Wow, Rob, this is an amazing paper. It should be given top billing at a conference where these issues are discussed in a sane and useful manner—instead of buzzwords, knee-jerkism, and ideology. But no, Canada’s Child King will go ahead with his zero-emissions policy, impoverish the citizens, and only make things worse.
Roger, I think you’re missing something here. When you say “One can predict with basic certainty that if you clearcut a forest it will immediately got hotter and drier in that place, and that will effect the local and therefore regional, and ultimately global climate. One can also predict that if the forest is converted to industrial monocrop the soils will degrade and desiccate and the plantation, lacking biological complexity and hydrologic function, will become susceptible to disease and fire. One can further predict that after such a fire, the unprotected ground will be susceptible to erosive rains, losing vital soil, such that come summer it will be even more susceptible to drought, while at the same contributing to it.”
I imagined a specific place.. it depends on how large the area is. Would a 30 acre clear cut affect “global” climate? probably not. And my observations of “mono cropped” loblolly pine plantations is that they are not more susceptible to disease.. and where the economics pencils out (in the US) for plantation forestry (industrial and small landowners) tend to be relatively moist places (think PNW and SE) with moderate climates where fire is not as much a problem.
My basic point is that climate folks tend to make generic worldwide statements but the biota is ultimately pretty specific in times and places. Ultimately it’s a bit of an epistemic problem. There is an idea (which I trace to math envy) that we can understand wholes without understanding parts; we can understand “forests” by averaging over the planet, or assuming the facts of one place to apply everywhere. Otherwise the science communities who actually work with specific places and organisms and people would have to be included, including those in the less-favored parts of the world.. the center of the US; the Global South. As long as we leave scientists and practitioners out.. as long as we have the Global Gaze, we are going to be missing out on reality. IMHO.
Firstly, I agree 147% with Roger Pielke Sr.'s comment that "working with tradesmen taught him that all expertise does not rest with PhD's". Quite the contrary. I am one, but I have encountered a significant number of damned fools with PhD's. By contrast I found that the wisdom of welders, pipefitters, crane operators and mechanics was not to be despised. When I approached them with humility, such skilled workers very often taught me more than I did them, and sometimes saved my pale pink fundament from professional humiliation and indeed physical destruction.
Secondly, there is a common assumption that industrialized humans are changing both climate and ecology away from a state of nature, and that returning to that state of nature is a desirable end goal of both climate science and the environmental movement. I question whether such a state of nature has actually existed since humankind underwent the Neolithic Revolution which invented farming. Peoples now thought primitive were altering "nature" in profound ways many thousands of years ago. When I lived in the UK, I learned that early humans built weirs and fish traps which fundamentally changed the water circulation of the Cambridgeshire fens 7000 years ago. Charles C. Mann's book "1491" makes a persuasive case that pre-Columbian Native Americans "humanized" some 25 to 45 % of the landscape of both North and South America with clearing by fire, agro-forestry, irrigation, terracing and earthworks for civilizations serving many millions of inhabitants. The State of Nature true believers strive to re-impose was lost some time around the retreat of the last Ice Age.
With all the solar fields and wind turbines on land and planed for the ocean, what is the impact on the ecological climate? Even with their supposed low carbon footprint, they require a great deal more of land and ocean to produce the equivalent amount of energy compared to fossil fuel or nuclear. We are going through rushed permitting processes for thousands of offshore wind turbines, from 900 -1300 ft high, placed in millions of acres in the ocean off the east coast - on the continental shelf from 9 - 45 miles offshore. There is no thought given to the disturbance of the ocean's ecological system in the Environmental Impact Statements by the government agencies. When concerned citizens argue of the many impacts, they are told that they either don't exist (look at EU and GB offshore wind - no problems there) or there will be studies on ecological damage once the turbines are in the ocean.
Thank you for this Rob, have learnt a lot from your essays here and they continue to inform and inspire the way we manage our piece of land here in the Philippines.
We have a river that borders the north side of our property, at the moment it runs year-round and the difference it makes to our comfort is noticeable, especially in the mornings. I went down there for the first time since this very dry season began and it was as if the river hadn’t received the memo that it’s summer already.
My daughter and I camped up on the mountain range that’s the source of the river last night, a beautiful area that’s sadly lacking in any sort of visible environmental protection. There’s quarrying going on for the road and housing developments nearby, whilst “eco” parks are opened to disguise the fairly obvious pillaging. There’s barbed wire fences across hiking trails that were once free to roam for the public. Hard for any sort of protest against this in a country where activists are often “disappeared”, taken from their beds.
In the morning from our tent, I watched for a time the clouds form on the windward tip of the higher peaks and drift across the rest of the range. For a time they drifted over us also, suddenly requiring us to don all the extra clothing layers I’d brought…. and it’s the tropics!
On the hike down we passed a brutal reminder of what often passes for land stewardship here, an ex-army colonel had cleared several hectares of land on the steep side of the mountain in order to build a chicken farm. My daughter, who at 10 seems to have more sense than most people multiple times older than her, remarked the chickens would have been far happier scratching in the fallen leaves and weeds littered below the remaining forest.
As I begin to understand the implications of this and be moved by both the beauty, the clarity and poetry to look up and around, I ardently want to mind my natural manners.
Great article. Cool you got to converse with Pielke. Wondering if you could clarify a bit more how the land use change in the Florida peninsula affected precipitation. As it gets deforested and paved over, more of it will heat up, causing convection to rise. How does that affect the water evapotranspiring from the marshes, and then flowing to the altered land?
I'm glad that you ended with a shout out to Lynn Margulis. I was thinking about her during your exposition. You don't need to get spiritual to understand the simple beauty of Gaia as developed by her and James Lovelock. Life is intimately involved in creating gases that have massively altered the composition of life itself. CO2 gets shortchanged as "plant food." It is the necessary chemical precursor to building out all the complexities of animal and vegetable life. It is the original and best solar power converter. Water to fill out the carbohydrate membranes that themselves are vast factories of cell growth which, weirdly enough, we can just rip into and nourish ourselves: flesh, blood, fruit, grains. Some clearly more potent than others, and some tastier, but nonetheless a miracle that the energy of life is transferable. And although oxygen get a lot of press, it is mostly just a combustable aid, as delicious as it feels atop a mountain or by the sea to fill our lungs. The real power is the simple sugars that keep us breathing.
Fantastic essay that makes it clear, particularly in the Florida example, that land use is a major driver of climatic change relative to CO2. I notice you seem to view the altering of natural landscapes by man as inherently negative which I interpreted from your use of the word "distruction." Have I read you correctly? The value of the work you're doing, in my view, comes from a better understanding of the impacts of land use change so mitigation of any negative effects can be part of the planning and approval process.
Really interesting article. I guess I have a hidden belief similar to your position. I well remember reading many articles by Roger P snr about landscape change and such related matters, when he had a blog many years ago. I have often thought how little attention there seems to have been to such things in more recent times.
Excellent work, Rob. I'll put this in my links next week and hopefully send some folks over to get a deeper understanding of the unity between climate and ecology. It's an elegant way to describe the reality. Thank you.
Rob, excellent pulling together of information to solidify my belief that the ecology and the climate are interconnected. It makes sense and affirms the route to keeping the Climate Crisis from totally destroying our planet. But, humans are not great at making changes to the status quo - so I am not very optimistic about my grand and great grand children having a livable planet. Thanks for sharing, Rob!❤️
Thanks for a great article Rob. The paper of Pielke sits on my desk because I plan to write someting about it. But now you did it in an elegant way! I restacked your article, not that I really understand what that means!
"Every locale has it’s own climatic situation and it’s own land-change reality. It’s critical that people assess their particular, placed-based vulnerabilities, along with what resources they have in their landscapes to improve their situation. Switching to renewables may eventually help the carbon balance in the atmosphere, but it will do little in the short term for people where they live in ways they can feel... If we continue to treat climate-change as purely the result of globalized average warming from CO2 emissions, we deprive millions of people the understanding they need to improve their own lived conditions."
Much of what you've written echoes my own thoughts on environmental damage and climate change. The whole idea of man made climate change due to CO2 emissions is a great distractor. Environmental groups are ignoring the enormous harm caused by many human actions as they just look at CO2 emissions. Industry can do what it likes, destroy as much of the environment as they want as long as they can talk about 'net zero carbon'. Destroying the opposition by capturing them as collaboratorS.
A couple of thoughts: Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis describes how life changes its environment to improve its chances of survival. So the idea that the biosphere is actively involved in changing the physical environment isn't new. Also, the effects of wind and sediment transfer also happens in the sea. I dive the coasts around the UK and the water movement over seaweed covered rocks differs from that over sand. So sediment gets trapped over the rocky, seaweed areas. Life on the oceans changes the physical environment around it. In the oceans the water is also part of the biosphere. Is that also the case with air?
In other words it's a complex system of which we have little understanding, and which we fiddle with at our peril.
Wow, Rob, this is an amazing paper. It should be given top billing at a conference where these issues are discussed in a sane and useful manner—instead of buzzwords, knee-jerkism, and ideology. But no, Canada’s Child King will go ahead with his zero-emissions policy, impoverish the citizens, and only make things worse.
Roger, I think you’re missing something here. When you say “One can predict with basic certainty that if you clearcut a forest it will immediately got hotter and drier in that place, and that will effect the local and therefore regional, and ultimately global climate. One can also predict that if the forest is converted to industrial monocrop the soils will degrade and desiccate and the plantation, lacking biological complexity and hydrologic function, will become susceptible to disease and fire. One can further predict that after such a fire, the unprotected ground will be susceptible to erosive rains, losing vital soil, such that come summer it will be even more susceptible to drought, while at the same contributing to it.”
I imagined a specific place.. it depends on how large the area is. Would a 30 acre clear cut affect “global” climate? probably not. And my observations of “mono cropped” loblolly pine plantations is that they are not more susceptible to disease.. and where the economics pencils out (in the US) for plantation forestry (industrial and small landowners) tend to be relatively moist places (think PNW and SE) with moderate climates where fire is not as much a problem.
My basic point is that climate folks tend to make generic worldwide statements but the biota is ultimately pretty specific in times and places. Ultimately it’s a bit of an epistemic problem. There is an idea (which I trace to math envy) that we can understand wholes without understanding parts; we can understand “forests” by averaging over the planet, or assuming the facts of one place to apply everywhere. Otherwise the science communities who actually work with specific places and organisms and people would have to be included, including those in the less-favored parts of the world.. the center of the US; the Global South. As long as we leave scientists and practitioners out.. as long as we have the Global Gaze, we are going to be missing out on reality. IMHO.
Two thoughts:
Firstly, I agree 147% with Roger Pielke Sr.'s comment that "working with tradesmen taught him that all expertise does not rest with PhD's". Quite the contrary. I am one, but I have encountered a significant number of damned fools with PhD's. By contrast I found that the wisdom of welders, pipefitters, crane operators and mechanics was not to be despised. When I approached them with humility, such skilled workers very often taught me more than I did them, and sometimes saved my pale pink fundament from professional humiliation and indeed physical destruction.
Secondly, there is a common assumption that industrialized humans are changing both climate and ecology away from a state of nature, and that returning to that state of nature is a desirable end goal of both climate science and the environmental movement. I question whether such a state of nature has actually existed since humankind underwent the Neolithic Revolution which invented farming. Peoples now thought primitive were altering "nature" in profound ways many thousands of years ago. When I lived in the UK, I learned that early humans built weirs and fish traps which fundamentally changed the water circulation of the Cambridgeshire fens 7000 years ago. Charles C. Mann's book "1491" makes a persuasive case that pre-Columbian Native Americans "humanized" some 25 to 45 % of the landscape of both North and South America with clearing by fire, agro-forestry, irrigation, terracing and earthworks for civilizations serving many millions of inhabitants. The State of Nature true believers strive to re-impose was lost some time around the retreat of the last Ice Age.
With all the solar fields and wind turbines on land and planed for the ocean, what is the impact on the ecological climate? Even with their supposed low carbon footprint, they require a great deal more of land and ocean to produce the equivalent amount of energy compared to fossil fuel or nuclear. We are going through rushed permitting processes for thousands of offshore wind turbines, from 900 -1300 ft high, placed in millions of acres in the ocean off the east coast - on the continental shelf from 9 - 45 miles offshore. There is no thought given to the disturbance of the ocean's ecological system in the Environmental Impact Statements by the government agencies. When concerned citizens argue of the many impacts, they are told that they either don't exist (look at EU and GB offshore wind - no problems there) or there will be studies on ecological damage once the turbines are in the ocean.
Thank you for this Rob, have learnt a lot from your essays here and they continue to inform and inspire the way we manage our piece of land here in the Philippines.
We have a river that borders the north side of our property, at the moment it runs year-round and the difference it makes to our comfort is noticeable, especially in the mornings. I went down there for the first time since this very dry season began and it was as if the river hadn’t received the memo that it’s summer already.
My daughter and I camped up on the mountain range that’s the source of the river last night, a beautiful area that’s sadly lacking in any sort of visible environmental protection. There’s quarrying going on for the road and housing developments nearby, whilst “eco” parks are opened to disguise the fairly obvious pillaging. There’s barbed wire fences across hiking trails that were once free to roam for the public. Hard for any sort of protest against this in a country where activists are often “disappeared”, taken from their beds.
In the morning from our tent, I watched for a time the clouds form on the windward tip of the higher peaks and drift across the rest of the range. For a time they drifted over us also, suddenly requiring us to don all the extra clothing layers I’d brought…. and it’s the tropics!
On the hike down we passed a brutal reminder of what often passes for land stewardship here, an ex-army colonel had cleared several hectares of land on the steep side of the mountain in order to build a chicken farm. My daughter, who at 10 seems to have more sense than most people multiple times older than her, remarked the chickens would have been far happier scratching in the fallen leaves and weeds littered below the remaining forest.
As I begin to understand the implications of this and be moved by both the beauty, the clarity and poetry to look up and around, I ardently want to mind my natural manners.
Great article. Cool you got to converse with Pielke. Wondering if you could clarify a bit more how the land use change in the Florida peninsula affected precipitation. As it gets deforested and paved over, more of it will heat up, causing convection to rise. How does that affect the water evapotranspiring from the marshes, and then flowing to the altered land?
I'm glad that you ended with a shout out to Lynn Margulis. I was thinking about her during your exposition. You don't need to get spiritual to understand the simple beauty of Gaia as developed by her and James Lovelock. Life is intimately involved in creating gases that have massively altered the composition of life itself. CO2 gets shortchanged as "plant food." It is the necessary chemical precursor to building out all the complexities of animal and vegetable life. It is the original and best solar power converter. Water to fill out the carbohydrate membranes that themselves are vast factories of cell growth which, weirdly enough, we can just rip into and nourish ourselves: flesh, blood, fruit, grains. Some clearly more potent than others, and some tastier, but nonetheless a miracle that the energy of life is transferable. And although oxygen get a lot of press, it is mostly just a combustable aid, as delicious as it feels atop a mountain or by the sea to fill our lungs. The real power is the simple sugars that keep us breathing.
Fantastic essay that makes it clear, particularly in the Florida example, that land use is a major driver of climatic change relative to CO2. I notice you seem to view the altering of natural landscapes by man as inherently negative which I interpreted from your use of the word "distruction." Have I read you correctly? The value of the work you're doing, in my view, comes from a better understanding of the impacts of land use change so mitigation of any negative effects can be part of the planning and approval process.
Really interesting article. I guess I have a hidden belief similar to your position. I well remember reading many articles by Roger P snr about landscape change and such related matters, when he had a blog many years ago. I have often thought how little attention there seems to have been to such things in more recent times.
Excellent work, Rob. I'll put this in my links next week and hopefully send some folks over to get a deeper understanding of the unity between climate and ecology. It's an elegant way to describe the reality. Thank you.
Rob, excellent pulling together of information to solidify my belief that the ecology and the climate are interconnected. It makes sense and affirms the route to keeping the Climate Crisis from totally destroying our planet. But, humans are not great at making changes to the status quo - so I am not very optimistic about my grand and great grand children having a livable planet. Thanks for sharing, Rob!❤️
Thanks for a great article Rob. The paper of Pielke sits on my desk because I plan to write someting about it. But now you did it in an elegant way! I restacked your article, not that I really understand what that means!
Fantastic Rob, thank you so much!
This is an essential insight. Thank you.
"Every locale has it’s own climatic situation and it’s own land-change reality. It’s critical that people assess their particular, placed-based vulnerabilities, along with what resources they have in their landscapes to improve their situation. Switching to renewables may eventually help the carbon balance in the atmosphere, but it will do little in the short term for people where they live in ways they can feel... If we continue to treat climate-change as purely the result of globalized average warming from CO2 emissions, we deprive millions of people the understanding they need to improve their own lived conditions."
Much of what you've written echoes my own thoughts on environmental damage and climate change. The whole idea of man made climate change due to CO2 emissions is a great distractor. Environmental groups are ignoring the enormous harm caused by many human actions as they just look at CO2 emissions. Industry can do what it likes, destroy as much of the environment as they want as long as they can talk about 'net zero carbon'. Destroying the opposition by capturing them as collaboratorS.
A couple of thoughts: Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis describes how life changes its environment to improve its chances of survival. So the idea that the biosphere is actively involved in changing the physical environment isn't new. Also, the effects of wind and sediment transfer also happens in the sea. I dive the coasts around the UK and the water movement over seaweed covered rocks differs from that over sand. So sediment gets trapped over the rocky, seaweed areas. Life on the oceans changes the physical environment around it. In the oceans the water is also part of the biosphere. Is that also the case with air?
In other words it's a complex system of which we have little understanding, and which we fiddle with at our peril.