Climate Crisis: The Challenge of Our Times

 It has become easy to email members of the House and Senate...to educate our leaders, sometimes!

http://www.enn.com/press_releases/3643

 I think this effort is really important since it is worldwide:

http://www.earthhour.org/

 Hey out there,

Anyone listening?  Speak now :)  I don't want to delete this community.

kmo had another great podcast over at the C-Realm the other day, interviewing long-time guest Albert K. Bates. This time Bates talked about something of which I've heard not even a peep: Biochar.

From one of his blog posts on the topic, Bates describes biochar as a charcoal formed from inactive, crystalized carbon. The end result of the biochar process produces a fractal structure with amazing longevity and pourosity: "One gram of biochar has a surface area of 1000 square meters." Once amended to the soil, this surface area provides the dirt with great advantages for growing plants, including crops:

In the soil, biochar’s cavities fill up with nutrient foodstocks for microbes, much like a kitchen pantry. The microbes move in, and pretty soon hyphae of fungi appear. The hyphae are a fast road for nutrients and moisture – a trade exchange route to plant and tree roots. Examination of biochar-amended soils a few months after treatment found that vigorous fungal colonization was common.

If you can imagine the char as providing a coral reef-like structure, full of tiny polyps and crevices, it attracts all manner of soil organisms to it. If the pantry is empty, then those microbes will go to work to stock it, which is why biochar denitrifies over-fertilized, burned out farmland and replaces it with slow-release fertility . . . .

Bates quoted this article on the topic, which notes the almost enigmatic discovery of this ancient agricultural practice. Biochar was produced and introduced to the soil thousands of years ago producing "Terra Preta:"

Terra Preta ("black earth") was discovered by Dutch soil scientist Wim Sombroek in the 1950's, when he discovered pockets of rich, fertile soil amidst the Amazon rainforest (otherwise known for its poor, thin soils), which he documented in a 1966 book "Amazon Soils". Similar pockets have since been found in other sites in Ecuador and Peru, and also in Western Africa (Benin and Liberia) and the Savannas of South Africa. Carbon dating has shown them to date back between 1,780 and 2,260 years.

Terra preta is found only where people lived - it is an artificial, human-made soil, which originated before the arrival of Europeans in South America. The soil is rich in minerals including phosphorus, calcium, zinc, and manganese - however its most important ingredient is charcoal, the source of terra preta's color.

Terra preta's promised improvement to soils seems almost too good to be true:

This year food shortages, caused in part by the diminishing quantity and quality of the world's soil, have led to riots in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2030, when today's toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratchetting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. "Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt," says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO.

Another topic that induces this MEGO phenomenon: Global climate change. And here terra preta steps in and offers an intriguing possibility; low-tech carbon sequestration. After all, these carbon crystals survived for thousands of years in Amazonian and Australian soil. What if this burying of charcoal were revived not only to revive crashing farm yields, but to simply remove carbon from the atmosphere? Bates quotes Tim Flannery:

Professor Tim Flannery told the gathering that even if we shut down every coal plant and stop all emissions of greenhouse gases from industry worldwide, the dangerous warming of our planet would continue for centuries. “That is the point at which you realize that biochar is really, really important,” he said.

Flannery suggested that 8 percent of CO2 is currently going into terrestrial vegetation, but if we could double that, we could buy ourselves time to work on moving away from coal and oil. Flannery said that we have to be mindful of the historic debt incurred by the one billion people whose ancestors made the industrial revolution. “That carbon debt to the other 6 billion could be repaid at 5 percent per year with biochar,” he said. (Emphasis mine.)

And that, as Bates told kmo on the C-Realm, could reverse atmospheric carbon concentrations to pre-industrial levels in a matter of decades, not centuries. And at a fraction of the cost of some proposed schemes.

I'll be reading Bates' new book on the subject as soon as it is available. Fascinating stuff.

what i think by my own thinking about to what leads burning fuel that is pulled out from underground - in my blog. it opens only from 5:54 to 22:54 utc+3 now. i post here because if it is in my blog without links to it almost nobody reads it.

My Dream is to change the world for the better. I currently think that our society is very selfish, materialistic and disconnected. This world is lacking so much love, unity, art, creation and faith. I feel as though people have forgotten the meaning of unconditional love, true happiness, true beauty, nature & so much more. Im here to remind the world. All it takes is one. This year, Im dedicating an entire year to the world. Im dedicating 365 of my life with acts of goodness for humanity. Everyday I will blog about my expierence of that day in the hopes of inspiring the world to do better & be on the pursuit of changing peoples lives!I know all it takes is passion, drive, a warm heart, one HUGE Dream, & I will never STOP!
My blog has alot of Eco-Friendly facts.
http://hofit365.blogspot.com/

Perhaps the time to stop trying to hold back the sea
(King Canute tried, and failed)
and ask how are we going to cope with the adverse effects
of Global Warming / Climate Change.

The planet is changing.
And so must the people.

We may be facing exinction.
Our systems are not weather-proof.
Our housing is not water-tight.
We depend heavily on electricity and petrol - lorries and cars...
but these will not survive a deep freeze.

Think!
Adapt!

NOW.
Co-ordinate, produce the essential equipment that's going to be needed
such as decent emergency shelters, mini solar & wind energy production kits...

Be prepared.

Without disputing that there is a problem, I think we can benefit from having more transparency and balance in any investigation we make http://sensit.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/science-is-a-business-for-profit/

http://brighterplanet.com/project_fund_projects/48

+++

i just voted three times for this awesome project which will help move Appalachia away from MTR mining and towards a sustainable, locally-owned, decentralized model [by utilizing timber industry byproducts.]

the project will entail "feedstock feasibility studies and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification to ensure sustainable forestry."

please vote today! signing up for brighterplanet.com only takes about 75 seconds. they are in second place and the prize is a $5000 grant!

other suggestions on how to win this thing:

- blog about it!
- send the link and description out to list serves
- make it a point of process at any meetings which might relate
[eco-advocates? new college climate justice squad? alliance of concerned students? everglades earth first? black manatee collective? st. pete for peace?]
- send a LTE [letter to the editor] in your local paper
- etc etc!!

xoxo and THANKS!

as follows is the full project description:

( click to read more about the project!Collapse )

The current voting period ends on SUNDAY the 15th of November, so please don't put this off!
Also, you do not have to be a U.S citizen to vote.
Thanks, and please do repost... :)

 We need to get BACK to 350, asap.  Learn about it here.