It’s About Making Babies!

Sharon writes on Casaubon’s Book of her concerns that climate change activism and government support seem to be waning as the Copenhagen conference approaches.

The Big Lie

The first, and I think biggest, obstacle Sharon, Peak Oil, and Transition movements face is the big lie. When the government and leaders states something, that statement becomes an act of faith for a people. This is most evident when the statement is false, the leaders know it when they first utter the nonsense – yet by repetition and the appearance of being affected by the statement – the people are convinced that the statement is meaningful and . . . true.

Few governments are talking about climate change, or global warming. The absence of climate from the media broadcasts of news and concerns, the absence of climate from government actions – they make an implied statement that global climate change is a non-issue. An implied Big Lie. And the nations of the world, for the most part, accept that there is no immediacy, no serious concern about climate change. Production of coal and oil, transport of coal and oil have not been curtailed due to concern over climate, again making an implied Big Lie statement that coal and oil aren’t all that much of a problem. And the American People and people elsewhere understand the meaning – that climate, coal, oil – these are middling important economic concerns. Period.

End of the world

I remember “duck and cover” drills in the classroom, and early dismissal of school to hold nuclear blast and fallout drills. An intercontinental exchange of nuclear missiles between the US and Russia, and / or China, was an almost accepted event, the only question was timing, and how many survivors – and who and where they would be! – and what of normal life could be salvaged.

Various churches have held the end times are now, and have been for 20 years. Then year 2000 was to be the second coming, or at least all computers would crash.

Miniskirts, swing, jazz, rock, rap, and hip-hop music were to bring about the end of civilization. Segregation was said to be the last bastion of the survival of our nation (that didn’t make any more sense that harassing Irish, Hungarian, German, or any others setting foot on America soil).

As a culture, using the specter of the end of life as we know it (TEOLAWKI) to motivate someone’s actions or changes has been used since before the first bible was opened. The argument form is new to younger people, and the argument content for climate change is compelling, for some. Yet as a culture and as individuals, many of us have learned to discount tales of the end of things. Call it experience, or wisdom, or apathy – this mostly depends on your support for any given argument – tales of the Zombicalypse is not immediately terrifying to all listeners.

Changing stories and Doubts

I have an issue with the science of global warming, or as it calls itself this week, climate change. A couple of issues, really.

- Methane

See, the first I recall hearing about methane was as sewer gas. That is, not the digestion of vegetation by ruminants like cows. And methane as swamp gas, the normal decay of vegetation that produces methane. Composting, forest mast, mulched grass, for goodness’ sake. I ask, and have heard no reply, whether a patch of pasture sufficient to sustain a cow or cows for a year, would produce more total methane over that year with a cow grazing, or a year dormant. Or a variant, with only wildlife grazing or otherwise utilizing that same patch of pasture. My concern should be obvious – how (why?) should we identify animal sources of methane, if they aren’t producing more methane than would have occurred in their absence?

- How much carbon in that there carbon-cycle?

We in the United States face a quandary about wild fires. Apparently the natural cycle of things is for burn offs of forest an plain at irregular intervals. Only, we don’t like to do that anymore since we might lose our homes and parks. Those wildfires put out a lot of particulates, water vapor – and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. How may gallons of gasoline, again, does it take to put the same amount of carbon into the air as a square mile of burned prairie or forest? How many tons is equivalent? And how does our modern suppression of fires, using fire lanes and other artificial control measures as well as firefighting crews, affect the natural balance of carbon in the environment?

Why, just think of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel expended fighting fires!

- Old Carbon

I do understand the theory of sequestered carbon. That the fossil fuels contain carbon removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago, and thus burning fossil fuels returns that carbon to an active cycle of life, and risks restoring an environment from millions of years ago, that we could not survive today. I do get it.

What I don’t know is where the atmosphere, carbon, wild fires, methane, and other factors stand in balance. And, like with other end-of-the-world scenarios, I am not convinced that this story is the only end of life story that is true. It would be a first, for me.

- Dust

I also know that the world, all of earth, accumulates about a centimeter (a bit over 3/8ths inches) of dust from outside our atmosphere, micrometeorites and various stuffs that fall onto the earth from outer space. What is the carbon – or carbon-reducing – effect of this cosmic debris? Volcanoes erupt, spewing untold thousands of tons of acids and dust and gases – including bunches of methane – on a nearly continual basis, year round and around the earth.

Dust changes things. It settles in water – or mixes in and changes the freezing and boiling points. It makes a bit of ground or plant absorb or reflect a bit more sun – it is mostly random in it’s affect. But accumulations of little things – like burning more coal or oil – does add up.

- Albedo, or how the earth shines

Take a kitchen wall. Paint it white, or eggshell or apartment-white or whatever is close. Notice how large the room feels, how bright, how warm. Now paint it a creamy beige color, that same wall. See how the room feels warmer, a different size, almost a calmer mood? Now paint that wall a crafty, thirsty orange. You may feel the room needs more light bulbs to feel well-lit, you may find you spend less time in the kitchens.

Now take a patch of the Earth. Take a forest. Cut it down, and plant oats, or corn, or soybeans. Part of the year the dirt will be worked up, part will be a bright, growing green. Other times you will have mature golds and browns, and then stubble or old plant debris.

What you will not have, is a patch of ground that absorbs or reflects the amount of energy at the same rate and degree that the forest it replaced absorbed or reflected energy.

You changed the “brightness” of that patch of the Earth. Next, build some roads, and some buildings, move a few metal or plastic vehicles about. Wow. Now we really see the changes. And you know what? The amount of energy, sunlight, cosmic radiation, UV, and heat that is either captured or bounced back off the earth – that energy shows up as warming and cooling. Warming and cooling of the ground and the air around that patch of the Earth. Warming and cooling of the environment. And let us not look at what clearing roads, that should be snow-covered in winter, does to affect the temperature of the environment.

Back to the trees.

I mentioned the albedo change when you whack down trees. But I grew up thinking of a tree as a water pump. Back before most apple trees were dwarfs, when a mature apple tree stood shoulder to shoulder with maples and oaks, I was told that a mature apple tree transfers nearly 150 gallons of water a day from the ground to the air. Now think what it means to the locale when you chop down a bunch of trees – the air is drier. I am told that at tree’s root system is generally as well developed as the top part – much of the water the mature tree utilizes comes from below what farmers call the subsoil, the moisture reservoir that rains replenish to provide for crops and pastures. And forests.

Change the amount of moisture in the air, and you change the temperature characteristics. Ever notice that some times the coolest temp of the day – just before or as the sun comes up in the morning – varies from the heat of the day – often mid to late afternoon? Have you noticed that when the difference is 40 degrees Fahrenheit (abut 22 degrees centigrade) – the humidity is quite low? That when the difference from low to high is 20 degrees the relative humidity, the percentage of moisture in the air to the amount of moisture that saturated air could hold, is high? That at nearly 100 percent humidity, the low and high temps are mere degrees apart?

Plants, including trees, are carbon-based life forms. The tons of mass that make up a mature, tall tree, is mostly water, just like nearly all life. But there is a sizable amount of carbon. I was taught in school that chlorophyll, the green stuff in plant leaves, in the presence of sunlight combines carbon dioxide in the air with moisture to release oxygen and produce sugars and starches. The mighty mass of the tree, like the profusion of the meadow, removes a bunch of carbon from the air. When we burn wood, leaves, or even grasses, we return that carbon to the air. When the wood or leaves or grasses decompose instead, they form carbon gases like carbon dioxide and methane, and leave a bit of ash as compost. In normal, sustained cycles the trees grow, carbon is capture, and again released. Because all is going on at any moment, the net effect is a steady amount of heat, carbon, moisture, etc.

Deforesting the Amazon

But what happens when Brazil deforests the Amazon River Basin, whacks down ancient trees and forests that have held hundreds of years worth of carbon – and keep that area deforested? That immense quantity of permanent carbon change, of that permanent interruption of the carbon cycle affects continents and oceans. The change in oxygen release, the change in moisture conveyed from deep underground to air, the change in minerals brought to the surface by tree roots – these all affect the world’s environment. The amount of carbon involved in the “only” thousand square miles of rain forest destroyed last year has to be the equal of train loads of coal. Coal, at least, barely affects water cycles and albedo.

More forests gone

China and Asia burn a lot of charcoal. It seems that charcoal makes a handy fuel for heating the home, for cooking. For the charcoal and wood, it seems the Asian rain forests are on their last few years, before being cleared quite away. The deforestation of Asia makes the Brazilian ecological assault on the Amazon Rain Forest pale in comparison. The Asian loss of forest is also having a proportionally larger impact on the environment.

Africa, too, is deforesting itself for charcoal. More and more devastation of ecologies and environments.

Burning wood, its not the same

I want to be clear about one thing – burning wood, making and burning charcoal, these can be part of a sustained environment. Burn deadfalls from stands of trees, trees downed by storm or trimings of trees harvested for lumber – that are replaced. So that any acre of ground maintains, more or less, about the same amount of growing tree mass, a similar range of maturities and ages of trees, from year to year. Even harvesting straggler unwanted trees can be sustainable if you only harvest them when they reach maturity, and never completely clear out the younger trees, again keeping about balanced from year to year.

Long pole in the tent.

So, Sharon, I think one of the reasons climate change is facing reduced commitment is a combination of people that haven’t committed to alleviating climate change factors have are pursuing other issues. Like keeping a nation’s eyes on a non-issue like insurance for health care as a distraction from clandestine actions. I think some of those that are concerned about global warming are distracted by life issues. I think the immediacy of the issues has worn thin as a motivating force.

An analogy. Take a tent like a circus tent, with several poles holding the center line of the tent high. But you notice one pole seems to stand higher than the others, so you pull that pole out, and shorten it. Now you notice a different pole is the tall one, so you shorten it. Because you continue to observe the changing skyline of the tent, and view from various vantages and angles, you can continue forever to find that one pole seems taller than another.

And I am not convinced that the issues being pursued – reducing fossil fuel emissions – is the long pole in the tent. Energy spent addressing the long pole – which I think is global deforestation – will have the most effective result.

Till next time

I had a bunch of comments on Sharon’s article, that will have to follow in another post – and ties back to Sharon’s concern about redefining lifestyle and my concern over family and culture.

Any thoughts?

Brad K Peak Oil, Society Climate Change, Deforestation, Peak Oil, Sharon Astyk, Transition