In a world of bigger, hotter fires, it is time to think of forests as vital infrastructure, and to invest in preserving these resources for the future.
If you live in the northwestern half of the continent, as I do, there has been no escaping this year’s extraordinary wildfire season.
Tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes. Tourists and hikers destined for national parks such as Glacier, Waterton, Yosemite and Mount Rainier have had to cancel plans or suffer through noxious smoke drifting in from fires, some hundreds of miles away. Hardly a day goes by when a public health official isn’t warning people to stay inside or reduce physical activity.
Once the smoke clears, a more enduring problem will emerge. Forests play a large role in regulating climate change and rainfall patterns over land. They also act as filters for water consumed by hundreds of millions of people.
But once trees catch fire, they unleash ash, sediments and various noxious chemicals. And heat from fires undermines soil stability. Then, when heavy rain falls, tainted water slides into rivers rather than seeping into underground aquifers. If it rains hard enough, flooding often follows, especially when there are no trees to take up what moisture is absorbed into the soil.
The inevitable overload of carbon and sediment coming from a big fire can interfere with a water treatment plant’s disinfection process, just like a dishwasher with a plugged drain. When that happens, carbon reacts with chlorine and produces undesirable chemical byproducts, including known and suspected carcinogens.
The science of wildfire hydrology has been around for some time. But most government agencies wouldn’t consider funding research into this field until the 2002 Hayman fire burned nearly 138,000 acres of forest in the Colorado Rockies, producing catastrophic results.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Parisians duck down to evade German sniper fire following Nazi surrender of Paris, 1945
If you ever wondered what the odds are of mankind surviving, let alone ‘defeating’, climate change, look no further than the essay the Guardian published this week, written by Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney. It proves beyond a moonlight shadow of a doubt that the odds are infinitesimally close to absolute zero (Kelvin, no Hobbes).
Yes, Bloomberg is the media tycoon and former mayor of New York (which he famously turned into a 100% clean and recyclable city). And since central bankers are as we all know without exception experts on climate change, as much as they are on full-contact crochet, it makes perfect sense that Bank of England governor Carney adds his two -trillion- cents.
Conveniently, you don’t even have to read the piece, the headline tells you all you need and then some: “How To Make A Profit From Defeating Climate Change” really nails it. The entire mindset on display in just a few words. If that’s what they went for, kudo’s are due.
These fine gents probably actually believe that this is perfectly in line with our knowledge of, say, human history, of evolution, of the laws of physics, and of -mass- psychology. All of which undoubtedly indicate to them that we can and will defeat the problems we have created -and still are-, literally with the same tools and ideas -money and profit- that we use to create them with. Nothing ever made more sense.
That these problems originated in the same relentless quest for profit that they now claim will help us get rid of them, is likely a step too far for them; must have been a class they missed. “We destroyed it for profit” apparently does not in their eyes contradict “we’ll fix it for profit too”. Not one bit. It does, though. It’s indeed the very core of what is going wrong.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
On the surface, things appear normal. The status quo of life in America circa 2016 isn’t to everyone’s liking, but at least the system is still working after a fashion. The price of oil is going up a bit: that means the cost of driving is also creeping higher, but steeper prices provide a little welcome relief for an oil industry otherwise teetering on the brink of financial ruin. There are tiresomely long lines at airports, but that means people have the wherewithal to pay for plane tickets. Most people are disgusted with the presumptive U.S. presidential candidates, but at least the machine of electoral politics is still marginally functioning. The stock market is up, unemployment is down. We’re muddling through.
Or are we? Beneath the lid, a pot of trends is coming to a boil. If Carl Jung was right about the existence of a collective unconscious, it must be seething with nightmares right about now.
So far, 2016 is the hottest year in history. And not by just a smidgen: every single month so far has set a record. This handy little animation has been making the rounds of environmental websites in the last couple of weeks; it shows a climate system that is shooting off the rails.
Slow, linear change is giving way to self-reinforcing feedbacks and non-linear lurches. Last December (just 6 months ago), delegates to climate talks in Paris agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade. Extend the temperature trend shown in that animation for just another few months and we may well be beyond that threshold. How long until we get to two degrees? Three?
Throughout Exxon’s global operations, the company knew that CO2 was a harmful pollutant in the atmosphere years earlier than previously reported.
DeSmog has uncovered Exxon corporate documents from the late 1970s stating unequivocally “there is no doubt” that CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels was a growing “problem” well understood within the company.
“It is assumed that the major contributors of CO2 are the burning of fossil fuels… There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Technology exists to remove CO2 from stack gases but removal of only 50% of the CO2 would double the cost of power generation.” [emphasis added]
Those lines appeared in a 1980 report, “Review of Environmental Protection Activities for 1978-1979,” produced by Imperial Oil, Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary.
[click on any of the screenshots in this story to see a PDF of the full document]
A distribution list included with the report indicates that it was disseminated to managers across Exxon’s international corporate offices, including in Europe.
The next report in the series, “Review of Environmental Protection Activities for 1980-81,” noted in an appendix covering “Key Environmental Affairs Issues and Concerns” that: CO2 / GREENHOUSEEFFECTRECEIVINGINCREASEDMEDIAATTENTION.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
It would have been a remarkable oversight, had not our use of the land and its soils featured among the discussions about climate change mitigation in Paris at COP21. However, at the conference was hosted a side-event and official launch of the “4 per thousand” initiative, which aims to increase soil carbon over a 25 year period, with the effect of halting the annual increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. It is important to be aware of what “4/1000” means: it is not an increase in the overall soil carbon by an annual 4 grams per 1000 grams of soil as has been claimed, but an increase in the existing carbon in the topsoil by 0.4%/year. This has been described from an Australian perspective:
“Let us start with the analogy of a football field (Soccer, not rugby!). Imagine it is a fifth larger than normal – making it one hectare in size. The top layer of soil on the field, 30 cm deep, is known as the topsoil.
“Carbon is the main ingredient of organic matter, so organic matter is often referred to as ‘soil organic carbon’. In Australian soils, this organic matter makes up on average, between 1 and 3 percent of the topsoil. For the purpose of the exercise, we will assume that the topsoil on the football field contains 1.5 percent carbon. This equates to 58 tonnes of carbon in the topsoil across the whole football field.What the French Government is calling for is to increase that 58 tonnes by 0.4 percent per annum – in our imaginary football field that would equate to an increase of 0.2 tonnes (or 200 kg) of carbon in the topsoil each year.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Carbon cycle is one of the fundamental requirement of life on earth. Soil organic carbon (SOC) can be described as the amount of carbon that is stored in the soil as one of the components of the soil organic matter which comprises the animal and plant materials and different stages of decay. Organic carbon (OC) mainly enters the soil by the decomposition of the animal and plant residuals, dead and living microorganisms, root exudates and soil biota. Soil organic carbon is heterogeneous structure that varies in it particle size, carbon content, turnover time and its decomposition rate. Soil organic carbon is the main energy source for the soil microorganisms. The soil organic matter in the soil has approximately 58% carbon.
ORGANIC CARBON STORED IN SOIL CAN BE INCREASED BY THE FOLLOWING PRACTICES
The processes that can be used to increase the amount of soil carbon in the soil include; things like increasing plant growth which generally increases the input of organic carbon to the soil in roots, shoot material and root exudates example is the increasing water use efficiency and optimal nutrition. Also growing plants for longer durations each year increases the inputs of the organic carbon to the soil. Also by improving the soil structure it can also help to increase the organic carbon stored in the soil by reducing the losses of organic carbon from the soil by erosion and decomposition and this can be done by maintaining the ground cover, retaining stubbles and reduction of compaction. In addition practices like conservation farming, improving crop management through rotation, maintaining and improving forestry management and also improving grazing management can help to increase the organic carbon in the soil.
SOIL CARBON AND SOIL HEALTH
Carbon content in the soil is a major factor of the overall soil health. Soil carbon is meant to improve the physical properties of soil like increasing the cation exchange capacity (CEC).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
If Arctic soils melt and release frozen carbon, the impact would cost almost half the world’s annual gross domestic product, researchers say.
LONDON, 22 September, 2015 – The melting permafrost in the Arctic could cost the world dearly. New research calculates that the economic damage that would flow from loss of permafrost and the increased emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) would add up to US$43 trillion.
And, British and US scientists say, this would be in addition to at least $300 tn of economic damage linked to other consequences of climate change.
The attempt to put a cumulative economic value on natural changes in climate that have yet to happen is part of the bid to get governments to take climate change seriously. In the latest attempt to cost the impact of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and the continuous rise in global average temperatures, all as a consequence of fossil fuel combustion and other human action, the economist Chris Hope of the University of Cambridge and the polar expert Kevin Schaefer of the University of Colorado have turned their sights on the Arctic.
The Arctic is the fastest-warming region of the planet. It was once much warmer, and its now-frozen soils are home to huge quantities of vegetation that never had a chance to decompose.
Increased risk
The two scientists report in Nature Climate Change that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise as they are doing now, the thaw of the permafrost and the loss of the ice caps could release 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon now locked in as frozen organic matter.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As the chart above indicates, since the end of World War II, the amount of carbon being leaked into the atmosphere has increased almost parabolically, with a brief pause around 1980 after the price of oil had come unhinged from its single digit moorings and economic activity slacked off for a bit. This rise is in line with the amount of coal, oil and gas that has been consumed in the meantime. It is also highly correlated to atmospheric and oceanic temperature increases.
In 2014, 35.5 billion metric tonnes were added to the mix. So far, this has not been a pay-as-you-go proposition, rather, the effects, and the externalities have been passed on to anyone and everyone who has been in the path of rising seas, rising temperatures and the storms, droughts and fires that have spread in their wake.
(Click to enlarge)
Though the U.S. has contributed the most since 1965, when temperatures started to rise (273 billion to China’s 166 billion, out of a total of 1.14 trillion added tonnes, according to BP), China has now taken the lead in annual output (9.7 billion tonnes in 2014 vs. 6 billion tonnes for the U.S., making up 44 percent of the total between the two), mostly due to that country’s reliance upon coal for so much of its electricity. China became the world’s largest car market a few years ago and expects to sell 24 million units, compared with 16 million projected sales in the U.S., assuming the recent market selloff there does not portend a dramatic economic slowdown.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In an official submission to the White House earlier this year, U.S. coal giant Peabody Energy claims that greenhouse gas is a “non-existent harm” and a “benign gas that is essential to all life.”
The March 2015 submission from Peabody further claims that “while the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis.”
It has become increasingly rare, especially in the last few years as countries and corporations have begun to take the issue of climate change more seriously, to see a publicly traded company like Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) making claims that are so contrary to the well-documented scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are negatively impacting our climate, health and way of living.
While there are thousands of peer-reviewed scientific documents available on the impacts of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, the Peabody climate change document relies heavily on claims made in newspaper opinion articles and by organizations with known connections to the fossil fuel industry.
An analysis of the 304 footnote citations in the Peabody document finds that opinion articles published in media outlets, primarily the Wall Street Journal, were cited as supporting evidence 41 times ,and groups with historical ties to the fossil fuel industry (e.g. Cato Institute, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and the Global Warming Policy Foundation) were cited 64 times.
Articles cited from peer-reviewed scientific journals made up only 8% of the evidence cited in Peabody’s arguments:
Here are some of the key quotes from the Peabody climate change document:
“There are no demonstrated foreseeable effects of any GHG emissions.” (pg.3)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
This is the first of several posts I will do on Global Collapse. I am not saying, right here anyway, that civilization as we know it will collapse, but I am asking the question: “Can collapse be avoided?” This post will deal with global warming and the associated climate change.
Right now CO2 is higher than it has been in over 20 million years. But it has been higher, a lot higher.
The chart below was published in the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2015 and the source of their data was Goddard Institute for Space Studies
What this chart clearly shows is that global warming, so far, is primarily a northern hemisphere phenomenon and mostly above 60 degrees latitude.
Arctic still heating up twice as fast as rest of planet. Annual average temperatures have continued to rise for the region as a whole throughout the recent slowdown in the pace of warming globally, according to a new analysis of conditions above 60 degrees north latitude.
In fact, the loss of reflective sea ice is part of the reason Arctic temperature has risen three times faster than the global average in recent decades. This effect, known as Arctic amplification, has consequences for nearby land ice, too.
But why is the Northern Well for one reason that’s where most of the people are. That’s where most of the CO2 emissions comes from. But… don’t the air mix from north to south?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Novelist and historian Wallace Stegner once said that every book should try to answer an anguished question. I believe the same is true for ideas, movements, and emergency efforts. In the case of climate change, an anguished question is this: what can we do right now to help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from its current (and future) dangerously high levels?
In an editorial published in July of 2009, Dr. James Hansen of NASA proposed an answer: “cut off the largest source of emissions—coal—and allow CO2 to drop back down . . . through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.” I consider these words to be a sort of ‘Operating Instructions’ for the twenty-first century. Personally, I’m not sure how we accomplish the coal side of the equation, which requires governmental action, but I have an idea about how to increase carbon storage in soils.
I call it a carbon ranch.
The purpose of a carbon ranch is to mitigate climate change by sequestering CO2 in plants and soils, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and producing co-benefits that build ecological and economic resilience in local landscapes. “Sequester” means to withdraw for safekeeping, to place in seclusion, into custody, or to hold in solution—all of which are good definitions for the process of sequestering CO2 in plants and soils via photosynthesis and sound stewardship.
The process by which atmospheric CO2 gets converted into soil carbon is neither new nor mysterious. It has been going on for millions and millions of years, and all it requires is sunlight, green plants, water, nutrients, and soil microbes. According to Dr. Christine Jones, a pioneering Australian soil scientist, there are four basic steps to the CO2/soil carbon process:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
But if heavy emitters are going to pay, they want consumers to share the burden
The biggest players in Canada’s oil and gas industry are urging Alberta’s government to step up its environmental policies and introduce a carbon tax.
Alberta already has carbon pricing, but the program is limited and it will expire in the next few months.
Suncor CEO Steve Williams told a crowd in downtown Calgary on Friday that change is needed in Alberta to improve Canada’s global reputation.
“We’re trying to move Canada to a position of leadership, that’s not how we are viewed around the world at the moment. We are viewed to be quite the opposite,” said Williams.
Suncor, along with fellow Canadian energy company Cenovus, says the time is right for Alberta to address its environmental policies. But they also say if the province adopts a carbon tax, it should be broad based and apply to everyone.
That includes consumers. The idea is that industry will pay a carbon tax, but so too will the average person. That would include having to pay extra at the pumps and on their natural gas and electricity utility bills.
“Absolutely,” said Williams. “A realization by the consumer is really important because if you want energy efficiency, if you want people to change their behaviours and affect the demand side, you have to get to those users.”
Alberta’s next premier, Rachel Notley, will be sworn in this weekend. She’s already facing pressure to address the province’s carbon emissions. Alberta produces 36 per cent of Canada’s total emissions.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Many consider forests as the ‘lungs’ of the planet — the idea that trees and other plants take up carbon and produce oxygen (the carbon and oxygen cycles). If we are to be fair though, the oceans store about 93% of the Earth’s carbon pool (excluding the lithosphere and fossil fuels) and oceanic phytoplankton produces between 50 and 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere. For comparison, the terrestrial biosphere — including forests — stores only about 5% of the Earth’s carbon and produces most of the remainder of atmospheric oxygen.
So, there’s no denying that the biggest player in these cycles is the ocean, but that’s not the topic of today’s post. Instead, I’m going to focus on the terrestrial biosphere and in particular, the carbon storage and flux of forests.
Now it’s pretty well established that tropical forests are major players in the terrestrial carbon cycle, with the most accepted estimates of about 55% the terrestrial carbon stock stored therein. The extensive boreal forest, covering most of the northern half of North America, most of Scandinavia and a huge chunk of Russia, comes in globally at about 33%, and temperate forests store most of the remainder.
That is, until now.
A niggly issue with estimating global carbon stocks in forests is that quite a bit of it is stored underground. In tropical forests at least (not including the few peatland forests), most (> 50%) of the carbon resides in the living biomass above the soil; however, in boreal forests where peatlands are extensive, 95% of the carbon is found below ground in the peat and soils. While most of this subsurface carbon is found in the top layers of the soil and peat, if you don’t dig down deep enough, you might miss an important component of the total carbon stock.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Christophe McGlade is a research associate in energy materials modelling at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources. He recently co-authored, with Paul Ekins, a paper called “The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2°C”, a paper whose stark call to leave the substantial majority of fossil fuels in the ground generated a lot of media coverage in recent weeks (see for example here and here). I started by asking him to give an overview of the paper and of its key findings:
“The paper is looking at the optimal use of fossil fuels if we want to have a good chance of staying below the agreed 2°C threshold. Within that, it breaks down the amount of oil, gas and coal reserves that are used and aren’t used at a regional level, so it points out or suggests the countries that would have to sacrifice a large proportion of their fossil fuel reserves if we want to have a good chance of 2°. The headline findings on a global level are that around 80% of coal reserves, 50% of gas and one third of oil reserves need to remain unburnt if we are to have this chance of 2°C.
Think of it as the uncertainty principle. By the nature of things, doubt, the unknown, and uncertainty are naturally part of the big picture in science, especially when it comes to creating “models” of the future. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway showed in their blockbuster book, Merchants of Doubt, the giant oil companies (following the playbook of Big Tobacco) proved adept at taking advantage of the uncertainty principle to protect their positions as themost profitable corporations in history. They funded a small group of scientists to not quite deny the reality of climate change, but to emphasize the element of doubt in its science, as in all science. Major fossil-fuel producers used their money both to create a network of outright climate deniers and a subtler if no less dismissive attitude toward climate change based on uncertainty. Think of them as the Yo-Yo Ma’s of doubt. And proof of their success at this effort is evident in a new Congress in which few self-respecting Republicans would dare claim (“I’m not a scientist…”) that there’s any reality to human-produced climate change, while the leading “environmental” figure in the party, Senator Jim Inhofe, dismisses the world’s climate scientists as part of a gigantic plot against the free market.
It hardly matters that climate change is, by now, an obvious reality or that the evidence piling up indicates that it will prove devastating for us and the planet unless the burning of fossil fuels is in some way significantly curtailed and most fossil fuel reserves are somehow kept in the ground. And here’s another point not to remember: uncertainty is actually a two-way street. The oil companies, not surprisingly, placed their bet on the direction that headed toward doubt that climate change was a serious issue for humanity. That part of the street is now largely blocked. However, the other direction is unnervingly open — and it leads into uncertainty about whether the effects of climate change will be more devastating than presently predicted by, for instance, the consensus science of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
