Category: Climate Change

Annals of defriending, installment #4681…

A friend posted a picture of the impeccably dressed family standing in front of a burning fireplace: “Not to distract from the impeachment bonanza, but Merry Christmas and Happy other Holidays!”

This garnered nearly 200 Facebook likes and 40+ positive comments, e.g., “Beautiful Family! Happy Holidays.”

On the other hand, me:

Looks like carbon that had been sequestered in those logs is now being released into the atmosphere. You are stealing [depicted boy] and [depicted girl’s] childhood. HOW DARE YOU?!?

Then a follow-up:

May I gently suggest that next year’s photo depict the family digging a hole in which to bury the wood instead. [Link to “Carbon sequestration via wood burial”]

From the cited 2008 paper:

Here a carbon sequestration strategy is proposed in which certain dead or live trees are harvested via collection or selective cutting, then buried in trenches or stowed away in above-ground shelters. The largely anaerobic condition under a sufficiently thick layer of soil will prevent the decomposition of the buried wood. Because a large flux of CO2 is constantly being assimilated into the world’s forests via photosynthesis, cutting off its return pathway to the atmosphere forms an effective carbon sink.

Based on data from North American logging industry, the cost for wood burial is estimated to be $14/tCO2($50/tC), lower than the typical cost for power plant CO2 capture with geological storage. The cost for carbon sequestration with wood burial is low because CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by the natural process of photosynthesis at little cost. The technique is low tech, distributed, easy to monitor, safe, and reversible, thus an attractive option for large-scale implementation in a world-wide carbon market.

The proposal is to (1) collect dead trees on the forest floor and (2) selectively log live trees. Then the tree trunks are either buried in the trenches dug on the forest floor (burial) or suitable landfills, or logs piled up above ground sheltered away from rain (Fig. 3). The buried woody material will have significantly longer residence time, and it effectively transfers carbon from a relatively fast decomposing pool (about 10 years) to a much slower carbon pool (100–1000 years or longer).

The 10 GtC y-1 dead wood production rate could also be enhanced by active forest management. Instead of waiting for the trees to die, one can also harvest relatively mature trees via techniques such as selective cutting. At first sight, this seems to be a carbon source as live trees take up CO2. However, if trees are selected properly, it may lead to an overall sink because younger forest tends to be more productive, and somewhere in the development stage, productivity significantly exceeds respiration and decomposition loss [24]. Since the less productive trees that do not do well compete for light and other resources, their removal will leave younger trees to grow more vigorously in the gaps, forming a net carbon sink. In an even-aged forest, self-thinning is a major step of the secondary succession in which a major fraction of young trees die to give way to other trees. In this case much younger trees can be selectively cut or collected after death.

It is an interesting question whether this can be a useful geoengineering strategy. Readers: Do you know of newer research in this area?

For trees that have already been cut, however, like the 25-30 million Christmas trees (source) sold each year in the U.S., wouldn’t burial of the trees do more to save the planet than a lot of the empty environmental gestures in which Americans engage?

In other Christmas news, a Facebook meme that seems to have been widely shared…

Boston Museum of Fine Arts tree, in which flags of Islamic nations are featured on a Christmas tree:

The year is almost over so nearly all of the accomplishments of 2019 have already happened.

Some people are complaining that Greta Thunberg shouldn’t have been chosen as TIME Person of the Year on the grounds that she didn’t accomplish anything (China and India are still growing and burning coal;, American say-gooders are still driving their pavement-melting SUVs, etc.).

If not Greta T, then who? On a planet of 7.6 billion souls, who among us is worthy of this singular honor? (a tougher challenge than what the Nobel Prize committees face since they are able to spread out the honors among 20+ people)

Some possibilities:

• Donald Trump, since he has generated more media stories than anyone (and CNN viewers consider him a god; he already won in 2016, but that was when he was merely a human and Obama was selected twice)
• Harvey Weinstein, since he kicked off the lucrative #MeToo industry (Person of the Year need not be a saint; Adolf Hitler was selected in 1938; note that the people getting paid were selected in 2017 as “The Silence Breakers”)
• Robert Mueller, who spent two years and tens of $millions in tax dollars to figure out that some young Americans wanted to be paid to have sex with older Americans and that some Americans wanted to evade paying income tax
• Volodymyr Zelensky, who has managed to keep roughly 50 percent of Americans spellbound with tales of a country that almost none of them would be able to locate on a map
• Bill Dally, chief scientist at NVIDIA, the hardware behind the end of the AI Winter
• someone in China who accomplished something awesome that we can all use? (the folks behind the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge are disqualified, though, since it opened in 2018)
• Xi Jinping, since he directs the world’s most important economy without hogging the headlines all the time
• Martin Herrenknecht, whose tunneling machines are transforming the world and enabling the Chinese to get everywhere quickly on their new metro systems
• Bernard Ziegler, who has kept tens of millions of people safe with the fly-by-wire systems that he pioneered at Airbus

Readers: Better ideas? (I hope!)

From the guy who runs the U.S. when nobody from Ukraine is available to act as the hidden power behind our government (NY Post):

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday took aim at teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, telling an energy forum he did not share the excitement about her United Nations speech last month.

Putin, chairing a session at an energy forum in Moscow, said: “I may disappoint you but I don’t share the common excitement about the speech by Greta Thunberg.

“No one has explained to Greta that the modern world is complex and different and … people in Africa or in many Asian countries want to live at the same wealth level as in Sweden.”

Why not implement an exchange program around this? People in poor countries that have low per-capita carbon output can swap with those in rich high-carbon countries who want to reduce their personal footprints. Thus the person from the poor country can immediately enjoy the more lavish material lifestyle within there being any net increase in carbon consumption (try to do the exchange via a standby flight reservation so that there is no extra carbon output from the airline trips).

It could also be a fun TV show depicting the adaptions of those who agree to participate in the swap, in the artistic tradition of Trading Places.

Readers: What to call this? The “Putin-Thunberg Shuffle”?

Related:

• “What tiny Bhutan can teach the world about being carbon negative” (CNN), which neglects to mention that deporting one-sixth of the population likely cut Bhutan’s carbon output considerably
• “Jane Fonda: The Climate Emergency Is a Political Emergency” (nytimes)… but the emergency is perhaps not so dire that it would require the successful divorce plaintiff to fly commercial (see the Telegraph for “Fonda filed for divorce from Turner in 2001, a decision spurred on by Fonda’s conversion to a ‘feminist, spiritual interpretation of Christianity,’ with the actress apparently pocketing $70 million in their settlement.”)

“World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency“ is signed by 11,258 scientists worldwide.

Let’s have a look at principal author Thomas Newsome’s conference papers, indicating travel from his Sydney, Australia base. In 2018 alone, he visited at least Cleveland, Minneapolis, Brisbane, and Hobart. How about principal author Phoebe Barnard? In addition to organizing and attending conferences around the world, she splits her time among Namibia, South Africa, and the U.S.

When will the climate emergency become so dire that these authors decide to use Skype rather than take transcontinental airline trips every few months?

Related only in the reference to United Premier 1K:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/10/05/new-version-of-the-boeing-787-announced/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/10/11/if-christine-blasey-ford-was-permanently-damaged-by-brett-kavanaugh-what-hope-is-there-for-the-refugees-that-the-u-s-admits/ : “Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that she was permanently damaged by Brett Kavanaugh, suffering from reduced academic performance, an inability to tolerate airline travel (except cross the Pacific to surf destinations in French Polynesia because driving to a California beach would be even more intolerable?), and various other maladies of PTSD…”
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/10/05/why-didnt-christine-blasey-ford-drive-to-manchester-new-hampshire/

Today is the big day for protesting climate change. Our virtuous neighbors will abandon their pavement-melting SUVs and ride the commuter rail (service ever two hours, whether you need it or not!):

This Friday, September 20, many members of the Lincoln community plan to attend the Boston Youth Climate Strike at Boston City Hall. We will board the 9:09 am train at Lincoln Station. Around the country and around the globe, young people and their adult allies will be leaving school and work to raise their voices to protect the Earth’s climate from further damage by human caused fossil fuel emissions.

St. Anne’s in-the-Fields Episcopal Church, Lincoln, invites anyone who is planning to take the 9:09 train to join us for a brief Liturgy for the Climate at Lincoln Station beginning at 8:45 am. Join our clergy and members of our congregation as we offer prayers of blessing for the Earth and acknowledge the climate emergency threatening the future of humanity. All are welcome!

You can find information about the Boston Youth Climate Strike on the web site for Massachusetts Mothers Out Front.

The school strike for climate, also known variously as Fridays for Future (FFF), Youth for Climate and Youth Strike 4 Climate is an international movement of school students who take time off from class to participate in demonstrations to demand action to prevent further global warming and climate change. Publicity and widespread organizing began after Swedish schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, staged a protest in August 2018 outside the Swedish Riksdag.

If you have not experienced Greta’s eloquence, please watch her Ted Talk. Greta recently took a sailboat trip from Sweden to New York City to be present for the strike with youth from New York prior to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Greta Thunberg was the object of derision among Scandinavians on our recent Northwest Passage cruise. She traveled to New York on an “emissions-free yacht” (New York Times) or “zero-emissions sailboat” (CNN). If you read unsanctioned news outlets, however, you’ll learn that eliminating one transatlantic flight required about $5 million in construction cost for the yacht (imagine how many trees could have been planted!) and multiple transatlantic flights for the crew (The Sun and Voice of Europe and Spectator).

Readers: What are your neighbors doing for the climate strike?

Update: Gridlock from all of the climate protesters trying to get home in their SUVs…

Related:

• betterlincolnschools.wordpress.com: Our climate-conscious neighbors vote to bulldoze a school (newly built or renovated 24 years earlier) and spend $110 million on a same-size replacement (the market verdict on this project seems to be negative; neighbors trying to sell their houses are failing and prices are falling relative to other Boston-area towns)