Land Development Releases Greenhouse Gases

Land use change releases stored carbon and should be counted under Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reporting.  

Example of a wildflower meadow (left) that was bulldozed to create a parking lot (right). This land use change results in direct emissions of stored soil carbon and plant biomass, as well as continuing opportunity costs: the meadow can no longer accumulate sequestered carbon. If this land is owned by the developing company, this would count as Scope 1 Emissions under GHG reporting requirements.

New GHG reporting standards for land use change are due to be finalized in 2024. According to these new standards,

"Companies shall:

-Account for land use change emissions from land carbon stock decreases across all carbon pools (biomass, soil organic carbon and dead organic matter).

-Account for and report direct land use change (dLUC) emissions or statistical land use change (sLUC) emissions in scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3."

This is important because, according to the IPCC AR6 (2023), land use change accounts for approximately 15% of anthropogenic emissions.  Interestingly, the parts of the land and ocean that have not been developed by humans still absorb 30% of our emissions.  As we degrade more and more land and water, the Earth loses this buffering capacity, in addition to the extra emissions created from land use change.

Saving Biodiversity is Essential to Stop Global Warming

This simple message -that we can't save the Earth without saving the actual physical, water-and-soil-and-plant Earth- needs to be said and re-said until everyone understands.  

We've been disappointed by the scientists, leaders, and especially the "environmentalists" (like Sierra Club, Audubon, Union of Concerned Scientists, etc...) who have decided to advocate for industrial "renewable" energy as the only solution.  They've looked at the massive environmental destruction required to mine, manufacture, and construct solar and wind farms and connecting transmission lines - and said yes, we must destroy the world to save the world.

However, there is hope within the current system.  The push to save biodiversity, while sometimes sidelined, has significant support in the COP15 agreement.  That agreement, and related work by TNFD, will have to be considered, often for the very first time, by every company and gov't with sustainability disclosures.  

Even the IPCC addresses the importance of land use - the latest AR6* still shows global photosynthesis absorbing net carbon every year, despite human land-use change continuing to destroy that literal lifeblood of our planet.  

All numbers are gigatonnes of Carbon.  Image Source: Hillis, David.  Life: The Science of Biology.  Textbook published 2020 by Macmillan Higher Ed.  

According to the diagram above, net plant growth (photosynthesis - respiration) stores 3 gigatonnes/year of carbon, offsetting almost 1/3 of the yearly emissions from fossil fuels (9.5 gigatonnes/year).  However, human-altered land use and human-caused fires emit another 2 gigatonnes/year of carbon to the atmosphere.   A gigatonne is about twice the weight of all the humans in the world. (Source: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Gigatonne)

Also, the upcoming (in 2024) standards for including land use change in Scope 1/2/3 emissions reporting will explicitly tie real environmental destruction (clearing forests, bulldozing farmland) to the statistics that accountants love to worship, total tons of carbon emitted.  Now developers (even of renewable energy) can't ignore the cost that continued industrialization has to the Earth's life-giving ability to absorb and store carbon.  

Source: https://ghgprotocol.org/land-sector-and-removals-guidance

Hopefully, with all of these connections being made, people will finally start to give credit where credit is due, and give thanks to our beautiful, fragile planet for all it does for us.

*IPCC overview diagrams of global carbon sinks and sources:

 AR6 (2023) : https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-5/figure-5-12/

AR5 (2013) overview: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Simplified-schematic-of-the-global-carbon-cycle-IPCC-2013-Numbers-represent-carbon_fig4_281185559

AR4 (2007) overview: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-global-carbon-cycle-boxes-are-carbon-pools-and-the-arrows-the-fluxes-between-them_fig2_255642401

Carbon offset controversy

 

https://carbon180.medium.com/in-search-of-carbon-removal-offsets-42abf71b3ccc

https://forestpolicypub.com/2020/12/10/bloomberg-green-on-the-nature-conservancy-and-meaningless-carbon-offsets/

Climate Change Belief Tree

An article in Nautilus magazine analogizes beliefs about climate change to branches on a tree.  I like that the tree diagram emphasizes the unity of thinking about climate change, even if we may be on different branches.  Also, I think it is OK for one person's beliefs to span different branches: belief about the future does not need to be certain but can be probabilistic and can change from one day to the next. 

Diagram and original article by Summer Praetorius.

The article concludes: "What if instead of feeling threatened by differences in opinion, we were to reconceptualize them in much the same way a tree will distribute a canopy to collect as much sunlight as possible—as a multi-pronged approach to getting the job done? In the same sense that both fast and slow processes contribute to Earth change, both steady progress and immediate local action will contribute to climate solutions. Let’s take stock of our pace and work together, thankful there is someone else to fill the space we can’t. After all, we are not lone trees, but a living, connected forest, and balance is essential for stability."

Ethnography and Human Health Pioneers

I'm interested in people who have traveled the world, learning from the diversity of human adaptations and health responses.

Esther Gokhale

Weston A. Price

Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic

Bayesian Statistics

A recent post by Scientific American writer and blogger John Hogan got me thinking about Bayesian statistics again.

My favorite explanation of Bayesian statistics was by Nate Silver in The Signal and The Noise.  The basic approach involves incorporating prior estimates of probability into new measures of probability.  The opposing approach, which does not rely on prior knowledge, is termed "Frequentist" statistics and is exemplified Fisher's standard test used with p=0.05 (which implies that a given result would occur "by chance" only 5 in every 100 such tests).

Hogan uses the standard example of cancer tests to illustrate the importance and power of Bayesian thinking, but an astute commenter points out that the real power of Bayesian thinking comes when used in a process that tests, updates probabilities, and tests again, so that each test incorporates the learning from previous tests.

Silver offered a similar example in his book, but a review in the New Yorker points out that Silver got it wrong.   In Silver's case, he applies Bayesian statistics to the probability that global warming is occuring.  But the prior probability is estimated, and Bayesian approaches only improve on standard statistics when prior probabilities are well known.  So while Silver does present a rational means of updating beliefs, since the original belief is not based on statistical data, the resulting analysis cannot be called statistically valid.

Both the New Yorker review and Hogan's thoughts highlight the inherent power of confirmation bias to trump any statistical test, even Bayesian tests.

A New Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index to Map Global Drought

Standardized precipitation–evapotranspiration index (SPEI) is precipitation minus potential evapotranspiration (Vicente-Serrano et al 2010).  It is distinguished from other drought indices because it accounts for temperature through modelled evapotranspiration. This website maps global drought:

Drought in the US 2010-2011.

SPEI has recently been used to predict pine mortality in SW forests.  When the SPEI is below -1.68 for at least 11 months, pinyon and ponderosa pines cannot grow and mortality soon follows. (Kolb, T.E., 2015. A new drought tipping point for conifer mortality.Environmental Research Letters, 10(3), p.031002.)

Long-term drought graph for NM.

Cremation is a major source of black carbon

Original Press Release.  News article.  Burning is central to human life, and many human after-lifes.  Unfortunately, smoldering fires release soot and toxic compounds which degrade air quality, accelerate snow melt, and warm the climate.

Two views on global warming "standstill"

A flash animation from wattsupwiththat:

The view from from Skeptical Science:

Current data shows biosphere carbon uptake holding steady

One of the biggest questions for ecosystem scientists is the degree to which terrestrial and marine ecosystems  can continue to sequester carbon in the face of continuing human emissions of CO2 and accompanying global climate change.

This is one of the best (i.e. easiest to interpret) graphs to show that the fraction of emitted CO2 remaining in the atmosphere (i.e. not sequestered) has held steady at around 50% for the last 40+ years (purple line, "Airborne Fraction").  Data Sources: Fossil fuel CO2 emissions - Land use CO2 emissions -  Airborne CO2 levels Graph by Willis Eschenbach.

Similar conclusions were reached by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado last year.

Pleistocene Climate Change Context

A roadmap of the last 50,000 years helps put the modern global warming in context:

This awesome graph, and many others, can be found here. Includes a good discussion of the Eemian interglacial and other interglacials in comparison with the modern Holocene.

Best comparison of world temperature trends

from: Wood for Trees

Climate model results from IPCC 2007

See details in IPCC 2007 Chapter 2.

Variable Land Carbon Sink

b, CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production, and from LUC. c, Land CO2 sink (negative values correspond to land uptake). d, Ocean CO2 sink (negative values correspond to ocean uptake).

Le Quéré C, Raupach MR, Canadell JG, Marland G, others. Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. Nature Geoscience. 2009;2(12):831–836.


"An increasing total airborne fraction implies that total sinks are increasing more slowly than total emissions, so that sinks are not keeping pace with emissions.

The CO2 growth rate also varies strongly at interannual (1 to 10 y) time scales, through mainly biophysical mechanisms. Fluctuations in CO2 growth rate correlate with the El-Nino-Southern-Oscillation (ENSO) climate mode (Keeling and Revelle, 1985; Keeling et al., 1995; Jones and Cox, 2005), because the terrestrial carbon balance in tropical regions is tilted from uptake to release of CO2 during dry, warm El-Ni ˜ no events (Zeng et al., 2005; Knorr et al., 2005).

Volcanic events are also significant: the CO2 growth rate decreased for several years after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991 (Jones et al., 2001), probably because of increased net carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems due to higher diffuse solar radiation (Gu et al., 2003) and cooler temperatures (Jones and Cox, 2001) caused by volcanic aerosols."
1. Raupach MR, Canadell JG, Le Quéré C. Anthropogenic and biophysical contributions to increasing atmospheric CO2 growth rate and airborne fraction. Biogeosciences. 2008;5(6):1601–1613.

Carbon Tracker


Fig. 1. A demonstration of how carbon flux indices [GSNF, growing season net flux; DSNF, dormant season net flux; AMP, amplitude (|DSNF – GSNF|); NCF, net carbon flux (GSNF + DSNF)] are calculated. Any month for which the net carbon flux is negative is included in the GSNF (open vertical bars). Any month for which the net carbon flux is positive is included in the DSNF (filled vertical bars). Mean 2000–2008 fluxes shown for boreal North America (a) southern Africa (b) and tropical Asia (c).

GURNEY KR, ECKELS WJ. Regional trends in terrestrial carbon exchange and their seasonal signatures. Tellus B.

Fig. 2. Comparison of decadal mean net carbon flux for individual land regions. Black cross symbols (X) denote the mean of 13 TransCom 3 models, open circle symbols (O) denote mean of the three S07 TransCom 3 models, individual model estimates within the S07 average are denoted by a filled square, circle and triangle. Vertical error bars represent the total 1σ flux uncertainty (quadrature sum of model spread and the root mean square of individual model posterior uncertainty) associated with the mean of the 13 TransCom 3 models. (c) 2000–2008 mean net carbon flux.

Global CO2 plumes

Ever wonder where our oxygen comes from in the winter? When vegetation dies back in the Northern Hemisphere, we have to subsist on old air until the summer. In this image, you can see the plume of carbon dioxide downwind of large human population centers.

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/index.html

The simplist explanation of Global Warming

The Earth is absorbing more heat than it is emitting.

Global Fire Trends and Consequences

In the modern age, the Anthropocene, global biogeochemical cycles are skewed by the massed action of almost 7 billion human beings. Chief among these forcings is the burning of both fossil and modern biomass. The burning of crops and forest by humans can be viewed on a global scale with imagery from NASA's Earth Observatory. Some of the fires viewed by NASA's satellites are due to natural causes, some are due to human causes, and many are a combination of human land use practices and natural causes.


Fires in the Amazon have increased to 2007. The good news is that since then the fires seem to have decreased, possibly as a result of lowered Soy and Beef prices.

A number of sources have recently discussed melting glaciers in the Himalayas, probably due to a combination of global temperature increase and soot (carbon particulate) from burning.

Africa has some of the most pronounced anthropogenic burning, although it is debatable whether much of the semi-arid regions would burn naturally. Interestingly, the Sahel is also reported to be "greening" since the droughts of the 1970's. I was first alerted to changes taking place in the Sahel by a short article from the University of Arizona School of Natural Resources. Now, I read in The Nation, an article by Mark Hertsgaard about farmers in Burkina Faso who have let trees grow in their fields (because of changes in government regulations that let them own trees on their land) to increase the productivity of their crops. However, after reading this, and other, sources, I'm still having trouble understanding farming practices in the region, specifically in regards to reconciling the massive burning evident from MODIS with the greening described in the articles.

Australia has also recently been afflicted by catastrophic wildfires caused by a combination of extreme drought and heat waves.

Soot is near the upper right corner of this diagram from C.A. Masiello, “New directions in black carbon organic geochemistry,” Marine Chemistry 92, no. 1-4 (December 1, 2004): 201-213.
Ironically, pyrolysis, or the incomplete combustion of biomass to create charcoal or biochar, is now touted as a possible technology to increase crop productivity by simultaneously sequestering carbon. Not as currently practiced, though.