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Itâs a bright sunny morning in NE Illinois and I was in a cheery moodâŚnow I may crawl back into bed for a while.
Our disconnect from the cycles of nature has consequences.
Even through the first two decades of this century, global growth remained reliant on cheap coal. As the Sierra Club here in the US won case after case efforts to build new coal-fired plants or delay the shutdown of old plants, we just shifted to importing the products of coal burning from China. 30% of the US carbon footprint comes in the form of embedded carbon through trade. China still get 65-70% of its primary energy from burning coal.
China knows this. It also realizes that itâs much simpler to import products that cost $20 million a kilogram than $20 a ton. The economy wants to go farther out on the technology frontier, but has yet to address the issues far from it. Fix this situation and weâll all be a lot safer.
As Christine Johnson, the associate director of the One Health Institute, an interdisciplinary epidemiological program at the University of California, Davis,
And let me post something from The Center for Urban Forest Research on that same campus in Davis, California.
Yet even the giants of the plant kingdom are not equally adept at gobbling up CO2. In fact, the differences can be dramatic. Silver maple (Acer saccharinum) tops the list of âbest treesâ compiled from data collected by the U.S. Forest Serviceâs Center for Urban Forest Research, which in recent years has been at the forefront of efforts to determine which species are the true champions of carbon capture and storage. Researchers at the Davis, California, facility calculate that a silver maple traps almost 25,000 pounds of CO2 after 55 yearsâ25 times more than cherry and plum trees, which ranked last.
Link:
https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/2011/Plant-Carbon-Eating-Trees
Iâve been planting Autumn Blaze trees because silver maple is one of the parent trees and it grows nearly as fast as a silver maple. Very similar except it has a more vibrant Fall color.( and no helicopter seeds) You donât want to plant SMs just anywhere because of their âhelicopter seedsâ late May and June that can be prolific as they mature. And they get huge! They can live 130 years. Thereâs one SM that made the news thatâs 178 years old because a woman was trying to save it from being cut down for development. She lost. You can Google it.
Its not just the carbon they store in their wood, they also convert CO2 to oxygen while alive. I do have 5 silver maples growing in containers I started from seed last Spring. They are among the cheapest trees you can buy. You can buy 100 of them 3-4 feet tall for $499.99 here.
This is worth a listen or a read regarding coal.
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/coal/
Absolutely one of the best reads TPM has posted in awhile.
Thanks!
Very Pittsburgh focused. Hoagie and a pizza!
The main problem with most human cultures is that the individuals that understand the problems are not in a position to impose solutions. The majority either cannot or do not want to understand the issues around consumption. The rich donât care because they are benefiting from environmental degradation and they have the politicians in every country in their pockets. There are going to be a series of pandemics, followed by major decreases in food production due to extreme weather. Significant areas of the earth will become uninhabitable by humans due to the extreme heat and absence of usable water. I donât think that humans will go extinct but there is going to be a major reduction in human population sizes. On the bright side, the removal of all or most humans from the picture will allow nature to heal the wounds we have inflicted in a relatively short time. The evolution of new species to replace the ones we have driven to extinction will take millions of years but that is a blink of an eye to the age of the earth, given that it is 4.5 billion years old.
Of course, we could prevent most of this by controlling our population growth, reducing our consumption, and preserving wild areas but it is going to require a major shift in paradigms and time is rapidly running out.
This news, as you might imagine, is not being well-received by the usual suspects.
Presidential candidates, agency regulators, oil lobbyists and members of Congress from both parties are using the preliminary research to advance their own political priorities â well before it has a chance to be peer-reviewed.
The stakes are high because the studyâs tentative findings could prove enormously consequential for both the pandemicâs impact and the global debate over curbing air pollution. The researchers found that pollution emanating from everything from industrial smokestacks to household chimneys is making the worst pandemic in a century even more deadly.
Donât worry. The Overshoot Predator (OP) will take care of that. In fact, the OP will clean up our mess pretty well after itâs done with us. Give it a century or two. Then, balance will be restored. Earth, when left to its own devices, is pretty fucking incredible at restoring balance.
Remember science? The science that told us 40 years ago that we were overheating the planet, and that the fallout would be weird and disastrous weather, famine, drought and increased pandemics? Remember when even Republicans believed the science? Remember when scientists were thought of as people doing special jobs for special reasons that would in large part benefit all of us and make our world better? Remember when people believed in and embraced vaccines as life saving? Remember when scientists did the impossible and put men on the moon without as much computing power as I have right here on my desk?
Remember?
I do, but I am a fossil.
J. M. Keynes and F. H. Knight (separately I believe) identified âfundamental uncertaintyâ as a situation not describable by a probability distribution. Nassim Taleb attached this idea to the notion of a Black Swan but added contrasting definitions: White Swans were situations describable by Gaussian Normal (bell curve) distributions and Grey Swans were situations that had a probability distribution that was not Normal; e.g., âfat tailsâ and, more generally, many extreme outcomes.
I claim no special expertise but believe that, similar to climate change, Covid-19 and the plagues that will follow are Grey Swan situations â only predictable in the broadest of terms â and precious few top government officials are responding appropriately; e.g., by default most have basically made the âdecisionâ to get to herd immunity the fastest way possible through a large body count without even knowing if herd immunity is possible.
Me too, but I found a Popular Mechanics from 1912 (March issue, pg 341) with a short article on carbon emissions, greenhouse effect and the possibility of climate change, and felt rather youngish again (in a not necessarily good kind of way) viz âThe furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.â
It came much sooner but the editors of PM can be forgiven: few indeed could have predicted how great the burning would become nor how powerfully influential those interested in stoking the flames would be.
Fucking wow - I am sending that clip to everyone I know.
Wow.
