USDA staff told not to say "sequester carbon"

[Karl Thidemann]

Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead.

A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.

A missive from Bianca Moebius-Clune, director of soil health, lists terms that should be avoided by staff and those that should replace them. “Climate change” is in the “avoid” category, to be replaced by “weather extremes”. Instead of “climate change adaption”, staff are asked to use “resilience to weather extremes”.

The primary cause of human-driven climate change is also targeted, with the term “reduce greenhouse gases” blacklisted in favor of “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency”. Meanwhile, “sequester carbon” is ruled out and replaced by “build soil organic matter”.

More at
US federal department is censoring use of term 'climate change', emails reveal | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-climate-change-language-censorship-emails

Karl
Soil4Climate

[erichjknight]

What a strange combination of nefarious and just plain silly, I mean you can call a sow's ear a silk purse a thousand times and it's still a sow's ear.

This reminds me of the Bush Administration giving Jim Hansen minders and restricting who he could talk to in the Press, the same thing happened to a high school buddy of mine who is our guy at EPA who has work on Ocean rise most all of his career.

Any right-thinking civil servant will ignore said advice and express what exactly needs expression.

Sent from my Sprint Phone.

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[Russ Conser]

Karl,

Indeed a bunch of silliness and Orwellian doublespeak overall.  But maybe a window to note that w/r to soil, this is one of my pet peeves - I actually agree.  

The magic of soil organic matter isn’t that it is somehow locked away and isolated, but that as it grows in volume, it remains a functional part of an active cycle that enables thriving life to catch and cycle solar energy.  In other words, its value is not that it’s out of circulation, but that it is still in it.  

Furthermore, whereas I think there are relevant and interesting questions about the different cycle times or fluxes of carbon, the permanence or stability of any given molecule of organic matter is a red herring.  Even from the basic viewpoint of its impact on atmospheric carbon radiative balance, it doesn’t matter that a molecule stays there “sequestered," but that the total volume is building.  

Perhaps more importantly and practically to the farmer, (s)he doesn’t need to even worry about the pigger picture, only that increasing soil organic matter helps create a more profitable farm.  As my good friend Peter Byck likes to say, this is a climate change solution that doesn’t require you to believe in climate change.  I think we might all might be more successful if we also framed it that way more often.

End of rant...

Russ

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[Jane Hammer]

Orwellian control aside, the new terminology is actually more empowering and positive.

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[erichjknight]

Yes there is recalcitrant soil carbon and label soil carbon or both types in the process of humification and Glomalin building.

The carbon sugar pathway is an important process involving photosynthesis and solar energy and if they would explain these processes I would have no problem with how they parse carbon sequestration.

All told we still don't know all the microbiotic players in this dance we just barely understand this role of root exudate in feeding the whole process, the wee beasties have so much more to teach us. As do the Myriad fungi and all the interplay of animals with both.

The way I try to explain this is to mention that iwhen we  animals crawled out of the ocean we made our deal with microbes, when plants before us crawled out of the ocean they made their deal with fungi and it has been a synergistic battle/ and co-dependence ever since.

However given the current state of affairs since the Agricultural Revolution we need to rebuild all our soil carbon to the point that we draw down sufficient carbon dioxide to basically do what we did about 400 more years ago, when so many farmers were killed bye either the black plague or Genghis Khan in Europe and enteric diseases unknowingly brought to the new world by Christopher Columbus that basically the little Ice Age lasted for several more hundred years than it would have otherwise

This means building several gigatonnes of soil carbon say 5 - 10,(5 GTC were drawn down when the Amazon rainforest grew up after the post Columbian 90% destruction of Paleo-Indians buy enteric disease), this can be accomplished by Dr Jim Hansen's hundred giggle tons of new Forest, and reform of our agricultural system to incentivize building soil carbon which all political Persuasions agree would be a good thing. We don't have to do the hundreds and hundreds of Giga tonnes of carbon that caused the snowball Earth 250 million years ago with silica rock"s degradation, we just have to do a handful of gigatonnes that we have done unknowingly before.

End of my cheerful rant,

Cheers,

Erich

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[Seth Itzkan]

Yeah, I posted that same observation on the Soil4Climate FB group,
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Soil4Climate/permalink/1976574369280974/

"Seth Itzkan Actually, I'm fascinated that 'build soil organic matter' is in the directive. In a bazaar, crazy-town kind of way, this verbal slight-of-hand is a good thing. Thank you Donald! (Did I just say that?)"

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[Janet Clark]

Hi Everyone,

There are a lot or reasons to build soil, but the chemists will appreciate a dramatic explosion of microbes if they can measure it.  The language may be different now, but they will be watching!

Janet

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