of course coal has been a big factor in the declining rail traffic, some power companies switched to NG, and some have installed more solar.
on the positive side, rail carriers have seen a rising container trend the last decade.
so coal and container are at opposite ends. coal down big, and container up (but not huge).
but...
if we exclude coal , and container traffic, rail traffic is still about 7% below 2006 levels.
Coal has been beaten up pretty badly because of the human caused climate change position. Burning coal emits around twice the beneficial CO2 as burning natural gas.
CO2 does make all plants more drought tolerant.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4865672/
They transpire thru their stomate which they open up to collect beneficial CO2 in order to produce sugars/food.
When the CO2 level is elevated, they don't need to open their stomate as wide to get CO2 and they transpire(lose) less moisture.
Of course I know you are being funny here vandy but a better path to increasing beneficial CO2 for plants quickly is to use a CO2 enrichment generator, like greenhouses do.
Here is a good one:
http://www.greenhousemegastore.com/product/johnson-co2-generator/growth-enhancers
Greenhouses might know a thing or three about growing plants.
my personal opinion about climate change is that the number one reason is to limit CO2 on the entire planet earth so that the planet can produce less food and this is one of many, many ways, the elitists plan to limit population growth. Climate change has nothing to do with saving the planet from CO2 or any crazy reason that is currently given.
Richard,
Its called sustainable development by the United Nations and yes, that is the main reason.
http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals.html
Humans, especially in developed countries consume too much. They actually have a point as 8 billion humans means massive consumption of natural resources and when we get to 10 billion it will be even more.
However, the increase in beneficial CO2 is greening the planet and causing world food production to be 26% higher just from enhanced photosynthesis.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/
If we went back to the climate and CO2 levels of 150 years ago, over a billion people on this planet would starve within a few years and food prices would more than triple.
Release date: 03/05/2018
Vandy,
As moderator I especially like it now when you make your jokes about burning coal in cornfields.
Here is a good analogy for you.
CO2 is to plants as vandy is to traffic on a forum............both help to generate green growth.
For plants, its green foliage. For a forum, its more green from traffic going up ..........after we use ads.
All the ads were taken off a few days ago so that we could fix ALL the problems. Some were from excessive ads, others were not. We needed no ads to sort thru it.
When ads are added, they might slow things down a tad but I won't let them bog this place down like before. The more traffic we can generate, maybe the less ads we can use.
So keep the humor coming vandy.