What I mean by the Climate According to Life

And further resources

Having begun using the phrase, the climate according to life, I should explain what I mean by it. The phrase came upon me about three years ago after reading the title of the 5^th IPCC Assessment Report—Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. I was struck by the last four words, “the physical science basis.” Given there are two bases to science, physics (the physical science basis) and biology (the life science basis), I wondered why the science seemed to be only using the one basis, and the non-living one at that? I pictured a pair of glasses with a physical lens and a biological lens—the scientific view—and imagined, rather than looking through the physical lens, looking through the biological one. What would we see if we could see the climate according to life? Thus came the phrase and the intention of this newsletter, to reveal the largely ignored role of living things and ecosystems in the climates we live in, rather than the one that lives in computer models composed entirely of physical data.

Seeing the climate according to life doesn’t mean we close our eyes to the physical science basis and globally dispersed CO2 emissions. Rather, we see them in relation to the whole system, which is intensely biological, and far too complex to be reduced to the mathematical terms required by the computer modelling to which the physical science basis is geared. We inhabit a living planet, not a physical one, and the climate has to be seen accordingly to be seen properly.

I sometimes use the term “living climate,” and don’t mean to imply that the climate system has it’s own consciousness, though it may, but to point attention to the living landscapes that are constantly at work orchestrating the climates within which we live. We can also think in terms of the “whole climate” which includes both biological and physical, and which in scientific terms is referred to as “a biophysically coupled system.”

Following are a few of the articles, books, organizations and scientific studies I’ve come across which have helped my own understanding of the climate according to life. I provide occasional notes on contents.

G e n e r a l A r t i c l e s

Working with plants, soils and water to cool the climate and rehydrate Earth’s landscapes. July 2021. UN Environmental Program Foresight Brief.   While there is extensive scientific literature on the living climate, the literature itself rarely pulls the pieces together into a coherent narrative. This article does that, in language that most people can understand. https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/36619/FB025.pdf

There’s another story to tell about climate change. And it starts with water. 2017. The Guardian. Judith Schwartz delivers a fine op/ed on why the single story on climate—carbon emissions and “green” energy—misses the heart of the climate, which is water. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/03/climate-change-water-fossil-fuel

How Climate Change Became Narrowly Focused on Carbon Dioxide. 2021. Thorsten Arnold.  A student of Earth Systems Science, Arnold provides some history to how the direct effects of land change got sidelined from the mainstream, CO2-only climate narrative. https://thorstenarnold.com/how-we-started-to-believe-that-climate-change-only-has-to-do-with-greenhouse-gases/

Managing forests for water and climate cooling. 2015. We Forest Brief.  In June 2015, over 30 experts in the fields of Earth and plant sciences convened in Leuven, Belgium, to discuss the latest scientific findings related to forest, water, soil and atmosphere interactions. They consolidated research showing how forests regulate water and climate, not only at local, watershed and catchment scales, but also at regional, continental and global scales. https://www.weforest.org/wp-content/uploads/WeForest-Brief-Managing-forests-for-Water_lowres-5_0_12.pdf 

Water for Recovery of the Climate: A New Water Paradigm. 2007. Michael Kravcik, Jan Pokorny, et al. In India they say “water is climate and climate is water.” So do Slavic and Czech scientists Michael Kravcik and Jan Pokorny. They call for a shift in our thinking about climate from one that centers carbon to one that centers water. http://www.waterparadigm.org/download/Water_for_the_Recovery_of_the_Climate_A_New_Water_Paradigm.pdf

Forest Modelling Misses Water for the Carbon: An Interview with Antonio Nobre and Anastassia Makievera. February, 2023. Mongabay. Judith Schwartz introduces us to the amazing work of Amazon forest researcher Antonio Nobre and Russian physicist Anastassia Makievera, who are discovering how living climates work and how terribly mathematical models represent them. https://news.mongabay.com/2023/02/forest-modeling-misses-the-water-for-the-carbon-qa-with-antonio-nobre-anastassia-makarieva/

O r g a n i z a t i o n s

Biodiversity for A Livable Climate  

https://bio4climate.org/

This grass roots organization has been working for over a decade to raise awareness about the living climate. Their 11 volume Compendium of citizen-reviewed science breaks it down for ordinary readers on everything from soils to vegetative cooling to rangeland ecosystems to the climatic role of reindeer in arctic biomes.

Ecosystem Restoration Communities .

https://www.ecosystemrestorationcommunities.org/

This group takes matters literally into their own hands by bringing people onto the land with restoration projects all over the world

B o o k s

Climate: A New Story. Charles Eisenstein. 2018. Charles Eisenstein is the first to propose in a comprehensive way the need to tell a new climate story, beginning with the simple, scientifically discernable fact that Earth is alive and climate is a creation of that life. Here is a 12 minute video summary: https://www.google.com/search?q=climate+a+new+story&rlz=1C1CHZN_enUS926US926&oq=climate+a+new+story&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i64j69i60l2.3214j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:9b4907a1,vid:8IO6Y5baPO0

Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World

Reindeer Chronicles: And Other Inspiring Stories of Working With Nature to Heal the Earth

In plain, entertaining language, these three books by Judith Schwartz lead the reader through the entire physiology of Earth’s climate, from soils to clouds, water cycles to reindeer. All the practical reality without the science talk.

Water: A Natural History. 1997. Alice Outwater.  When European colonists landed on the shores of Turtle Island, they were astounded at how clean and voluminous the water was. Then they proceeded to destroy the living systems (and cultures) that created and cleansed it. What Outwater describes is the dewatering of the North American continent, the source of many of our climate woes today, particularly in the Western US. If you want to understand the climate mess we’re in, you have to understand what we’ve done to water here.

S c i e n t i f i c L i t e r a t u r e (There are hundreds of scientific studies concerning the biological aspects of climate. I’m listing a few that seem most pertinent.)

Extreme hydrometeorological events and climate change predictions in Europe. Millan Millan, et al. 2014. Journal of Hydrology. In 1999, the European Commission tasked Dr. Millan with figuring out why the afternoon storms in the Western Mediterranean Basin were disappearing, with rivers drying up in their wake. The culprit, he discovered, was land destruction. Critical scientific work, largely ignored by climate orthodoxy. I will soon be publishing a three-part series on this remarkable man, his work and it’s meaning for the rest of us.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268630896_Extreme_hydrometeorological_events_and_climate_change_predictions_in_Europe_Journal_of_Hydrology_518_2014_206-224

Ecology and Climate of the Earth: Same Biogeophysical System. R.A. Pielke Sr. 2022. MDPI Climate. Pielke and his associates make a bold conclusion: “ecology and the climate of the Earth provide two views of the same biogeophysical system.” They also note that “this congruence of perspectives is not yet generally adopted.” The implications of this are enormous, yet mainstream climate-media hasn’t even noticed. I will be writing more on Dr. Pielke, his work, and the resistance he has encountered from climate orthodoxy.  Climate | Free Full-Text | Ecology and Climate of the Earth—The Same Biogeophysical System (mdpi.com)

Trees, forests and water: Cool insights for a hot world. David Ellison, et al. 2017. Global Environmental Change. From the abstract: The substantial body of research we review reveals that forest, water and energy interactions provide the foundations for carbon storage, for cooling terrestrial surfaces and for distributing water resources. Forests and trees must be recognized as prime regulators within the water, energy and carbon cycles. If these functions are ignored, planners will be unable to assess, adapt to or mitigate the impacts of changing land cover and climate. Our call to action targets a reversal of paradigms, from a carbon-centric model to one that treats the hydrologic and climate-cooling effects of trees and forests as the first order of priority. For reasons of sustainability, carbon storage must remain a secondary, though valuable, by-product.” https://hal.science/hal-01517232v1/file/2017_Ellison_Global%20Environ%20Change_%7BE2C92B9A-82D4-4489-A192-599FEDF77AA1%7D.pdf

Forests, atmospheric water and an uncertain future: the new biology of the global water cycle. Sheil, Douglas. 2018. Forest Ecosystems. From the abstract: “Here, for non-specialist readers, I review our knowledge of the links between vegetation-cover and climate with a focus on forests and rain (precipitation)…There are significant shortcomings in our understanding of the atmospheric hydrological cycle and of its representation in climate models.” https://forestecosyst.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40663-018-0138-y

Are the impacts of land use on warming underestimated in climate policy? Mahowald, Natalie, et al. 2017. Environmental Research Letters. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa836d

Biodiversity in Focus: United States Edition. Natureserve. A still fresh, thorough analysis of the tragic state of biodiversity (plants, animals, soil, ecosystems) in America.  https://www.natureserve.org/bif