Will reducing or stopping carbon dioxide emissions stop global warming? Not according to the IPCC. The Fourth Assessment FAQ, section 10.3, notes that "complete elimination of CO2 emissions is estimated to lead to a slow decrease in atmospheric CO2 of about 40 ppm over the 21st century." By going cold turkey on fossil fuels, we only get down to about 1985 levels in 92 years. The oceans will continue to heat up.
In other words, we might as well try to drive a big wood screw into hard oak with a hammer. Yet the belief that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will have some leverage on the problem is widespread.
To examine our beliefs, which are often hidden from us, I offer two solutions to global warming. Both will likely work, but they are very different.
1. The Earth Bag. Many elaborate and expensive geoengineering proposals have been made, but here is the most practical.
The earth's overall temperature depends in part on albedo, or reflectivity to solar radiation. Change this by a few percent, and we change the climate.
We manufacture 5 trillion plastic bags each year. All we need to do is to make them all white and bright, and get them into the dark tropical oceans, where they will reflect huge amounts of solar radiation back into space.
No new infrastructure or technology is required, or massive research budgets. The huge area of floating debris in the Pacific already represents proof of concept. All we need to do is to insist to our bag manufacturers: white and bright. (The generic Earth Bag could also contain a small bubble-wrap capsule for better buoyancy.) For coastal areas, storm sewers are existing pathways for the plastic bags to get to the ocean. Elsewhere, rivers would serve. White styrofoam -- chunks as well as packing peanuts -- could make a contribution, and UPS already functions as a distribution network.
Some change in social norms would be required. Collecting plastic bags or styrofoam peanuts to a landfill would become deviant behavior. We want them broadcast, especially over our darker landscapes and waters. If the climate began to cool too much, we could fine-tune by making the bags and styrofoam darker.
Unlike large floating rafts that have been proposed, the Earth Bag solution makes use existing technology and existing behavior, and would allow whales and other marine life to surface. Instead of large appropriations to a few corporations, we all get to participate in a solution, without new taxes even.
2. Soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is 58 percent carbon by weight. Even in their presently depleted state, soils contain more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation combined.
Innovators and pioneers of alternative agriculture have discovered rapid ways of increasing soil organic matter at little cost, without material inputs or new technology. If 1.6 percent of the top foot of soil in the world's crop and grazing lands were to become organic matter, we could be near 300 ppm of atmospheric concentration.
Soil represents the largest and most stable carbon pool that we have the capacity to increase. This enormous opportunity has remained hidden because:
- it is underground and invisible
- it is the result of process, and is not a thing or species
- our agriculture is built around inputs of chemicals and technology, and soil organic matter has long been viewed as irrelevant
- soil organic matter doesn't represent an economic opportunity to any major sector
- soil organic matter is formed fastest in grasslands, which are of less concern to most environmentalists than forests
- prevailing views of the carbon cycle exaggerate the role of technology and fossil fuels
- most soil organic matter studies have been done in dysfunctional farm belt conditions, where tillage and chemicals make any increases slow and uninspiring
- the discovery of how to create soil organic matter rapidly and cheaply was not made by institutions at the centers of power, but by alternative agriculture innovators from the edges.
There would be enormous side benefits to the soil carbon solution: better human nutrition and health, less floods and droughts, less dependence on chemicals and fossil fuels, more biodiversity, better water availability and quality.
However, to implement the soil carbon solution would require a transformation of both beliefs and behaviors worldwide -- from agriculture as a technology or input-output business to biological stewardship of basic ecosystem processes and services. Environmentalism could no longer be protectionist and species based, but must become holistic.
Both of these solutions would likely be effective; both would be cheap. Which one addresses causes and which one symptoms? Which would be easier? Which would correspond most closely to our predilections and habits? And which would correspond most closely to our deeply held values and goals?
Ask Umbra on buying carbon offsets
If REDD can’t save this….
Climate-news poem: Tck, tck, tck edition
Comments
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Jon Rynn Posted 9:15 am
25 Feb 2008
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Pangolin Posted 9:51 am
25 Feb 2008
I can show you soil that has not been turned in 50 years, has a living mat of plants on it, is under a canopy and yet is low in carbon. Scrape the plants off and it's yellow or red clay. This is common with tropical soils. Carbon rich soils are black
When you take some of the organic matter that is above the surface, turn it to charcoal, grind it and bury it it becomes a living sponge for soil flora. The mineralized carbon is stable for thousands of years even in the amazon and harbors living colonies that equal the mineral carbon with bio-available carbon.
Here's a link: http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
from the front page today:Restoring soil carbon can reverse global warming
"It appears that the pre-industrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280ppm, and that globally we are now at 455ppm, and heading towards 550ppm. To get from 550ppm back to 280ppm, 270ppm must be removed. Globally, a 4.2% increase in SOM would potentially reverse the expected situation. In any case, any form of determined management will substantially reduce the now crippling legacy loadings in the atmosphere."
There, now isn't that easy? Your share is about 13 tons of char a year; better fire up that weber.
Put the Carbon Back
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elbarto Posted 10:07 am
25 Feb 2008
If the issue was to be solved properly then I believe the following needs to happen:
Abandon fossil fuel energy now for solar and its derivatives (wind / wave)
Convert all farming to biodynamic permaculture.
Stop deforestation, reforest/ regrass deserts by irrigating with solar/wind desalinated water. A desert is a failed forest / savanah.
With any luck the above will halt warming enough to restore lost ice albedo and reverse the warming trend.
Control carbon, control climate. Humans now control carbon.
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elbarto Posted 10:24 am
25 Feb 2008
Dead soil becomes live again.
In any case, it's not difficult.
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Gar Lipow Posted 10:58 am
25 Feb 2008
Terra preta using charcoal really does take living carbon and turn it into stable carbon. And stable carbon does make good soil structure. However there are still problems. There are limits to how much agwaste you want to burn and convert into pure structure. The extreme of modern industrial agriculture is to create a plastic soil that is all nutrients and no structure. We don't want to go the other extreme and create an industrial agriculture based on soil that is all structure and lacks nutrients. True Terra Preta as developed in preindustrial Brazil developed was a unique agricultural ecology in which a complex combination of microrganisms thrived on charcoal, so you had the stability of dead carbon in a living system. Unfortunately, while we can pour charcoal onto living soil, we can't duplicate the unqiue microsystem that thrived in the Brazilian rainforests.
Modern Preta Terra still offers a great deal of potential. Even without the knowledge of ancient pre-Columbian Brazil, just about any agricultural land can benefit from a great deal of charcoal, and absorb a great deal more without harm. But, minus that unique micro-ecology, there are probably limits to how much dead (as opposed to living) carbon you can add to soil before causing problems.
I think given our current level knowledge there are two limits to Preta Terra: how much agricultural waste (straw and such) we can burn without compromising other potential uses, and how much charcoal soil can absorb without harm. I'm sure the former is a serious limit. I'm not sure about the latter. I'll bet there are some agricultural experts on this board who can tell us if there are limits to the ability of soil to accept stable carbon (such as charcoal) without harm.
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lorne0406 Posted 11:03 am
25 Feb 2008
Agriculture Canada has been doing some really interesting reearch on improving soil carbon through long term zero till. Long term trials conducted at their Indian Head Research farm, as well as on 30 year zero till plots done in conjunction with Jim Halford, one of the earliest zerotill farmers, look very promising.
Halford says his knolls and level areas have stored an average 1.0 and 1.25 Tonnes of CO2 per acre per year over the last 20 years. The storage in the latter 7 years was 1.7 and 1.9 Tonnes of CO2 per acre per year for the knolls and level areas respectively!!
In the future he believes that the soils in his fields can exceed the level of organic matter, (and hence carbon and nitrogen) that exists in our native grass soils!!!
Granted Canadian farmers are about a decade ahead of their US counterparts on the Great Plains but the Canadian example shows increasing soil carbon is very possible in cereal, legume and oilseed rotations. Here's a link to a presentation by an ag canada researcher. If you are interested in soil carbon tis is really quite interesting and remarkably readable for something from a soil scientist
http://www.farmtechconference.com/pdf/2008proceedings/Lafond_FT2008.pdf
lorne0406
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:42 pm
25 Feb 2008
How about "Enviroes" make the ultimate sacrifice?
I mean, everyone is always telling everyone else to use less of this or that. Better way: build those Soylent ethanasia centers and turn yourself into the ultimate Green, a tasty wafer to feed the next generation.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 5:07 pm
25 Feb 2008
Increasing forest coverage, decreasing or even reversing human-induced desertification, increasing healty riparian ecosystems, and rebuilding the world's lost wetland areas and even fisheries should all help speed up the process.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:15 am
26 Feb 2008
The biogas providing a clean, storable energy backup for a renewable smart grid with distributed biogas powered cogeneration (electricity and heat).
Manure, waste biomass from farming, and biomass from forests and grasslands in drought stricken, fire prone regions would be the biomass source.
Additionally, conservation reserve crop land and depleted cropland should be restore to natural prairie. Prairie grasses store 1.8 tons of cO2 per acre per year. Grasses can be mowed in fire break strips with around one third of the biomass harvested for biodigestion each year.
Here in Wisconsin, dairy cow bedding, wood chips, and manure are biodigested for energy and fertilizer already. That digested biomass would make a great soil ammendment, already soaked with fertilizer if it were applied directly to soil.
This whole process could be mechanized with robotics that substitute for the weed and pest control and wastefull irrigation and fossil fuel based fertilizer now in use.
When manure runs off into wetlands it releases huge amounts of stored carbon in the form of methane, a 23 times worse gHG than cO2.
Organic ag and conservation can reverse GHG climate disaster without spewing plastic bags on the oceans.
And it will provide backup energy for a renewable smart grid, charging your plugin hybrid with the money going to farmers instead of into the gas pump credit card slot and off to the bushco oil mob and saudis.
Healthcare costs will drop as organic food replaces chemfood.
Green jobs building out organic ag and building/operating the robotics will boom.
The time to recognize the climate necessity of organic ag and natural carbon sink land conservation is yesterday. Someone tell Barack.
It's going to be an uphill battle, he is from a big agrichem corn state.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 4:27 am
26 Feb 2008
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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nickcroix Posted 7:28 pm
02 Apr 2008
Fish end up in the human food chain with their dose of toxins. Cut down the use of plastic and definitely keep it out of waterways and seas.
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