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Comments 11501 to 11550:

11501. nigelj at 10:50 AM on 20 March 2019
       The temperature evolution after 2016 suggests hotter future
       

       MA Rodger @21, thanks. The Scarfetta paper (2010)  claims there exists a 60 yr climate cycle related to motions and gravity of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, and he makes the claim it will cause global cooling from 2000 - 2030. This idea has all been dealt a rather lethal body blow by the last 4 years temperatures, right in the wrong place in his cycle! So yeah fairyland stuff, and spurious correlations perhaps, or just some very weak insignificant relationship.

11502. TVC15 at 10:05 AM on 20 March 2019
       Climate's changed before
       

       Hi Skeptial Science,

       First let me say that I LOVE this site as it's helped me to debunk the human caused climate change deniers.

       I keep running into one denier who keeps repeating this: 

       "The average global temperatures for seven of the previous Inter-Glacial Periods was 66.2°F to 73.7°F not the current 58.4°F and CO2 levels never exceed 292 ppm CO2.

       The temperatures in Greenland during the last Inter-Glacial Period were 14.4°F warmer than now, in part, because the average global temperature was 15.3°F warmer than now, and CO2 levels peaked at 287 ppm CO2.

       So, how can you possibly state with absolute certainty that temperatures will not rise another 7.8°F to 15.3°F on their own?

       The reason it was 14.4°F warmer in Greenland than it is now is because during the last Inter-Glacial Period, the average global temperature was 73.7°F and not the current 58.4°F."

       "You should also know the Greenland Ice Sheet always melts, and the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet always melts, and that sometimes the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet undergoes substantial melting, like it did during MIS-5 and MIS-11, and that it may have had substantial melting during other Inter-Glacial Periods, but the data has not yet been evaluated.

       In short, nothing abnormal is happening very slowly."

       How to respond to what appears to be inaccurte cherry picking?

11503. scaddenp at 09:40 AM on 20 March 2019
       The temperature evolution after 2016 suggests hotter future
       

       Scarfetta has tried to relate climate to who knows now how many unphysical cycles. However, the methodology used to detecting them is, well somewhat suspect. This paper does a take-down of the methodology and reanalysis with proper method. Scarfetta replied but another take-down here.

       While the statistical/mathematical analysis is pretty confusing, the real issue is the lack of any credible physical mechanism.

11504. Post Vegan at 09:10 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       One other thing, as noted in my blog entry on methane, Ruminations-Methane math and context, spikes in atmospheric methane emissions correlate with industrialization, conventional natural gas use, and most recently the fractured natural gas industry. From 1998 to 2007, atmospheric methane levels had leveled out. During this period of time, global cattle inventories increased. Since 2007, global cattle inventories have decreased yet atmospheric levels of CH4 have again started to rise. So there is NO correlation between global cattle inventories and atmospheric CH4 levels. What started in 2006? You betchya, fracking. Typical microbial sources of methane (methanogenesis from archae- methanogens) have C12 isotopic signatures of methane while thermogenic sources of methane (fossil fuels) have C13 isotropic signatures of methane. But fracking and coal bed gas also have C12 isotopic signatures. This has led to some confusion in top down analysis of methane sources, especially when very rudimentary inventories of CH4 isotopes have been used. There's a lot of overlap in signatures, but in general some studies have been attributing CH4 to the animal Ag sector that should really be attributed to the natural gas fracking sector. (Note bottom up analysis of CH4 tends to over count and place blame on those sources of methane easier to extrapolate - like cattle- rather than sources of methane harder to account for like leaky gas pipes or the number of cockroaches).

11505. RedBaron at 09:06 AM on 20 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       @22 nigelj,

       The reason for the dichotomy in numbers is for 2 reasons. 

       1. The second pathway (LCP) was completely unknown until very recently. Glomalin wasn't even discovered until 1996 and it wasn't until several years after that when we began to understand its importance. Much of the literature simply omits it completely and much of the soils test data doesn't even sample deep enough to detect carbon sequestered that way.
       2. NPK fertilizers shut down AMF symbiosis. So even if it is known, there is a tendancy to believe it doesn't matter anyway because chemical fertilizers are required to keep yields up. This is wrong of course. Fertilizers are not required to keep yields up, if the LCP is fully functioning.  This is not known by very many people though.
11506. MA Rodger at 06:50 AM on 20 March 2019
       The temperature evolution after 2016 suggests hotter future
       

       nigelj @20,

       The title? It is that the author is away with the fairies that "does not inspire me with confidence." The PDF below should work. Enjoy!!

       And that mention of "many ancient calendars" referenced in Wikithing appears as the un-referenced quote:-

       "A quasi-60 year cycle has been found in numerous multi-secular climatic records, and it is even present in the traditional Chinese, Tibetan and Tamil calendars, which are arranged in major 60-year cycles."

       Scarfetta N. (2010) 'Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications.'

11507. nigelj at 06:11 AM on 20 March 2019
       The temperature evolution after 2016 suggests hotter future
       

       "Climate oscillation" on wikipedia lists various relevant cycles. The AMO is around 60 years. The Gleissberg cycle is a weak solar cycle of about 88 years.

       Of interest is the statement "a 60-year climate cycle recorded in many ancient calendars[1]" This in turn is linked to a paper by Scarfetta . "Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations", but the link to this paper wouldn't open when I tried it. The title of the paper does not inspire me with confidence.

       However I think its a good point that given the so called pause was definitely not a period of cooling any such cycle (if it exists) is fairly weak and is being dominated by AGW.

11508. nigelj at 05:43 AM on 20 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Red Baron @18, thanks again and I understand the fixed carbon and soil carbon distinction now, and I did already understand the general nature of the biochemical pathways.

       It's the quantities I struggle with. It appears Nordberg has 10% of the fixed carbon going into soil carbon and Jones has roughly 30 - 40% going into soil carbon, if I read things right. This would still seem to fall somewhat short of Savorys claims, but is obviously a pretty big improvement. That would be what is possibly significant.

       I'm out of my depth trying to compare findings of different studies that seem to measure things a bit differently. I think the writer of the article should address the issues and papers you quote.  

11509. RedBaron at 05:05 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       @12 John Hartz,

       Yes Cell grazing from your link is an early form of Savory's work. It is not the same as HM, because quite a bit more work went into developing HM since the early days when Savory developed cell grazing from Voisin's rational grazing. But yes they are closely related. It is quite possible to get exactly the same results in soil carbon sequestration.

       Cell Grazing

       Cell Grazing the first 10 years in Austrailia

11510. Kevin C at 04:46 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       Still working through the paper list slowly:

       • Gattinger et al (2012) report a “maximum technical potential” of 56 Gt C globally from 2010 till 2030, based on shifting all farming (not just rangeland grazing) to organic. This assumes no economic barriers and that no land is already organicly farmed. That’s one of the highest numbers I’ve found. When extended to 40 years, that would reach about ¼ of Savory’s figure, but by making much more extensive changes.
       • Lai (2010) show in figure 8 an economic potential for sequestration of 0.49 Gt C/yr (or 1.8 Gt CO2eq/yr) from livestock and grazing land management. Over 40 years that makes 20 Gt of carbon.
       • Teague et al (2011) and Teague et al (2016) provide a higher estimate. They estimate 0.8 Gt C/yr for adoption of adaptive multipaddock grazing across the whole of the US. If we were to assume the same benefit worldwide sustained over 40 years, that would give 120 Gt C - still a factor of 4 below Savory.

       My expertise in temperature data does not transfer to animal husbandry. All I'm doing is reading papers carefully and looking for numbers which are actually comparable (to whatever extent possible) and relevant to the question.

11511. Post Vegan at 04:43 AM on 20 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       As noted in my blog entry on methane: Ruminations-Methane math and context. Spikes in atmospheric methane emissions correlate with industrialization, conventional natural gas use, and most recently fractured natural gas. From 1998 to 2007, atmospheric methane levels had leveled out. During this period of time, global cattle inventories increased. Since 2007, global cattle inventories have decreased yet atmospheric levels of CH4 have again started to rise. So there is NO correlation between global cattle inventories and atmospheric CH4 levels. What started in 2006? You betchya, fracking. Typical microbial sources of methane (methogenesis from archae- methanogens) have C12 isotopic signatures of methane while thermogenic sources of methane (fossil fuels) have C13 isotropic signatures of methane. But fracking and coal bed gas also have C12 isotopic signatures. This has led to some confusion in top down analysis of methane sources, especially when very rudimentary inventories of CH4 isotopes have been used. There's a lot of overlap in signatures, but in general some studies have been attributing CH4 to the animal Ag sector that should really be attributed to the natural gas fracking sector. (Note bottom up analysis of CH4 tends to over count and place blame on those sources of methane easier to extrapolate - like cattle- rather than sources of methane harder to account for like leaky gas pipes or the number of cockroaches).

11512. Post Vegan at 04:26 AM on 20 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Holistic management isn't something one can really understand by reading papers on a computer screen, especially when one relies on papers that don't know the difference between holistic management and short duration grazing [SDG] or rotational grazing [RG]. The whole argument above is built on a house of cards since the author bases a large part of the analysis on Nordborg, who in turn relies on Briske and Holechek. All of these people make the same error. So let me reiterate, holistic management (aka AMP management) and short duration grazing or rotational grazing are not the same thing.

       I didn't fully understand what holistic management was until I attended a few HM workshops and visited a few ranches using these management practices. Savory's talks and book weren't very useful since Savory's writing and speaking styles tends towards the use of a lot of run on sentences with non-parallel structure that tend to obfuscate rather than clarify. His TedTalk was one of his more persuasive talks since because of the time constraint, he was forced to be succinct. Though in this talk, many of the points, he’d normally qualify, were stated without any qualifications.

       Now most people think HM is just another way or system to move cattle. But HM (more specifically holistic grazing), is primarily a process to restore and regenerate land utilizing a holistic ecosystem view. Holistic grazing, also called adaptive grazing, should also be thought of as regenerative or ecological grazing. Holistic grazing mimics nature, regenerates land and restores ecosystem function.

       When starting with HM, the land’s existing conditions are assessed, goals are then determined, and a plan is implemented. That plan is constantly re-assessed and modified to achieve the plan's goals. Goals include improving soil health, greater plant and wildlife diversity, improved forage, improved animal welfare, improved hydrology, increased ground cover, etc. Ranchers using HM are as much soil farmers as they are meat producers. HM isn’t prescriptive. Movements are adapted to the land conditions. Every ranch will have its own unique plan to achieve its goals. Now systems like SDG and RG are systems, with specific movements patterns based on specific set timing irrespective of specific land conditions with the primary goal being cattle weight gains.

       With holistic grazing, ruminants are an essential tool for achieving these restorative and regenerative goals. Ruminants are "all-in-one" tools. They are mowers, seed pushers, ground "indentors", composters, fertilizer spreaders, nutrient cyclers and soil builders. Moreover these four-legged decomposing spreader nutrient cyclers, in the field, don't require any fossil fuels.

       Now the connection between grazing management and carbon sequestration is soil biology, specifically what practices improve biology and which one’s don’t improve biology. Soil biology drive carbon utilzation, respiration and sequestration as well as water infiltration and retention. As the most recent soil science has been finding when root mass is maintained, as I noted above, plants continue to exude exudates into the soil. When plants are grazed more than 50%, the plants lose most of their root mass. This is why cattle in HM or AMP systems have to be frequently moved. The tops of plants also have the most nutrition. Additionally when ruminants eat the tops, they are less exposed to worms and other potential pathogens closer to the soil. All the animal movements are based on field observations of plant growth and ground cover, not a specific pattern or timing as with SDG or RG systems. So once again, HM and SDG/RG are not the same thing.

       Cattle’s urine, manure and saliva function as inoculates that increase plant growth. Ruminants, including cattle’s ancestors’ auroch, co-evolved with vegetation in grassland ecosystems. Grasses have nodes, so when bit they regrow from those nodes. The manure in healthy grassland ecosystems is broken down quickly by different types of dung beetles that quickly move the dung into the earth and thus reduce any methane off gassing. This helps build soil. But the primary mechanism for building soil, again as I noted previously, is microbial necromass accumulation. Up until recently, the general belief was that top soil takes hundreds of year to accumulate through mineralization. MacArthur Fellow, and geologist Dr. David Montgomery in his last two books, The Hidden Half of Nature and Growing a Revolution, does an excellent job of dispelling this belief by illustrating how better soil conservation agricultural practices, including livestock integration, speed up top soil formation significantly. So, as I noted in my prior response, more soil accumulates and captures more carbon. There isn’t a finite amount of soil, so there isn’t a finite of carbon capture, thus the whole premise of “saturation” is a flawed one except for in a degenerated system where no more soil is accumulating.

       Better land management, including better grazing and agricultural practices, also maintain arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi [AMF] networks. When land is over grazed, tilled or treated with syn N, those AMF networks are destroyed. These networks connect plants and per preliminary research seem to play a huge role in the amount of carbon that can be sequestered. Dr. David Johnson, a microbiologist at New Mexico State University, did two self-financed research studies that showed massive increases in carbon sequestration coupled with decreased carbon respiration when fungi to bacteria ratios were improved. Johnson’s carbon sequestration numbers were 10 to 20 times those of Lal. Johnson’s numbers were so good, that one of the conservative peer reviewers didn’t believe those numbers, so both of Johnson’s paper were not accepted for publication. Though currently, several places across the globe including the new regenerative Ag program at Cal State Univ. Chico, are replicating Johnson’s studies to (hopefully) validate Johnson’s numbers. In the meantime, Johnson has made his composting methodology reading available online for anyone to replicate. This is a non-proprietary, non-licensed methodology, so Johnson doesn’t gain a dime directly from his processes. Here’s a good recent talk by Johnson at Cal St. Univ. –Chico where he discusses his research: Regenerating the Diversity of Life in Soils: Hope for Farming, Ranching and Climate.

11513. Post Vegan at 03:51 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       I've writen more about the importance of soil biology in this blog entry : It's the Soil Biology, Stupid. 
       
       Climate scientists and soil scientists as well as botanists really need to get out of their respective silos and talk to one another. Obviously we live in an interconnected (rather than reductive) world. For example: Carbon dioxide converted to glucose via the krebs cycle gets exuded and feeds soil microbes, which in turn, improves soil structure thus allowing for more water infiltration and retention. Thus more plant growth. More plant growth versus bare ground means more cooling immediately at the surface level. Plus plants transpire monoterpines like isoprene and pine which when oxidized become nuclei essential for rain cloud formation. Thus consolidation of water vapor leads to cooling as well as more cloud formation which reflects solar radiation…and thus more cooling. The more soil is recarbonized, the less evaporation and the more plant growth, so less water vapor and more cloud formation. Capiche?

       Anyway, I’ll be writing something about these interconnections soon, until then here’s something else I wrote that is a more systems view of methane: Ruminations- Methane math and context.

       All this reductive thinking like noted in the author’s myth busting gives everyone who is more mindful a lobotomy. We should be asking more questions rather than trying to “prove” all the time that others are “wrong”.

11514. Post Vegan at 03:33 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       Holistic management isn't something one can really understand by reading papers on a computer screen, especially when one relies on papers that don't know the difference between holistic management and short duration grazing [SDG] or rotational grazing [RG]. The whole argument above is built on a house of cards since the author bases a large part of the analysis on Nordborg, who in turn relies on Briske and Holechek. All of these people make the same error. So let me reiterate, holistic management (aka AMP management) and short duration grazing or rotational grazing are not the same thing.
       
       I didn't fully understand what holistic management was until I attended a few HM workshops and visited a few ranches using these management practices. Savory's talks and book weren't very useful since Savory's writing and speaking styles tends towards the use of a lot of run on sentences with non-parallel structure that tend to obfuscate rather than clarify. His TedTalk was one of his more persuasive talks since because of the time constraint, he was forced to be succinct. Though in this talk, many of the points, he’d normally qualify, were stated without any qualifications.

       Now most people think HM is just another way or system to move cattle. But HM (more specifically holistic grazing), is primarily a process to restore and regenerate land utilizing a holistic ecosystem view. Holistic grazing, also called adaptive grazing, should also be thought of as regenerative or ecological grazing. Holistic grazing mimics nature, regenerates land and restores ecosystem function.
       
       When starting with HM, the land’s existing conditions are assessed, goals are then determined, and a plan is implemented. That plan is constantly re-assessed and modified to achieve the plan's goals. Goals include improving soil health, greater plant and wildlife diversity, improved forage, improved animal welfare, improved hydrology, increased ground cover, etc. Ranchers using HM are as much soil farmers as they are meat producers. HM isn’t prescriptive. Movements are adapted to the land conditions. Every ranch will have its own unique plan to achieve its goals. Now systems like SDG and RG are systems, with specific movements patterns based on specific set timing irrespective of specific land conditions with the primary goal being cattle weight gains.
       
       With holistic grazing, ruminants are an essential tool for achieving these restorative and regenerative goals. Ruminants are "all-in-one" tools. They are mowers, seed pushers, ground "indentors", composters, fertilizer spreaders, nutrient cyclers and soil builders. Moreover these four-legged decomposing spreader nutrient cyclers, in the field, don't require any fossil fuels.

       Now the connection between grazing management and carbon sequestration is soil biology, specifically what practices improve biology and which one’s don’t improve biology.  Soil biology drive carbon utilzation, respiration and sequestration as well as water infiltration and retention.  As the most recent soil science has been finding when root mass is maintained, as I noted above, plants continue to exude exudates into the soil. When plants are grazed more than 50%, the plants lose most of their root mass. This is why cattle in HM or AMP systems have to be frequently moved. The tops of plants also have the most nutrition. Additionally when ruminants eat the tops, they are less exposed to worms and other potential pathogens closer to the soil. All the animal movements are based on field observations of plant growth and ground cover, not a specific pattern or timing as with SDG or RG systems. So once again, HM and SDG/RG are not the same thing.

       Cattle’s urine, manure and saliva function as inoculates that increase plant growth. Ruminants, including cattle’s ancestors’ auroch, co-evolved with vegetation in grassland ecosystems. Grasses have nodes, so when bit they regrow from those nodes. The manure in healthy grassland ecosystems is broken down quickly by different types of dung beetles that quickly move the dung into the earth and thus reduce any methane off gassing. This helps build soil. But the primary mechanism for building soil, again as I noted previously, is microbial necromass accumulation. Up until recently, the general belief was that top soil takes hundreds of year to accumulate through mineralization. MacArthur Fellow, and geologist Dr. David Montgomery in his last two books, The Hidden Half of Nature and Growing a Revolution, does an excellent job of dispelling this belief by illustrating how better soil conservation agricultural practices, including livestock integration, speed up top soil formation significantly. So, as I noted in my prior response, more soil accumulates and captures more carbon. There isn’t a finite amount of soil, so there isn’t a finite of carbon capture, thus the whole premise of “saturation” is a flawed one except for in a degenerated system where no more soil is accumulating.

       Better land management, including better grazing and agricultural practices, also maintain arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi [AMF] networks. When land is over grazed, tilled or treated with syn N, those AMF networks are destroyed. These networks connect plants and per preliminary research seem to play a huge role in the amount of carbon that can be sequestered. Dr. David Johnson, a microbiologist at New Mexico State University, did two self-financed research studies that showed massive increases in carbon sequestration coupled with decreased carbon respiration when fungi to bacteria ratios were improved. Johnson’s carbon sequestration numbers were 10 to 20 times those of Lal. Johnson’s numbers were so good, that one of the conservative peer reviewers didn’t believe those numbers, so both of Johnson’s paper were not accepted for publication. Though currently, several places across the globe including the new regenerative Ag program at Cal State Univ. Chico, are replicating Johnson’s studies to (hopefully) validate Johnson’s numbers. In the meantime, Johnson has made his composting methodology reading available online for anyone to replicate. This is a non-proprietary, non-licensed methodology, so Johnson doesn’t gain a dime directly from his processes. Here’s a good recent talk by Johnson at Cal St. Univ. –Chico where he discusses his research: Regenerating the Diversity of Life in Soils: Hope for Farming, Ranching and Climate

11515. John Hartz at 03:06 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       I just came across this ABC News (Australia) video and it may or may not relate directly to the ongoing discussion on this thread.

       Boorowa farmer, David Marsh, began his journey into regenerative agriculture in the 1980s, after a drought brought him to the edge of ruin. He began adopting regenerative practices in 1999, increasing the amount of native vegetation and tree coverage on his property from just 3 per cent to 20 per cent.

       Regenerative farming has helped transform the landscape of dry properties, ABC News (Australia), Mar 14, 2019

11516. michael sweet at 02:21 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       Nick Palmer:

       Statements like "which is probably not covered, or fully conceived of, in the IPCC chapter" and "I don't think this aspect is covered by the IPCC chapter" do not make for a very convincing argument.  Either it is covered or it is not. 

       Since the IPCC includes very experienced scientists who have certainly heard about all aspects of soil science it seems to me that it would be covered.  If it was not covered, the proponents of holistic management could have asked questions and gotten it in.

11517. Nick Palmer at 02:10 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       Kevin C wrote: "Chapter 11 reviews the potential for CO2 mitigation from agriculture and land restoration, with figure 11.13 being particularly relevant. According to this figure, the potential CO2 emissions mitigation from grazing land management, land restoration and livestock is about 2 GtCO2eq/year, or about 5% of our current emissions at the highest carbon price of $100/tonne. If we were to achieve this level of mitigation continually for 40 years, that would be 80 GtCO2eq or 22 tT C, or 5% of Savory’s estimate."
       
       For those readers who don't know, 'Kevin C' is a heavyweight climate scientist. I think the IPCC figures given above relate to 'conventional' soil restoration and grazing management. As I wrote, I think Allan Savory claims too much in his headline statements, but I'm pretty sure his figures include large contributions from reversing desertified and highly degraded land which is probably not covered, or fully conceived of, in the IPCC chapter. Whether his techniques can do that, of course, is a subject of debate...

       It's a truism that many giant agricultural fields have very low soil carbon in them nowadays due to the way they are cultivated - much lower, percentage wise, than the soil would have had when first cultivated. Industrial agriculture has denuded carbon from the soil and the quantities are thought provoking.  As a thought experiment, just assume that all land we use for food crops and livestock on earth has a SOM of, say 3%. Given that, if we could increase that average up to, say, 6% then a relatively simple calculation shows that just about all current greenhouse emissions could be absorbed  by this increased 'sink', but also that some way could be gone towards sucking historic CO2 emissions back out the atmosphere.
       
       There are, of course, known limits to increasing soil organic matter conventionally, as has been mentioned. For example, just piling on endless tonnes of compost has only a temporary effect - bacteria 'respire' much if it right back out again in to the atmosphere as CO2 - unless one simultaneously addresses recreating the bacterial and fungal etc ecosystems that conventional agriculture has degraded. Building up them the long lived humic acids and glomalins  creates soil carbon that is much more resistant to breakdown. I don't think this aspect is covered by the IPCC chapter.

11518. RedBaron at 00:49 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       @6 Nick,

        Even Savory doesn't claim that. He clearly states in many interviews that part of HM includes renewable energy and reducing emissions as a holistic approach to AGW mitigation. There are some people out there claiming a silver bullet, but Savory is not one of them actually. This is from his plan:

       A Two-Path Strategy is Essential for Combating Combat Climate Change

       1.  High Technology Path. This path, based on mainstream reductionist science, is urgent and vital to the development of alternative energy sources to reduce or halt future emissions.
       2. Low Technology Path. This path based on the emerging relationship science or holistic world view is vital for resolving the problem of grassland biomass burning, desertification and the safe storage of CO2, (legacy load) of heat trapping gases that already exist in the atmosphere.

       You can read his whole plan here:

       A Global Strategy for Addressing Global Climate Change
       by Allan Savory

11519. Kevin C at 00:49 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       Firstly, we need to establish the scope of the question. There is scientific discussion as to whether holisitic management provides significant benefits over other managed grazing techniques (and of course there is no doubt that managed grazing provides benefits over mismanaged grazing). Conclusions vary both by location and by the field of the researchers, with sociologists (who talk to the farmers) more positive than experimental agriculturalists (who rely more on measurements). While extremely interesting from a scientific viewpoint, this is not a relevant question for Skeptical Science.

       The question which is key to the work of Skeptical Science is whether Savory’s very specific claims about the ability of holistic management to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at levels sufficient to reverse climate change are credible. Savory claims that over a period of 40 years the application of holistic management could remove 500 Gt of CO2 from the atmosphere.

       So lets start with the IPCC report (AR5 WG3), since it is a comprehensive assessment by some of the best people in the field. Chapter 11 reviews the potential for CO2 mitigation from agriculture and land restoration, with figure 11.13 being particularly relevant. According to this figure, the potential CO2 emissions mitigation from grazing land management, land restoration and livestock is about 2 GtCO2eq/year, or about 5% of our current emissions at the highest carbon price of $100/tonne. If we were to achieve this level of mitigation continually for 40 years, that would be 80 GtCO2eq or 22 tT C, or 5% of Savory’s estimate. Taking the upper 1 sigma bound only leads to a small increase in this value.

       Note however that this is based in part on reductions in emissions rather than uptake, and ignores the issue of non-permenance of additional soil sequestered carbon (section 11.3.2), both of which reduce the expected mitigation potential.

       Are there estimates of the long term carbon sequestration potential of soils under improved grazing or other management schemes? Eagle et al (2010), which is the primary source for the Delgado paper cited by Red Baron, lists two 40 year studies (table 23), with one showing no change from altered grazing practices, and the other showing a small increase in sequestration (0.66 tCO2eq/ha yr, 0.2 tC/ha yr) from a change in grazing. For single year studies, Eagle finds the CO2 sequestration potential of rangeland as uncertain and varying in sign from study to study.

       The two Retallack papers cited by Red Baron don’t seem to be relevant – the first deals with very long timescales (~10Kyr). The second contains a brief speculative section at the end, but does not offer any data except for a citation to Sanderman (2010), who in turn cites Connant (2001), which was a source work for this rebuttal and found vary variable results from different studies. Sanderman also notes that “On average, 1-2% of plant residues become stabilised as humified soil organic matter for significant periods of time (Schlesinger 1990).” highlighting the importance of the permenance issue.

       I'll try and work through a couple more of the suggested papers this evening.

11520. Kevin C at 00:42 AM on 20 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       A couple of comments to facilitate the discussion. First, let me set some context. (This post could go at the bottom of any rebuttal.)

       The aim of Skeptical Science is to communicate what we as a species know (and don’t know) about climate change, and to call out claims which misrepresent what we as a species know about climate science.

       This raises the question of how we, as a species, can know something. Clearly, there are things that we do know – that the earth is round and orbits the sun. A few people dispute these things, but we consider it nonetheless as something that is known. So how do we know that we know?

       The answer is laid out in lay terms in this talk by science historian Naomi Oreskes, and in many more academic talks she and others have given on the same subject. The problem is that people are human, and have incomplete information and cognitive biases. So we can’t trust people. Scientists train themselves to focus on evidence, but are still people, and so not very reliable. Scientific papers are a little more reliable, because of two additional social factors – when we attach our name to a paper, some of our reputation goes with it, and also the paper should be rigorously critiqued by (when the system works) independent scientists looking to find holes in our work. But science is hard, so we still expect many individual papers to be wrong. The best measure of what we as a species know comes from an assessment of all of the scientific literature on the question, because more diverse and more dispersed groups are less subject to groupthink and other biases.

       When we address a claim on SkS, we have to have a standard against which to evaluate a claim. And the most reliable standard is to compare that claim against the whole body of scientific opinion relevant to that claim. We expect a diversity of opinion, but we can assess the breadth of diversity on a particular question. We can then identify whether a particular claim is representative of the scientific knowledge on a particular question, or whether it is part of a spectrum of diverse opinions. In the latter case we can further identify whether the claim falls in the middle of that spectrum, on the edge, or is an extreme outlier with little other support.

       Obviously this can’t be done by citing individual papers, it must be done on the basis of an extensive review. Hence the lengthy citation list. We expect to find outliers on any question – I’ll discuss some of these later. However, we also expect multiple systematic reviews to reach similar conclusions, so comparison with the IPCC reports is an important starting point.

       So, that raises two questions:

       1. Where do Savory’s claims stand with respect to the spread of scientific opinion on those questions?
       2. Does the rebuttal do a good job of communicating the spread of scientific opinion and the relative position of Savory’s claims?

       I'll try and look into the first of these in my next post.

11521. Nick Palmer at 23:05 PM on 19 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       I have quite a good knowledge of this area. I'll just state my opinions to start... Allan Savory's rhetoric and claims are rather over the top - and this rebuttal is rather 'under the top'. It throws the baby out with the bath water.

       The 'climate myth' as stated is (probably) still a myth but strip the hyperbole away from the myth-as-stated and there is still a useful technique left which I think this rebuttal unfairly denigrates.

       Much of the substance of these rebuttals uses straw man arguments and fallacious analogising. I think it should be removed from Skepticalscience.com because it is rather 'denialist' in the way that it argues. Post Vegan @5 gives a good explanation of why this rebuttal is mostly invalid.

       It is no doubt true that just holistically managed grazing alone can not be enough to suck all that excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Similarly, increasing soil organic carbon in agricultural crop fields - I don't think anyone could reasonably argue that our industrial agriculture has not greatly reduced 'natural' levels of SOM - is also not (using accepted figures from such as Lal) enough to do the job. We already know that greatly reducing fossil fuel emissions is also not enough, on its own, to do the job. I think we need all three, plus extras!

11522. SirCharles at 22:39 PM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Global spike in methane emissions over last decade likely due to US shale

11523. MA Rodger at 21:28 PM on 19 March 2019
       The temperature evolution after 2016 suggests hotter future
       

       ThinkingMan @17,

       The concept of a natural unforced climate cycle is part of the denialist armoury and is usually presented as a 60-year cycle. I think it gets lengthened to allow more abiguity when fitting it to data.

       The sole basis of it is the global temperature record which can been seem as having peaks in 1880, 1940 & 2000 and dips in 1910 & 1970. Thus a 60-year cycle is proposed as causing these peaks and dips.

       

       Those proposing the existence of such a 60-year natural cycle have failed to take the idea forward. Further the peaks and dips can be understood without the existence of some grand natural wobble.

       Thus the so-called 'hiatus' of recent years can be explained by the impact of ENSO which is a natural wobble-maker. Yet such a natural wobble does not explain the slight cooling post-1940. This has more to do with a slowing of AGW positive forcings through those years and a massive increase in the rate of anthropogenic SO2 emissions. The 1940 peak is more of a challenge but over half of it results from forcing, most of this anthropogenic. And back to the 1880 dip, the volcanism during the latter part of the 19th century easily privide the dip without any 60-year wobble.

       Another approach to finding a 60-year wobble is to seek evidence for the wobble within the known natural oscillation. As set out above, ENSO (& thus PDO) are not powerful enough to be a source of the size of wobble being talked about. One other candidate is AMO mentioned @16. AMO is an interesting phenomenon. It was fisrt identified within a proxy reconstruction of North Atlantic temperatures. This were part of the work that resulted in the famous 'hockeystick' reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures. And here's a thing - the AMO is not seen in the 'hockeystick',  suggesting it too has not the power to provide a significant 60-year global wobble (IPCC AR5 also demonstrate the lack of power) although there is much work now showing the AMO is a true oscillation of roughly 60-year pitch.

11524. RedBaron at 19:59 PM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       @17 nigelj,

       I discussed this with Dr. Teague myself in person last year, as he was kind enough to visit here in Oklahoma and make a presentation to the State soil conservation society. I can very confidently reply that you have this wrong actually. Teague told me that actually we can sequester much more carbon than Savory claimed in his famous TedTalk.

       What Nordborg calls (NPP) and what Jones calls fixed carbon is the same. Net Primary Productivity (NPP), or the production of plant biomass, is equal to all of the carbon taken up by the vegetation through photosynthesis (called Gross Primary Production or GPP) minus the carbon that is lost to respiration. Here is a simple guide for students on how to calculate NPP and convert it to CO2e fixed.[1] 

       None of this is soil yet. What we have at this stage is sugars and proteins that flow as sap and become either root exudates to feed soil microbial colonies, or flows to other plant tissues to become plant biomass. In essense then NPP becomes live biomass. This is fixed carbon.

       Later this carbon becomes via, one pathway or the other, dead biomass. At this point it can start to become part of the soil stored carbon. The O-Horizon in the soil is almost all decaying biomass and the biology that recycles dead biomass, Saprophytes. A small % eventually can become soil.

       Labile carbon is the fraction of dead biomass in the soil that eventually decomposes into CO2, CH4 and trace minerals. Stable carbon is the fraction of the dead biomass in the soil that turns into stable humic polymers tightly bound to the soil mineral substrate.

       Only this last fraction of Stable carbon can be considered Sequestered  for the purposes of AGW mitigation.

       Jones claims 30-40% of fixed carbon becomes root exudates feeding AMF which then produce glomalin, a soil glue. She further claims to have measured a stable fraction to labile fraction for this pathway of 78% sequestered carbon. [2] She doesn't count O-horizon carbon at all assigning it nearly 0% stable fraction, assuming nearly all of it eventually returns to the atmosphere as CO2 or CH4. Teague and Jones are generally in agreement regarding soil function. He told me this personally when we met. I asked directly.

       Nordborg assigns an astonishingly high maximum potential of 10% stable fraction of soil carbon from the O-horizon as sequestered and completely ignores the LCP entirely. It's not even in the calculations.

11525. nigelj at 18:25 PM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Red Baron @13, thanks. I'm a bit relentless at getting to the bottom of things, please excuse me. My impression is as follows.The Nordburg calculations (under the advanced tab) are that improved grazing systems could sequester an additional 3.8 tonnes carbon / hectare / year, and well short of the claims by Savory. The Nordberg calculation seems to be based on 10% of this carbon content actually go into soil carbon and declining over time.

       The Teague et alia paper you quote appears to say properly managed grazing can sequester an additional 4 tonnes carbon / hectare / year and all of this in the soil itself. This would be a lot more promising than the Nordberg result, but I'm not sure if I have understood Teague correctly. I'm not a soils expert by a long way. 

       I would appreciate a comment from the experts, particularly the writer of the article as to the Teague paper.

       The general impression I get is soils could sequester significant carbon but short of what Savory claims. 

11526. RedBaron at 15:52 PM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       @14 Nigelj,

       You are asking for a copy paste? 

       "These sources report the sequestration of extra C from
       regenerative management of between –2 and –4 t C ha–1 y–1 (–0.89 and –1.78 tn C ac–1 yr–1) compared to current management alternatives so we calculate GHG emission mitigation by regenerative, conservation grazing and cropping at –3 t C ha–1 y–1 (–1.2 tn C ac–1 yr–1; figures 1 and 2)" 

       The role of ruminants in reducing agriculture’s carbon footprint in North America  W.R. Teague, S. Apfelbaum, R. Lal, U.P. Kreuter, J. Rowntree, C.A. Davies, R. Conser, M. Rasmussen, J. Hatfield, T. Wang, F. Wang, and P. Byck JOURNAL OF SOIL AND WATER CONSERVATION MARCH/APRIL 2016 —VOL. 71, NO. 2

       To convert that to CO2e we multiply by 44/12 or 3.67 so just to clean this formatting and scale up a bit for comparison we get  11 tonnes CO2e/ha/yr on average.

       That is dead center of what was reported by Dr Jones or 5-20 tonnes CO2e/ha/yr on average.

       Under appropriate conditions, 30-40% of the carbon fixed in green leaves can be transferred to soil and
       rapidly humified, resulting in rates of soil carbon sequestration in the order of 5-20 tonnes of CO2 per
       hectare per year.

       Liquid Carbon Pathway Unrecognized By Christine Jones, Australian Farm Journal
       Edition 338, 3/07/2008

       You can go right down the list actually. You can find much smaller and larger too. What this rebuttal claims is impossible has been done and measured repeatedly. These are conservative numbers for many holistic managed agricultural systems. Some people are at the low end and some have exceeded even these rates. But it certainly has been proven it is possible, since it has been done and repeated.

       There are more but I really don't like copy pasting cherry picks of papers that include much more information regarding when, where and why these sorts of carbon sequestration rates can be found and what methods succeed where others fail. Like everything else, the devil is in the details. Carbon farming could be described as knowledge intensive farming. A farmer really does need to understand how this functions and frequently monitor and apply this to adapt to changing conditions in order to get these results. That really is the secret to Holistic management. It really isn't just some prescribed grazing plan. That's just a superficial resemblance. In fact in my personal research animal impact is only optional and currently not even used.

       But most importantly from my view is the biophysical possibilty is proven. Next it is up to people like me to find ways to integrate this biophysical knowledge into a system that works in context with our own abilities and facilities, goals and community. This is the context in which HM has meaning. 

11527. John Hartz at 11:37 AM on 19 March 2019
       2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #11
       

       citizenschallenge: 

       Based on the analyses of the issue presented in the Climate Feedback's post and on other articles I have read on the topic over the years, I conclude that there is no scientiifc consensus at this point in time about the relationship between man-made climate change and the frequency and intensity of tornados in the US. If I am correct, it plays right into the climate deniers' hands to assert otherwise.   

11528. nigelj at 11:15 AM on 19 March 2019
       Hopes for our climate future
       

       Daniel Mocsny @8, 9

       "Because people are clever and resourceful, they have an almost unlimited number of ways to resist coercion.

       Some people will try to do this yes.

       "This makes it almost impossible to structure any system of incentives that causes immoral people to behave morally. See for example the War on Drugs."

       No with respect I think you are wrong, and on the basis of obvious, clear evidence. Criminal and property law are coercive legislation, by attempting to make people behave better or in a certain way. They certainly work because in countries with diminished criminal law and / or the related enforcement of the same law , you have high rates of crime and sometimes total anarchy and chaos, or criminal gangs take over running of those countries. Other regulations and environmental regulations are no different "in principle".

       Remember there are also tools like carbon taxes, and there is evidence they work. The UK is a good example.

       Your war on drugs analogy is flawed. Firstly it does work ok if implimented with a very heavy brutal punishments as in places like Singapore, not that I'm promoting that! However the core problem in countries like America is 1) its very hard to enforce drugs laws, harder than for example enforcing the road rules and 2) large numbers of the public probbaly see drug use as largely a victimless crime, so they simply don't support drug laws in the same way they support other criminal laws.

       "In contrast, when people are moral, they don't need outside coercion to do the right things."

       Agreed. But many people are moral, to a reasonable degree anyway. They will do thje right thing without the need of coercion. They won't commit crimes, take drugs or the like. The problem is how to deal with the rather substantial minority that are not moral? I think that only the law can realistically do this.

       To think otherwise would require we make fundamentally and deeply immoral people moral. How do you propose we do this? I don't think we know how. 

       We probably make people more moral with education, but clearly it hasn't been enough to obviate the need for laws and punishments, and I would think it never will be.

       "To solve climate change, we must increase the number of people who believe contributing to climate change is wrong."

       Yes, but again how?

       "To abolish slavery, for example, we first had to get a substantial number of people who voluntarily freed their slaves, or refrained from ever buying slaves. "

       Yes. But getting to the climate issue, a substantial majority of the public already want more done about the climate issue, including building of wind farms etcetera and they are ignored by politicians. Now ask yourself why? I would say it's the pressure of lobby groops and campaign donors. Look at how politiicans are petrified of annoying the NRA gun lobby.

       People won't do much to change their personal carbon footprints until they see a big change at the top of society in government policy. There is no point changing lifestyles unless there is confidence that others will do the same starting with the leadership otherwise you are unlikely as an individual to make a significant difference. This does not make individuals immoral it's simply understandable economic rationalism.

       Don't interpret me the wrong way. I'm all for people acting in a more moral way, and ideally without coercion, but I just dont think we have simple effective ways to do that. It's very idealistic.

11529. Post Vegan at 10:56 AM on 19 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       Might actually help if you understood what holistic management is before you critique it. Hint: It isn't short duration or rotational grazing. Might also help if you referenced more current soil science.

       Carbon sequestration, utilztion and sequestration is driven by photosynthesis, plant diversity and soil biology. The more soil biology, and specifically arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (especially relative to bacteria), the more carbon capture and utilzation. Soil microbial science has had a major paradigm shift since more new metagenomic tools have been developed to gene microbial DNA. Sadly your paper references a lot of soil science pre-paradigm shift that doesn't account for the roll of soil microbiology, which pretty much drives everything including the carbon, nitrogen and water cycles (1,Paul et al 2018).

       There are two pathways for carbon utilzation: one the decompostion pathway, and the second the microbial carbon pump [MCP] (2.Liang et al 2017). The decomposition pathway is what's respires. This is labile carbon. The microbical carbon pump store carbon as deep as roots tips go. This is "deep carbon" that is what's sequestered and doesn't respire. As long as there is ground cover, respired carbon is what actually leads to more photosynthensis than atmospheric carbon so respired carbon is NOT lost to the atmosphere (3). Respire labile carbon is recycled with more of it being exuded by the roots as deep carbon. Diversity contributes a diversity of root depths and different exudates to a wider array of soil microbes. (4,5 Eisenhauer et al. 2017 and Zhalninal et al. 2018)

       The carbon saturation argument fails to acknowledge that via photosynthesis and the MCP more soil is formed. Soil too is formed from the top via decomposition and from the bottom (a-b horizon) via microbial necromass (6. Kallenbach et al 2016). As long as photosynthesis is occuring with diverse plant feeding microbes those microbes die and form more soil organic matter (SOM). More SOM contains more soil organic carbon (SOC) . So soil may reach equilibrium, but more soil is always accumulating from the top and bottom that can capture more carbon. The key for this to occur is to keep root mass in the soil.

       This is where grazing management comes into play. Contrary to what you wrote, holistic management and short duration grazing are NOT the same thing. Nordborg relies on Briske and Holechek both of whom looked at short duration grazing systems. Holistic Management is actually a comprehensive system to evaluate land to determine goals and paths for both ecosystem and economic restoration that may or may not involve holistic grazing based on the appropriateness of cattle (or other ruminants) in that ecosystem. So, it helps to actually understand what one is critiquing before actually makes a critique or relying on others' critiques. Dr. Richard Teague also wrote a response to the critique of Briske called "Deficiencies in the Briske et al rebuttal of the Savory method" (6). In this response Teague also notes that Briske is comparing grazing systems and doesn't seem to understand what holistic management is.

       In subsequent research, due to prejudice against Savory, in order to get published Teague coined the term AMP management. AMP stands for "adaptive multi-paddock" and is sometimes shorted further to adaptive grazing or adaptive management. Many of the more recent crtics in doing there analysis seem to be unaware that holistic and AMP management are the same thing, so they exclude papers are AMP management when they proclaim that there is no research to back up holistic management. This is a common, though mistaken, refrain. The body of research supporting AMP and HM actually continues to grow (plus is supported by a lot of the more recent soil science). Here's a stack of more recent range science papers supporting HM/AMP aggregated on Defending Beef's ISSUU page: issuu (dot) com/defendingbeef/stacks/c2202fc5e40d4766902627af9453909b

       Now holistic management that includes holistic grazing, unlike short duration or rotational grazing, isn't a prescribed system. When cattle or other ruminants are moved, they are monitored and not allowed to eat more than half the forage. Why half? Because anything more than half drastically reduces the amount of root mass. When root mass is maintain, the microbial carbon pump is also maintained, thus carbon exudates are continuously pumped into the soil. Extra plant growth not consumed is trampled down where that forage decompose and becomes part of the decompostion pathway and providing valaublae ground cover which reduces evaporation. The carbon pumped into the soil also improves the soil structure, allowing for more water to infiltrate and be retained, and ths allow for more plant growth. The area just grazed may not be regrazed for anywhere up to six months to a year depending on regrowth of plants. Again this is closely monitored , and animal movement is based on 'reading the land" through careful observation...again NOT a prescriptive system like SDG or rotational grazing.

       Curious, author have you ever been on a ranch of any kind? How about one that uses holistic managament? My guess is that you're only reading literature and have no real idea how any of this works. You should take a page from author Barry Estabrook's recent article on Savory. In this article, Estabrook listened to both advocates and critiques. Then Estabrook went and visited a Savory hub for himself and saw the results. which were undeniable....

       Now as for methane, using your logic, we should drain all the remaining wetlands and peat bogs plus kill all beavers since wetlands emit copious amounts of biogenic methane as do beaver ponds. Now the argument as to whether there were or were not more wild ruminants is a silly one since there's no real real accounting to prove either side. In North America, we have guestimates of bison, elk, pronghorn, moose, deer, big horn sheep, etc population that may or may not exceed current domesticated populations of domesitcated ruminants both in number and in mass. In Asia and Europe, the ecological memory is much more distant since the large herds of auroch, bison, stepped bison, irish elk, etc were exterpated a much much longer time ago. What's much easier to argument is that we had much greater regions of wetlands than we do have today as well as a lot more beavers making ponds full of methanogens making methane. Microbial, thermogenic and pyrogenic methane comes from a multitude of places like cockroaches, shellfish, coal bed gas, fracking, centipedes, burning biomass, decomposing organic mass, landfills, etc. Despite all of these emissions, the vast majority of this methane is oxidized by hydroxyl radicals in the troposphere (and to a lesser exent in the stratosphere). A small amount is oxidized by methanotrophs in the soil. The geosink though is very small.

       But here's the thing, Carbon flows, and shift forms.....

       Due to hydroxyl radical oxidation, enteric and most other forms of microbial methane really are part of the carbon cycle so it's a constant amount. CO2 from the atmosphere is converted to sugars plant use to make cellulose, lignan and exudates. Cattle eat the cellulose. A quorum of bacteria/archae including methanogens in the rumen convert that cellulose to H2, short chained fatty acids and CH4. The SFCA's are used for energy, and the CH4 is burped. That CH4 collides with OH (hydroxyl radicals) which steals a hydrogen atom and thus breaks down to H2O and eventually back to Co2 which again then goes to photosynthesis to make the grasses and twigs cattle and other ruminants eat. It's a cycle ...loop. ...not an aggregating process. If cattle or ruminants don't eat the grasses, those grasses still oxidize or decompose back to CO2 directly or to CH4 which then is oxidized in the geosphere by methanotrophs or the troposphere by hydroxyl radicals back to CO2 which then also cycles.

       Or, in other words, enteric methane from ruminants and other microbial sources is part of respiration. It's just a few extra steps from CO2 to cellulose to CH4 back to CO2 back to cellulose. So these sources of CH4 are not what are causing methane levels to rise again after 2007. What is? Natural gas from fracking which confused some researchers in their top down analysis becuause fracked gas has a C12 isotope signature. (Thermogenic -fossil fuel- methane sources typically have only C13 heavier isotope signatures). So if you really want to reduce methane levels, switch electrical generation to green energy ...and get rid of fracked natural gas and coal generation of electricity.

       Anyway, sorry got lazy with my references in the second half of this response. My references for methane include Prinn, Rigby, Howarth, etc.

       1). Paul, D et al. 2018. Molecular Genomic Techniques for Identification of Soil Microbial Community Structure and Dynamics
       2).. Liang, c et al 2017 the importance of anabolism in microbial control over soil carbon storage
       3). Farming the CO2 Factor, Eco-Farming Daily 10/10/2018
       4). Eisenhauer et al. 2017. root biomass and exudates link plant diversity with soil bacterial and fungal biomass
       5). Zhalnina1, K et al. 2018. Dynamic root exudate chemistry and microbial substrate preferences drive patterns in rhizosphere microbial community assembly
       6). Kallenbach et al. 2016. Direct evidence for microbial-derived soil organic matter formation and its ecophysiological controls

11530. citizenschallenge at 10:44 AM on 19 March 2019
       2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #11
       

       Who's kidding whom, this handwringing about tornado trends is nothing but cyncial political score keeping intend on distractiung.  Just like that ludicrous obsession with the nonexistant "global warming hiatus."  That's politics in action not science, even though it deeply impacts science.

       I did read it all - and again just now for you.  It spends more time focusing on uncertainties, lossing the opportunity to explain some fundamentals.  Of course, it's all accurate, I'm not disputing that.

       It's the messaging that fails, as it has for decades!  You may not admit it, but words in that FactCheck were all about playing second-fiddle to the contrarian storyline, rather than taking the moment to refocus on the important stuff. But, no, instead, repeat it, underscore it, get lost in more details that fly by people's heads - because the headline will have already told them all they need to know:

       'oh still no connection between tornadoes and global warming.  When will the climate scientists finally figure out this global warming thing?

       Please, the worst part of those write ups, none of them helped convey any fundamental gut level understanding of what our global heat and moisture distribution is all about.  

        

       Perhaps it wouldn't be the worst for you to read with a bit less prejudgementn yourself - and a bit more attention on what I've actually written?

       My question:

       Why continue spending our time focusing on the inconsequential uncertainties, while ignoring the huge certainties and what they have to tell us for certain.  

       Why not actively steer the dialogue alway from the cynical distractions and back to the real world basic fundamentals that few seem to grasp.

       I invite you to show me where my above statement is factually wrong?  I'll take any lesson you want to teach me.

       ______________________________________

       Here's an offering for you, a different perspective perhaps, but definately based on down to Earth facts as revealed by science and learned about over a life time.

       a) Who says understanding Earth’s Evolution is irrelevant? 2018

       d) Considering our dysfunctional public dialogue in 14 verses.

       e) Map v Territory Problem, Statistical Certainty vs Geophysical Realities

       also - 

       https://confrontingsciencecontrarians.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing-key-gould.html

11531. Bob Loblaw at 10:42 AM on 19 March 2019
       The temperature evolution after 2016 suggests hotter future
       

       The 80-year period for climate cycles was riniging bells, and I managed to find a bit of support to the idea:

       "On the basis of 200 years of data, Willett (1964) notes that sunspot activity, as indicated by the Zurich relative sunspot number (Fig. 48), has cyclic variations of 80 and 11 years, with the latter being composed of alternating maxima of high and moderate intensities (the double sunspot cycle).

       (Sellers, W.D., 1965, Physical Climatology, U Chicago Press, p221)

       The reference to Willett is H.C. Willett, 1964 "Evidence of Solar-Climatic Relationships", pp123-51, in Weather and our Food Supply, Iowa State University, Ames.

       Mind you, I first read that when Sellers' book was not much more than a dozen years old. It is, shall we say, a bit dated now.

11532. Post Vegan at 10:36 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Might actually help if you understood what holistic management is before you critique it. Hint: It isn't short duration or rotational grazing. Might also help if you referenced more current soil science.

       Carbon sequestration, utilztion and sequestration is driven by photosynthesis, plant diversity and soil biology. The more soil biology, and specifically arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (especially relative to bacteria), the more carbon capture and utilzation. Soil microbial science has had a major paradigm shift since more new metagenomic tools have been developed to gene microbial DNA. Sadly your paper references a lot of soil science pre-paradigm shift that doesn't account for the roll of soil microbiology, which pretty much drives everything including the carbon, nitrogen and water cycles (1,Paul et al 2018).

       There are two pathways for carbon utilzation: one the decompostion pathway, and the second the microbial carbon pump [MCP] (2.Liang et al 2017). The decomposition pathway is what's respires. This is labile carbon. The microbical carbon pump store carbon as deep as roots tips go. This is "deep carbon" that is what's sequestered and doesn't respire. As long as there is ground cover, respired carbon is what actually leads to more photosynthensis than atmospheric carbon so respired carbon is NOT lost to the atmosphere (3). Respire labile carbon is recycled with more of it being exuded by the roots as deep carbon. Diversity contributes a diversity of root depths and different exudates to a wider array of soil microbes. (4,5 Eisenhauer et al. 2017 and Zhalninal et al. 2018)

       The carbon saturation argument fails to acknowledge that via photosynthesis and the MCP more soil is formed. Soil too is formed from the top via decomposition and from the bottom (a-b horizon) via microbial necromass (6. Kallenbach et al 2016). As long as photosynthesis is occuring with diverse plant feeding microbes those microbes die and form more soil organic matter (SOM). More SOM contains more soil organic carbon (SOC) . So soil may reach equilibrium, but more soil is always accumulating from the top and bottom that can capture more carbon. The key for this to occur is to keep root mass in the soil.

       This is where grazing management comes into play. Contrary to what you wrote, holistic management and short duration grazing are NOT the same thing. Nordborg relies on Briske and Holechek both of whom looked at short duration grazing systems. Holistic Management is actually a comprehensive system to evaluate land to determine goals and paths for both ecosystem and economic restoration that may or may not involve holistic grazing based on the appropriateness of cattle (or other ruminants) in that ecosystem. So, it helps to actually understand what one is critiquing before actually makes a critique or relying on others' critiques. Dr. Richard Teague also wrote a response to the critique of Briske called "Deficiencies in the Briske et al rebuttal of the Savory method" (6). In this response Teague also notes that Briske is comparing grazing systems and doesn't seem to understand what holistic management is.

       In subsequent research, due to prejudice against Savory, in order to get published Teague coined the term AMP management. AMP stands for "adaptive multi-paddock" and is sometimes shorted further to adaptive grazing or adaptive management. Many of the more recent crtics in doing there analysis seem to be unaware that holistic and AMP management are the same thing, so they exclude papers are AMP management when they proclaim that there is no research to back up holistic management. This is a common, though mistaken, refrain. The body of research supporting AMP and HM actually continues to grow (plus is supported by a lot of the more recent soil science). Here's a stack of more recent range science papers supporting HM/AMP aggregated on Defending Beef's ISSUU page: issuu (dot) com/defendingbeef/stacks/c2202fc5e40d4766902627af9453909b

       Now holistic management that includes holistic grazing, unlike short duration or rotational grazing, isn't a prescribed system. When cattle or other ruminants are moved, they are monitored and not allowed to eat more than half the forage. Why half? Because anything more than half drastically reduces the amount of root mass. When root mass is maintain, the microbial carbon pump is also maintained, thus carbon exudates are continuously pumped into the soil. Extra plant growth not consumed is trampled down where that forage decompose and becomes part of the decompostion pathway and providing valaublae ground cover which reduces evaporation. The carbon pumped into the soil also improves the soil structure, allowing for more water to infiltrate and be retained, and ths allow for more plant growth. The area just grazed may not be regrazed for anywhere up to six months to a year depending on regrowth of plants. Again this is closely monitored , and animal movement is based on 'reading the land" through careful observation...again NOT a prescriptive system like SDG or rotational grazing.

       Curious, author have you ever been on a ranch of any kind? How about one that uses holistic managament? My guess is that you're only reading literature and have no real idea how any of this works. You should take a page from author Barry Estabrook's recent article on Savory. In this article, Estabrook listened to both advocates and critiques. Then Estabrook went and visited a Savory hub for himself and saw the results. which were undeniable....

       Now as for methane, using your logic, we should drain all the remaining wetlands and peat bogs plus kill all beavers since wetlands emit copious amounts of biogenic methane as do beaver ponds. Now the argument as to whether there were or were not more wild ruminants is a silly one since there's no real real accounting to prove either side. In North America, we have guestimates of bison, elk, pronghorn, moose, deer, big horn sheep, etc population that may or may not exceed current domesticated populations of domesitcated ruminants both in number and in mass. In Asia and Europe, the ecological memory is much more distant since the large herds of auroch, bison, stepped bison, irish elk, etc were exterpated a much much longer time ago. What's much easier to argument is that we had much greater regions of wetlands than we do have today as well as a lot more beavers making ponds full of methanogens making methane. Microbial, thermogenic and pyrogenic methane comes from a multitude of places like cockroaches, shellfish, coal bed gas, fracking, centipedes, burning biomass, decomposing organic mass, landfills, etc. Despite all of these emissions, the vast majority of this methane is oxidized by hydroxyl radicals in the troposphere (and to a lesser exent in the stratosphere). A small amount is oxidized by methanotrophs in the soil. The geosink though is very small.

       But here's the thing, Carbon flows, and shift forms.....

       Due to hydroxyl radical oxidation, enteric and most other forms of microbial methane really are part of the carbon cycle so it's a constant amount. CO2 from the atmosphere is converted to sugars plant use to make cellulose, lignan and exudates. Cattle eat the cellulose. A quorum of bacteria/archae including methanogens in the rumen convert that cellulose to H2, short chained fatty acids and CH4. The SFCA's are used for energy, and the CH4 is burped. That CH4 collides with OH (hydroxyl radicals) which steals a hydrogen atom and thus breaks down to H2O and eventually back to Co2 which again then goes to photosynthesis to make the grasses and twigs cattle and other ruminants eat. It's a cycle ...loop. ...not an aggregating process. If cattle or ruminants don't eat the grasses, those grasses still oxidize or decompose back to CO2 directly or to CH4 which then is oxidized in the geosphere by methanotrophs or the troposphere by hydroxyl radicals back to CO2 which then also cycles.

       Or, in other words, enteric methane from ruminants and other microbial sources is part of respiration. It's just a few extra steps from CO2 to cellulose to CH4 back to CO2 back to cellulose. So these sources of CH4 are not what are causing methane levels to rise again after 2007. What is? Natural gas from fracking which confused some researchers in their top down analysis becuause fracked gas has a C12 isotope signature. (Thermogenic -fossil fuel- methane sources typically have only C13 heavier isotope signatures). So if you really want to reduce methane levels, switch electrical generation to green energy ...and get rid of fracked natural gas and coal generation of electricity.

       Anyway, sorry got lazy with my references in the second half of this response. My references ofr methane include Prinn, Rigby, Howarth, etc.

       1). Paul, D et al. 2018. Molecular Genomic Techniques for Identification of Soil Microbial Community Structure and Dynamics
       2).. Liang, c et al 2017 the importance of anabolism in microbial control over soil carbon storage
       3). Farming the CO2 Factor, Eco-Farming Daily 10/10/2018
       4). Eisenhauer et al. 2017. root biomass and exudates link plant diversity with soil bacterial and fungal biomass
       5). Zhalnina1, K et al. 2018. Dynamic root exudate chemistry and microbial substrate preferences drive patterns in rhizosphere microbial community assembly
       6). Kallenbach et al. 2016. Direct evidence for microbial-derived soil organic matter formation and its ecophysiological controls

11533. ThinkingMan at 10:15 AM on 19 March 2019
       The temperature evolution after 2016 suggests hotter future
       

       To the moderator:  Your request for documentation encourages confidence in  "skepticalscience".

       To Ari:  Thank you for providing relevant docs and related comments.

       To all:  A hypothesis consistant with my 18 Mar. post is:  Anthropogenic warming countered the cooling phase of the current 60-80 year temperature cycle.  The answer may be there is no such cycle, as the moderator suggests.

       If, however, such a cycle does exist, the fact a downward temperature trend has not started since 2000 may give credence to the concept human caused releases of greenhouses are affecting temperatures.  Man's influence may have offset natural forces driving the cooling phase.  This possibility should be welcome by AGW advocates.  The proposal should not be viewed suspiciously as a Trojan Horse deployed by deniers.

        

11534. nigelj at 10:01 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Red Baron, you have claimed on several occasions that improved grazing and soil management can sequester an additional  5- 20 tonnes carbon / hectare / year. This would seem to be a key issue. The article mentions 3 tonnes / hecate / year. Can you please provide details of your claim.

       I don't really want a list of research papers to wade through because we are talking hundreds of pages. Can you please provide the name of the research paper, and copy and paste of the relevant text to substantiate your claim, and your commentary on it if you want.

11535. Daniel Mocsny at 08:51 AM on 19 March 2019
       Hopes for our climate future
       

       "Talking about all the negatives we want to avoid isn't exactly the most hopeful thing."

       That's why we need morality. A moral person isn't motivated by hope. For example, if the moral person chooses to avoid murdering his neighbor, for purely moral reasons, the moral person doesn't require any "hope" for a better world or any other extraneous motivation. The moral person refrains from committing murder because murder is wrong. No further justification or icing on the cake is necessary. Even if everybody else commits murder, the moral person won't. The moral person doesn't care about popularity, efficacy, larger goals, or anything else when contemplating an action - only about what is right and what is wrong.

       Imagine having to come up with some idealistic picture of a future society to persuade people not to kill their neighbors. We don't want to just focus on how horrible murder is. Let's find something else to make the message positive and hopeful. Could humanity have ever gotten past the Stone Age if that were necessary? Before the scientific revolution, material progress was negligible. Most people could look forward to a life not much different or better than their grandparents'. There was no message of hope for most people based on any expectation of material progress or political progress. For most of human history, people had to manage without hope. And they did.

       To solve climate change, we must increase the number of people who believe contributing to climate change is wrong. So they start by cutting the contributions they can control. Initially those will be their own personal contributions. Once they exhaust that low-hanging fruit (it's far easier to cut your own carbon footprint than to cut anyone else's) they can look for ways to persuade and if necessary coerce others to cut their carbon footprints. As well as organize to get government help to cut their remaining emissions that are difficult to cut.

       Pretending we can skip the vital first step of cutting our own carbon footprints is to imagine climate change will be unlike all previous moral revolutions. To abolish slavery, for example, we first had to get a substantial number of people who voluntarily freed their slaves, or refrained from ever buying slaves. Those who continued to own slaves were never going to be part of the constituency to abolish slavery. To think that people who like to fly around the world on jets to climate conferences are going to abolish fossil fuels is like pretending slave owners would ever abolish slavery.

11536. Daniel Mocsny at 08:33 AM on 19 March 2019
       Hopes for our climate future
       

       The free market also has the awesome ability to compare the cost (to self) of complying with regulations to the cost (to self) of buying political influence and overturning the regulations. Because people are clever and resourceful, they have an almost unlimited number of ways to resist coercion. This makes it almost impossible to structure any system of incentives that causes immoral people to behave morally. See for example the War on Drugs.

       Donald Trump has been gutting environmental regulations and torpedoing policy responses to climate change, proving that the resistance strategy works and it is an effective investment. It was presumably cheaper for polluting interests to install Trump than to comply with the regulations that Trump has destroyed. To solve climate change with policy, you must first somehow change democracy to insure that nobody like Donald Trump can get elected ever again. And remove all the judges he has appointed to lifetime terms.

       In contrast, when people are moral, they don't need outside coercion to do the right things. They will prioritize the moral aim above their own short-term benefits and desires. For example, a moral person would never consider flying for entertainment (such as on holiday). The moral person would proactively learn about carbon footprinting, and change his/her behavior to cut his/her carbon footprint as far as possible. This would occur in a tiny fraction of the time that any conceivable policy change would require to force the same reduction.

       Expecting policy to solve climate change requires imagining people are nothing more than passive chess pieces who can be moved around any which way. But these chess pieces fight back. As long as most people place a higher value on, to pick just one example, the benefits to self from jetting around on holiday, than they care about minimizing their personal contributions to climate genocide, humanity will remain firmly on its current trajectory to cook civilization out of existence and keep the Fermi paradox intact.

11537. RedBaron at 06:15 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Daniel,

       That source you gave on Methane seems pretty good, even to the point of reasonably discussing this point:

       "There are large potential benefits in dietary change (e.g., Ritchie et al., 2018), especially reduction in intense factory farming of cattle, but the net cut in methane emission from taking pastureland out of food production is not easily quantified. Replacing organic beef from rocky Scottish hills with soya grown intensively on former tropical rainforest or cerrado is not necessarily advantageous."

       However, they fall short of firmly taking a stand here. The lectures on methane and CO2 sequestration given by the USDA-SARE for farmers that I have attended says it quite a bit more firmly. Although the USDA conclusions are often only based on ongoing case studies and soil sample data rather than peer reviewed journal publishing.

11538. Kevin C at 06:10 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Hi RB. We're keen to make this rebuttal as representative of the peer reviewed literature as possible. I've contacted Seb, however term has just ended here, so I am not sure if he is available. I'd like to give him a couple of days to respond, otherwise I'll try and comment. He reviewed I think more than 50 papers on this topic, I'm afraid I've only read only a handful, so we will probably have to wait for his input.
       Regards, Kevin

11539. John Hartz at 05:58 AM on 19 March 2019
       2019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #11
       

       citizenschallenge: 

       Climate Feedback's review of Bernie Sander's claim about the link between tornados and climate change is not about scorekeeping as you have asserted.

       Here is Climate Feedback's statement on the matter:

       It is likely that a warmer, moister world would allow for more frequent instability as measured by the convective available potential energy which is fueling tornadoes[3]. However, it is also likely that a warmer world would lessen chances for wind shear, leading to fewer tornadoes. Climate change also could shift the timing of tornadoes or the regions that are most likely to be hit, with less of an impact on the total number of tornadoes. 

       You would do well to carefully read Climate Feedback's entire review of this matter — especially the Scientist's Review section of it.

       Senator Sanders’ claim that climate change is making tornadoes worse isn’t supported by published research, Edited by Scott Johnson, Climate Feedback, Mar 8, 2019

11540. RedBaron at 05:24 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Robert,

       I have no idea where you learned logic, but your false premise is not the logic flaw I pointed out from rebuttal.

       The premise, "They are at risk of completely drying out because of increasing temperatures and more at risk to the detrimental effect of mismanaged grazing (Lal, 2004)." is actually true. It is not a false premise like your green cheese analogy.

       The logic flaw is in claiming that because this true statement of fact, thus the second part, "This makes it unreasonable to apply Holistic Management to such dry areas, where the intense grazing would no doubt leave soils further damaged."

       It is a formal logic fallacy called a non sequitur, one does not follow the other. You can not determine the validity of Holistic management by observing mismanagement of any sort, Holistic or not. This is especially important for native grasslands deteriorating due to undergrazing, where the mismanagement is actually due to abandonment. (after previously removing all the animal impact from wild animals)

11541. robert test at 04:28 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       RedBaron would make his argument coherent if he would not confuse false statements with invalid inferences. Statements are false, true or meaningless. Arguments and inferences are valid or invalid, i.e., logical or illogical.

       A statement such as 'the moon is made of green cheese' might be false but it is not illogical. There is no logical flaw in the statement. Nor is there a logical flaw in an argument such as:

       All bodies that reflect light are made of green cheese.

       The moon reflects light.

       Therefore, the moon is made of green cheese. 

       RedBaron has not shown any logical flaws in the article he is crticizing. Perhaps he is correct in saying there are false claims in the article but he throws around the term 'logic flaw' without any understanding of the term.

11542. michael sweet at 03:51 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Red Baron anbd others,

       I have found that if I take a long time to write a response I time out of Skeptical Science and when I post the response it disappears.  The screen on my computer does not indicate when I time out.  

       If you know a response will be long you can write it in Word and then copy paste it so that it does not get lost.  You can also copy a post in the SkS box so that if it disappears you have a copy.

11543. Daniel Bailey at 02:37 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       "Melting clathrates and permafrost releases fit that description. There is bubbling methane increasing in the arctic. That is well established. How much it is increased above what would be expected as natural increases and from what source is somewhat controversial. I am actually of the opinion most of it is from melting permafrost"

       So you continue to speculate.  Understood.

       As to sources of the recent rise in atmospheric fraction of methane, it seems to be sourced primarily from the tropics and mid-latitudes, mostly from natural sources and a small but non-zero contribution from fugitive emissions from fracking and agriculture.

       SOURCE

       "The rise in atmospheric methane (CH4), which began in 2007, accelerated in the past four years. The growth has been worldwide, especially in the tropics and northern mid‐latitudes. With the rise has come a shift in the carbon isotope ratio of the methane. The causes of the rise are not fully understood, and may include increased emissions and perhaps a decline in the destruction of methane in the air."

       Nisbet et al 2019 - Very strong atmospheric methane growth in the four years 2014‐2017: Implications for the Paris Agreement

11544. RedBaron at 01:35 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       It's controversial. Sorry for the lack of clarity on a side issue. 

       Methane being part of the natural short biological cycles is not part of anthropogenic climate change. This includes all methane releases from termites and other insects, decaying compost and leaf litter on forest floors, the normal rate it bubbles from peat boggs and swamps, and yes, this includes ruminates. 

       When discussing why the methane is increasing, the need is to show a changed increase over the natural cycle. Most of this is natural gas leaks. There is also a component that is a reinforcing feedback.

       Melting clathrates and permafrost releases fit that description. There is bubbling methane increasing in the arctic. That is well established. How much it is increased above what would be expected as natural increases and from what source is somewhat controversial. I am actually of the opinion most of it is from melting permafrost. However, what ever % is clathrates and what % is from melting permafrost, or whatever % is from Natural gas, all these are fossil methane, and thus NOT part of the normal methane cycle.

       Whereas a cow grazing on a properly managed grassland actually reduces net methane because of the action of methanotrophs in the grassland soils when properly managed.

11545. Daniel Bailey at 01:08 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       So your claim about clathrates being part of "most of the issue" lacks foundation. 

       Got it.

11546. Ari Jokimäki at 00:58 AM on 19 March 2019
       The temperature evolution after 2016 suggests hotter future
       

       The 60-80 year cycle refers to AMO/AMV, I think. One of the first papers discussing it was Schlesinger & Ramankutty (1994): An oscillation in the global climate system of period 65-70 years. See also my paperlist on the subject.

       At least one of the hiatus papers (in the paper sample of our paper 1 linked in the post above) mentions that there was a switch to cooling in Atlantic at around 1995. There aree some other papers also that discuss the role of Atlantic relating to the global warming hiatus. I think the answer to ThinkingMan is that the cooling phase might already have made an appearance but in the presence of long term warming, it doesn't show so clearly in the global mean surface temperature. While AMO's effect is strong around Atlantic, it's effect to GMST might not be so strong.

11547. RedBaron at 00:58 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       Clathrates melting are a hypothesis and mostly controversial outcome from oceans warming beyond the range they are stable. While there are fossil methane releases from arctic waters, most of these are actually thought to be methane released from melting permafrost rather than clathrates.

       The key of course not being any chemical difference, but rather how long the Methane was outside the short term carbon cycle. Is it new? or fossil? That's what matters. 

11548. Daniel Bailey at 00:39 AM on 19 March 2019
       New rebuttal to the myth 'Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change'
       

       "Most of the issue is Natural gas leaks and clathrates"

       What's your evidence for your claim about clathrates?

11549. RedBaron at 00:15 AM on 19 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       Thanks David, but no. That is also a pretty basic answer. I wrote out a long version that took about 3 or 4 hours to write. It vanished. Unfortunately I did not save a draft.  So I'll not be doing that again. Anyone with questions just ask and I'll handle them one at a time instead.

11550. David Kirtley at 23:21 PM on 18 March 2019
       Holistic Management can reverse Climate Change
       

       RedBaron, your other comment is to the "blog post" announcing this new "rebuttal" here: https://skepticalscience.com/holistic-management-rebuttal.html

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