Sir Richard Branson is offerering a prize of $32 million to the inventor who can come up with a design which removes harmful greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Great idea?
What about genetically modified diatoms designed to consume more carbon dioxide for every tonne of iron dumped in Antarctic waters?
We could stop fertilizing them when carbon dioxide levels were low enough?
OK! So you don’t like the idea. Got a better one?
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Replace annual grain crops with perennial, legume based ones. A per hectare energy equivalent saving of 50-200L of crude oil! Sandalwood nuts for Australia.
This has to be one of the most silly proposals on record.
There is no evidence at all that increasing CO2 results in rising temperatures. Geologically we know it to be false and now Doug Hoyt has shown it to be correct on human timescales on Warwick Hughe’s blog.
The fundamental axiom of climate sensitivity being 1.3K/2xCO2 has never been experimentally verified. (Hoyt suggests it might be .4K/2xCO2)
Until it is, it remains a highly speculative presumption or hypothesis.
There is no scientific basis to AGW. That will happen when climate sensitivity is verified by physical experiment.
It behoves the proposers of an hypothesis to supply the experimental data supporting their proposal. It is not the role of sceptics to disprove the hyopthesis.
There is no need for an alternative because we are subject to the vagaries of Nature, not it, us. Why try to fix something that isn’t broke in the first place.
Whoops – Doug Hoyt has confirmed the geological observation on human time scales, not climate sensitivity per se.
Profuse apologies.
Louis,
John Howard agrees with me that there is evidence that increasing CO2 results rising temperatures.
Louis you are digging a hole; get the/any/whatever invention for a CO2/CH4/whatever extraction machine and sell it Branson for $32M.
I want 5% for thinking about it and 5% for telling you.
But considering the past I am willing to forgo 5% if the money is paid before 30 Dec 2007
This offer lasts until 11/03/06
I bet Luke cant do better!!
whoops
“This offer lasts until 11/03/07”
Rog,
I was thinking along those lines but commercially successful production of CO2 does not involve extracting it from air because CO2 does not exist in air as a physically distinct phase.
So all CO2 extraction methods have to be chemical or biochemical.
And there is another problem Branson omitted – human contribution to global CO2 per day is 3% of of total CO2. Total CO2 is about 0.04% vol so our contribution will be 3% of 0.04%.
Given we could invent something to remove 3% of 0.04%, I suspect the cost of doing so would probably equal the prize money.
So, no go.
A lot of wind on Jennifer’s excellent forum. Any of you do anything but post? Of course global warming is merely a front for the world’s governments not being able to actually tell us there are problems ahead with fossil fuel supplies where consumption will be curbed anyway. We couldn’t handle the truth I am sure. Averting global warming threats will likely be a more politically digestible way of reducing usage via government policy (it’ll likely come in time) when it was going to happen anyway. Maybe we should make a rule. Don’t post unless you are actually physically get off your butt and changing the way you will depend on energy in the future. That way you’ll likely have a lot more money in your pocket for tomorrows children anyway. That oughta stir some egos! Surprise me smart posters!
Iron Fertilisation of the oceans seems to offer promise, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
“…Advocates say that using this technique to restore ocean plankton to recent known levels of health would help solve half the climate change problem, revive major fisheries and cetacean populations, and alleviate several other urgent ocean crises…”
Seems a bit too easy. Solving global warming needs to be a lot harder than this to justify the alarmism which has been generated.
How will we know when the atmosphere has the “right” amount of CO2, when temperatures won’t rise and climate won’t change. In other words, when will we know the pie is cooked?
If Branson spent more time with his head outside his own ‘ask your mother for sixpence’ he would know that we already have such a machine. It is called the TREE.
It will sequester carbon anywhere it can get water and sunlight, even on road culverts with no soil. You can cut it down and change it into all sorts of other carbon based products. Some of those products retain their carbon only for as long as it takes to wipe one’s backside while other products (fine furniture, good books, quality houses) can be stored for centuries without emitting any of their carbon.
The only problem is that the IPCC has deemed all tree based carbon to be an emission on the day the tree is cut. It is the only form of emission that does not take place on the actual day the carbon is released. So in one incredibly stupid and short sighted move, they removed all incentive to store carbon in this way.
The simple minded green morons could not get their tiny brains around the fact that new trees grow when a big one is cut. And if the big one is converted to stable, quality products that last longer than 15 years, then the forest will have absorbed more carbon before the previous carbon has been released.
That is, the act of cutting the tree has actually enabled an additional volume of carbon to be sequestered by the neighbouring trees.
But under IPCC rules, there is no point storing all my building off-cuts in a termite proof situation under my house for the next 60 years because they, in their wisdom, pretend that this carbon is already in the atmosphere. So I just burn it because the IPCC has already counted it.
As old Zim said, “Its an idiot wind, blowin through the buttons of my coat, blowin through the walls of the capitol, its a wonder that they still know how to breathe”.
Aaron, I think you are correct in that we only have a few hundred years of coal and natural gas available and cost will eventually curb fossil fuel use. I doubt that govt’s have to go to such lengths to disguise what we all(should) know ie. fossil fuels will run out and get dearer as we approach that point.
I don’t think we know how we’ll depend on energy in the future, who knows what some bright spark will think up. necessity being the mother of invention and all.
If you listen to Richard Branson we’re pretty much doomed. I suspect he has an angle to make a few dollars out of the “crisis” we face.
What simple minded brown morons have not been able to get their around is that any system of biosequestration into trees has to be verifiable, tracked and accountable lest it be rorted big time. Gee everyone does their ag census correct don’t they.
The 5 farm inventories (1) what ABS says is there (2) what Tax thinks is there (3) what the landholder thinks is there (4) what satellites say is there (5) what is there.
If areas are destroyed by fire that needs to be accounted. Some people will store their off-cuts in a fire-proof, termite proof fashion while others will not. Some retain form-work – some dump it or burn. So we need a register of those who will and will not do the right sequestration thing at an internationally level – ought be a cinch for anyone with a big envelope.
Of course how much area of cropping land and pasture will we take out of production, with what consequent effect on production, exports and on hydrology.
Might planting tree belts anywhere except the tropics actually darken the albedo and actually make GW worse.
Is there enough confidence in the climate trajectory that rainfall in your favourite tree planting areas will hold up over 50-100 years.
So let’s see if we picked a modest scenario and decided we’d try to stabilise at 450 ppm how many trees would that be, what areas, what side effects and where?
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways,
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
Let us assume for the moment that CO2 is heating the planet, and that sequestering CO2 will cool it.
Historically, warm climate phases have proved beneficial, and cold ones miserable and disastrous.
So I would like to know–if someone introduces a CO2 sequestration technology which reduces planetary temperature, can we sue them for the lives lost, crops destroyed, increased winter heating bills, etc. due to global cooling?
Cold kills more humans than heat, so wrongful-death lawsuits against those responsible for global cooling could be enough to bankrupt the AGW industry.
And who will compensate Canada when glaciers sweep it off the map? I bet we could set up another “carbon trading fund” for “glacier refugees.” Sweeter yet, we could have the IPCC administer the fund.
The most chilling (literally) notion is that I might leave a cooling planet to my children, with Luke to console them, perhaps with phrases like, “ice is nice.”
Fantastic – now Schiller if you want to argue this way obviously CO2 is more important than you’re making out? So which is it. You’ve argued black and blue for months how teensy weensy it all is. Now it seems it’s all that HOT devil gas suffocating the planet 🙂
Sounds if you were on the judging panel you’d like a tap to put all the CO2 back in the atmosphere if you got the willies in a cold snap.
Another issue for CO2 sequesterers is that the current thinking probably doesn’t have CO2 and methane factored in that will volatilise out of permafrost, tundra, peat bogs and reducing soil carbon reserves (warming soil makes the microbes munch more).
So if we make a CO2 slurper – better make two.
P.S. Does anyone live in Canada anyway – except American political dissidents ?
Luke,
I said, “let’s assume.”
The fact is, we’re on the brink of giving our children a planet so stifled with greenie regulations that they’ll live in poverty.
That’s not an assumption, that’s a *fact.*
I supremely hope that my children will sue the knickers, shingles and everything else off of whomever sold them into poverty for the sake of preventing the planet from becoming a warm place.
Among our children, some will become lawyers; others will become soldiers. Poverty drives more wars than anything else.
After we impoverish ourselves for the sake of meeting the uber-green goal of the “planned environment,” the lawyers will fade away, when the rule of law subsides, and wars over resources will begin anew. The children will then be soldiers.
And according to the highest available figures, as much as 20 percent of CO2 in the atmosphere is from fossil fuel combustion. Which is squat per million.
The greenies want to make fossil fuels a scarce resource, but they haven’t yet considered what could ensue when people need them badly–and if there isn’t an open, free market for fuel, people *will* kill for them.
Figure it out.
So if we are accepting of the fact we are in a ‘carbon constrained’ world, and given the old and new technologies that exist to turn cellulose into liquid fuel or utilisable energy (ie ruminant animals and cellulosic ethanol), the question has to be asked what form of carbon can be sequester that will not have the temptation to be ‘sold’ to market. There is only one real answer, trees that produce STAPLE food commodities. That way the ‘organic infrastructure’ that is the tree is safe from being turned back into carbon dioxide because that infrastructure is essential for STAPLE food production. Eg I don’t see anybody pulling down oil palms for the timber market. You’ll see more nut plantations hitting the ground all around the world, chestnuts in the northern hemisphere, pistachios throughout the Middle East, Brazil Nuts (once they master propagation techniques) in South America and finally sandalwood nuts in Australia! Like Ian said, the solution is simple, get more trees in the ground and just as in Cuba, make sure they produce food and you’ll protect that carbon asset.
Luke, I wasted half a weeks pay to hear that song in a foot of mud at the SCG. It did not go down well.
The point is not to put more trees in the ground because they may actually warm the planet as Luke has said. My point is that the one broadly based industry that converts free carbon into storable carbon has been actively discouraged by the deemed emissions on harvesting.
This anti-harvesting fetish is the core of IPCC methodology when we should be maximising the potential for storing carbon in every day products that last longer than the forest recovery cycle. It provides a perverse incentive to buy less long lasting wood products.
If the emission is only counted at the time of emission then the obligation to pay the carbon tax is passed along the chain of custody to the point where the responsibility for the decision to keep or discard actually rests.
The purchasing of a long lasting wood product should not be the trigger for a carbon tax when it is actually the discarding of that product, or the burning of it, that produces the emission.
Likewise, the purchasing of a newspaper does not automatically mean an emission takes place if the newspaper is recycled into another storable product. It would be, and should be, the discarding of recycled packaging into a landfill that would cause the emission.
But if I chose to take my past 20 years of accumulated newspapers and bury them in the desert, and again, safe from termites, then that action must constitute carbon sequestration.
The only valid test is, will it prevent or postpone an emission? If yes, then the IPCC has no business ruling it out on the basis of administrative convenience.
At the moment the IPCC has carefully ensured that accounting for carbon only takes place at the wholesale level. And this absolves the consumer from any responsibility for their subsequent actions after they have purchased a carbon based product.
They are not given the opportunity to buy the product and change their behaviour to avoid the emission. And that is a recipe for failure.
Trees are the Answer! Regardless of rules set up by the IPCC, if Richard Branson and Al Gore are genuine then more trees and more timber products are the answer to removing CO2 from the Atmosphere.
The Australian Greenhouse Office provides the following expert opinion:
“Trees and other plants take up (sequester) carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow, through the process of photosynthesis. This decreases the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and helps reduce the greenhouse effect. Trees use the sequestered carbon to grow leaves, stems, bark and roots. The amount of carbon in forest soils can also increase over time. While the forest is actively growing and sequestering carbon, the system is termed a carbon sink”.
If global warming is caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, then to care for the environment we must grow more trees, the best way to do this is to get the forest industry to fund, plant, protect and harvest those trees.
Despite the rantings of green senator Brown that wants to destroy both Tasmania’s forest industry and Queensland coal industry, Tasmania is leading the way with a 25% reduction of GHG from the Kyoto base year.
It has achieved this remarkable result by, you guessed it, planting more trees and supporting a sustainable forest industry.
Perhaps if we close down Virgin Airlines, and perhaps if we stopped tricky Ricky’s space dreams we could meet his target.
Tell him instead of cash send me a one of his funny shaped credit cards with a $32 million dollar limit and balance.
The world has indeed gone nuts.
Ian, (I’m probably going to get lynched), but…
Rather than storing the off-cuts under your house why not just dump them in the sea?
(Don’t have the time now to look for it), but some time back I came across an article where the idea was mooted that a very effective way of decreasing atmospheric carbon and offsetting our use of fossil fuels was to gather all the surplus agri products (chaff, dung etc) and rather than burning it (or ploughing back in to fields) sink it in the deep and I mean DEEP ocean. The numbers used (though I did not verify them) seemed to stack up.
The cold / high pressure environment in the deep ocean would mean that there wouldn’t be significant decomposition before the stuff was covered by silt… especially if the dumping area was under the abyssal land (sea?) slide zones.
Think about it. Doing this could remove billions and billions of tons of carbon from the biosphere each year, and it has the benefit that the Kyoto watchdogs could measure this to the ounce. Once this converts to coal / oil there’s the added benefit that future generations would thank us for our foresight.
Of course we’ll all starve in the meantime – so the future generations may be those of cockroaches…
cheers
Arnost
You’ll never be able to dump carbon without the temptation to send it to market, ie large opportunity cost. The only way you can store carbon is to value added it into ‘infrastructure’ that is completely essential for the production of a commodity of need – food. Plant trees, preferably natives, that yield harvestable food products. A carbon constrained world means all forms of carbon will be viewed by energy markets as a feedstock! Thinking caps on people.
Deep sea dumping would work just as well as desert storage and would probably be cheaper to transport. In fact, any old bog will add half a century to a lot of wood products.
The irony is that these dumb turkeys can comprehend a planted tree storing carbon but cannot comprehend that removing a tree from an existing native forest can actually store more carbon than is emitted.
I have fence posts that are still doing the job 60 years after they were cut and the stand they were cut from has been partially harvested three times since then. And it is not that a new tree has grown from seed in the place of the first one. Rather, as one tree is removed, the ones beside it can rapidly occupy its space and replace all the removed wood volume. On average this can be every 15 to 20 years.
So the original cut tree has allowed three times its volume of carbon to be absorbed before the first volume has broken down. No other industrial process can get anywhere near it.
It was really great stuff until the IPCC came along.
We have all heard much about the ability of CO2 to keep the Earth in a smothering blanket.
Therefore, I propose that CO2 be sequestered for home insulation. Because of the remarkable qualities of CO2, including forcing and feedback effects, a home insulated with CO2 will not need a heating system. In fact, you would have to leave the windows open during winter to not bake yourself to death.
We’ve all been taught that “runaway greenhouse” occurs when we hit about 10 degrees C above average, which happens every year, and it alternates years depending on your hemisphere.
So with CO2 insulation, you could have “runaway greenhouse” in your own house! You could even generate your own electricity!
Yes, this idea is the winner, I do believe.
Schiller : It is climate science after all, remember the golden rule: No claim too great in climate science
A great video on this link … plant trees people!
————————————————-
In Niger, Trees and Crops Turn Back the Desert
Michael Kamber for The New York Times
In Ague, Niger, where replanting trees helped alleviate the effects of a famine in 2005, boys operate a foot pump to draw water for irrigation.
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: February 11, 2007
GUIDAN BAKOYE, Niger — In this dust-choked region, long seen as an increasingly barren wasteland decaying into desert, millions of trees are flourishing, thanks in part to poor farmers whose simple methods cost little or nothing at all.
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Michael Kamber for The New York Times
In Tahoua, where women have regenerated once-barren fields by digging manure pits, women mill their grain by pounding it with wooden pestles.
Better conservation and improved rainfall have led to at least 7.4 million newly tree-covered acres in Niger, researchers have found, achieved largely without relying on the large-scale planting of trees or other expensive methods often advocated by African politicians and aid groups for halting desertification, the process by which soil loses its fertility.
Recent studies of vegetation patterns, based on detailed satellite images and on-the-ground inventories of trees, have found that Niger, a place of persistent hunger and deprivation, has recently added millions of new trees and is now far greener than it was 30 years ago.
These gains, moreover, have come at a time when the population of Niger has exploded, confounding the conventional wisdom that population growth leads to the loss of trees and accelerates land degradation, scientists studying Niger say.
The vegetation is densest, researchers have found, in some of the most densely populated regions of the country.
“The general picture of the Sahel is much less bleak than we tend to assume,” said Chris P. Reij, a soil conservationist who has been working in the region for more than 30 years and helped lead a study published last summer on Niger’s vegetation patterns. “Niger was for us an enormous surprise.”
About 20 years ago, farmers like Ibrahim Danjimo realized something terrible was happening to their fields.
“We look around, all the trees were far from the village,” said Mr. Danjimo, a farmer in his 40s who has been working the rocky, sandy soil of this tiny village since he was a child. “Suddenly, the trees were all gone.”
Fierce winds were carrying off the topsoil of their once-productive land. Sand dunes threatened to swallow huts. Wells ran dry. Across the Sahel, a semiarid belt that spans Africa just below the Sahara and is home to some of the poorest people on earth, a cataclysm was unfolding.
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Severe drought in the 1970s and ’80s, coupled with a population explosion and destructive farming and livestock practices, was denuding vast swaths of land. The desert seemed determined to swallow everything. So Mr. Danjimo and other farmers in Guidan Bakoye took a small but radical step. No longer would they clear the saplings from their fields before planting, as they had for generations. Instead they would protect and nurture them, carefully plowing around them when sowing millet, sorghum, peanuts and beans.
Today, the success in growing new trees suggests that the harm to much of the Sahel may not have been permanent, but a temporary loss of fertility. The evidence, scientists say, demonstrates how relatively small changes in human behavior can transform the regional ecology, restoring its biodiversity and productivity.
In Niger’s case, farmers began protecting trees just as rainfall levels began to rise again after the droughts in the 1970s and ’80s.
Another change was the way trees were regarded by law. From colonial times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them. Trees were chopped for firewood or construction without regard to the environmental costs. Government foresters were supposed to make sure the trees were properly managed, but there were not enough of them to police a country nearly twice the size of Texas.
But over time, farmers began to regard the trees in their fields as their property, and in recent years the government has recognized the benefits of that outlook by allowing individuals to own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them.
The greening began in the mid-1980s, Dr. Reij said, “and every time we went back to Niger, the scale increased.”
“The density is so spectacular,” he said.
Mahamane Larwanou, a forestry expert at the University of Niamey in Niger’s capital, said the regrowth of trees had transformed rural life in Niger.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/world/africa/11niger.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Best forward that post to the knuckle dragging neanderthals that govern us. For they have spent the past decade trying to take our trees away from us. Explain to them that private ownership of trees protects them while public ownership of trees makes them disappear. But don’t hold your breath, the term “smart state” really is a classic piece of Orwellian newspeak. Ditto for Environment Protection Authority.
Private ownership protects trees – hmm – that’s logical – so where do all those ploughed and cleared fields come from that weren’t there pre-European; and why are the early 1988-91 tree clearing numbers so high.
Of course the forests will probably incinerate under government ownership/controls and increasingly sour property owners who advocate letting things burn so the neanderthalian, scum, spivalicious administration types will simply decide that you can’t trust trees as a carbon sink.
Ian still hasn’t explained how he’s going to devise an internationally verifiable system that works out whether you’ve burned your off-cuts or stored them.
If we’re going to be storing CO2 in underground reservoirs, etc., you just know there’s going to be something somewhere along the line that springs a leak. And the CO2 will be called a “toxic spill” and hazardous materials teams wearing moon suits will be called in. And then there will be claims of environmental damage, and the environmental scientists and lawyers will line up lawsuits.
There are other options. For instance, the brewing of beer is responsible for significant returns of CO2 to the atmosphere, and humans consuming beer also release sequestered CO2.
See http://www.beerandpub.com/content.asp?id_Content=942
The process of making ethanol for consumption by automobiles also produces CO2, but it can be sequestered and used for making carbonated beverages.
See http://www.ethanolresearch.com/about/faq.php
Unfortunately, this also results in CO2 eventually being released.
So I have another idea: take the grain used for beer and ethanol production and bury *it* in the ocean. This would sequester the CO2 and make spills more manageable. You wouldn’t need guys in moon suits.
Here’s NSW Farmers thinking on reducing emissions:
http://www.nswfarmers.org.au/legislative_action/election_2007
“Address Climate Change
The Association urges the establishment of a carbon market that recognises cropping and grazing systems that enhance carbon storage and which provides carbon credits to farmers for their past contribution to reducing emissions by retaining native vegetation.”
And the National Farmers Federation:
http://www.nff.org.au/pages/nr07/005.html
“THE threat of global climate change is potentially the biggest issue Australian agriculture has ever faced with reports of increasing seasonal variability and more extreme weather events,” National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) President David Crombie declared today in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released over the weekend.”
Whatever solutions are picked to getting CO2 out of the atmosphere, I think its important that all parties come to the table to participate constructively in developing those solutions. Whining from the sidelines about supposed neanderthals in govt is an impotent lobbying policy.
For all the talk of trees storing carbon on this thread, there doesn’t seem to have been much reference to NCAS, to the huge body of work that has already been developed to try and quantify emissions from deforestation and afforestation. There has been no discussion of carbon released from the soil after an area is cleared. From my limited understanding, this can be significant. Though I’m definitely no expert, and happy to defer to more knowledgeable contributors.
At the very least it isn’t straightforward that the carbon stored in timber would offset the methane released from rotting roots, and unused branches, bark, leaves etc, or else the CO2 from incinerated waste. In addition to soil carbon released.
Good to see NSW Farmers and the NFF take a cooperative approach to AGW and demand a seat at the table when it comes to working through the solutions.
Maybe the timber industries could follow suit if they are sure that their industry has a contribution that is not being well recognised. Tree planting is certainly already well recognised as a way to store carbon, if accounting is not correct or can be improved, who is going to fix that?
Steve,
I prefer the idea of burying food in the ocean. It’s a perfect demonstration of what the greenies advocate. But it *would* sequester CO2!
Food crops have been bred for thousands of years to increase their ability to produce edible biomass. After centuries of effort, we could actually use them to make sure our planet doesn’t become as warm as in the bad old days.
Historians assure us that a warmer planet is a nicer place, but who cares about that?
And burying food would be be an “all-natural” limit on the proliferation of humans.
Yes, I like this idea better than housing insulated with self-roasting CO2.
Let’s stuff our food into underground caverns.
Not only do trees and timber products sequester lots of carbon, but mild controlled burns leave more charcoal than fierce summer wildfires, which ash or volatilise everything. Charcoal is a wonderful carbon store – it can last for thousands of years in the soil, termites notwithstanding. It also can play a big role in soil fertility, by harboring bacteria. Charcoal on the outside of a fallen tree slows down decay, so slowing CO2 release. How about a Minister for Charcoal Production? Come on Branson, hand over the million dollars.
Schiller, there are no ‘remarkable’ qualities for CO2. It exhibits behaviours of many gases. It just happens to trap radiated heat at a frequency that others don’t. Water vapourm for example, is transparent to radiation at some frequencies, but traps it at other frequencies. CO2 just happens to to trap it at the frequencies that water vapour doesn’t, for example. If you have more CO2, you get more heat trapped. (This is not a linear relationship, though). Once again, nothing remarkable about that.
Argument from incredulity is not an argument.
Re charcoal. My understanding (per John Carter at QDNRM) is that charcoal has made up the majority of soil carbon in the woodland landscapes and this was wrongly being assumed to be released after clearing when it remains in stable form.
It also forms the key element in the highly prized black soils of Amazonia, assumed to be a relic of past slash and burn activities.
Darker exposed soils also warm up faster in spring producing earlier microbial activity that boosts fertility.
John Raison, of CSIRO Forestry advised the Intensive Management of Regrowth Forest for Wood Production workshop, Orbost Vic. 5/1999 that ash beds could boost seedling growth six fold. General fertiliser application (P) trebled stand volume at 8.5 years.
This can also be used as a tool for controlling initial seedling densities. Nature often produces too many seedlings and the spacing of burned material (windrows) can ensure that the most vigorous trees can be pre-positioned to minimise subsequent thinning costs.
The other interesting point to note is that old growth forests make no contribution to carbon sequestration because old trees exhibit very slow growth which is negated by internal decomposition.
So we have Bob Brown and his knuckle draggers trying to “preserve” old growth, and anything even vaguely resembling same, to prevent the non-existent emission from stable sawn timber, while maintaining emissions through decay that completely negate the greenhouse contributive value of the forest.
Don’t be fooled by the green spin, if a big old giant has any valuable wood in it then it will end up in long storage, stable carbon, sawn timber. Only the waste will be sold as woodchip while the stump and larger roots will still be full of carbon in 50 years time.
The regrowth stems that replace the old trees will grow very much faster and will need to be thinned and partially harvested numerous times over the following century. And each partial harvest will produce more stored carbon while the remaining trees replace all the carbon that has been moved from forest to someones house.
And provided a few nest trees are retained, the wildlife prefer the regrowth forest and achieve higher population densities from a more nutritious, abundant, stable and reliable food supply.
So if CO2 really is a problem, and the wildlife are better served by regrowth, then how can we possibly justify leaving millions of hectares of forest locked up in public reserves waiting to be “broadscale clearfired” by departmental incompetence.
Old growth is a hideous luxury in a climate crisis.
OK you advocates of a burnt earth policy! How much carbon can you lock away per fire?
Sydney Uni is supporting my idea of fertilizing the ocean! And has done some numbers for me. Here’s the media release:
“Sydney Uni has a candidate for the Branson prize waiting in the wings
Researchers from the University of Sydney’s Ocean Technology Group and their partners think they could be in the running for a US $25 million prize for removing CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere.
Flamboyant English entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson recently announced the US $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge Prize to find the best way to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and save the planet from global warming.
Professor Ian S F Jones from the Ocean Technology Group at the University of Sydney believes he has the solution – Ocean Nourishment. “Ocean Nourishment takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into fish” says Professor Jones. “The carbon dioxide not converted to fish falls into the deep ocean where it is stored for hundreds of years.”
The process mimics nature by introducing reactive nitrogen into the open ocean. Utilising natural sunlight, Ocean Nourishment economically changes carbon dioxide into organic vegetable matter, known as phytoplankton. Fish and other marine life feed on this matter ensuring plentiful and healthy fish populations.
Over the past decade researchers at the University of Sydney have been investigating the environmental risks of Ocean Nourishment and its benefits in restoring the health of the ocean. The process provides the open ocean with the nutrients that are missing. Students are currently working with engineering firms at the Australian Technology Park to develop the most cost effective methods of generating and delivering these nutrients.
Each Ocean Nourishment scheme would create 10 million carbon credits per year -as much as a million hectares of new forest can produce.
Professor Jones and the Ocean Nourishment scheme are currently featured in a BBC TV production, Five Ways to Save the World, being aired in the UK this week.”
PS We can apparently lodge our entries here: http://www.virginearth.com/
Branson should put the money into a trust administered by a third party, otherwise it is just empty rhetoric. He may as well say $320M as no-one will ever see it and he will never have to spend it.
Anyway, how could he spend $Ms of company money on a stunt? its just another peace of PR, like this one http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E6D81438F93BA25756C0A962958260
It could be seen as a breach of company particles and of fiduciary obligations of the directors.
Tiger Airways are clawing an entry into Australia, they say Virgin and Qantas are too expensive.
articles not particles
While the ultimate absurdity of all this is sinking in, i could add that the contibution of fat people to carbon sequestration needs recognition too….We need more Fat People to act As Carbon Sinks! They should all get a “lard-allowance” for carting around all that bulk for seventy years. And, on the other hand, compulsive polluters, like joggers and such, who have to keep eating to replace the energy burnt off with exercise, should pay for it!
Be careful with trees – the albedo effects from planting in temperature regions may actually make it warmer ! I would have thought Ian, being a recent albedo groupie, would have reminded us by now.
Ah Yes! Trees are the answer. Natures carbon recyclers. PLantation forests are magnificent carbon recyclers over short term timescales and native forests over mediumto longer term.
Recent work by NSW DPI researchers has demonstrated that wood products stored in land fill have life expectancies far greater than previously thought.Newspapers are sti readable after 50 years and solid wood products have shown little sign of decay. The IPCC has got it wrong on wood products in the same way they have got it wrong on trees in general for both Kyoto and UNFCCC accounting and reporting rules.
Interesting, Peter. That means that even woodchipped harvest slash, millwaste and first thinnings will store carbon for at least three times longer than the forest takes to regrow the same volume.
A standard 50% basal area removal would be replaced by the remaining trees in about 20 years, 15 years on quality sites, 25 on poorer ones. And as most woodchip goes to newsprint then we must conclude that this option stores carbon just as effectively as house frames, fence posts, poles or sleepers.
So it is not the planting of new trees that will boost carbon sequestration but, rather, the on-going management of the forest in perpetuity that produces cumulative sequestration that is greater than the total volume of the fully stocked forest.
And that makes Peter Beattie, Bob Carr and assorted other state Premiers who have closed state forests and ended the “management for timber production in perpetuity” the worst carbon criminals in the country.
In Queensland their partners in crime have been Rod McInnes of Timber Queensland and Aila Keto of some obscure sect who colluded to exclude native forest wood from woodchip markets and biogeneration feedstocks. It is now left to be burned as waste. Dumb and dumber.
Sounds very logical Ian. Carbon sequestration in forest products certainly adds to the contribution trees make to limiting CO2 and carbon trading schemes should acknowledge this fact.
On another tack, trace elements were found to be the limiting factor on vegetative growth around Esperence and south-eastern South Australia.
Is it possible that the growth in areas of scrub/forest could be similarly limited?
Perhaps carbon sequestration could be enhanced in ,say, the Pilliga with a cheap fertilisation of boron for example.
Nobody is going to give you a credit for business as usual. Has to be new forestry.
So we’re no longer worried about hydrological impacts or darker albedos?
And how will we devise an international verification system to keep track of the decay level status of your off-cuts and newspapers and whether you knicked out the back and burnt it as soon as we left ?
The way the biological carbon stuff is going I can see in the next rounds of negotiations they’ll say it’s full of Aussie forestry shonkies or AGO policy swifty merchants and simply disallow all of it.
So back to iron filings in the ocean then?
Thats not true, Luke and where true, it needn’t remain so. The carbon trading system envisages that existing emitters are given credit for reductions in emissions but this also means they get credit for the level of their 1990 emissions.
It will eventually becomes clear that the anthropogenic action of closing a state forest that was dedicated to timber production in 1990 will actually produce a substantial reduction in levels of sequestration. And this reduction in sequestration will have the same status as an increase in emissions.
This will mean the various EPAs that took over those forests will need to find the budget to cover a massive carbon tax bill on their reduced sequestration.
Furthermore, on private native forest that had no harvesting activity in 1990, one can argue that a continued postponement of harvesting after 1990 will, again, eventually produce a decline in the volume of sequestration as the forest goes into lock up. And when the public eventually understands what these IPCC hideoids are up to, it will change.
And even if the IPCC won’t see sense, the High Court will. Remember, once we get out of the IPCC fairyland and into the actual tax system of Australian business, the stakes will be high enough to ensure that every single principle is properly tested for rigour, reasonableness, justice and equity. Tax accountants test EVERYTHING.
And your repeated claims that wood carbon accounting would be too hard are unfounded. Most wood is sold in large volumes and the dry weight and carbon content is easily assigned. The purchase of a house is a big ticket item that can cover the cost of a carbon calculation. Newsprint is a standard product with known weight in gsm for which the printers costing system can easily allocate carbon volume and have it printed on the product just like the ingredients on a food product today.
Another approach is to simply discount the carbon tax by the standard discount rates depending, for example, on how long a newspaper will last in a landfill. If it takes 60 years to release all its carbon then a $50/tonne carbon tax today should be discounted to the price that covers an emission in 60 years time.
At an interest/discount rate of 7%pa, the tax would halve every ten years so a $50 emission that is posponed to year 2067 would be paid in full with $0.78 today. And if a guy from Sydney Uni comes up with a scheme that will sequester it for 70 years then the tax will only be $0.39/tonne. And that, whether anyone agrees with it or not, is what the courts would be bound to rule, is the true value today of a postponed emission.
And obviously, the compliance costs will tend to ensure that sequestered wood carbon is not done on an individual basis but, rather, as part of a larger scheme (like a council tip) which undergoes the audit process.
In the building industry the builder does not pass on his off-cuts to the home owner so the builder would have the choice of what he does with the carbon in the off-cuts. Again, maybe an industry scheme.
And then cellulosic ethanol technology comes along and completely disincentivises any carbon sequestration in any form because it can all be turned into ethanol via enzymatic hydrolysis and then normal fermentative processes. In a carbon constrained world, sequestration will come with a large opportunity cost therefore it is not sustainable. In order for carbon to be “stored” and be safe from energy markets, it must be integral in structural infrastructure for production of a commodity – ie trees that produce staple food commodities. Why do people have to try and complicate something that is so simple? Just plant trees that produce life essential stuff. Theres plenty of land being inefficiently managed out there, ie most of Australias southern cropping zones.
Bollocks, Aaron. Wood carbon comes as a bonus to the wood itself which is already valued at between $1000 and $2500/m3 in its own right as house frames or flooring etc. So the price of energy will need to rise a very, very, very long way before anyone will be passing up the aesthetic and investment value of a Brushbox floor so they can chip it up for ethanol.
If the IPCC’s brain was in it’s head, rather than it’s backside, they would recognise that the smart thing to do would be to store wood waste for 50 years and then use it as feedstock for co-generation etc, just before it starts to break down. That would maximise the contribution of all the properties of the wood.
At the moment they accept that the rotting away of an old tree is a “natural emission”, and termites consuming a tree is a “natural emission”, but the moment I intervene before those emissions take place I am likely to be slugged with a full price carbon tax for carbon that will not hit the atmosphere for another 60 years.
Just another day in the august business of planetary salvation.
Ian you should update yourself on inventory process developments.
An example:
http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2005/sbsta/eng/inf07.pdf
Luke,
Unfortunately Yes, it does have to be new forest under Kyoto rules. But as Kyoto will only account for an at best 1% reductionin emmissions then perhaps we need to rethink the policy on forest sinks. As it stands countries such as Australiathat have abundant forests have effectively had any competitive advantage removed at the behest of the European kyoto negotiators. The 1990 baseline is indeed meaningless for surely if they were really serious the baseline would have been at the start of the industrial revolution.
Putting more trees int he ground will probably have apositive impact on water balance in that it may return to a pre-european hydrological cycle not the anthropogenic one we have today.
Darker albedos would have to be balanced agains a greater surface roughness and the impcat on increased forest cover on local weather paterns.
Trees/forests may not be THE answer but they surely have a role in the solution. As CO2 is the only greenhouse gas that does NOT have an atmospheric life (it just moves in and out of sinks)it is not illogical to create additional sinks nor to manage those that exist so that they have a greater capacity to absorb additional carbon.
Peter – yes surely it’s reasonable that it would be new forestry as nobody is going to give you a prize for business as usual if atmospheric CO2 is increasing. Only new activities which actively remove it from the atmosphere long term will get a credit. I’m merely pointing out to Ian that he should do some more background reading into SBSTA as the “dimwit IPCC types” may be taking some advice and he, being our forestry advocate, update himself and ourselves on the latest information, instead of shooting wildly from the hip.
IMO there seems to be a move for wall to wall accounting to count everything well but gee it’s complex with much room for rorting.
After some recent reading the darkening albedo of temperate forests and impact on hydrology has me wondering are trees an AGW answer or not. I’m now simply not sure. Not a political position – purely scientific. Indeed surface roughness, stomatal conductance and evapotranspiration effects are also in this complex mix.
The situation with tropical forests seems to be about generating clouds (reflective) above the forests and evapotranspiring lots of water.
Thanks for the link, Luke. These are obviously steps in the right direction but are still way off the mark. In the Australian case the assumed decay rates and estimated life of products are;
Biofuel 1.0 life 1 year
Pulp and paper 0.33 life 3 years
Packaging wood 0.20 life 5 years
Furniture/poles 0.05 life 20 years
Fibreboard 0.07 life 14 years
Construction 0.02 life 50 years
Mill residue 1.0 life 1 year
Now assuming most paper products end up in landfill then the actual life of paper is 50+ years, ditto for packaging wood and fibreboard.
As for poles, they are all treated and mostly durability class 1 (unless pine) which means they are good for 40 years in ground and either 15 more years as landscaping material or another 30 years in landfill.
And, Luke, the entire notion that no credit is given for ‘business as usual’ as you put it is in direct contradiction of the “no disadvantage” principle. That is, that those who take greenhouse abatement actions early should suffer no disadvantage in relation to competitors who start later. The whole 1990 cut-off is a disadvantage for everyone who either grew or tended a native or plantation forest prior to 1990.
To apply a cut-off test, that was designed to minimise emissions, to a process that absorbs emissions, is a hideous perversion of the meaning of consistency. Who else but the IPCC would try to solve a problem by discriminating against those who are already contributing to the solution?
I have photos to prove that my native forest was a bare paddock in 1942. So every single tonne of carbon in that forest deserves a credit.
Luke,
Business as usual should be rewarded if it contributes to a reduction in greenhouse gases. Currently the perverse situation is that emissions are counted if forests are cleared, but no recognition is given to the maintenance of those same forests as sinks. A far more difficult task than reducing emissions resulting from industry.
Well managed production forests can be used to remove and store carbon in forest products (house framing, wood products etc) and the forest regenerated to sequester additional carbon from the same land base. This is is a scientifically proven fact that every forester knows. Basically modelling the growth of forests and their response to treatmetn is fundamental to forestry.
IPCC/UNFCCC rules prohibit such accounting. Why? when it does not result in a transfer of land from one activity to another and management interventions beyond business as usual can be documented and independently verified. The same IPCC/UNFCCC rules also prohibit greater than 2% of a countries greenhouse gas reductions from coming from increased forest sinks. Clearly influenced by countries that do not have a large land base on which to carry out afforestation or reforestation projects. Still a perverse outcome for the environment which ever way its looked at.
So you think the Brushbox flooring market could be a great sink for carbon Ian and thats great but I’m not talking about furniture. Its a niche market in the context of the volume consumed particularly given most homes are already furnished. A slowing global economy could easily take care of growth in that sector in any case. You really ought to get up to speed with the developing cellulosic ethanol market. It is the mother of all end uses to earmark cheap carbon sinks and sources for conversion to liquid fuels. Whether I agree with this or not is irrelevant but this is what is unfolding.
All this stuff depends on getting agreement !
I think it’s a work in progress. So they are trying to improve the model. But you have to get agreement – that’s where it gets irrational and you end up with a camel – group process and heavy vested interests and little good will = camel.
The problem with your 1942 paddock, while the cause is just, is that they’re going to have to verify every case by hand. Think how much fun and unwieldy tree clearing permits by hand have become as an example tree bureaucracy. And in a British derived public service ! Then let’s project globally back into the 1940s !! ARGH!
Then think international from Berlin to Botswana !
So they then move to a modern 1990s cutoff date with satellite imagery available for expedience.
Then you’re not happy.
So – this gets to the position where the negotiators say “TOO HARD”. SO the bureaucrats say – well most of the problem is coal and oil.
We’ll WIPE the entire forestry bit from the equations as it’s too hard to monitor effectievly.
THen you’ll say “unfair !”.
Don’t think what’s exactly 100% right down to 6 decimal places for your place Ian – think how could I get agreement.
NO agreement means nothing happens. (if that’s want you want cool – (err hot) – but you can’t have it both ways). Timber Australia needs a white paper for SBSTA if you want to influence the game. But make it workable pls !
First thing to do is see where SBSTA is up to on this stuff. I’ve just given you one Google which is not the way to research properly here.
I’ve just read Peter’s comments above.
Guys the IPCC process can be influenced. But you have to make a case.
And you have to think what others think about it too.
IT’s not about being 100% right – it’s about getting agreement.
And in the current 4AR process – it’s the opposite to what you think – bureaucrats are watering down what the scientists think – not sexing it up. Left alone the scientists would be more forthright.
So this business is simply an RFA process on steroids – so what’s Timber Australia and the property rights movement doing about it besides spoiling and throwing googlies.
“Just an RFA process on steroids”, eh Luke. Well most of us have had an absolute gut full of RFA processes and outcomes that are subject to political interference only 18 months after the ink is dry. These people are paid very well and have big budgets to get it right. They are more likely to get it right when the consequences of getting it wrong is widespread derision and contempt.
Consultation with these people, in the face of green political interference, merely makes us the least stressful interest group to shaft. The political cost of shafting forestry is much lower than the cost of shafting green swing voters.
So if you think my communication style might be straying towards the villification end of the spectrum then, congratulations, the smart pills are starting to work. I am sick of having my pocket pissed in and time wasted by bogus consultation processes.
The simple message from native forest owners is the same one that is now comming out of New Zealand, if governments think they can deny credits to the lawful owners and still hit them with a full price carbon tax for harvesting then it is “burn baby burn” as they said in the Watts Riots in LA.
All I need to do is let regrowth clog up a few strategic gaps and head off to the beach on the right day and I don’t have a problem any more. No more tree, no more bull$hit.
By the way, Luke, it is not clear whether the submissions on emission rates were accepted by the IPCC. Can you confirm?
Also, note the multiple of 1.9 times mill waste which is to cover the volume of branches etc left in the forest. These are assumed to be emitted in the year of harvest when in most partial harvests they remain for years, even decades. The firewood collectors usually wont touch them for ten years and only the smallest twigs get burned in cold hazzard reduction burns. The rest gets a coating of charcoal that adds another 30 years to expected life.
The only time it is emitted quickly is in a clearfall and hot regen fire, but even that needs a few years to dry out to get a proper burn.
And this is no minor issue because it is about 33% of total volume that is lumped in with mill waste (for convenience) but is not emitted for between 10 and 30 years.
And even mill waste is off the mark. A lot of the solid waste ends up in fireplaces but most of the sawdust ends up either being mixed with topsoil or, if on farm milling, just dumped around the paddock. In the soil it wont start breaking down for 5 years and residues will remain to 15 years.
That is, unless it is Iron Bark or other durability class 1 sawdust. We recently found a sawdust pile still intact from our 1943 mill site that had been covered by a thick carpet of Kikuyu that had only utilised and broken down the top 10cm. That is 60 times longer than the IPCC standard.
We are not just talking about some minor percentage errors here, it is a fundamental failure to comprehend the nature of the industry and it’s processes.
Well at least you can’t accuse me of widdling in your pocket. And I know how they pseudo-consult you – yes yes.
But you need to carpe diem it and get your own white paper which you announce with some media razza mattaz. (Jeez why I am telling you guys this)
It’s a question of – do you want to win or just do the nana.
Will look into your request for info (as usual 🙂 )
Ian check:
http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/2006gl/vol4.htm
2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Volume 4,
Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use
and from here:
http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/
Good Practice Guidance for Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry
Definitions and Methodological Options to Inventory Emissions from Direct Human-induced Degradation of Forests and Devegetation of Other VegetationTypes
Good Practice Guidance and Uncertainty Management in National Greenhouse Gas Inventories
Has anyone thought of using liquid CO2 as a fuel. In this way you wont be adding CO2 to the atmosphere you`ll just be using it temperarely
im 16 years old and i have a crazy idea what if we open the atmosphere and let the co2 out and let the bad stuff go out or is that a bad idea