How To Stabilize Earth's Climate
New ideas on how the planetary ecosystem works gives us hope to avoid climate disruption.
Munich, April 9th, 2024. At the conference “Embracing Nature’s Complexity,” Anastassia Makarieva illustrates the concept of biotic regulation and climate stabilization. The control of climate by the ecosystem is an innovative concept that may help us avoid the looming climate disasters. The idea is discussed below by Rob De Laet.
WE CAN BEAT CLIMATE CHAOS!
We can stabilize the climate and cool the planet within twenty years!
Guest post by fellow holobiont Rob de Laet
Rob de Laet is an earth systems visionary who has lived and worked for many years in the Amazon bioregion. He is a climate activist, consultant, educator and an EU Climate Pact Ambassador in the Netherlands. (original source)
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In order to survive the climate crisis we must transform the current economic and societal model, which has significantly contributed to planetary degradation. This transformation, a metamorphosis really, centers around a vision of a sustainable and resilient world, a story that inspires and unites people towards a common goal: a new sense of belonging and community in deep relation to our living planet and in harmony with the world. Our innate qualities of altruism and cooperation can trigger collective action against climate chaos and the deterioration of the only planet we call home. Together we can restore the global commons and steward the rich resources our planet provides us tirelessly. The movement to restore the planet to its previous abundance must be inclusive, participatory and a call for a common goal: the creation of a beautiful future for generations to come. It must be a celebration of the great gift of life and to be part of the only living planet in the universe we are aware of. If communities everywhere engage in local sustainable practices such as food production, ecological restoration and the protection of nature and sustainably shared use of resources, our movement for change will be a source of hope and guiding us on a path out of the mess we are in, into that brighter tomorrow.
I invite you to become the heroes of the new story to create that beautiful tomorrow!
Onward, because we have much to do and are running out of time to make the great transformation possible.
HOW DO WE CREATE THAT BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW?
“If you want to make major changes, you have to change the way you SEE things.”
Let’s start by understanding our planet differently: The Earth is alive, it is one functioning organism, with all species and ecosystems playing a role in establishing the conditions for life to thrive in a hostile universe. The biosphere is responsible for creating and maintaining the livable climate within which we’ve all evolved. Many Indigenous peoples have long held this story of a living planet and so has James Lovelock with the Gaia theory.
Greenhouse gasses trap heat in the atmosphere, but another major factor almost completely overlooked is the role of water. Water is Life. In its various states (ice, liquid water and vapour), water interacts with plant life and the atmosphere, driven by photosynthesis and sunlight. This interaction stabilizes weather and cools the climate. The destruction of ecosystems and living biomass all over the Earth is responsible for a lot of the temperature increases and extreme weather events we’re experiencing, because of the disruption it has caused to the water cycles. Anyone who understands the role of plants and the water cycle in stabilizing our climate will intuitively know that this is the case, and understanding this is crucial for addressing the climate crisis. Global warming is not just caused by CO2. The other hugely important cause is the degradation of the cooling capacity of living ecosystems.
Healthy ecosystems, soils, and plants stabilize weather and cool the planet, offering effective, tangible solutions that we can and must leverage to stabilize our climate. Once the damage to the biosphere is reversed, the planet regains its capacity to regulate its own temperature and other processes, attaining homeostasis. Ecological restoration, done by everyone, everywhere, is our fastest way out of climate chaos.
BUT HOW MUCH DO WE HAVE TO DO TO REVERSE CLIMATE CHAOS FAST?
To stop further warming within 20 years and reduce extreme weather events, we need a strategic plan involving the global population, powerful institutions (governments, armed forces, corporates, etc), and place-based solutions to correct the Earth Energy Imbalance (of about 1,8 Watt/m2) through a series of measures.
We must also operate from a risk management perspective, acting at a necessary scale and speed to avert collapse of societies. Key priorities include:
· Supporting, via finance, information and tools, 500 million indigenous and smallholder families worldwide, mostly in the Global South, to transition to regenerative agroforestry food production and protect remaining forests and ecosystems NOW! This will restore small water cycles, regenerate soils, protect biodiversity and increase living biomass. According to our calculations regenerating vegetation on at least 250 million hectares of land in the tropics, transitioning to agroforestry or reforested area will stop the planet from heating up further.
A plan for this has been written. Together with other measures to transition the global food system towards climate resilience, an estimated cost of 0.5% of Global GDP or around 500 billion dollars per year for 20 years is needed.
· Mobilizing large networks of organizations, such as Rotaries, Red Cross, Oxfam, and climate action groups, to support communities in regenerating local ecosystems and improving their well-being.
· Implementing an ocean and coastal marine ecosystem restoration program, delivering nearly immediate positive socio-economic results. We already know how to do this, with an estimated cost in the tens of billions of dollars per year but with huge returns through increase in fish, molluscs, crustaceans, seaweeds, marine mammals, while cooling the surface waters and sequestering Gts of carbon and reducing ocean acidification. Coastal areas will get more clouds and gentle rains.
· Developing a Digital Gaia to support restoration efforts. An outline has been written, almost all parts already exist, with an initial launch cost of 10 million USD to run a pilot for proof of concept.
Funding for this planetary restoration project will come from governments, philanthropy, investment programs, carbon credit finance and the aggregation of projects into large de-risked funds making them investable for pension funds, hedge funds, reinsurers and sovereign wealth funds. The investments in these projects will be able to bring a return of investment through a combination of elements in the range of 5-10% per annum depending on context. The massive investments will trigger many co-benefits and second round stimulative effects. It will be profitable to invest in a livable planet!
While reducing emissions remains important, we must focus as well on the second, even more important leg on which climate action must stand: repairing nature and water cycles it drives, worldwide. Implementing regenerative agricultural practices and agroforestry (where appropriate), while reviving adjacent ocean and land-based ecosystems, will restore a balanced climate, mitigate extreme weather, and cool the planet and sequestrate tens of gigatons of CO2 each year, contributing massively to our emissions-reduction goals.
Emergency priorities to stabilize the planet's climate:
1. Avert the tipping point of die-back of the Amazon rainforest and strategically reforest the biome to restore the full vigor of the biotic pump function over the area, for fast regrowth of huge forest areas in the Americas and a transition to agroforestry food production with similar programs for the rainforests in Africa and Indonesia.
2. Create and apply a global plan for the fast revival of ocean biology in strategic locations including the fertilization of ocean deserts to sequester carbon, restore the ocean food chain, increase vertical mixing of the water column, increase planetary albedo through increased aerosol production and cloud formation.
3. Green the desert areas from the Thar desert to the Sahara and the desertifying Mediterranean through strategic ecosystem regeneration connecting the Indian monsoon moisture streams with the West-African monsoon and the Mediterranean.
4. Strategic reforestation over the Indian subcontinent will likely increase precipitation on the Third Pole.
5. Organize the best minds around the world to reverse polar amplification by reversing the melt of polar sea ice on both sides of the planet. We do not know how to do that yet but a lot of plans are forming both with Nature based Solutions and some more technical interventions that focus on vertical mixing of the water column, increased cloud formation and precipitation as well as stabilizing the jetstreams connected to reinforcing the biotic pump over large forest areas. Bringing back precipitation up north is definitely key. zIn the video below you see the flow of precipitable water during a year. Imagine the biotic pump working at full force at key entrance points over the continents would help this a lot including a reforested west- and south coast of the USA, reforested coastal areas from Portugal to the UK and NW Europe and pulling the moisture in by reforesting Mesopotamia. The biotic pump does not need fully closed canopy covers and certain forest patterns are definitely more conducive of pulling in the moisture.
2019: global, one year time lapse of precipitable water
Once these programs of emergency regeneration are well underway, possibly supported by some temporary technical projects of solar radiation management (SRM) like cloud seeding or cloud brightening to correct the EEI, we can slowly relax and focus more on that amazing future we can create together on an abundant planet, with a higher level of consciousness and deep gratitude for the gift of life which we are here to steward and create the conditions and a new human culture for it to thrive and further develop.
Onward!
See below for more detailed information
For those who want a bit more background on how the climate really works:
Plants cool through evapotranspiration, turning water into vapour that rises up to the higher atmosphere, carrying large amounts of absorbed solar energy (in the form of latent heat) with it, avoiding the warming of the lower atmosphere. With that, plants cool the Earth’s surface. At the same time, plants also send up a variety of biological aerosols together with the water vapour, which serve as the condensation nuclei for water droplets.
So this helps the water vapor to condense on these aerosols, forming clouds, increasing albedo while enabling the transport of latent heat into the higher atmosphere, dissipating from there into space.
Plants seed clouds and rain!
Of the energy that the water vapour releases at the moment of condensation, at least half leaves the atmosphere into space. As vapour condenses into clouds, they cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space. Under certain conditions clouds can also warm the Earth’s atmosphere but on balance they cool. The condensation into clouds, while creating rain also produces wind. A volume of one thousand cubic metres of vapour becomes one cubic metre of rain, creating a sudden vacuum which draws in air from below and from the side, creating wind. Over large forests, these processes are so strong that they drive a powerful biotic pump, which draws in humid air from the oceans, bringing rains deep inland and enabling the forest to thrive thousands of kilometres away from the coast.
The condensation nuclei cause moderate rains, minimizing the potential for extreme flash floods. An intact biotic pump averts droughts by extending the rainy season while bringing moderate rains. This also increases the production of living biomass which in turn draws down carbon. Heatwaves, droughts and flash floods are avoided when the rain is created around these biological aerosols. When the rain falls on healthy soils, with thriving societies of bacteria and fungi, there is little or no erosion. Healthy soils work as sponges absorbing the water to be released slowly with some of it percolating into the aquifers, where it can be retained for a long time.
Meanwhile, the sedimentation from land-based erosion which can seriously inhibit marine vegetative growth, is reduced significantly. Phytoplankton, crustaceans, and various marine organisms play a crucial role in capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They use this carbon to create calcium carbonate, which becomes part of their carapaces and shells. Upon their demise, these calcium carbonate deposits accumulate on the ocean floor, eventually forming extensive reserves that, through geological processes, transform into the limestone mountains found on land. This metabolic activity is essential for mitigating ocean acidification. Therefore, it's imperative that we prioritize the protection and revival of ocean ecosystems as diligently as we do terrestrial ones.
If you are interested in more detail, please mail me at robdelaet@yahoo.com
I can't take this seriously He says we need to come at this with fresh minds--and then he proposes capitalist solutions, including a technofix geoengineering scheme mentioned near the end. If things like helping indigenous and smallholder, peasant farmers hang on and properly steward their land were going to generate a profit, it would already be happening. Every day I see a fresh illustration of the reality that We Cannot Combat Climate Change (AND the other environmental catastrophes) Without Ditching Capitalism. We also need to ditch militarism, especially here in the US, and this gets no mention except for militaries being among the institutions that should be part of the solution. SRM may help cool the planet in the short term but is replete with serious risks, including the risk (certainty) that any use of it will be used to justify doing nothing to cut emissions, and the risk of stirring up international tensions; no doubt with nothing deep changing, it will also work to exacerbate inequality.
And the image illustrates a key part of the cause not mentioned here--too many humans. We can't solve THAT problem without horrific killing of humans, in the short run--but we could begin plans to slowly reduce our numbers, which it seems to me is something every intelligent species would do. But of course, the moniker Homo SAPIENS was bestowed by humans on humanity--much like those hierarchies made up by white peoplethat put white people at the apex of creation and other races lower, or one I recently read about in which a Zionist in an illegal settlement explained that Jews were at the top and the rest of us in between and Palestinians at the bottom with other animals.
All these false solutions come from the same place--a desire to correct the climate problem while not reducing consumption at all, a determination that The American Way of Life is Not Negotiable. Therefore there is an attempt to negotiate with the laws of physics and biology.
Grow vegetables. Ride a bike. Be a friend.
Let the big things take care of themselves.