There would be a rapid response by the establishment if the UNFCCC process was introduced to them. Money is of great interest.

The amount of money would have to be compared to the value of the charcoal as a fuel sold in the urban area. It is illegal to produce charcoal in the Gambia, so it is 'supposed' to come from Casamance province, in fact from disputed territory. Legal or not, law enforcement staff buy and use it, and levy an informal tax on it and other substances at a large number of check points along the main highway. There would be great difficulty to monitor production and use of biochar, so in my opinion carbon credits would be additional income for those involved in the charcoal trade.

Consider:

Sub-Saharan Africa has huge untapped reserves of natural gas. It also has a huge potential market, given that charcoal in African cities — the fuel of choice for hundreds of millions of people there — is often more expensive than gas. But the production of charcoal is destroying forests, and its use for cooking can destroy lungs in households choking on smoke. For the time being, promoting ways to use charcoal more cleanly and efficiently is a goal of many development specialists in Africa. But when will the jump to gas take place?

Q. Why isn’t development of this African gas resource, for both local and global markets, a priority for rich countries that claim they are committed to helping Africa break the bonds of persistent poverty? (Dysfunctional governments are surely an issue in some places, but not all.)

Q. Should projects that develop natural gas and related propane supplies in regions with few fuel choices get credit under proposed climate-treaty provisions?

On the climate front, discussions of ways to limit global warming seem more focused on capturing stray emissions of methane (more on that anon) than on pressing for ways to promote it as an alternative to coal, at least as a bridge to even less-polluting energy sources. For several decades, a cluster of scientists — in particular Jesse H. Ausubel, Arnulf Grübler, and Nebojsa “Naki” Nakicenovic — have pressed the case that methane is a vital ingredient for navigating toward a prosperous planet with a stable climate. It releases half the carbon dioxide per unit of energy that coal does. And if burned in certain ways, the resulting stream of CO2 is pure and easily captured for storage, Dr. Ausubel says.

It is also becoming ever clearer that the world has vast untapped stores of natural gas, everywhere from the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico to a wide swath of the Arctic.

With an open mind and good information about the agro-enviro-energy system one can see some useful policy directions that advance the interests of all segments and the system as a whole. Methane, for example, is a feedstock in one type of nitrogen fertilizer synthesis. African methane could be used to make it, and so increase their agricultural productivity, while reducing pressure on forests for expanded low production agriculture, while also using methane for energy instead of biomass, and have progress on several fronts while reducing net emissions. Add in biochar production and use in some types of CHP systems and they could end up being net carbon negative due to increased use of fossil methane!

A leading climate scientist argues that overbroad claims by some researchers—coupled with overblown reporting in the media—can undermine the public's understanding of climate issues. Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate modeler, author and PM editorial advisor, concurs with the consensus view that the planet's temperature is rising due largely to human activity. But, he says, many news stories prematurely attribute local or regional phenomena to climate change. This can lead to the dissemination of vague, out-of-context or flat-wrong information to the public.

The Study /// In early 2006, a study in Nature published surprising results that plants were giving off trace amounts of methane.

The Fallout /// We know that methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so the suggestion that it comes from plants led to a blizzard of headlines suggesting that trees could be contributing to global warming.

The Truth /// The researchers balked after the media coverage of their study broke. The scientists said they were widely misinterpreted when it was reported that plants contribute to global warming. Rather, if plants do give off methane, they've been doing it since long before humans were on the scene and their emissions aren't connected to today's anthropogenic climate change.

I won't hold my breath waiting for Schmidt to complain about all of the animal methane hype, there's too much money at stake and too many climate activists invested in animal bashing.

Update: Jeffrey sent this link.

"1) Except [for] the fossil fuel borne CO2-emissions by the livestock industry (production, processing and commercialization of meat and milk) and except [for] some unique biosphere borne CO2-emissions, associated with land use change (e.g. deforestation), domestic animal husbandry is totally "climate neutral" (using a controversial terminology, only justified under the assumption of any measurable effect of anthropogenic GHG-emissions on global temperature). Why? Because all the CO2 emitted by forage digestion and respiration had previously been captured from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Therefore, not a single CO2 molecule is added additionally to the atmosphere that had not been there before, recently.

2) This is also true for the methane produced by internal fermentation. Methane derives from organic substances originating from recent photosynthetic processes. And - as Richard Douthwaite from Ireland correctly points out in his letter (page 11) - methane molecules in the air are oxidized to CO2 and water at the end of their residence time in the atmosphere, closing the cycle. As a matter of fact the methane concentration has stabilized or even passed its peak just at the beginning of the new millennium. So obviously, just as much methane is oxidized in the atmosphere as is added to the air per unit of time. The resulting CO2 is available to be re-captured by photosynthesis. Therefore animal borne methane (how much its proportion ever may be among the total global methane emissions), just like CO2, forms part of a natural cycle, and not a single methane molecule is added additionally to the atmosphere by rumen fermentation that had not been there before, recently, unless livestock numbers increase.

3) The European satellite ENVISAT measured over a three years period the world wide close-to-the-surface-methane-concentrations. The average values are shown in figure 2 (source: University of Bremen ). Not even international organizations like the IPCC or FAO seem to have taken notice of the fact, that even the humid tropical forests do obviously emit far more methane than grazing cattle. How can the big grazing areas of the world (Australia, Southern Latin America, South and East Africa, and Western United States with hundreds of millions of cattle) and even India with the highest cattle density worldwide show such low methane concentrations? Something wrong with the theory?

There is one land use issue for emissions. The loss of soil carbon due to tillage is a major source of GHGs. CO2, methane and other gasses are released in huge quantities when land is cultivated. This impoverishes the soil and clogs the atmosphere. Plowing up the grasslands of the world for cropping has released carbon sequestered over centuries and eons. We would be in much better shape if those grasslands has been left as permanent pasture for the ruminants who co-evolved with the grasslands and co-created them, building the finest most carbon rich soil in the world.]]> Enviro-Politics back40 2009-07-02T07:38:01-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001218.html Worth repeating.

there is enough space in the world to produce the extra food needed to feed a growing population. And contrary to expectation, most of it can be grown in Africa, say two international reports published this week. . .

"Some 1.6 billion hectares could be added to the current 1.4 billion hectares of crop land [in the world], and over half of the additionally available land is found in Africa and Latin America," concludes the report, compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

If further evidence were needed, it comes in a second report, launched jointly by the FAO and the World Bank. It concludes that 400 million hectares, straddling 25 African countries, are suitable for farming.

Models for producing new crop land already exist in Thailand, where land originally deemed agriculturally unpromising, due to irrigation problems and infertile soil, has been transformed into a cornucopia by smallholder farmers.

As in Thailand, future success will come by using agriculture to lift Africa's smallholder farmers out of poverty, aided by strong government measures to guarantee their rights to land, say both reports.

2.1 Micro-catchment rainwater harvesting systems

Perhaps the most successful of these techniques is the zai ("water pocket") in Burkina Faso Zai is an ancestral planting pit developed in the Yatenga province, North Western part of Burkina Faso (where average rainfall is about 600 mm, with recurrent droughts and where soils are heavily encrusted. . .

the objective of the Zai practice is to regenerate the most degraded part of the field. It consists of digging holes or 'basins' of around 20-20 cm in diameter and 10-15 cm in depth. (Bandre and batta, 2002). The holes store rainwater, for plant growth. Generally the density is about 10,000-15,000 holes/ha depending on the crop chosen and the spacing between holes. Farmers use stone contour bunds to reduce the speed of runoff allowing infiltration into the zai which collect and concentrate the runoff. The larger the planting pits, and the bigger the spacing, the more water can be harvested from the uncultivated micro-catchments. Organic manure is put in the holes at a rate of about 3-4 t/ha. . .

. . . the quality of the amendment in Zai played a significant role. Low TDM as well as grain yield was produced with crop residue and compost of low quality. He observed for instance at the three study sites in Niger, that TDM produced on average with crop residue application was 756 at Sadore; 925 at Damari and 2185 kh ha-1 at Kakassi in 1999, compared to 3957, 4600 and 5030 kg ha-1 respectively with same rate of manure application. The grain yield was 151 kg ha-1 at Damari and 393 kg ha-1 at Kakassi with crop residue application, while it was 987 and 778 kg ha with manure application.

Ftondji (2002) observed that the Zai planting technique induced a higher water use efficiency than flat planting at three sites in Niger. Combination of Zai with manure improved considerably water use efficiency in three different sites. Therefore it is imperative to promote technologies that can on one hand help increase potential water availability and on the other hand consequently help rehabilitate degraded lands. "Zai" enhanced soil water storage and increased plant water availability, though most of this water could be drained out in soil with low water holding capacity as in Sadore and Damari in Niger. Nevertheless, the use of good quality organic amendment (manure) promoted rapid and deep root growth and helped limit water loss by drainage.

The first book on Keyline book was published in 1954. In it, P.A. Yeomans exploded the myth that it takes 1,000 years to produce an inch of topsoil. Yeomans pioneered, among other things, the use of on farm irrigation dams in Australia, as well as chisel plows and subsoil aerating rippers. Yeomans perfected a system of amplified contour ripping that controlled rainfall run off and enabled the fast flood irrigation of undulating land with out the need for terracing. . .

Keyline Designs features large earth walled irrigation dams that are all equipped with through-the-wall Lockpipe systems to gravity feed irrigation stock water and yard water. Across the landscape the dams may be interlinked by channels. Graded earth channels broaden the catchment areas of high dams, conserve the height of water and transfer rainfall run-off into the most efficient high dam sites. Flat land flood irrigation at up to sixteen hectares per hour and flood irrigation of undulating grass land. The road systems of Keyline follow both ridge lines and the graded contour water channels. Contour roads and paths, being almost flat, provide easy low energy movement across even very undulating land.

Avenues of trees are left or planted parallel to the roads and channels and as well as in tiered contoured forests. Better building sites become revealed and then fences and gateways can be positioned more strategically. Within this harmonious design, soil regeneration can occur by deepening the bio-fertility of the topsoil and converting subsoil into living topsoil. This is achieved partially by soil aeration, which increases water absorption, also by an amplified contour cultivation pattern, which prevents soil wash and by using an enhanced cell grazing design for "rational" grazing. Incidental results are the healing of soil erosion and salinity and better stock health.

In a rural setting Keyline is far more than a unique combination of water conservation and farming with nature. Keyline completely supersedes the widely imposed but misconceived concept of Soil Conservation. One of the typical benefits of Keyline is the rapid development of living soil.

There are issues on the other side too. Improving soil so that water infiltration increases not only helps avoid loss of water, it also helps soils drain when there is too much water. The increase in soil carbon that results from such systems also helps hold water in the root zone. It's a triple benefit: catch water, drain water, hold water.

This is all very old tech but not always well understood or practiced. One of the unfortunate parts of agronomic changes with development has been the lack of sophisticated understanding by remote bureaucracies. Looking on such systems from the commanding heights the small but crucial behaviors were invisible. Big think blunders such as massive irrigation projects that dammed water courses and doled out water during the year; cleaned, dredged and straightened water courses for improved navigation; and drilled deep wells to pump out aquifers have resulted in monotonic degradation of land while increasing both drought and seasonal flooding.

What makes this worth discussing (again) is the potential benefit of marrying char usage to such water systems. As noted above the benefit of zais increases with the quality of the material used to fill them. A mix of manure and char seems like a best practice, better than manure alone. Char helps hold water and nutrients, and is not consumed in the process. Top dressing with char in Keyline and bund systems should increase benefits for the same reasons as with zais, and won't just erode away as it might if top dressed on land where surface flows are poorly managed.]]> Water back40 2009-07-01T08:46:01-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001216.html For some years now I've been keen about using charcoal as a soil amendment. The fact that it is a durable form of carbon in soil was a plus since it would accumulate over time rather than dissipating like the vast majority of organic carbon. The more you dosed a field the better it got. Obviously there's some upper limit, but many tons per acre could usefully be added.

A tertiary benefit is that this in effect sequesters carbon drawn from the atmosphere by plants. The carbon in organic materials that would otherwise have been burned as wastes - quickly in fire or slowly by bacteria - would be captured for centuries or perhaps millennia.

Unfortunately, climate nutters glommed onto the idea and touted it as the solution to the worrisome increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. They zealously inflated the idea, proposing massive projects funded by rents from various tax schemes. The resultant backlash by more careful thinkers and the politicization of the idea has obscured the utility of the notion, but some have stuck to the knitting and seem to be making progress.

The re:char team is developing a low-cost mobile pyrolyzer to burn agricultural biomass waste and turn it into biochar, which acts as a fertilizer, in addition to sequestering carbon dioxide. The unit also produces bio-oil, a hydrocarbon fuel that can be used as heating oil, run a diesel engine, or burned to power a microturbine and generate electricity. Technology like re:char's may soon help small, remote farms increase crop growth, generate energy and survive off the grid in one fell swoop. . .

The current prototype can process up to a ton of biomass per day, running full time. Half of the output is bio-oil, thirty percent is biochar, and the rest comes out as gases that are fed back through the system and react further to make more hydrocarbon vapor. . .

Large-scale stationary pyrolyzers are already available on the market, but these are expensive and have a lot of moving parts, which means there are more places where they can break down. Biomass has to be transported to these units, rather than the other way around, which increases carbon output. As far as mobile pyrolyzers go, there are others available. But re:char's design is currently the only small-scale mobile pyrolyzer that makes both biochar and bio-oil. . .

Early-stage projects are already underway. Researchers at the University of Michigan are working with re:char to test a prototype based on Aramburu's design, and a working prototype on a small farm in Norfolk, Connecticut processes waste wood from trees that were destroyed in an ice storm last winter.

I see this as an aspect of the issues discussed earlier in Fertility Tech - the lack of recent progress in formulations and manufacturing systems for fertilizers. It has been 40 years since most of our current fertilizer technology was developed at the Tennessee Valley Authority. It is important to note that the manufacturing processes are just as important as the fertilizer itself. The same issues apply to the production and use of char. We need better understanding of the properties of chars produced from various materials in various ways, and efficient systems for producing them.]]> Ag-tech back40 2009-06-30T07:57:20-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001215.html One of the disappointments of increasing interconnection is the realization that so many of those in positions of influence are so meagerly endowed.

The House bill contains a provision, inserted in the middle of the night before Friday’s vote, which requires the president, starting in 2020, to impose a “border adjustment” — or tariff — on certain goods from countries that do not act to limit their global warming emissions.

The bottom line is that Waxman-Markey, as it currently stands, would in fact be counterproductive, once the international scale of the problem is taken into account. That we learn about this provision only now is startling enough.

I write this all as someone who a) favors a much higher price for fossil fuels, b) thinks that if micro-nutrients are a good idea they are not an alternative to addressing climate change; we could do both with positive expected long-run return, c) thinks that many people on the "Right" oppose W-M mostly because its passage would raise the status of environmentalists and others on the "Left" (but they will not admit as much), and d) thinks that our collective American incompetence in limiting emissions does not eliminate our moral obligation to address the problem.

Climate change is not a political problem, it's a technological problem. Morality is irrelevant. The mindless assumption that something can be done to fix it if only we have the will to do so - shamed if need be by moral suasion - is either very stupid or very devious.

Both, it often seems, which is a good demonstration of why politics is inadequate to the problem. Those in the game lack the intellectual power to understand the issues much less make useful responses. The more political power they have the worse things get since they do the wrong things and displace some of the right things that would otherwise have happened. They are the drunken posers who suck the air out of the room and make intelligent conversation more difficult.]]> Psychoceramica back40 2009-06-28T19:51:17-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001214.html So far Obama has been an utter failure. The problems are difficult and his administration has not been up to the task. Part of that is political distortion of policies, and part is incompetence. Some think that the worst is yet to come, but immanent.

Not since a misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey. . .

It's what Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, might call a "man-caused disaster," a phrase she coined to replace the politically incorrect "terrorist attack." But no terrorist could ever dream of inflicting as much damage as this bill. . .

It is the largest tax increase in American history — a tax on all Americans — even the 95% that President Obama pledged would never see a tax increase.

It's a political bill that could come to a vote now that a deal was struck with farm-state legislators concerned about the taxation of even bovine flatulence.

As part of the agreement reached Tuesday night and announced by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Beverly Hills, agricultural oversight for cap-and-trade was transferred from the Environmental Protection Agency to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. . .

The American Farm Bureau warns that cap and trade would cost the average farmer $175 on every dairy cow and $80 for beef cattle. So farm-state politics trumped climate change. . .

And what would we get for all this pain? According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050 — the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill — would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius. . .

Those who are sincerely concerned about climate change should be appalled since this legislation assures that nothing useful will be done. All of the political and material capital needed for useful policies is being squandered.]]> Enviro-Politics back40 2009-06-26T06:25:16-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001213.html A couple of years ago there was a flurry of interest in hydrothermal carbonisation, another way to make char from biomass.

Earlier we referred to carbon-negative energy systems that rely on gasification and biochar sequestration: biomass is gasified which results in a carbon monoxide and hydrogen rich gas that can be used for energy or transformed into ultra-clean synthetic biofuels via the Fischer-Tropsch process, whereas a fraction becomes bio-char that can be stored in soils (using a technique known as 'terra preta'). Similar techniques can be build around pyrolysis processes (earlier post). In such systems, soil fertility would be gradually enhanced, 'historic' CO2 would be sequestered and clean biofuels could be used to power our societies.

Only biomass can be used for the creation of such carbon-negative energy systems that clean up our emissions from the past. Other renewables are carbon-neutral at best, meaning they can only reduce future CO2 emissions - something many scientists think is not enough to avert dangerous climate change.

Maria-Magdalena Titirici, Arne Thomas and Markus Antonietti of the Department of Colloid Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, now describe a new, highly efficient though 'low-tech' way to use biomass as a tool to clean up past emissions. Their research appears in an open access article in the New Journal of Chemistry, in which they suggest creating "turbo-rainforests" based on fast-growing energy crops that are grown, turned into bio-coal via a process known as hydrothermal carbonization (HTC), and then stored into 'carbon landfills', while deriving energy from the process. The technique can be practised on an ultra-large scale, and can thus be described as a geo-engineering option - one that is actually technically and economically feasible.

Importantly, in contrast to other biomass carbonisation techniques that require dry biomass, the hydrothermal carbonisation process is a highly efficient 'wet' process that avoids complicated drying schemes and costly isolation procedures. The resulting carbonaceous materials also open a new field of chemistry, full of novel possibilities and challenges that may lead to the development of new (nano)materials: . . .

Finally, to summarize the outcome of the optimization trials, catalyzed HTC required only the heating of a biomass dispersion under weakly acidic conditions in a closed reaction vessel for 4–24 h to temperatures of around 200 °C. This is indeed an extremely simple, cheap and easily scalable process. Besides that, HTC has a number of other practical advantages. HTC inherently requires wet starting products or biomass, as effective dehydration only occurs in the presence of water, plus the final carbon can be easily filtered from the reaction solution. This way, complicated drying schemes and costly isolation procedures can be conceptually avoided. In addition, under acidic conditions and below 200 °C, most of the original carbon stays bound to the final structure. Carbon structures produced by this route—either for deposit or materials use—are therefore the most CO2-efficient.

Once activated, HTC is a spontaneous, exothermic process. It liberates up to a third of the combustion energy stored in the carbohydrate throughout dehydration (due to the high thermodynamic stability of water). . .

Therefore, we strongly believe that the carbonization of fast growing plants is currently the most efficient process for removing atmospheric CO2, binding it into depositable carbon or even as useful solids.

For a negative atmospheric CO2 balance, the generated carbonaceous materials have to be deposited on a large scale, and potential carbon landfills may lay the foundations for chemical starting materials of the next century.

Another quite attractive application with immediate impact is their use as water- and ion-binding components to improve soil quality. This is a chemical process that is also found in nature, and carbonaceous soil is presumably the largest active carbon sink on earth. The proposed terra preta, i.e. artificial coal-enriched soil as a potential carbon sink of global dimensions, has already been mentioned in soil research, improving soil quality and plant growth at the same time. Instead of clearing the rainforest for questionable palm oil production, such a carbon-reinforced "turbo-rainforest" would produce at least 10 times the energy, but stored in carbon, whilst also being CO2-negative for the climate and supporting biodiversity at the same time.

But some question the whole concept.

The world already has a huge amount of coal in storage, and the burning of that coal will be responsible for a great deal of global warming. So if you want to use plants as a way to do something about climate change, the best thing you can do is not engineer them to make new coal, but simply burn their biomass for energy and leave an equivalent amount of coal safely unperturbed. Burning the carbon stored in plants before microbes can eat it all up and leaving coal in the ground makes a lot more sense than trying to store away the carbon.

And this in turn illustrates a larger lesson that bears strongly on tackling the carbon-climate crisis. The fact that a great deal of energy was stored away in fossil fuels over time has conditioned people to think of energy itself as something embodied in fuels. But energy, which cannot be created or destroyed, is far better seen in terms of flows than of stores.

An extraordinary amount of solar energy flows through the earth-system, coming in as sunlight, leaving as infrared radiation. On its way through the system it runs through many different channels, like the wind and the waves and the carbon cycle. The challenge of the carbon-climate crisis is to put to work these flows and others — the flow of heat stored for billions of years in the interior of the earth, and of energy stored away earlier still in the nuclei of radioactive elements — in ways that make civilization independent of the fossil fuels stored away in the crust.

The question of how to use the biosphere against global warming is thus better seen in terms of harvesting energy from the carbon cycle, rather than storing away carbon. And there is much that can be done here. Biomass already supplies a lot of energy — a large part of the world cooks with it, for example — but the ways in which it is used are terribly inefficient. New agronomy, new crops and new technologies can all add to the flow of energy out of the plant and into the cooker battery, hot water or whatever. In that way, bioenergy can be substituted for fossil fuel.

In itself, expanding the carbon cycle this way cannot be the whole solution. While the world’s supply of solar energy is for all intents and purposes unlimited, its supply of well-watered, arable land is not. And although photosynthesis is so impressive in its workings as to be almost miraculous, it is not particularly efficient. Even in a plantation geared to nothing but the maximal growth of biomass, it is difficult to store away much more than 2 or 3 percent of the solar energy that hits the leaves, and it’s hard to see how that can be improved on a great deal. (There might be better efficiencies with algae and bacteria, but as yet they come with other problems.)

At that sort of efficiency — and bearing in mind that a lot of land is needed to feed people, and that a fair bit of the rest houses ecosystems we value and much more of the rest isn’t really cultivatable — bioenergy can never be more than a small-to-medium part of the energy supply in a fossil-fuel-free world.

But there is no need for a single solution; the more there are on offer, the merrier. And bioenergy, done properly, has a poetry of its own. To know how to use the mechanisms that keep the atmosphere alive in order to prevent any further harm to humanity is good in itself.

At any given moment there will be more carbon tied up in biomass than in the recent past, which does reduce the amount in the air by some amount. And if some of that biomass is used for energy generation of the sort that produces a char residual - such as in some CHP pyrolysis systems - and the char is used as a soil amendment, then even more biomass can be produced. (I won't repeat why this is so here, see earlier posts if necessary, but you ought to know by now.)

This won't be enough to drop CO2 levels back to those of the last century as some would like, but it is a better use of biomass than simply burning it for its energy and so displacing some amount of fossil fuel use. Switching to other energy sources, such as the geothermal and nuclear sources mentioned above, will be required to reduce the use of fossil fuels, though they will always be the smart choice for some purposes.

NB - See a site search on stocks and flows to get some idea of why Oliver's analysis is compelling for me, though I have a somewhat different view. Stocks, flows and accumulation have been a minor theme here.]]> Energy back40 2009-06-24T20:25:36-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001212.html Sagebrush chat.

The sagebrush communicated and cooperated with other branches of themselves to avoid being eaten by grasshoppers, Karban said. Although the research is in its early stages, the scientists suspect that the plants warn their own kind of impending danger by emitting volatile cues. This may involve secreting chemicals that deter herbivores or make the plant less profitable for herbivores to eat, he said.

What this research means is that plants are "capable of more sophisticated behavior than we imagined," said Karban, who researches the interactions between herbivores (plant-eating organisms) and their host plants.

"Plants are capable of responding to complex cues that involve multiple stimuli," Karban said. "Plants not only respond to reliable cues in their environments but also produce cues that communicate with other plants and with other organisms, such as pollinators, seed disperses, herbivores and enemies of those herbivores."

I just wanted to make one point: There's knowledge work and there's manual work, and the idea that these are two very different things seemed very bogus to me. I needed to make the case for how much thinking goes on in the trades. . .

Crawford’s book arrives just as a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the demands and rewards of the modern economy is coalescing into something like a movement. In 1998, the sociologist Richard Sennett published “The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism,” in which he saw soul-destroying consequences in our new work habits—endless hours spent at flexible jobs, performing abstract tasks on computer screens. Last year, in “The Craftsman” (Yale; $18), Sennett suggested that skilled labor could be a way to resist corporate mediocrity. The environmentalist writer Bill McKibben proposed something similar in “Deep Economy,” which condemned the ruinous effects of endless economic expansion and urged readers to live smaller, simpler, more local lives. This artisanal revival has been particularly pronounced among foodies, thanks in part to the writer Michael Pollan, who helped popularize an American variant of the Italian culinary-agrarian movement known as Slow Food. In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food,” Pollan surveyed the excesses of the “industrial food chain” and paid thoughtful tribute to small farms and local produce. (You can see evidence of Pollan’s influence on the White House lawn, where Michelle Obama has planted an organic vegetable garden.) These ideas have crept farther toward the mainstream in the wake of the economic collapse, which inspired calls for a return to real work—a return, in other words, to activities more tangible (and, it was hoped, less perilous) than complex swaps of abstract financial products. Crawford means his book to be a philosophical manifesto for a dawning age: an ode to old-fashioned hard work, and an argument that localism can help cure our spiritual and economic woes. An excerpt appeared in the Times Magazine, where Pollan is a contributing writer, and it stayed near the top of the paper’s most e-mailed list for a week.

It seems that every generation discovers anew what Crawford has discovered: that work is — that we are — stupid and getting stupider. In “The Wealth of Nations,” which appeared in 1776, Adam Smith argued that while professional specialization broadened the economic activity of a society, it narrowed the lives of workers themselves. “Among nations of hunters, the lowest and rudest state of society, such as we find it among the native tribes of North America, every man is a warrior, as well as a hunter,” he wrote. By contrast, a worker with a dull, repetitive job would inevitably degenerate: “The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.” Crawford’s low-level data analysts are about as miserable as Smith’s “manufactory” drones, and for the same reason: they’re bored.

Laborers are "generally held in bad repute," Xenophon wrote about 700 years later, "and with justice." Manual jobs keep men too busy to be decent companions or good citizens, "so that men engaged in them must ever appear to be both bad friends and poor defenders of their country."

In Ion, Plato wrote that techne (in the sense of an art or craft) represented a threat to peace, order and good government for which Reason and Law “by common consent have ever been deemed best.” Aristotle saw it as representative of the imperfection of human imitation of nature. For the ancient Greeks, it signified all the Mechanical Arts including medicine and music. The English aphorism, ‘gentlemen don’t work with their hands,’ is said to have originated in ancient Greece in relation to their cynical view on the arts. Due to this view, it was only fitted for the lower class while the upper class practiced the Liberal Arts of ‘free’ men (Dorter 1973).

I think it varies by individual with no connection to work type. Many academics are leather bottomed time servers who haven't had a thought in decades. Their lives and work are mind numbingly empty, as much or more so as any drudge that Smith worried about. And in each case it is not necessarily so. People choose to be empty headed or not.

The "artisanal revival" movement is just another update on the old arts & crafts type movements with which we have been afflicted for a couple of centuries at least. They usually are accompanied by a delusional populist socialism which does some harm and then fizzles again since it's merely fashion. It's escapism, a petulant refusal to think rather than what Crawford claimed was his main point that there's a lot of thinking going on in the trades. Thinking and daydreaming are not quite the same thing. Fantasy is not enough.

The previous post about fertilizer myths and the unthinking analyses and prescriptions of "some researchers" can serve as an example. A grower may be seen to be doing repetitive physical labor but that provides no insight into his mental life. He may be a delusional day dreamer living a retro fantasy - Mother Nature's son growing heirloom tomatoes for wealthy fashion victims - or he may be doing rigorous analysis and prescription for improved agronomic methods. It looks the same to an observer and is not a function of the work itself, rather it depends on the character and intellect of the grower.]]> cognition back40 2009-06-20T21:24:12-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001210.html About the role of gossip, mainly from media (including us), in myth making.

When Slashdot runs the slightly misleading headline, “Real Nanotechnology Getting Closer, Says Drexler” (with a link to the technology roadmap — lots of downloads!), the Tech Talk blog at IEEE Spectrum quite naturally reports this as “Eric Drexler has just been quoted as saying ‘Real nanotechnology is getting closer’”… and thus inadvertently reinforces the myth that so-called “real nanotechnology” has little connection with what researchers know is the real real nanotechnology, in the lab today — or at least, that Eric Drexler thinks so, and is rude about it, too. Supposedly. It’s a quote, right?

Well, no… But it’s a fine example of how myths take root and obscure reality.

Synthetic fertilizers have dramatically increased food production worldwide. But the unintended costs to the environment and human health have been substantial. Nitrogen runoff from farms has contaminated surface and groundwater and helped create massive "dead zones" in coastal areas, such as the Gulf of Mexico. And ammonia from fertilized cropland has become a major source of air pollution, while emissions of nitrous oxide form a potent greenhouse gas.

There's no difference between fertilizers. Urea is urea whether it comes out of a retort or the excretory organs of animals. Ammonia is ammonia whether it comes from a catalyzed reaction of hydrogen and nitrogen in a pressure vessel or the action of soil bacteria living and growing in a pile of leaves.

In any case, runoff from farms is unconnected unless one assumes that farms can grow something, anything, without fertile soil. The emission of nitrogen gasses to the air happens everywhere that organic matter, water and bacteria exist. That's the nitrogen cycle. It's been going on since life began. Some bacteria fix nitrogen from the air, mineralizing it so that plants can use it, while others do the reverse, consuming the fixed nitrogen and emitting it back to the atmosphere as a variety of gasses from ammonia to nitrous oxide to unreactive nitrogen gas, the main component of the atmosphere and of use to no plants.

The problem isn't synthetic fertilizers, it's agronomic systems. The threat of runoff and gas emissions is the same from fields dosed with granules of mineral nitrogen or dosed with a plowed down green manure crop of clover or soya in preparation for sowing a cereal crop. The trick is to have all the mineral nitrogen required and desired by the cereal available at just the time that it is needed, increasing the percentage of nutrients that get into the plant rather than being leached away or consumed by soil organisms. It's an ecosystem, a competition, and test tube perfection isn't the goal. You try to win more than you lose, but be real: you will suffer losses.

The proper attitude is to investigate why losses occur and intervene to reduce them. For example, applying nitrogen in the form of ammonium rather than as urea, anhydrous ammonia or organic matter is already past the gas phase of the multi-step process of bacterial nitrate synthesis. And unlike nitrate it is attracted to many soil particles so it doesn't leach away readily, NH4+ rather than NO3-. Its positive charge makes it sticky in soil rather than being repulsed like negatively charged nitrate. This isn't a total solution, life goes on and bacteria will still consume it and in the end send it back to the air if not taken up by plants before then, but it's better.

There are many such practices that improve agriculture to get more benefit from nutrients while losing less to the environment. Managing soil PH and carbon content helps. Timing matters. Balanced fertility - having all the nutrients needed available at the right time in the proper proportions - matters. Water management matters.

These and other negative environmental impacts have led some researchers and policymakers to call for reductions in the use of synthetic fertilizers.

"Most agricultural systems follow a trajectory from too little in the way of added nutrients to too much, and both extremes have substantial human and environmental costs," . . .

"Some parts of the world, including much of China, use far too much fertilizer," Vitousek said. "But in sub-Saharan Africa, where 250 million people remain chronically malnourished, nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrient inputs are inadequate to maintain soil fertility." . . .

In China, where fertilizer manufacturing is government subsidized, the average grain yield per acre grew 98 percent between 1977 and 2005, while nitrogen fertilizer use increased a dramatic 271 percent, according to government statistics. "Nutrient additions to many fields [in China] far exceed those in the United States and northern Europe--and much of the excess fertilizer is lost to the environment, degrading both air and water quality," the authors wrote. . .

Zhang and his co-workers also demonstrated that nitrogen fertilizer use could be cut in half without loss of yield or grain quality, in the process reducing nitrogen losses by more than 50 percent. . .

In a 2004 study in west Kenya, co-author Pedro Sanchez and colleagues found that farmers used only about 6 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre (7 kilograms per hectare)--little more than 1 percent of the total used by Chinese farmers. And unlike China, cultivated soil in Kenya suffered an annual net loss of 46 pounds of nitrogen per acre (52 kilograms per hectare) removed from the field by harvests.

"Africa is a totally different situation than China," said Sanchez, director of tropical agriculture at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. "Unlike most regions of the world, crop yields have not increased substantially in sub-Saharan Africa. Nitrogen inputs are inadequate to maintain soil fertility and to feed people. So it's not a matter of nutrient pollution but nutrient depletion."

China is phasing out ABC in favor of urea. It's more stable, but still evaporates at a rate as much as 10% per day unless it is incorporated into soil and heavily watered. Even then there are loses since urea isn't useful to plants. Soil bacteria must convert it to nitrate (or to a lesser extent ammonium) and there are losses in the process since it passes through the ammonia gas phase.

When all of these factors are considered the narrative changes. A more informed analysis leads to utterly different prescriptions.

In the Midwestern United States, over-fertilization was the norm from the 1970s until the mid-1990s. During that period, tons of excess nitrogen and phosphorus entered the Mississippi River Basin and drained into the Gulf of Mexico, where the large influx of nutrients has triggered huge algal blooms. The decaying algae use up vast quantities of dissolved oxygen, producing a seasonal low-oxygen dead zone in the Gulf that in some years is bigger than the state of Connecticut.

Since 1995, the imbalance of nutrients--particularly phosphorus--has decreased in the Midwestern United States, in part because better farming techniques have increased yields. Statistics show that from 2003 to 2005, annual corn yields in parts of the Midwestern United States and north China were almost the same, even though Chinese farmers used six times more nitrogen fertilizer than their American counterparts and generated nearly 23 times the amount of excess nitrogen.

"U.S. farmers are managing fertilizer more efficiently now," said co-author Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment. However, environmental problems have not disappeared.

My interest in these matters - expressed in many previous posts - is that to get the production I need I must import fertility. The less I import the better. A combination of home grown fertility (nitrogen fixing bacteria), soil chemistry management (PH, CEC, AEC, redox potential, soil life etc.), and an intimate knowledge of the life cycles and nutrient requirements of the forage crops that I grow helps me achieve these objectives and turn a profit. That's real sustainability. My reward for smart and hard work is that I get to continue to do smart and hard work until I drop and my place is taken by another (gender indifferent) fellow.

It doesn't matter to the plants whether I import fertility as forage, which animals turn into manure and urine and cooperatively spread fairly evenly on the land, or as manure or compost that I have to spread, or as little white granules or variously colored dusts that I spread with a great deal less work and cost. What matters is that the end result is well timed, balanced fertility. As it happens I do all of these things, opportunistically, since my end objective is to keep home and hearth together and groceries on the table, just like any grower, even those in China and Kenya.]]> Ag-tech back40 2009-06-20T17:01:56-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001209.html Aerosols - small particles suspended in the atmosphere - have a variety of effects that directly or indirectly affect climate concerns. Not all aerosols have the same effects.

Aerosols that scatter — such as sulphates, nitrates and organic carbon — tend to cool the Earth by sending some incoming radiation back into space, while absorbing aerosols, such as black carbon (formed from the incomplete burning of fossil fuels), heat up the Earth’s atmosphere.

. . . calculations based on satellite measurements assume that the relative concentrations of different aerosols in the atmosphere have remained constant throughout the industrial age. This is a problem because calculating the cooling effect of anthropogenic aerosols involves subtracting the effect of aerosols naturally present in the atmosphere, in other words working out the relative strength of scattering and absorption before the industrial era. It turns out, in fact, that emissions of black carbon have increased by more than a factor of six whereas output of the various scattering aerosols has gone up by a factor of only three or four. . .

Myhre calculates a new best estimate of -0.3 Wm-2 for the cooling of the direct aerosol effect. He says that this will tend to reduce future projections of global warming. This is because the expected drop in aerosol production will not lead to as large a temperature rise as previously thought. Indeed, he estimates that the direct aerosol effect offsets only 10% of global warming. However, he points out that there is still some uncertainty in the vertical distribution of aerosols within the atmosphere, which is significant in so far as absorptive aerosols have a much greater effect when located above a cloud than when below.

Myhre also points out that the direct aerosol effect is smaller than another phenomenon known as the “indirect” effect, in which aerosols enhance scattering through cloud formation. The IPPC’s estimate for the indirect effect is -0.7 Wm-2, ranging from -1.8 Wm-2 to -0.3 Wm-2. Edwin Cartlidge

It is a given of astrophysics that stars like the sun get brighter over time. So in the Earth’s early history, three billion years back and more, the sun must have been distinctly fainter than it is today – so much fainter that, were the Earth then to have had an atmosphere anything like today’s, the planet’s surface would have frozen solid. . .

One of the ideas spurred by this observation was that the Earth could have a rough and ready sort of thermostat.

In the presence of water, the rocks of the Earth’s crust will react with the carbon dioxide continuously pumped out of the planet’s innards to form carbonate ions that end up incorporated into more rocks. The warmer the planet, the more vigorous this reaction is. But the more vigorous the reaction is, the more of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide it uses up. And the more carbon dioxide is used up, the cooler things get. This is what is known as a negative feedback – negative in the sense that it damps down fluctuations rather than amplifying them. And this feedback system offers the climate a way to respond to the gradual heating up of the sun. A high level of carbon dioxide in the original atmosphere would have warmed the planet in the age of the faint young sun, but slowly have become incorporated into rocks as the sun warmed up; the thermostat would have kept the temperature much the same throughout the process. . .

In a paper called “Life span of the biosphere,” Lovelock and his friend Michael Whitfield pointed out that the ever-warming sun would eventually create a world warm enough that all carbon dioxide would be immediately sucked up by the rocks, and there would no longer be enough for the plants that need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. No photosynthesis meant a massively pauperized biosphere bereft of oxygen and energy, the merest shadow of its former self.

The idea that the ever-warming sun would make the planet uninhabitable was well established, but it had always been assumed that it would do so directly, through its heat, not indirectly, through changing the composition of the atmosphere so far that life was no longer able to hold onto it. Finding that Gaia could “die” like this fitted into the way that Lovelock’s thinking was developing at the time towards a sense that Gaian self-regulation was limited in various ways, and that when those limits were reached the system might swap from one state to another. . .

Further work on the lifespan of the biosphere extended it from the 100 million years Lovelock and Whitfield had calculated to something more like a billion; but that still put the end far closer than solar physics alone would suggest. This week a clever paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests a way to extend the lifespan further still. Coming from the lab of Joe Kirschvink, an Earth scientist with a penchant for outrageous hypotheses, the paper by King-Fai Li and his colleagues deals with a rarely considered way life might modify the climate – not by removing carbon dioxide, which plants need, but by removing most of the rest of the atmosphere, which is in some ways surplus to requirements.

The amount of infra-red radiation absorbed by carbon dioxide depends on the ambient pressure. Decrease the pressure and the absorption decreases too. If atmospheric pressure started to drop quite severely in a billion years or so the greenhouse effect could be reduced enough for a modicum of carbon dioxide to persist. Thus photosynthesis might persist much longer than other studies have suggested – two billion years or more. . .

The paper by Li et al does not provide a compelling mechanism for the pressure drop; but it notes that most of the atmosphere, by bulk, is nitrogen, and that living creatures are capable of fixing the free nitrogen of the atmosphere into other compounds, some of which can be buried away in the crust of the earth. . .

This brings to mind work that a young scientist called Colin Goldblatt presented last December at the American Geophysical Union’s annual fall meeting in San Francisco. Goldblatt’s focus was Sagan’s original problem: the faint young sun paradox. Recently, thinking about how to keep the world warm under a faint sun has tended to stress a swaddling blanket of carbon dioxide and methane, but there may be some holes in this theory; the warming power of methane under such conditions has been overstated, and there is some evidence that the atmosphere didn’t actually contain the amount of carbon dioxide needed.

Goldblatt argued in San Francisco that this greenhouse deficit could be offset by increased atmospheric pressure – specifically, a nitrogen level more or less twice what it is today. When life appeared it would have sucked this nitrogen into sediments, but plate tectonics, by reprocessing the sediments, would have liberated it again, keeping levels high. At some point, though, the gradual cooling of the Earth’s interior (stars may heat up, but planets cool down) would have slowed that tectonic recycling, and the amount of nitrogen stored deep in the Earth would have started to rise.

A deeper atmosphere in the past might have been even more affected than it is now, causing a higher loss rate. Fluctuations in the magnetosphere, which are common, may have had some role as well. Those fluctuations may be a product of changes in ocean circulation, which have been theorized to have a causal effect in creating the magnetosphere. Plate tectonics as well as episodes of freezing over seem like they would alter circulation.

Humans have been affecting the nitrogen cycle by converting abundant but unreactive nitrogen gas into forms more useful to plants. Many enviro-whingers complain of this but I wonder if it isn't fitting given that humans have also been raising carbon dioxide concentrations. Plants are happy about both of these alterations. As CO2 continues to rise, perhaps at an increasing rate due to feedbacks, increasing useable nitrogen could have mitigating effects. It seems improbable that this could reduce air pressure, and so the heating effects of GHGs, unless it continued for a very long time, but in this age of geoengineering speculation it seems proper to be imaginative and entertain outrageous hypotheses until they can be verified or proven to be flawed.]]> Natural Systems back40 2009-06-17T13:20:11-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001207.html Here's another report of the new bioRefinery project in Iowa that will produce ammonia.

Natural gas is used to make ammonia, the basic component for nitrogen fertilizer. Prices for natural gas rose dramatically in the U.S. over the past 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Because natural gas is cheaper in other countries, the U.S. has increasingly turned to foreign supplies for ammonia since 1990.

"We don't relish being in Ukraine's shoes," Oswald said, referring to Russia's embargo on natural gas supplies to its neighbor during the winter.

The cost of natural gas now accounts for up to 90 percent of the cost of making nitrogen fertilizer, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

SynGest says its system for making fertilizer also reduces the heat-trapping gases stored in the atmosphere. Corncobs are from plants that consumed carbon dioxide as they grew, and the gasification process needed to make the ammonia leaves behind a black residue, called biochar, that can be added back to the fields to improve the soil. Biochar also stores carbon dioxide.

"If energy supplies in general become tight we can always turn down the thermostat and we can always carpool," Oswald said. "But when nitrogen fertilizer is missing or reduced in farming, crop production drops by a measurable amount. That directly affects the amount of food available, which is not replaceable. You can't just hitch a meal the way you can hitch a ride."

Dennis Harding, a former farmer who directs new business development for the Iowa Farm Bureau, said one of the most attractive parts of the SynGest plan is that it would set a more stable price for fertilizer.

"Over the last couple years grain prices went up but inputs went up as well because of changes in energy costs, and we had a lot of volatility," Harding said. "Sometimes volatility is the hardest thing to manage."

I've been writing about the sensibility of such systems for a long time. Ammonia is also a fuel. The image of a grower driving an ammonia fueled tractor to spread ammonia fertilizer in fields to grow crops that not only produce food and fiber but also produce more ammonia has a pleasing circularity. When we add that the carbon sucked from the air by those crops is also spread back on the fields in a durable form that accumulates over time and improves the soil in many ways, not least by reducing the need for ammonia, the system promises increasing returns or reduced costs, or both.

This would also be a better use for the methane produced by manure lagoons, landfills and anaerobic compost digesters. Just burning it for energy production seems wasteful when it could be used to create more biomass. Methane is also a transportation fuel, so a similar though lesser sort of circularity could be achieved in a biomass -> anaerobic digestion -> methane system. Compost isn't a durable form of carbon, so that benefit would be lost, but some small amount of humus is produced which is semi-durable.

I expect such systems to become more common as fossil fuels become more expensive. There's still a great deal of natural gas to be mined, but it isn't often near where it is needed and is subject to all manner of political gaming, all of which will drive prices higher and make availability unreliable.]]> Ag-tech back40 2009-06-15T13:44:26-08:00 http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001206.html Dark siders - advocates, activists, believers, politicians, opportunists and grifters - are always wrong. They don't reason from evidence to form sensible views, they exploit evidence - spin, omission, selection, exaggeration etc. - to advance their agendas. This isn't just deceitful, isn't just marketing for power and profit, because they confuse themselves as well as their victims, and compound the problem.

There are limits. Eventually nonsense positions become impossible for even such posers to hold and they have to convert, be born again, but they don't learn from their mistakes, they just go on as before with a new agenda.

If we’re going to avoid climate disaster, we’re going to have start getting a lot more direct. We’re going to have to think about cooling the planet. . .

Many of us who have been watching this subject closely have gone from being skeptics to advocates. Very reluctant advocates, to be sure, but advocates nonetheless.

What has changed? Quite simply, as the effects of global warming have worsened, policy makers have failed to meet the challenge. As a result, if we want to avoid an unprecedented global catastrophe, we may have no other choice but to reduce the impact of global warning, alongside focusing on the factors that are causing it in the first place. That is, while we continue to work aggressively to reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, we also need to consider lowering the temperature of the Earth itself.

let’s be clear about one other thing: We will still have to radically reduce carbon emissions, and do so quickly. We will still have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and adopt substantially more sustainable agricultural methods. We will still have to deal with the effects of ecosystems damaged by carbon overload.

The global institutions we rely on to deal with a problem like climate change seem unable to look past short-term roadblocks and regional interests. At the same time, climate scientists are shouting louder than ever about the speed and intensity of environmental changes coming from global warming.

In short, although we know what to do to stop global warming, we’re running out of time to do it and show no interest in moving faster. So here’s where geoengineering steps in: It gives us time to act.

It’s imperative that we increase funding for geoengineering research, building the kinds of models and simulations necessary to allow us to weed out the approaches with dangerous, surprising consequences.

Our overall goal must remain the reduction and then elimination of greenhouse-gas emissions as swiftly as humanly possible. This will require feats of political will and courage around the world. What geoengineering offers us is the time to make it happen.