Saturday 24 January 2015

Parable of the weeds

Which verse in the Bible mentions removing as many weed seeds as possible ? 
Matt 13v29 has Jesus saying that the owner of a field," told his servants to leave the weeds alone in case they pulled up the wheat." How come Jesus never thought of selective herbicides, now that would have been prophetic. How come God didn't influence the genes of the weeds to make them only grow small, that way they could still provide nectar & seeds for wildlife yet not interfere with the crop for human needs.
Matt 13v30 has the owner advise the servants to go at harvest and first collect the weeds, tie them in bundles and then gather the wheat but in real life that would not be sensible. If using a sickle you would cut the whole lot and throw the large weed plants aside as you went along. If using a combine you would spray roundup to kill the whole lot so it would be dry to go through but there might be seeds of a certain size which were difficult to remove from the wheat grains. In Bible times when there was only hand winnowing there would be a whole load of seeds that might have remained in the wheat, some if eaten could be harmful to health.
Matt 13v26 "When the wheat sprouted and formed ears, then the weeds also appeared" but weeds mostly appear around the time of wheat sprouting, certainly long before heading. Also why would it need an enemy to sow weed seeds when there are always so many in the soil seed band. However it does happen eg wild oats among the purchased seed or weeds seeds blowing in or carried in on machinery.
In any case CO2 is essential plant food and the increase so far has mostly been beneficial to plant growth & contributed to crop yields.
The real issue here is why the world has not increased the proportion of nuclear power stations, which are a dispatchable supply. It is pitiful that the total stock of nuclear power stations has actually decreased over the last two decades. People need to make up their mind which is the bigger threat; possible global warming or possible nuclear disaster. For intermittent sources of electricity like from wind turbines or solar there would need to be invention of grid scale batteries - this is not even close to happening. It would be different if all countries were like Norway or Austria with high mountain lakes for hydro-electric or if the wind blew at a constant 20mph. For a national electricity grid supply must match demand at all times. For this reason fossil fuel power stations are on spinning reserve with their boilers running constantly ready for winter & night time when solar doesn't work or ready for calm weather when the wind turbines stop

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