Filed under: Geoengineering, Global change, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Published stuff
The last of my filling-in-for-Olivia columns at the NYT is now up, a quick run through some points from the later parts of Eating the Sun and subsequent stuff. It’s a carbon-climate crisis, energy is about flows not stocks, many wedges needed, yadda yadda yadda:
Given that humans are changing the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, what responses should we expect from the biosphere? And is there anything that we can do to make those responses work to human benefit? For those in a hurry, the answers in brief: a) complicated ones; b) yes, at least a bit.
Filed under: Trees
Willow and fruit tree, near Grana, Utaly
Just cool: One tree growing atop another. From AtlasObscura, via BoingBoing: original source the Bricc e Foss bed and breakfast
Can't help thinking this is good for Gondor
Belatedly, I should point out that I am doing a few columns/posts over at the Times so that Olivia Judson can enjoy some time off. Turns out that they are about life and atmospheres, last week’s (Found in Transit) on detecting life by way of the atmospheres of other planets, this week’s (Heavy Weather) on a speculative mechanism by which life might influence the climate. One more to come next week…
Filed under: Reviews received
Another very nice capsule review in one of my favourite magazines
This original account of photosynthesis does what every popular-science work strives to do: provide a lucid-to-the-lay-reader explanation of a mundane or complex phenomenon. Yet Morton goes well beyond that laudable achievement. Folded cunningly into his disciplinary synthesis (physics, chemistry, cellular biology, environmental science) and basic explainer (what, exactly, photosynthesis is, and why apprehending “the most important process on the planet” is crucial to our understanding of today’s pressing energy and climate-change issues) is nothing less than a majestic terrestrial biography—a meticulous look at the history and future of the Earth itself. All this is in a well-paced, smartly plotted, bouncingly written package. Buoyed by a tone of optimism and uplift (“The science that enriches our wonder at the world also offers us ways of making things better”), Morton’s clear-eyed assessment makes visible a heretofore unseen world—ours—and illuminates its possibilities.
Filed under: Earth history, Geoengineering, Global change, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Plant physiology
Here’s the video of a conversation I had with Jim at the Nature offices a few weeks ago. Also available in its full glory at the Nature site. And indeed apparently at The Guardian too. I’d post excerpts from a transcript if I had the time, or a transcript…
Filed under: Uncategorized
William Carlos Williams, austere but dispositive in Spring and All
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
John Updike’s faith, and doubt, refusing seasonal metaphor in Seven Stanzas at Easter
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
Philip Larkin, the weight of last lost years uncharacteristically leavened in The Trees (audio)
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Filed under: Trees
Here’s an interesting jeu d’esprit of extreme conservation (via Gary):
My favourite long-term solution is simply to aim for not just a post-industrial civilization but a post-biological one. We can currently roughly foresee how we could go about it. We would fixate our brains (presumably when near biological death), scan them in detail, reconstruct the functional structure and recreate it as software. The successor version would then go on living in virtual reality, with occasional visits to the physical world using a robot, android or just remote controlled human body.
How efficient could a postbiological civilization be? The current IBM roadrunner does 376 million calculations per watts. If we take my mid-range estimates of computing needs, 10^22 to 10^25 FLOPS, then a single emulation would need 10^13 to 10^16 watts. The total insolation of Earth is about 10^17 watts, so this won’t do – there would be space for just a few minds on the entire planet. But current research on zettaflops computing suggest we can do much better. A DARPA exascale study suggests we can do 10^12 flops per watt, which means “just” a dozen Hoover dams per mind. Quantum dot cellular automata could give 10^19 flops per watt, putting the energy needs at 200-2000 watts.
That is between 2 and 20 times the current wattage of a current human. However, we bio-humans get our energy through the inefficient method of having plants collect sunshine (at about 3%) efficiency, then we either harvest them and eat a small part of them (expending a lot of agricultural energy) or have animals eat them (at a few percent efficiency) and finally we eat the result, again with a few percent efficiency. A brain emulation of this type would just need a few square meters of solar panels (plus night-time energy storage). In terms of area and energy required, these postbiological humans would have far smaller material requirements than we do. They could also run slower to save energy.
…
How much matter would go into this system? Using [quantum dots], each gate would be on the order of a nanometer. Each floating point operation would require about 20,000 gates. These gates would be re-used every 0.1 millisecond timestep, so a full 10^25 flop emulation would need a volume of 0.02 cubic meters. This does not take the rest of the infrastructure into account. Let’s scale it up to one cubic meter. 6.7 billion people would then require the same volume, or a cube with side 1885 meters if bunched together into the ultimate datacenter. That is unlikely to work if the energy use is on the orders of many watts per person, since cooling would be hard (not to mention the vulnerability of having everybody in the same spot). A more likely solution would be smaller centres distributed close to energy sources: a single hydroelectric dam would supply several million people with energy, a square kilometre of 20% efficiency solar panels would supply 150,000-1.5 million people. A 100×100 kilometre area would be enough to run all of posthumanity. And if the reversible computing works, the energy collection infrastructure could be 10,000 times smaller.
Maybe the most sustainable thing we could do would be to aim at a future ensconced in cold datacenters under the subtropical deserts of Earth. Humanity would largely look like a forest of quiet semiconductor trees. We would indeed have become plants.
It reminds me a little, among other things, of this passage from Eating the Sun:
The simplest, and perhaps the most profound, of the differences between those that eat light and those that eat others … stems from the fact that sunlight is, at the efficiencies photosynthesis is capable of, a rather dilute source of energy. To appreciate how insufficient it would be to animal needs, imagine the Green Man of forest folklore. Let us assume that his greenness is due to chlorophyll through which he feeds himself. Given the surface area of his skin—and the fact that at any given time some of it will inevitably be averted from the sun—such a green man would have about as much energy on which to run his metabolism as someone restricted to a diet grown in a couple of square metres of garden. All he could eat in a day would be what his little plot could grow in a day. A few leaves for breakfast, maybe a morsel of root for supper: berries for Sunday lunch.
On the sunshine equivalent of this meagre diet, our Jack of the Forest has no energy for moving, or for thinking—nerves and muscles use a lot of energy. He lacks the energy to breathe in or out, or to keep his body any warmer than the outside air. He’s not good for much except sitting there repairing the daily entropic wear and tear to his body. Indeed he doesn’t really have enough energy for that; quite a lot of him will rot away. The prognosis for the Green Man is vegetable.
Plants simply don’t have the energy to rush around like animals, pumping blood and flapping wings and flashing nerve impulses hither and thither along their limbs. So they eschew the compactness of muscle and opt for the looseness of leaf. The lines of their lives do not rush back and forth across the landscape—instead they are recorded in their shoots and limbs and twigs. Plants have shape where we have behaviour; their history is recorded in their form. Where the swoop of the sparrowhawk falling on the pigeon is gone in an instant, the tree’s decision to grow its twigs this way or that, depending on the light, is written in wood and lasts the rest of its life—or at least until some rough wind or uncouth animal snaps the relevant limb off.
I must admit, I don’t like the idea of the disembodied, emulated life. Although my own is not the finest specimen, I am all for embodiment, not least for the existential constraints it provides; I like my consciousness to come with an off switch. That caveat aside, I have the feeling that given its premises Anders‘ vision is oddly conservative. The idea that such power would be allocated to emulations of individuals seems a little traditionalist; if this trick can be pulled off, then surely it would be to create worlds where consciousness was far less confined, new universes of thought and distributed experience. And having the thinking trees rooted in the Earth seems peculiar; it is a harsh and vulnerable place for such things. As Freeman Dyson has argued on various occasions, places like the Oort cloud seem much more hospitable for life of this type, and indeed of other types.
And why on earth or off it do this in real time? Surely once the clock rate is semi-arbitrary one would either want to go really fast, so as to cram the most in, or — another Dyson idea — very slow: To watch the milky way turn like a waxing moon, to see the quasars redden like leaves in the fall, to tell stories around campfires of thought after the last stars gutter out. And to find out what spring, if any, comes after.
Image from Indium’s solar materials science blog, used under a Creative Commons licence
Filed under: Earth history
A bit of catch-up. Just before dashing off to Copenhagen I had the chance to spend some time with Jim (and Sandy) Lovelock, some of which was at and after a Nature event and some more of which will soon be making it to a Nature video, I hope. Jim is, among many other things, a master of analogy, and I was struck by a new one that he was road testing – one that mixes catastrophe and optimism in a way that chimes with his new book, but which is not I think spelled out there.
The analogy is between oxygen and intelligence, and the creatures — cyanobacteria and humans — which brought these new and terrible entities to the world. In both cases, there were precursors. There are non-biological processes which produce free oxygen, and there is intelligence of various sorts elsewhere in the animal world. But in both cases there was at a specific point a quantitative shift so huge as to be qualitative and then some. Cyanobacteria really did overturn the biosphere 2.45 billion years ago, and they and their descendents have shaped it ever since; human intelligence has done so too, from the Pleistocene die-offs onwards.
Lovelock’s point is that an evolutionary breakthrough in a single form of life can have global consequences and that such a breakthrough can be — probably must be — highly destabilising, even catastrophic. The presence of free oxygen was a huge change in the terms on which life prospered on the earth, since everything that came before was based on anaerobic metabolisms: many niches and perhaps species were wiped out. Similarly, intelligence of the sort demonstrated by humans is proving far from benign on a global level, with ever increasing stress on ecosystem services and, as with oxygen, wholesale rewiring of various biogeochemical cycles.
Yet in time, for all the disruption it caused early on, oxygen became the basis of something far grander than what had come before. The amount of free energy available to the biosphere increased spectacularly, with reasonable levels of oxygen facilitating complex multicellular life in way which may well be impossible in an anaerobic world (Catling et al [pdf]). All the life you see and care about is made possible by that oxygen (though not all the life that you depend on — at the deep biogeochemical level the microbes, including the anaerobic ones, still rule). Similarly Jim suggests that, in time, intelligence may make possible a more wonderful planet in ways we can hardly guess at today and bring forth a “wise, thoughtful world”.
A stromatolite that looks like a brain. Coincidence...?
There are what seem to be weaknesses to the analogy. Many (including, FWIW, me) continue to believe that oxygenic photosynthesis was around for a long time before oxygen was able to build up in the atmosphere — hundreds of millions of years, maybe even a billion — and that the eventual breakout of oxygen in the Great Oxidation Event of 2.45 billion years ago was not quite the catastrophic holocaust that it has previously been portrayed as, and which Jim still feels it was. But a) we may be wrong (Joe Kirschvink certainly thinks so [pdf]) and b) that may not matter too much. This is an analogy, after all.
And as an analogy, Jim takes it one intriguing stage further. While cyanobacteria still abound, they are no longer the sole source of oxygen, nor even the dominant one. The cyanobacteria not only made new life forms possible — they also incorporated theselves into them, in the form of chloroplasts. The ability to make oxygen was disseminated into creatures radically unlike the original cyanobacteria — into kelp forests and elm trees and cactuses and camelias. Perhaps, Jim suggests, the same is true of intelligence — that its destiny is to be spread far beyond the species in which it first originated, into new achitectures of life and thought.
It’s an idea that may sit uneasily with Lovelock’s current pessimism, which sees human activity as bound to lead to a fairly massive die-back. But it flows easily from the tradition of thought that Lovelock (and Freeman Dyson, and the late Arthur C. Clarke) drank from as a young man, a tradition that combines a respect for thermodynamics (there’s a free-energy/information level to Lovelock’s analogy that would probably be interesting to tease out) with a cosmically-contextualised yearning for transcendence. It’s a tradition that retains its power to move today, and it’s a thought-provoking pleasure to hear him give it voice.
Images: Death in Biscay by Christian Darkin on the basis of MODIS imagery commissioned for a great feature by Nick Lane that Nature ran last year, all rights reserved; brainy stromatolite from mjwy’s guide to stromatolites on eBay
Filed under: Farming, Geoengineering, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis
Interest in biochar has been building up in the UK recently. There was a cover story by Fiona Harvey in the FT a month ago with a familiar headline, Jim Lovelock and James Hansen have been extolling its virtues, it’s been on the Today Programme (text here on BBC News), there are new technologies being talked up and there’s an interesting looking workshop at the newly established UK Biochar Research Centre in Edinburgh on April 1st. And so of course there is also a backlash: last Monday George Monbiot, whose written on such subjects before, delivered a stirring oppositional salvo in the Guardian (and here’s the link to the version on his own site, same text but with references — a good habit more newspaper columnists should take up):
This miracle solution has suckered people who ought to know better, including the earth systems scientist James Lovelock(3), the eminent climate scientist Jim Hansen(4), the author Chris Goodall and the climate campaigner Tim Flannery(5). At the UN climate negotiations beginning in Bonn on Sunday, several national governments will demand that biochar is eligible for carbon credits, providing the financial stimulus required to turn this into a global industry(6). Their proposal boils down to this: we must destroy the biosphere in order to save it.
In his otherwise excellent book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, Chris Goodall abandons his usual scepticism and proposes that we turn 200 million hectares of “forests, savannah and croplands” into biochar plantations. Thus we would increase carbon uptake, by grubbing up “wooded areas containing slow-growing trees” (that is, natural forest) and planting “faster-growing species”(7). This is environmentalism?
But that’s just the start of it. Carbonscape, a company which hopes to be among the first to commercialise the technique, talks of planting 930 million hectares(8). The energy lecturer Peter Read proposes new biomass plantations of trees and sugar covering 1.4 billion ha(9).
…
In their book Pulping the South, Ricardo Carrere and Larry Lohmann show what has happened in the 100m ha of industrial plantations planted around the world so far(16). Aside from trashing biodiversity, tree plantations have dried up river catchments, caused soil erosion when the land is ploughed for planting (which means the loss of soil carbon), exhausted nutrients and required so many pesticides that in some places the run-off has poisoned marine fisheries.
In Brazil and South Africa, tens of thousands of people have been thrown off their lands, often by violent means, to create plantations. In Thailand the military government that came to power in 1991 sought to expel five million people. Forty thousand families were dispossessed before the junta was overthrown. In many cases plantations cause a net loss of employment. Working conditions are brutal, often involving debt peonage and repeated exposure to pesticides.
As Almuth Ernsting and Rachel Smolker of Biofuelwatch point out, many of the claims made for biochar don’t stand up(17). In some cases charcoal in the soil improves plant growth; in others it suppresses it. Just burying carbon bears little relationship to the complex farming techniques of the Amazon Indians who created terras pretas. Nor is there any guarantee that most of the buried carbon will stay in the soil. In some cases charcoal stimulates bacterial growth, causing carbon emissions from soils to rise. As for reducing deforestation, a stove that burns only part of the fuel is likely to increase, not decrease, demand for wood. There are plenty of other ways of eliminating household smoke which don’t involve turning the world’s forests to cinders.
This kicked off a whole week of biochar stuff in the Guardian. Various people criticised came back to say that they were really talking only about making biochar from crop waste: here’s Jim Lovelock’s benevolent response and here’s a slightly pricklier one from Hansen and Kharecha. Chris Goodall also came back in a let’s find common ground sort of way, and there were letters pro and con. Peter Read’s right-to-reply piece, by way of contrast, comes out fighting.
This degraded land [a large amount of land discussed in Read's biofuel plans] is former forest that has been logged over and abandoned – not, as Monbiot says, “land occupied by subsistence farmers, pastoralists, hunters and gatherers”. Given the chance, impoverished people often opt for a waged income. Does Monbiot wish to keep them impoverished for ever?
In reality there is not the shortage of land Monbiot implies but a desperate shortage of investment in the land. His “global total” of 1.36bn hectares of arable land does not include 2.38bn of unused potential arable land reported by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, into which such investment, eg irrigation, might go. Moreover, the productivity of the 1.36bn could be raised with biochar pyrolysed from currently wasted agricultural residues, thus linking carbon removal with increased food supply and incomes.
Monbiot misses the point that the need for land-use improvements comes from the threat of climatic catastrophe. With too much carbon in the atmosphere and oceans, some of it has to be removed and put somewhere safer. Using the gift of nature – photosynthesis which enables green plants to use the sun’s energy to absorb atmospheric carbon – is the only economic way.
…
The remedy is not “an easy way out” but needs hard work and good policy resulting in, to quote last year’s Sustainable Biofuels Consensus, “a landscape that provides food, fodder, fibre, and energy; that offers opportunities for rural development; that diversifies energy supply, restores ecosystems, protects biodiversity, and sequesters carbon.”
George comes back in kind:
I wasn’t harsh enough about Peter Read. In his response column today he uses the kind of development rhetoric that I thought had died out with the Indonesian transmigration programme.
To him, people and land appear to be as fungible as counters in a board game. He makes the extraordinary assertion that “degraded land” – which he wants to cover with plantations – is uninhabited by subsistence farmers, pastoralists or hunters and gatherers. That must be news to all the subsistence farmers, pastoralists and hunters and gatherers I’ve met in such places. Then he repeats the ancient canard that, by denying such people the opportunity to have their land turned into a eucalyptus plantation/hydroelectric dam/opencast mine/nuclear test site/re-education camp or whatever project the latest swivel-eyed ideologue is trying to promote, we are keeping them in poverty.
Has he learnt nothing from the past 40 years of development studies? Does he not understand that development is something that people must choose, not something that can be imposed on them from on high by megalomaniacs?
It should be fairly obvious to everyone who’s not just in this for the aggro that there will be good biochar interventions and bad ones. Forcing biochar on people or soils that don’t want it or can’t prosper with it will not help; helping people to find systems that are biochar friendly could quite possibly provide the win-win prospects everyone wants to see. As usual, Gary has sensible things to say about this, with helpful comparisons to the use of manure and lime as soil additives — as might be expected from someone whose ideas are rooted in practice and who has been blogging on this topic a lot while remaining impressively self-critical.
My biggest worry about the technology is that its strengths could have within them a fatal flaw. The soil is an easily reached reservoir, and provides a multiplier effect that’s crucial to the efficacy of biochar: the carbon stored in biochar schemes is not just the carbon in the charcoal, it’s the increased organic carbon in the rest of the soil. But easily reached is also easily breached, and multipliers can work two ways. If people use biochar to store a lot of carbon in soil, but not enough to forestall significant warming (which is a not unlikely scenario in the world biochar enthusiasts imagine) then they’ll have provided an extra bolus of soil carbon to be respired back into the atmosphere by the warmer, and thus harder working, soil bacteria; they will have effectively traded emissions now for emissions later. So the carbon could quickly come right back out. If the microbial priming effect kicks in in this scenario — with the easily mobilised carbon providing enough energy for the bacteria to tackle more refractory carbon they would normally ignore – you might end up with not just with the carbon you stored away leaking out, but also some of the carbon that was already there. This is a subject on which I’d like to see more research before squirelling away the odd gigatonne of carbon.
Further resources: International Biochar Initiative, CSIRO biochar report (pdf), Biofuelwatch
Image borrowed from www.vividaria.it, rights neither asserted not inquired into, happy to remove if owners object
The Forestry Commission has unknowingly thwarted a David Hockney project. Sometime in the past month or so the commission cut down a small stand of beech trees (at the private owners request) in Yorkshire. Here’s the before and after on that:
What the woodsmen didn’t know was that David Hockney had painted the copse twice, in winter and in summer, and had wanted to complete the whole four season set. As it is, that ain’t going to happen. He gave the whole story to the Guardian, including repro rights on the two pictures involved.
On the radio later I heard someone from the Forestry Commission apparently taking the fairly reasonable position that one couldn’t leave trees standing when people wanted to fell them on the off chance that a major artist was going to paint them. In retrospect it would probably have been a good idea if Hockney had let the owners know about his project. That’s not to blame him — but it’s worth remembering, in England, that most pretty stuff you see in the countryside is someone’s property and responsibility, and often their pride and joy too.
Anyway, the Guardian story quotes Hockney saying he may do some sort of follow up painting anyway.
Though he still mourns the lost trees [on returning yesterday he] was impressed by the patterns of the massive stacked trunks.
“I think now this is my next painting of the wood. It will be very different – but the piles of wood are quite beautiful in their own right, simply because wood can’t help being beautiful.”
I’d be big on that. I’m something of a Hockney fan; there was a time when he was occasionally visiting the gallery downstairs from our flat, and I wish I’d known that he had been. A retrospective in Paris that had some of the Grand Canyon pictures in it was quite an influence on one of the chapters of Mapping Mars. I’m sorry he won’t complete the set — but not too sorry, as he’ll surely use the time for something else. And his unfinished project provides scope for other eyes and hands to undertake a companion project he wouldn’t necessarily be able to see through to maturity. It seems to me that someone, or some collective, should adopt this little copse on the corner as a phenology/rephotography project, or more, and record what regrowth there is, or isn’t, as a tribute to Hockney. If I had visual skills and lived nearby I might even do it myself. Anyway, if anyone’s interested I’m pretty sure this is the spot in question in Google Maps.
Update: More on the story in the Mail.
All images except the Google one from David Hockney, used with great respect but no permission
