Realclimate.org–Environmental Media Services! Thanks for the heads-up on that one, good catch!

EMS is owned by the Fenton Corporation. Highly unsavory group, unless your tastes run to Marxism-Leninism. See, for instance,

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6958

Thanks again for your thoughts. My “game” was only an artificial construct to explore this thought about sequestration. I agree that long-term carbon management makes perfect sense, and it may be where environmentalists and hard-core capitalists could/should see eye-to-eye.

I think the cleanup problems surrounding gas and oil are a management problem too. If processes were controlled to a point that avoids messes (or, in some cases, ecological disaster) it would be a very good thing. I see no reason why the petroleum industry should be regarded as irredeemably “dirty”. I believe that, on balance it is clean, but one has to see “clean” in the right context, and I do not deny large-scale problems that continue to plague the industry. Where it is dirty, dangerous and harmful, I believe there is still room to mitigate the effects and/or reduce the problem, and it is worth the government creating carrots and sticks to encourage such, but I think to have the desired longterm effect and not cripple our economy this should be done as sparingly as possible, and the primary mover and shaker in such reforms should not be the radical environmental lobby, but well-informed and balanced advisory councils that pay more attention to science than politics and propaganda.

I personally love this earth (who doesn’t?) and would not see harm come to it. But a great deal of what groups like Greenpeace do nowadays amounts to what C.S. Lewis called “straining at fern seeds while swallowing elephants”. The world may invest billions, or trillions, in CO2 reduction, putting all of our environmental ethos and energy eggs into this one basket … and then discover that there was little value in doing so, at great harm to our own welfare, and possibly even worse harm to those less prepared to adapt, if we can just as effectively cripple developing nations by exercising muscle internationally. The investment in CO2 just represents resources that are NOT invested in other, more worthwhile, environmental needs, and does harm by misallocation and miseducation.

Further, Dr. Tipler (and you) have made a convincing case that the whole CO2 program is not even neutral — that there is net benefit to the ecosphere in the present-day trends of CO2 release that is threatened by it. It is insanity for — of all groups — those who regard themselves as the most faithful friends of Gaia to cut off this important supply of her most vital nutrient. The way I look at it is that the earth, coming into the Holocene, was starving; facing its last gasps. The plentiful CO2 from earlier geological eras during which the herbisphere flourished so grandly had diminished, being “sequestered” underground in giant deposits of oil and gas where it was no longer available to the biosphere. The “tank” was nearing empty, and Earth was facing its most extreme shortage of carbon. The only salvation for the biosphere is continuing warm temperatures, which siphoned CO2 back out of the ocean reservoires into the atmosphere, and carbon that exited via food lines from the oceans to us (through the harvesting of kelp, fish, etc.

It may be, in the broadest analysis, that the best thing humanity has done for this earth is the restoration of all this carbon into the biosphere. It may even amount to the salvation of the biosphere. Who’s to say how close it came to being snuffed right out?

Had the earth remained at the all-time low mid-19th-century CO2 levels then suddenly, by a change in solar irradiance, been plunged into a centuries or millennia-long “hard ice age”, CO2 would drop precipitously (the Henry Law constant would increase and atmospheric CO2 would be absorbed in massive quantities by the oceans over a period of centuries). Faced with unusually cold conditions and starved of their main nutrients, how many important plant species would permanently succumb? I think it may have meant the permanent decline, perhaps toward the end, of life on Earth as we know it.

How “environmentalists” could be so single-minded in the wrong direction really eludes me.

So my thought was “If we’re going to sequester, it’s best to do so in a recoverable fashion”.

I’m still not clear on whether I’m right about the relative values of old-growth versus new forests vis-a-vis carbon management, but it seems likely that new forests are easier to “steer” and in any case soak up carbon much more rapidly.

While I agree that the devastation of rainforest must stop, I am a bit uncertain what “stopping” looks like. I don’t mean to sound dumb — I expect someone may say “just stop cutting down the damn trees”. What I mean is, there are other forms of encroachment that may be just as devastating, are more subtle, and even more inexorable. Do we prevent migration toward use of rainforest resources that do not simply amount to “cutting down trees”? Should rainforests be left in a virgin state, or is there a “managed” version that is actually healthier? Like the northern forests, would rainforests actually benefit from carefully managed harvesting of wood? To what extent should wildfires be permitted to run their course? Do we intervene when there are natural threats to the intricate biosystem — pest invasion, disease, drought or flooding? Should rainforests become sanctuaries against all human activity — no tourists at all, only indigenous subsistence? Should there be concerted efforts to re-flood drained basins and reestablish past rainforests? What do we do about the resulting increase in disease due to insect-born vectors and the necessary relocation of formerly impoverished peoples whose lives are now dependent on the former rainforest lands?

There are many such questions, and I know they go beyond a political blog’s comments discussion. But I’d be happy with some brief thoughts about managed harvesting of wood and other plant products in a rainforest environment (and perhaps this would answer some of the other questions at the same time. For example, if large-scale rainforest-friendly harvesting systems that indigenous folks could take ownership of, this may help answer the “relocation” and lifestyle questions…)

I am not really sure how to play this game, the concept of believing in a single variable and acting out a single cure, carbon sequestration, because the planet is going to warm up, raises myriad purely scientific warning bells that seem impossible to ignore. But if I get the gist of what you are trying to do here it is to advance the premise that managing forests as a carbon sink or reservoir might be a better idea if we are so concerned about it.

Frankly, I see little wrong with doing it anyway. For those that feel a compulsion to manage CO2, the the forest management concept you put forth is a good and not so expensive a place to start.

However, again I feel compelled to mention that if we do not stop triple canopy rainforest devastation, first, and soon, this may all be for naught. Managing all other forests combined will probably not net much of an advantage given the massive amounts of CO2 being released by removal of the worlds rainforests for any reason. And with spent soils, replacing them may not even be possible. Just re-planting those areas will not be sufficient for them to regenerate their own self-sustaining water budget dynamics until they have re-established themselves without it. A process which likely took millions of years to reach stasis in the first place.

But in your game, D seems the correct choice if we do not consider the above.

Might want to visit a rainforest before they are gone. I suspect it will be long before the end of the interglacial, it might even go a ways towards precipitating it!

Not the best way to enjoy the interglacial.

You raise some fascinating points. I haven’t the time this early morn to give them the consideration they deserve (work calls), but I will spend some time this evening replying.

Briefly, I think managing forests more sustainably is a fine idea. If done to manage carbon, well, why not? Though the oceans are by far the larger reservoir. But putting an end to rainforest forest devastation must be the first step or this will be rather ineffective.

Perhaps I should qualify my statement about not being a fan of carbon-based fuels. Over the past 25 years I have spent an inordinate amount of my time cleaning up messes at all manner of fuel producing, storage and dispensing locales. Like forests, we need to manage this better, if for no other reason than to protect, in particular, groundwater supplies. Cleaning up these messes is horrendously expensive, and the benefits of doing so are often questionable. Although at least in this country (as well as many others) cleaning up the combustion process has reaped huge benefits in terms of air quality (I live in LA). But try as I might, I see no viable alternative to carbon-based fuels for the foreseeable future.

As I mentioned before, carbon sequestration, in any form, might, again I say might, result in some amelioration of climate forcing, but I am so far convinced that this will be a particularly good answer to a non-existent problem. As for the other many variables, fusion remains my answer of choice. We will do nothing about solar and orbital forcings, and iron filings was recently tested and that didn’t work out so well (nature turned out to be a little more complex than anyone thought, go figure).

Gotta go do the interglacial work thing.

I am impressed by your command of a broad set of disciplines. I detect a bit of a polymath, and I like your style. Still, while you came close to answering my question I think it was a near miss. Just to be clear, I am with you — I don’t advocate carbon sequestration, and your excellent demonstration of why it’s a dumb idea rings well with me, but then I’m sitting in the choir.

What I was looking for was more like this: Let’s play the sequestration game as a Gedankenversuch (thought experiment). Take it as read that CO2 is an evil bad guy gas that is about to turn the planet into a fireball. Further, let us isolate the single strategy of sequestration for mitigating our guilt over burning fossil fuels over the last 100 years.

(The other strategies being (i) to stop adding CO2 — next to impossible and only then by going back to the stone age; and (ii) to do something else to the environment that would hopefully compensate — like dumping millions of tons of iron filings into the ocean to promote plankton growth or orbiting large reflective membranes over the earth to increase it’s albedo — these may be technologically realistic, but this sort of “tinkering” can have unforeseeable catastrophic complications…)

So we’re playing a game, under the dubious assumption that sequestration is the right thing to do. Burying carbon in deep holes (bubbling it into shale formation, or whatever…) is just an expensive waste. Carbon, after all, is a natural resource. And, besides, what happens when the solar irradiance decreases by 5% and we have sudden need for increasing the GHG content of the atmosphere to avert a catastropic descent into an ice age? Pouring out billions of tons of long-life aerosols is probably a very bad idea, CO2 is the only reasonable alternative, Mother Nature’s home remedy if you like. So I would argue that it is far better to put all this carbon in a place where it is easily retrieved.

I can’t think of any better form of sequestration than wood and paper.

Aside: I wonder if I calculated how much carbon there is stored in the wood frame of my house, I would find I have huge carbon credits coming to me under some new legislation? I’m just sayin’… Then there’s my library, and big bin of newspapers I put out each day for recycling. But maybe the “sequestration” would be more effective if, instead of recycling, these papers were buried in a landfill. Or, if I’m right that it should be retrievable, perhaps there should be special enormous landfills outside every city reserved for cellulose and other carbon-intensive waste, for long-term (but retrievable) sequestration?

Now, to the forest management business. I also don’t know much about this subject, although for a short time I actually helped a lumber company pick plots of standing timber (we called it “cruising”; you drive around in a pickup and record the dimensions and health of randomly-sampled trees in marked-off areas. Pays good), but that was in a different life, and I can’t claim any “expertise” from that.

Suppose we are a generic forest management organization and we have, say, a thousand square kilometers of virgin timber, let us say, at maturity.

Our mission (and our ONLY consideration in this game we’re playing) is to manage this huge forest over a period of a century or two in such a way as to maximize the net amount of CO2 that is taken from the atomosphere by our vertical stock. In your framework, it’s a 1 variable game. Dumb, yes, but if one can’t play well with 1 variable, what are the hopes of playing with dozens, or thousands, or an unknowns number?

For simplicity I’ll further assume that, “if a little is good then a lot is better” — whatever we find the best use is, we apply it to the whole forest.

What should we do to have the best chance at accomplishing our mission? Some possibilities:

A. Leave the forest untouched and let nature take its course?
B. Harvest the wood that’s there and put it to another, carbon-neutral use?
C. Let it grow for some period and then carry out B?
D. Harvest it in some cycle, replanting trees and reharvesting at some stage?

B is just dumb. No new carbon is taken in by the trees. The only thing that can be said is that, if the harvested wood is not burned or otherwise returned to the biosphere, then we have kept that carbon from entering the atmosphere.

C seems a bit wiser, and perhaps so. But, let us say that one harvests after, oh, say, 50 years. If we imagine that we are standing there in 50 years, what is option C? It is now option B. If option B for a mature forest was wrong 50 years ago, why is it right today, as 50 years doesn’t really make the forest significantly more mature.

While A is the option that tugs at my heartstrings as a natural-born lover of nature, I think it’s also a wrong choice, because our forest, being mature, is not “bulking up” like a young forest. Further, the status quo, in such a large forest, means leaving it vulnerable to forest fires, etc. Indeed, in its natural state what will necessarily happen, in order for equilibrium to be attained, is that over the long run burn-off returns about the same amount of carbon to the environment as is removed by photosynthesis. As forests mature there is more and more dead, dry, flammable material on the forest floor and the probability of fire skyrockets. After some stage it is so incendiary that such fires cannot be stopped…the forest becomes carbon-neutral. This is not, in the large view, distinguishable from B and C in terms of sequestration potential.

Option D, on the other hand, makes a great deal of sense in this one-dimensional analysis. At every harvest, huge amounts of carbon are extracted in a form that permits us control of whether or not it is returned to the environment or “sequestered”. It avoids the problem of becoming a carbon-neutral fire trap to which old-growth forests are so susceptible. And, a new forest planted in its place will continue the process of extracting CO2 from the environment. Further, new forests bulk up far faster than old ones (here I’m bluffing — I don’t know this, I’m appealing to common sense.) I don’t imagine they do in the first few years, but there must be some period early in a tree’s life during which its carbon-bulking is maximized. Knowing the growth pattern of our trees and a few other management factors would permit us to choose an optimal age for harvesting.

I think (by the rules of our game) Option D is the winner. Probably something even better is

E. As D but to partially harvest, thinning the forest at intervals to optimize growth among remaining trees.

And, as I understand, this is precisely what the vast majority of paper producers use — paper is no longer, in the main, harvested from mature virgin forests, but from cultivated forests of fast-growing wood with good paper-friendly qualities, that is continually harvested and replanted. The lumber industry is less fixed on this option, but a good portion of this industry is employing sustainable practices of this sort. I have read that the timber stock in the U.S. has increased significantly in the U.S. over the last 50 years. I don’t know if the same is true in Canada but I have been impressed with the large areas of B.C., for example, that are now subject to sustainable practices, and I know their silvicultural expertise is in demand around the world (I know a number of people who have entered the profession there).

A comment on one of your last paragraphs. I don’t know that I’d say I’m a “fan” of carbon-based fuels, but I have to say I don’t think they’re the bogeyman they are being made out to be. Petroleum, in any case, is soon to decline, and I expect its use will fade over a few decades, as natural gas becomes a fuel of choice for many things. Our Natural Gas reserves are very healthy and will easily take us into the next century, by which time hopefully we’ll have mastered fusion or some other safe, clean energy source.

Natural gas has the advantage that it burns cleaner and at a lower temperature than petroleum, though it has fewer helpful biproducts for industry (which may keep the petroleum industry alive long after it ceases being the dominant fuel). The problem with burning petroleum is not the CO2 but the other more toxic emissions products associated with it.

The other end of the spectrum is the wholesale burning and clear-cutting (not always for timber, but to clear land for planting crops as is being done in the rainforests) on an unimaginable scale has already been proven to be a particularly bad idea from a host of perspectives. When we are talking about +50,000 square miles a year (and a significant boost to that in just the last year or two), the sheer scale of replanting, and of course managing this, becomes a herculean task. Particularly if the soils are depleted in the process. How would one pay for such a massive undertaking? How could it be done at anything approaching the speed of the devastation?

Now here are the clinchers regarding CO2. We have from the many lines of proxy data the fact that for the vast majority of natural, reliable, often abrupt and seemingly unavoidable climate mode switches temperature leads and GHGs follow. The relatively rare instances where the reverse has occurred seems to be related to the temperature switches occurring faster than the oceans (as the largest reservoir) can come into CO2 equilibrium with the atmosphere and the prevailing cold or warm state. It takes hundreds to thousands of years for the oceans to turn over, warm up or cool down, releasing and re-absorbing CO2. During periods of maximum climate variability (fast temperature switches), such as at the major and stadial/interstadial transitions, the proxy records show that the state switches happen with astounding swiftness, from years to decades, leaving the much slower process of atmosphere/ocean equilibrium, which take centuries to millenia to re-equilibrate, in a far more gradual swing. With temperature swings driving, and GHGs reacting, it is hard to fathom the focus on a single variable, CO2, as capable of actually producing one of these events.

However, having said that, one must also consider the possibility that rapid upswings in CO2 concentrations, like we seem to be experiencing now, could precipitate a climate state switch. Honestly, in my vast readings of all sides of this issue, I remain unconvinced that anyone truly knows for sure, but on the other hand, we really don’t know that it couldn’t. The problem here is that the experimental proof must be done on the planetary scale, because this is definitely not a single variable equation. But this sort of equation is what the present issue of the genus Homo is best at.

Consider for a moment that when we split genetically off from the Australopithecines about 2.8 million years ago, the first species of the genus Homo, habilis, meaning handy man, kicked off the Stone Age with the astonishing discovery of rocks. This single variable rocked our world. We are so proficient at single variable processing that we quickly (over the next million years) tooled up to hand axes and bi-face tools, the Acheulian period had begun. We stuck with these more or less single variables (still rocks for goodness sake) for almost twice that time (1.8 million years) before we figured out how to cook metals out of them, kicking off the metals ages (Iron and Bronze etc.). It took yet another 5,000 years to shift into industrial age overdrive.

Now sapiens is in this too, with that 5,000 years less than 5% of the time we have been stomping around the place. We seem to be genetically pre-disposed to distill complexity down to the least common denominator, and seem quite pleased with ourselves if that turns out to be just a single variable, like CO2 for instance. One would have to suppose that some of us have evolved the proclivity towards multivariate processing, for it seems the only way James Watt could have managed to cobble metal, fire and water together to harness the power of steam.

Given that only during the present interglacial did we graduate from rocks, could it possibly be that what we are witnessing is the rapid evolution of Homo from single variable processing to multivariate processing? I often wonder.

Let’s test the hypothesis. We are well on our way to the carbon sequestration schema of which you speak. We know from the proxy records that for hundreds of millions of years the overall trend of CO2 concentrations has been steadily down. Still, many extinction events, periods of much greater warmth and bitter cold happened anyway. And the gradual trend of earth’s temperatures has also been down, certainly over the past 5 million years. We know that ice sheets have spread to Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska and Illinois over the past million years, and we know that sea levels have bounced so regularly through 100-140 meter swings that we can set our geologic clocks by them. Does it strike anyone as odd that by stuffing only carbon down holes (or all manner of schemas) that we will have any kind of substantial effect on the plethora of other variables that seem to have a much greater effect on climate? If we are really all that concerned about climate change vis-a-vis our current level of civilization, would it not seem more reasonable to set our sights on something which can power our civilization through events which are stupefyingly faster, larger and far more certain to occur?

I am no fan of carbon-based fuels, but they did power our history straight on from the discovery of fire. We have toyed with the simpler particle level process of fision, but it strikes me often that every penny spent on anything other than fusion will likely turn out to be a penny wasted.

Personally, I can see no deleterious effects whatsoever with CO2 levels at 1000 ppm. If we are at peak oil now (or soon will be), it beggars the imagination to think we could even approach 1,000 ppm with what is left to be found and burned. Having said that, I stand ready to accept your tax dollars to do my geological thing and drill holes and pump it into the ground for you, and I am headed that very way. Most of us find that we have been standing in the wrong line most of our lives anyway, and fools and their money soon part ways. This multivariate processor sees no conflict taking the single variable processors money if they are hades bent on spending it this way.

Just another way to enjoy the interglacial…..while it lasts.

P.S. Methinks you are spot-on with the CO2 healthy biosphere. But cutting back on forest products usage might pay good dividends, particularly with respect to anthropogenic induced climate change potential.

It seems that old-growth and mature forests are close to carbon-neutral, relative to young ones. If one measures carbon sequestration in forests by growth in carbonaceous plant material, mature forests don’t soak up much atmospheric carbon at all — they consume space that could be more efficiently utilized for this purpose by fast-growing immature forests.

The practice of clearing out mature growth and planting new wood in it’s place, as is now done across much of the lumber industry and most of the paper industry, would seem to be a “best practice” in terms of long-term carbon sequestration, considering that much of that wood ends up in construction that more-or-less permanently takes it out of the carbon cycle, and the bulk of paper ends its life permanently sequestered in landfills.

So, if our goal is to encourage carbon sequestration in massive forest systems the first thing we should be considering is knocking down all of the old-growth forests the environmentalists have been campaigning to preserve in their carbon-neutral state and replacing them with rapidly-growing harvestable young forests.

My only objection to the plan is that as far as I can tell, the optimum CO2 level, if such a thing exists, for supporting a healthy biosphere for the needs of both flora and fauna, appears to be somewhere between 500 and 1000 PPM. If this is true, then it strikes me that it’s a bit premature to talk about strategies for global-scale carbon sequestration projects.

And, if we do use harvested wood, paper and similar products to sequester carbon long-term, I would argue that disposal of such products ought to be done in a fashion that makes it retrievable, in case large-scale release of carbon becomes necessary later. After all, in geologic terms, the current amount of carbon in the atmosphere is precipitously low, and we should not risk dropping much farther.

Your thoughts?

Deforestation is a myth. Urbanization has shifted populations from dependence on forests and wood as fuel to industrialized electrical power plants. Suggest reading environmentalist Alston Chase’s book “In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Myths of Nature.” According to Chase, we have more forests than 200 years ago.