Restoring Nature Is Our Only Climate Solution - resilience

[Philip Bogdonoff]

Here is a very good just-published article by Richard Heinberg:

Restoring Nature Is Our Only Climate Solution - resilience
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-07-01/restoring-nature-is-our-only-climate-solution/

-- Philip
  

[rob...@rtulip.net]

Hello Philip.  I don’t agree with your comment that this article is very good.  While it does contain much excellent information, its strategic vision is romantic, impractical and wrong, with no workable theory of change.  The measures it promotes to fix the carbon problem are far too small and slow to prevent dangerous warming before tipping points overwhelm Earth systems.

 

The basic problem, like numerous similar articles, is the total failure to recognise the central role of albedo in global warming and Earth System Sensitivity.  The author relies on this appalling article to defend his ridiculous dismissive line that solar geoengineering might be “worse than the problem they are trying to solve.”  It is profoundly biased for him to say “critics point out” something that is totally disputed by knowledgeable scientists.  This attack on sunlight reflection is alarmist political rhetoric with no scientific basis, failing to recognise the central roles of research and governance in albedo enhancement.  Just because some ignorant activists can speculate about what “might” happen is not a moral or sensible basis for policy recommendation.

 

It would be far more balanced if this article engaged with James Hansen’s recent assessment that the darkening of the world since 2015 has warming effect equivalent to 110 ppm of CO2.  This recent driver of warming is many orders of magnitude more critical than any carbon effect, and needs to be recognised in any good analysis of the climate situation.  Hansen states “the large increase of global absorbed solar radiation since 2015 is a decrease of Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) by 0.4%. This reduced albedo is equivalent to a sudden increase of atmospheric CO2 from 420 to 530 ppm.”

 

Hansen’s 0.4% calculation uses a conservative method.  This sudden albedo collapse could equally be calculated as 1.4%, and even worse since 2000, about 2%.  This problem is the primary driver of accelerating feedbacks.

 

Restoring lost albedo needs to become the primary climate focus, creating governance systems to rebrighten the planet that will buy time and create political awareness to address the much slower and more difficult real challenges of carbon that are covered in this article.  Thinking globally means understanding the need for net zero heating.

 

Regards

 

Robert Tulip

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[Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas]

Natural systems are a good sounding idea that is no longer so good and sound. This used to be a fundamental solution, but not since we crossed the tipping collapse activation threshold. Earth systems are collapsing (tipping systems) and once a system begins collapse --any system-- it does not stabilize unless the perturbation to the system that caused the collapse to begin is stabilized. Because Earth systems are only very modest sequestering agents on a per unit basis, it is likely on average, that those systems that have seen their tipping collapses activated are now emitting and no longer sequestering.

(From Heinberg's article - Restoring Nature Is Our Only Climate Solution)

The biggest contributors to the small water cycle are intact forests; therefore, our first order of business should be to protect existing old-growth forests (you can plant a tree in a few minutes, but an old-growth forest requires centuries to mature). At the same time, we can plant millions more trees—but they must be the right kinds of trees in the right places. We must anticipate climate change and assist forests to migrate to suitable climate zones.

On average globally, forests have seen a doubling of mortality, meaning a halving of forest age and carbon storage with time relative to the age of the forest. This is one of the major things we film. These collapses will not stop until we have restored Earth's temperature back to within the evolutionary boundaries of our forests. A doubling of mortality means a doubling of tree death from (generally) 1 per 200 to 1 per 400 per year, to 2 per 200 to 2 per 400 per year. Some of the science on forest mortality is below but I want to emphasize the above statement "our first order of business should be to protect existing old-growth forests." 

Our planet's oldest, old growth forests in California and along the West Coast are in active collapse from water stress, disease, insect attack and fire. These forest contain not only wildly old, old growth sequoias and redwoods, but the fabulous climate of the West Coast also includes numerous other species that attain a giant stature and age: sugar, ponderosa, limber, bristlecone, and lodgepole pines, white and Douglas fir, western hemlock, incense cedar, sitka spruce, western juniper, -- it's an amazing list of giants, much larger list than this.

There are too many indicators of forest collapse and regeneration failure to list now, but below I have copied in some of my forest health notes I have collected over the years in the form of summarized academic findings.

Also, the following link is a deeply referenced article I wrote for Truthout in 2022 on the collapse of the sequoia ecosystem in the Sierra Nevada.

Steep trails,

B

Mass Death of Sequoias Is the Harbinger of Earth Systems Collapse
We have entered an era where burned forests may not return unless we cool Earth to below the tipping point.

By Bruce Melton , TRUTHOUT
Published August 9, 2022
https://truthout.org/articles/mass-death-of-sequoias-is-the-harbinger-of-earth-systems-collapse/
(An unabridged version with summarized references is here - https://climatediscovery.org/giant-sequoias-a-tipping-point/)

~ ~ ~

These notes below  include summaries and references for Forest Mortality, Wildfire and Forest Regeneration failure.

~ ~ ~

Forest Mortality Master

~ ~ ~

Summary with citations 111123 Mortality, Emissions and  Regeneration Failure

~ ~ ~

Earth's natural systems carbon sequestration permanence is failing...

A simple interpretation of findings reveals that except for our oceans, the most important Earth systems for sequestration are in collapse. McDowell 2020 says that on average in the US and Europe, forests have seen a doubling of mortality. A doubling of mortality halves a forest's life and halves carbon storage, creating emissions instead of sequestration because forests are only modest sequestration resources when healthy. Work in the Amazon, western North American forests, from Canada and Australia, all show a doubling or greater of forest mortality. Work from the Amazon, permafrost lands that include forest drowning, and Canadian forests show net greenhouse gas emissions instead of sequestration. If these subcontinental-scale areas are seeing forest failure, similar forests globally are likely behaving similarly. When it is understood that even if the global temperature were stabilized tomorrow morning, not only would currently extreme chronic and acute weather events that have caused mortality to increase still occur, rarer and even more extreme weather events would still occur as time passed because of the distribution of different extremeness of weather events as a part of frequentist statistics. It is clear then that with our current global temperature, forest mortality rates will continue to worsen. This singular concept of, once a natural system collapse begins it does not stabilize unless the perturbation to the system that activated the collapse is removed, bodes poorly for continued sequestration of natural systems globally. The reality is that natural systems collapses generally create feedback emissions quite soon after collapse initiation. There is a high risk that if we use these systems to offset emissions or provide drawdown, the systems will not only fail at the task, but reverse the intention through feedback emissions.  Below are numerous findings that show that it is plausible if not likely that globally, our natural systems are failing and likely even emitting greenhouse gases, not sequestering them as the standard body of the science climate change mitigation continues to suggest is reality.

 

~ ~ ~

Many other lines of research collaborate a general global flip of forests to emissions from increased mortality: Bauman 2022 - doubling of Australian tropical forest mortality in the previous 35 years, with a plausible similar shift in southeast Asian tropical forests, Mantgem 2009 - US West tree mortality from the mid 1950s to late 2000s, more than double, McDowell 2015 - Western North American forest mortality increased two to four times between 1980 and the mid-2000s with much of the increase happening recently, Rosenblad 2023 - Thermophilization: Mortality increased eight times in western US forests, Liu 2023 - Canada's boreal forest mortality about doubled 1970 to 2020 and lost (net) 3.5 Gt carbon as CO2, about 90 percent since 2000, and Allen 2015 – Ten drivers of a warmer climate that reveal underestimation in forest mortality.

Emissions from these collapsing systems are now being documented: Forzieri 2022 - Forest collapse globally of 12.2 Gt CO2 2000-2022, equal to 23 percent of intact undisturbed forests at a critical threshold, Qin 2021 - From 2000 to 2019 the Amazon had a gross above ground carbon loss of 0.6 gigatons, or 2.45 Gt CO2eq, with 73 percent from forest degradation and 27 percent from deforestation, Gatti 2021 - Amazon emitting, not absorbing, 1 Gt CO2 annually on average from 2010 to 2018, Canadian Forest Service 2020 - Canadian forests emitting 250 Mt CO2eq annually, and Natali 2019 - Permafrost collapse of 2.3 Gt CO2eq annually, including emissions from drowned forest.

Mortality alone is just a part of the picture. Regrowth can minimize emissions, but forest regeneration is failing:  Hill 2023 - Increased regeneration failure and wildfire risk from warming across the Sierra Nevada, Hill and Field 2022 - Seedling regeneration in unburned plots is reduced by 15 to 36 percent from 2000 to 2019 in Western forests, Singleton 2021 - Poor ponderosa regeneration because of climate warming and moisture limitation, Coop 2020 - An era when prefire forests may not return, Davis 2019 -- Forests exceed climate change regeneration threshold leading to non-forested states, Stevens-Rumann 2017 - One third of burned Western US forests are not regenerating at all, Crasubay 2017 - Anticipated transition from forested to shrubland ecosystems, and Singleton 2021 - Poor Ponderosa Regeneration because of climate warming and moisture limitation.

 

 

 

(Summary)

Global tropical, high altitude and high latitude forests have likely flipped on average from sequestration sink to emissions source, based on Bauman 2022 and McDowell 2015…

Bauman 2022 shows Australian tropical forests have seen a doubling of forest mortality which translates to a halving of forest age and a halving of carbon storage. Because forests are only modest carbon sinks, Bauman 2022 suggests Australian tropical forests have now flipped to emitting GHGs. They also suggest that southeast Asian forests are likely behaving similarly. I spoke to Bauman to confirm and he said what he now believes is that globally, because of the same water stress that created a doubling of Australian tropical forest mortality, all tropical forests globally are likely now behaving similarly.  McDowell 2015 describes forest mortality across western North America with ranges from nearly doubling to quadrupling and using the same logic as Bauman 2022, this means these forests are now emitting, not absorbing.

Assuming that western North American high altitude and high latitude forests are also analog to similar ecologies across the globe where a doubling of mortality results in a halving of carbon storage, on average then it is likely that in addition to tropical forests globally, high altitude and high latitude forests globally have also flipped from sink to source.

This interpretation is backed up by flips of the Amazon (1 Gt CO2eq emissions annually - Gatti 2021, Quin 2021), Canadian forests (250 Mt CO2eq emissions annually - Canadian Forest Service 2020), and permafrost (2.3 Gt CO2eq emissions annually - Natali 2019, where this is net emissions that include drowned forests). We also need to consider the Amazon and permafrost emissions are averages, and both were likely stable at the beginning of the averaging period, therefor emissions at the end of the averaging period could be interpreted as being double the average, assuming a linear increase. This would put emissions from just the Amazon, Canadian forests and permafrost regions at about 7 Gt CO2 annually.

(End Summary)

Australian tropical forest mortality doubled in the last 35 years, mostly recently. A personal communication with Bauman says global tropical forests are likely behaving similarly because of the same water stress… Bauman 2022 analyzed a 49-year record across 24 old-growth tropical forests in Australia and found mortality has doubled because of water stress across all plots in the last 35 years indicating a halving of life expectancy and carbon residence time and suggesting that Australian tropical forests have now flipped from a CO2 sink to a source of CO2 emissions. Further, they suggest Southeast Asian tropical forests are behaving similarly. When I asked Bauman to confirm that Australian tropical forests are analog to Southeast Asian tropical forests,  he suggested what he believed now was that the same water stress is likely affecting all tropical forests globally in a similar way. 
Bauman et al., Tropical tree mortality has increased with rising atmospheric water stress, Nature, May 17, 2022.
(Researchgate, free account required) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360691427_Tropical_tree_mortality_has_increased_with_rising_atmospheric_water_stress

Understanding this relationship with mortality doubling resulting in a halving of carbon storage, I recalled McDowell 2015 discussed mortality rates of forests across Western North America:

Western North American forest mortality increased two to four times between 1980 and the mid-2000s with much of the increase happening recently… It is also pertinent that warming since the mid-2000s has just about doubled as of 2022, and that much of the recent western US forest mortality from bark beetles and increase in burn area was not captured in McDowell 2015:

Mortality of Western North American forests from McDowell 2015:
-- Sierra Nevada mortality has doubled from 0.75 to 1.5 percent
-- Western Canadian forest mortality has quadrupled from 0.6 percent to 2.5 percent
-- Eastern Canadian forest mortality has nearly doubled from 0.8 to 1.45 percent
-- Western US interior forests mortality has more than doubled from 0.3 percent to 0.65 percent.
-- Pacific Northwest forests mortality has tripled from 0.45 to 1.25 percent

McDowell et al., Multi-scale predictions of massive conifer mortality due to chronic temperature rise, Los Alamos National lab, Nature Climate Change, December 21, 2015.
https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dsmackay/mackay/pubs/pdfs/nclimate2873.pdf

US West tree mortality from the mid 1950s to late 2000s, more than doubled… This is a good view of early tree mortality trends showing the increasing trend accelerating after the 1970s. Regional mortality in prior to the 1970s was 0.2, 0.4 and 0.8 percent in Pacific Northwest, Coastal California, and the interior. After the 1970s mortality rate accelerated and at 2008 was 0.5, 1.3 and 1.8 percent, indicating a more than doubling to a more than tripling or mortality. Average forest age was 450 to 1000 years.
Mantgem et al., Widespread increase of tree mortality rates in the Western United States, Science , January 23, 2009.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/pnw/pubs/journals/pnw_2009_vanmantgem001.pdf

US and European Forests mortality more than doubled… "The impacts of global change on forest demographic rates may already be materializing. In mature ecosystems, tree mortality rates have doubled throughout much of the Americas and in Europe over the last four decades (7-9)…  Beyond changing vegetation dynamics within “intact” or relatively undisturbed forests, episodic disturbances are tending to be larger, more severe and, in some regions, more frequent  under global change(17-20).  Similarly, the rates and types of land-use change (LUC) vary widely (21) but have, on average, increased globally in the past few centuries (2,22,23)… Thus, at the global scale, disturbances [climate change related] and LUC [land use change] have likely amplified tree mortality beyond that suggested by the doubling of background mortality rates in undisturbed forests (7-9)."
McDowell et al, Pervasive shifts in forest dynamics in a changing world, Science, May 29, 2020.
https://www.dora.lib4ri.ch/wsl/islandora/object/wsl%3A23827/datastream/PDF2/McDowell-2020-Pervasive_shifts_in_forest_dynamics-%28accepted_version%29.pdf

Rosenblad 2023, Thermophilization – Mortaity increased eight times in Western US Forests 2010 to 2018 … Simply put, thermophilization is forest evolution due to warming. It is driven in Western US forests by two factors, recruitment of new heat and drought tolerant species and mortality of less heat and drought tolerant species. Mortality is winning by 2:1. Rosenblad reveals a 20 percent mortality rate in 10 years - four to eight times normal. A doubling of mortality rate halves carbon storage... ""Here, we analyze 10-y changes in tree community composition across 44,992 forest subplots in the western United States... The dataset comprised 316,519 trees that survived between censuses (mean = 5.6 per subplot), 64,024 that died (1.1 per subplot), and 35,836 that recruited (0.63 per subplot)."
Thermophilization... Rosenblad et al., Climate change, tree demography, and thermophilization in western US forests, PNAS, April 24, 2023.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2301754120

Canada's boreal forest mortality about doubled 1970 to 2020 and  lost (net) 3.5 Gt carbon as CO2, about 90 percent since 2002… "From 1970 to 2020. We show that the average annual tree mortality rate is approximately 2.7%. Approximately 43% of Canada's boreal forests have experienced significantly increasing tree mortality trends (71% of which are located in the western region of the country), and these trends have accelerated since 2002. This increase in tree mortality has resulted in significant biomass carbon losses at an  approximate rate of 1.51 ± 0.29 MgC ha−1 year−1 (95% confidence interval) with an approximate total loss of 0.46 ± 0.09 PgC year−1 (95% confidence interval). Under the drought condition increases predicted for this century, the capacity of Canada's boreal forests to act as a carbon sink will be further reduced, potentially leading to a significant positive climate feedback effect… The boreal ecosystem accounts for about a third of the Earth's extant forests, containing an estimated one-third of the stored terrestrial C stocks (Bradshaw & Warkentin, 2015; Pan et al., 2011). The land area of Canada's boreal forests (including other wooded land types) covers 309 Mha (Brandt et al., 2013), nearly 30% of the global boreal forested area (Brandt, 2009)… The overall increase in the biomass loss rate led to a significant reduction in biomass over the study period. From 1970 to 2020, the reduction in biomass was estimated at 3.01 ± 0.58 Mg ha−1 year−1 (95% confidence interval) with a total biomass loss throughout the entire boreal forested area of Canada (310 Mha) of approximately 0.93 ± 0.18 Pg, [3.4 Gt CO2eq] of which 83% was aboveground biomass and 17% was belowground biomass." Mortality increase from Figure 1b.
Liu et al., Drought-induced increase in tree mortality and corresponding decrease in the carbon sink capacity of Canada's boreal forests from 1970 to 2020, Global Change Biology, January 3, 2023.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1962503

Forests in the Canadian Rockies have seen a ten times increase in mortality in the last fifty years … Peng et al., A drought induced pervasive increase in tree mortality across Canada’s boreal forests, Nature Climate Change, December, 2011.       http://www.crc.uqam.ca/Publication/2011/Peng%20et%20al_Nature_CC_Nov20_2011.pdf

Canada's boreal forest mortality about doubled 1970 to 2020 and  lost (net) 3.5 Gt carbon as CO2, about 90 percent since 2002… "From 1970 to 2020. We show that the average annual tree mortality rate is approximately 2.7%. Approximately 43% of Canada's boreal forests have experienced significantly increasing tree mortality trends (71% of which are located in the western region of the country), and these trends have accelerated since 2002. This increase in tree mortality has resulted in significant biomass carbon losses at an  approximate rate of 1.51 ± 0.29 MgC ha−1 year−1 (95% confidence interval) with an approximate total loss of 0.46 ± 0.09 PgC year−1 (95% confidence interval). Under the drought condition increases predicted for this century, the capacity of Canada's boreal forests to act as a carbon sink will be further reduced, potentially leading to a significant positive climate feedback effect… The boreal ecosystem accounts for about a third of the Earth's extant forests, containing an estimated one-third of the stored terrestrial C stocks (Bradshaw & Warkentin, 2015; Pan et al., 2011). The land area of Canada's boreal forests (including other wooded land types) covers 309 Mha (Brandt et al., 2013), nearly 30% of the global boreal forested area (Brandt, 2009)… The overall increase in the biomass loss rate led to a significant reduction in biomass over the study period. From 1970 to 2020, the reduction in biomass was estimated at 3.01 ± 0.58 Mg ha−1 year−1 (95% confidence interval) with a total biomass loss throughout the entire boreal forested area of Canada (310 Mha) of approximately 0.93 ± 0.18 Pg, [3.4 Gt CO2eq] of which 83% was aboveground biomass and 17% was belowground biomass." Mortality increase from Figure 1b.
Liu et al., Drought-induced increase in tree mortality and corresponding decrease in the carbon sink capacity of Canada's boreal forests from 1970 to 2020, Global Change Biology, January 3, 2023.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1962503

From 2000 to 2019 the Amazon had a gross above ground carbon loss of 0.6 gigatons, or 2.45 Gt CO2eq, with 73 percent from forest degradation and 27 percent from deforestation… This is the second major finding that ht Amazon has flipped from carbon sink to carbon source. See also Gatti 2019.
Qin et al., Carbon loss from forest degradation exceeds that from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Nature Climate Change, April 29, 2021.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2206/2206.07363.pdf

 

Amazon emitting, not absorbing, 1 Gt CO2 annually on average from 2010 to 2018… based on atmospheric measurements over time…  "Considering the upwind areas of each site, we combine fluxes from all sites to calculate a total Amazonia carbon balance for our nine-year study period (see Methods) of 0.29±0.40 Pg Cyr−1 (FCTotal=0.11±0.15gCm−2d−1), where fire emissions represent 0.41±0.05PgCyr−1 (FCFire=0.15±0.02gCm−2d−1), with NBE removing −0.12±0.40PgCyr−1 (31% of fire emissions) from the atmosphere (FCNBE=−0.05±0.15gCm−d−1). The east (region 1 in Extended Data Fig.6), which represents 24% of Amazonia (of which 27% has been deforested), is responsible for 72% of total Amazonian carbon emissions, where 62% is from fires. One recent study showed cumulative gross emissions of carbon of about 126.1MgCO2 ha−1 for 30yr after a fire event, where cumulative CO2 uptake from forest regrowth offsets only 35% of the emissions. Another recent study13 reported that fire emissions from Amazonia are about 0.21±0.23PgCyr−1. Recently, vander Werf etal.24 estimated for the period 1997–2009 that globally, fires were responsible for an annual mean carbon emission of 2.0PgCyr−1, where about 8% appears to have been associated with South American forest fires, according to estimates from the Global Fire Emission Data set (GFED V.3). The Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR) project showed a decline in sink capacity of mature forests due to an increase in mortality1–3. Adjusting the three RAINFOR studies to a consistent area (7.25×106km2) and taking their mean yields a basin-wide sink for intact forests of about −0.57, −0.41 and −0.23PgCyr−1 for 1990–1999, 2000–2009 and 2010–2019, respectively. The NBE from this study is consistent with the RAINFOR results for the last decade, because NBE represents the uptake from forest but also all non-fire emissions, such as decomposition, degradation and other anthropogenic emissions (see Supplementary Table 3)."

Gatti et al., Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change, Nature, July 14, 2021.

https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/176729920/s41586_021_03629_6.pdf

 

Permafrost Collapse is Underway With Emission Plausibly Rivaling All of Global Transportation... "Here we synthesize regional in situ observations of CO2 flux from Arctic and boreal soils to assess current and future winter carbon losses from the northern permafrost domain. Across the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost melt emitted 630 TgC, or 2.3 Gt CO2eq. "We estimate a contemporary loss of 1,662 TgC per year from the permafrost region during the winter season (October–April). This loss is greater than the average growing season carbon uptake for this region estimated from process models (−1,032 TgC per year)." Of critical note, emission are average per year from 2003 – 2017. With permafrost melt increasing rapidly today, this means emission in 2017 were much more than in 2003, therefore emissions today are much more than the 2.3 Gt per year estimated on average, quite likely double the 2.3 Gt and possibly triple or quadruple and rivalling global transportation CO2 emissions for about 6.7 Gt CO2  per year... "The dataset represents more than 100 high-latitude sites and comprises more than 1,000 aggregated monthly fluxes. We examined patterns and processes driving winter CO2 emissions and scaled fluxes to the permafrost domain using a boosted regression tree (BRT) machine learning model based on hypothesized drivers of winter CO2 flux. Environmental and ecological drivers (for example, vegetation type and productivity, soil moisture and soil temperature) obtained from satellite remote sensing and reanalysis data were used to estimate regional winter CO2 emissions for contemporary (2003–2017) climatic conditions."
Natali et al., Large loss of CO2 in winter observed across the northern permafrost region, Nature Climate Change, October 21, 2019.
https://www.uarctic.org/media/1600119/natali_et_al_2019_nature_climate_change_s41558-019-0592-8.pdf

Transportation emissions of 7 GT CO2eq or 6.7 Gt CO2 annually…

IPCC 2013, Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8, Transport

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter8.pdf

Forzieri 2022 - Forest collapse globally of 12.2 Gt CO2 2000-2022, equal to 23 percent of intact undisturbed forests at a critical threshold… "We show that tropical, arid and temperate forests are experiencing a significant decline in resilience, probably related to increased water limitations and climate variability [during 2000 – 2022]… Reductions in resilience are statistically linked to abrupt declines in forest primary productivity, occurring in response to slow drifting towards a critical resilience threshold. Approximately 23% of intact undisturbed forests, corresponding to 3.32 Pg C (12.2 Gt CO2e) of gross primary productivity (above ground carbon), have already reached a critical threshold and are experiencing a further degradation in resilience. Together, these signals reveal a widespread decline in the capacity of forests to withstand perturbation that should be accounted for in the design of land-based mitigation and adaptation plans."
Forzieri et al., Emerging signals of declining forest resilience under climate change, Nature, July 13, 2022.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04959-9.pdf

 

End Forest Mortality Master

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Wildfire Master
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ONLY ONE OF SEVEN INCREASED FIRE BEHAVIOR ENHANCING FACTORS WE KNOW OF TODAY IS NOT CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE

 

The seven fire behavior factors that have caused these repeatedly unprecedented climate change-caused wildfires are: record dry fuels, a longer dry season with earlier spring and later fall, easier ignition with warmer temperatures, bigger wind storms, delayed onset of fall precipitation, increased nighttime fire behavior, and increased fuels because of fire suppression. Only increased fuels because of fire suppression is not climate change caused, but 100 million acres of native bark beetle kill across North America, plus millions more acres in mortality from drought, other insects and disease, a re certainly a climate change-caused enhancement of the excess fuels issue. Together, CalFire says these increased extremeness of fires because of these seven enhancement factors are now causing fires to burn 400 degrees F hotter, and area burned in 2020 was similar to pre-European times, only CalFire spent $3 billion fighting fires in 2020. These fire behavior enhancing mechanisms have increased extreme severity fire by 800 percent with 95 percent of burned area in 2020 and 2021 being extreme severity fire.

 

Extreme fire weather days have more than doubled since 1980 in California…

"Observed frequency of autumn days with extreme (95th percentile) fire weather—which we show are preferentially associated with extreme autumn wildfires—has more than doubled in California since the early 1980s."

Goss et al., Climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme autumn wildfire conditions across California, Environmental Research Letters, August 20, 2020.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab83a7/pdf

Climate Change Caused Wildfires: Columbia University, University of Idaho, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Colorado Boulder... "During 1972–2018, California experienced a fivefold increase in annual burned area, mainly due to more than an eightfold increase in summer forest‐fire extent. Increased summer forest‐fire area very likely occurred due to increased atmospheric aridity caused by warming. Since the early 1970s, warm‐season days warmed by approximately 1.4 °C as part of a centennial warming trend, significantly increasing the atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD). These trends are consistent with anthropogenic trends simulated by climate models. The response of summer forest‐fire area to VPD is exponential, meaning that warming has grown increasingly impactful. Robust interannual relationships between VPD and summer forest‐fire area strongly suggest that nearly all of the increase in summer forest‐fire area during 1972–2018 was driven by increased VPD. Climate change effects on summer wildfire were less evident in nonforested lands. In fall, wind events and delayed onset of winter precipitation are the dominant promoters of wildfire. While these variables did not change much over the past century, background warming and consequent fuel drying is increasingly enhancing the potential for large fall wildfires. Among the many processes important to California's diverse fire regimes, warming‐driven fuel drying is the clearest link between anthropogenic climate change and increased California wildfire activity to date."
Williams et al., Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California, American Geophysical Union, Earths Future, August 4, 2019
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019EF001210

 

400 Degrees Hotter…  Wildfires are burning 400 degrees F hotter because of drier fuels. "The infernos bellowed by those winds once reached a maximum temperature of 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, Cal Fire’s Angie Lottes says; now they reach 2,100 degrees, hot enough to turn the silica in the soil into glass."
Wallace-Wells, Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. A bulletin from our climate future.
By David Wallace-Wells, NYMag, May 12, 2019.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/los-angeles-fire-season-will-never-end.html

 

Cal Fire says fire season is year-long now… Yahoo News is reporting that Cal Fire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) says the fire season is now year-long.

Walsh, California fights wildfires year-round now: 'There's no such thing as a fire season', Yahoo News, November 19, 2018.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-fights-wildfires-year-round-now-theres-no-thing-fire-season-200437814.html?guccounter=1

 

The climate change connection… Summary and Conclusions: "most acute fire weather in over two decades… longest duration Santa Ana wind event in the 70-year record… the most extreme drought on record… lowest fuel moisture on record… driest March through December since 1895."
Abstract: " Two extreme wind-driven wildfire events impacted California in late 2017, leading to 46 fatalities and thousands of structures lost. This study characterizes the meteorological and climatological factors that drove and enabled these wildfire events and quantifies their rarity over the observational record. Both events featured key fire-weather metrics that were unprecedented in the observational record that followed a sequence of climatic conditions that enhanced fine fuel abundance and fuel availability. The North Bay fires of October 2017 occurred coincident with strong downslope winds, with a majority of burned area occurring within the first 12 hours of ignition. By contrast, the southern California fires of December 2017 occurred during the longest Santa Ana wind event on record, resulting in the largest wildfire in California’s modern history. Both fire events occurred following an exceptionally wet winter that was preceded by a severe four-year drought. Fuels were further preconditioned by the warmest summer and autumn on record in northern and southern California, respectively. Finally, delayed onset of autumn precipitation allowed for critically low dead fuel moistures leading up to the wind events. Fire weather conditions were well forecast several days prior to the fire. However, the rarity of fire-weather conditions that occurred near populated regions, along with other societal factors such as limited evacuation protocols and limited wildfire preparedness in communities outside of the traditional wildland urban interface were key contributors to the widespread wildfire impacts."
Nauslar et al., The 2017 North Bay and Southern California Fires, A Case Study, Fire, June 9, 2018.
https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/1/1/18/htm

 

Exponential increase in extreme fire behavior from drying… "Increases in large wildfires associated with earlier spring snowmelt scale exponentially with changes in moisture deficit, and moisture deficit changes can explain most of the spatial variability in forest wildfire regime response to the timing of spring." Westerling, Increasing western US forest wildfire activity, sensitivity to changes in the timing of spring, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, May 23, 2016, abstract.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1696/20150178

 

Westerling - large California Wildfires are increasing nonlinearly with drying and earlier onset of spring... "Increases in large wildfires associated with earlier spring snowmelt scale exponentially with changes in moisture deficit, and moisture deficit changes can explain most of the spatial variability in forest wildfire regime response to the timing of spring."
Westerling, Increasing western US forest wildfire activity, sensitivity to changes in the timing of spring, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, May 23, 2016, abstract.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1696/20150178

 

Modest increase in Santa Ana Wind Events 1948 to 2010… Results show a modest increase in intensity of extreme events. The authors identified two 2015 Santa Ana events were exceptional in the record, but not included in this research.
Guzman Morales et al., Santa Ana Winds of Southern California, Six Decades, GEophysical Resaerch Letters, March 14, 2016.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/cnap/wp-content/uploads/sites/109/2017/02/GuzmanMorales2016_SantaAnaWinds.pdf

 

Extremely large Santa Ana fires increased since 2003… Abstract, Jin et al., Contrasting controls on wildland fires in Southern California during periods with and without Santa Ana winds, Journal of Geophysical Research, Biogeosciences, March 28, 2014.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/2013JG002541

 

Wildfire season increased 60 percent, burn time has increased 800 percent, burned area increased 1,271 percent, human-caused ignition has played a very small role in increasing wildfire trends… Westerling, Increasing western US forest wildfire activity, sensitivity to changes in the timing of spring, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, June 15, 2016, Table 2.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1696/20150178

 

Wildfire area burned… Too little left to burn

•      Ten percent of western forests have burned total in the last 30 years.

•      Most of the increase has happened since 2000, about 75 percent.

•      Beetle kill enhancement is not included. (40 million acres +/- in the US West has been killed by beetles.)

•      In the next 15 years up to 30 percent of western US forests will burn.

•      In 20 to 30 years, so much of the forest will have burned that the rate will fall even with continued warming because there will be too little forest left to burn. ***

*** Personal communications, John Abatzgoglou, 10/2016.

Abatzoglou and Williams, Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in the western US, PNAS, October 16, 2016.

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770

 

The four biggest wildfire in Colorado's history happened in 2020 and the two biggest in new Mexico in 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Colorado_wildfires
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/09/weather/historic-simultaneous-new-mexico-wildfires-weekend/index.html

 

Forests are recovering after fire… It's a long-term look since 1950. Looking at the results, fires in the 1998 to 2018 period have very little return to conifers. The rest of the story is that a third of fires that have burned since the late 1990s have not recovered and half of the remaining that are recovering are recovering at half the 20th century rate. The Phys.org article states, "The researchers note this may not be permanent; recent decades have seen an uptick in fire disturbance in these forests, so in the future, the return to coniferous cover may take longer than it has in the past. As the climate continues to get warmer and drier, that also will affect how forests burn and how they recover."

If conifers return, and they are in many places, just not as robustly; when they do return, as they age and become less vigorous, degradation becomes greater nonlinearly with warming... not counting fires that are burning far more extremely, and far more frequently. In California in 2020, as many acres burned as burned annually in pre-European times, only in 2020 California spent $3.1 billion fighting those fires.

One other thing - they found near neutral changes in albedo (reflectivity). Their evaluation was over the long term. Immediately after a fire and for several years until vegetation grows back up above the snow line, there are obvious and large changes to not only albedo, but to ground temperature. Without the shade of the forest, before the vegetation grows back, the forest floor warms significantly. In areas where the boreal is atop permafrost, this usually initiates permafrost. Also, for numerous years after a burned before vegetation grows back above the snow line, albedo in winter is greatly increased from a near solid snow cover versus the very dark forest pre-fire. This also creates very large but local ecological changes.

And further, it's not fire that modelers are so concerned with about changing northern lands albedo, it's vegetation growing up in the tundra or scrublands. This taller vegetation allowed by a longer growing season and less fierce winter temps greatly changes albedo from what was once snow covered tundra and scrub. The problem with fire in boreal lands is what I stated above - permafrost collapse activation from loss of shaded tree cover.

Massey, Forest composition change and biophysical climate feedbacks across boreal North America, Nature Climate Change, October 23, 2023.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01851-w

 

 

 

 

AUSTRALIA'S BLACK SUMMER

 

The 46 million acre Australian fire season 2019-2020 influenced the uncommon three-peat La Nina 2020-2022… "In response to the fires, an increase in biomass aerosol burdens across the southern hemisphere is simulated through late 2019 and early 2020, accompanied by an enhancement of cloud albedo, particularly in the southeastern subtropical Pacific Ocean. In turn, the surface cools, the boundary layer dries, and the moist static energy of the low-level flow into the equatorial Pacific is reduced. In response, the intertropical convergence zone migrates northward and sea surface temperature in the Niño3.4 region cools, with coupled feedbacks amplifying the cooling. A subsequent multiyear ensemble mean cooling of the tropical Pacific is simulated through the end of 2021, suggesting an important contribution to the 2020–2022 strong La Niña events ."

Fasullo et al., A multiyear tropical Pacific cooling response to recent Australian wildfires in CESM2, Science Advances, May 10, 2023.
https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.adg1213

The record 2019-2020 fire year in Australia saw 21 percent of eucalyptus forests burn where on average less than 2 percent burn every year… "The area burned in eastern Australian eucalypt forests, well-known for being fire-prone, is only 2% or less on average, even in extreme fire seasons, similar to the average areas burned of temperate broad-leaf forests on other continents, where the fraction is well below 5% (apart from Africa and Asia, where the burn area can reach 8-9%). However, the 2019/2020 eastern Australian fires consumed over 21% of the total forested area, an area far beyond anything previously experienced in Australia, or in the rest of the world."
Norman et al., Apocalypse now: Australian bushfires and the future of urban settlements, Nature, February 23, 2021.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-020-00013-7

Of the 17 million acres burned in 2019-2020 in SE Australia, 44 percent were high severity representing 44 percent of all high severity burned in the last 33 years…

"The absolute area of high-severity fire in 2019/2020 (∼1.8 M ha) was larger than previously seen, accounting for ∼44% of the area burnt by high-severity fire over the past 33 years.
Collins et al., The 2019-2020 mega-fires exposed Australian ecosystems to an unprecedented extent of high-severity fire, Environmental Research Letters, March 24, 2021.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abeb9e/meta  

Black Summer Fires in Australia emitted 0.715 gigatons CO2 from smoke, future emissions from further decomposition and volatilization of soils not included. Loss of future sequestration not included… "All evidence points towards increases in the frequency of severe fire seasons in Southeast Australia34–36, indicating that at least part of the emissions will not be offset in the future. From a climate perspective, these wildfires may therefore present a new category of

fires that are neither CO2 neutral nor fully net CO2 emissions  but fall in between. Given the large magnitude of these events, as exemplified by our work, fire-driven climate-carbon feedbacks may become an increasingly relevant factor in determining future CO2 levels."
van der Velde at al., Vast CO2 release from Australian fires in 2019–2020 constrained by satellite, Nature, September 15, 2021.
https://research.vu.nl/ws/files/152420184/Vast_CO2_release_from_Australian_fires_in_2019_2020_constrained_by_satellite.pdf

 

Black Summer fires in Australia created a plankton bloom in the South Pacific that was as big as Australia…

Tang et al., Widespread phytoplankton blooms triggered by 2019–2020 Australian wildfires, Nature, September 15, 2021.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354614634_Widespread_phytoplankton_blooms_triggered_by_2019-2020_Australian_wildfires
NASA - Australian Fires Fueled Unprecedented Blooms, January 6, 2020.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149039/australian-fires-fueled-unprecedented-blooms

 

Australian fires of 2020 created an unprecedented puncture of the stratosphere with a smoke column 50 percent higher than the tallest thunderstorm ever recorded and a 700 mile-wide ozone hole that persisted for thirteen weeks. The smoke persisted for 13 weeks generating an average cooling effect across the globe similar to a medium size volcanic eruption…

"The Australian bushfires around the turn of the year 2020 generated an unprecedented perturbation of stratospheric composition, dynamical circulation and radiative balance. Here we show from satellite observations that the resulting planetary-scale blocking of solar radiation by the smoke is larger than any previously documented wildfires and of the same order as the radiative forcing produced by moderate volcanic eruptions. A striking effect of the solar heating of an intense smoke patch was the generation of a self-maintained anticyclonic vortex measuring 1000 km in diameter and featuring its own ozone hole. The highly stable vortex persisted in the stratosphere for over 13 weeks, travelled 66,000 km and lifted a confined bubble of smoke and moisture to 35 km altitude. Its evolution was tracked by several satellite-based sensors and was successfully resolved by the European Centre for Medium- Range Weather Forecasts operational system, primarily based on satellite data. Because wildfires are expected to increase in frequency and strength in a changing climate, we suggest that extraordinary events of this type may contribute significantly to the global stratospheric composition in the coming decades."

Khaykin et al,. The 2019 to 20 Australian wildfires generated a persistent smoke-charged vortex rising up to 35 km altitude, Nature Communications Earth and Environmental, September 21, 2020.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-020-00022-5.

 

Black Summer: 60 million acres burned in Australia… The 2019-2020 bushfires Australia occurred during the hottest and driest year on record, with much of the country that burnt already impacted by drought. The Forest Fire Danger Index was the highest ever recorded.
Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements Report 28 October 2020.
https://naturaldisaster.royalcommission.gov.au/system/files/2020-11/Royal%20Commission%20into%20National%20Natural%20Disaster%20Arrangements%20-%20Report%20%20%5Baccessible%5D.pdf

 

 

 

PYROCUMULONIMBUS – CUMULONIMBUS FLAMMANGENITUS

They rain lightning, generally no liquid, start fires 22 miles away
Create fire tornados, far more extreme than fire devils
Puncture the stratosphere like volcanoes with feedback capacity to warm ? Or cool?
As much energy and impact as moderate-sized volcanic eruptions

Pyrocumulonimbus events appear to be increasing dramatically, producing more energy, and erupting in places where they have never been seen before. No one knows what the rate of increase is for pyroCbs. (Yale Environment 360)
https://e360.yale.edu/features/fire-induced-storms-a-new-danger-from-the-rise-in-wildfires
Image: Willow Fire Arizona 07082004 Eric Neitzel, Wikimedia Commons

Australia – CBS News -
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fires-in-australia-pyrocumulonimbus-thunderstorm-clouds-victoria-sydney/

NASA - https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/pyrocb.html

 

A meteorological note: Pyrocumulonimbus clouds can occur when the plumes of very intense, hot-burning fires breach the cap atop a deep, well-mixed boundary layer (characteristic environments of extreme fire behaviour), sending deep, vigourous updrafts rocketing toward the tropopause when the large scale environment is favourable for their development - usually resulting from cooling aloft owing to synoptic forcing. These are effectively the same environments that support high-based thunderstorms, and can result in the injection of incinerated biomass into the stratosphere. The strong updrafts associated with these plumes can influence the local wind field near the base, drawing more oxygen-rich air into the fire, and can transport fire brands up to 5 kilometres downwind of the fire itself. Perhaps more frighteningly, these clouds can generate intense cloud-to-ground lightning (much of which can be of a more powerful positive polarity) that can start new fires. On the June 30th event, numerous new wildfire starts occurred beneath the plume between 50-100km to the north of the fire itself. One witness noted that there were "several lightning strikes all at once" for a time.
http://stormchaserkyle.blogspot.com/2021/07/record-breaking-heat-and.html

 

Pyrocumulonimbus, Pyroconvective: Rivalling or exceeding those in tornadic supercell thunderstorms… "Massive wildfires (i.e., megafires) produce enough heat to generate powerful updrafts that are as strong as those observed during tornadic supercell thunderstorms. Weather radar data show that these updrafts are as strong as 130 mph… and even contribute to deadly fire‐generated vortices (firenadoes)… [Updrafts] can be extreme, reaching at least 58 m s−1, more than double previous estimates (Banta et al., 1992) and rivaling those in tornadic supercell thunderstorms,

for which updraft speeds of 20–55 m s−1… The magnitude and width of the observed updrafts have important implications for fire behavior. First, mass continuity requires strong inflow winds to replace the evacuated updraft air. These inflows are poorly understood yet can have a profound impact on the rate and direction of fire spread. Second, updrafts of this magnitude can loft large burning debris capable of initiating “spot fires” that merge to form “mass fire,” which can feedback on fire intensity (Finney & McAllister, 2011). Third, these updrafts may help stretch, tilt, and twist fire‐generated and ambient sources of vorticity, providing a pathway to tornado‐strength vortices in wildfire plumes… We conclude by noting that extreme pyroconvective updrafts are also a previously undocumented aviation risk. Upon penetrating the 35 m s−1 updraft in the flanking plume (Figures 3a and 3b), the UWKA experienced a dramatic vertical displacement, injuring a flight scientist. Similarly, a Qantas Airlines flight en route to Canberra, Australia, was forced to make an emergency landing after encountering extreme turbulence in a developing pyroCu/Cb in January 2020 (Black & Hayne, 2020). Both the UWKA and Qantas pilots  indicated their weather‐avoidance radars did not alert them to these hazards, likely due to the low radar reflectivity of the pyrometeors (e.g., 25 dbZ in the updraft Figure 1c), as compared with the high reflectivity (50–75 dbZ) in precipitation‐loaded thunderstorm updrafts, which are a well‐known aviation hazard (Allen, 2013). Both pilots also reported dramatic reductions in ambient light within the plumes (i.e., nearly black), consistent with previous research flights documenting radiances reduced by several orders of magnitude in pyroCu plumes (Gatebe et al., 2012)."

Rodriguez et al., Extreme Pyroconvective Updrafts During a Megafire, Geophysical Research Letters, September 9, 2020.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346573430_Extreme_Pyroconvective_Updrafts_During_a_Megafire

 

 

GLOBAL FIRE

 

Siberia forest fire threshold crossed... "Satellite observations reveal that fires burned ~4.7 million hectares in 2019 and 2020, accounting for 44% of the total burned area in the Siberian Arctic for the entire 1982–2020 period."
Descals, Unprecedented fire activity above the Arctic Circle linked to rising temperatures, Science, November 3, 2022.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn9768

 

Area burned globally doubled 2001 to 2018, 10 times more in tropical forests...
MacCarthy et al., New Data Confirms: Forest Fires Are Getting Worse, World Resources Institute, August 17, 2022.
https://www.wri.org/insights/global-trends-forest-fires
Full paper - Tyukavina et al., Global Trends of Forest Loss Due to Fire From 2001 to 2019, Frontiers in Remote Sensing, March 15, 2022.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsen.2022.825190/full

 

 

FIRE IN CALIFORNIA, THE WESTERN US AND CANADA

 

California's 100-year carbon credit buffer pool has almost completely burned, mostly in fires in 2020 and 2021, showing extreme lack of permanence… "Wildfires have depleted nearly one-fifth of the total buffer pool in less than a decade, equivalent to at least 95 percent of the program wide contribution intended to manage all fire risks for 100 years. We also show that potential carbon losses from a single forest disease, sudden oak death, could fully encumber all credits set aside for disease and insect risks. These findings indicate that California’s buffer pool is severely undercapitalized and therefore unlikely to be able to guarantee the environmental integrity of California’s forest offsets program for 100 years." … "Estimated carbon losses from wildfires within the offset program’s first 10 years have depleted at least 95 percent of the contributions set aside to protect against all fire risks over 100 years." … "the potential carbon losses associated with a single disease (sudden oak death) and its impacts on a single species (tanoak) is large enough to fully encumber the total credits set aside for all disease- and insect-related mortality over 100 years." … "From the program’s inception through our study cut-off date of January 5, 2022, a total of 31.0 million credits (13.4 percent) had been contributed to the buffer pool out of a total 231.5 million issued credits, such that the 31.0 million buffer pool credits insure a portfolio of 200.5 million credits against permanence risks."

Badgley et al., California's forest carbon offsets buffer pool is severely undercapitalized, Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, August 5, 2022.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2022.930426/full

Burned Forest Carbon Credits…
California ARB buffer mitigates current wildfire risk to forest carbon projects, (undated)
https://climatetrust.org/california-arb-buffer-mitigates-current-wildfire-risk-to-forest-carbon-projects/

 

The 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise burned 14,000 homes in just 6 hours… The Camp Fire in Paradise, California became the most destructive and deadly fire in California history, with over 18,000 destroyed structures, 700 damaged structures, and 85 fatalities.
Maranghides, A study of the Camp Fire - Fire Progression Timeline, NIST Technical Note 2135, February 8, 2021.
Summary and link to paper - https://www.nist.gov/publications/case-study-camp-fire-fire-progression-timeline
Paper - https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/TechnicalNotes/NIST.TN.2135.pdf

 

Excess deaths in California from smoke, August 1 to September 10, 2021: 1200  - over the 90 days after the smoke event there were 3000 excess deaths… In a blog post from G-feed, an interdisciplinary group working cooperatively to understand the relationship between society and the environment, found that, " There are about 6 million people aged 65+ in CA. Applying the Deryugina et al estimates to the change in PM and the exposed population, we arrive at 1200 excess deaths (deaths that would not have happened otherwise) and 4800 additional ER visits among the elderly.  If we use the Deryugina  2019 estimates of how much one day of additional PM2.5 increases mortality over the next month (not just next three days), the estimated number of deaths rises to 3000.  This is just in CA alone!  And just for people aged 65+.  Oregon and Washington are being hit very hard right now too, and non-elderly are also surely affected.  So this is likely a substantial lower bound on total health costs."
Burke and Heft-Neal, G-FEED_ Indirect mortality from recent wildfires in CA, September 11, 2021.
http://www.g-feed.com/2020/09/indirect-mortality-from-recent.html

 

Extreme wildfires in California are responsible for 97 percent of the area burned in California in the last two decades… have increased significantly in the last two decades with the cause being climate warming related…
"Between 2000 and 2019, compared to 1920 to 1999, the proportion of extreme wildfires larger than 10,000 acres (40.47 km2 ) has increased significantly… The burned area of large wildfires accounted for 97.04 % of the total burned area (13,089.68 out of 13,488.19 thousand acres, that is 52,972.05 out of 54,584.77 km2 ) in the past two decades… The frequency and burned area growth of wildfires in the past

two decades are much higher than that during the 80 years in history from 1920 to 1999… The frequency of large wildfires and the burned area of small wildfires in the recent 20 years even have decreased… From 2000 to 2019, the frequency of wildfires in July increased significantly and became much more considerable than in other months. Meanwhile, the start of the wildfire season has also advanced to May (from June) and the duration has increased each month… there has been a major increase in the natural wildfires in July in the past two decades."

Summary: "We found that the frequency and total burned area of all wildfires have increased significantly. The start time and peak months of the wildfire season have been advanced, and the covered months have been lengthened. For large and small wildfires, the annual frequency of large wildfires has remained stable for the last 100 years, but the total burned area has increased rapidly in the past two decades… illustrat[ing] that the comprehensive environmental conditions, such as changes in climate

and vegetation, have increased the coverage of potential wildfire ignitions… slope, temperature and maximum vapor pressure deficit have positive correlation with wildfire occurrence… natural factors, especially climate variables, have a greater impact on the density of wildfires."
Li and Banerjee, Spatial and temporal pattern of wildfires in California from 2000 to 2019, Nature Scientific Reports, April 22, 2021.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-88131-9

 

California Wildfires in 2020 emit twice the amount of carbon as that the total California emissions reductions from 2003 to 2019… "We first compared sectoral emissions to wildfire emissions, which indicate an approximate release of 127 mmtCO2e in 2020, nearly seven times the 2003–2019 mean. From 2003 to 2019, California’s GHG emissions declined by 65 mmt CO2e (-13%), largely driven by  reductions from the electric power generation sector. The 2020 fire season alone is two times higher than California’s total GHG emissions reductions and would comprise 49 percent of California’s 2030 total greenhouse emissions target of 260 mmtCO2e (Fig. 1) (CARB, 2017)."
Jerret et al., Up in smoke: California's greenhouse gas reductions could be wiped out by 2020 wildfires, Science Direct - Environmental Pollution, October 1, 2022.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749122011022#bbib30

Wildfire-Caused Stratospheric Injection… Creates Major Ozone Hole over Australia

 

NASA on the 2020 Western Fire Season – the ten largest wildfires in California all happened in 2020…

"Five of California’s 10 largest wildfires on record happened in 2020, and the state set a new record for acres burned. According to CAL FIRE, the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, more than 9,600 wildfires burned nearly 4.2 million acres through mid-December, causing more than 30 fatalities and damaging or destroying nearly 10,500 structure... Oregon, Washington, and Colorado were also particularly hard hit. In fact, as of mid-December 2020, the National Interagency Fire Center reported more than 10.6 million acres burned and nearly 17,800 buildings destroyed…

Buis, The Climate Connections of a Record Fire Year in the U.S. West, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, February 22, 2021.

https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3066/the-climate-connections-of-a-record-fire-year-in-the-us-west/

 

Western wildfires increase extreme weather in the Central US with hail greater than 2 inches increasing 34 percent and extreme precipitation increasing 38 percent…     Abstract, " Wefindthat the western US wildfires notably increase the occurrences of heavy precipitationrates by 38% and significant severe hail (≥2 in.) by 34% in the central United States. Both heat and aerosols from wildfires play an important role. By enhancing surface high pressure and increasing westerly and southwesterly winds, wildfires in the western United States produce (1) stronger moisture and aerosol transport to the central United States and (2) larger wind shear and storm-relative helicity in the central United States. Both the meteorological environment more conducive to severe convective storms and increased aerosols contribute to the enhancements of heavy precipitation rates and large hail."
Zhang et al., Notable impact of wildfires in the western United States on weather hazards in the central United States, PNAS, October 17, 2022.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2207329119

Average area burn area per fire in the US has increased by 400 percent and the number of fires has decreased by 20 percent... Fires are getting bigger and harder to control resulting in greater burned area, where prevention and education have resulted in fewer overall fires.
Wildfire Statistics, Congressional Research Service, October 3, 2022.
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF10244.pdf 

 

Global models have underestimated needleleaf evergreen mortality from drought and future projections of greater than 50 percent mortality of Norther Hemisphere conifers by 2100, considering the underestimating models, "predict widespread conifer loss in coming decades under projected global warming."…
"Global temperature rise and extremes accompanying drought threaten forests1,2 and their associated climatic feedbacks3,4. Our ability to accurately simulate drought-induced forest impacts remains highly uncertain5,6 in part owing to our failure to integrate physiological measurements, regionalscale models, and dynamic global vegetation  models(DGVMs). Here we show consistent predictions of widespread mortality of needleleaf evergreen trees (NET) within Southwest USA by 2100 using state-of-the-art models evaluated against empirical data sets. Experimentally, dominant Southwest USA NET species died when they fell below predawn water potential thresholds (April–August mean) beyond which photosynthesis, hydraulic and stomatal conductance, and carbohydrate availability approached zero. The evaluated regional models accurately predicted NET predawn water potentials and 91% of predictions (10 out of 11) exceeded mortality thresholds within the twenty-first century due to temperature rise. The independent DGVMs predicted 50% loss of Northern Hemisphere NET by 2100, consistent with the NET findings for Southwest USA. Notably, the global models underestimated future mortality within Southwest USA, highlighting that predictions of future mortality within global models may be underestimates. Taken together, the validated regional predictions and the global simulations predict widespread conifer loss in coming decades under projected global warming."
McDowell et al., Multi-scale predictions of massive conifer mortality due to chronic temperature rise, Los Alamos National lab, nature Climate Change, December 21, 2015.
https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dsmackay/mackay/pubs/pdfs/nclimate2873.pdf

 

Forest Mortality in Western North America between 1980 and the first two decades of the 20^th century, doubled to quadrupled, with much of the increase happening recently rather than earlier…It is also pertinent that warming since the mid-2000s has just about doubled as of 2022, and that much of the western US forest mortality from bark beetles was not captured in these evaluations.

Sierra Nevada mortality has about doubled from 0.75 to 1.5 percent
Western Canada mortality has quadrupled from 0.6 percent to 2.5 percent

Eastern Canada has nearly doubled from 0.8 to 1.45 percent
Western US interior forests have more than doubled from 0.3 percent to 0.65 percent.

Pacific Northwest has tripled from 0.45 to 1.25 percent
McDowell et al., Multi-scale predictions of massive conifer mortality due to chronic temperature rise, Los Alamos National lab, nature Climate Change, December 21, 2015.
https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dsmackay/mackay/pubs/pdfs/nclimate2873.pdf
from :
Peng, S. et al. A drought-induced pervasive increase in tree mortality across

Canada's boreal forest. Nature Clim. Change 1, 467471 (2011).

and,
Van Mantgem, P. J. et al. Widespread increase of tree mortality rates in the

western United States. Science 323, 521524 (2009)

An eightfold increase (800 percent) in high-severity fire (95% or greater mortality, Stevens 2017) burned area from 1985 to 2017, implicates increased probability of conversion of forests to alternative vegetation types…

"Significant increases in annual area burned at high severity (AABhs) were observed across most ecoregions, with an overall eightfold increase in AABhs across western US forests. The relationships we identified between the annual fire severity metrics and climate, as well as the observed and projected trend toward warmer and drier fire seasons, suggest that climate change will contribute to increased fire severity in future decades where fuels remain abundant. The growing prevalence of high‐severity fire in western US forests has important implications to forest ecosystems, including an increased probability of fire‐catalyzed conversions from forest to alternative vegetation types."

Parks and Abatzoglou, Warmer and Drier Fire Seasons Contribute to Increases in Area Burned at High Severity in Western US Forests From 1985 to 2017, Geophysical Research Letters, October 22, 2020.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL089858

 

Mortality of 95 percent or greater in high-severity fire…
Stevens et al., Changing spatial patterns of stand-replacing fire in California conifer forests, Forest and Ecology Management, June 23, 2017.
https://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/north/psw_2017_north005_stevens.pdf

 

Unprecedented Arctic Wildfires Caused by Heat - World Meteorological Organization
"Since the start of June, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) has tracked over 100 intense and long-lived wildfires in the Arctic Circle. In June alone, these fires emitted 50 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is equivalent to Sweden’s total annual emissions. This is more than was released by Arctic fires in the same month between 2010 and 2018 combined."
Unprecedented Wildfires in the Arctic, World Meteorological Organization, May 12, 2019.
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/unprecedented-wildfires-arctic

Unprecedented Arctic Wildfires Caused by Heat - Smithsonian
The fires are burning through long-term carbon stores, … emitting greenhouse gases, which will further exacerbate greenhouse warming, leading to more fires,”
Solly, The Arctic Is Experiencing Its Worst Wildfire Season on Record, Smithsonian, July 29, 2019.

 

Federal wildfire suppression costs in the United States have spiked from an annual average of about $425 million from 1985 to 1999 to $1.6 billion from 2000 to 2019, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.
https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Publications-and-media/NFPA-Journal/2020/November-December-2020/Features/Wildfire

 

Cal Fire alone spent $3.1 billion in fire suppression costs in 2020… As of October 19, 2020, the California Legislative Analyst's Office projected the 2020 fire season's fire suppression costs to be $3.1 billion. This does not count local, Bureau of land management or National Forest Service expenditures.
State Wildfire Response Costs Estimated to Be Higher Than Budgeted, California Legislative Analyst's Office, October 19, 2020.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4285

Suppression Costs

Federal Firefighting Costs (Suppression Only)

https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/suppression-costs

 

Fire Fighting Suppression Costs in California… Costs have risen by 176 percent since 2003 from $174 million to $470 million in 2017 dollars. Kousy et al, Wildfire Costs in California and the Role of Electric Utilities, Wharton University of Pennsylvania, August 2018.
https://riskcenter.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Wildfire-Cost-in-CA-Role-of-Utilities-1.pdf

 

Pre-European burned area in California… Abstract, " Approximately 1.8 million ha (4.5 million acres) burned annually in California prehistorically (pre 1800)." In 2020 California saw 4.4 million acres burn, equaling their pre-European area burned area average of 4.5 million acres, doubling their previous contemporary record set in 2018 of 1.975 million acres, which doubled the previous record set in 2003 of 1.02 million acres.

Prehistoric area burned "annually in California varied from 1,814,614 to 4,838,293 ha (excluding the desert region in Southeastern California) during the prehistoric period. With the land area of California equaling 40,396,822 ha (CCDB, 2003), this results in 4.5–12.0% of the state’s lands burning annually.

Stephens et al., Prehistoric fire area and emissions from California’s forests, woodlands, Forest Ecology and Management, June 6, 2007.
https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/FireForestEcology/FireScienceResearch/FireHistory/FireHistory-Stephens07.pdf

 

 

Climate Change and Western Wildfires - Pro Prescribed Burn

A collection of pro management forestry strategies, mostly prescribed burning, that omits knowledge on our new climate where regeneration is limited today, where compound impacts form warming further decrease regeneration failure with no additional warming.

First published: 21 July 2021

Last updated: 10 February 2022

 

Three articles on climate change and western wildfires (Hessburg et al below is a synthesis of the other two articles in this series: Hagmann 2021 and Prichard 2021)

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)1939-5582.climate-change-and-westernwildfires&ved=2ahUKEwjT9pfy65D5AhUmk2oFHaogD20QFnoECE0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw2HzGLyHeknnDY53aVvL0AZ

 

Fire exclusion caused profound changes in many western North American forested landscapes, leaving them vulnerable to seasonal increases in drought and wildfire. As climate warms, the likelihood of severe, large-scale disturbance increases. There is generally strong agreement that wildfires, insects and disease are rapidly changing western landscapes and that the pace and scale of adaptive management (prescribed burning mostly) is insufficient. However, confusion persists regarding the need for proactive management. In three articles, this Invited Feature evaluates the strength of scientific evidence regarding changing forest conditions, fire regimes, and science-based strategies for adapting western forests to climate change and future wildfires

 

Climate Change and Western Wildfires – Results of Prescribed Burn In Our New Climate

 

An era when prefire forests may not return… "Changing disturbance regimes and climate can overcome forest ecosystem resilience. Following high-severity fire, forest recovery may be compromised by lack of tree seed sources, warmer and drier postfire climate, or short-interval reburning. A potential outcome of the loss of resilience is the conversion of the prefire forest to a different forest type or nonforest vegetation. Conversion implies major, extensive, and enduring changes in dominant species, life forms, or functions, with impacts on ecosystem services. In the present article, we synthesize a growing body of evidence of fire-driven conversion and our understanding of its causes across western North America. We assess our capacity to predict conversion and highlight important uncertainties. Increasing forest vulnerability to changing fire activity and climate compels shifts in management approaches, and we propose key themes for applied research coproduced by scientists and managers to support decision-making in an era when the prefire forest may not return."

Coop et al., Wildfire Driven Forest Conversion in Western North American Landscapes, BioScience, July 1, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa061

 

Old trees just don't die, they are killed by something and old forests are a part of a stable ecology…
"Large, majestic trees are iconic symbols of great age among living organisms. Published evidence suggests that trees do not die because of genetically programmed senescence in their meristems, but rather are killed by an external agent or a disturbance event. Long tree lifespans are therefore allowed by specific combinations of life history traits within realized niches that support resistance to, or avoidance of, extrinsic mortality. Another requirement for trees to achieve their maximum longevity is either sustained growth over extended periods of time or at least the capacity to increase their growth rates when conditions allow it. The growth plasticity and modularity of trees can then be viewed as an evolutionary advantage that allows them to survive and reproduce for centuries and millennia. As more and more scientific information is systematically collected on tree ages under various ecological settings, it is becoming clear that tree longevity is a key trait for global syntheses of life history strategies, especially in connection with disturbance regimes and their possible future modifications."
Piovesan and Biondi, On tree longevity, New Phytologist, November 25, 2020.
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/nph.17148

 

Forest carbon sequestration policy does not always consider climate impact risks to forests stability where widespread climate change-induced forest die-offs are creating dangerous feedbacks…

"Forests have significant potential to help mitigate human-caused climate change and provide society with a broad range of co-benefits. Local, national, and international efforts have developed policies and economic incentives to protect and enhance forest carbon sinks – ranging from the Bonn Challenge to restore deforested areas to the development of forest carbon offset projects around the world. However, these policies do not always account for important ecological and climate-related risks and limits to forest stability (i.e. permanence). Widespread climate-induced forest die-off has been observed in forests globally and creates a dangerous carbon cycle feedback, both by releasing large amounts of carbon stored in forest ecosystems to the atmosphere and by reducing the size of the future forest carbon sink. Climate-driven risks may fundamentally compromise forest carbon stocks and sinks in the 21st century. Understanding and quantifying climate-driven risks to forest stability is a crucial component needed to forecast the integrity of forest carbon sinks and the extent to which they can contribute towards the Paris Agreement goal to limit warming well below 2 °C. Thus, rigorous scientific assessment of the risks and limitations to widespread deployment of forests as natural climate solutions is urgent."

Anderegg et al., Climate-driven risks to the climate mitigation potential of forests, Science, June 19, 2020.
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10182667

 

 

 

Prescribed Burning… While standard practice and a good one in our old climate, this is not our old climate. These practices result, not in restoration, but in further degradation because our forests cannot respond to these practices like they did in our old climate. It is just too dry and hot during weather extremes and it is the extremes that create the most significant mortality, and that prevent young trees from maturing.

 

Prescribed burning significantly reduces carbon storage - California Carbon stocks in 2069 modeled at 25 percent of today's values with 870 megatons net emissions in the next 50 years… With restoration of forests using fuels reductions strategies that reduce the number of trees per acre, in combination with both current and additional warming that favors lower tree density and more pines, total carbon storage in California's forests in 2069 is only 25 percent of carbon storage today.

Abstract, "Restoration of fire-prone forests can promote resiliency to disturbances, yet such activities may reduce biomass stocks to levels that conflict with climate mitigation goals. Using a set of large-scale historical inventories across the Sierra Nevada/southern Cascade region, we identified underlying climatic and biophysical drivers of historical forest characteristics and projected how restoration of these characteristics manifest under future climate. Historical forest conditions varied with climate and site moisture availability but were generally characterized by low tree density (∼53 trees ha−1 ), low live basal area (∼22 m2 ha−1 ), low biomass (∼34 Mg ha−1 ), and high pine dominance. Our predictions reflected broad convergence in forest structure, frequent fire is the most likely explanation for this convergence. Under projected climate (2040–2069), hotter sites become more prevalent, nearly ubiquitously favoring low tree densities, low biomass, and high pine dominance. Based on these projections, this region may be unable to support aboveground biomass >40 Mg ha−1 by 2069, a value approximately 25% of current average biomass stocks. Ultimately, restoring resilient forests will require adjusting carbon policy to match limited future aboveground carbon stocks in this region." and, "Based on the relationship between AGLB and total biomass (supplementary figure 8), these forests store a total of 1,167 MMT CO2e. We project that the median AGLB in 2069 will be no more than 40 Mg ha−1, which translates to 307 MMT CO2e stored in the total biomass pool. These extrapolations suggest that this region could emit 860 MMT CO2e over the next 50 years (2019–2069). Liang et al (2017a) projected the Sierra Nevada’s carbon carrying capacity under climate-wildfire interactions through the late 21st century and found that the region could lose as much as 78% of current aboveground carbon stocks, which aligns with our projections of climate resilient forests supporting <25% of current AGLB."

Bernal_ et al., Biomass stocks in California's fire-prone forests, mismatch in ecology and policy, Environmental Research Letters, March 25, 2022.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac576a/pdf

 

Increased frequency of disturbance decreases carbon storage, particularly in management practices that emphasize prescribed fire… "Our results suggest increasing the frequency of disturbances (a lower DRI) would reduce the percentage of high-severity fire on landscape but not the total amount of wildfire in general. However, a higher DRI reduced carbon storage and sequestration, particularly in management strategies that emphasized prescribed fire over hand or mechanical fuel treatments…Climate change is moving the landscape toward becoming a carbon source (Fig. 3, left). This can be moderated or accelerated by the type of management actions taken on the landscape, which is reflected in the different management areas present (see Table 3). Higher removals of biomass (whether from combustion of litter/downed woody material or from higher mortality than other forms of treatment) by prescribed fires in Scenarios 4 and 5 on the landscape affected the carbon balance (Fig. 3, right), where both live and dead C pools decreased through time… Our analysis suggests that, with the management approaches tested, there was a trade-off between C storage and fire severity. Although a lower DRI reduced high-severity fire, the net effect was reduced C storage."
Maxwell et al., Frequency of disturbance mitigates high-severity fire in the Lake Tahoe basin, Ecology and Society, 2022.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/63891

Regardless of prescribed burn treatment, fire weather conditions in Australia resulted in a doubling of fire risk across all categories … "There is an imperative for fire agencies to quantify the potential for prescribed burning to mitigate risk to life, property and environmental values while facing changing climates. The 2019–2020 Black Summer fires in eastern Australia raised questions about the effectiveness of prescribed burning in mitigating risk under unprecedented fire conditions. We performed a simulation experiment to test the effects of different rates of prescribed burning treatment on risks posed by wildfire to life, property and infrastructure. In four forested case study landscapes, we found that the risks posed by wildfire were substantially higher under the fire weather conditions of the 2019–2020 season, compared to the full range of long-term historic weather conditions. For area burnt and house loss, the 2019–2020 conditions resulted in more than a doubling of residual risk across the four landscapes, regardless of treatment rate (mean increase of 230%, range 164–360%). Fire managers must prepare for a higher level of residual risk as climate change increases the likelihood of similar or even more dangerous fire seasons."
Clarke et al., The 2019–2020 Australian forest fires are a harbinger of decreased prescribed burning effectiveness under rising extreme conditions, Nature, July 13, 2022.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-15262-y

 

Fire suppression and fuels management (prescribed burning generally) are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfire…

"Policy and management have focused primarily on specified resilience approaches aimed at resistance to wildfire and restoration of areas burned by wildfire through fire suppression and fuels management. These strategies are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfires. In contrast, policies that promote adaptive resilience to wildfire, by which people and ecosystems adjust and reorganize in response to changing fire regimes to reduce future vulnerability, are needed. Key aspects of an adaptive resilience approach are (i) recognizing that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends; (ii) targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire; (iii) actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severities; and (iv) incentivizing and planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire. These strategies represent a shift in policy and management from restoring ecosystems based on historical baselines to adapting to changing fire regimes and from unsustainable defense of the wildland–urban interface to developing fire-adapted communities. We propose an approach that accepts wildfire as an inevitable catalyst of change and that promotes adaptive responses by ecosystems and residential communities to more warming and wildfire."

Schoennagel et al., Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes, PNAS, February 24, 2017.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422781/pdf/pnas.201617464.pdf

 

Meta review of management to return forest conditions to pre-European times (via prescribed burning generally) does not include enhanced extreme fire behavior from warming…

"Coupled thinning and prescribed burning treatments are proven approaches to mitigating wildfire severity in many seasonally dry forests, but they are not appropriate to all forest types, land allocations, and conditions. These treatments require regular maintenance application of prescribed or cultural burning to maintain low surface fuel levels and remove developing fuel ladders. The vast scale of ongoing fuel reduction necessitates wise use of naturally ignited future fires during moderate fire weather as well. Considering the narrow seasonal operating window and spatial imprecision concerns, managed wildfires cannot be a cure-all, but can be one of several options in a broader toolkit… Many studies show that fuel reduction treatments are effective at moderating subsequent fire severity, even under extreme weather Far fewer experimental or

empirical studies challenge this premise. Moreover, there is strong evidence that some prior burn and reburn mosaics reduce landscape contagion, which limits subsequent spread and severity of wildfires… Prior to fire exclusion, historical landscapes in seasonally dry regions of wNA were the

product of complex mosaics of low-, moderate- and high-severity fire patches, which yielded highly variable patterns of surviving forest and scattered fire refugia (ie., unburned patches that functioned as seed sources for postfire tree regeneration in their vicinity). After contemporaneous wildfires, this mosaic is often simplified by large high-severity fire patches, and fire refugia are operationally burned out in closing suppression actions. Within one to two decades after a high-severity fire, dead wood accumulations contribute to uncharacteristically high surface fuel loads. Post-fire removal of the dead understory stems (i.e., those that had previously colonized the landscape during the lengthy period of fire exclusion) by harvest or reburning can mimic this historical reburn influence, thereby minimizing surface fuels in some developing new forests

(Stevens-Rumann and Morgan 2016), and reducing future wildfire vulnerability (Coppoletta et al.

2016). The ecological justification for this post-fire removal of the smaller dead understory trees can be observed in the low surface fuel loads associated with the frequent reburning of pre-management era landscapes and modern-day wilderness areas. It is also clearly revealed in intentional Indigenous cultural burning practices. Indigenous fire stewardship actively mediated post-fire landscape effects to stagger the availability of desired resources and species over time, and ensure their quality, quantity, and abundance."

Hessburg et al., Wildfire and climate change adaptation of western North American forests, case for intentional management, Ecological Applications, August 2, 2021.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eap.2432

 

 

POOR COMMUNICATIONS IN MEDIA REPORTS

 

The doubling of California's previous fire record in 2020, caused by dryness and winds… "In 2020, 1.74 million ha [4 million acres] burned in California, 2.2 times more than the previous historical record but only average when compared with pre-Euroamerican conditions. Economic losses exceeded $19 billion, and 33 people were killed directly by fire.  Vegetation type and recent fire history had important effects on burning. Variability in high-severity burning among vegetation types was driven principally by vapour pressure deficit and wind speed; variability among fire events was related principally to time since the last fire (a surrogate for fuel loading)."
Safford et al., The 2020 California fire season: A year like no other, a return to the past or a harbinger of the future? Global Ecology and Biogeography, March 19, 2022.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/geb.13498#accessDenialLayout

 

Bloomberg/LA Times fuel the myth of increased fuels from fire suppression… An article in in Bloomberg by Todd Woody, (see LA Times link below) wrongly stated that Safford 2022 said the following about the cause of the fires in California in 2020,  "A century of fire suppression has left California with what the researchers call a “massive fire deficit” as forests become choked with trees and undergrowth. The payback in 2020 was devastating. All that fuel, rising temperatures, drought and high winds dramatically increased the intensity and speed of wildfires, which burned 2.2 times more land than the previous record set only two years earlier."

SAFFORD 2020 said in their findings was, "In 2020, 1.74 million ha burned in California, 2.2 times more than the previous historical record but only average when compared with pre-Euroamerican conditions. Economic losses exceeded $19 billion, and 33 people were killed directly by fire.  Vegetation type and recent fire history had important effects on burning. Variability in high-severity burning among vegetation types was driven principally by vapour pressure deficit and wind speed; variability among fire events was related principally to time since the last fire (a surrogate for fuel loading)."

DISCUSSION: Blomberg's article repeatedly blames excess fuels as the primary cause of the 2020 fires in California, and they said that Safford 2020 revealed this in their findings. This is not the case. What Safford 2022 said was that vapour pressure deficit (low humidity) and wind speed, both were made more extreme by climate warming. The mention of "fuel loading" by Safford was only in reference to the variability among fire events, i.e. burn severity." This misinterpretation is common among journalist and environmental advocates as the primary concern with forest fire in our legacy climate was with these excess fuels from fire suppression. Today in a warmer climate, this is no longer the case as the principle driver of fire is record dry humidity and increased winds among other things.

Woody (Bloomberg), Fire suppression fueled California’s destructive 2020 blazes, study says

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-05-06/fire-suppression-fueled-california-2020-blazes

END Wildfire Master
*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^

 
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Regeneration failure

 

 

Intensifying wildfire regimes are increasingly exceeding biological thresholds of  resilience… (Abstract) "In an increasingly flammable world, wildfire is altering the terrestrial carbon balance. However, the degree to which novel wildfire regimes disrupt biological function remains unclear. Here, we synthesize the current understanding of above- and belowground processes that govern carbon loss and recovery across diverse ecosystems. We find that intensifying wildfire regimes are increasingly exceeding biological thresholds of  resilience, causing ecosystems to convert to a lower carbon-carrying

capacity. Growing evidence suggests that plants compensate for fire damage by allocating carbon belowground to access nutrients released by fire, while wildfire selects for microbial communities with rapid growth rates and the ability to metabolize pyrolysed carbon. Determining controls on carbon

dynamics following wildfire requires integration of experimental and modelling frameworks across scales and ecosystems."
Hudiburg et al., Terrestrial carbon dynamics in an era of increasing wildfire, Nature, December 4, 2023.

(Paywall) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01881-4

 

 

Increased regeneration failure and wildfire risk from warming across the Sierra Nevada… Warming has created regeneration failure and a greater risk of wildfire across up to 19.5 percent of the Sierra Nevada. In this study that compared assumed stable forest conditions from 1915 to 1955, a mismatch in climate and forest regeneration for forest stability was found compared to the period 2000 to 2022. This mismatch is degrading or eliminating regeneration or the ability of sapling trees to survive because of water stress in the warmed environment at lower elevation areas along the western slope of the Sierras. Of most importance in this study, the comparison was made between the average conditions from 1915 to 1955 and 2000 to 2022. Because it is quite likely that the period 2000 to 2022 has seen more warming later rather than sooner during this period, the 19.5 percent mismatch is biased low or is understated.
Full - Hill et al., Low-elevation conifers in California’s Sierra Nevada are out of equilibrium with climate, PNAS, February 28, 2023.
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article-pdf/2/2/pgad004/49406200/pgad004.pdf
Press Release - Jordan, Stanford-led study reveals a fifth of California’s Sierra Nevada conifer forests are stranded in habitats that have grown too warm for them, Stanford, February 28, 2023.
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2023/02/28/zombie-forests/

 

 

Seedling regeneration in unburned plots is reduced by 15 to 36 percent from 2000 to 2019 in Western forests... In burned plots, seedling regeneration is 89 percent greater than in unburned plots with regeneration reduced by 28 to 68 percent. This study is based on the average regeneration of 28 different tree species. It also includes a bias where recent warming is greater than earlier warming during the study period of 2000 to 2019, as well as not including the most warming during the period 2020 to present where wildfire burn area  in California increased to Pre-European burned area in 2020.

Hill and Field, Forest fires and climate-induced tree range shifts in the western US, Nature Communications, November 15, 2022.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26838-z
Press Release - Jordan, Stanford researchers reveal how wildfire accelerates forest changes, Stanford, November 15, 2022.
https://news.stanford.edu/2021/11/15/trees-on-the-move/

 

Poor Ponderosa Regeneration because of climate warming and moisture limitation… "Regeneration density varied among fires but analysis of regeneration in aggregated edge and core plots showed that abundance of seed availability was not the sole factor that limited ponderosa pine regeneration, probably because of surviving tree refugia within high-severity burn patches.  furthermore, our findings emphasize that ponderosa pine regeneration in our study area was significantly impacted by xeric topographic environments and vegetation competition. Continued warm and dry conditions and increased wildfire activity may delay the natural recovery of  ponderosa pine forests, underscoring the importance of restoration efforts in large, high-severity burn patches."

Singleton, Moisture and vegetation cover limit ponderosa pine regeneration in high-severity burn patches in the southwestern US, Fire Ecology, May 7, 2021.
https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42408-021-00095-3

 

 

An era when prefire forests may not return… "Changing disturbance regimes and climate can overcome forest ecosystem resilience. Following high-severity fire, forest recovery may be compromised by lack of tree seed sources, warmer and drier postfire climate, or short-interval reburning. A potential outcome of the loss of resilience is the conversion of the prefire forest to a different forest type or nonforest vegetation. Conversion implies major, extensive, and enduring changes in dominant species, life forms, or functions, with impacts on ecosystem services. In the present article, we synthesize a growing body of evidence of fire-driven conversion and our understanding of its causes across western North America. We assess our capacity to predict conversion and highlight important uncertainties. Increasing forest vulnerability to changing fire activity and climate compels shifts in management approaches, and we propose key themes for applied research coproduced by scientists and managers to support decision-making in an era when the prefire forest may not return."

Coop et al., Wildfire Driven Forest Conversion in Western North American Landscapes, BioScience, July 1, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa061

 

Old trees just don't die, they are killed by something and old forests are a part of a stable ecology…
"Large, majestic trees are iconic symbols of great age among living organisms. Published evidence suggests that trees do not die because of genetically programmed senescence in their meristems, but rather are killed by an external agent or a disturbance event. Long tree lifespans are therefore allowed by specific combinations of life history traits within realized niches that support resistance to, or avoidance of, extrinsic mortality. Another requirement for trees to achieve their maximum longevity is either sustained growth over extended periods of time or at least the capacity to increase their growth rates when conditions allow it. The growth plasticity and modularity of trees can then be viewed as an evolutionary advantage that allows them to survive and reproduce for centuries and millennia. As more and more scientific information is systematically collected on tree ages under various ecological settings, it is becoming clear that tree longevity is a key trait for global syntheses of life history strategies, especially in connection with disturbance regimes and their possible future modifications."
Piovesan and Biondi, On tree longevity, New Phytologist, November 25, 2020.
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/nph.17148

 

Davis 2019 -- Forests Exceed Climate Change Regeneration Threshold Leading to Non-forested States
The take-away, "In areas that have crossed climatic thresholds for regeneration, stand-replacing fires may result in abrupt ecosystem transitions to nonforest states." The authors "examine[d] the relationship between annual climate and postfire tree regeneration of two dominant, low-elevation conifers (ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir) using annually resolved establishment dates from 2,935 destructively sampled trees from 33 wildfires across four regions in the western United States... [They] demonstrate[d] that ... forests of the western United States have crossed a critical climate threshold for postfire tree regeneration. [They] found abrupt declines in modeled annual recruitment probability in the 1990s for both species and across all regions. Annual rates of tree regeneration exhibited strongly nonlinear relationships with annual climate conditions, with distinct threshold responses to summer VPD [humidity], soil moisture, and maximum surface temperatures. Across the study region, seasonal to annual climate conditions from the early 1990s through 2015 have crossed these climate thresholds at the majority of sites. [Their] findings suggest that many low elevation mixed conifer forests in the western United States have already crossed climatic thresholds beyond which the climate is unsuitable for regeneration. The nonlinear relationships between annual climate and regeneration observed in this study are likely not unique to these two species."
Davis et al., Wildfires and climate change push low-elevation forests across a critical climate threshold for tree regeneration, PNAS, March 26, 2019.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/13/6193

 

Stevens-Rumann 2017 - One third of burned Western US forests are not regenerating at all… Conclusion, "Significantly less tree regeneration is occurring after wildfires in the start of 21st century compared to the end of the 20th century, and key drivers of this change were warmer and drier mean climatic conditions. Our findings demonstrate the increased vulnerability of both dry and moist forests to climate-induced regeneration failures following wildfires. The lack of regeneration indicates either substantially longer periods of forest recovery to pre-fire tree densities, or potential shifts to lower density forests or non-forest cover types after 21st-century wildfires… Our results suggest that predicted shifts from forest to non-forested vegetation may be underway, expedited by fire disturbances [and] that short post-fire periods of wetter climate that have favoured tree regeneration in the past may not occur frequently enough to facilitate tree regeneration in the future, across a broad region and multiple forest types in the Rocky Mountains… Our results suggest a high likelihood that future wildfires will facilitate shifts to lower density forest or non-forested states under a warming climate."

Data, "For sites burned at the end of the 20th century vs. the first decade of the 21st century, the proportion of sites meeting or exceeding pre-fire tree densities (e.g. recruitment threshold of 100%) decreased by nearly half (from 70 to 46%) and the percentage of sites experiencing no post-fire tree regeneration nearly doubled (from 19 to 32%)… This negative relationship demonstrates the potential increased vulnerability and lack of resilience on hotter and drier sites, or of dry forest species, to climate warming… Tree seedlings may establish in response to short-term anomalous wetter periods in the future, but our results highlight that such conditions have become significantly less common since 2000, and they are expected to be less likely in the future…  Further, persistent or long-lasting vegetation changes following wildfires have been observed worldwide." … Sevenens-Rumann 2017 found a significant decrease in tree regeneration in post fire landscapes in the last 15 years (since 2015) vs. the previous 15 years.  For fires that burned in the early 21st century, regeneration tree density decreased by nearly half, and sites experiencing no post-fire regeneration nearly doubled, over fires that burned at the end of the 20th century.

From the abstract, "Forest resilience to climate change is a global concern given the potential effects of increased disturbance activity, warming temperatures and increased moisture stress on plants. We used a multi-regional dataset of 1485 sites across 52 wildfires from the US Rocky Mountains to ask if and how changing climate over the last several decades impacted post-fire tree regeneration, a key indicator of forest resilience. Results highlight significant decreases in tree regeneration in the 21^st century. Annual moisture deficits were significantly greater from 2000 to 2015 as compared to 1985–1999, suggesting increasingly unfavourable post-fire growing conditions, corresponding to significantly lower seedling densities and increased regeneration failure. Dry forests that already occur at the edge of their climatic tolerance are most prone to conversion to non-forests after wildfires. Major climate-induced reduction in forest density and extent has important consequences for a myriad of ecosystem services now and in the future."

Stevens-Rumann et al., Evidence for declining forest resilience to wildfires under climate, Ecology Letters, December 12, 2017.
(Paywall) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ele.12889
Full (Researchgate free account required)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Monica_Rother/publication/321753770_Evidence_for_declining_forest_resilience_to_wildfires_under_climate_change/links/5a315ae90f7e9b2a284cea8f/Evidence-for-declining-forest-resilience-to-wildfires-under-climate-change.pdf
Press Release, University of Montana -
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-12/tuom-sfr121317.php

 

Ecological Drought, shifting ecosystems – New Climate Change Drought Category…
“Ecological drought has recently been proposed as a fifth drought metric classification. In contrast to other drought classifications, ecological drought metrics attempt to describe abnormal departures from moisture conditions when accounting for local ecosystems without a human-specific viewpoint of drought effects. Ecological drought metrics identify droughts on longer time and larger spatial scales that have the potential to shift ecosystems—as well as human systems—past their adaptive capacity (Crausbay et al. 2017). Addressing the prevalence of ecologically significant droughts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries requires a metric suited to addressing long-term ecosystem trends.”
Crockett and Westerling, Greater Temperature and Precipitation Extremes Intensify Western US Drought, Wildfire Severity, and Sierra Nevada Tree Mortality, Journal of Climate, January 2018.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0254.1

 

Allen 2015 – Ten drivers of a warmer climate that reveal underestimation in forest mortality, a literature review… "Studies from diverse forest biomes show increased background tree mortality rates that have been associated with warmer temperatures.. High confidence drivers – Drought occurs everywhere, Warming creates hotter droughts, nonlinear vapor pressure deficit, faster death fro from water stress,increased frequency of lethal drought and forest death in a warmer climate is faswtser than growth."
Allen et al., On underestimation of global vulnerability to tree mortality and forest die‐off from hotter drought in the Anthropocene, Ecosphere, August 7, 2015.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1890/ES15-00203.1

 

Crasubay 2017 - Anticipated transition from forested to shrubland ecosystems...
"Droughts of the 21st century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration and greater spatial extent, and are increasingly exacerbated by human demands for water. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another, e.g., forest to a shrubland (Jiang et al. 2013)."
Crausbay et al., Defining ecological drought for the 21 st century, BAMS, July 27, 2017.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0292.1

 

 

Singleton 2021 - Poor Ponderosa Regeneration because of climate warming and moisture limitation… "Regeneration density varied among fires but analysis of regeneration in aggregated edge and core plots showed that abundance of seed availability was not the sole factor that limited ponderosa pine regeneration, probably because of surviving tree refugia within high-severity burn patches.  furthermore, our findings emphasize that ponderosa pine regeneration in our study area was significantly impacted by xeric topographic environments and vegetation competition. Continued warm and dry conditions and increased wildfire activity may delay the natural recovery of  ponderosa pine forests, underscoring the importance of restoration efforts in large, high-severity burn patches."

Singleton, Moisture and vegetation cover limit ponderosa pine regeneration in high-severity burn patches in the southwestern US, Fire Ecology, May 7, 2021.
https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42408-021-00095-3

 

 

~ ~ ~ ~

END FOREST REGENERATION MASTER

Bruce Melton PE
Director, Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3
President, Melton Engineering Services Austin
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[Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas]

Hi Jon.

How does one restore a system that is in collapse? The definition of ecological systems collapse is; the system collapses so new species and mechanisms can evolve a new system tolerant of the changed conditions. Current warming then, has locked-in complete collapse of our Earth systems that have already seen collapse initiated (tipping collapses), because only removing the perturbation (warming) to the systems that caused the collapse to begin can halt the collapse.  Traditional natural systems conservation and preservation philosophy is now on its head, as this philosophy is only valid in the climate where our natural systems evolved.

I am a long-time leader at Sierra Club and I immensely respect and understand the principles of ecological restoration, so I ask this question based on climate change, not the science of restoration. This science, upon which the literature almost exclusively describes as being based upon recovering an ecology from degradation in our old climate, is no longer accurate because our climate has now warmed beyond its natural variation.

Today, our climate is simply hostile to many ecologies that evolved in our old climate. Recovery of these systems may seem valid, as the new recruits are vigorous, if they can survive recruitment. Once they start to age though, and their vigor wanes, repeated stress events degrade them until they succumb. They succumb so that new species tolerant of the new conditions can evolve a new system. I have read this in the findings and witnessed it in the field across North America. It doesn't happen all the time, but it is happening more and more as the stress events become more extreme and more frequent.

Climate restoration then, is fundamental to restoration of natural systems. One just cannot "restore" a degraded systems in a hostile environment. I see this constantly in my witnessing of climate impacts. Here and there, there are examples of success, maybe, as restoration remains time-dependent. But the science of restoration is based on work from our old climate, where the ecologies that evolved there were still viable.

The great benefit of restoration actions today, is that when we restore our climate in a few decades, many restoration efforts that can survive that long will plausibly still be viable and as the temperature falls, risks of collapse completion or recurring collapse will diminish. Fundamentally though, if restoration to within the natural variation of our old climate is forestalled, there is great risk that restoration efforts will fail.

At the very bottom of this email are my notes on regeneration failure findings of forests across western North America. A third of forests that burned at the turn of the century are not regenerating at all and half of the rest are regenerating at only half the normal 20th century rate (Stevens-Rummans 2017). The reason is drought and heat. The pervasive drought across the West is caused by heat, where evaporation increases nonlinearly with temperature. Even with "normal" precipitation then, drought can persist because of the nonlinear relationship between heat and evaporation.

I shot the mesa tops at Mesa Verde National Park a couple of times recently (see our filming report here). Fires there at the turn of the 21st century, unprecedented in the tree ring records dating back over a thousand years, have created an "emerging grassland" with zero regeneration of the juniper-pinyon woodland. Across the West I see this at least in proportion to what the research says and it is occurring in beetle kill too.  Findings have identified this new kind of drought as ecological drought, a drought so severe it shifts ecosystems. Replanting may seem to be successful, but why in the first place has the ecology's collapse been initiated? Because current environmental conditions are beyond the evolutionary boundaries of the existing system and the species in the existing system can no longer survive the hostile conditions.

Planting new species?

The Club is definitively against this (and I agree), as establishment of a new ecological system in place of an old collapsed system has exceedingly troublesome drawbacks. To start with carbon sequestration is a two-part system: above and below ground, where both systems are reliant upon one another and the underground system accounts for about half of sequestration generally and cannot be transferred to a new system with different species because of co-dependencies. Carbon sequestration in a regenerated system does not happen for human generations in general, as the carbon balance is such that it simple takes that long for the new system to recover the lost carbon from the collapsed system.

But the most egregious loss from collapsing Earth systems is environmental services. We cannot expect that a system with species foreign to the old system will provide the same environmental services, services that all species on this planet evolved with and depend upon, including humans. This is literally one of the fundamental reasons I was able to convince Sierra Club to change their warming target from a further warming 1.5 C, to a restoration 1 C, so that our natural systems have a chance of regeneration, so that their environmental services are available to the rest of the species on the planet.

Steep trails,

Bruce

Bruce Melton PE
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On 7/3/2024 8:21 PM, Jon Schull wrote:

If sequestration was the only mitigator, and if CO2 were the only issue, I would agree "Earth systems are modest sequestering agents on a per unit basis" (though they much better than anything else available to us.)

However, restoring nature does far more than restore sequestration rates.  

Healthy ecosystems mediate homeostatic processes that 

• remove heat from the earth's surface, 
• modulate  cloud formation (which further reduces surface heat by making shade)
• stimulate and moderate rainfall via bioaerosols
• draw moisture inward from oceans and across continents (biotic pump)
• increase resilience against warming, storming, fires, floods, and drought

Heat, not CO2 per se, is causing chaos, not CO2 levels. 

Restoring nature has direct effects on heat, independent of sequestration.  

It will be centuries before CO2-charged oceans stop outgassing carbon.  

We can't wait.

Fortunately, the salutary effects of ecorestoration kick in within a single year, with temperature and resilience benefits focussed on the site of restoration (and the people who invest in restoration).  

We need to go beyond carbon tunnel vision to focus on the necessary and essential solution to the metacrisis: restoring nature. 

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Co-Founder EcoRestorationAlliance: Climate mitigation through eco-restoration.

Co-founder,  e-NABLE: volunteers worldwide making free, 3D printed prosthetics

Innovation Fellow, JMK Innovation Fund

[Andre Leu]

Hi Philip and all,

Thanks for this. It is a critical issue.

The late Ronnie Cummins and I have a book on this, The Regenerative Agriculture Solution,  that will be published by Chelsea Green on September 12. 

It is available on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Regenerative-Agriculture-Solution-Revolutionary-Resilience/dp/1645022692/

Saludos

André

Prof. Dr. André Leu D.Sc., BA Com., Grad Dip Ed.

International Director, Regeneration International

Agroecological, Regenerative Organic Farmer

Ambassador, IFOAM - Organics International 

Adjunct Professor, South Seas University

Author, Regenerative Agriculture Solution, Growing Life,  Poisoning our Children, The Myths of Safe Pesticides

 +61428459870

andre...@gmail.com

an...@regenerationinternational.org

http://regenerationinternational.org

Twitter @Andreleu1

 

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[Elizabeth Kucinich]

Congratulations, Andre. We miss Ronnie dearly. How wonderful that this book is being published posthumously. 💚🌱

On Jul 3, 2024, at 08:11, Andre Leu <andre...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sequestering-carbon-in-soil-addressing-the-climate-threat/CAD02OARSbArB5oe_mO_cSqcjK3__4%3DMJ8uDB2a%3DuPt9bYv3uPA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jon Schull]

If sequestration was the only mitigator, and if CO2 were the only issue, I would agree "Earth systems are modest sequestering agents on a per unit basis" (though they much better than anything else available to us.)

However, restoring nature does far more than restore sequestration rates.  

Healthy ecosystems mediate homeostatic processes that 

• remove heat from the earth's surface, 
• modulate  cloud formation (which further reduces surface heat by making shade)
• stimulate and moderate rainfall via bioaerosols
• draw moisture inward from oceans and across continents (biotic pump)
• increase resilience against warming, storming, fires, floods, and drought

Heat, not CO2 per se, is causing chaos, not CO2 levels. 

Restoring nature has direct effects on heat, independent of sequestration.  

It will be centuries before CO2-charged oceans stop outgassing carbon.  

We can't wait.

Fortunately, the salutary effects of ecorestoration kick in within a single year, with temperature and resilience benefits focussed on the site of restoration (and the people who invest in restoration).  

We need to go beyond carbon tunnel vision to focus on the necessary and essential solution to the metacrisis: restoring nature. 

On Wed, 3 Jul 2024 at 13:07, Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas <bme...@earthlink.net> wrote:

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[Andre Leu]

Hi Jon,

I agree. We must scale up landscape nature-based systems rather than the current push to industrialize ecosystems to produce more energy for cities.

Saludos

André

Prof. Dr. André Leu D.Sc., BA Com., Grad Dip Ed.

International Director, Regeneration International

Agroecological, Regenerative Organic Farmer

Ambassador, IFOAM - Organics International 

Adjunct Professor, South Seas University

Author, Regenerative Agriculture Solution, Growing Life,  Poisoning our Children, The Myths of Safe Pesticides

 +61428459870

andre...@gmail.com

an...@regenerationinternational.org

http://regenerationinternational.org

Twitter @Andreleu1

 

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[David Ellison]

Hi Bruce,

Many kind thanks for sharing this... Most interesting... Did you use AI to generate this, or collect over time... I find the points and references very helpful?

However, there are many truths and untruths mixed into this long set of references and inputs... A few thoughts on some of these:

1) increasing forest mortality (and fire) is (are) of course important. But they are both significantly smaller than the total available forest and annual forest growth. Thus, planting more forests is  still a benefit.

2) while many argue that saving old growth forests is somehow key, this misunderstands two things. a) old growth forests sequester less carbon per year than younger forests, and b) mortality is more likely to affect older rather than younger forests. For these reasons, protecting old growth forests is not a key, though it may be more beneficial with respect to biodiversity concerns. The main point here is that young forests also bring positive benefits in terms of carbon sequestration rates, resilience, etc. .... Old growth forests are good, but younger forests may have a stronger impact on rates of carbon sequestration overall... On the other hand, since old growth forests typically store more sequestered carbon, it is unwise to allow these forests to be harvested. This will lead to higher, one-off emissions.

3) since more and more forests are becoming an emission, many argue we should not plant... This is a peculiar way to think. Since mortality and emissions are a VERY small percentage of the total annual carbon sequestration from new forests, planting new forests is always the smarter solution... They will sequester far more than might be lost by a small share of emissions from increasing mortality...

4) Many argue that since the climate is just getting worse, we need to solve the climate problem BEFORE planting new forests... This is crazy... Forest cover affects and improves the climate. Thus, planting forests will HELP SOLVE the climate problem and HELP REDUCE climate impacts on forests. Even though increasing mortality and fire are a problem, overall the balance of the contribution from planting more forests is highly likely to be positive... 

5) Many seem to believe that old growth forests are somehow more resilient against climate change than other forests. However, the data on climate change impacts on forests suggests there is little difference across the two... So again, planting younger forests can be just as beneficial and may sequester more carbon...

6) I do agree that the right forest has to be planted in the right locations... But this is clearly NOT ALWAYS tree types that are natural to the area. Forest biomes are shifting rapidly due to climate change. This complicates the decision of which trees to plant in which location and makes solutions more difficult than before. Sometimes choosing alternate, imported species is the only solution... 

I tend to agree with most of the rest... But I do believe that more care should generally be given to thinking about the above points...  

Kind regards,

David

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[Didi Pershouse]

Hello All, 

Here's another version of this story: Here's what I think everyone needs to know about climate change, originally published in 2018, but seems more relevant than ever, so I just republished it. 

There are a bunch of wonderful interviews--particularly one with Vijay Kumar and one with Swati Renduchintala, both unpacking the history of the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative--on the same site. 

Thanks for all your good work.

Didi

Didi Pershouse  

Author •  Educator • Policy Strategist 

Check out "The Wisdom Underground" podcast, and articles on Substack

Courses, Community, and Resources: The Land & Leadership Initiative

Free Downloadable Manual: Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function

Book: The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities 

www.didipershouse.com  (603) 252-1930

 I acknowledge the people of the Abenaki nation upon whose land I live and work, and indigenous peoples everywhere. I recognize that their connection to this earth persists and pay my respects to elders past, present and future.  On behalf of all beings, I listen for their guidance in my work.

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[Tom Goreau]

Here’s a great new book by people who have spent decades regenerating the land:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Regenerative-Agriculture-Solution-Revolutionary-Resilience/dp/1645022692/                                                                                                                                                                                           

The Regenerative Agriculture Solution: A Revolutionary Approach to Building Soil, Creating Climate Resilience, and Supporting Human and Planetary Health Paperback – September 26, 2024

by André Leu (Author), Ronnie Cummins (Author), Vandana Shiva (Foreword)

See all formats and editions

---

Pre-order Price Guarantee. Terms

Is it possible that the solution to the global climate emergency lies in a “waste” agricultural product? 

The best-kept secret in today's world is that solutions to some of our most pressing issues―food insecurity, deforestation, overgrazing, water scarcity, rural poverty, forced migration―lie in adopting, improving, and scaling up organic and regenerative agriculture best practices.

The Regenerative Agriculture Solution starts with the story of how two brothers―Jose and Gilberto Flores―are at the leading edge of this approach, pioneering the use of the previously discarded leaves of the prodigious agave plant to regenerate agricultural soils, reduce erosion, and improve water capture.

When Ronnie Cummins, the cofounder of Organic Consumer Association (OCA) and Regeneration International, met the Flores brothers in 2019 and witnessed their revolutionary agave agroforestry system, he knew they were onto something important.

Cummins had spent decades studying the potential and pitfalls of organic and regenerative agriculture and knew best practices when he saw them. He started to write a book about Flores’s brother and other visionary people, such as Dr Vandana Shiva, Allan Savory, and John Liu, who started landscape-scale regeneration projects. The scientific data was even more convincing, suggesting that these projects―and others like it―could revolutionize how we understand the climate catastrophe.

Sadly, Cummins passed away in April 2023, in the midst of working on the book. Not to leave this work unfinished, Ronnie’s widow and OCA cofounder, Rose, called on their friend, colleague, and collaborator, Regeneration International’s cofounder André Leu, to complete the work and place the Flores brothers’ breakthroughs in the broader context of regenerative agriculture solutions to the world’s many interlocking ecological crises.

The result isThe Regenerative Agriculture Solution, a book that shows how regenerating our forests, rangelands, and farming ecosystems can cool our planet, restore the climate, and enrich our communities.

---

1. Print length

208 pages

2.     Language

English

3.     Publisher

Chelsea Green Publishing

4.     Publication date

September 26, 2024

5.     Dimensions

5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches

Next slide of product details

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

André Leu is the International Director of Regeneration International, an organization he cofounded in 2015 with Dr. Vandana Shiva, Ronnie Cummins, Dr. Hans Herren, and Steve Rye, and which has now grown to 540 partners in 75 countries, advancing projects in agroecology, permaculture, AMP grazing, agroforestry, and biological, organic, and ecological agriculture. Dr. Leu holds a Doctor of Science in Environmental and Agricultural Systems and is an Adjunct Professor of regenerative agriculture at South Seas University. His books include Growing Life, Poisoning Our Children, and The Myths of Safe Pesticides. Dr. Leu and his wife, Julia, live on their organic tropical fruit farm in Daintree, Australia.

Ronnie Cummins was the cofounder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), a nonprofit, US-based network of more than two million consumers dedicated to safeguarding organic standards and promoting a healthy, just, and regenerative system of food, farming, and commerce. Cummins also served on the steering committee of Regeneration International and OCA’s Mexican affiliate, Vía Orgánica. He was the coauthor of The Truth About COVID-19 and author of Grassroots Rising and Genetically Engineered Food.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation, and of the Slow Food Movement. Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights, she is the author and editor of a score of influential books, among them Oneness vs. the 1%; Making Peace with the Earth; Soil Not Oil; Globalization’s New Wars; Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard; and Who Really Feeds the World?

Shiva is the recipient of over twenty international awards, including the Right Livelihood Award (1993); the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (1998); the Horizon 3000 Award (Austria, 2001); the John Lennon-Yoko Ono Grant for Peace (2008); the Save the World Award (2009); the Sydney Peace Prize (2010); the Calgary Peace Prize (2011); and the Thomas Merton Award (2011). She was the Fukuoka Grand Prize Laureate in 2012.

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Product details

·         Publisher ‏ : ‎ Chelsea Green Publishing (September 26, 2024)

·         Language ‏ : ‎ English

·         Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages

·         ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1645022692

·         ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1645022695

·         Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds

·         Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches

·         Best Sellers Rank: #675,693 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

o    #11 in Irrigation

o    #61 in Agronomy (Books)

o    #75 in Crop Science (Books)

 

.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/planetary-restoration/CAAAR4pUehOxWs%3D6ha%2B5UN3qL%3DxhWEro5kffJiM4bXnvZekZFrA%40mail.gmail.com.

[H simmens]

A friendly reminder that the HP ‘About Us’ description explicitly includes ecosystem restoration as follows:

We advocate the world community urgently come together to carry out an equitable, science-based plan of action that includes what HPAC calls, the Climate Triad:

• directly cooling the climate through sunshine reflection, ecosystem restoration, and other safe and effective means,

• accelerating emission reductions, and

• deploying large scale removal of atmosphere carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.

One could also include ecosystem restoration under large scale carbon dioxide removal amongst its many co-benefits as Jon points out. 

While these discussions are necessary and enlightening HP does not privilege or favor any one ‘solution’ or portfolio of solutions. 

The HP goal is to get the world community through whatever institutional mechanism is possible and appropriate to urgently, comprehensively, objectively and equitably evaluate all plausible pathways to bring global temperature increases back down to below 1° C. 

HP’s emphasis is on achieving this end goal rather than the means. - which is radically different than the current dispiriting goal of simply avoiding the worst. 

Herb

 

Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future

“A SciencePoem and an Inspiration.” Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
HerbSimmens.com

On Jul 5, 2024, at 1:42 PM, Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org> wrote:



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[Peter Fiekowsky]

Bruce-

 

Thank you for an important new message.

 

Traditional natural systems conservation and preservation philosophy is now on its head, as this philosophy is only valid in the climate where our natural systems evolved.

 

Today’s CO2 level, 50% higher than pre-industrial levels, and temperature 1.5C warmer, corresponds to a new epoch, often called “hothouse earth”. Stabilizing at today’s level means regenerating most of Earth’s ecosystems for these new conditions. Choosing to do that, rather than restore preindustrial CO2 and temperatures makes the 1980’s UNFCCC choice for stabilization rather than restoration into a radical choice  today. The decision must be remade in favor of restoring preindustrial CO2 levels, now that we are seeing the predicted impacts of warming…and now that we see the NOAA Keeling curve data showing that nature removed 20 Gt CO2 in just one year, 1992, following the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.

 

Naturally there will be people who prefer to let nature evolve in this new hothouse Earth, but everyone I ask with prefers that we go back to pre-industrial climate and ecosystems. It’s a choice between life as we know it, and a totally uncertain future. Earth’s conditions have changed since the UNFCCC’s decision to stabilize. The UNFCCC mission, along with the climate community’s needs to change accordingly.

 

Give our children the safe CO2 levels we were given as children. Nature has done it (randomly), and we can do it too (carefully, intentionally and quickly, by 2050).

 

Peter

 

From: healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas <bme...@earthlink.net>
Date: Thursday, July 4, 2024 at 10:32 

AM

To: Jon Schull <jsc...@gmail.com>
Cc: Philip Bogdonoff <pbogd...@gmail.com>, healthy-planet-action-coalition <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>, Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>, Healthy Climate Alliance <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com>, Sequestering Carbon in Soil: Addressing The Climate Threat <sequestering-carbon-in-soil-...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-climate-alliance/dcf48964-514b-4a03-8171-349c416afaff%40earthlink.net.

[Laura Madden]

I fully agree.  Here is another one published by a wise elder who has worked in community toward this her whole life.  We need to deeply engage community to find and attend to this connectivity between humans and Nature, especially water. 

Nature-based solutions for living systems: Connectivity, complexity, community - ScienceDirect

Laura Madden

Phoenix Consults - community and strategic planning

St. Louis, MO

Phone: 202-845-4503

Co-Organizer and Local Lead, Global Freshwaters Summit 

River Ambassador, Global Being Foundation

2021 Global Freshwaters Summit

--

[David Price]

Hi Folks

It may be inconsequential, but I notice that Ronnie Cummins (original lead author on this book before he died) was also a second author (with Joseph Mercola) on the book “The Truth About Covid 19”, reviewed here by the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/technology/joseph-mercola-coronavirus-misinformation-online.html

David 

From my cellphone

I acknowledge that I reside on unceded Traditional Territory 

of the Secwépemc People

On Jul 5, 2024, at 5:42 AM, Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org> wrote:



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<81agZW4cscL._SL1500_.jpg>

[Linda VerNooy]

Good point Peter. We don't know for how long humanity can exist at these new levels with the natural feedback we are already seeing.

[Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas]

HPAC Presentation July 11, 5:30 PM EDT.

Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88954851189?pwd=WVZoeTBnN3kyZFoyLzYxZ1JNbDFPUT09

Colleagues - Please join the founder of the global climate restoration movement, Peter Fiekowsky, for our presentation this Thursday, the 11th.

The Climate Restoration Roadmap
Peter Fiekowsky

We all want to give our children a safe climate like the one we were given. We know that nature has removed about 1 trillion tons of CO2 before ice ages, so we know that it is theoretically possible. However climate leadership does not yet support or even discuss restoring safe CO2 levels.

In the 1980s, as the UNFCCC and IPCC were developing, the concept of restoring a safe climate made no sense because the climate was still safe. In the last 30 years, though, our planet has moved into climate chaos, and it is clear that we need to shift our goal to restoration.

How will we do it? I'll present an engineering and scientific roadmap to getting CO2 back to safe levels below 300 (or 350 ppm CO2e) by 2050.  It's a fascinating and surprising pathway.

PAC Presentation  - Peter Fiekowsky, author of Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race (2022), is an MIT-educated physicist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist with 27 patents. He has 30 years’ experience as a citizen lobbyist for poverty and climate issues, and recently has been working to build the organizations required to ensure the survival and flourishing of humanity.  His mission is to leave a world we’re proud of to our children. To that end, he founded the Foundation for Climate Restoration, Methane Action, Stable Planet Alliance, the Climate Restoration Safety & Governance Board, the Humanity Day organization and most recently RestoreTheClimate.

[rob...@rtulip.net]

This is a very informative discussion with Peter, who is one of the most influential advocates for effective climate policies.

 

Link to the recording is at https://youtu.be/lx1vJ7kTfxo?t=1

 

Regards

 

Robert Tulip

https://www.healthyplanetaction.org/

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[Ron Baiman]

Thank you Robert!  I'm sorry I missed it but will be reviewing the recording!  When you get a chance, if you could send me and Lucinda a downloadable version for the HPAC website and YouTube channel when you get a chance that would be great!

Best,

Ron

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Healthy Planet Action Coalition

 

Addressing the Urgent Need for Direct Climate Cooling: Rationale and Options

An Open Letter to the IMO Supporting Maritime Transport that Cools the Atmosphere While Preserving Air Quality Benefits

[Dana Woods]

Thank you Ron and thank you Peter F ,

I haven't had time to view this yet but I definitely intend to do so

Regards, Dana

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[Ron Baiman]

Dear Colleagues,

Just finished viewing the video and concur that this was an excellent talk!  I found the summary discussion particularly encouraging as all appeared to agree that both cooling and carbon removal are necessary (along with emissions reductions of course) and urgent. 

One point that I would have liked to hear more about (my bad for not being able to attend!) was a bit more of an attempt to unpack the evidence for and against the view expressed by Peter that trillions of tons of carbon can very rapidly be absorbed in the oceans through OIF.  Mike raised some questions, and as I recall (from NOAC meetings) other concerns have been expressed including an absolute cumulative limit on the amount of iron that can be safely absorbed by the oceans. 

However, I hope Peter and the The Climate Restoration folks are right that OIF can provide enormous carbon removal (and also cooling benefits through methane removal) and I applaud their ability to quickly operationalize their vision so that it can be tested as we definitely need  both cooling and carbon removal (and GHG emissions reductions) to be implemented as soon as is "humanly" possible!

Best,

Ron

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/CAKum48sChzfhBE70FjFdyB5o4imsYM_sATi6WhCte0fHtXreOA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Peter Fiekowsky]

Ron-

 

Thank you for the good review and excellent question: Can OIF remove the required 1000 Gt of CO2 by 2050? (and another 500-1000 Gt from 2050 to 2100). Here is a quick response. Maybe we can write up a longer one together.

 

How does one answer the question, “is it possible?”.  One of the strongest answers to that is, “Yes, it’s been done before.” It is hard to defend a claim of impossibility when the process in question has been done before, especially if it’s been done recently.

 

We know that Earth has ice ages in which 1000 Gt of CO2 get removed into biocarbon dissolved in the deep ocean. That has happened roughly dozen times in the last million years.

The question from the science community is, “Can humans design a process to replicate what nature did randomly, and do it 1000 times faster?” As you know, the majority opinion in science is, “No, we have not proven that we can replicate that CO2 removal, so it’s safest to assume it’s impossible.”

 

There is no arguing with that logic calling for more research. It assumes that our top priority is the same as science’s: Avoid the embarrassment of calling for doing something that’s never been done before and will probably have several failures before success. I suggest we abandon that assumption.

 

Last year we showed that nature removed 20 Gt / year in 1992, following the Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines. This is separate from the half degree of cooling in 1992 from aerosols in the upper atmosphere. CO2 removal is from the gigatons of fine ash that fell into the ocean nearby. This CO2 removal from less than 0.1% of the ocean area is five times faster than current ocean theory says is possible with OIF done on the whole ocean. This CO2 capture rate per square meter is consistent with observed photosynthesis rates in nutrient-rich areas, but over large areas it requires that nitrogen-fixing algae provide the needed nitrates, which I am told, is not part of current theory.

 

There are two approaches to that incongruity between theory and data: Either the theory is insufficient, or the data is wrong. Oceanographers write that cooling from the eruption caused the CO2 level change. This is despite the fact that 4 other eruptions in the last 250 years caused similar cooling, but no significant CO2 impact (see Appendix B of our  white paper), and the fact that the numbers don’t work (footnote 9, p7).  Scientific consensus still dismisses the NASA / NOAA / Scripps Keeling curve interpretation, but that’s shifting.

 

There are a couple oceanographers now supporting the Pinatubo pause replication test we are developing. More scientists will probably switch sides eventually and agree that the theory should be updated to match the 1992 data.

 

Bottom line: CO2 removal at 20 Gt CO2 / year ( 1/3 the rate required to get to 300 ppm by 2050)  was recorded in 1992. It is almost certain that humans can optimize this process and remove CO2 from 1% of the ocean and restore a safe CO2 level by 2050. No attempt to do so has been made in the 30 years since the first 1993 Pinatubo pause report, so it is reasonable to predict that no attempt will be made in the next 30 years.

 

However, we have a group organizing funding and a project to break the log-jam.

The speed and cost of scaling up the Pinatubo pause (3-5 years and less than a billion dollars), plus the fact that Nature has demonstrated the CO2 removal already makes a compelling argument to prioritize the testing.

 

Peter

[Ron Baiman]

Thank you Peter for this detailed explanation of your thinking. Unfortunately I'm not enough of an expert on any of this to be able to confidently evaluate the case you're making.  The bottom line though, is that I do hope that you're able to draw down large quantities of CO2 and this is, needless to say, sorely needed. My main concern (as wthl all of us) is time. As I can't tell with confidence that, even if Pinatubo did lead to a 20 GT drawdown this is something that could be doubled and continued at the same higher rate for multiple years, I favor hedging our bets and making sure we have a direct climate cooling tourniquet in place, even as we're trying our best to reduce and remove as fast as possible!

Best,

Ron

[John Nissen]

Hi Ron and Dennis,

Ron, you are absolutely right that we need cooling in the short term, and very urgently to deal with the crisis of global overheating.  And Peter is right that we need to bring the CO2 level (and more importantly the CO2e level) towards its pre-industrial level in the long term.  I believe that we should aim for 385 ppm CO2e (as in 1980) within 30 or 40 years or so.  OIF and biochar between them could achieve this by promoting life in soils and the oceans, with the added benefit of feeding an expanding world population.

Peter may or may not be right about Pinatubo ash causing the decline in CO2.  But two facts are clear: OIF has the potential to remove gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere; and cooling the ocean surface will increase its ability to absorb CO2.  About a third of CO2 emitted is absorbed by the ocean (most of that within a decade) and a sixth is absorbed by plants on land; meaning that only about half of emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere.  A greater proportion of emitted CO2 will remain in the atmosphere as global warming continues.  Cooling intervention helps on the CO2 side.

The other lesson from Pinatubo is that injecting SO2 into the stratosphere has a dramatic cooling effect, without any unmanageable side-effects according to the latest research.   Dennis, you were going to do a documentary on Pinatubo and how it cooled the world.  How is that coming along?  We desperately need people to appreciate the amazing potential for SAI to cool the planet and, even more urgently, to refreeze the Arctic.  Planetary restoration, which is an unalienable right for the young people of today, requires both this cooling and the massive CDR which Peter envisages.

Cheers, John

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/planetary-restoration/CAPhUB9DjF2pv5XyeTE1u58z3hoFVpUs4cbMWH1ee3UKSSaNiYA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas]

A quote from Peter F from the very beginning of the Healthy Climate Alliance in 2013, "First we have to create the mission of restoration, because restoration solutions do not make sense with a mission of only limiting further warming." (and I paraphrase you Peter, this may not be your exact words, but it does reflect the idea that we cannot achieve climate restoration at any cost, if we continue with our current civilization's mission of limiting further warming." I say this because the Triad neglects this fundamental. Without a mission of restoration, in my opinion, the Triad is not very meaningful.

I also want to add another piece of the history of geoengineering that is often overlooked. During post WWII industrial expansion, we emitted an enormous amount of sulfur from burning fossil fuels. These emissions not only cooled Earth by about 0.1 C by the 1970s when air pollution regulations became strong enough to overcome some of the cooling from sulfate emissions, but this cooling period permanently lowered the resulting Earth temperature. Why? Because geoengineering lowers the increase of the load of long-lived warming pollutants in the atmosphere from natural feedback emissions. This is because Earth's natural feedback emissions of climate pollutants increase with increasing temperature. Anything that lowers Earth's temperature then, lowers natural feedback emissions of climate pollutants that are long-lived in our atmosphere. This reduction is semi-permanent, likely in human generational time frames, depending on the warming rate. Net then, aerosol cooling  from WWII to the 1970s was not 0.1 C as the thermometer record indicates. If the warming trend remained linear from prior to WWII, the cooling would have been about 0.5 C by the mid-1970s when warming resumed after air pollution regulations began affecting aerosol emissions enough to matter.

   
(From) How much did aerosols contribute to mid-20th century cooling?
Posted on 16 September 2010 by dana1981 at Skeptical Science
https://skepticalscience.com/How-much-did-aerosols-contribute-to-mid-20th-century-cooling.html

-MeltOn

Bruce Melton PE
Director, Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3
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[H simmens]

Hi Bruce,

I don’t understand your comment that the Triad neglects restoration. 

The HP policy is clear that the triad is the means - along with enhanced adaptation - to a restored climate as per the HP ‘about us’ statement:

i

Cool, reduce, and remove to restore the climate.

Later is too late!

We advocate the world community urgently come together to carry out an equitable, science-based plan of action that includes what HPAC calls, the Climate Triad:

• directly cooling the climate through sunshine reflection, ecosystem restoration, and other safe and effective means,

• accelerating emission reductions, and

• deploying large scale removal of atmosphere carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.

The goal of these actions, along with enhanced and transformative adaptation and regeneration measures, is to reduce the average global temperature increase to well below 1°C in the coming decades. Doing so will sharply reduce weather extremes, slow or stop the collapse of key ecosystems, and help ensure a livable planet for humanity and the natural world.

Herb

Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future

“A SciencePoem and an Inspiration.” Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
HerbSimmens.com

On Jul 17, 2024, at 12:49 PM, Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas <bme...@earthlink.net> wrote:



We all want to give our children a safe climate like the one we were given. We know that nature has removed about 1 trillion tons of CO2 before ice ages, so we know that it is theoretically possible. However climate leadership does not yet support or even discuss restoring safe CO2 levels.

In the 1980s, as the UNFCCC and IPCC were developing, the concept of restoring a safe climate made no sense because the climate was still safe. In the last 30 years, though, our planet has moved into climate chaos, and it is clear that we need to shift our goal to restoration.

How will we do it? I'll present an engineering and scientific roadmap to getting CO2 back to safe levels below 300 (or 350 ppm CO2e) by 2050.  It's a fascinating and surprising pathway.

PAC Presentation  - Peter Fiekowsky, author of Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race (2022), is an MIT-educated physicist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist with 27 patents. He has 30 years’ experience as a citizen lobbyist for poverty and climate issues, and recently has been working to build the organizations required to ensure the survival and flourishing of humanity.  His mission is to leave a world we’re proud of to our children. To that end, he founded the Foundation for Climate Restoration, Methane Action, Stable Planet Alliance, the Climate Restoration Safety & Governance Board, the Humanity Day organization and most recently RestoreTheClimate.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/planetary-restoration/26c9e449-ed0f-4c07-9084-71abced723c4%40earthlink.net.

[Michael MacCracken]

Dear Bruce--Just a note on the temperature record you are showing (so a separate point than what Herb has made). I've attached the land and the ocean temperature records from NOAA. If you look at the land record, it is quite flat from the 1930s to 1970s, with the years of World War II being slightly high (up an average of say 0.2 F).  Hard to see much cooling, except around the time of the 1963 Agung eruption. And note the scaling goes up to 3.6 F--so, that the temperature was so stable is pretty impressive.

Now look at the ocean record--due to limited areal coverage, the records from the 19th century have pretty large gaps, so a bit more variable due to less good coverage. Note that the scaling is half that of the atmosphere. Note that the WWII years really stand out as different, up by 0.4 F, twice as much as over land. This is really rather strange as land tends to change more than the ocean. It has long been recognized that there were a lot of changes going on in how SST was measured starting in the war years. Aside from different ship routings, different mix of ship types and loading, the way SST was measured was changed from throwing a canvas bucket over board and sticking a thermometer in it as it cooled to measuring the cooling water intake temperature in the engine room (likely of a freighter running its engines hot for fast crossing with heavy load and so drawing water from a different depth than the bucket--or coming back empty and bobbing like a cork on the ocean). Also, instead of taking nighttime air temperature with a seaman holding up a thermometer at the bow of the ship and doing the reading by shining a flashlight, the temperature was taken just outside a wheelhouse door that was opened a crack right next to the ship structure that had been heated by the sun all day; this was done so as to reduce likelihood of the light being spotted by an enemy submarine . While these and other factors are known and surely contributed to a bias in the record, correcting the record has been viewed as near impossible to do. And so, when one now combines the land and ocean records (ocean about twice as much area as the land), one gets the temperature record you are using showing a cooling from the 1940s to 1970s.

What is interesting to do is to put your finger over the WWII years and then look at the ocean record. To me, it doesn't look like there is a cooling--rather a rather steady warming from the 19th century, with GHG loading the likely cause. The land temperature record ends up relatively flat, so perhaps sulfate cooling offsetting GHG warming  until the 1970s when SO2 emissions were reduce and GHG emissions accelerated. Another possible explanation is that the pollution clean up that started in the 1930s or so of not cutting emissions, but emitting them through a tall stack increased the atmospheric lifetime of atmospheric sulfur (it would transform from SO2 to sulfate) and so the cooling offset due to sulfate grew along with the CO2 induced increase in radiative forcing, and they roughly balanced.

In any case, I'd be very cautious about drawing conclusions based on what was happening in the middle of the 20th century. WWII is about the only time in the temperature record where the model simulations don't agree with the observations. Steve Koonin in his book blames the models and so discounts their results; an open-minded physicist would look also at data problems and perhaps suggest it is the data that is problematic and that the models may well have things right.

Best, Mike

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-climate-alliance/3C9418BF-F8BF-4041-AAED-4D525974ED30%40gmail.com.

[Ron Baiman]

Dear Bruce,

Here's a statement of the triad from the plain language summary at the beginning of the HPAC cooling paper: https://essopenarchive.org/users/673263/articles/716465-addressing-the-urgent-need-for-direct-climate-cooling-rationale-and-options, that is repeated several times (basically verbatim in other parts of the paper):

" On a global scale, restoring the relatively beneficial climatic conditions of the 20th Century will require a restoration plan to return global warming to well below 1°C. To be effective, such a plan would need to include: a) researching, field testing, and deploying one or more large-scale cooling influence(s) perhaps initially in polar regions and applying local and regional cooling measures that also support adaptation, b) accelerating emissions reductions with an early prioritization of short-lived climate-drivers, and c) deploying large scale carbon removal to draw down legacy greenhouse gas."

Can you explain why you think this does not include a mission of restoration?

Thank you.

Best,

Ron

[Ron Baiman]

Lol!  I just saw Herb's comment!  Apologies for repeating the question, though the triad formulation above is a more recent updated version of the HPAC triad.

Best,

Ron

[Peter Fiekowsky]

Excellent discussion here.

 

A few points of clarification:

1. CO2 restoration is assumed intuitively--I'm working to make that assumption explicit so that it can be budgeted.   It's independent of cooling.
   
   CO2 restoration and cooling are ‘both-and ‘;not ‘either-or’.  Economics discusses buying decisions as either-or: We either buy a Ford or a Chevy, and their marketing is aimed at influencing that either-or decision. We often hear “CDR vs. Cooling” like an economic choice. It isn’t.
   

CO2 restoration is required, it seems that everyone agrees, at least unconsciously. It's sort of like eating breakfast is required. We don't debate "breakfast or cooling?". We assume that people will eat (and sometimes skip breakfast). independent of advocating cooling. The same is true for CO2 restoration (and the energy transition). Not to restore safe CO2 (and switch to clean energy) is suicidal. And even if we committed that suicide, CO2 would still fall gradually, and fossil fuel use would disappear.   

 

2. Given that we should pursue both CDR at scale and cooling, which deserves HPAC top focus? This is the real question in discussion, right? We want to weigh:

1. Which is most critical to humanity surviving & flourishing? I propose that is CO2 restoration. Cooling just “buys time” for more CDR, if we survive that long, if ‘the ship hasn’t already sunk’.
2. Which is most likely to succeed? Ocean fertilization can be justified by its observed large benefit to certain indigenous (and commercial) fisheries. The anti-geoengineering radicals are unlikely to oppose relatively small scale indigenous fishery restoration projects (which just happen to restore CO2 levels as ‘by-catch’). We already see various forces aligning loudly against MCB and SAI, making their success at scale a long-shot.
3. Which is in the most need of support? Which has roughly zero support now? Again it’s ocean fertilization. There is zero discussion of Pinatubo pause replication in government funding agencies today. ARIA is already proposing several million in funding for MCB, and the White House has done studies on SRM, but not on replicating the 20 Gt CO2 removal from 1992—it’s simply not being considered.
4. OIF is most critical, most likely to succeed, and most in need of support today. I recommend that HPAC put OIF (Pinatubo pause replication) as the top priority for private and government funding for the next few years.
   
   
   

3. We don’t know what caused the Pinatubo pause but there are hypotheses. The concept of ash fertilizing phytoplankton growth in the downwelling eddy just downwind of Pinatubo is by far the most likely explanation. In fact, it is the only testable explanation proposed so far that survives mathematical analysis. That makes it the first pathway to test. The replication test is insanely cheap—2-3 million dollars. If the test shows it’s something other than iron + phosphorus, then that’s the progress we need to make this year.
   
   
4. CO2 removal related to Cooling is tiny, much smaller than you probably think (about 0.1 Mt CO2 per degree of cooling).  It’s important to quantify this claim so that we’re believable, not seen as speculative zealots. If SAI or MCB is used to cool the planet this decade (by a degree, let’s say), that cooled ocean surface would absorb 0.0001 Gt CO2, or 0.00001 ppm. See footnote 9, P7 for the simple calculation. That is 30 minutes of global emissions, insanely small. Please, let’s be at least believable, even rigorous.

 

 

[Ron Baiman]

Impressive pitch Peter!  

But wouldn’t it be better for us to unite in pushing for a comprehensive (and less risky as not dependent on any single approach being wholly successful) triad approach rather than singling out one approach at the expense of others?  Especially as we all appear to agree that all three legs of the triad are urgently needed and as you point out they are not mutually exclusive (or “substitute goods” in economics parlance)?  

For example, I think the strategy of uniting in a “grand coalition” of potential direct climate cooling approaches as part of comprehensive triad approach to regenerating a healthy climate and ecosystem on Earth for humans has been the ingredient in the modicum of success that HPAC has had in getting the mainstream to contemplate breaking from the “emissions reduction only” (now) fantasy solution to the climate crisis.

In short wouldn’t it make more sense for the climate restoration movement to support the  climate triad rather than posing restoration and cooling as competing strategies? 

Best,

Ron

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 17, 2024, at 8:04 PM, Peter Fiekowsky <pfi...@gmail.com> wrote:



<image001.jpg>

We all want to give our children a safe climate like the one we were given. We know that nature has removed about 1 trillion tons of CO2 before ice ages, so we know that it is theoretically possible. However climate leadership does not yet support or even discuss restoring safe CO2 levels.

In the 1980s, as the UNFCCC and IPCC were developing, the concept of restoring a safe climate made no sense because the climate was still safe. In the last 30 years, though, our planet has moved into climate chaos, and it is clear that we need to shift our goal to restoration.

How will we do it? I'll present an engineering and scientific roadmap to getting CO2 back to safe levels below 300 (or 350 ppm CO2e) by 2050.  It's a fascinating and surprising pathway.

PAC Presentation  - Peter Fiekowsky, author of Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race (2022), is an MIT-educated physicist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist with 27 patents. He has 30 years’ experience as a citizen lobbyist for poverty and climate issues, and recently has been working to build the organizations required to ensure the survival and flourishing of humanity.  His mission is to leave a world we’re proud of to our children. To that end, he founded the Foundation for Climate Restoration, Methane Action, Stable Planet Alliance, the Climate Restoration Safety & Governance Board, the Humanity Day organization and most recently RestoreTheClimate.

<image002.jpg>

<image001.jpg>

<image002.jpg>

[Sev Clarke]

Ron,

Peter’s concept does use something like the triad approach as his version of OIF that includes phosphate would not only restore marine biomass and biodiversity, but would also increase ocean albedo and strengthen the biological pump. Moreover, I do not think that he is against deploying other triad elements and restoration methods. It is just that ocean fertilization can be tested first in many different ocean regions with little of no teleconnection concerns, and be adjusted if necessary, before being rapidly and safely scaled up to near-global scale. His are not competing strategies but complementary ones.

Sev

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/planetary-restoration/FBA564E4-D7EE-4B5B-A54D-62BD95FAD63B%40gmail.com.

[Peter Fiekowsky]

Ron-

 

A great question: “wouldn’t it make more sense for the climate restoration movement to support the climate triad rather than posing restoration and cooling as competing strategies? “

 

I find that the answer depends on your perspective.

My perspective is that without CO2 restoration, life as we know it is over, period. I get that "life is over" feeling now in talking with my millennial and gen-Z connections. I consider giving them the same climate we were given to be top priority. Don’t you?

 

Reducing emissions faster than we are now produces health and economic benefits but practically no climate impact. Tell me if you don’t believe that, and I’ll show you how to do the modeling yourself with the on-line MAGICC system. Reducing emissions is inevitable and thus necessary, just as dying is necessary—campaigning for the inevitable is a sign of deep resignation.

 

Global cooling and saving ice might reduce suffering, but won’t keep humanity alive, at least not for long. That's physically true, but physical reality is probably not what you're thinking about. 

I think you're asking, "How do we get society to act to preserve ourselves? Don't we need to agree with the UN and scientists who say, "First focus on net-zero emissions. If we make it there, then remove the remaining excess CO2." 

I'm inclined to the approach that won WW II in 4 years and landed a man on the moon in just 8 1/2 years. In that approach national leadership declares a specific goal which seems impossible but deeply meaningful at the time: "Win the war";  "Land a man on the moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade"; "Restore the climate by 2050".

Later-- "Net-zero by 2030 to restore the climate by 2050"

Do you think anything less bold will work in today's emergency?

Would "Tanks, Planes, and Ships to win the war" have worked better to generate action in 1942?

[Ron Baiman]

Thanks again Peter for the continued dialogue on this.  But your characterization of my view:

"I think you're asking, "How do we get society to act to preserve ourselves? Don't we need to agree with the UN and scientists who say, "First focus on net-zero emissions. If we make it there, then remove the remaining excess CO2." 

 (and the HPAC view as I understand it) is incorrect.

We are saying (what I think is obvious) that all three legs of the triad need to be ramped up as fast as possible as they are essentially (if you'll excuse further economeeze) "complementary not substitute goods". We need them all (plus natural ecosystem regeneration - see attached paper) to get us out of the dire mess that we're in!  To state the obvious we can't have net-CDR if we don't at least get to net-zero emissions.

In terms of the highest priority urgent necessity, I think most in HPAC would say DCC as we don't believe the other legs (on their own) can improve the situation in the "near" future (decades or a Century or more). I understand that you believe that this is not the case but this is not something that I think it's useful for us to quibble about. It's good that you and allies are working on CDR and us on DCC! 

Best,

Ron

[Peter Fiekowsky]

Ron-

 

Good work together here. Indeed, this is a useful dialog. I’m learning a lot from it.

 

You say that you don’t believe that we can remove CO2 as fast as nature did in 1992, and therefore we (society) should focus first on SRM or direct climate cooling (DCC) to buy us time.  I believed that too, ten years ago, before I studied OIF, and especially before last year where I rediscovered the fact (reported in Nature 1993), hidden in plain view, that nature removed 20 Gt CO2 / year in 1992. (In 1993 it was reported as 1.5 ppm, or 12 Gt CO2 because the impact of the El Nino at the time was unclear).

 

Given your premise that we can’t replicate Nature’s rate of CO2 removal, your Triad conclusion makes perfect sense.

 

On the other hand, I see little evidence that DCC will get implemented. Who specifically might budget the money, and with what justification? It won’t help investors or voters—and in fact the almost certainty of huge lawsuits blaming any bad weather on the DCC perpetrators would dissuade most investors. That thinking is demonstrated in the marine cloud brightening ban in Alameda.

 

What would it take to convince you that we can replicate (and eventually increase) Nature’s 20 Gt CO2 / year removal? Further, since it also produces food for fish and fisheries (indigenous and commercial), it will be hard for environmentalists to block. I acknowledge that the oceanographic community largely denies that the (obvious to most people—see the graph on the cover) removal even happened. I argue that they have professional loyalty reasons for the denial. They defend the denial so far with anger and silence, rather than with data.

 

Plus, the probability of the CDR replication succeeding is significantly higher than DCC / SRM getting implemented. This is demonstrated by the fact that we’re already getting governmental support in Asia to get the permits and ships to make it happen, primarily as fishery restoration, in the next year or so (details are withheld for now).

[H simmens]

Ron and Peter,

Your position Ron and your interpretation of HP’s position is well put and totally consistent with HP policy as represented in the Vision for a Healthy Planet and in the About Us statement, both available on our website. 

Other than stating that DCC is the most urgent of the three legs of the Triad and that Arctic and polar intervention may likely be the most urgent urgent need, HP is not in the business of advocating for particular technologies, modalities or priorities within any of the three legs. 

If we were to do so officially we would become embroiled in endless debates and discussions (sounds like our list!) on the means rather than the end goal. 

That said HP has made a commitment to review and update the Vision, and if a credible argument can be made that the Vision should not privilege DCC, or privilege CDR instead, I’m sure that would be given full and fair consideration by the Steering Circle and the entire HP community. 

The HP goal which is very similar to yours as you know is to bring temperature increases back down to well below 1° C in the coming decades. 

If we can all work together to somehow get the world community to embrace a restoration goal - and much thanks to you for your leadership and bravery in first suggesting the need for and feasibility of a restoration goal - whether expressed in temperature increase or CO2 parts per million or some other metric - it will then be up to world leaders to figure out how to achieve that in the most urgent, comprehensive, and equitable matter possible. 

The Steering Circle created an Advocacy Task Force earlier this year that is now focused on efforts to achieve this goal. We welcome anyone interested in learning more about the task force to reach out to us. 

Herb

Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future

“A SciencePoem and an Inspiration.” Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
HerbSimmens.com

On Jul 19, 2024, at 12:37 PM, Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com> wrote:



 

Best,

Ron

 



On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 2:09 AM John Nissen <johnnis...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Ron and Dennis,

 

Ron, you are absolutely right that we need cooling in the short term, and very urgently to deal with the crisis of global overheating.  And Peter is right that we need to bring the CO2 level (and more importantly the CO2e level) towards its pre-industrial level in the long term.  I believe that we should aim for 385 ppm CO2e (as in 1980) within 30 or 40 years or so.  OIF and biochar between them could achieve this by promoting life in soils and the oceans, with the added benefit of feeding an expanding world population.

 

Peter may or may not be right about Pinatubo ash causing the decline in CO2.  But two facts are clear: OIF has the potential to remove gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere; and cooling the ocean surface will increase its ability to absorb CO2.  About a third of CO2 emitted is absorbed by the ocean (most of that within a decade) and a sixth is absorbed by plants on land; meaning that only about half of emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere.  A greater proportion of emitted CO2 will remain in the atmosphere as global warming continues.  Cooling intervention helps on the CO2 side.

 

The other lesson from Pinatubo is that injecting SO2 into the stratosphere has a dramatic cooling effect, without any unmanageable side-effects according to the latest research.   Dennis, you were going to do a documentary on Pinatubo and how it cooled the world.  How is that coming along?  We desperately need people to appreciate the amazing potential for SAI to cool the planet and, even more urgently, to refreeze the Arctic.  Planetary restoration, which is an unalienable right for the young people of today, requires both this cooling and the massive CDR which Peter envisages.

 

Cheers, John

 

 

On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 2:22 AM Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you Peter for this detailed explanation of your thinking. Unfortunately I'm not enough of an expert on any of this to be able to confidently evaluate the case you're making.  The bottom line though, is that I do hope that you're able to draw down large quantities of CO2 and this is, needless to say, sorely needed. My main concern (as wthl all of us) is time. As I can't tell with confidence that, even if Pinatubo did lead to a 20 GT drawdown this is something that could be doubled and continued at the same higher rate for multiple years, I favor hedging our bets and making sure we have a direct climate cooling tourniquet in place, even as we're trying our best to reduce and remove as fast as possible!

Best,

Ron

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 16, 2024 at 12:02 PM Peter Fiekowsky <pfi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ron-

 

Thank you for the good review and excellent question: Can OIF remove the required 1000 Gt of CO2 by 2050? (and another 500-1000 Gt from 2050 to 2100). Here is a quick response. Maybe we can write up a longer one together.

 

How does one answer the question, “is it possible?”.  One of the strongest answers to that is, “Yes, it’s been done before.” It is hard to defend a claim of impossibility when the process in question has been done before, especially if it’s been done recently.

 

We know that Earth has ice ages in which 1000 Gt of CO2 get removed into biocarbon dissolved in the deep ocean. That has happened roughly dozen times in the last million years.

The question from the science community is, “Can humans design a process to replicate what nature did randomly, and do it 1000 times faster?” As you know, the majority opinion in science is, “No, we have not proven that we can replicate that CO2 removal, so it’s safest to assume it’s impossible.”

 

There is no arguing with that logic calling for more research. It assumes that our top priority is the same as science’s: Avoid the embarrassment of calling for doing something that’s never been done before and will probably have several failures before success. I suggest we abandon that assumption.

 

Last year we showed that nature removed 20 Gt / year in 1992, following the Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines. This is separate from the half degree of cooling in 1992 from aerosols in the upper atmosphere. CO2 removal is from the gigatons of fine ash that fell into the ocean nearby. This CO2 removal from less than 0.1% of the ocean area is five times faster than current ocean theory says is possible with OIF done on the whole ocean. This CO2 capture rate per square meter is consistent with observed photosynthesis rates in nutrient-rich areas, but over large areas it requires that nitrogen-fixing algae provide the needed nitrates, which I am told, is not part of current theory.

 

There are two approaches to that incongruity between theory and data: Either the theory is insufficient, or the data is wrong. Oceanographers write that cooling from the eruption caused the CO2 level change. This is despite the fact that 4 other eruptions in the last 250 years caused similar cooling, but no significant CO2 impact (see Appendix B of our  white paper), and the fact that the numbers don’t work (footnote 9, p7).  Scientific consensus still dismisses the NASA / NOAA / Scripps Keeling curve interpretation, but that’s shifting.

 

There are a couple oceanographers now supporting the Pinatubo pause replication test we are developing. More scientists will probably switch sides eventually and agree that the theory should be updated to match the 1992 data.

 

Bottom line: CO2 removal at 20 Gt CO2 / year ( 1/3 the rate required to get to 300 ppm by 2050)  was recorded in 1992. It is almost certain that humans can optimize this process and remove CO2 from 1% of the ocean and restore a safe CO2 level by 2050. No attempt to do so has been made in the 30 years since the first 1993 Pinatubo pause report, so it is reasonable to predict that no attempt will be made in the next 30 years.

 

However, we have a group organizing funding and a project to break the log-jam.

The speed and cost of scaling up the Pinatubo pause (3-5 years and less than a billion dollars), plus the fact that Nature has demonstrated the CO2 removal already makes a compelling argument to prioritize the testing.

 

Peter

 

 

From: Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2024 at 8:58 AM
To: Dana Woods <danaj...@gmail.com

>
Cc: rob...@rtulip.net <rob...@rtulip.net>, Bruce Melton -- Austin, Texas <bme...@earthlink.net>, healthy-planet-action-coalition <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>, Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>, Healthy Climate Alliance <healthy-clim...@googlegroups.com>, Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>, Peter Fiekowsky <pfi...@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: [HPAC] Re: [prag] Recording of Peter Fiekowsky's HPAC Presentation - Climate Restoration Roadmap

Dear Colleagues,

<image001.jpg>

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[Ron Baiman]

Thanks Herb. 

Agreed that when it was first produced we were thinking that the vision document would need to be periodically updated.  Also agree that we’re not in the business of promoting particular DCC methods. 

However, per our  peer reviewed and about to be published cooling paper, I think it is important that we have an (as much as possible) scientifically  grounded approach to DCC approaches (especially the 14 in our paper) that includes their “urgent” rapid scaling potential, where and how they are likely to most effective, costs, potential risks, etc.  

We also have a more developed analysis of potential coordination and governance in the DCC paper that (as you have recently acknowledged) is a key issue for our advocacy and strategy.  

So I think we need to be a bit more nuanced about our positions (than I’m at least) seeing  in your summary, but hopefully we all can work out these issues out as we proceed!

Best,

Ron 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 19, 2024, at 1:44 PM, H simmens <hsim...@gmail.com> wrote:



<Baiman_2022_ Our Two Climate Crises Challenge RRPE print version.pdf>

[Michael Hayes]

Hello, Peter et al.,

Below are a few observations;

PF] "CO2 restoration is assumed intuitively--I'm working to make that assumption explicit so that it can be budgeted.   It's independent of cooling."

MH] Cooling and CDR can be achieved using a single tech such as the Cryogenic Carbon Capture method. The FF industry currently uses CCC as its primary point source CO2 capture tech.

The CCC method is not the only CDR technique that can cool surface water. Reactor-based biotic mCDR, a form of agriculture, would pull cold nutrient rich cold water up into a surface infrastructure. The cooled reactors will cool surface water. Any excess CO2 can be run through a CCC unit and create sea ice as a byproduct of the CCC operations.

The technique known as Thermodynamic Geoengineering, a method which is neither CDR or SRM, can produce sea ice if tasked to do so.

https://energycentral.com/c/ec/energy-solution-boiling-planet

PF] " 

1. Which is most likely to succeed? Ocean fertilization can be justified by its observed large benefit to certain indigenous (and commercial) fisheries. The anti-geoengineering radicals are unlikely to oppose relatively small scale indigenous fishery restoration projects (which just happen to restore CO2 levels as ‘by-catch’). We already see various forces aligning loudly against MCB and SAI, making their success at scale a long-shot.

MH] There is a large distinction between classical OIF and seagrass pasture fertilization. The prior is intended for use in highly isolated marine areas, the latter would be within coastal areas that are already over nutrified. Moreover, a coastal outbreak of microbial toxins that is anywhere near a seagrass pasture fertilization effort would be, legally speaking, rather expensive to deal with, and the operation(s) more than likely shut down, with operators possibly arrested. 

Moreover, work at the small scale that seagrass pastures represent will not move the global C cycle needle. If 10 GtC/y is the CDR goal, that represents a substantially larger C weight than all life in the Ocean, or 6 GtC. Pasture feeding does not go there.

PF] "

1. Which is in the most need of support? Which has roughly zero support now? Again it’s ocean fertilization. There is zero discussion of Pinatubo pause replication in government funding agencies today. ARIA is already proposing several million in funding for MCB, and the White House has done studies on SRM, but not on replicating the 20 Gt CO2 removal from 1992—it’s simply not being considered.

MH] In the USA, the administration has opened up RD&D support for virtual all CDR paths, and mCDR paths in particular. The OIF technology is not being neglected anymore than other methods. As the classical OIF method is used far offshore, not coastally, the advancement of OIF is up to international policy bodies, not one nation state. As such, classical OIF may never get approved or get approved tomorrow.

PF] "OIF is most critical, most likely to succeed, and most in need of support today. I recommend that HPAC put OIF (Pinatubo pause replication) as the top priority for private and government funding for the next few years."

MH] The classical OIF method, not coastal fertilization, is likely the most effecient agricultural method humans will ever develop on this planet. Yet, we get only the reduction in CO2 with zero ability to pay for it without C credits, and the MRV values are low as final storage amounts will always be questioned. However, by containing that water chemistry in reactors, we can realize the benefits of low cost OIF water chem, greatly improve the MRV values as final storage issues can be resolved, and extract C out of the system in the form of food, feed, fertilizer, fuel and pharma, just to name a few downstream products.

To conclude, I would recommend that TG be a primary focus as it can create sea ice and support a number of mCDR methods with the energy it converts.  A second focus would be reactor-based agriculture as both methods can use much of the same physical infrastructure components. Below is an example of such infrastructure components. Reactor-based mCDR can create the needed ethylene to produce such structures, and thus this system of systems would be largely self-replicating at the basic materials level, and would be a C sink itself at a CDR scale. Many other CDR and SRM technologies can piggyback on a TG/Reactor-based biotic mCDR network of instalations. 

https://youtu.be/qXtVQWHgNig?si=57isr56zWWTjWeDe

Best regards 

 

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[Michael Hayes]

Dear Peter, et al.,

To reduce the entire CDR field of study, particularly the mCDR field, down to a method that has never been discribed in a single peer reviewed paper, a method that has now been rejected by the coastal tribe that was first talked into using it, and to use the title of OIF, which there is no record of actual OIF experts supporting pasture feeding, is not supportable at any level by any CDR expert.

Moreover, mention of commercial fisherman loving pasture feeding was made. I'm an experianced Bering sea, Kodiak, and SE Alaskan commercial fisherman. Dumping Fe in shallow waters is a form of fish chumming, that was the only discovery of the effort. Chumming for fish is illegal in N America and most of the rest of the civilized world.

The origional classical OIF method is a highly respected piece of scientific work, pasture feeding is not, on both counts.

Best regards

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[Oswald Petersen]

Hello Herb,

 

thanks for your information.

 

« if a credible argument can be made that the Vision should not privilege DCC «

 

I will try to make such credible arguments. I will confine them to three, even though there are many more.

 

• DCC, as an acronym for SAI / MCB, is a method not acknowledged by IPCC. It will take decades to convince IPCC that SAI is a method to embrace. It is therefore not a method than can be applied within the next decades.
• Even if science would embrace DCC, it is politically not a viable option. Because of its global effect it would need global consent, which is something which cannot even be reached on much simpler global goals, e.g. condemnation of war crimes.
• Finally DCC will not get public support. Darkening the sun causes great anxiety, people instinctively reject it, for many, including religious, reasons.

 

All in all DCC is unfit for fast deployment, and any effort to push for it is counterproductive. If HPAC wants to be heard in the powerful circles of this world, take down DCC.

 

Instead I would ask HPAC to not give any privilege to any cooling effort. HPAC repeats again and again that they are neutral regarding the method, but then give privilege to DCC. This is contradictory and it is not helping the cause HPAC is fighting for.

 

I would ask HPAC to separate GHG removal from GHG emission reduction, because the latter is something that’s already agreed upon and being done, whereas GHG removal is a GeoEngineering method and as such still highly controversial. The “triad” which HPAC proposes is henceforth non-existent, you need at least four if not more legs to this stool.

 

Personally I would recommend GRAP as a preferred method, but I am aware that HPAC would not agree to that, so I don’t ask for it.

 

I do ask for a neutral standpoint of HPAC regarding the different methods,  

 

Regards

 

Oswald Petersen

Atmospheric Methane Removal AG

Lärchenstr. 5

CH-8280 Kreuzlingen

Tel: +41-71-6887514

Mob: +49-177-2734245

https://amr.earth

https://georestoration.earth

https://cool-planet.earth

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[Metta W Spencer]

Hi, guys:

I’ve been busy with other matters and have fallen behind in following this current discussion. In the meantime, I’ve had two cancellations of panelists who were set to talk on forums next week – so I am scrambling to replace them, or at least one of the forums. 

I did watch about five minutes of Peter’s own video and then I think I’ve lost it in the jumble of replies in my inbox. I gather that everyone recognizes it as a helpful presentation, though the usual disputes continue in HRAC after even a clear presentation. I think there are some useful points being made in this "post-op” discussion, but it would be work to distill it into a form that a layperson could follow.

I am reaching out to Clive for a follow-up forum on one that he and Franz did a few weeks ago. If we can collect a team over the weekend, we will do that on Monday.

But it would be good to fill in the second vacant slot as well, probably on Wednesday (July 24th) and maybe Peter can help me by selecting the people who have been replying most astutely to his video this week. Peter, if you have time to try this, please reply to this email ASAP or phone me at any time at 1-416-789-2294.

Warmly,

Metta Spencer

PS. One of the upcoming talks next week was to be about SAI, and I was going to contact John Nissen about joining it. But that  whole conversation will have to be delayed  several weeks, giving me time to invite some of the other HRAC “usual suspects” to offer to participate in the SAI forum, if and when it ever happens. Just let me know that you’re interested.

M

 

Best,

Ron

 



3. CO2 removal related to Cooling is tiny, much smaller than you probably think (about 0.1 Mt CO2 per degree of cooling).  It’s important to quantify this claim so that we’re believable, not seen as speculative zealots. If SAI or MCB is used to cool the planet this decade (by a degree, let’s say), that cooled ocean surface would absorb 0.0001 Gt CO2, or 0.00001 ppm.See footnote 9, P7 for the simple calculation. That is 30 minutes of global emissions, insanely small. Please, let’s be at least believable, even rigorous.

 

 

 

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[Michael MacCracken]

Dear Oswald--There is a rather large international scientific research program on SAI and other approaches. IPCC even held an international workshop on it a decade or so ago. Compared to the impacts of climate change now and lying ahead, SAI, for example, is on net less impactful. I don't disagree that it will take a bit of time to get approval, mostly because of a lot of mischaracterizations being put out to the media such as yours.

In contrast, I'm not even sure that IPCC has been able to cite (it does not do research, it evaluates issues form the literature) any published scientific literature on the approach you are supporting, that any global atmospheric chemistry modeling has been done or published, and so on. Your efforts would, it seems to me, likely to be much more productive doing, writing, getting peer-reviewed the approach that you are so strongly in favor of. Figure out how to demonstrate it would work, that it is safe, that it would have limits, that the change if it works would be slow enough--you have a lot to get done if you are going to get global approval, and, just to note, I think going ahead without such approval would lead to huge objections.

Mike MacCracken

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[Peter Fiekowsky]

Ron and Herb and the HPAC steering committee-

It sounds like we're getting on the same page gradually. I see two differences to resolve:

1. HPAC doesn't believe that humans can replicate the natural 20 Gt CO2 / year removal that occurred in 1992, and for that reason logically assigns top priority to global cooling / SRM. I believe that we can replicate and increase what nature demonstrated by adding sufficient iron in a few downwelling eddies to provide the needed nitrates. By 2050 this would restore CO2 below 300 ppm, and warming back to 2000 levels (0.75 C warming). That cooling could be achieved by 2040 if we also accelerated natural methane oxidation, at a cost of about $1B / year.Full-scale Methane Oxidation Implementation to Halve Methane Levels by 2030

I also believe that permission for global cooling is not forthcoming. Any group that permits it has to be prepared for very large lawsuits from anyone who experiences inconvenient weather conditions. Thus no permits or funding is predictable.

2. Decision makers: HPAC implicitly believes that there are global organization decision makers empowered to decide to restore a climate safe for our children, and they need to be convinced.

I have no evidence that there is an organization with authority to decide to restore a safe climate for our children, and thus no decision makers to convince.

If I may, here are four unrequested recommendations to the HPAC steering committee:

1. Re-evaluate the data regarding the probability of replicating Nature's CDR at 20 Gt CO2 / year.  Also re-evaluate the probability of SRM being permitted or funded. For now the UN calls for stabilizing GHG levels, not restoring safe levels for humanity. What would it take to believe that we can do what nature does, and probably far more efficiently in this case of CDR? And do it separately from the UN and its governments, as long as our expressed goals conflict.

2. Figure out the target audience for the HPAC mission. I recommend focusing on the real stakeholders for restoring the climate: Grandchildren (who have little money) and their grandparents (who often have money and care more than the world about their grandkids' well-being). Grandparents (as grandparents, not in their CEO or politician roles) will support restoration if we do the heavy lifting, that is, organizing and running the projects. CEOs and politicians (and non-profit directors) have strong accountability to shareholders and voters but not to our collective grandchildren. For this reason the organizations will continue to do all they can to greenwash rather than restore CO2. Their jobs require that they do so.

3. Decide that HPAC is serious about actually making a safe climate happen. Give up our ideologies and follow the data (not the science, but the data).

4. After deciding to be serious about getting the job done, follow good marketing practices and have a simple, clear, and emotionally compelling message, like "Give our children the same safe climate we were given, by 2050." It needs to be almost impossible (like win the War or land on the moon) or it won't evoke urgent funding and action. This is the exact opposite of how science funding works, so the scientists don't get a say on the message.

Is that useful?
Peter

[Michael MacCracken]

Dear Peter--It seems to me the problem with your suggestion is that it is simply unproven as a way of removing carbon. I was on the executive committee of the Scientific Committee for Oceanic Research (SCOR), which sort of oversees and coordinates virtually all international ocean research, from 2003-11 and for a while I was in charge of looking at the ocean fertilization studies up to that time. None was really convincing even though blooms were created as there were basically no measurements out the bottom of the study zone indicating that the carbon falling down would not dissolve on the way down and so not go down far enough to ensure it would not be recycled to the surface in the following decade or so. Research to get this proof is likely to be expensive--but essential to be convincing; creating blooms is just not enough.

I realize you view the Pinatubo eruption as proof but it is a little strange that is apparently the only eruption that did this, just in the right place and right time for your conclusion, whereas virtually all major volcanic eruptions have caused cooling that is quite coincident with the stratospheric aerosol loading over following months, etc. I sent you a note about a session planned at the upcoming December meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC that is planning a Union session on the subject of potential ocean carbon uptake. This is where your hypothesis needs to be presented and considered. Abstracts are due in by July 31, I think it is, and I do hope you find some speaker who presents the idea for serious consideration, research planning, etc. Just your assertion is not going to be enough to be really convincing. I don't disagree that yours is an interesting hypothesis to be tested, but it needs to be tested.

And then there is this question of how to possibly take advantage of iron fertilization. Thinking that this could be done by fertilizing just a few eddies seems quite remarkable given the hundred of billions of tons of C that will need to be removed to achieve what you are suggesting. Not only is there the amount in the atmosphere, but to keep chemical equilibrium, there will be CO2 being degassed from the the ocean mixed layer and you will have to remove that C as well, and same with C that comes up into the mixed layer and then is degassed.

And it needs to be that the C is taken well down in the ocean, best would be to the sediments, so it is not recycled to the surface. I'm sorry, but it is not at all clear that the approach will work.

So, as indicated above, I'd suggest you make sure your hypothesis is quickly well written up (if not done already)--say a draft scientific paper--and that it is being presented and evaluated at the AGU meeting (all that is needed immediately is an abstract).

Best, Mike

On 7/19/24 8:29 PM, Peter Fiekowsky wrote:

Ron and Herb and the HPAC steering committee-

your

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[Sev Clarke]

Hi Christopher,

What you say is only relevant to some atmospheric or spatial methods of SRM. Solar farms would be largely unaffected by SRM methods such as ocean fertilization (by ocean brightening), ice thickening, and terrestrial brightening that would have little effect on reducing insolation over solar farms. Furthermore, as MCB methods could largely be restricted to having their main cooling effects over the oceans, these also would have little effect on reducing sunlight to terrestrial solar farms. The largest players will get on board after possibly some of the lesser, and more agile, ones demonstrate effective cooling, marine & forest regeneration, and cryogenic zone net benefits from carefully-gated trials and modelling of these methods. 

Cheers,

Sev 

On 20 Jul 2024, at 12:06 PM, Christopher Ede-Calton <chris...@calton.us> wrote:

For what it's worth, regarding SRM: major countries (such as China) that have invested in solar farms will oppose it on the basis that it will reduce the efficiency of their solar farms. I have heard this from very credible people within the Chinese policy making apparatus. Geopolitics is now paramount, and we need to find a way to get the largest players to an agreeable solution. 

[Sev Clarke]

Marine regeneration is currently being enthusiastically investigated by five international research labs, see https://www.climaterepair.cam.ac.uk/marine-biomass-regeneration-mbr whilst forest regeneration and the consequential increase to cooling evapotranspiration might be achieved by a large variety of means, including some of those dealing with MCB and what the Chinese have achieved to regenerate the Loess Plateau, see https://eempc.org/environmental-challenges-facing-china-rehabilitation-of-the-loess-plateau/ and other such projects.  

On 20 Jul 2024, at 1:19 PM, Michael Hayes <electro...@gmail.com> wrote:

'Marine and forest regeneration ' is a meaningless term. No one knows how to either, much less both.

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[Peter Fiekowsky]

Mike M-

 

I’m glad you brought up the important point that the correlation between Pinatubo and OIF is unproven.

 

First. You misinterpreted what I wrote. Note that I never say that that the mechanism for the Pinatubo pause is OIF. Yes, OIF is the only explanation so far that fits the data (see my article), and yes it is unproven and is not in the peer review literature.

 

Next, remember that in science, nothing can be proven. Hypotheses can be disproven by evidence, but not proven. This is especially true in the varied and rapidly changing ocean. We will never know what chemistry happened in 1992—the ocean has changed too much since then.

 

By the same token, none of the SRM methods are proven—they’re all hypotheses and always will be until they’re disproven.

 

That leaves the real question: For those of us looking to give our children a safe climate (CO2 like 40, 100 or 200 years ago) while we still can (by 2050), what is the best use of our time and money right now? I propose that it’s the Pinatubo pause replication (already moving forward). I challenge you and others to propose a different first project that gives our children a better chance of a safe climate.

 

The Pinatubo pause replication project will test, in parallel, the most plausible explanations until we experimentally find a method that roughly replicates the net-zero event in 1992. That won’t prove anything, but is likely to get us to net-zero well before 2030.

 

All the hypotheses about carbon falling down are irrelevant to this test, because we know that those hypotheses can only explain about 5% of the CO2 removed in 1992. As the oceanographic community agrees—conventional OIF theory does not apply to the Pinatubo pause. Some other testable theory is needed, and that is discussed in my paper.

 

Regarding writing up the material in a paper, I have been looking for a coauthor to help whittle down my white paper for that. Do you know anyone?

 

Warmly,
Peter

 

 

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[Michael MacCracken]

Dear Christopher--While that is mentioned as a concern, it is important to understand the nuances (just in case any major decisions might depend on the nuances). What we have learned from volcanic eruptions that put SO2 that becomes sulfate into the stratosphere, is that the forward-scatter is about 10 times the back-scatter. The estimate is that offsetting a full CO2 doubling would require reflecting back about 2% of solar radiation (so increasing planetary albedo, say, fro 30% to 32%. It the world is serious about mitigation, what would roughly be needed is to do half of this, so reflect 1% of solar radiation. Associated with this would be diversion of 10% of the radiation from downward direct to downward diffuse radiation (so whitening the sky a bit--a concern of astronomers, though much of their work is now done from satellites). Right now roughly half the incoming solar radiation is absorbed at the surface, so this would be decreased by about 1% (which I think is well within the interannual variability caused by the weather).

Now, it turns out that increased diffuse radiation can actually increase plant growth because diffuse radiation reaches down further into the canopy, so providing more abundant light to shadowed exposures and less peak direct radiation, so for forests and agriculture, the reduction in absolute radiation may actually at lease somewhat compensated.

What SRM (and normal air pollution, clouds, etc.) is problematic for is solar thermal power systems as they depend on using mirrors to reflect the direct component of solar radiation to a specific point on a tower to melt something like sodium to carry the heat to a system to make electricity, etc. Back in 1982, Sandia was building one of the first such systems in Barstow, CA with DOE funding. They designed the system to 110% or so, but when they powered it up, it came in at a bit under 90% as I recall. Their solar measuring instrument showed only a 2% reduction in solar due to the recent El Chichon eruption. They came over to our atmospheric science group at Livermore seeking an explanation. We asked them about the instrument and they were using a total sky radiometer. We suggested they pay a bit more and get an instrument that measured direct radiation (actually it measures total sky and then shades out the sun and the difference is direct radiation) and then wait a couple of months for the volcanic aerosol to spread latitudinally (so out of the latitudinal band the aerosol was initially in). They did and the system went on to perform as expected.

So for SRM, as noted above, it is not farmers and foresters who would be affected by the reduction in radiation--and indeed, they would likely benefit from the less hot conditions and from the shift of direct radiation to diffuse radiation. Solar PV uses total sky radiation, so SRM is not a problem, and I think solar PV is becoming generally preferred approach based on economics, so affecting solar thermal installations is not a primary problem.

Best, Mike MacCracken

On 7/19/24 10:06 PM, Christopher Ede-Calton wrote:

For what it's worth, regarding SRM: major countries (such as China) that have invested in solar farms will oppose it on the basis that it will reduce the efficiency of their solar farms. I have heard this from very credible people within the Chinese policy making apparatus. Geopolitics is now paramount, and we need to find a way to get the largest players to an agreeable solution. 

On Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 9:21 PM 'Michael MacCracken' via Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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[Michael MacCracken]

Hi Peter--My apologies--change "proven" to "demonstrated."

I'm at a bit of a loss to understanding how you can say that putting sulfate aerosol into the stratosphere is not a demonstrated approach to cooling the climate. And it happens consistently, which does not seem to be the case for the hypothesis that you are proposing. Yes, there is engineering to be done to make it happen, but Nature has consistently demonstrated this for us.

As to what I would propose, see my paper from several years ago. Copy attached. Or consider papers by Doug MacMartin and team at Cornell, or ones on the ARPA funded study by Elizabeth Barnes and team at Colorado State. We can actually get started on the cooling.

Regarding the effect you mention, is there anything written up about what is being proposed to "move forward" on the Pinatubo pause replication? The better done iron fertilization studies required considerable resources and generally ended up not having, especially to effectively measure the C flow out of the bottom of the experimental are. Thus, please do tell us about it so its strengths and weaknesses can be evaluated (and then perhaps improved).

Best, Mike

[Peter Fiekowsky]

"Next, remember that in science, nothing can be proven."

Mathematical theorems can be proven, but not scientific theories.

 

 

A Google search gives this:

Can a theory be proved?

Scientific theories are testable. New evidence should be compatible with a theory. If it isn't, the theory is refined or rejected. The longer the central elements of a theory hold—the more observations it predicts, the more tests it passes, the more facts it explains—the stronger the theory.

 

What Is a Theory? A Scientific Definition | AMNH

American Museum of Natural History

 

Theories get stronger as test data confirms them, but are never proven. The standard OIF theory claims that the maximum CO2 removal is 1-4 Gt CO2 / year. That may be disproven by the 20 Gt / year observed in 1992, and 5 Gt / year removal over 11 years, recorded in ice cores about 15,000 years ago.

 

Thus the standard OIF theory might be considered to be a weak theory, explaining the quality but not the magnitude of CO2 remova.

 

Peter

 

 

From: Michael Hayes <electro...@gmail.com>

"Next, remember that in science, nothing can be proven."

 

I ask that you to further explain that statement.

 

 

[John Nissen]

Hi Michael,

This is an emergency.  The Arctic is in an accelerated meltdown, hurling us ever faster towards catastrophic climate change and sea level rise. This crisis is of a kind and magnitude never experienced in the history of our modern civilisation.  We have a duty to call this out to invoke the international response it deserves: immediate preparations for SAI cooling at maximum strength possible ASAP.

One needs to do the maths which nobody else seems to have done.  The situation is far, far worse than I feared.  We are desperately close to the point of no return for Arctic meltdown using SAI at its maximum strength - even SAI will have its practical limits.  We have to cool the Arctic faster than it is warming.  What does this mean in practice?  In order to start bringing Arctic temperatures down (and they are rising on average 4 times faster than the global mean) we need to have cooling power greater than the extra heating power which the Arctic is experiencing (relative to 1980 when the sea ice exponential retreat started).  I have been trying to find out what this heating power might be, and the answer, for sea ice albedo loss alone, is colossal: the Arctic sea ice has lost 25% of its cooling power since 1980 [1].  If the extra heat from snow retreat, and the extra heat from incursion of Atlantic and Pacific water into the Arctic, are taken into account, the heating power concentrated in the Arctic could be approaching that produced by CO2 for the whole planet.  Subpolar SAI seems our best bet [2].  We cannot afford to fail.

Sorry for such devastating news.  The good news is that, if SAI is successfully deployed to refreeze the Arctic, it can be used to cool the whole planet and then we have an opportunity to return the planet to a sustainable, biodiverse and productive state: promoting life in soils (e.g. with biochar) and in the ocean (e.g. with OIF) and thereby removing one or two trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.  Such restoration should be a human right for the young people whose future is at stake.

Remaining determinedly optimistic, John

[1] Duspayev, Flanner and Riihela (GRL, 17th July)

Earth's sea ice radiative effect from 1980 to 2023

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109608

[2] Hayes et al. (2023)

A subpolar-focussed stratospheric aerosol injections deployment scenario

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ac8cd3

On Sat, Jul 20, 2024 at 9:19 PM Michael MacCracken <mmac...@comcast.net> wrote:

Dear Oswald--If climate change induced extreme weather disasters, ice sheet destabilization, and more, become more and more impactful, a lot of what you mention can be overcome--as happens when there are other types of emergencies (World War II, Ukraine, Hamas attack, COVID, etc.). The situation is getting closer and closer to desperate in some aspects.

Best, Mike

On 7/20/24 3:08 PM, Oswald Petersen wrote:

Dear Mike,

“We can actually get started on the cooling.”

This is a scientists’ view.

In reality, before you can “get started on the cooling”, you have to do a field test, where a plane actually demonstrates the dispersion of SO2-particles at 13.000 m altitude. To do that, you need to develop a disperser, test it in a lab, make it work, evaluate it and then you can maybe think about a field test. For the field test you have to develop the plane/disperser combo, which will cost you millions of $ and many years. Also you have to define the exact specification of the particles and describe the production process, the sources, quantities needed... You need to do an EIA and a LCA. All in all you would need thousands of pages of documentation, at least 10 million $ and at least 5 years time to get to and do the field test. The field test must be permitted, which in itself is a task that takes years, if it can be done at all.

I do not see any preparation happening for this. I am afraid that ýou have to come to terms with the fact that this will not happen any time soon. In saying this it is not my intention to frustrate you, but to free you from a burden. I am in the process of doing all this for EAMO, and that’s much easier than SAI with respect to the technology as well as the permits. We are working on this for 2 ½ years now and will need another year before the field test. So I know how this process works for a smaller project.

Once EAMO is up and running, SAI will become much easier. SAI is many years from realization, and no one is even trying to get it done. It would be wise to bury it for the next ten years, and maybe come back to it in 2040.

Have a great weekend😊

Oswald

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oswald Petersen

Atmospheric Methane Removal AG

Lärchenstr. 5

CH-8280 Kreuzlingen

Tel: +41-71-6887514

Mob: +49-177-2734245

https://amr.earth

https://georestoration.earth

https://cool-planet.earth

 

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[Christopher Ede-Calton]

For what it's worth, regarding SRM: major countries (such as China) that have invested in solar farms will oppose it on the basis that it will reduce the efficiency of their solar farms. I have heard this from very credible people within the Chinese policy making apparatus. Geopolitics is now paramount, and we need to find a way to get the largest players to an agreeable solution. 

On Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 9:21 PM 'Michael MacCracken' via Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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[Michael Hayes]

'Marine and forest regeneration ' is a meaningless term. No one knows how to either, much less both.

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[Oswald Petersen]

Dear Mike,

 

AMR is an engineering company, we do not write scientific papers. We develop the technology needed for EAMO.

 

A growing number of scientists are publishing papers regarding EAMO. We publish links to all relevant papers here

 

https://amr.earth/blog

 

Please note that AMR does not publish any comment on SAI / DCC. This is a purely internal HPAC debate.

 

IPCC has approved GHG removal is principle. This is not the case with any albedo manipulation. However small scale projects like the one at the Great Barrier Reef are seen with sympathy.

 

I am personally not against SAI. I just don’t see it happening in the next 50 years. SAI blocks all other GE approaches, because it takes most media attention and crowds out the other approaches.

 

It would really be progress if HPAC stops pushing SAI. HPAC has done this for 20 years with zero avail. Time to try something new.

 

Regards

 

Oswald Petersen

Atmospheric Methane Removal AG

Lärchenstr. 5

CH-8280 Kreuzlingen

Tel: +41-71-6887514

Mob: +49-177-2734245

https://amr.earth

https://georestoration.earth

https://cool-planet.earth

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/8c959439-b504-42e0-aaa3-245859d32b60%40comcast.net.

[Michael Hayes]

"Next, remember that in science, nothing can be proven."

I ask that you to further explain that statement.

[Oswald Petersen]

Dear Mike,

“We can actually get started on the cooling.”

This is a scientists’ view.

In reality, before you can “get started on the cooling”, you have to do a field test, where a plane actually demonstrates the dispersion of SO2-particles at 13.000 m altitude. To do that, you need to develop a disperser, test it in a lab, make it work, evaluate it and then you can maybe think about a field test. For the field test you have to develop the plane/disperser combo, which will cost you millions of $ and many years. Also you have to define the exact specification of the particles and describe the production process, the sources, quantities needed... You need to do an EIA and a LCA. All in all you would need thousands of pages of documentation, at least 10 million $ and at least 5 years time to get to and do the field test. The field test must be permitted, which in itself is a task that takes years, if it can be done at all.

I do not see any preparation happening for this. I am afraid that ýou have to come to terms with the fact that this will not happen any time soon. In saying this it is not my intention to frustrate you, but to free you from a burden. I am in the process of doing all this for EAMO, and that’s much easier than SAI with respect to the technology as well as the permits. We are working on this for 2 ½ years now and will need another year before the field test. So I know how this process works for a smaller project.

Once EAMO is up and running, SAI will become much easier. SAI is many years from realization, and no one is even trying to get it done. It would be wise to bury it for the next ten years, and maybe come back to it in 2040.

Have a great weekend😊

Oswald

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oswald Petersen

Atmospheric Methane Removal AG

Lärchenstr. 5

CH-8280 Kreuzlingen

Tel: +41-71-6887514

Mob: +49-177-2734245

https://amr.earth

https://georestoration.earth

https://cool-planet.earth

 

Von: 'Michael MacCracken' via Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>

Gesendet: Samstag, 20. Juli 2024 20:41
An: Peter Fiekowsky <pfi...@gmail.com>; Michael Hayes <electro...@gmail.com>; sevc...@me.com
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[Michael MacCracken]

Dear Oswald--If climate change induced extreme weather disasters, ice sheet destabilization, and more, become more and more impactful, a lot of what you mention can be overcome--as happens when there are other types of emergencies (World War II, Ukraine, Hamas attack, COVID, etc.). The situation is getting closer and closer to desperate in some aspects.

Best, Mike

On 7/20/24 3:08 PM, Oswald Petersen wrote:

[Oswald Petersen]

Dear Mike,

 

well, you may be right there.

 

However climate change comes in parcels. It is a slow process, which peaks now and then. It is, in this sense, unlike COVID or any other emergency. It will take many years till the world will see climate change as an immediate threat to our livelihood. Science is, in this respect, way ahead of the pack. Climate change will not make this our planet go into emergency mode any time soon. You may complain, even rightfully, but this fact remains unbothered.

 

The only way to make things happen at this stage is to build a business case, so private investors get interested. SAI however is currently not a convincing business case, as I have pointed out earlier. It won’t happen any time soon.

 

Regards

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