Must-Read: Cosma Shalizi (2014): Review of Oliver Morton (2008): Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet

Must-Read: Cosma Shalizi (2014): [Review of Oliver Morton (2008): “Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet”][]:

Of Heliophagy: I cannot remember the last time I read a popular science book with such enjoyment, or learned so much from it….

Photosynthesis… relayed by telling the story of how we came to… understanding… the lives of its discoverers… biochemistry… isotopes and radioactive decay… molecular bonding and the interaction of light and electricity, the biophysics of free energy flow through cells and through molecules, crystallography, the molecular biology which let us isolate and manipulate individual enzymes, and so on…. discovery, rivalry, insights and false paths, human and biological ingenuity, and ultimately a deep understanding of one of the fundamental processes of life as we know it….

The evolution of photosynthesis… everything from the origin of life to plate tectonics to the spread of grasses over the last few million years. Again, much of it is told through stories of discovery and the history of the science. It is necessarily more conjectural than the very settled science of how photosynthesis works, but none the less fascinating for all that. The… “climate/carbon crisis”. Agriculture already had non-trivial impacts on climate, but our real change began with the Industrial Revolution and the vast growth in consuming fossil fuels…. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has already drastically increased… is good at trapping heat radiated back from the ground… warm[ing] the Earth. The exact effects depend on incredibly complicated and ill-understood feedback processes…. To take these uncertainties as ground for complacency, though, seems grotesque.

Our global civilization runs at something like 40 terawatts…. Tidal and geothermal energy are too localized and small-scale…. Nuclear fission looks more attractive when one compares long-lived radioactive waste to long-lived carbon dioxide as a pollutant, but there are very real practical obstacles. All our other options are ultimately solar…. Morton is very hopeful about the last two, and especially about what real molecular engineering might be able to do in the space intermediate between photovoltaic plates (high efficiency, but also high cost) and naturally-occurring leaves (low efficiency, but they grow)…. A marvelous book, filled with wonders: I strongly urge you to encounter them for yourself.