Part of climate change sickness is that every issue under the sun is warped by the venal efforts of opportunists to belly up to the slops trough.

Nitrogen's role in climate change will be highlighted at an event on 7 December at the COP-15 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Event organisers will be calling for a new assessment of nitrogen and climate, which will identify innovative nitrogen management strategies for global climate change mitigation and associated co-benefits to society.

"Nitrogen and climate interactions are not yet adequately included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment process. There is an urgent need to assess the possibilities of nitrogen management for climate abatement and at the same time increase food security, while minimising environmental and human health impacts."

Dr Palm added, "We believe that in tackling nitrogen new opportunities for climate abatement will be created."

Accounting for the nitrogen cycle in models that purport to describe the behaviors of the environment and climate is necessary. Without such completeness the models are amateurish. Similarly, the effects of CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere on plant growth on lands and in the seas is necessary. Together, nitrogen and CO2 enrichment have a large effect which needs to be better understood so that future effects can be better anticipated. A linear change is improbable, especially since full understanding will require consideration of other nutrients and how they might limit or enhance effects.

In a manner of speaking they need to raise their level of understanding at least to the level of a backyard gardener, though little of true value will be achieved until they have greater sophistication. This is unlikely so long as the focus is on climate change. The whole idea of "nitrogen management for climate abatement" is nonsensical. Nitrogen is too important, too central to civilization, to be crassly manipulated by narrow minded and short sighted opportunists riding the climate change bandwagon.

The INI team believes that it is essential to untangle the complexity of the nitrogen and carbon cycle, identify the advantages of nitrogen management for climate abatement and investigates the costs and barriers to be overcome. Such an assessment needs to distinguish between developed areas where there is already an excess of nitrogen and the developing parts of the world where nitrogen management can help increase food security. Improved Nitrogen management will help limit fertilizer use, increase its efficiency and increase carbon sequestration in soils, decrease N2O emissions, while limiting other environmental and human health impacts.

This is nonsense. It sort of sounds thoughtful but it's just a checklist of buzzwords used without insight or even elementary comprehension. It's isn't "management" that is needed, it is improved agronomic and energy technologies. Agronomic systems that use more nitrogen - but do so more effectively - are necessary to increase food production to levels required in the very near future. Energy systems that emit less gaseous nitrogen compounds (i.e. NOx) while producing more usable energy are necessary to increase energy production to levels required in the very near future. Neither objective is advanced by an attitude of "management" since this is merely code for centralized ham-handed controls by ignoramuses.

We really do need to be more competent, professional, about these issues. Politicians and their potted scientists bellying up to the slops trough and blundering around in matters that they have only the most childish understanding of is a worse disaster for civilization as well as the environment than the problems and threats that they use to leverage themselves into power and riches. The more apparent these threats are to you the more you should oppose their activities. The threats are real but these are not the people who should be be developing policies to address them. Their ideas are infantile, their understanding is minuscule, and their general maturity is low.

We need adult supervision.