits the ground or dirt or some other absorbent color, it turns into more heat. Heat, which is infrared longwave radiation is then radiated back into space to the extent that it is not blocked by either glass or one of the greenhouses gases—carbon dioxide or methane being the most common. The glass in an old-fashioned greenhouse reflects this heat back to the earth raising the temperature. That is what it effectively does, although sometimes it is stated as the heat is absorbed and re-radiated, achieving the same thing. The glass in an old-fashioned greenhouse was the only transparent sheet that could be found to cover a structure before polyethylene or polycarbonate were discovered and these substances are used as greenhouse or poly house coverings in the modern world for any number of structural reasons.
Carbon dioxide, CO2, and methane, CH4, in the atmosphere, act just like the glass does in the microcosm of an old-fashioned glass greenhouse, or your own car on a hot day in the sun in the parking lot. Here is what the internet says happens, and I did not, because I cannot, make this up. “Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a linear molecule, but certain vibrations make it asymmetrical. This creates a changing charge balance (dipole moment) that allows it to interact with infrared light, unlike abundant symmetric gases like nitrogen and oxygen.” “About half of the re-emitted infrared energy heads back down toward Earth’s surface, preventing it from escaping directly into space and keeping the planet warm enough to support life.” By now you are probably sorry that you asked. You may understand why the author of this book did not go to the work of trying to explain how this all works. Next time, do not ask me to try to explain it, just accept it by faith.
Feel free to look up the electromagnetic spectrum on the internet where you will find that artificial intelligence says this: “Infrared (IR) and Ultraviolet (UV) are invisible forms of electromagnetic radiation located on opposite ends of the visible light spectrum. IR has longer wavelengths, lower energy, and is felt as heat, while UV has shorter wavelengths, higher energy, and causes tanning or damage.” You can also google “carbon dioxide and infrared radiation” which will explain it all in great detail, even to how many micrometers long the infrared wavelengths are.
We are not done with the book review, we are, in fact, just getting some of the basics explained. The book is much more interesting than this introduction and will keep us occupied for weeks. You will pay attention to this series when you realize how many trillions of dollars are about to be wasted on politically inspired feel-good projects that are ineffective in their goal of saving the world from some future catastrophe of global warming, also known as ‘climate change’. You will notice that all the nay sayers, prophets of doom, purveyors of scare tactics, have not bothered to attempt to explain how this physics of long wave and short wave works. They just repeat what they hear the national media repeat, over and over. This works into their axe to grind of how bad freedom is, particularly economic freedom and how much we need a political dictatorship to take over all of our decisions and make us poorer and more dependent upon them, the governing class. I could go on but that would digress too much.
For you to be well enough informed to be able to vote rationally, then you will need to get up to speed on this ‘global warming’ business. In order to keep you focused on the importance of this subject, just remember how many billions of dollars were recently wasted by the Detroit automobile companies on electric car development. While thinking about this last bit of news, you may want to mull over the kind of job that the mass media has done in explaining anything about all this to you. Fortunately, your hometown newspaper is taking this waste of money and this apocalyptic vision of the world seriously—seriously enough to attempt to explain it.
Thanks for wading through this far. We may interrupt the science lesson of the day with some local news every so often.
