Interesting idea.  I like the low-fruit metaphor, and I think it has great value.  

*You can establish a program which will protect the rainforest by subsidizing small local growers to provide sustainable products from the forest.  You have to  match a substantial portion of the potential income from row crops.

*Create bioreserves and put in place substantial numbers of heavily armed and equipped guards.  

*Teach locals natural history to act as ecotourism  guides.

I don't know offhand the monthly cost for Iraq, but the total for the entire criminal exercise is  projected to be ~$2.3 trillion--over the lifetime medical care for military.  

Yep, the whole goddam thing is awful.

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

This is an old argument, but if tropical slash burning is not in any CO2 emissions inventory, how can one take credit for reducing it?

Sorry, but that's the truth and it seems like a bunch of people are planting Palm Oil trees in the tropics without measuring any impacts on the emissions inventory there - such as slash burning to plant "x" many thousands of Palm Oil trees in what was virgin forest or brushland.  

The whole subject of agricultural burning, slash burning, prescribed burning, and wildfires is not adequately represented in ANY emission inventory, period.  If you don't have a clue about the numbers how can you roll them back?  In engineering terms, we have an out of control situation here.  Great idea but no vertical traction.

/sammie

Onward through the fog

Also of interest is shifting from the inefficient pit charcoal methods to something like flashcarb, that can generate power from the medium BTU gas emitted in the production chamber during charcoal generation ... and of course the charcoal itself can be buried to provide for a hefty increase in the productivity of tropical soils, allowing for the elimination of rotating slash and burn for cultivation (as opposed to buring for land clearing for cattle ranching).


Virtually Yours, BruceMcF Energize America 2020

And man is it ever a big business now, a complete sham.  You can exctually get on the Internet and figure out how many trees you have to buy to offset the emissions from your SUV.  What a crock of rotten baloney!

Nobody tells you these "trees" are actually seedlings and it could take 5 to 15 years to really do the work as advertised.  It is a total and complete scam and a giant industry is now pushing it.  Even the rock band Cold Play bought some "trees" somewhere to offset the carbon used in making their latest CD.  Ludicrous!

If you want to reduce man-made CO2, simply stop burning and wasting so much dang fuel.  End of discussion.  
/sammie

Onward through the fog

First, what's being offered here in UK is 60 years, i.e. the tree maturing.

Second, buying this service each year means that you're not carbon neutral till 60 years after your death / stop emitting GHGs.

Third, the term for this degree of dishonesty is not ludicrous, it is fraud.

The worst aspect of this fraud IMHO
is that it acts to discredit the concept of carbon baking in real time,
that is planting sufficient trees to mop up this year's output from a given source this year,
which, given the acceleration of Climate Destabilization and its feedbacks,
looks increasingly essential.

And this is one major option for funding the necessary reforestation.

Regards,

Bill

Simply by covering every roof that is air conditioned with a high albedo roofing material we could save 20%-40% on cooling/heating costs for each building treated. Roofs are replaced on a 25-40 year rotation anyway. Outlaw the sale of black roofing material.

Geo-exchange HVAC has costs of about 40% of gas heat/electric cooling sytems. It can be powered entirely by solar electricity.

In the South almost all AC is coal powered.

All in all the US uses 50-60% more CO2 per capita than the EU or Japan and we don't even have cradle to grave healt care.

We really aren't even trying to change. Not a bit.

Put the Carbon Back

I well agree that the US, like the UK, has yet to make any real effort to cut GHG outputs -
as far as I can see this is firstly because it would mean reduced fossil fuel sales, and hence profits,
and secondly because it is seen simply as lousy negotiating (with China et al) to commit to serious change without first getting a deal.

That we are going to make swingeing cuts is unavoidable,
and that they are already very late in view of feedbacks' acceleration seems obvious.

Thus it seems to me increasingly certain that,
once those successive GHG cuts are a matter of international treaty law,

we are going to have to employ all the sustainable sequestration techniques we can,
(i.e. a giga-hectare of reforestation, and worldwide terra preta, and CCS)

as well as at least researching the reliability of the emergency measures of water &/or sulphur delivery for atmospheric cooling,

in order to maximize the chance of avoiding the feedbacks' swamping the declining carbon sinks
(after which we'd have no further mitigation options).

It seems sadly a rather unfashionable view to observe
that campaigning for an equitable and efficient Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons
is thus the very highest priority,
on whose achievement all subsequent changes rest.

Regards,

Bill

I'm still having this problem with the tree thing.  I keep thinking "what about all those huge wildfires we get every year, like already in Georgia, Florida, and LA?"

Knowing something abut EPA and Forestry Service air emission factors, the release of CO2 from such fires is measured in terms of not tons, but tens of thousands of tons.  

So here I sit, thinking like "whoa, we need to replant a hundred million trees here in the US just to overcome the damage from wildfires and suburban growth."

Is any of this making any sense?  Why are we generating offsets values at 3-15 bucks a ton of CO2 when we're actually going backwards, that is increasing CO2?
/sammie

Onward through the fog

I think that planting perhaps 1,000 trees may be sensible in the particular case of banking the CO2 from our farm's FUV -
which is indispensible in present circs for towing trailers for livestock, fodder & gear -

Personally I'd simply ban SUVs outright, and penalize gratuitous pollution in general.
If this appears extreme, it's because I see the causality between GW and megadeaths in Africa by drought-based famine.

I take your point about wildfire, but would respond that a new forest burning after say twenty years' growth,
has held perhaps millions of tonne-years of carbon out of the atmosphere.

Clearly there are of course issues over where and how to plant such forests to minimize fire risks,
but in principle the more native forestry we can plant on non-agricultural land,
and as shelterbelts and copses on farmland,
the better in my view.

Regards,

Bill

The price of carbon must unavoidable and high enough to reward efficiency and low-carbon energy transitions.  $100/ton may be the cusp of what's needed to stimulate consumer demand and American innovation.  China, India, and the world will follow and copy our technical progress.

Counter-intuative, isn't it :P

-David Ahlport

Rainforest does not = "lungs of the earth." But maybe, air filter of winter?

In fact most forest have some pattern of fire cycle in thier succesion pattern. Without fire some trees like the Giant Sequoia don't reproduce. The problem in my area is that people have interrupted the fire cycles with clearcuts and fire suppression.

Within a half hours drive from my house I can go to second growth pine forests so thick that you cannot walk between the trees. If these areas are exposed to fires at the right time of year a proper percentage of trees survives and creates a fire resistant climax forest. If the forest burns in late summer it will burn to the ground.

Because there are no planned seasonal burns these forest areas will eventually burn off completely and bypass the climax forest that sequesters the most carbon.

Right now thinning harvests of small diameter brush and trees would benefit the forests if we could find ways to finance them. Biofuels/Terra Preta could be that way. Burning some of the trees for biofuels could enhance the health of the forest as Billhook keeps reminding us.

In the meantime on the valley floor former cornfields are being converted to almond and walnut orchards as fast as farmers can get the financing. Nut orchards have high value yields per labor input. Nobody gives a rats hiney about the carbon yield because almonds and walnuts fetch a good price.

The nut trees also provide a steady output of biofuels in the form of wind-downed trees that are harvested for cordwood. Woodstoves are popular heating options locally and the newer ones don't pollute all that much.

Locally, to manage our forests properly, we have to burn a portion of them each year. If we could harvest those burns as biofuels so much the better.

Put the Carbon Back

Certain definitions need to be very clear before we can have a useful discussion on this topic.

For example: There is a difference between sequestering carbon that already in the atmosphere and preventing more carbon from going up in the future. Stopping deforestation will not prevent the climate change that is already being driven by the carbon that's already up there. Forests are not some sort of infinitely-active sink - a mature forest, although it contains a lot of carbon, does not carry on absorbing carbon at significant rates forever. Avoiding deforestation is, as certain economists would put it, avoiding damage costs, not generating profit. Although this distinction might seem trivial (after all, a penny saved is in many ways actually a penny earned) it has massive implications in terms of communicating the climate change message and assessing the relative methods of combating climate change.

At the moment the message is going out that if you pay for the conservation of a forest somewhere, you're paying for the maintenance of a carbon sponge that'll soak up the emissions from your SUV or business flights. The impression is given that you're somehow neutralising your impact. You're NOT. You're still increasing carbon in the atmosphere, but you're paying to prevent a further, additional increase from happening.

Of course, planting trees is very different to conserving extant forest. Replacing an ecosystem that contains v little carbon with one that contains more will obviously reduce atmospheric carbon, albeit, arguably, only semi-permanently (the forest can always be burned or chopped down in the future). (There are biodiversity impacts associated with planting new forests in some areas that don't often get talked about - what about natural grassland species that might lose habitat?)

Which brings us to the question of what really constitutes sequestration. Many would argue that 'proper' sequestration involves putting the carbon back underground, into the lithosphere. It doesn't perhaps matter which definition you choose, so long as you have a clear, consistent definition - which seems to be lacking in this group at the moment.

Whiskerfish

Which brings us to the question of what really constitutes sequestration. Many would argue that 'proper' sequestration involves putting the carbon back underground, into the lithosphere. It doesn't perhaps matter which definition you choose, so long as you have a clear, consistent definition - which seems to be lacking in this group at the moment.

Whiskerfish

The only true carbon sequestration tactic we have available is Terra Preta. Injecting CO2 into the ground is completely unproven and has the potential for some truly nasty tragedies if the well caps ever fail.

We and our descendents will be burying charcoal for a thousand years to repay the 200 years of coal burning. Let's just hope we have the opportunity to do it.

Put the Carbon Back

To Sammie: You wrote: " It is like the Medieval Days when you could pay the church to absolve you of a sin; it didn't do any good, but people felt better."

Your conclusion about carbon offsets sounds true enough.  But the business about indulgences is a good bit more complicated than what you suggest, and does not deserve to be treated so cynically.  To be sure, the abuse of the sale of indulgences in Germany, in the early 16th century (a bit after the Middle Ages), which so provoked Martin Luther, basically to raise funds to build the new Saint Peter's Basilica (yes, the one that stands to this day in the Vatican, the largest church in Christendom), was horrible.  But there was nothing normal about it.

Funny, how this anti-Catholic ill-informed propaganda from the 16th century keeps popping up.

And anyway, even if the most sincere simple German peasant bought an indulgence from the most corrupt German priest serving the designs of the most corrupt Italian pope, how can we say that it did no good to that poor little German peasant, in some way above our understanding?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

your observation that we lack definitions around the concept of sequestration applies globally as much as it does here.

For many years I've pushed for the distinction between the one reliable sequestration for geological time, namely the "Sink" of plankton acreting on the seabed,
and the sundry forms that are reliable for only biological time, namely the "Banks" of carbon in soil, bog, and forest biomass,
and the notional forms of unknown reliability, namely the "Deposits" of fossil carbon injected into sundry extant subsurface cavities.

Even this spread of "Sink, Bank & Deposit" has grey areas,
given that forests, such as the Amazon, have stood for 60 million years (i.e. geological time)
and some of the peat-bog permafrost may be as old,
yet both forests and soils can of course be eroded in a less than a generation.

The oldest terra preta that I've heard of was 12,000 years, which to my mind puts it well into the "Bank" definition,
in that it appears entirely stable so long as the soil it occupies is not eroded.
(Yet as Gar has pointed out, quite how it is done we have yet to rediscover).

While it seems highly imprudent to attempt plankton Sink enhancement
without at least several decades of cautious research,
Bank expansion by afforestation and ground-charcoal soil enhancement both appear eminently sensible.

In terms of the "Low-hanging fruit," of ending deforestation,
I think Nepstad may perhaps be missing the multi-yield opportunity
for the reforestation of abandoned ex-forest ranchland
(about 1/4th of total area of deforested Amazon)
using native species in "Coppice & Standards" regimes,
with a view to producing both the feedstock charcoal
(and, long-term, some lumber),
and also the easily-transported liquid fuel Methanol,
as well as greatly serving the conservation of native biodiversity
by reconnecting forest fragments.

On the other hand Nepstad may of course be well aware of this option,
but his interviewer wasn't.

Regards,

Bill

For 30 years I tried to be carbon-neutral by permanently protecting an old-growth forest.  Every year the trees became taller and thicker.  Now global warming is killing those trees and my forest is expelling huge amounts of carbon.  If I could use those decaying trees to displace fossil fuel heating then the savings would be in the bank.  But that is not happening.  

The Puget Sound region is loaded with down firewood from last winter's November storm.  There is no incentive to use this resource.  Cap and trade does not reward firewood use, and if it did it would only be worth $5 per cord.  Cap & trade enables greenwashing.

It seems likely that the Amazon will become a savanna and the tundra a forest.

I like forests and biodiversity.  Our best options to save forests are linked to suspensions of dead carbon emissions.  The goal is to make coal obsolete with low-cost energy efficiency and low-carbon energy technology.

I am not going to be so silly as to say air masses never mix from higher latitudes into the tropis - to be mixed in this equatorial sink - but something just doesn't add up here.  If one looks at the ocean current maps and typical location of the northern jet stream and SUB-tropical jet, it looks like a good deal of our CO2 is headed to the Arctic and the North Pole - which interestingly is where we're seeing some dramatic changes in the environment, like the warming and greening of Greenland.  

Call me dumb if you want, but anything south of the tropical latitudes seems like a completely different ball game.  The huge forests of the Amazon are not shooting massive doses of oxygen our way, and we're not shooting most of our CO2 back in that direction.  It just doesn't work that way.  Intuitively and mathematically it is a wash.
sammie

Onward through the fog

Imagine we are in a car about to go over a cliff.  If we don't effectively brake before the front wheels go over the steep edge, natural forces (like, um, gravity) will accelerate our descent and bad things will happen to us, no matter how hard or skillfully we work the brakes after that point.

Similarly, if we rely on slow methods of sequestering carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere today, a positive feedback loop of natural forces will lead to even more carbon being released before, say, trees we plant offset the initial carbon directly released.  By that time, we have a bigger problem on our hands than we can likely contend with, and crashing and burning is more or less guaranteed.

The biochar sounds interesting, but I am concerned about unintended consequences.  For instance, it may well be that if and when we figure out how to to do this effectively and on a large scale, there are other impacts on air quality that directly degrade the air we breath even if it does remove CO2.  Meanwhile, like so many other magic bullets, it does not seem ready for prime time and there is not guarantee that it will be before CO2 has built up and set off the effects of positive feedback loops to the point that the next few generations will witness ever greater global warming catastrophes no matter how intensively they employ  Terra Petra at some later date.

Simply by covering every roof that is air conditioned with a high albedo roofing material we could save 20%-40% on cooling/heating costs for each building treated.

Sorry, but that is overstating the potential benefits tremendously.  I work in this field, testing real buildings before we install comprehensive mitigation measures, modeling the potential energy savings, then retesting to see what really happened as a result of mitigation.  There is no one thing you can do to make a 20% difference.  The key concept to understand is that buildings, like biospheres, work as an integrated combination of systems.  If you adjust one component but don't reengineer and rework the others that have been working in concert with that other part, a sort of path of least resistance or weakest link effect will bite you in the butt.  Worse, if you do a really good job of sealing a building, you can poison or burn to death the occupants if you don't carefully balance the ventilation components.  And, if you don't seal the building, changing the color or composition of the roof won't deliver satisfying results, nor will it save a heap of energy in real life.

On the other hand, if you do a great job of sealing, insulating, reengineering, downsizing appliances, putting in smart systems to turn off devices that aren't really doing anything people appreciate, etc., you can save about 30% of heating energy, 40% to 60% of cooling energy, 10% to 40% of "plug load," and make the buildings quieter, healthier, and more comfortable while you are at it.

 -----  "That we are going to make swingeing cuts is unavoidable,
and that they are already very late in view of feedbacks' acceleration, seems obvious.

Thus it seems to me increasingly certain that,
once those successive GHG cuts are a matter of international treaty law,

we are going to have to employ all the sustainable sequestration techniques we can,
(i.e. a giga-hectare of reforestation, and worldwide terra preta, and CCS)

as well as at least researching the reliability of the emergency measures of water &/or sulphur delivery for atmospheric cooling,

in order to maximize the chance of avoiding the feedbacks' swamping the declining carbon sinks
(after which we'd have no further mitigation options)." ----------

From your post above, it seems that you consider carbon banking in forestry too slow a mode of sequestration to be worthwhile.

Do you really think that we should limit our efforts just to cutting GHG outputs ?

Even though a giga-hectare of afforestation could, under the terms of a global treaty,
start recovering over two gigatonnes of carbon per year by 2027 ?
Even though this could be the difference between a 30% global GHG cut by 2030
and a cut of 60% ?

(Remembering that we need to cut global emissions by > 80%
just to stop adding to the cumulative problem of excess atmospheric carbon).

As for your anxiety about charcoal production, maybe it would ease your mind to research current best practice standards in the industry ?

It's also worth noting that the bi-products of pyrolization for charcoal production include a wide range of potentially valuable materials,

which can not only be synthesised into an excellent liquid transport fuel - Methanol -

they can also add wonderful flavours to fish or meats smoked in them,
which, in addition, has an excellent preservative effect on the food.

The uncertainty over terra preta BTW is not about getting charcoal into the soil,
and thus a given volume of carbon banked;
it is about how to do so in a manner that permanently enhances soil fertility,
rather than just raising it for 3 or 4 years.

Which is of course a tertiary issue for this  thread on the dynamics of ending deforestation.

Finally, I'd ask whether you propose some other self-funding globally replicable option
that can potentially Bank more than 2.0GTC /yr before 2030
while also yielding a host of benign secondary goods and services ?

Regards,

Bill

But may I ask a favor?  Can we please stop using the term "feed-back loop?"  Mother Nature does not have a damned feed-back loop.  It is how the mathematical models react under certain conditions that can create a ficticious feed-back loop.  Point to your forehead and say "this is a feed-back loop."

If you're going to describe a condition such as where reductions in CO2 in one place could lead to increases in others, then please define it specifically and in detail and not as some meaningless and empty term such as "feed-back loop."  

It's intellectualy dishonest and we have no idea what you mean.
sammie

Onward through the fog

CO2 is a so-called 'well-mixed' gas in the atmosphere. I.e. it diffuses rapidly and levels of CO2 are pretty much equal across the globe.

Therefore your earlier statement re the 'separation' of CO2 sources and sinks in terms of the 'separation' the N and S hemispheres is misleading. CO2 released in the N hemisphere raises the global levels, so the notion that planting trees in the S hemisphere to mop up CO2 is not intrinsically misguided nor 'intellectually dishonest'. There may, however, be other problems with the idea.

Whiskerfish

RealClimate.org will no doubt provide chapter and verse on these phenomena,

but I'll point out that there are a range of potentially massively potent positive loops
(as well as sundry minor ones) that GW has already awoken.

The simplest of these are:

Loss of albido (reflectivity) with declining ice & snow cover,
which is causing more solar heat to enter the soil and sea ,
rather than being reflected off the planet;

Increasing frequency and intensity of forest fires releasing extra CO2 and CH4 (methane), the latter being over 20 times as potent a GHG as the former;

Accelerating melting of permafrost peat bog,
which is again releasing extra methane and CO2.

Comparable active negative feedbacks have yet to be identified.

In that all positive loops contribute to GW,
which then accelerates each loop directly or indirectly,
all the feedback loops are effectively interacting with eachother.

They are perhaps the most dangerous reality we have to face.

Regards,

Bill

1. CO2 disperses globally. CO2 emitted anywhere adds to global warming.

2. Burying char is just another idea, not an answer:

Sammie sez:
Can we please stop using the term "feed-back loop?"  Mother Nature does not have a damned feed-back loop.  It is how the mathematical models react under certain conditions that can create a ficticious feed-back loop.  Point to your forehead and say "this is a feed-back loop."

Sammie, here's a little news flash for you: Mother Nature is a fictitious character.  Whether or not she has a feedback loop or any other quality is up to the people imagining and describing "her."  

Perhaps you knew that.  But did you know that most of what we regard as components of "nature," such as sound, color, temperature, and solitary things, from atoms to galaxies, are just products of our minds, symbols of things we are prone to believe actually exist, but which we lack any way of directly experiencing, let alone approaching logically or discussing without resorting to symbols and models.  All language and logic, in particular, including any mathematics, are symbolic in nature, which is to say, they are models of other things and ideas, "real" or imagined.  In fact, most of modern philosophy is so tied to this notion of symbolism being the meat of "reality" that the elements of language are themselves treated as the objects of interest rather than the abstract concepts we intuitively think of as being concrete and exogenous to our minds.  So, while you may think you have something truly profound to say about the distinction between a quantitative model of climate processes and the qualities of climate processes themselves, if you are human, you are just fooling yourself about that in the final analysis.  That's fine with me.  What isn't fine, in my opinion, is for you to derail a good discussion that many people are interested in by throwing out snarky comments that actually go nowhere when you take a moment to consider what is behind them.

Perhaps youdon't know what is meant by a "feedback loop" in the context of global warming caused or contributed to by human activities.  Others do, I am sure, given that it has become a term of art used with increasing frequency by climate researchers describing both actual events and simplified models of those events used to predict the consequences of various activities that might be undertaken by people.  If you have missed out on that, take heart, for ABC News has dumbed down the concept without losing its essence just for people who are so removed from this issue that they have no idea what it means.  And, of course, you could simply ask what one means when they use a term you find confusing.

So, sorry, Sammie, but "feedback loop" is already well established as a key concept in climate dynamics, as well as in quantitative methods employed to simplify and better understand them.  Your request is not only late, but lame at this point.  The term feedback loop is a simple way of alluding to many complex and detailed processes of a certain nature.  That is why many of us use the term when the basic concept, rather than the details, are important to our point.  Knock yourself out trying to convince the world that we can't use such linguistic devices, much as you used the term "Mother Nature," to effectively communicate.  But do it somewhere else, OK?  Thanks.

Bill asks:
Do you really think that we should limit our efforts just to cutting GHG outputs?

Bill, that seems like a simple question, but I think the answer is more complex than I have time for at the moment.  But here is the essence of my thinking for now.

If the objective people are interested in, when they plunk down their guilt money to erase their sin of carbon emissions at a time when they fear reaching a climate tipping point into catastrophic changes if GHG accumulations reach a certain level in eight to twenty years, then it is misleading to offer them absolution in return for buying natural services that won't add up to the level of remediation they are seeking for four, five, six, or more decades--not taking into account positive feedback loops that will tend to counteract and overwhelm the remediation attempt in the meantime.  If that is the objective--and for most of the parties in this game at present, it is, I believe--then we are better served by remediation options that are more immediate, have a higher likelihood of actually avoiding the release or capturing the release of GHG in question, and are more economical, all things considered.  In general, the best conservation and process avoidance efforts meet those criteria, when compared to tree plantings and such longer term and less directly controlled options that are being marketed today.

On another note, I am also concerned about what enormous tree plantings and similar mega-scale efforts may mean for the ecological and geologic systems we are hoping not to further destabilize.   As I am sure everyone in this discussion understands, planting a monoculture of any type is similarly aged vegetation over a huge area will not provide the quality, diversity, and resilience of habitat or ecology that would otherwise take shape if natural biological successions were permitted to take their own course.  So, while we may have a clever way of rapidly manipulating one part of the complex processes we are concerned with, we may be further destabilizing the overall systems that matter most to us if we take such a myopic approach.

I believe--then we are better served by remediation options that are more immediate, have a higher likelihood of actually avoiding the release or capturing the release of GHG in question, and are more economical, all things considered.  In general, the best conservation and process avoidance efforts meet those criteria,

The above describes the RED initiative quite well. The word conservation has two main meanings.

Not mentioned by anyone is the problem of leakage. Preserve one forest and loggers simply move next door and consume one that is not protected. But leakage for wood products is not as closely linked to food prices as it is for biofuels. When loggers run out of forests to cut, prices for wood go up and equilibrium will be met. With agrofuels, food prices are already starting to climb in tandem with fuel prices. Higher wood prices may force us to live in smaller houses without wood floors but we all need to eat.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world