Earth's Climate

Earth's Climate

    There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear.  So sang Stephen Stills long ago, although he was talking about an upcoming change in mood, people protesting over a seemingly never-ending war.  And sometimes, as I stare at my pile of saved articles and references on climate change, I feel like joining the protest.  Battling such giant corporations and governments over climate change and what exactly is causing it can appear to be a losing, or at least a prolonged, fight.  But something is happening here...go back just two months and you'll find that both January and February recorded their hottest temperatures ever (or at least, since record-keeping started over 100 years ago)...and not only the hottest, but the May/June issue of Sierra magazine added, the hottest "by far...Sea levels are rising faster now than at any time in the past 2,800 years.  If greenhouse gas emissions continue at a high rate, oceans could rise by three to four feet by 2100...The EPA estimates that methane emissions from the oil and gas industry are 27 percent higher than previously thought.  The climate impact over 20 years will be equivalent to that of 200 coal-fired power plants."

    Depressing, isn't it?  Add to that, the giant methane leak recently capped in California (but not before 100,000 tons of methane leaked into the air), a possible precursor of what could happen to the aging gas pipes that web through the United Stated and haven't been replaced.  Said Standord environmental scientist, Rob Jackson, in an interview with NPR: Methane is far more potent, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide is — the gas that people are used to thinking about in terms of climate change.  On a 20-year time scale methane is 80 or 90 times more potent, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide.  And even at a century time scale, it's 30 or 40 times.  That's the reason that we care so much about methane in the atmosphere.  So was this leak a big deal, the show asked.  It really depends on the scale that you look.  The amount of methane leaking out on a day-to-day basis is comparable to whole countries.  If you look in Europe, for instance, countries like Belgium and Austria produce about this much methane on a day-to-day basis from human activities.  So it's really big...If you look globally, you're not going to see a massive spike when you look back at 2015 and 2016.  It's not that huge.  It's a huge leak in human terms, but it's not big enough that it will affect the global methane cycle so much that this will be some kind of bellwether year.  It's really pretty small in the global scheme of things.

    Yesterday, of course, was the signing of last December's Climate Accord.  170 nations, from tiny islands to countries such as China and the U.S., arrived in New York for the signing, the first step of moving the accord along (countries now have to go on to ratify it and then actually put their self-imposed limits on carbon emissions into action, likely something that will happen at the end of the year at the earliest).  Today, of course, is Earth Day.  And rather than go over and over on the issue --the calving of the glaciers as they recede, the rising sea levels, the El Ninos and typhoons and changing fish patterns, the threatened birds as mosquitos move ever higher in the mountains, the opening of the Arctic seaways, and more and more-- there was something I only recently learned and found interesting.  That issue was that when we think of climate change and what causes it (some say our human emissions*, some say it is only a natural part of our world such as volcanic eruptions and such), usually only two things pop up, our carbon emissions (this is the greenhouse gas stuff, the trapping of emissions warming the atmosphere and thus causing our shift in cycles, from excessive warming to excessive cooling) and our carbon capture (from our forests to actual human efforts to bury the released gases).  But it turns out that those are only two of what are believed to be five major components of how our climate works...our Gaia Earth apparently still finds us as students of her teachings.

    Returning to my earlier post of that collection of articles from 2010, I was struck again by the words of Freeman Dyson. Traveling to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the state of Tennessee, a place Dyson says they "understand fluid dynamics and climate modeling," he learned, in his words, two basic facts: First, the natural environment contains five reservoirs of carbon of roughly equal size: fossil fuels, the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, land vegetation, and topsoil.  Second, these five reservoirs are tightly coupled together.  Anything we do to change any one of them has important effects on all of them...The orthodox climate-alarmist view describes the problem of climate change as involving only two reservoirs of carbon, fossil fuels and the atmosphere, ignoring the other three.  This simplification of the problem makes predictions seem more certain and more dire...From the experience of greenhouse growers, we can calculate that the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by fossil-fuel burning has increased the worldwide yield of agricultural crop plants bt roughly 15 percent in the last fifty years.  In addition, when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plants will put more growth into roots and less into above-ground stems and leaves.  These effects of carbon dioxide on vegetation might in turn cause large effects on topsoil.  After they decay, roots add carbon to the soil, while stems and leaves mostly return carbon to the atmosphere.  The plowing of fields by farmers all over the world then exposes topsoil to the air and increases the loss of carbon from soil to atmosphere.  The flows of carbon among soil and vegetation and atmosphere may be as important as the flows between fossil fuels and atmosphere...Instead of shouting, "Stop burning coal!" the climate alarmists might shout, "Stop plowing soil!"

    What?  That surge in agriculture, that massive industrial plowing that now feeds the world, might be as much to blame as our coal-fired "plants?"  It's an interesting premise, one still being studied and one showing us how much we might still have to learn about how our home planet works.  And behind much of this might be a more profitable way of raising cattle, one that not only adds to the pocketbooks of farmers and ranchers, but one that might prove more beneficial to the earth and yes, to our atmosphere.  And it ties into reducing our plowing and our turning over of the soil.  Who knew?  I'll talk about this more in the next post, and tell you about the writer Richard Manning who dares to explore these areas, but on this Earth Day, perhaps what is more important is to simply step back and gaze in wonder at it all, how our planet (and indeed ourselves) somehow tie together far more, and far more intricate, systems than we could have ever imagined.  It is a marvel to behold, and one it seems that we are still struggling to understand.  Earth Day, symbolic as it might be, perhaps is enough of a nudge on the calendar to have us pause and just wonder, and wander.  There is still much left to explore...


*Even ExxonMobil now  "... publicly acknowledges the reality of human-driven climate change," said the May/June issue of Sierra.  For a glimpse of the changing climate's effects on the Arctic, view the beautiful and somewhat frightening pictures posed by the recent issue of Audubon.