James Lovelock is a desiccated old stick at 90, but he's still only half baked.

Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. . .

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast. . .

The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it. . .

I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.

Half-baked is better than most, especially the green scammers, politicians and other environmental opportunists that we are afflicted with, but we can do better.

It's useful perhaps to recall the Keeling graph. Freeman Dyson explains:

There is a famous graph showing the fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it varies month by month and year by year . . . It gives us our firmest and most accurate evidence of effects of human activities on our global environment. The graph is generally known as the Keeling graph because it summarizes the lifework of Charles David Keeling. . .

The graph has two obvious and conspicuous features. First, a steady increase of carbon dioxide with time, beginning at 315 parts per million in 1958 and reaching 385 parts per million in 2008. Second, a regular wiggle showing a yearly cycle of growth and decline of carbon dioxide levels. . .

The only plausible explanation of the annual wiggle and its variation with latitude is that it is due to the seasonal growth and decay of annual vegetation, especially deciduous forests, in temperate latitudes north and south. . . The wiggle is giving us a direct measurement of the quantity of carbon that is absorbed from the atmosphere each summer north and south by growing vegetation, and returned each winter to the atmosphere by dying and decaying vegetation. . .

When we put together the evidence from the wiggles and the distribution of vegetation over the earth, it turns out that about 8 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming. . .

Lovelock notes that "The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes." We are pikers at this CO2 emissions business. And Keeling via Dyson notes that 8% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere is captured every year by vegetation.

Lovelock plays the biochar card and it's worth a close look. He scoffs at CO2 burial schemes, calling them dangerous. Biochar is carbon, not carbon dioxide. You could perhaps understand it metaphorically as dehydrated carbon dioxide in that it is concentrated, stable, and lighter weight. More than half of the weight in CO2 is the O2 part. Burying biochar is not dangerous.

Given that so much atmospheric CO2 is accessible in vegetation each year a concerted effort to turn it into biochar would hugely and quickly reduce atmospheric concentrations.

But I think that Lovelock misstates the effect of doing so. He sees it as a zero sum game pitting vegetation against organic carbon consumers such as soil bacteria. Making biochar steals their groceries. What actually happens when the process is executed iteratively is that soil is enriched so plants grow more and better, drawing down more CO2 and providing more for the bacteria to eat. This matters since some of that biomass is retained in soil for more than the one year cycle. Biochar also stimulates soil bacteria and fungi as well as plants, and they too are made of organic carbon. Using biochar increases carbon sequestration in several ways, and nobody goes without groceries.

He may be wrong about another thing too. It's true that the political and diplomatic shenanigans of Kyoto have done squat, and all of the green nonsense is just a money hustle, but if the grifters can figure out a way to support their graft and corruption with biochar schemes then it may still happen on a large enough scale to make a difference.

I think he may also be mistaken about progress in other technologies. He grants that nuclear power may solve the UK's dilemma but doubts that it can have a global impact, and doesn't give much thought to biotechnology. I'm more optimistic that these technologies will have an impact despite the counter-productive efforts of greens and politicians. We're also making relevant progress in materials science, especially at the nano level, which may provide an enhanced tool set to accomplish these objectives.