Image by Rakib Al Hasan from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The pagan witchdoctors are out in force —
This time an invisible spooky force called carbon dioxide is stealing away nutrients from food, at least that’s how the Washington Post propaganda team words it. It’s a “surging” culprit causing anemia in pregnant women which can lead to complications and “even death”. Stop the car! Is there no evil this molecule can not do?
This is pure climate-scare porn — carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster, and so it has this “awful” effect where crops bulk up more quickly, and without extra fertilizer, the mineral content and protein levels will be slightly diluted by the extra carbohydrate. And when I say slight, I mean barely measurably — in the last 37 years the levels of zinc in an undisclosed amount of chickpeas has fallen from 22% of our RDA to only 20%!
Let’s be clear: no one in the rich world eats chickpeas to get iron, protein and zinc, not if they can eat steak instead. All these nutrients are far higher in meat, and they are more absorbable too.
So this article is mostly at the concern-troll level. They pretend to care for the poor of Africa, but use their suffering to sell carbon reduction policies. It’s true the world’s poor rely on paltry rice and chickpeas for basic nutrition, but if we want to help them, the answer is to lift them out of poverty and give them a steak, not to change the global climate, cars, and electricity generation in order to get more zinc in their peas.
Weight for weight, beef contains three times the protein, four times the zinc, and twice the iron that chickpeas do. The minerals in beef are easier to absorb and also come with B12, B6, selenium, B3, B5, Vitamin A, E, and D.
At the very least, in the short term, it would be kind of us to help the poor get better fertilizer and richer soils. NPK fertilizer is essential (and that’s a challenge), but the soils are steadily depleted of iron, magnesium, boron, calcium, vanadium, iodine and twenty other trace minerals.
The invisible force making food less nutritious
By Naema Ahmed and Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post
Chickpeas and rice are not the only foods steadily growing less nutritious. Many of humanity’s most important crops — including wheat, potatoes, beans — contain fewer vitamins and minerals than they did a generation ago.
The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution.
Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth’s food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won’t get the nutrients they need to thrive.
More spooky associations:
On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million.
Nutrient decline in the last 30 years could just as easily be soil depletion from constant cropping with no replacement of trace minerals. Can poor farmers get seaweed spray in Chad? Can they afford blood and bone fertilizer?
Ultimately, Myers said, the best way to protect human health is for people to stop releasing so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which not only depletes the nutritional value of crops but leads to escalating heat waves, intensifying floods and lengthening droughts that hurt food production around the globe.
How many windmills in Dubbo does it take to stop one case of anemia in Nigeria? Sadly, the answer is infinity-and-another-ARC-Grant.
The diet witchdoctors have done this all before back in 2014. Back then, the fear campaign was about rice losing some iron, and the answer I calculated to compensate for the tiny decline was for the world’s poor to eat one extra chickpea.
REFERENCES
Protein — 7.02g, Zinc — 0.72mg, Iron — 1.04mg
Protein — 21.6g, Zinc — 3.43mg, Iron — 2.29mg
For the people who believe this Climate Change Claptrap, Barnaby Joyce’s words must be like a deathknell. “Abolish the Climate Change Authority” is a call to arms for common sense, of which these often highly intelligent but wisdom bereft individuals almost completely lack. ON FTW!
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A large proportion of the aged population has an iron deficiency caused by a lowering of the ability to absorb iron.
If you are suffering from dizziness at 65+ this is probably the culprit. An iron tablet every third day is the answer.
At 60+ I recommend a standard blood test annually in any case. Better to go with hard data and its free under Medicare.
Dorevitch now has the blood test data for a large percentage of the population. I doubt that epidemiologists have access or use it. If they did we would not have worried about Covid. A great way to save A$384 Billion. Josh Frydenberg should have asked for the national blood test results before handing the borrowed funds to ravenous ALP premiers. They were available.
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The Climate Council was formed in 2013 after the Australian government, led by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, disbanded the Climate Commission, which was previously funded by taxpayers. The Climate Council operates as a non-profit organization funded by public donations to continue its work on climate change communication and advocacy.
And yes, CC is a non-government organisation that was founded by Tim Flannery
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The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) is a department of the Australian Government. The department was established on 1 July 2022, superseding the water and environment functions from the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment and energy functions from the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.[
The inaugural head of the department is the Secretary, David Fredericks.[4] In July 2025 Anthony Albanese announced the appointment of Mike Kaiser as Secretary. He was a Queensland State cabinet minister who was forced to resign and then moved to the Queensland Government Office in London UK, he returned later to a senior NBN Co executive role appointed by the Rudd Labor Federal Government
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These clueless donkeys believe in their fantasy world and yet the data and evidence is very easy to find, but it doesn’t tally with their extremist point of view.
Africa today has increased their population by over 1200 million since 1950 and their life expectancy has increased from 36 years then to 64 years today.
This is the greatest increase in population and life expectancy in Human history or for the last 300,000 years and only takes 5 minutes to find online.
So why do the prefer to spread BS and lies? IOW we now live in the safest climate / weather in Human history and this has occurred in only the last 0.1% of our existence. Why can’t they just look up the data and wake up?
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Here’s the UN data for African population from 1950 to 2025.
That’s 227 million in 1950 and 1530+ million today.
Just click on the life expectancy button since 1950.
https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countries/afr/africa/population
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” So why do they prefer to spread BS and lies? ”
Easy question.
Answer: the Blob rules.
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Because in the Kingdom of Lies, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
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Junk. Is the word we were looking for.
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This is a lesson in how to take potentially valid basic science and turn it into a world ending disaster headline. It reeks of desperation. Whatever else is happening in the world, there is a lot less talk about climate change now compared to even two or three years ago. The government’s persistence is either at the behest of supranational powers, or due to the amount of Australian superannuation money tied up in renewable investments. Or some combination of both?
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FWIW
Mandate galvanised iron rainwater tanks for drinking water!
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Here’s a facebook clip showing the stupidity of batteries. Under 5 minutes. ToM
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18jsYQ6oRY/
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A very good summary by Lars Schernikau. One takeaway is that building a battery requires 450 times the energy that the battery will store.
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Here’s global life expectancy since 1770 = 28.5 years.
1900 = 32 years etc
Global life expectancy today has more than doubled and OWI Data has these graphs for all the continents, plus global life exp and I’ve added in Australia and Japan and both over 83 years today.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?country=OWID_WRL~Americas~OWID_EUR~OWID_AFR~OWID_ASI~OWID_OCE~AUS~JPN
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Meanwhile, the American Chemical Society (Ag Science Div) reports other Experts who find that a CO2 enriched atmosphere not only improves Chick Pea germination, but also boosts nutritional value:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsagscitech.5c00703
”This study examined the effects of elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on chickpea seed (Cicer arietinum L.) germination and phytochemical content. The seeds were germinated under two CO2 concentrations: ambient (approximately 400 ppm) and elevated (approximately 750 ppm). The results showed that the high CO2 environment significantly improved germination rates and accelerated seedling growth. More importantly, it led to a substantial increase in bioactive compounds, thereby significantly enhancing antioxidant capacity. Metabolomic profiling confirmed that the elevated CO2 treatment enriched the levels of valuable flavonoids, such as formononetin and biochanin A. Taken together, these findings suggest that elevated CO2 represents an innovative strategy for biofortifying germinated chickpeas, significantly increasing their content of health-promoting phytochemicals.”
Obviously these Experts are Fallen Experts – probably in the pay of Big Coal.
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And the WaPo Experts identify another hideous threat to the unsuspecting Chick Pea consumer.
Sugar.
More sugar.
Satan’s white powder.
Surging empty calories, obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay.
“Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. “
Shirley some sort of restriction on Chick Pea production and trafficking is warranted. The UN must act.
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Yes, and the other name for extra carbohydrate in plant foods is “fibre” which would also be boosted by higher CO2 levels.
But good point. When they want you to like plant foods they call it starch or carbohydrate. When they want you to panic and give them a bigger grant they call it sugar.
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The Periodic Table, chemist Primo Levi on the story of a carbon atom as a basis of life. Worth repeating…
‘It is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one that concerns us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream: it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the carbon which was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.’
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This is a textbook example of junk science. Robert Malone’s recent Substack piece on Anthony Fauci perfectly describes “scientism” — the outward appearance of science used to push agendas while stamping out questioning and skepticism.
Researchers rely heavily on government grants, so they must conform to the approved narrative to keep the money flowing. It’s a closed shop. Challenge the system and you’re out.
Imagine the perfect grant-harvesting study: claim modern farming has stripped zinc from our food, weakening our immune systems and fuelling the COVID pandemic. One neat story that taps both agriculture and health funding buckets.
The good news boys and girls is that most Australian broadacre farmers (wheat, chickpeas, etc.) have been adding zinc to fertilisers for about 40 years. Farmers are nice citizens but it wasn’t to protect community health — it was to boost root growth, yields, and profits. Never criticise a farmer with your mouth full.
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That’s a good read. The word monopsony has been added to my vocabulary.
The closed shop analogy relating to the dependent relationship between government grants and a prevalent narrative is reinforced by MSM (whether that be by design or a journalist is unwittingly participating in the process). I could send Robert Malone’s substack article to several friends and family, but l won’t because as soon as they see Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name, they’ll rule a line through it. They won’t objectively assess the article, embedded prejudices will override the content.
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” In the last 37 years the levels of zinc in an undisclosed amount of chickpeas has fallen from 22% of our RDA to only 20%!”
That figure means nothing without soil samples , where do they think the zinc comes from.
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They would have us believe that it is a vegetable apocalypse now.
Says Colonel Kurtz: “The hummus, the hummus!”
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“Nutrient decline in the last 30 years could just as easily be soil depletion from constant cropping with no replacement of trace minerals. ”
Well of course! Anyone who thinks some factory mix of ‘fertiliser’ can replace what plants take out of the soil is dreaming!
The answer here is to drive more cars past the farm! One of the most common pollutants released from tyre wear is zinc, quite noticeable in road runoff.
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That’s interesting KP. If you’ve ever seen a broadacre seeder which is commonly a seeder bar and air seeder cart there is a large number of tyres. Plus, these days the sowing tynes also have press rollers, made from rubber. The farmer could be self fertilising while sowing 🙂
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Checking on Zinc in road runoff, I learned a new acronym:
Tire and road wear particles (TRWPs)
Leading to the insight that the road wears too. Who Knew?
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The analytical chemist left in me is suspicious about these analyses of food. Usually, when crops are sampled, a sample is weighed, then dried and weighed again. The dry matter is the part analysed. Therefore, the extent of drying has an effect on how a change looks expressed on the “as sampled” weight compared to dry weight. Now this “as sampled” weight also varies by time of day, time since last watering/rainfall, whether the person sampling prefers dead-looking leaves or fresh juicy ones and so on. Over history, it S possible that a fundamental shift happened when during was done in a microwave oven, not an electric element heated oven or a gas burning oven.
There is a lot of room for errors, including errors of deliberate intent. You grow to be suspicious of all chemical analyses that do not include proper uncertainty brackets when nothing prevents their routine use (especially when the boundaries are so wide that one could drive a combine harvester through them). Geoff S
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I took a few chemistry classes in the early 1960s. Analyses were conducted in a manner called “wet chemistry”. We took a field trip to the U. S. Bureau of Mines Pittsburgh Research Center and saw a demonstration of newer technology.
In your text, should “during” be curing?
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I supposed drying was intended but the typo curing is likelier.
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Human calories per day are much higher than 60 years ago.
And today there are 5.2 billion MORE people to feed than 60 + years ago.
When will these liars and urgers look up the data and wake up?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply?country=OWID_WRL~AUS~OWID_AFR~OWID_EUR~OWID_ASI
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After a summary of the report, the pigs are fuelled ready for takeoff.
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Yes, grains are formulated into intensive animal feeds as an energy source. The protein and mineral sources are formulated in to acheive the desired balanced (energy:amino acids:minerals) diet.
Us humans (usually!) have the happy circumstances to be able to diversify our diets to achieve the ideal balanced intake, although most of us tend to go heavy on the carbs (bread, pasta, potatoes, and beer).
The dilution effect of growing higher yielding crops (via genetic improvement and fertiliser) is a simple and well known fact of grain farming, well documented for decades:
Higher-yielding grain crops typically have lower protein and mineral percentages due to a phenomenon known as the “dilution effect”.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378429023000382
Therefore, from an animal nutritionist’s viewpoint it is a complete non event, and can have some economic benefits to the farmer:
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Is that Naema Ahmed and Sarah Kaplan from the Agronomy Department of the WAPO? Kaloo kalay, such scientific acumen from these two chick pea induced windbags.
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During the Copenhagen COP the delegation from China told delegates that during 3,600 years of recorded civilisation history in China there were three warmer periods than present time and each warmer period brought increased prosperity as food and other crop yields increased.
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I am president of the ‘I hate chickpeas society’. They do not compute with my digestion.
Should be banned in order to save manufacturing of toilet paper.
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So fundamentally and irreversibly change the global economy so that chickpeas may contain 3.2 percent more nutritional iron?
Sign me up!
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From the WAPo: “Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere,”
Am I the only person that finds such prouncments silly? In Carbon Dioxide (CO₂), the weight composition is approximately 27.3% Carbon and 72.7% Oxygen.
If any sense can be made of this sort of thing it would be that Oxygen is surging relative to Carbon.
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That’s why carbon sequestration (CCS) is such a dumb idea. Most of what is being sequestered is oxygen, not carbon.
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Zinc supplements are incredibly cheap … a small amount of Zinc Sulphate each day is sufficient … even at the level of 50mg per day is quite reasonable.
There are more exciting options such as chelated Zinc but those cost more. If you are seriously dirt poor then just take a tiny pinch of Zinc Sulphate and don’t stress over the chickpeas.
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