Redwood Reader

18. CLIMATE CHANGE
There is a lot of talk these days about climate change, and considerably less about doing something about it. If we don’t take control of the problem, the problem will persist in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. There can be no doubt the weather in some areas has been altered. Yet no article I have seen includes all the things various specialties are pointing out, for better or for worse. Our ability to deal with these issues rather than reacting afterwards puts the carriage before the horse. The earth doesn’t care where what grows, people do. Climate change foretells of political and economic disruption, some loss of habitat, but otherwise it is the endless march of the seasons and species. We must act in our interests or be left in the dust.
There are many dire models being expounded, and the temperature is rising for sure. But it is hard to say it is beyond normal, and a casual reader sees over and over that lots of information is out there that is not being collated or analyzed at some higher level that would put the pieces together into actionable intelligence. Sound familiar? Researchers are operatives for the executive branch but the analyst layer has been left to Congress to fund and regulate, or the courts to halt. Every bit of unfavorable scientific news is challenged on basis of what it will do to industry or the economy. This seriously delays action against threats from a world so complex we can’t tell what action or substance A may do in environment C to lifeform Y. Action gets taken on partial information when the rest of the information is available elsewhere.
So it is with climate change, true enough in itself as an expression. Yet not accounting for carbon dioxide released from soil by development and agriculture has skewed the picture. Rising CO2 is blamed extensively on emissions since the dawn of the industrial age. Some push the date for anthropomorphic climate change to the beginning of agriculture with land clearing and forest burning. Indeed, the Roman warm Period followed by the Little Ice Age also followed a peak and trough effect of expansion and retreat of forests in Europe directly relating to human population. No account is made for reduced land disturbance although it is estimated half the acreage in crops went back to forest, and large amounts of CO2 were returned to the soil.
Massive deforestation began with the Age of Discovery and colonialism. Steel came to the forests of North America and Africa and South America and Australia within a hundred years of each other and land clearing for agriculture went on continuously down to today. We constantly ask people not to do the very things we did to make this nation great. A great deal of carbon went up in smoke, and some was released by the plow, and more was released by sunlight and rain reaching the exposed ground where trees had been removed. And we began reducing the very mechanism for returning the soil carbon.
Our modern technology has made it possible to disrupt the soil mechanisms that blanket the earth. Carbon stored in the ground for eons has suddenly been returned to the atmosphere in huge quantities, and we incorrectly assess much of the blame on the engine when the wheels are probably releasing more carbon than the combustion. Vast acreages of carbon storage have been paved, had their vegetative layer thinned to lawns, had the forest removed and the floor skinned, and wetlands filled. The method to restore it is a known quantity, even if it is not generally known among the people that make decisions. It should be, as it is government science. The government is spending money to tackle the problem, so why is it slow to recognize its own research that is proving itself in crops but has not made it to forestry and absolutely had no impact on development planning here or abroad. We need to put large acreages away to absorb this carbon back. There is no reason to expect third world countries with rain forest to take action when our forests are probably better storage locations due to lower temperature, which extends glomalin life.
There are other problems in the climate change picture. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an article about low nitrogen plants in serpentine areas being out-competed by annual grasses that are receiving a boost from “dry nitrogen” fallout from urban smog in the surrounding area. Most native plants are low nitrogen in the first place. Higher nitrogen plants are usually agricultural plants. Dry nitrogen has allowed European annual grasses like Italian ryegrass and wild oats to take over large areas of California grassland that is often perennial bunchgrass or allium family meadows, which exude into the soil chemicals that prevent grasses from sprouting. (When pigs till up an area for these little bulbs, grass comes in thick and tall.) Protein seeking cattle have discovered the nitrogen rich grasses and are being used to reduce the grass. The native plants are not interesting to the cattle and so are making a wonderful resurgence in Coyote Point, at lease, restoring native plants by using oft-maligned cow.
Last week on Nova the story was about fluctuating magnetic fields and the possibility of a pole reversal in the near future. This would seem like it will have some consequence. The magnetic field is set in motion by convection from the earth’s core. Suddenly swarms of activity boil up in the opposite magnetic region until finally the pole flops. Time estimates vary widely but paleoclimatologists have learned an individual spot on the earth may have far more extreme weather in a few years than old models thought was possible in thousands. Solar wind is stripping away the ice caps it can now reach because the weakening magnetic field does not keep the radiation away from the arctic regions. So here is a completely different reason for warming in the Arctic region and higher latitudes and elevations.
Even our ancestors lived in a world where regional climate varied much more than it does now. It seems possible human activity warmed the earth enough to take the extreme points down a little until surface disruption released far more carbon dioxide than remaining vegetation could absorb in a few years. Now add in emissions, so that any progress made is negated, and continued development can only make things worse. We know all of this. What are we going to do? Leaving things alone seems to work wonders, but it has to be justified economically.