It’s about time we call this problem what it is .....

From an Article by Andrew Freedman, Washington Post, November 5, 2019

A new report by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency,” and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it.

The analysis is a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming, such as those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in that it does not couch its conclusions in the language of uncertainties, and it does prescribe policies.

The study, called the “World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency,” marks the first time a large group of scientists has formally come out in favor of labeling climate change an “emergency,” which the study notes is caused by many human trends that are together increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The report, published Tuesday in the journal Bioscience, was spearheaded by the ecologists Bill Ripple and Christopher Wolf of Oregon State University, along with William Moomaw, a Tufts University climate scientist, and researchers in Australia and South Africa.

“Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament,” the study states.

The paper bases its conclusions on a set of easy-to-understand indicators that show the human influence on climate, such as 40 years of greenhouse gas emissions, economic trends, population growth rates, per capita meat production, and global tree cover loss, as well as consequences, such as global temperature trends and ocean heat content.

The results are charts that are, at least compared with the climate graphics presented by the IPCC, surprisingly simple, and that help reveal the troubling direction the world is headed.

The study also departs from other major climate assessments in that it directly addresses the politically sensitive subject of population growth. The study notes that the global decline in fertility rates has “substantially slowed” during the past 20 years, and calls for “bold and drastic” changes in economic growth and population policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Such measures would include policies that strengthen human rights, especially for women and girls, and make family-planning services “available to all people,” the paper says.

On energy, the report calls for the world to “implement massive energy efficiency and conservation practices” and cut out fossil fuels in favor of renewable sources of energy, a trend it notes is not happening fast enough. It also calls for remaining fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, to remain in the ground, never to be burned to generate energy, a key goal for many climate activists.

Maria Abate, a signatory of the scientists’ warning and a biology professor at Simmons College in Boston, says she hopes the paper will raise awareness. “Like other organisms we are not adapted to recognize far-reaching environmental threats beyond our immediate surroundings,” she said via email. “The reported vital signs of our global activity and climate responses give us a tangible, evidence-based report card that I hope will help our culture to develop a broader awareness more quickly to slow this climate crisis.”

Other items on the study’s list of policy priorities include quickly cutting emissions of short-lived climate pollutants, such as soot and methane, which could slow short-term warming. The study also calls for a shift to eating mostly plant-based foods and instituting agricultural practices that increase the amount of carbon the soil absorbs.

On the economy, the study states that improving long-term sustainability and reducing inequality should be prioritized over growing wealth, as measured using gross domestic product. The authors also advocate for policies that would curtail biodiversity loss and the destruction of forests, and they recommend prioritizing the preservation of intact forests that store carbon along with other lands that can rapidly bury carbon, thereby reducing global warming.

Ripple, of Oregon State, is no stranger to organizing scientific calls to action, having founded the Alliance of World Scientists and organized scientists’ “Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” in 2017, which was also published in Bioscience and focused on the urgent need to solve a broad array of environmental problems including climate change and biodiversity loss.

Thousands of scientists issue bleak ‘second notice’ to humanity

“We’re asking for a transformative change for humanity,” Ripple said in an interview. Many of the signatories to the warning do not list themselves as climate scientists but, instead, as biologists, ecologists and other science specialists. Ripple says that is intentional, as the authors sought to assemble the broadest support possible.

“The situation we’re in today with climate change,” he says, “shows that this is an issue that needs to move beyond climate scientists only.”

Moomaw says the paper comes from researchers who are seeing the consequences of a rapidly changing planet, and is in part “a statement of frustration on the part of many in the scientific community.”

“Scientists, and in particular those that are studying what is happening in a changed climate, have become the most alarmed at how rapidly these changes are taking place and the urgency of needing to take far more drastic action,” Moomaw said.

The term “climate emergency” has been championed by climate activists and pro-climate action politicians seeking to add a sense of urgency to the way we respond to what is a long-term problem. The Climate Mobilization, an advocacy group, is seeking to have governments in the United States and elsewhere declare a climate emergency and enact response measures commensurate with such a declaration.

New York’s City Council has declared a climate emergency, as has San Francisco. European cities have also taken this step. Bills labeling global warming as an emergency are pending in both the House and the Senate, endorsed by prominent liberals including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

The youth climate movement, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has been leading the charge to ratchet up the language used in describing global warming. To date, scientists have been reluctant to use such language. However, this study may change that.

Phil Duffy, a climate researcher and president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who added his name to the paper Monday, said he finds the term fitting, considering the scale of the problem and lack of action so far.

“The term ‘climate emergency’ … I must say, I find it refreshing, really, because you know, I get so impatient with the scientists who are always just waffling and mumbling about uncertainty, blah, blah, blah, and this certainly is, you know, much bolder than that,” he said. “I think it’s right to do that.”

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.

Soil Disturbance Challenge for Doddridge County Watershed Association

The Earth’s Soil Serves as a Carbon Storehouse

Analysis by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

An exciting new way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by a natural process is being discussed in many places. See here, and see here, and see here, and see here, for example.

To understand it, some background is needed. As the reader will know, most of our energy in this age is derived from burning carbon containing compounds (fossil fuels) in the form of natural gas, oil and coal. They are burned with oxygen in air and carbon dioxide is formed. Less energy is derived from the hydrogen in these compounds atom for atom, and most of the compounds formed from the sulfur, phosphorus. and other elements present in fuels are pollutants.

The process of burning (combustion) oxidizes carbon and the other elements, but some of the carbon dioxide and water from the air are converted to plant life by photosynthesis. Decomposition of dead plants and animals exposed to the air also contributes carbon dioxide. The evidence indicates this has been going on for 2.8 billion years. Sometimes in geological periods past there has been greater or lesser amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than now. The return to plant life of oxidized carbon through photosynthesis is slow.

Much of plant life grows roots into the soil. When the plant dies its roots are converted to a soil carbon form known as humus to gardeners. This is done by fungus, (actually up to 1.5 million species are present in the soil worldwide according to a recent article in Science, the journal of the AAAS) and other microorganisms. As everyone knows, humus helps hold nutrients in the soil, and water. This helps new plants to grow. Scientists now understand soil based life is an association between plants and special microorganisms acting between soil and plant roots. This helps the plants to get nutrients from the soil and from the soil carbon compounds (which are very numerous and complex) in humus.

The excitement is that in many parts of the world soil carbon is depleted, but with proper management it can be rebuilt. It is a huge reservoir – one source gives 2.7 x 10¹⁸ long tons of carbon in soil compared to 0.78 long tons in the atmosphere and 0.75 long tons in biomass, i.e., living matter.

According to Rattan Lal, director of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, the world’s cultivated soils have lost between 50 and 70 percent of their original carbon stock, much of which has oxidized upon exposure to air. (Notice this is cultivated soils, not all soils.) Some of it goes back 15,000 years to when forests were first cleared for crops.

Regenerating these soils involves agricultural practices such as using year-around cover crops, and what is commonly called rotational pasture and other measures. Top priority would be in restoring degraded and eroded lands, avoiding both deforestation, and farming of peat land. Restoration of mangrove areas along coasts, salt marshes and sea grasses would also play a part.

The good thing about this method of reducing carbon dioxide, in contrast to mechanical sequestration, is that it increases the capacity to produce food for the coming increase in world population by increasing soil productivity, and making soils more resilient to both floods and drought. It is not high tech, but involves techniques already with an advanced state of understanding. It is not capital intensive, but education intensive.

One of the most severe problems is with grassland. Much of the world’s agricultural land produces grass and is not suitable for crops, except for certain small favored spots. It is too dry, too hilly, or too wet for crops which produce parts that can be eaten by humans. Grasslands developed under herds of grazing animals, so they are adapted to each other.

Here is a video of an expert, Allan Savory of Rhodesia (now Nyasaland) in Africa explaining the method in a TED talk. It will be recognized by any Appalachian farmer as “rotational grazing.” It is also called holistic management. The animals are kept close together, stay on one spot long enough to eat the top one-third or one-half the plant, the part that has the highest sugar content, then moved on. (The customary practice now is to keep animals in the same field continuously, in the worst case, as long as any of the plant growth remains there.)

The claims of holistic management have their detractors, too. But if you are “into” research on extreme hydrocarbon energy exploitation (shale drilling, mountaintop removal, deep water drilling, etc.) you have learned to look at who is financing what. Don’t skip the last line. Established environmental groups can be slow to change, too! They can’t argue that grazing doesn’t reduce grass fires, though, a benefit important near habitation.

Ohio State University maintains the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, which lists four measures for reestablishment of soil carbon: afforestation, wetlands management, no-tillage of soils and close management of grazing. (1) Reforestation is the name that has been used for decades when the objective was to get the resulting timber. It is now recognized as a good way to build soil, too, because trees have the same kind of relations with microorganisms and humus as grass. Our Appalachian soils developed under forest cover. It is also recognized that the carbon in timber (since it is protected by roofs, etc., last decades to centuries after the tree is cut, before returning to carbon dioxide.

(2) Wetlands often preserve carbon for a long time, since the remains of plants are cut off from oxygen at the water level. Peat is a residue built up from wetland plants that is almost entirely organic. At one time it was cut and dried for fuel, a practice which has largely been discontinued. However peatlands can be drained and farmed, resulting in oxidation of the peat to carbon dioxide. The emphasis is now on preventing this from being done. (3) “No tillage” means not plowing to plant crops which have been traditionally handled this way. Plowing and tillage are primarily weed control activities. Today the best method for corn, soybeans and such like is to plant a cover crop, frequently a legume, which gets good growth before winter and keeps the ground covered and crowds out baby weeds. This prevents oxidation of the carbon in the soil, adds to it, and helps fertilize the main crop. It also helps control some insect pests and encourages wildlife.

So holistic management of soil can remove some carbon dioxide from the air and do it for decades to come. This can provide quite a few other benefits to society, such as food, timber, erosion and flood control, improved wildlife habitat, and scenic values. It is not  high tech nor does it does it require rare or expensive materials. It employs and educates many people, including the poorest, all over the world. Well now, it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

This article was prompted by a recent extended review from Yale University.