Fourier had no idea in 1824 of all the impacts of global warming

From an Article by Robin McKie, The Guardian News Service UK, July 30, 2022

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say.

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”

McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth at the end of 2021. He includes many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted the planet, including extremes that had struck the UK. A few months after he completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found that many of those records had already been broken. “That is the trouble with writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “By the time it is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are moving.”

Among the records broken during the book’s editing was the announcement that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on 19 July, the highest ever recorded in the UK. (The country’s previous hottest temperature, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.)

In addition, London’s fire service had to tackle blazes across the capital, with one conflagration destroying 16 homes in Wennington, east London. Crews there had to fight to save the local fire station itself. “Who would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be almost wiped out by wildfires in 2022,” says McGuire. “If this country needs a wake-up call then surely that is it.”

Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity have also swept across Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone national park. “And as we head further into 2022, it is already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.”

These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises translate into extreme weather.

“Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated up by just over one degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.”

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”

And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C.

From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further, McGuire says.

Certainly, as it stands, Britain – although relatively well placed to counter the worst effects of the coming climate breakdown – faces major headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050.

“Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire.

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.”

The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilisation.

“This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.”

Now available ~ Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99

Five unexpected threats posed by the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

1. Under our feet ~ As vast, thick sheets of ice disappear from high mountains and from the poles, rock crusts that had previously been compressed are beginning to rebound, threatening to trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. “We are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one,” says Bill McGuire.

2. New battlefields ~ As crops burn and hunger spreads, communities are coming into conflict and the election of populist leaders – who will promise the Earth to their people – is likely to become commonplace. Most worrying are the tensions over dwindling water supplies that are growing between India, Pakistan and China, all possessors of atomic weapons. “The last thing we need is a hot war over water between two of the world’s nuclear powers,” McGuire observes.

3. Methane bombs ~ Produced by wetlands, cattle and termites, methane is 86 times more potent in its power to heat the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, though fortunately it hangs around for much less time. The problem is that much of the world’s methane is trapped in layers of Arctic permafrost. As these melt, more methane will be released and our world will get even hotter.

4. Losing the Gulf Stream ~ As the ice caps melt, the resulting cold water pouring from the Arctic threatens to block or divert the Gulf Stream, which carries a prodigious amount of heat from the tropics to the seas around Europe. Signs now suggest the Gulf Stream is already weakening and could shut down completely before end of the century, triggering powerful winter storms over Europe.

5. Calorie crunch ~ Four-fifths of all calories consumed across the world come from just 10 crop plants including wheat, maize and rice. Many of these staples will not grow well under the higher temperatures that will soon become the norm, pointing towards a massive cut in the availability of food, which will have a catastrophic impact across the planet, says McGuire.

EARTH DAY is April 22nd this month in 2021

From Bill McKibben, 350.ORG, Reply-To: 350@350.org

Dear Friends and Concerned Citizens,

I’ve stepped back to emeritus status at 350.org as I start on other projects, but I still follow my old colleagues’ work intently — and the next big thing is coming up very soon. And you can be a part of it.

The Global Just Recovery Gathering — three days of free, online, brass tacks education — starts this Friday, and it has one focus: building energy for real action as we come out of the pandemic. Given the speed with which scientists say we must work, this may be the last high-leverage moment for huge change. We’ve seen some promising initial signs with things like the Biden plan for green infrastructure — but we need more, we need it everywhere, and we need it fast.

The movement was on the cusp when the pandemic hit — remember those truly giant student-led climate strikes in the fall of 2019? Now, we need to regain momentum.

So this Gathering is all about training everyone up. Whether you’re new to activism or a veteran of many year’s work, there will be useful sessions for you — and the special focus on the Just in Just Recovery will add to the power of this event.

Over 17,000 people from every corner of the world have signed up already — you’ll get a first-hand sense of what I mean when I say this is the largest, most diverse movement for change the world has ever seen. And you’ll come out equipped to be a better part of that movement, making change with even more power than you do now.

Can I count on seeing you at the Global Just Recovery Gathering starting this Friday, April 9? Register now to join me and thousands of climate activists from around the globe.

Register » “Global Just Recovery Gathering”

I’m on the “End Fossil Fuel Finance” plenary session, but mostly I’m looking forward to watching. And to seeing you there.

Let’s go onward together!

Bill McKibben, 350.ORG,
PO Box 843004, Boston, MA 02284-3004

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See also: Despite Pandemic Shutdowns, CO2 Now at Levels Unseen in 3.6 Million Years, Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams News, April 8, 2021

NOAA warned that carbon dioxide and methane “continued their unrelenting rise in 2020.” Carbon dioxide has now exceeded 412 ppm and continues to rise more rapidly year by year.

Tori Goebel, Y.E.C.A.

Press Release from the Young Evangicals for Climate Action, January 28, 2021

Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA) welcomes Tori Goebel as the organization’s incoming National Organizer and Spokesperson. Tori has spent the last 4 years as Communications Director for YECA and the Evangelical Environmental Network, YECA’s partner ministry. During this time, she also served on YECA’s national steering committee. Tori brings a wealth of experience in political organizing and policy advocacy to the role, as well as professional communications and marketing skills.

“We are at a pivotal moment as we face the climate crisis,” says Tori. “Communities are already being hurt in a myriad of ways, and many Christians within the U.S. have ignored this reality for far too long. I believe we have a unique role to play in addressing environmental injustice, and YECA has been on the cutting edge of educating, empowering, and mobilizing young Christians to take action at all levels. I am excited for the future of YECA, and humbled by the opportunity to lead in this way.”

YECA’s previous National Organizer and Spokesperson, Rev. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, has been named Vice President of the Evangelical Environmental Network. Kyle served in the role of National Organizer and Spokesperson for YECA from August 2016-January 2021.

“I am prouder than I can say of what YECA has accomplished these last 4 and a half years,” says Kyle, “and Tori is the perfect leader to guide YECA toward even greater impact. Having had the privilege of working alongside Tori for the past 4 years, I can say with certainty that she has the vision, skill, and passion to help YECA flourish and grow for years to come.”

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See also: YECA Calls for President Trump To Be Removed From Office, Rev. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, January 12, 2021

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See also: Young Evangelicals Call for Renewed Commitment to Climate Action on 5th Anniversary of Paris Agreement, Y.E.C.A., December 11, 2020

President-elect Biden must rejoin the Paris Agreement on January 20, and then do everything in his power every day thereafter to achieve the future that the Paris Agreement makes possible. We pledge to continue doing all we can to help, for the sake of God’s good creation and our neighbor’s good.”

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See also: WHAT NOW? WV Center on Climate Change, Three Speaker Webinar, January 25, 2021. “Climate Solutions 2021 and A Just Transition for West Virginia”

Heavy sustained rains bring down boulders onto the roads in WV and elsewhere

From Prof. David Lodge, Cornell University, February 5, 2020

Can this planet be saved? Yes, we think so !!

In this timely program, David Lodge, director of Cornell’s Atkinson Center for Sustainability, will challenge us with bold ideas that may help us and our planet survive our current environmental challenges.

We’ll weigh the costs and benefits of changing the ways we produce human necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and water—to conserve energy and finite natural resources.

Join us in figuring out how to minimize environmental impact without diminishing economic growth and our quality of life.

Details: July 5 to 11, 2020 on Campus in Ithaca, NY

Course highlights — 1. Explore the controversies surrounding efforts to reduce and respond to climate change.

2. Discuss the urgent need for more sustainable practices and policies. Become acquainted with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, the hub of collaborative sustainability research at Cornell University.

3. Learn about the work of the passionate experts and innovators, theorists, practitioners, business leaders, and philanthropists who are developing strategies and shaping policy to protect our planet.

4. Discover how you can participate in sustainability efforts.

Faculty for This Course Professor David Lodge

David Lodge serves as Cornell University’s first Francis J. DiSalvo Director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. His academic home is Cornell’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with a joint appointment in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Arts and Sciences..

David has led research on freshwater biodiversity as part of the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and led an expert subcommittee providing advice to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on reducing biological invasions from the ballast water of ships. He recently served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. Department of State.

Under David’s leadership, Cornell Atkinson Center is focused on working with NGO, corporate, foundation, and government collaborators to move knowledge to action in reducing climate risks, accelerating energy transitions, increasing food security, and advancing the One Health Initiative.

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See also: CLEARWAY Signs Power Contracts for WV Wind Farm, WV News, February 6, 2020

CHARLESTON, WV — Clearway Energy Group announced Thursday that it signed power purchase agreements with AEP Energy and Toyota for Clearway’s 110-megawatt Black Rock wind farm, in Grant and Mineral counties, West Virginia.

The power contracts will enable both AEP Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of American Electric Power, and Toyota to meet their energy management objectives while helping each company achieve their respective clean energy goals.

“We’re thrilled that Black Rock will provide economic benefits to AEP Energy and Toyota while helping meet their sustainability goals,” said Craig Cornelius, CEO of Clearway Energy Group. “Black Rock, along with our nearby Pinnacle wind farm, reaffirms Clearway’s commitment to West Virginia and wind energy’s growing role in the state’s economy and environment.”

Atmospheric methane on steep rate of increase

Letter from the Clean Air Council, August 31, 2019

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, led by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, just proposed the complete elimination of methane controls in the 2016 New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for oil and gas facilities.

Methane is the main component of natural gas and is 87 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming our planet over a twenty-year timeline. Scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in their latest report that the world has only 11 years to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, by 45% to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Methane leaks occur at every step along the oil and gas supply chain. When methane leaks, it is accompanied by emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which include known carcinogens that also contribute to ground-level ozone (the main constituent of smog).

Pennsylvania’s state standards for methane pollution apply only to oil and gas sources constructed after August 8, 2018, while the NSPS covers facilities stretching back three years earlier (September 18, 2015). Pennsylvania residents would also be negatively impacted by additional air pollution traveling across the state line from oil and gas operations in Ohio and West Virginia and from additional climate change impacts exacerbated by methane.

If methane is completely removed from the NSPS, it may affect the current legal mandate that requires EPA to establish methane controls for existing oil and gas operations that predate the NSPS. Even large oil and gas companies like Exxon and Shell are demanding the administration abandon its plan to remove methane from the NSPS.

Tell the EPA we need to control methane pollution.

Sincerely, Joseph Otis Minott, Esq., Executive Director and Chief Counsel, Clean Air Coalition, Philadelphia, PA

Human beings are really “out of touch” with the natural world!

From an Article by Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com, January 22, 2019

Britain’s Prince William interviewed famed broadcaster David Attenborough at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

During the sit-down, the 92-year-old naturalist advised the world leaders and business elite gathered in Davos that we must respect and protect the natural world, adding that the future of its survival—as well as humanity’s survival—is in our hands. “We can wreck it with ease,” Attenborough said. “We can wreck it without even knowing we are doing it. And if we wreck the natural world, in the end, we wreck ourselves.”

The Blue Planet narrator stressed that a healthy planet is essential for life itself, and yet people have never been more “out of touch” with the natural world.

“We have to recognize that every breath of air we take, every mouthful of food that we take comes from the natural world. And that if we damage the natural world we damage ourselves,” Attenborough said to the Duke of Cambridge when asked about how young people can make a positive impact on the environment. “We are one coherent ecosystem. It’s not just a question of beauty or interest or wonder. It’s the essential ingredient, the central part of human life is a healthy planet,” Attenborough said.

Prince William asked the conservation advocate why some global leaders are “faltering” on tackling environmental challenges. “Because the connection between the natural world and the urban world, the human society, since the Industrial Revolution, has been remote and widening,” Attenborough said. “We didn’t realize the effects of what we were doing ‘out there.’ But now we are seeing that almost everything we do has its echoes, its duplications and implications across the natural world.”

He added that it was “difficult to overstate” the urgency of the climate change crisis. “We are now so numerous, so powerful, so all pervasive, the mechanisms we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening that we can exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it,” Attenborough said.

In the documentary series Blue Planet II, Attenborough gave viewers an unflinching look at the harmful impact of human activity on our oceans. “We have now to be really aware of the dangers of what we are doing. And we already know the plastic problems in the seas is wreaking appalling damage upon marine life. The extent of which we don’t yet fully know,” said in his chat with the prince.

Also in the interview, the legendary television icon spoke about how the world has changed since he started broadcasting in the 1950s: “I went to West Africa for the first time and it was a wonderland,” Attenborough said. “You’d just step off from the beaten track … and it seemed to me as a newcomer, unexplored and exciting and everywhere you turned you saw something new.”

“The human population was only a third of the size of what it is today … you really did get the feeling of what it might have been like to be in the Garden of Eden,” he continued.

Attenborough, who was honored at the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Awards for his leadership in the fight against climate change, remains hopeful about the planet’s future. “There’s a source of great optimism there, we have the knowledge, we have the power, to live in harmony with that natural world,” he said, according to the BBC.

Watch the full interview here:

Conversation with Sir David Attenborough and HRH The Duke of Cambridge

Mother Nature can help us resolve Climate Change, ..... if we let her.

Excerpt from the Book by David Montgomery, November 6, 2017

[NOTE: Today, the 23rd annual U.N. climate talks begin in Bonn, Germany, and this week we continues to explore agriculture’s role in causing—and mitigating—climate change. This is an edited excerpt from David Montgomery’s new book, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life.

I confess I never thought I’d write an optimistic book about the environment. For many years, I was a dark green ecopessimist convinced humanity was rushing headlong into self-inflicted disaster. While I still harbor some such fears, I’ve become far more positive about our long-term prospects. Over the past few years, I’ve traveled extensively, meeting visionary farmers who are restoring life and fertility to their land. These experiences convinced me that it’s possible not only to restore soil on a global scale, but to do so remarkably fast.

At least I hope it is, since we face the confluence of the end of cheap oil, continued population growth, and a changing climate over the coming century. How farming will adapt remains uncertain, as political, economic, and environmental interests push competing visions, policies, and agendas. No matter how all this plays out, it will shape the fate of nations and define the world we leave for generations to come.

My perspective on this issue started to change a decade ago, after I did something some colleagues might consider unpardonable—I wrote a book about soil and titled it Dirt. You see, soil scientists consider it blasphemous to call soil dirt. This is because there are very important differences between soil and dirt. For one, soil is full of life, dirt is not. So why would a geologist like me write an irreverently titled book about the importance of what covers up rocks? While my primary focus of study is how landscapes are shaped by natural processes and changed by people, over the course of examining the evolution of landscapes around the world, I came to see how soil erosion and degradation influenced human societies.

Some geologists argue that people, directly and indirectly, now move more earth around than nature herself. Earth scientists have even proposed a new epoch, the Anthropocene, or “Age of People.” Although we argue about when this epoch started, it is perfectly clear that of all our world-changing inventions, the plow was, and remains, one of the most destructive.

Yes, you read that correctly. The plow. That iconic symbol of our agricultural roots that helped launch civilization as we know it. The plow enabled few to feed many and set the table for the rise of commerce, city-states, and hierarchical societies with priests, princes, politicians, and all the rest of us who don’t farm. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the plow makes land vulnerable to erosion by wind and rain.

Through fieldwork spanning three decades and six continents, I realized that long-cultivated regions that had lost their topsoil remained impoverished as a result. Telltale signs are etched in ragged gullies and slopes with subsoil exposed at the surface. The poor fertility of the soil that remains on the land is harder to see.

However, it’s worth noticing—and reversing. For restoring the soil can help address the fundamental challenges of water, energy, and climate, as well as a number of important environmental and public health problems. Nitrogen pollution, born of our dependence on fertilizers, is affecting urban water supplies in the Midwest and creating a great dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico off the mouth of the Mississippi River. Algal blooms from excess phosphorus in agricultural runoff kill fish in the Great Lakes.

Direct exposure to insecticides and indirect effects of herbicides that kill their food source contribute to crashing populations of pollinators, like bees and Monarch butterflies, with dire implications for crop production and biodiversity. Wholesale reliance on agrochemicals directly affects human health, too, as increased risk of depression and certain cancers are associated with pesticide exposure. Restoring healthy, fertile soil would cast a broad net, helping to address all these problems. So how feasible is it?

After writing Dirt, I received invitations to speak about the history of soil loss and degradation at more farming conferences than I can remember. This gave me opportunities to travel to places I wouldn’t otherwise go (geologists usually gravitate toward mountains rather than to flat farmland), and the chance to meet innovative farmers I wouldn’t normally encounter. At first, I didn’t fully appreciate this opportunity. But after hearing one story after the next of how farmers revived degraded land, I started seeking out their opinions on this pressing issue. In doing so, I began to realize that I shared more common ground with farmers than I thought. Many of them saw the destructive effects of plowing as clearly as I did, if not more so.

In 2010, Guy Swanson invited me to speak at a farming conference in Colby, Kansas. His company sells an attachment to no-till planters that helps farmers reduce the amount of fertilizer they use. No-till farmers don’t plow, they use specialized planters that open a narrow slot in the soil about the width of a kernel of corn. Seeds drop down into the slot, disturbing much less of the surrounding soil than plowing it up would.

Swanson’s system injects a uniform amount of fertilizer adjacent to and below each just-planted seed, putting nutrients right where plants need them—and only there. This uses far less fertilizer than spraying it all over the field. The farmer saves money and fewer chemicals run off to pollute streams, lakes, and oceans. That sounds like a win-win, except of course to fertilizer companies. Swanson had seen me talk at a no-till farming conference and wanted me to come speak about the civilization-killing problem of soil erosion to potential customers contemplating a shift to no-till methods and precision fertilizer use.

As I ended my talk, I looked out on a sea of baseball hats. One elderly fellow in the middle stood up, stuffed his hands down into his pockets, and said he’d taken one look at me and didn’t think I could possibly say anything worth listening to. I braced myself for what was to come. But then he surprised me. He said the more I’d talked, the more sense I’d made. He’d seen what I was talking about on his farm. It no longer had the rich fertile topsoil his grandfather had plowed. Something needed to change if his own grandchildren were going to prosper working his land.

Time and again, at one farming conference after another, instead of walking out or lobbing verbal grenades at me, farmers readily acknowledged the possibility that plowing resulted in long-term damage to the soil. A surprising number said they knew this to be true from firsthand experience. Older farmers would share stories about how their soil quality had gone downhill over their lifetimes, too slowly to notice year to year, but plain as day in retrospect. One after another piped up to say that they’d noticed their soil decline under the now-conventional marriage of the plow and intensive fertilizer and agrochemical use.

In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have been surprised that farmers recognized the twin problems of soil loss and degradation. After all, who knows the land better than those who work it for a living?

After that talk in Colby, I started paying more attention to what individual farmers thought it would take to carry on farming well into the future. I asked them what they were doing—and how they were doing it. It didn’t take long to see common threads running through their answers.

I began to wonder what it would actually take to generate a resilient, productive, and permanent agriculture. I doubted there was a simple one-size-fits-all-farms answer. And I knew the answer wasn’t simply organic farming. Many, if not most, organic farmers plow to suppress weeds and prepare the ground. I realized that the basic question that society needs to focus on is how farmers of all stripes can forgo the plow and leave their soil better off after a crop is planted and harvested—over and over again.

A New Revolution

A look back at our agricultural past reveals a long series of innovations, and a few bona fide revolutions, that greatly reduced the amount of land it takes to feed a person. These changes led to a dramatic increase in how many people the land could support and a corresponding decrease in the proportion of people who farm. By my reckoning, we’ve already experienced four major revolutions in agriculture, albeit at different times in different regions.

The first was the initial idea of cultivation and the subsequent introduction of the plow and animal labor. This allowed sedentary villages to coalesce and grow into city-states and eventually sprawling empires. The second began at different points in history around the world, as farmers adopted soil husbandry to improve their land. Chiefly, this meant rotating crops, intercropping with legumes (plants that add nitrogen to soil), and adding manure to retain or enhance soil fertility. In Europe, this helped fuel changes in land tenure that pushed peasants into cities just in time to provide a ready supply of cheap urban labor to fuel the Industrial Revolution.

Agriculture’s third revolution — mechanization and industrialization — upended such practices and ushered in dependence on cheap fossil fuels and fertilizer-intensive methods. Chemical fertilizers replaced organic matter-rich mineral soil as the foundation of fertility. Although this increased crop yields from already degraded fields, it took more money and required more capital to farm. This, in turn, promoted the growth of larger farms and accelerated the exodus of families from rural to urban areas.

The fourth revolution saw the technological advances behind what came to be known as the Green Revolution and biotechnology breakthroughs that boosted yields and consolidated corporate control of the food system through proprietary seeds, agrochemical products, and commodity crop distribution—the foundation of conventional agriculture today.

What will the future hold as we burn through the supply of cheap oil and our population continues to rise alongside ongoing soil loss and climate change? A recent study authored by hundreds of scientists from around the world concluded that modern agricultural practices must change once again if society is to avoid calamitous food shortages later this century.

We need to ask what agriculture would look like if we relied on building fertile soil instead of depending on chemical substitutes. What would this new, fifth agricultural revolution look like?

Those at the vanguard invoke a variety of names—agroecology, conservation agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and the Brown Revolution. While proponents of these approaches include those who passionately disagree about the roles of organic practices and genetic engineering in the future of agriculture, I am more struck by the common ground they share in placing soil health at the heart of their practices.

When the United Nations declared 2015 the International Year of Soils, I received more invitations to speak at soil-themed conferences. I listened to farmers tell of how they changed the way they farmed, restoring life and fertility to their land. After a while, I started to think we might actually get it right this time. Maybe we could reverse the ancient pattern of farming ourselves out of business.

Seeking to understand what an agricultural revolution centered on soil health might look like, I set off on a trip across several continents to visit farmers who were restoring life to their land. What I learned shattered central myths of modern agriculture and pointed to simple, effective ways to help solve some of our most vexing problems.

Not all the farmers I met did things the same way. How could they? They grew different crops in different regions with different soil and different climates. Some integrated livestock into their operations. Others favored cover crops. A few, perched in the cabs of space-age prairie crawlers, worked fields stretching to the horizon. Others labored by hand in the tropics to coax sustenance from small plots to feed a single family.

As varied as their situations and practices were, they all viewed farming as working with, rather than against, nature. When I realized that they all operated according to a common set of principles, I knew that the foundation for a new agricultural revolution had already been laid.

The singular message that came through loud and clear from farmers I visited was that restoring the productive capacity of the soil could be done quickly and profitably. But it meant doing things differently, a willingness to walk away from conventional practices and to take a chance on the idea that building healthy soil was the best investment a farmer could make. Most of all, it seemed, it took the courage to try new things in the face of regulatory disincentives and skeptical corporate and academic crop advisors. These farmers were not being encouraged to change. They were deciding for themselves that they needed to practice a radically new form of agriculture.

Though already underway, the revolution still has a long way to go. Like all revolutions, it faces entrenched opposition from powerful interests and conventional thinking. Yet if it succeeds, it could solve one of humanity’s most pressing problems: how to keep feeding us all on this lonely rock in space.

Geologic Time Goes Over Billions of Years

A Planet With Brains? Peril & Potential of Self-Aware Geological Change

From an Article by David Grinspoon, 13.7 NPR Blog, December 18, 2016

The universe is 13.7 billion years old.  Now we have something new! Recent years have seen a vigorous debate over whether or not we have entered a new epoch of geologic time, the “Anthropocene,” characterized by humanity as a new geologic force.

Much of this has centered over when this age began. Three candidates for this include: an “Early Anthropocene” many thousand years ago when humans first started large-scale modification of land and climate; the beginning of the industrial revolution with its CO2 emissions; and the nuclear test horizon. Choosing a single moment of origin may be less important than the realization that we are now in it. However, the debate has been fruitful, as all these candidates mark interesting steps in our journey from being just another primate to becoming a dominant geological force.

As a planetary astrobiologist, I am focused on the major transitions in planetary evolution and the evolving relationship between planets and life. I want to frame our current time as a stage in the cosmic life of our planet. What I wonder most about the Anthropocene is not when did it start — but when, and how, will it end? Will it end? Or is it possible that our own growing awareness of our role on Earth can itself play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome toward one that we would desire?

Although it has been proposed as a new epoch, we may in fact be experiencing something much more unusual. Picture the “geologic time scale” you’ve seen where the various phases of Earth’s history are represented by a sequence of different layers corresponding to the rocks from different geological ages, with the most recent periods drawn at the top. New epochs are actually rather common in Earth’s history. They typically last for millions of years. They are marked by the relatively thin layers in geological time. Their boundaries are often characterized by episodes of global change and extinction events. Much more rare and consequential are the boundaries, separating the longest phases, the billion-year-scale chunks of time called eons.

Geologists separate our planet’s long history into only four eons. These represent fundamental branching points which each left the world permanently changed. I suspect we may now be at another of these pivotal moments, and our planet may be at the beginning of its fifth eon, which I propose we call the “Sapiezoic” (a hopeful, aspirational term meaning “age of wisdom”). Because what we are observing are the effects of not only a new geologic force, but a radically new type of geologic change. Never before has a geological force become aware of its own influence.

The first eon is named the Hadean because it was pure hell, with leftover debris from planet formation crashing down from space, erratically smashing, churning and heating Earth’s surface, making red-hot atmospheres first of vaporized rock and then of boiling steam. Eventually, the cosmic pounding subsided and the steam turned to rain, which filled the first oceans.

The transition to Earth’s second Eon, the Archean, came around 4 billion years ago and corresponds roughly to the coming of stable habitable conditions and the origin of life. Since then, biology has been a major agent of geologic change.

Earth’s third eon, the Proterozoic, beginning 2.5 billion years ago, corresponds roughly to the Great Oxygenation Event when, chemically, life took over the planet. In discovering solar energy, photosynthetic bacteria began to flood the atmosphere with oxygen, a poisonous gas that caused mass extinction, but also created the chemical conditions for animal respiration and the protective ozone layer that allowed life to leave the oceans and colonize the land.

Then, 540 million years ago, came the Cambrian Explosion — the sudden appearance of complex, multicellular animal and plant life forms. This enabled, among many other things, the evolution of intricate nervous systems, elaborate behavior and learning. This explosion of biological innovation is recognized as the beginning of the fourth and final (so far) eon of Earth’s history — the Phanerozoic Eon, which continues to this day.

Now, humans have become a dominant force of planetary change and, thus, we may have entered an eon of post-biological evolution in which cognitive systems have gained a powerful influence on the planet. The beginning of a time when self-aware cognitive processes become a key part of the way the planet functions is potentially as significant as the origin of life and the pivotal changes marking the two other eon boundaries in Earth’s history.

Yet to become a new eon, such a transition would require an additional quality: great longevity. Can this new force possibly persist for millions or billions of years? This is closely related to the subject of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), whose theorists have long recognized that the number of technological civilizations in the universe must be proportional to their average longevity. The literature of this field is filled with discussion of the potential longevity of human-like civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. What exactly do we mean by “human-like?” That is a wonderful question that connects questions of our essential nature, our exceptionalism compared to the rest of life, and our role on the planet. Can a civilization become integrated into the cyclic functioning of its planet in a sustainable way? This implies a different mode of interaction with the planet than is currently being exhibited by “intelligent” life.

From a systems perspective, the early stages of this transition are highly unstable because global influence precedes global control. Such a system is characterized by unstable positive feedbacks which threaten catastrophe. Hence the dangers of our current “Anthropocene dilemma”: We have global influence without global self-control. However, global technological influence clearly contains both peril and promise. Conscious awareness and control can also be sources of stabilizing negative feedback. This merely requires recognizing a problem and acting to fix it.

We’ve done this with our, so far, successful efforts to repair the ozone layer. There are pathways by which this stabilizing cognitive phenomenon could become a very long-lived and even permanent part of the Earth system. This would require that we reach a stage where we have a deep understanding of nature and an ability to forestall natural disasters, as well as the deep self-understanding necessary to forestall self-imposed disasters. In other words, it will require both technical and spiritual progress.

How does this affect the way we view our future? It reframes our task. And it puts our immediate challenges over the next century, stabilizing population and devising an energy system that can provide for the needs of this population without wrecking the natural systems upon which we depend, against the backdrop of a much longer-term challenge. Once we get over the relatively short-term, century-scale threat of destabilizing fossil-fuel induced climate change, we need to learn how to become a long-term stabilizing factor on the planet. This will include: over the next several hundred to thousand years, asteroid and comet defense; over the next several tens of thousands of years, learning how to prevent ice ages and natural episodes of dangerous global warming; over several billions of years, compensating for the warming sun and preventing the inevitable runaway global warming that will otherwise result from solar evolution.

Our current struggles and anxieties about the future must be faced with an awareness of the very long view. We need to have a vision of the world we want to create so that we can see ourselves as collaborators with future generations in the project of shaping it.

The story of our species is one of overcoming existential risk through new forms of cooperation and innovation. Our current dilemmas require these same skills applied on new temporal and spatial scales. Although right now we are initiating a mass extinction, in the long run, by preventing future extinctions and prolonging the life of the biosphere, we could be the best thing that ever happened to planet Earth.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net

Can you see EARTH 4 billion miles away?

From the Book “Pale Blue Dot,” by Carl Sagan, Cornell University, 1994

PHOTO: The Pale Blue Dot of Earth, NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2/14/1990

This excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

This image of Earth is one of 60 frames taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990 from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In the image the Earth is a mere point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Our planet was caught in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the Sun. This image is part of Voyager 1′s final photographic assignment which captured family portraits of the Sun and planets.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Trees Absorb & Retain Carbon Dioxide

An essay from “The Future of Conservation,” a series exploring how nature can help tackle the most pressing challenges facing people and the planet.

From an Article by Justin Adams, The Nature Conservancy, August – September 2016

Twenty years ago, long before I joined The Nature Conservancy, I was already searching for solutions to climate change. Initially, I was a clean-tech entrepreneur. Then I became a senior executive for BP’s $8 billion alternative- energy business. My job at BP was to develop and invest in a portfolio of alternative-energy technologies and solutions, looking at all possibilities that could help the company produce clean energy and reduce carbon emissions.

One innovative project was at In Salah, a city in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Algeria. Outside the city, about a mile underground, BP was pumping carbon dioxide from natural gas development into a massive rock formation, to keep this greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. The project was a pioneering investment in carbon capture and storage technology. At In Salah we proved that such technology could work, but it was expensive and, as I later came to see it, one-dimensional.

By contrast, I also built a portfolio of an entirely different kind of project—investing in forests. One such project was being run by The Nature Conservancy in the tropical forests of Bolivia, near Noel Kempff Mercado National Park. BP and two other energy companies in 1996 had given the Conservancy money to buy up logging rights on land adjacent to the park. Instead of the forests being cut—the likely outcome if the Conservancy hadn’t stepped in—the area was added to the park, expanding it from 1.8 million acres to 3.9 million. Not only would the trees remain standing—which meant no carbon would be emitted from forest destruction—but they would all keep growing. And as every schoolchild knows, trees absorb carbon dioxide.

This was one of the world’s first large-scale attempts to use nature to help solve the climate challenge. In 2005, the Noel Kempff project was certified by an independent agency as helping to avoid more than 1 million metric tons of carbon emissions. By 2026, the forests there will have prevented 5.8 million metric tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere.

“If the world is to slow climate change, we must emit less carbon. Technology will get us part of the way—but protecting and restoring nature will be critical.”

Unlike In Salah, the forest project was relatively inexpensive. And it did much more than simply absorb carbon. Plants and animals thrived. Local residents got jobs as park rangers and ecotourism guides. The project partners even helped indigenous residents secure title to their traditional lands.

The Noel Kempff project was far from perfect, but it explains why I am now working on land use for a conservation organization: Nature offers so many opportunities to address climate change, and each one comes with myriad secondary benefits that help people.

Cutting down forests, plowing under prairies and the like not only emit carbon but also reduce the planet’s overall capacity to store carbon. Consider the protected forests at Noel Kempff. Measured by weight, each tree consists of roughly 50 percent carbon, which is stored in roots, trunks, branches and leaves. The carbon-storage capacity gets larger as each tree grows. If we cut the trees, the living tissues decompose and the stored carbon is emitted. That’s bad for the climate. But it’s doubly bad because those cut trees will no longer absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We lose net storage capacity.

Humans have already altered almost half of Earth’s land surface to make way for cropland, pasture and commercial forestry. The effect on the global climate has been profound. In 2010, the clearing of forests, savannas and other ecosystems accounted for 12 percent of global carbon emissions. The use of fertilizers and methane emissions from livestock accounted for another 13 percent. And about one-quarter of the world’s converted land—land used for agriculture, industry and so on—doesn’t produce as much food or store as much carbon as it could.

If these numbers paint a dire picture, they also provide a blueprint to reversing our climate crisis.

To limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century—as nations agreed to do in the recent Paris Accords—we must, by 2030, reduce annual emissions from a projected 70 gigatons of carbon dioxide down to about 40 gigatons. The Conservancy’s scientists estimate that nations can achieve about a third of the reduction needed in the next critical decade by protecting and restoring nature and its carbon storage capacity.

This requires three basic strategies: Protect natural lands from development where appropriate. Restore degraded lands so they absorb more carbon. And implement the most productive and sustainable methods on land  that is already in cultivation. Many of these natural climate solutions, as we call them, would cost less than $10 per metric ton of carbon to implement—much less than some of the industrial and technological fixes now being developed.

The Conservancy is pursuing strategies like these across the globe. Incorporating lessons from Noel Kempff, we have launched forest-carbon projects in Louisiana, California, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere. These projects absorb carbon, create sustainable jobs and ensure that indigenous communities get a say in how their traditional lands are used.

“Nations can achieve about a third of the carbon reduction needed in the next critical decade by protecting and restoring nature and its carbon storage capacity.”

In other places, restoring degraded lands can help the climate. In Australia’s northern tropical savannas, for example, the setting of small fires early in the dry season—an indigenous practice—was largely abandoned after European settlement. Today, devastating wildfires devour the parched vegetation during the late dry season—fires that emit significant amounts of carbon. But the Conservancy has been working with several indigenous communities across northern Australia to set controlled fires early, before vegetation gets too dry. The resulting patchy, less-intense burns safely restore habitat for small mammals and birds, and they emit less carbon.

At one ranch, called the Fish River Station, the indigenous rangers have reduced the amount of land charred by wildfires from an average of 36 percent a year to just 1 percent. Since 2010, the project has cut annual carbon emissions nearly in half while helping to maintain a healthy savanna.

Conservationists also can partner with farmers and ranchers to manage working landscapes in ways that reduce carbon emissions. Research suggests that the world’s cultivated soils used to hold much more carbon— perhaps as much as 50 to 70 percent more—than they store today. The science is still evolving, but some of that carbon-storage capacity can be restored by adopting conservation-oriented practices, such as planting cover crops on fallow agricultural fields.

I recently saw this in action while touring the Midwest. I joined a group visiting a pioneering Iowa farmer, Tim Smith, who is working with the Conservancy and the Natural Resources Conservation Service to demonstrate what’s possible when farmers focus on soil health. We looked at fields that had been traditionally tilled and kept “square and bare” after harvest as generations of farmers have learned to do. On other fields, Smith had planted cover crops or practiced conservation tillage, where more crop residue is left in the ground. More carbon is retained in these soils. They also absorb water more quickly and retain water better. Such soils reduce the  nutrient-laden runoff that emits greenhouse gases and pollutes rivers, lakes and oceans. These practices can also deliver higher returns for the farmer and, planned correctly, can get more production off the same acreage.

Ultimately, we will need farmers, ranchers, foresters and indigenous communities on board if we are to bring natural climate solutions to bear on a meaningful scale. The conservation movement can’t achieve the necessary scale on its own.

Yet I’ve seen firsthand how partnerships can make these types of solutions possible. A few months ago, I visited the Dayak village of Merabu in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province. After a long canoe ride upriver, I met the village chief, a 28-year-old dynamo in flipflops and trousers named Franly Oley. He showed me a three-dimensional map that the Conservancy had helped him create, detailing the region’s veins of forest woven between  limestone karst pinnacles. Armed with these maps, Merabu had gained legal title to nearly 20,000 acres of forest that had been under threat from the expansion of palm oil plantations. This forest could have been destroyed. Instead, it stands, storing carbon dioxide every day. The Conservancy has worked with partners on similar efforts with more than 20 villages in this part of Indonesia and plans to help hundreds more in the coming years.

Land conservation has been part of the Conservancy’s mission for some 65 years, during which time we have protected hundreds of millions of acres around the world. It’s exciting to realize that expanding our efforts can also solve a substantial portion of the climate challenge. Unlike any generation before us, we have the scientific and economic tools to analyze how to manage our natural resources in a more sustainable way. Ours is the generation that can actually begin to restore the planet on a significant scale.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net