Redwood Reader

While our good friends at CO2 Science magazine have made us aware of the mitigating effects of increased plant growth and carbon storage in the ground, the main body of evidence seemed to support global warming as an important issue. This week errors in reporting data in the troposphere, or lower atmosphere, were made public that pretty much eliminates the last shreds of hope for those who think the concept of global warming is over blown. However, carbon sequestration estimated at two billion tons a year for forests and seven billion tons for the oceans leaves us well short of the reported twenty-five billion tons annually produced by anthropomorphic activities. Atmospheric concentrations are at 379 ppm, up about 100 ppm in the last fifty years. Another television item reporting on pumping CO2 byproduct from coal to gasoline production (synthetic fuel) into oil wells to release more oil from depleted wells. I earlier though this ludicrous but put in terms of capturing this waste directly from manufacturing (!) and thus keeping it out of the carbon cycles seems worthier. However, a lot of questions are not answerable about this process, including if it would stay there and what impacts it may have on subsurface chemistry. The report says a hundred million tons of CO2 can be used this way each year, and that that amount surpasses all vehicular emissions worldwide. But it is only one two hundred-fiftieth of global emissions.
The ongoing interplay of environmental forces and the response of living systems is becoming clearer, and we see how conditions have been radically altered and then mitigated repeatedly through the history of our planet, arriving where we are today at some point in between naturally occurring extremes.
In Cloud Condensation Nuclei (Climatic Effects of Biologically-Produced Aerosols and Gases) a naturally self-preserving cycle of increased CO2 leading to more gaseous emissions from greenery that transform into particles for cloud condensation creating more and brighter clouds, increasing atmospheric reflectivity and thus slowing warming. This is a perfectly natural cycle that predates man by eons and is one of the many ways vegetation modifies climate in order to sustain itself. We see the more particles the more clouds, and by extension precipitation.
It helps to look at the forest as a community of purposeful individuals each with his own life and job and contributing to the greater good through payment to the general good, taxes if you like. The various life forms conduct trade and consume products and generate waste products. In its long life span the waste products have been used to improve the living conditions necessary to survival for the entire community, of which we are only marginally a part. Increasing available water in the root zone for drought protection for example. Even water vapor emissions contribute to fog and so we see no part of natures process is for nothing.
It has been a talking point for years whether old growth left on ridge tops attracts incoming fog, which by appearance seems to be the case. Adding to it the role of fog drip and it seems easy to draw conclusions. Some st5udies were saying fog drip was a large percentage of precipitation in an area. My experience is that fog drip is not enough to soak more than an inch or two into the soil, and must be on the hundredths of an inch scale in absolute terms. Divided by at least a hundred inches of rain, or even fifty, it disappears as a major factor in annual precipitation. Seasonally, while occurring in the dry summer it probably has more significance. No studies of the down range effects of this have ever been done, and we wonder about the role of coastal forest on inland weather.
Down wind studies have been done for dust arriving from Africa in Florida and China all along the West Coast. In fact an array of monitoring stations lines the coast from Alaska to Mexico that are looking at mercury emissions from coal burning in China as well as airborne life forms that may carry infectious diseases across oceans. Watching weather patterns it seems likely our activities contribute to weather on the continent east of here. We wonder if our Pacific storms originate over the oceans or are created by particles and emissions for vegetation on land masses.
Another way we contribute to climate change is through changes in native perennial cover over large regions. The replacement of the dark leaved, deep rooted sage with annual cheat grass on three million acres of Great Basin lands is an example of the way nature has already selected suitable species for specific climates. Here is the real danger of global warming. Nature will adjust as she always has. In that adjustment some areas will be favored and species will move with the changing climate. The only immutable objects on the face of the earth are political boundaries. Cheat grass does not condition the soil. Or store water or carbon in the soil, or absorb sunlight in the dry season. A nation located here would find itself in deep trouble very soon. I think we find this in many places and will explain some of histories questions, especially where more aggressive types without knowledge of local patterns replaced aboriginal people with a deep understanding of local conditions. I suspect that the people that came to Mesa Verde, for example, may have left poor climatic and/or political conditions invading more sedate agricultural societies. Winning easy victories they failed to understand local processes and in the end broke the very way of life they had hoped to benefit from. It seems many then reverted to building and sacrificing to appease the gods rather than learning to live in the harsh new environment and disappearing into history sooner rather than later.
Lack of vegetation allows sunlight to be reflected from an already inhospitable climate. When I first arrived here, the creek bottom had been completely devegetated and the glare in summer so harsh it was hard to see, and it seemed to add a couple of degrees to already high temperatures. Later we learned there could be a thirty-degree difference from open sun to shade from a group of trees.
Satellite photos released several weeks ago indicated fifteen percent of the habitable earths surface was located in devegetated urban and developed areas since 1980. Comments by Space Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins that smoke, brown earth and muddy sea water were visible from space should give humans real cause for concern. Added to croplands and impacted forests and we see only a small percentage of earths climate mitigating power is available to us, although it is easy to revert to natural systems if we care to. Our focus on human populations does not bode well because so little is being done to preserve the conditions necessary for a huge biomass to consume freely.
So we see starvation in Africa with little emphasis on moderating climate regionally, and realize one of the things that make the superpowers, whether the US, Russia or China, is a continent wide land base to extract materials from and to provide food for their masses. We do not see development of the prime grain areas being used to feed the rest of the continent in exchange for whatever local goods are available- water, oil, labor and so forth. When growing patterns shift in regions of smaller statehood we see results much more quickly.
In the Petrie dish that is the globe, humans are the third largest biomass amongst all species, behind blue green algae and krill. Almost all earths resources are needed to support a top of the food chain type that is also at the top in sheer volume. We have been given a brain that allows us to be aware, creative and make decisions. We will have to use these resources to maintain suitable habitat for all of us.