Sunday, March 25, 2007

Monoterpenes Slow Global Broiling

"Fragrance from Pine Forests Helps to Slow Climate Change"
European Commission News Alert issue 25
08 June, 2006

"Climate change is one of the greatest environmental, social and economic threats facing the planet. It is believed that boreal forests play a very important role in both climate regulation and the global carbon cycle.

Monoterpenes are plant volatiles that give pine and spruce forests their characteristic aroma...There is growing evidence that naturally emitted monoterpenes contribute notably to the formation of atmospheric aerosols (tiny particles of solid or liquid suspended in a gas), which in turn affect climate directly by bouncing sunlight back into space or by seeding clouds."

Source: Tunved P. et al. 2006 "High natural aerosol loading over boreal forests", Science 312: 261-263

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The Cannabis plant produces an abundance of monoterpenes and other atmospheric aerosols. Cannabis grows in more soil and climate conditions, at a much faster rate, than pine trees. Widespread, intensive Cannabis agriculture could potentially have a much greater effect on slowing global broiling than any other agricultural crop. Cannabis is the premier choice of an agricultural resource that can be cultivated in rotation, as a beneficial companion crop, grown organically to produce a globally distributed, sustainable supply of clean biofuels, while sequestering carbon and other pollutants from the atmosphere. Any agricultural resource that produces atmospheric monoterpenes, is a crop that mankind cannot afford to ignore any longer.

Time is the limiting factor in the equation of survival. Each spring planting season that passes is gone forever. Mankind's rudimentary understanding of how the ecosystem works is not sufficient for an accurate prediction of how much time we have left to repair the damage that's being done to the environment, our economic system, and our social evolution. Synergistic collapse of these elements is the greatest threat to all life on this planet. Because of time lags that preclude our awareness of where we are in the extinctionistic paradigm we have created, it is impossible to predict when synergistic collapse will become irreversible.

It is the individual responsibility of every person who understands the significance of Cannabis agriculture to teach others about the benfits of Cannabis, so that we may all move forward, beyond the counter-productive prohibition of the world's best hope for recovering a sustainable future for the Earth.