Tag Archive for: Reverse Global Warming

Soil Could Save Earth From Overheating

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Author: Tim Radford

LONDON, 17 April, 2016 − Climate scientists anxious to find ways to limit atmospheric greenhouse gases have started to look at the ground beneath their feet.

They calculate that although the world’s soils already hold 2.4 trillion tonnes of gases in the form of organic carbon, there’s room for more.

Scientists from the US and Scotland report in Nature journal that with a few changes to agricultural practice, there would be room for another 8 billion tonnes.

“In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change in the 21st century, we need heavyweight allies,” says Dave Reay, a geoscientist and specialist in carbon management at Edinburgh University. “One of the most powerful is right beneath our feet. Soils are already huge stores of carbon, and improved management can make them even bigger.”

Data availability

“Too long they have been overlooked as a means to tackle climate change. Too often have problems of accurate measurement and reporting stymied progress towards climate-smart soil management.

KEEP READING ON CLIMATE NEWS NETWORK

Soil4Climate and Tufts Global Development and Environment Institute Release Earth Day Climate Policy Brief – Emphasize Soil

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THETFORD, Vermont — April 22, 2016 — Soil4Climate today announced that an Earth Day climate policy brief prepared jointly with the Tufts University Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE), has been released.

To summarize, the policy brief states that cutting fossil fuel emissions, on its own, will not suffice to meet the temperature goals set by the agreement reached during the Paris climate negotiations in December 2015, to be signed today by participating nations in New York. In addition to decreased emissions, active removal, or drawdown, of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, through the implementation of innovative agricultural practices, will also be required.

As noted in the policy brief, “While reducing energy and industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases is essential, reducing emissions from forests, grasslands, wetlands, and soils, and enhancing their capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, offers a crucial pathway for success in meeting the Paris temperature goals.”

Seth Itzkan, cofounder of Soil4Climate and contributor to the brief, said, “Soil4Climate is pleased to have collaborated with the team at the Tufts University Global Development and Environment Institute on this climate policy brief. Expanding awareness of soil as a climate solution is core to our mission.”

The GDAE/Soil4Climate policy brief is available at https://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/climate/ClimatePolicyBrief3.pdf.

The GDAE homepage is at https://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/.

Join the Soil4Climate Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/Soil4Climate/.

UCSC study shows how urchin-loving otters can help fight global warming

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Author: Guy Lasnier

Can an abundance of sea otters help reverse a principal cause of global warming?

A new study by two UC Santa Cruz researchers suggest that a thriving sea otter population that keeps sea urchins in check will in turn allow kelp forests to prosper. The spreading kelp can absorb as much as 12 times the amount of CO2 from the atmosphere than if it were subject to ravenous sea urchins, the study finds.

The theory is outlined in a paper released online today (September 7, 2012) in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment by lead authors UC Santa Cruz professors Chris Wilmers and James Estes.

“It is significant because it shows that animals can have a big influence on the carbon cycle,” said Wilmers, associate professor of environmental studies.

Wilmers, Estes, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and their co-authors, combined 40 years of data on otters and kelp bloom from Vancouver Island to the western edge of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. They found that otters “undoubtedly have a strong influence” on the cycle of CO2 storage.

Comparing kelp density with otters and kelp density without otters, they found that “sea otters have a positive indirect effect on kelp biomass by preying on sea urchins, a kelp grazer.” When otters are around, sea urchins hide in crevices and eat kelp scraps. With no otters around, sea urchins graze voraciously on living kelp.

Kelp is particularly efficient at sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased 40 percent since the beginning of the industrial revolution, causing global temperatures to rise, the authors write.

KEEP READING ON UCSC NEWSCENTER

Interview: Researcher, Author Eric Toensmeier Explores Practical, Effective Carbon Farming Strategies

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While this interview was being prepared a story surfaced on public radio about a couple of enterprising Americans who are taking advantage of changing policy to open a factory in Cuba. Their product? Tractors! The whole idea, the story helpfully explained, was to introduce “21st century farming” to the beleaguered island. By making it easier to tear up the soil. Clearly there is some distance to go before an accurate idea of 21st century farming penetrates the mainstream. It will take people like Eric Toensmeier. His new book, The Carbon Farming Solution, carries enough heft, range and detail to clear away forests of confusion. If the notion of leaving carbon in the soil is going to take its place next to that of leaving oil in the ground, this one-volume encyclopedia on the subject is exactly the kind of deeply informed work that’s required. Reached at his home in western Massachusetts, Toensmeier was exhilarated over finishing a project years in the making, and more than happy to talk about it.

This interview appears in the May 2016 issue of Acres U.S.A.

ACRES U.S.A. Carbon farming was unknown even a few years ago, and it is still obscure for many people who are otherwise well-informed. Could you establish the basic premise for us?

ERIC TOENSMEIER. Sure. Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is there because of burning fossil fuels and also because of the degradation of land. Whether it’s forests being cleared or prairie being plowed or a badly grazed pasture, when those ecosystems are degraded, carbon that was stored in soil and in biomass bonds with oxygen and heads up into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. There are practices that can bring it back. They all use photosynthesis, which takes carbon dioxide out of the air and turns it into sugars in the plant; then those sugars are converted into various other things such as lignins. Some of them end up in the plant itself, and some of them end up in the soil. Some get there quickly through root exudates, and some end up in the soil more slowly through decomposition. Some of them are off-gassed to go back up into the atmosphere. We can pull down a bunch of that excess atmospheric carbon and store it in the soil and in perennial biomass. The amount that is possible is quite hopeful and could be just about enough to do the job if it’s coupled with a drastic reduction in emissions. It’s not enough to do the job on its own.

ACRES U.S.A. If carbon storage via agriculture is essential to an overall climate strategy, how do you lay it out to a skeptic who doesn’t believe farms can play a big part?

TOENSMEIER. That’s a really important question. We’re not going to stop climate change, but we can’t get it to a manageable level without farmers, and here’s why. Even if we stopped all emissions today — all deforestation, all fossil fuel burning — there’s already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s partly because carbon dioxide takes a couple decades to kick in. We’re already in for a lot more warming than we can tell from what we’ve emitted. We can pull it back down, and to do that we have to stop emissions, but we also have to sequester carbon. Neither one works on its own. There’s not enough land available for reforestation to do all the sequestration we need with land leftover for agriculture. So agriculture itself has to be part of the solution. What’s cool is that almost all of these agricultural solutions weren’t invented for climate change mitigation — they were invented because they make farms work better. They make farms more resilient. They make farms more productive. They’re good ideas anyway! There are plenty of tradeoffs and drawbacks, but as far as I can see it’s quite a good news story.

KEEP READING IN ECO FARMING DAILY BY ACRES U.S.A. MAGAZINE

The Soil Solution: Regenerative Farming

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Author: Eli Wallace

When scientists and environmentalists talk climate change, doom and gloom is often the main topic. Scientific American reported last spring that the earth was essentially at or close to the “point of no return,” in terms of carbon emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in 2009 that unless drastic action was taken between 2015 and 2020, it would be too late to save the ice caps, let alone polar bears, coastal infrastructure and the temperate, predictable weather patterns we know and love.

So it’s not every day you hear an environmentalist declare we can actually reverse global warming. Steven Hoffman, managing director of the Boulder-based environmental marketing group Compass Natural and an avid environmentalist with ties to Regeneration International, visited the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21 Global Climate Summit) in Paris this year, where the reversal of global warming through soil regeneration was a major focus.

“People keep talking about reducing carbon emissions and getting to carbon neutral, but that’s not enough anymore,” Hoffman says. “We’re already heating, so we need to take the excess from the atmosphere. A lot of people want to make new technology that can help solve our previous technology problems.”

Hoffman says the conversation around carbon emissions usually centers on personal consumption and oil use, even though 50 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions comes from agriculture.

“Yes, we need to increase renewable energy, but that’s only half the equation. All of the carbon in the air used to be in the ground, and industrial-scale agriculture is responsible. If you ignore that, you’re missing the practical, easily applied solution that we can address immediately.”

That solution, regenerative farming, focuses on increasing organic matter in the soil, which would up the amount of carbon in the soil. “We could sequester more than 100 percent of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available and inexpensive organic-management practices,” reported the white paper “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” published by Rodale Institute, a nonprofit agricultural research group.

“Organic farming nurtures the living soil,” Hoffman explains. “Plants draw carbon from the air to their roots, where it’s sequestered in soil and used by microbes, worms and other organisms.”

KEEP READING IN THE BOULDER COUNTY HOME & GARDEN

 

Smallholder farmers and the Paris Agreement

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As 60 million people around the world face severe hunger because of El Niño and millions more because of climate change, world leaders will meet in New York this week to sign the Paris Agreement on Earth Day.

This historic pact, formed during the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference at the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21), is the first universal climate agreement of its kind.

On 22 April, more than 130 countries are planning to sign and implement the Paris Agreement, including the United States, China, and numerous countries in Africa and the European Union.

These efforts come at a critical time as projections show climate change is only going to become more problematic.

[…]

The role of agriculture

According to Laganda, incorporating agriculture into climate discussions has always been a contentious issue.

“Agriculture on the one hand contributes to global warming, and on the other hand is suffering from its impacts,” Laganda said. “Plus, different countries have different agricultural strategies, with some being more carbon-intensive than others. This makes it difficult to have an over-arching agreement that works for everyone. Agriculture was always an ambivalent topic in these negotiations.”

The Paris Agreement overcomes this problem with the use of intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs). INDCs communicate to the international community the steps governments are taking to address climate change gas emissions within their own countries.

In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, countries are reporting their intentions to reform their transportation systems and to increase their use of energy-efficient and renewable energy. A majority of these nations are talking about agriculture as well.

“Through the INDCs, the Paris Agreement manages to establish a link with agriculture which has been missing so far,” Laganda said. “Around 80 per cent of INDCs include agriculture, which means that many countries have now recognized that agriculture is part of the solution to global warming.”

KEEP READING ON IFAD

Carbon Farming: Hope for a Hot Planet

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Author: Brian Barth

Michael Pollan deemed it agriculture’s “secret weapon” in a December op-ed for the Washington Post. Bill McKibben, in his praise for an upcoming book on the topic, described carbon farming as “a powerful vision,” one that he hopes will “presage major changes in our species’ use of the land.” Paul Hawken went so far as to call it “the foundation of the future of civilization,” with potential to “surpass the productivity of industrial agriculture.”

Why all the hubbub? And, for that matter, what exactly is it about?

Carbon farming is agriculture’s answer to climate change. Simply put, the goal is to take excess carbon out of the atmosphere, where the element causes global warming, and store it in the soil, where carbon aids the growth of plants. The principle is pretty straightforward—the practice, not so much.

Most folks understand that burning fossil fuels puts carbon that was once buried deep beneath the earth into the atmosphere, turning the planet into one big greenhouse in the process. But in addition to petroleum underground, the soil on the surface of the earth contains a sizable store of carbon in the form of organic matter—the stuff that environmentally aware farmers and gardeners are always striving to maximize. Plants add organic matter to the soil when they decompose, and photosynthesis, by definition, removes carbon dioxide from the air and pumps it through the roots of plants and into the soil.

Concern over climate change may have thrust the concept of carbon farming into the limelight—25 countries pledged to pursue it during the December climate talks in Paris—but ranchers like Gabe Brown, who raises livestock and an array of crops on 5,000 acres outside Bismarck, North Dakota, have preached its virtues for decades. “All soil biology eats carbon, and that’s how nutrients cycle,” explains Brown of the network of microbes and fungi and earthworms underground. “Farmers need to think of carbon as their fertilizer, because it’s what drives a healthy system.”

KEEP READING ON MODERN FARMER

Soils for food security and the climate

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Thanks to plants and living organisms, soils contain two to three times more carbon than the atmosphere.  Carbon-rich soil organic matter is essential: it retains the water, nitrogen and phosphorus that are indispensable to agriculture. But alternating phases of drought and intense rainfall accentuate erosive phenomena.  In the long term, almost 30 million hectares of arable land could be lost every ten years.

The solution: carbon storage

If the carbon stocks in the top 40 centimetres of soil could be increased by 4 per 1000 each year, this could theoretically help to stop the current rise in the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere, on condition that deforestation is halted.

The methods: 5 ways to develop soil management and agroecology

  1. Avoid leaving the soil bare in order to limit carbon losses
  2. Restore degraded crops, grasslands and forests
  3. Plant trees and legumes which fix atmospheric nitrogen in the soil
  4. Feed the soil with manure and composts
  5. Conserve and collect water at the feet of plants to favour plant growth

Applied to the surface horizon of the world’s soils, or a stock of around 860 billion tonnes of carbon, the 4‰ target would result in the annual storage of 3.4 billion tonnes of soil carbon, thus counterbalancing the rise in atmospheric CO2. This measure would be extended beyond agricultural soils to most soils and their uses, including forests.

570 million farms in the world and more than 3 billion people living in rural areas could implement these practices.

The cost for crops, 20 to 40 USD per tonne of CO2. For grasslands and forests, 50 or 80 USD per tonne of CO2. Carbon would continue to accumulate in soils for twenty to thirty years after the introduction of good practices, if they are sustained.

Keep Reading on INRA

Soil as Carbon Storehouse: New Weapon in Climate Fight?

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Author: Judith D. Schwartz

The degradation of soils from unsustainable agriculture and other development has released billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. But new research shows how effective land restoration could play a major role in sequestering CO2 and slowing climate change.

In the 19th century, as land-hungry pioneers steered their wagon trains westward across the United States, they encountered a vast landscape of towering grasses that nurtured deep, fertile soils.

Today, just three percent of North America’s tall grass prairie remains. Its disappearance has had a dramatic impact on the landscape and ecology of the U.S., but a key consequence of that transformation has largely been overlooked: a massive loss of soil carbon into the atmosphere. The importance of soil carbon — how it is leached from the earth and how that process can be reversed — is the subject of intensifying scientific investigation, with important implications for the effort to slow the rapid rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The world’s cultivated soils have lost 50 to 70 percent of their original carbon stock.

According to Rattan Lal, director of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, the world’s cultivated soils have lost between 50 and 70 percent of their original carbon stock, much of which has oxidized upon exposure to air to become CO2. Now, armed with rapidly expanding knowledge about carbon sequestration in soils, researchers are studying how land restoration programs in places like the former North American prairie, the North China Plain, and even the parched interior of Australia might help put carbon back into the soil.

Absent carbon and critical microbes, soil becomes mere dirt, a process of deterioration that’s been rampant around the globe. Many scientists say that regenerative agricultural practices can turn back the carbon clock, reducing atmospheric CO2 while also boosting soil productivity and increasing resilience to floods and drought. Such regenerative techniques include planting fields year-round in crops or other cover, and agroforestry that combines crops, trees, and animal husbandry.

“CO2 cannot be reduced to safe levels in time to avoid serious long-term impacts unless the other side of atmospheric CO2 balance is included,” says Thomas J. Goreau, a biogeochemist and expert on carbon and nitrogen cycles who now serves as president of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.

Keep Reading on Yale Environment 360

The Surprising Leading Contributor to Pollution: Agriculture

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Did you know that the modern agricultural system is responsible for putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the actual burning of fossil fuels? Understanding this reveals an obvious answer to pressing global problems.

There are only three places for carbon to go: land, air, and water. Our agricultural practices have removed massive amounts of valuable carbon from land, transferring it into air and water. Carbon management is critically important regardless of one’s views of climate change.

By paying greater attention to carbon management, we have the opportunity to make a dramatic difference in this area, which is having major negative consequences to our agriculture, our air, and our oceans, lakes, streams and rivers.

One important factor that some experts believe is KEY for reversing environmental devastation like desertification, which is when land turns to desert, is to return much of our land to grasslands and build a network of herbivore economics.

There is no better way to improve the conditions for animals, solve the carbon problem, bring more revenue to farmers, and improve our health by purchasing nutritious foods from properly pastured animals – vs the horrible CAFO model based on the monocultures of corn and soy fed to the animals in questionable conditions in which they are proactively fed antibiotics to make them fat and keep them alive in such atrocious conditions.

Keep Reading on Mercola.com