Global Warming/Climate Change

Abrupt Climate Change – and the Geo-Engineering Trick That Can Stop It


Sahel Drought – worst of the 20th Century

I thought I’d supplement the previous post by George Monbiot by expanding a little on his mention of the Sahel drought and its cause. Being one of the worst environmental disasters of the last century, it’s certainly worth a little consideration. A million people were directly killed by the drought, which lasted a dozen years, from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, and 50 million more were adversely affected in several countries in a wide swathe of sub-Saharan Africa.

The sudden shift in climate that brought this disaster about has come to be known as ‘Abrupt Climate Change’, a phenomenon that has been attracting the attention of scientists and world leaders along with the development of global warming science — as the latter exacerbates the former. A scientifically challenged version of this phenomenon was ‘Hollywood-ised’ in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, where a sudden shift in ocean current temperatures brought an instant ice-age upon the northern regions of the planet.


Ocean currents play a large role in regional weather phenomena

Hollywood aside, where many think of Global Warming as a gradual, almost imperceptible adjustment in temperature, the phenomenon is expected to increase the frequency and severity of regionalised abrupt climate change events. This obviously translates to an enormous strain on food supplies.

Scientists looking at this issue put out a report (PDF) in 2007, apparently the first of its kind, that indicates abrupt climate change events are a lot more common than initially believed.

Dramatic as this single event was [the Sahel Drought], University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have now uncovered 29 other regions worldwide that endured similarly precipitous climatic changes during the 20th century — far more than scientists previously thought. Their study publishes March 30 in the online edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

The work represents the first systematic survey of abrupt climate changes that have occurred in recent history, says postdoctoral researcher Gemma Narisma, who led the study with professor Jonathan Foley, director of the UW-Madison Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. The National Academies’ National Research Council has called for more research on abrupt climate change, warning that it’s more likely to happen as global temperatures rise and humans continue to alter the environment.

"This study is important, because previous work largely focused on ancient climates or theoretical changes in future climates," says Foley. "But our work here is showing that abrupt climatic changes are real, are with us today, and that they have major impacts on human societies."

By identifying diverse regions around the globe where rapid climatic shifts have taken place, the study opens up new opportunities for understanding why these changes happen and what makes areas susceptible to them, says Narisma. A range of factors is likely involved, including human activities, such as deforestation and land degradation, and natural phenomena, like sea surface temperatures.

The work might also lead to interventions that would make systems less vulnerable to sudden climate change, Narisma adds. – Science Daily

It’s become patently obvious that global warming has advanced sufficiently so that mitigation alone will not suffice to protect us from present and future impacts. Adaptation also needs to be part of our strategy. Building resilience into our social and environmental systems should be a key aspect of both mitigation and adaptation strategies. There is one ‘geo-engineering’ strategy which can hasten adaptation, whilst simultaneously attacking the cause of these problems at source — that being appropriate land management.


The 1930s Dustbowl saw much
of mid-west topsoil blown
into the Atlantic Ocean

The 1930s Dustbowl disaster in the U.S. mid-west, in particular, was caused by poor land management techniques, and if it didn’t contribute to the Sahel drought as well, it certainly exacerbated it.

Permaculture has a lot to offer here. The potential to be found in millions of resilient, virtually closed-loop food production systems is immense in many ways, and stabilising climate and eliminating abrupt climate change events is arguably the most significant. Restore biomass and soil carbon and you stabilise and restore the hydrological cycle. For more on this read this excellent interview with Slovak hydrologist Michal Kravčík.

Dr. Christine Jones agrees:

A soil carbon improvement of only 0.5% in the top 30 centimetres of 2% of Australia’s estimated 445 million hectares of agricultural land would safely and permanently sequester the entire nation’s annual emissions of carbon dioxide. Sequestering atmospheric carbon in soil as humified organic carbon would also restore natural fertility, increase water-use efficiency, markedly improve farm productivity, provide resilience to climatic variation and inject much-needed cash into struggling rural economies.

[…]

The process whereby gaseous CO2 is converted to soil humus has been occurring for millions of years. Indeed, it is the only mechanism by which topsoil can form. When soils lose carbon, they also lose structure, water-holding capacity and nutrient availability.

Understanding soil building is thus fundamentally important to future viability of agriculture. Rebuilding carbon-rich topsoil is also the only practical and beneficial option for productively removing billions of tonnes of excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

[…]

How can it be that trees are still turning CO2 into wood, but soils are no longer turning CO2 into humus?

The answer is quite simple. In order for trees to produce new wood from soluble carbon, they must be living and covered with green leaves. In order for soil to produce new humus from soluble carbon, it must be living and covered with green leaves. — fromthesoilup.com

As I’ve said before, It’s Time to Colonise Earth!

Also see: Soil Carbon – Can it Save Agriculture’s Bacon?

I’ll leave you with a quote from the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM):

Organic agriculture can play a role in mitigating the impacts of land degradation and global change. Organic agriculture increases the resilience and stability of the production system, thus decreasing the vulnerability of small farmers to natural disasters and other disturbances…. For example, after Hurricane Mitch hit the lands of Central America, farmers who used traditional cropping methods suffered less damage than their neighbors who used conventional techniques. The sustainable plots had on average more topsoil, greater soil moisture, and less erosion, and experienced less economic losses….

In addition to mitigating the effects of global change, organic agriculture also directly ensures environmental sustainability. The environmental benefits of organic agriculture have been widely documented and include the provision of ecosystem services, and reduced energy use…. — Organic Agriculture & the Millennium Development Goals, IFOAM (325kb draft PDF)

7 Comments

  1. Allan Savory makes it very clear what’s going on with climate. Human civilisations have repeated the same mistake over and over again. This time, I think it’s even worse, because it’s global, and the causes have been completely misunderstood (again) https://vimeo.com/12166235

  2. Hi Craig,

    All good points. Geo-engineering is the bargaining phase, don’t you think?

    I spent a couple of hours today on soil rebuilding. Woody mulch goes into the chook run, three to four weeks later it comes out of the chook run (and a new lot goes in). The stuff that comes out of the chook run looks to me like rich black turned over soil – very fine and crumbly if dry. From there I wheelbarrowed it around the orchard and threw it around as a top dressing. After under a year of this activity the results are amazing. When the grass and cover crops (ie. weeds in some peoples minds) grow up to a certain height, I cut them back with the mower and let it all drop as a top dressing. Mmmm soil humus!

    However, this is labour intensive and it takes a long term perspective which when you’re in commercial farming and locked into forward supply contracts, you won’t have.

    Still just like the climate, we’ll hit a tipping point sooner or later.

    Regards

    Chris

  3. Craig, nice post.

    I worked on two large HM cattle and sheep farms in NSW last spring – Lana Farm near Uralla and Papanui farm (you can find a youtube video on Papanui). The deep knowledge these farmers have of the land and pastures was to me truly astounding. The farmers both inherited their farms along with the unsustainable conventional farming practices but were financially forced to try a new approach or risk losing it all. At great cost, Tim converted their 9,000 acres (during the early 90s it resembled a dust bowl) to HM by installing hundreds of km of fencing, many hundreds of paddocks, necessary water pipe, pumping and storage. He told me he had no choice, with upwards of 10 staff to pay, conventional seeding, fertilizing and spraying, and drought intolerant pastures, he risked losing the farm. Over 10 years the microbiology and pastures healed, and he now manages the 9,000 acres and 6,000 animals with only the help his son and wife! The cows and sheep I worked with, to my eye looked very healthy with sheeny coats and a pretty nice lifestyle living in large mobs with minimal interference (other than their daily routine of moving paddocks which they apparently looked forward to). Tim runs sheep and cattle in a complimentary offset rotation to reduce pestilence. In the late 1990s, Dr. Christine Jones ran a scientific series of before-and-after soil tests at Lana farm and proved that HM had worked wonders on the soil biology and carbon content.

    I came to realize that HM livestock farming holds great promise for a massive scale transformation of degraded lands and enormous carbon sequestration, while improving profitability for millions of farmers and growing more food.

    I encourage anyone to visit these farms, support these farmers and volunteer for HMI International to help educate farmers and the world about HM.

    Matt

  4. This was an interesting article, but I was hoping to read more about exactly what precipitated the Abrupt Climate Change. Not just “global warming”, but whether it was a change in ocean currents, a shift in the weather patterns, neither or both.

  5. gday Mat
    do you know how the farms you worked on transitioned to HM
    or how they afforded to do the fencing and watering systems?
    I’ve done a lot of fencing and irragation and know the cost and lobour involved, just interested to know how they did it
    cattle yea more easy because electric fencing works, but sheep are a bit different

    cheers

  6. The fact that abrupt climate change have been very common throughout geological history implies that the mainstream theories about absolute limitations to phyletic plasticity is wrong. Life has already survived changes vastly worse than the worst IPCC predictions, and yet mainstream biologists worry that life should not be able to adapt to the moderate mid-IPCC range! Guess why life has unstable DNA instead of stable XNA as genetic material despite the energy expenditure to repair it, and read “Bacteria evolved way to safeguard crucial genetic material”. The DNA repair enzymes discovered during examination of Chernobyl mammals provides a mechanism for directing adaptive mutations. Red blood cells survive for weeks without DNA, proving the existence of self-organization capable of controlling cellular functions and noticing that something must be done without specialized error messages. Jack Szostak have shown that cell membranes capable of growing and dividing without genes as long as there are suitable complex molecules present spontaneously form when water containing dissolved such molecules are shaked. Vertical Gun Lab experiments proves that such molecules can be produced by asteroid/comet impacts. The decrease of impact rate about 3,8 billion years ago caused a scarcity of ready-to-use complex molecules that forced the membranes to start using genes to produce their own. We are not the survival machines of genes at all. Genes are merely the kitchen servants of cell membranes. There is no contradiction whatsoever between Darwinism and Lamarckism. Darwinian variability selection wiped out any biochemistry that was not capable of Lamarckian evolution.

  7. This is permaculture’s level of awareness? Seriously? “Abrupt climate change” is caused by geoengineering and they now are attempting to sell you geoengineering as the solution! Problem- Reaction – Solution
    Research weather modification history and patents and get up to speed. Geoengineering to fix geoengineering caused issues id hardly a bargaining phase. It’s pure propaganda.

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