[geo] The ‘Unfolding Global Disaster’ Happening Right Under Our Feet

[Andrew Lockley]

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/12/21/3734206/soil-loss-unfolding-catastrophe/

The ‘Unfolding Global Disaster’ Happening Right Under Our Feet

BY NATASHA GEILING
DEC 21, 2015 3:25 PM

With all that’s going on in the world — from record-breaking warm
spells to rapidly melting ice sheets — it’s easy to ignore something so
seemingly mundane as dirt. But scientists at the University of Sheffield’s
Grantham Center for Sustainable Futures suggest that we ignore dirt at our
own peril.

Nearly a third of the world’s arable land has been lost over the past four
decades, according to a new report, released to coincide with the Paris
climate talks earlier this month. Experts at the the University of
Sheffield called this soil loss “an unfolding global disaster” that
directly threatens the agricultural productivity of the planet.

But soil erosion isn’t just a problem for food security — which is expected
to become even more pressing as the world’s population booms and land
available for food production wanes. Soil erosion is also tied to the
climate, as the world’s soils represent a massive carbon storage system,
containing three times the amount of carbon that is currently in the
atmosphere.

Soil is lost rapidly but replaced over millennia, and this represents one
of the greatest global threats to agriculture

“If the soil carbon reserve is not managed properly, it can easily
overwhelm the atmosphere,” Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management
and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, told ThinkProgress in
April.

The University of Sheffield report places most of the blame for soil
erosion on what it calls unsustainable farming practices, which require
large amounts of fertilizers and tilling to boost crop yields. Switching to
a more sustainable model of intensive agriculture, the report urges, can
help offset soil loss.

Right now, the report found that plowed fields lose soil to erosion at a
rate 10 to 100 times greater than soil formation, meaning that the Earth is
currently losing valuable land faster than it can be naturally replenished.
Replenishing topsoil naturally is not a quick process — it takes about 500
years to replenish just 2.5 cm of topsoil.According to the World Wildlife
Fund, about half of the world’s topsoil has been lost in the last century
and a half.

“Soil is lost rapidly but replaced over millennia, and this represents one
of the greatest global threats to agriculture,” University of Sheffield
biology professor Duncan Cameron, co-author of the report,said in a press
statement. “This is catastrophic when you think that it takes about 500
years to form 2.5 cm of topsoil under normal agricultural conditions.”

Over-plowing fields constantly disturbs top soil, exposing the microbes
that live within it to oxygen and releasing its stored carbon. That, in
turn, impacts soil’s ability to store more carbon. It also degrades the
soil’s structural integrity, impeding its ability to absorb water and act
as a buffer against floods, or store water for plants. Degraded soil can
wash away more easily during extreme precipitation events, causing rivers
and streams to become flooded with silt and sediment, which can impact
ecosystems in the water.

The good thing is that no one disagrees that increasing soil carbon is good
for agriculture, is good for the environment, good for food security

Degraded soil is also less fertile than non-degraded soil in terms of
agricultural productivity — a worrisome reality for a planet that is
expected to need to increase its agricultural production 50 percent by
2050. According to the United Nations, 95 percent of our food comes from
the soil, but about one-third of the world’s soils are currently degraded.
For sub-Saharan Africa, that number jumps to about two-thirds, which the
Montpellier Panel — an international group working to support national and
regional agricultural development and food security priorities in
sub-Saharan Africa — estimates costs the region about $68 billion per
year in lost productivity. If topsoil loss is not slowed or reversed, the
U.N. estimates that all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60
years.

In order to slow or reverse the trend of soil degradation, the University
of Sheffield report suggests a few tweaks to the currently agricultural
model. First, they suggest a more hands-on approach to soil management with
cover crops and no-till soil, both of which can help boost soil health by
keeping soil microbes from being exposed to oxygen and preserving a system
of roots that keeps soil more tightly packed. The report also suggests
weaning the world off of synthetic fertilizers and returning to the age-old
but currently-underused tradition of applying night soil — also known as
human sewage — to cropland, which the report argues can help restore
nitrogen and phosphorus back to the soil.

As part of the U.N. climate talks, the French government launched a program
aimed at studying the best methods for restoring soil 

Re: [geo] Negative emissions for climate change stabilization & the role of CO2 geological storage

[Andrew Revkin]

Here's a piece with a coda proposing who should help finance "negative
emissions" RD&D:


http://nyti.ms/1Omq9F2
As Documents Show Wider Oil Industry Knowledge of CO2 Climate Impacts, a
“Take it Back” Proposal
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
 DECEMBER 22,
2015 8:17 PM December 22, 2015 8:17 pm 3 Comments

   - Email
   - Share
   - Tweet
   - Save
   - More

Photo
[image: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122015/exxon-mobil-oil-industry-peers-knew-about-climate-change-dangers-1970s-american-petroleum-institute-api-shell-chevron-texaco";>Documents
published by InsideClimate News show that oil companies and the
American Petroleum Institute (API) were gauging carbon dioxide's climate
impacts decades ago.]
Documents published

by
InsideClimate News show that oil companies and the American Petroleum
Institute (API) were gauging carbon dioxide's climate impacts decades ago.
CreditInsideClimate News

Updated, 8:38 p.m. | There are new revelations from the continuing
InsideClimate News investigation of what the oil industry knew about the
potential climate impacts of carbon dioxide from fuel burning even as it
sought delays in related national and international policies.

The headline and deck on today’s story neatly summarize the news:

Exxon’s oil industry peers knew about climate dangers in the 1970s, too.
Members of an American Petroleum Institute task force on CO2 included
scientists from nearly every major oil company, including Exxon, Texaco and
Shell.

Below you can read my proposal for what the industry might do to make the
best use of its deep knowledge of carbon dioxide and climate change, along
with its scientific and technical capacity.

Here’s a snippet from Neela Banerjee’s article, but please read the rest at
the link below:

The American Petroleum Institute together with the nation’s largest oil
companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between
1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry, not just Exxon alone, was
aware of its possible impact on the world’s climate far earlier than
previously known.

The group’s members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly
every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company, including Exxon,
Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, and Sohio, according to
internal documents obtained by InsideClimate News and interviews with the
task force’s former director. [*Read the rest
*
.]

My thoughts on the series’ earlier findings are here

.

All of this bolsters a notion I first floated awhile ago on Twitter
, related to a 1978
proposal by an Exxon scientist, Harold N. Weinberg:

In a memo to superiors, revealed in InsideClimate’s earlier reporting
,
Weinberg wrote: “What would be more appropriate than for the world’s
leading energy company and leading oil company [to] take the lead in trying
to define whether a long-term CO2 problem really exists and, if so, what
counter measures would be appropriate.”

The proposal was not embraced, needless to say.

While others pursue investigations

that
may or may not bear fruit (but will surely enrich several generations of
lawyers), I have an idea for something that could start now.

I suggest that Exxon, and perhaps the fossil fuel industry more generally,
might help propel a vigorous new burst of research in ways to take back the
CO2 added to the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion at a scale that would
matter to the climate system. (Those of us who benefitted from decades of
cheap fossil fuels can do our part by supporting boosted federal
investments in clean-energy science

 and technology development — and, yes, deployment

.)

After all, the putative trajectories for avoiding dangerous climate change
 that
were the centerpiece of discussions and pledges in the Paris climate treaty
talks all rely on as-yet-untested massive atmospheric CO2 removal

RE: [geo] Negative emissions for climate change stabilization & the role of CO2 geological storage

[Hawkins, Dave]

Myles Allen has been advocating the take back concept for several years now.  
But the description in this piece of the timing for such a take-back obligation 
is mistaken:

"We simply need to ensure that, by the time global temperatures reach 2℃ (or 
1.5℃ if that is what is eventually deemed safe), any company that sells fossil 
fuels, or any carbon-intensive product like conventional cement, is obliged to 
take back an equivalent amount of CO2 and dispose of it safely to ensure it 
doesn’t end up in the atmosphere."

If we were to wait until the global temperatures actually reached 2 (or 1.5) 
degrees C above pre-industrial to start a take-back requirement, we would have 
locked in very substantial additional temperature increases, due to the thermal 
imbalance created by the accumulated atmospheric CO2.  Myles, of course, 
understands this.  I assume this was just due to writing something too quickly 
(or perhaps an errant editor).

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [geoengineering@googlegroups.com] on 
behalf of Andrew Revkin [rev...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2015 8:00 AM
To: johnnissen2...@gmail.com
Cc: Andrew Lockley; geoengineering; Greg Rau; Ronal Larson
Subject: Re: [geo] Negative emissions for climate change stabilization & the 
role of CO2 geological storage

Here's a piece with a coda proposing who should help finance "negative 
emissions" RD&D:


http://nyti.ms/1Omq9F2

As Documents Show Wider Oil Industry Knowledge of CO2 Climate Impacts, a “Take 
it Back” Proposal
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
 DECEMBER 22, 2015 8:17 PM December 22, 2015 8:17 pm 3 Comments

  *   Email
  *   Share
  *   Tweet
  *   Save
  *   More

Photo
[http://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122015/exxon-mobil-oil-industry-peers-knew-about-climate-change-dangers-1970s-american-petroleum-institute-api-shell-chevron-texaco";>Documents
 published by InsideClimate News show that oil companies and the American 
Petroleum Institute (API) were gauging carbon dioxide's climate impacts decades 
ago.]
Documents 
published
 by InsideClimate News show that oil companies and the American Petroleum 
Institute (API) were gauging carbon dioxide's climate impacts decades 
ago.CreditInsideClimate News

Updated, 8:38 p.m. | There are new revelations from the continuing 
InsideClimate News investigation of what the oil industry knew about the 
potential climate impacts of carbon dioxide from fuel burning even as it sought 
delays in related national and international policies.

The headline and deck on today’s story neatly summarize the news:

Exxon’s oil industry peers knew about climate dangers in the 1970s, too. 
Members of an American Petroleum Institute task force on CO2 included 
scientists from nearly every major oil company, including Exxon, Texaco and 
Shell.

Below you can read my proposal for what the industry might do to make the best 
use of its deep knowledge of carbon dioxide and climate change, along with its 
scientific and technical capacity.

Here’s a snippet from Neela Banerjee’s article, but please read the rest at the 
link below:

The American Petroleum Institute together with the nation’s largest oil 
companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 
and 1983, indicating that the oil industry, not just Exxon alone, was aware of 
its possible impact on the world’s climate far earlier than previously known.

The group’s members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every 
major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company, including Exxon, Mobil, 
Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, and Sohio, according to internal 
documents obtained by InsideClimate News and interviews with the task force’s 
former director. [Read the 
rest.]

My thoughts on the series’ earlier findings are 
here.

All of this bolsters a notion I first floated awhile ago on 
Twitter, related to a 
1978 proposal by an Exxon scientist, Harold N. Weinberg:

In a memo to superiors, revealed in InsideClimate’s earlier 
reporting,
 Weinberg wrote: “What would be more appropriate than for the world’s leading 
energy company and leading oil company [to] take the lead in trying to define 
whether a long-term CO2 problem really exists and, if so, what counter measures 
would be appropriate.”

The proposal 

[geo] Re: Talks in the city of light generate more heat - Nature

[Nathan Currier]

I'm all for Kevin Anderson's ideas on efficiency, but please note: Anderson 
is also strongly anti-nuclear...Happy holidays, Nathan 

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 6:51:53 AM UTC-5, Chris Vivian wrote:
>
> NB You can download a PDFof the article at: 
> http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.19074!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/528437a.pdf
> .
>
> Chris.
>
> On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 5:24:31 AM UTC, Andrew Lockley wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.nature.com/news/talks-in-the-city-of-light-generate-more-heat-1.19074?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
>>
>> Talks in the city of light generate more heat
>>
>> Rather than relying on far-off negative-emissions technologies, Paris 
>> needed to deliver a low-carbon road map for today, argues Kevin Anderson.
>>
>> 21 December 2015
>>
>> Article toolsPDFRights & Permissions
>>
>> The climate agreement delivered earlier this month in Paris is a genuine 
>> triumph of international diplomacy. It is a tribute to how France was able 
>> to bring a fractious world together. And it is testament to how assiduous 
>> and painstaking science can defeat the unremitting programme of 
>> misinformation that is perpetuated by powerful vested interests. It is the 
>> twenty-first century's equivalent to the victory of heliocentrism over the 
>> inquisition. Yet it risks being total fantasy.
>>
>> Related storiesA seismic shiftA ‘perfect’ agreement in Paris is not 
>> essentialIs the 2 °C world a fantasy?
>>
>> More related stories
>>
>> Let's be clear, the international community not only acknowledged the 
>> seriousness of climate change, it also demonstrated sufficient unanimity to 
>> define it quantitatively: to hold “the increase in … temperature to well 
>> below 2 °C … and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 
>> °C”.
>>
>> To achieve such goals demands urgent and significant cuts in emissions. 
>> But rather than requiring that nations reduce emissions in the 
>> short-to-medium term, the Paris agreement instead rests on the assumption 
>> that the world will successfully suck the carbon pollution it produces back 
>> from the atmosphere in the longer term. A few years ago, these exotic Dr 
>> Strangelove options were discussed only as last-ditch contingencies. Now 
>> they are Plan A.
>>
>> Governments, prompted by their advisers, have plumped for BECCS (biomass 
>> energy carbon capture and storage) as the most promising 
>> 'negative-emissions technology'.
>>
>> What does BECCS entail? Apportioning huge swathes of the planet's 
>> landmass to the growing of bioenergy crops (from big trees to tall grasses) 
>> — which absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis as they grow. 
>> Periodically, these crops are harvested, processed for worldwide travel and 
>> shipped around the globe before finally being combusted in thermal power 
>> stations. The CO2 is then stripped from the waste gases, compressed (almost 
>> to a liquid), pumped through large pipes over potentially very long 
>> distances and finally stored deep underground in various geological 
>> formations (from exhausted oil and gas reservoirs through to saline 
>> aquifers) for a millennium or so.
>>
>> The unquestioned reliance on negative-emission technologies to deliver on 
>> the Paris goals is the greatest threat to the new agreement. Yet BECCS, or 
>> even negative-emission technologies, received no direct reference 
>> throughout the 32-page package. Despite this, the framing of the 2 °C goal 
>> and, even more, the 1.5 °C one, is premised on the massive uptake of BECCS 
>> some time in the latter half of the century. Disturbingly, this is also the 
>> case for most of the temperature estimates ascribed to the outcome of the 
>> voluntary emissions cuts made by nations before the Paris meeting.
>>
>> “The almost euphoric atmosphere that accompanied the drafts could not be 
>> squared with the content.”
>>
>> The scale of the assumption is breathtaking. It would be the equivalent 
>> of decades of planting and harvesting of energy crops over an area of one 
>> to three times that of India. At the same time, the aviation industry 
>> envisages powering its planes with biofuel, the shipping industry is 
>> seriously considering biomass to propel its ships and the chemical sector 
>> sees biomass as a potential feedstock — and by then there will be 9 billion 
>> or so human mouths to feed. This crucial assumption deserves wider scrutiny.
>>
>> Relying on the promise of industrial-scale negative-emissions 
>> technologies to balance the carbon budget was not the only option available 
>> in Paris — at least in relation to 2 °C.
>>
>> Reducing emissions in line with 2 °C remains a viable goal — just. But 
>> rather than rely on post-2050 BECCS, deciding to pursue this alternative 
>> approach would have begged profound political, economic and social 
>> questions. Questions that undermine a decade of mathematically nebulous 
>> green-growth and win–win rhetoric, and questions that

[geo] New post- Building Better Concepts in Climate Engineering: why bother with CDR and SRM?

[Michael Thompson]

Patrick Taylor Smith of the National University of Singapore weighs in on
the discussion about categorizing climate engineering proposals and
technologies-

"I submit that we could easily resolve this debate if we adopted a new set
of conceptual categorizations for geoengineering strategies that emphasized
the relevant normative considerations for evaluating those strategies
rather than by physical mechanism."

full post is here
.
Your comments are welcomed.

Upcoming posts on this topic from Noah Deich, Center for Carbon Removal,
and Stefan Schafer, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies.

The series of posts can be found here

.

thanks, Michael

-- 


*Michael Thompson*

*Managing DirectorForum for Climate Engineering Assessment *
School of International Service, American University
www.ceassessment.org
o - 202 885 2459
m- 202 556 3776



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[geo] The climate's apprentices-witches (ARTE TV)

[Michael Thompson]

One of our researchers spotted the French film that many of you appear in.

"The climate's apprentices-witches (ARTE TV)"
​ ​
- its up
​​
 on youtube
​ (here

)​
, though my understanding is still has not aired on ARTE.

​On the channels website they've posted some graphics about CE techs (here

) ​


*​in the film*- ​

​​Nathan Myhrvold
David Keith
Matt Watson
Lee Lane
Clive Hamilton
Stewart Patrick
Dominique Bourg
Regis Briday
Mike MacCracken
Kristine C Harper
Ronald Doel
Ken Caldiera
Oliver Morton
Alan Robock
Yihui Ding
Kingsley Edney
Jiahua Pan
Paul Crutzen
Pablos Holman
Hugh Hunt
Anders Levermann
Michael Thompson
Katherine Houghton


*Michael Thompson*

*Managing DirectorForum for Climate Engineering Assessment *
School of International Service, American University
www.ceassessment.org
o - 202 885 2459
m- 202 556 3776



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[geo] Sea spray aerosol as a unique source of ice nucleating particles

[Andrew Lockley]

http://m.pnas.org/content/early/2015/12/17/1514034112

Paul J. DeMott

Sea spray aerosol as a unique source of ice nucleating particles

Ice nucleating particles (INPs) are vital for ice initiation in, and
precipitation from, mixed-phase clouds. A source of INPs from oceans within
sea spray aerosol (SSA) emissions has been suggested in previous studies
but remained unconfirmed. Here, we show that INPs are emitted using real
wave breaking in a laboratory flume to produce SSA. The number
concentrations of INPs from laboratory-generated SSA, when normalized to
typical total aerosol number concentrations in the marine boundary layer,
agree well with measurements from diverse regions over the oceans. Data in
the present study are also in accord with previously published INP
measurements made over remote ocean regions. INP number concentrations
active within liquid water droplets increase exponentially in number with a
decrease in temperature below 0 °C, averaging an order of magnitude
increase per 5 °C interval. The plausibility of a strong increase in SSA
INP emissions in association with phytoplankton blooms is also shown in
laboratory simulations. Nevertheless, INP number concentrations, or active
site densities approximated using “dry” geometric SSA surface areas, are a
few orders of magnitude lower than corresponding concentrations or site
densities in the surface boundary layer over continental regions. These
findings have important implications for cloud radiative forcing and
precipitation within low-level and midlevel marine clouds unaffected by
continental INP sources, such as may occur over the Southern Ocean.

marine aerosols ice nucleation clouds

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Re: [geo] The climate's apprentices-witches (ARTE TV)

[Olivier Boucher]

Hello,
the documentary was aired on ARTE in late November, right after another 
documentary on the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project.

Best,
Olivier

One of our researchers spotted the French film that many of you appear 
in.


"The climate's apprentices-witches (ARTE TV)"
​ ​
- its up
​​
 on youtube
​ (here 
) 
​

, though my understanding is still has not aired on ARTE.

​On the channels website they've posted some graphics about CE techs 
(here 
) 
​



_​in the film_- ​
_
_
​​Nathan Myhrvold
David Keith
Matt Watson
Lee Lane
Clive Hamilton
Stewart Patrick
Dominique Bourg
Regis Briday
Mike MacCracken
Kristine C Harper
Ronald Doel
Ken Caldiera
Oliver Morton
Alan Robock
Yihui Ding
Kingsley Edney
Jiahua Pan
Paul Crutzen
Pablos Holman
Hugh Hunt
Anders Levermann
Michael Thompson
Katherine Houghton

*
Michael Thompson*
/Managing Director
Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment /
School of International Service, American University
www.ceassessment.org 
o - 202 885 2459
m- 202 556 3776


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.
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.

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