Can biochar help suppress greenhouse gases? New study shows biochar to decrease nitrous oxide emissions

Can biochar help suppress greenhouse gases?

New study shows biochar to decrease nitrous oxide emissions

by Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, April 3, 2011

Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas and a precursor to compounds that contribute to the destruction of the ozone. Intensively managed, grazed pastures are responsible for an increase in nitrous oxide emissions from grazing animals’ excrement. Biochar is potentially a mitigation option for reducing the world’s elevated carbon dioxide emissions, since the embodied carbon can be sequestered in the soil. Biochar also has the potential to beneficially alter soil nitrogen transformations.

It’s Sunday, so I’m reprinting this news release from the American Society of Agronomy.  It’s the short, readable version of the full study, “Biochar Incorporation into Pasture Soil Suppresses in situ Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Ruminant Urine Patches.”


Many readers have expressed interested in biochar (aka “charcoal created by pyrolysis of biomass” aka “a C-rich product that is manufactured by thermal decomposition of organic material under a limited oxygen supply at relatively low temperatures (<700 °C),” as the study puts it).


I’ll run a longer post on biochar later this year.  For now, here’s the rest of the release:

Laboratory tests have indicated that adding biochar to the soil could be used to suppress nitrous oxide derived from livestock. Biochar has been used for soil carbon sequestration in the same manner. 

In a study funded by the Foundation for Research Science and Technology,scientists at Lincoln University in New Zealand, conducted an experiment over an 86-day spring-summer period to determined the effect of incorporating biochar into the soil on nitrous oxide emissions from the urine patches produced by cattle. Biochar was added to the soil during pasture renovation and gas samples were taken on 33 different occasions. The study was published in the March-April 2011 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality. 

Addition of biochar to the soil allowed for a 70% reduction in nitrous oxide fluxes over the course of the study. Nitrogen contribution from livestock urine to the emitted nitrous oxide decreased as well. The incorporation of biochar into the soil had no detrimental effects on dry matter yield or total nitrogen content in the pasture. 

Arezoo Taghizadeh-Toosi who conducted the study, says that under the highest rate of biochar, ammonia formation and its subsequent adsorption onto or into the biochar, reduced the inorganic-nitrogen pool available for nitrifiers and thus nitrate concentrations were reduced. Such effects would have diminished the substrate available for microbial nitrous oxide production.” 

Research work is ongoing and still required to determine seasonal effects, and the effects of repeated urine deposition. 

The full article is available for no charge for 30 days following the date of this summary. View the abstract at https://www.agronomy.org/ publications/ jeq/abstracts/ 40/ 2/ 468.

The study itself concludes:

If other studies confirm the relatively long residence time expected of biochar in the soil, then the “win-win” situation of both sequestering C while reducing N2O emissions may prove achievable.

So perhaps biochar can contribute to a full wedge of soil-based GHG reductions post-2030, as I’ve suggested (see “The full global warming solution: How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm“).

For more on biochar, see Biochar Discussion List Web Site and the International Biochar Initiative.

Related posts:

• How biochar production could help climate change fight
• Biochar emerges as major tool for curbing carbon

http://climateprogress.org/2011/04/03/biochar-greenhouse-gases/

J. C. Moore, S. Jevrejeva & A. Grinsted, PNAS (2010), Efficacy of geoengineering to limit 21st century sea-level rise

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print August 23, 2010; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1008153107

Efficacy of geoengineering to limit 21st century sea-level rise

J. C. Moore*, S. Jevrejeva and A. Grinsted

Abstract

Geoengineering has been proposed as a feasible way of mitigating anthropogenic climate change, especially increasing global temperatures in the 21st century. The two main geoengineering options are limiting incoming solar radiation, or modifying the carbon cycle. Here we examine the impact of five geoengineering approaches on sea level; SO₂ aerosol injection into the stratosphere, mirrors in space, afforestation, biochar, and bioenergy with carbon sequestration. Sea level responds mainly at centennial time scales to temperature change, and has been largely driven by anthropogenic forcing since 1850. Making use a model of sea-level rise as a function of time-varying climate forcing factors (solar radiation, volcanism, and greenhouse gas emissions) we find that sea-level rise by 2100 will likely be 30 cm higher than 2000 levels despite all but the most aggressive geoengineering under all except the most stringent greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. The least risky and most desirable way of limiting sea-level rise is bioenergy with carbon sequestration. However aerosol injection or a space mirror system reducing insolation at an accelerating rate of 1 W m^-2 per decade from now to 2100 could limit or reduce sea levels. Aerosol injection delivering a constant 4 W m^-2

reduction in radiative forcing (similar to a 1991 Pinatubo eruption every 18 months) could delay sea-level rise by 40–80 years. Aerosol injection appears to fail cost-benefit analysis unless it can be maintained continuously, and damage caused by the climate response to the aerosols is less than about 0.6% Global World Product. 

*Correspondence e-mail: john.moore.bnu@gmail.com.
 
Link:  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/20/1008153107

J. C. Moore, S. Jevrejeva & A. Grinsted: Geoengineering 'not a solution' to sea-level rise

Geoengineering 'not a solution' to sea-level rise

by Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News, August 24, 2010
 

 

There are many different approaches to geoengineering

Even the most extreme geoengineering approaches will not stop sea levels from rising due to climate change, a study suggests.

New research proposes that as many as 150 million people could be affected as ocean levels increases by 30-70 cm by the end of this century.

This could result in flooding of low-lying coastal areas, including some of the world's largest cities.

The team published the study in the journal PNAS.

Scientists led by John Moore from Beijing Normal University, China, write that to combat global warming, people need to concentrate on sharply curbing greenhouse gas emissions and not rely too much on proposed geoengineering methods.

"Substituting geoengineering for greenhouse emission control would be to burden future generations with enormous risk," said Svetlana Jevrejeva of the UK's National Oceanography Centre, a co-author of the study.

Geoengineering has been talked about for countering some of the effects of climate change for the past several years, with some figures like the billionaire Bill Gates ploughing millions of dollars into the research.

But Dr Jevrejeva told BBC News that some proposals such as placing mirrors in space and spraying aerosols -- microscopic particles -- into the sky would only treat the symptoms, as greenhouse gases would remain in the Earth's atmosphere.

Dr Jevrejeva and her colleagues examined two geoengineering schemes with five different scenarios.
 
'Not a solution'

The first approach involves limiting incoming solar radiation through the injection of SO2 (sulphur dioxide) aerosols into the stratosphere. Alternatively, giant mirrors could be launched into orbit, they said.

The second approach would involve modifying the carbon cycle by either planting more trees (afforestation), converting organic material into charcoal (biochar) or using renewable energy from materials derived from biological sources (bioenergy).

"We used [a computer model to track] 300 years of tide gauge measurements to reconstruct how sea level responded historically to changes in the amount of heat reaching the Earth from the Sun, the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, and past human activities," said Dr Jevrejeva.

"We then used this information to simulate sea level under geoengineering schemes over the next 100 years," she added.

The team found that, if taken individually, even the most extreme of these methods would result in severe sea-level rise.

 

Placing a mirror into space could reflect some of the sunlight

"We suggested that the most effective approach would be a combination of three different techniques for managing the carbon cycle," said Dr Jevrejeva.

She explained that these scenarios relied on biological mechanisms to remove CO2 from the air and store it in biomass, soils or geological storage sites.

For instance, afforestation, or adding forests to places where they have been cut down or never existed, would lower the amount of atmospheric CO2, but only by 45 ppm (parts per million) -- a lot less than the amount humans have already emitted.

Biochar would reduce the CO2 levels by even less -- 35 ppm.


Biofuel production would be more effective, and the combination of the three methods could eliminate up to 250 ppm of CO2 and limit sea level rise to between 20 and 40 cm.
 
Carbon storage
 
The carbon storage technique also has other advantages, pointed out Dr Jevrejeva. It actually reduces the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, whereas the method of reflecting sunlight back into space does not.

"If you use a mirror, it's extremely expensive and it's an engineering challenge -- you have to place mirrors [weighing] some 20 million tonnes into the Earth's orbit," Dr Jevrejeva explained.

There was also the chance these mirrors might break in orbit, the researcher added.

The same goes for SO2 aerosol injection -- a controversial approach that has already been tested on a small scale in Russia by one of the country's leading climatologists Yuri Israel.

"What worries me is that it's cheap and do-able and all you need is a country with a rocket”  Sir David King Former UK Chief Scientific Adviser

But Dr Jevrejeva said that even though injecting a certain amount of SO2 into the atmosphere might lower mean global temperatures by 1 °C or more over a few decades, the CO2 would still persist there. 

The researchers' simulations showed that spraying the stratosphere with aerosols would produce a similar effect to a major volcanic eruption occuring every 1.5 years. Besides reducing global temperatures, this approach would also delay sea-level rise by 40 to 80 years.

"During a natural volcanic eruption, there's usually a cooling effect in the atmosphere and a drop in sea level. We [followed] different scenarios using the amount of aerosols equivalent to the biggest eruption of the 20th Century -- the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991," said Dr Jevrejeva.

"Particles from volcanic ashes end up in the stratosphere and reflect the radiation from the sun, but the same amount of CO2 stays in the atmosphere, so you do not solve the problem."

Also, no one knows the effect such spraying could have on the ecosystem, added the scientist.

"It's a huge challenge, no one knows what could happen."

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the scientists wrote that SO2 injection into the atmosphere would likely lead to such undesirable consequences as "disruption in precipitation patterns and stratospheric ozone, and do nothing to avert the continued absorption of CO2 by the global ocean leading to rising acidity and ecosystem damage."

This controversial technique has already been tested in Russia, where scientists led by climatologist Professor Israel sprayed aerosols into the atmosphere from a small aircraft.
 
Major concerns

Professor Israel told BBC News that a stratospheric layer of SO2 could effectively cool the planet and would be an effective and none-too-expensive way of tackling climate change.

But there are also many opponents of geoengineering techniques, among them former UK chief scientific adviser Sir David King.

He told BBC News about his concerns over geoengineering proposals, especially those involving spraying the stratosphere with aerosols.

"What worries me is that it's cheap and do-able and all you need is a country with a rocket and they can put aerosols up into the stratosphere. We have no confidence in models on what these aerosols would do there.

Sir David explained: "Imagine if the aerosols would in some way cause more aerosol production -- because there are a lot of chemicals there including ozone -- and in time we find that we're getting more than we anticipated so the planet gets cooler and cooler when we wanted it to be stable."

Link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11076786

Richard Black, BBC: Delivering biochar's triple win

Delivering biochar's triple win

by Richard Black, Environmental correspondent, BBC Online, 10 August 2010

Last year, there seemed to be an unwritten rule in enviro-circles: whenever two or more enviro-folks were gathered together in a place of meeting, talk must turn to biochar.



Accounts would be exchanged of articles half-read and half-digested...the pros would be arrayed against the cons...the words "local" and "sustainable" would be flagged up early and often.

A common reaction was "Good idea, but..."

The notion of biochar takes us back to ancient human civilisations in South America.

The ground remaining when rainforest is cleared isn't very fertile, despite the luxuriant herbage of the forests themselves.

So about 2,500 years ago, people developed what Portuguese settlers later termed terra preta -- black earth -- created by ploughing carbon into the soil in the form of charcoal.

With ever more hungry mouths on the planet, with soils degrading in many places and with climate change threatening to reduce yields in coming decades, there's renewed interest in the ancient technology, which has been championed by James Lovelock of Gaia fame among others.

The vision put forward is of a world where waste is burned, where some of the heat from that burning is used to transform waste to charcoal, and where the charcoal is ploughed into soil, increasing its capacity to support crops and locking up carbon for centuries, possibly millennia.

The waste that can be used includes spare stuff from plants, such as husks and shells and stems, and even sewage and plastics - pretty much anything based on carbon, in principle.

What's proposed would be nothing less than a revolution in the way we handle waste -- turning it from waste into fuel, fertiliser and climate saviour with a single blast of the charcoal oven.

Such grand notions always require quantifying in the cold light of day; and that's what we have this week in the form of a paper in the journal Nature Communications.

A group of researchers that includes Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University, the closest thing biochar has to a spiritual father, has attempted to calculate just how much impact the technology could have on climate change if societies all over the world transformed their waste streams into biochar production facilities -- "the maximum sustainable technical potential of biochar to mitigate climate change."

Their answer is a large number -- 1.8 gigatonnes of carbon emissions, or about 12% of humanity's total, per year.

The researchers identify six ways in which biochar curbs emissions, including reducing methane production from decaying plant waste, reducing nitrous oxide release from soils, and avoiding carbon dioxide emissions by storing carbon in the soil.

But there are negatives. Using plant waste this way means you couldn't simply burn it for fuel, reducing the world's biomass potential; and there are the carbon costs of transporting it and processing it and such like.

Putting all the numbers together gives the 1.8-Gt figure, with an added but unquantified benefit through a presumed impact agricultural yields, especially in poorer parts of the world where the need for food is likely to become even more acute as the years go by.

Put in these terms, you might ask why we aren't doing it already. On the surface, biochar is a win-win-win technology: a win for the climate, a win for food production, and a win for reduction of the human waste stream.

Some of the caveats will be familiar to anyone who's followed the biofuels issue down the years.

Depending on where and how you do it, it can produce more carbon than it saves. And if you simply grew stuff to produce biochar, the carbon economics would be turned on their head, just as they are if old-growth forest is stripped for biofuel plantations.

There are also concerns about who would own and control biochar production and use, if it were to become the subject of a global, high-level political push - just as there is with geo-engineering and again with biofuels.

But the biggest hurdle to the widespread implementation of biochar is the economics would have to be right in each part of the world -- not the carbon economics so much as the economic economics.

A study released earlier this year found that all kinds of factors affect this issue, including whether sending the stuff to biochar facilities would be cheaper or more expensive than how waste is dealt with now.

Currently biochar isn't something that can win money from carbon offset schemes. And just as with biofuel and biomass, the amount of money that should be issued would vary widely between locations, technologies and types of waste used, just as the amount of carbon storage varies.

Biochar is already a good idea in many peoples' books. What this paper does is to help sort out just how good it is, and where it sits in relation for example to biomass burning.

But the fact that it can take away a slice of global emissions isn't enough to ensure its adoption.

After all, pretty much everyone involved in Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) thinks that is a good idea, but we still don't have a global system for making it happen.

Energy efficiency is a good idea even from the simple standpoint that it will save you money. But not everyone practises it -- even your humble correspondent is impeachable in that regard.



From a strictly carbon-saving point of view, biochar can now be added as a new wedge to the Stabilisation Wedge concept developed by Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow.

In this notion, you break down the gap between the emissions level you want at some point in the future and the emissions level you will have at current rates of growth, and break it down into manageable fractions -- wedges -- that can each be addressed with specific policies.

They're all quantified, and most are technically achievable with today's technology. But it doesn't mean they will be; and the same, for all its Amazonian roots and win-win-win potential, is true of biochar.

Link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/08/last_year_you_could_hardly.html

Comment:

Anonymous said... For those looking for an overview of biochar and its benefits, These authors have done a very nice job of distilling a great deal of information about biochar and applying it to the US context: US -Focused Biochar report: Assessment of Biochar's Benefits for theUSA

http://www.biochar-us.org/pdf%20files/biochar_report_lowres.pdf

Not talked about in this otherwise comprehensive US study are the climate and whole ecological implications of new , higher value, applications of chars.

First, the insitu remediation of a vast variety of toxic agents in soils and sediments.
Biochar Sorption of Contaminants; http://www.biorenew.iastate.edu/events/biochar2010/conference-agenda/agenda-overview/breakout-session-5/agriculture-forestry-soil-science-and-environment.html
Dr. Lima's work; Specialized Characterization Methods for Biochar http://www.biorenew.iastate.edu/events/biochar2010/conference-agenda/agenda-overview/breakout-session-4/production-and-characterization.html
And at USDA; The Ultimate Trash To Treasure: *ARS Research Turns Poultry Waste into Toxin-grabbing Char http://www.ars.usda.gov/IS/AR/archive/jul05/char0705.htm

Second, the uses as a feed ration for livestock to reduce GHG emissions and increase disease resistance.

Third, Recent work by C. Steiner showing a 52% reduction of NH3 loss when char is used as a composting accelerator. This will have profound value added consequences for the commercial composting industry by reduction of their GHG emissions and the sale of compost as a nitrogen fertilizer.

Erich J. Knight
Chairman; Markets and Business Review Committee
US BiocharConference, at Iowa State University, June 27-30
http://www.biorenew.iastate.edu/events/biochar2010/conference-agenda/agenda-overview.html

EcoTechnologies Group Technical Adviser
http://www.ecotechnologies.com/index.html 

Green machine: Don't burn plant waste, bury it -- biochar

Green machine: Don't burn plant waste, bury it

 by Helen Knight, NewScientist, August 10, 2010

Green machine is our weekly column on the latest advances in environmental technologies.

When it comes to using plant waste to mitigate climate change, most people think of turning it into ethanol or biodiesel for use as a fuel. But a new study suggests we may have more to gain by converting plant material into biochar, a type of charcoal, and burying it in farmers' fields.

Biochar is produced by heating plant waste in an oxygen-free environment, a process known as pyrolysis. This also yields syngas – a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen – plus a small amount of oil. Both can be burned as fuels.

Typically, up to 60 per cent of the plant's carbon ends up as biochar. When buried, this can lock the carbon away for thousands of years if necessary. The pyrolysis itself releases no carbon dioxide into the air.

Burning issue

The new study was the work of James Amonette at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, and colleagues. It centres on a computer model they developed to compare the carbon emissions that would be saved by converting the world's available supplies of plant waste into either biofuel or biochar.

The model showed that converting all the world's available plant waste into biofuels would cut carbon emissions by 10 per cent from today's levels. Turning it into biochar could cut emissions by up to 12 per cent – or 1.8 gigatonnes of the 15.4 gigatonnes emitted each year (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1053).

Carbon storage

However, the relative benefits of biochar and biofuel will vary from region to region. "It depends on the fertility of the soil in the region where you are producing the biochar, and whether you are offsetting coal or some other form of energy," Amonette says.

In regions with highly fertile soil and a high proportion of coal in their energy-generation mix, such as the American Midwest, Amonette says it may be better to convert all the available plant waste into biofuel. "But in South America, Africa, south-eastern parts of the US and most of the rest of the world on average, you're better off going with char."

Burying biochar also increases soil fertility. The Biochar Fund, based in Heverlee, Belgium, is carrying out trials of biochar with rural communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and southern Cameroon to improve the fertility of soil in these regions.

Midway through the second growing seasons in Cameroon with biochar in the soil, average maize yields have increased from 1.7 tonnes per hectare to 2.5 tonnes per hectare. "In many cases, we saw a spectacular boost in both biomass and grain yield because of the addition of biochar; these extremes are generally found on the poorest soils," says Laurens Rademakers, Biochar Fund's managing director.

Biochar increases the pH of acidic soil, and helps it to retain nutrients such as ammonium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus. Some biochars are also highly porous, allowing them to trap moisture and improve the water retention of soils in dry regions, says Amonette.

Link:  http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19289-green-machine-dont-burn-plant-waste-bury-it.html

Cutting non-CO2 pollutants can delay abrupt climate change, solve “fast half” of climate problem

Cutting non-CO₂ pollutants can delay abrupt climate change,

solve “fast half” of climate problem 

           

Washington, D.C., October 12, 2009 – Reducing non-CO₂ climate change agents such as black carbon soot, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), as well as expanding bio-sequestration through biochar production, can forestall fast approaching abrupt climate changes, according to Nobel Laureate Dr. Mario Molina and co-authors in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The paper’s authors said that pursuing these solutions could change the character of the United Nations climate change conference taking place this December in Copenhagen.

“Cutting HFCs, black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and methane can buy us about 40 years before we approach the dangerous threshold of 2 ˚C warming,” said co-author Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a Distinguished Professor of Climate and Atmospheric Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

“By targeting these short-term climate forcers, we can make a down payment on climate and provide momentum going into the December negotiations in Copenhagen,” said co-author Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development.  “The Obama Administration and other key governments need to take up the fast-action climate agenda before it is too late.”

HFCs are powerful greenhouse gases originally developed as substitutes for ozone-depleting chemicals.  They are poised to become a larger part of the climate problem over the next few decades. HFCs are used primarily as refrigerants and in making insulating foam, and emissions are expected to grow dramatically due to increased demand for air conditioning in developing countries.  By 2050, HFC emissions could equal up to 19% of global CO₂ emissions under business-as-usual scenarios. The good news, the paper points out, is that a binding legal agreement exists that can cut HFCs now—the Montreal Protocol ozone treaty—and that many alternatives to HFCs have already been developed and are on the shelf waiting for the right regulatory incentive from the Montreal Protocol to be deployed.

 “The Montreal Protocol has already delayed climate change by seven to 12 years, and put the ozone layer on the path to recovery later this century,” said Dr. Mario Molina, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his path-breaking work in 1974 that sounded the alarm on ozone-depleting CFCs. “The Montreal Protocol is critical for avoiding abrupt climate change.  We have to take advantage of the proven ability of this legally binding treaty to quickly phase down HFCs.”  

The small island nations of Micronesia and Mauritius submitted a joint proposal in April to phase down production and consumption of HFCs under the Montreal Protocol. North American leaders followed suit with their own joint proposal, which builds on the islands’ submission. The Montreal Protocol is an essential strategy for the island nations to achieve fast mitigation to slow sea-level rise that is already starting to destroy their countries. “We must consider all viable strategies that will help protect vulnerable island nations, in particular, those strategies that have a track record of success, such as the Montreal Protocol,” said Ambassador Masao Nakayama, Permanent Representative of the Federated States of Micronesia to the United Nations. Although the Kyoto Protocol currently addresses emissions of HFCs, it does not address production and consumption.

A neglected fast-action strategy presented in the paper is reducing black carbon soot, an aerosol produced largely from the incomplete combustion of diesel fuels and biofuels, and from biomass burning.  It is now considered to be the second or third largest contributor to climate change.  Black carbon is responsible for almost 50% of the 1.9˚C increase in warming of the Arctic since 1890, as well as significant melting of the Himalaya-Tibetan glaciers that feed the major rivers of Asia, providing fresh water to billions of people. 

Researchers consider black carbon an ideal target for achieving quick mitigation because it only remains in the atmosphere a few days to a few weeks and can be reduced by expanding the use of diesel particulate filters for vehicles and clean-burning or solar cookstoves to replace those burning dung and wood. With indoor air pollution killing 1.6 million people a year, global action to cut soot emissions would reap major benefits for both public health and climate.

 “If we reduce black carbon emissions worldwide by 50% by fully deploying all available emissions-control technologies, we could delay the warming effects of CO₂ by one to two decades and at the same time greatly improve the health of those living in heavily polluted regions,” said Dr. Ramanathan.

Like black carbon, ground level or tropospheric ozone doubles as a major climate forcer and health hazard. It also lowers crop yields. A recent study reported that ozone’s damage to crop yields in 2000 resulted in an economic loss of up to $26 billion annually. It is formed by “ozone precursor” gases such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, methane, and other hydrocarbons, many of which can be reduced by improving the efficiency of industrial combustion processes. Reducing tropospheric ozone by 50% could buy another decade’s worth of time for countries to start making substantial cuts in CO₂.

Biochar is one of the few promising “carbon-negative” strategies that can drawdown existing concentrations of CO₂. The fine-grained charcoal product is a stable form of carbon that can be plowed into soil where it remains for hundreds to thousands of years, also serving as a natural fertilizer. Biochar comes from cooking biomass waste at low temperatures with minimal oxygen—a process called pyrolisis. “The other fast-action strategies can quickly mitigate emissions, but to back away from the cliff of abrupt climate change, we need biochar,” said Zaelke.

Although most of the world is focused on CO₂ in the months leading up to Copenhagen, the authors of the paper hope that policymakers will recognize the advantages of implementing these fast-action strategies to complement reductions in CO₂. “These fast-action strategies will support the long-term CO₂ solution by stopping near-term climate change with non-CO₂ solutions,” said Dr. Stephen Andersen. “This will bring momentum to those negotiating the international agreement and the U.S. legislation.”

The paper is part of a “Tipping elements in Earth systems” special feature to be published in PNAS later this year. 

“Cutting CO₂ emissions is essential, but it won’t produce cooling fast enough to avoid passing tipping points for abrupt climate change,” said Zaelke. “With the world already committed to more than 2˚C of warming, we need these fast-action strategies to put the brakes on climate change, and in the case of biochar, put us in reverse by reducing existing atmospheric concentrations of CO₂.”

“We intend our paper as a call to action,” said co-author K. Madhava Sarma of the Montreal Protocol’s Technology and Economic Assessment Panel.

###

Title: Reducing abrupt climate change risk using the Montreal Protocol and other regulatory actions to complement cuts in CO2 emissions

Authors:  Mario Molina, Durwood Zaelke, K. Madhava Sarma, Stephen O. Andersen,

Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Donald Kaniaru

Available online: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/09/0902568106.full.pdf+html

 

For further information on the Montreal Protocol and its contribution to climate protection:

IGSD background note on Montreal protocol: http://www.igsd.org/documents/OzoneDayPR15Sept1055am.pdf

IGSD press release on “North American leaders submit joint proposal to phase down HFCs under Montreal Protocol”: http://www.igsd.org/documents/PR_NAHFCproposal1245pm.pdf

Contact: Alex Viets, IGSD: +1.213.321.0911 or +1.202.498.2457, aviets@igsd.org

M. Molina et al., PNAS, Reducing abrupt climate change risk using the Montreal Protocol and other regulatory actions to complement cuts in CO2 emissions

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print October 12, 2009; doi: 10.1073/pnas.0902568106

Reducing abrupt climate change risk using the Montreal Protocol and other regulatory actions to complement cuts in CO₂ emissions

Mario Molina, Durwood Zaelke*, K. Madhava Sarma, Stephen O. Andersen, Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Donald Kaniaru

Edited by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford, U.K., and approved August 31, 2009 (received for review March 9, 2009).

Abstract

Current emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) have already committed the planet to an increase in average surface temperature by the end of the century that may be above the critical threshold for tipping elements of the climate system into abrupt change with potentially irreversible and unmanageable consequences. This would mean that the climate system is close to entering if not already within the zone of “dangerous anthropogenic interference” (DAI). Scientific and policy literature refers to the need for “early,” “urgent,” “rapid,” and “fast-action” mitigation to help avoid DAI and abrupt climate changes. We define “fast-action” to include regulatory measures that can begin within 2–3 years, be substantially implemented in 5–10 years, and produce a climate response within decades. We discuss strategies for short-lived non-CO₂ GHGs and particles, where existing agreements can be used to accomplish mitigation objectives. Policy makers can amend the Montreal Protocol to phase down the production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) with high global warming potential. Other fast-action strategies can reduce emissions of black carbon particles and precursor gases that lead to ozone formation in the lower atmosphere, and increase biosequestration, including through biochar. These and other fast-action strategies may reduce the risk of abrupt climate change in the next few decades by complementing cuts in CO₂ emissions. 

*Correspondence; e-mail: dzaelke@igsd.org or zaelke@inece.org

Link to abstract:  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/10/09/0902568106.abstract

James Lovelock on biochar: Let the Earth remove CO2 for us

James Lovelock: George Monbiot is wrong to dismiss biochar out of hand – burying carbon is one way to tackle climate change

by James Lovelock, The Guardian, March 24, 2009

I usually agree with George Monbiot and love the way he says it, but this time – with his assertion that the latest miracle mass fuel cure, biochar, does not stand up – he has got it only half right.

Yes, it is silly to rename charcoal as biochar and yes, it would be wrong to plant anything specifically to make charcoal. So I agree, George, it would be wrong to have plantations in the tropics just to make charcoal.

I said in my recent book that perhaps the only tool we had to bring carbon dioxide back to pre-industrial levels was to let the biosphere pump it from the air for us. It currently removes 550 bn tons a year, about 18 times more than we emit, but 99.9% of the carbon captured this way goes back to the air as CO2 when things are eaten.

What we have to do is turn a portion of all the waste of agriculture into charcoal and bury it. Consider grain like wheat or rice; most of the plant mass is in the stems, stalks and roots and we only eat the seeds. So instead of just ploughing in the stalks or turning them into cardboard, make it into charcoal and bury it or sink it in the ocean. We don't need plantations or crops planted for biochar, what we need is a charcoal maker on every farm so the farmer can turn his waste into carbon. Charcoal making might even work instead of landfill for waste paper and plastic.

Incidentally, in making charcoal this way, there is a by-product of biofuel that the farmer can sell. If we are to make this idea work it is vital that it pays for itself and requires no subsidy. Subsidies almost always breed scams and this is true of most forms of renewable energy now proposed and used. No one would invest in plantations to make charcoal without a subsidy, but if we can show the farmers they can turn their waste to profit they will do it freely and help us and Gaia too.

There is no chance that carbon capture and storage from industry or power stations will make a dent in CO2 accumulation, even if we had the will and money to do it. But we have to grow food, so why not help Gaia do the job of CO2 removal for us?

• James Lovelock is an independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist. He is known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/24/biochar-earth-c02

Lovelock: Adapt, try to survive, CO2 drawdown via biochar may help

Climate change is inevitable, proceeding and even accelerating

by Tyler Hamilton, June 22, 2009

Climate change is inevitable, proceeding and even accelerating.

With those alarming words, author and theorist James Lovelock left the two dozen or so people within earshot – a mixed bag of politicians, activists, corporate types and media – feeling awkwardly helpless. They'd gathered May 26, 2009, in a small boardroom on Spadina Ave. to hear the British scientist talk about the coming impacts of climate change.

Lovelock kept his message simple: There's nothing we can do now but adapt and survive. He even confided that he wanted the subtitle of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, to read "Enjoy It While It Lasts."

His publisher, perhaps figuring that hopeful people are more likely to purchase books, objected.

All this defeatist talk didn't sit well with most in the room, including Ontario Green Party leader Frank DeJong, who directly challenged Lovelock on his assertion. Surely, said DeJong, there's something we can do. "I just can't accept what you're saying."

When pushed, Lovelock said the only way we could do something meaningful was to extract and permanently store greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, in addition to dramatically reducing our emissions. If we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, he explained, it wouldn't do much. The damage is done. We've already released enough carbon over the past 100 years to push us past the point of no return.

But if we could also extract CO2 we "might" have a shot. And the approach with the most potential, said Lovelock, is to turn organic material into "biochar" and bury it. Lovelock endorsed the approach during his May 26 meeting in Toronto. "I've written before about biochar, or agrichar, or charcoal, or just plain char – it's all pretty much the same. Take biomass, such as wood or municipal organic waste, and bake it at over 300 degrees C in the absence of oxygen. The process is called pyrolysis, and what it does is lock in about 60 per cent of the carbon in the charred biomass."

The char, unlike the original biomass, can't rot and release methane into the atmosphere. It doesn't oxidize. It is chemically stable for hundreds of years, meaning the carbon is permanently sequestered. "This makes it safe to bury in the soil or in the ocean," wrote Lovelock.

It is considered a way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere because while the char doesn't release CO2, the new trees, crops and algae that grow to replace the charred biomass consume CO2. Repeat the char-and-grow process repeatedly and on a large enough scale and you've essentially created a global carbon vacuum.

Lovelock isn't alone in his enthusiasm for charcoal sequestration, to the dismay of hyper-skeptical Guardian News columnist George Monbiot, who trashed the idea in a March column. Australian biologist Tim Flannery, author of the bestselling climate-change book The Weather Makers, is an avid supporter of the approach. James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor of Earth sciences at Columbia University, also sees an important role for turning biomass into charcoal as long as it's done responsibly.

Of course, it's not a silver bullet – there are no silver bullets with climate change. But if we're serious about halting and eventually lowering CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, it could prove the best way of managing organic waste from municipalities, croplands, wastewater treatment plants, and a certain amount of residues from forests.

Potentially, though more controversial, fast-growing poplar and willow trees that are planted once and can be harvested for about 20 years could become a source of biomass for char. These trees can be genetically modified to withstand heat and drought, as well as grow on depleted lands that can't be used for much – certainly not for growing food.

The problem, as with all other climate-mitigation approaches, comes with reaching scale. Can this really be done on a large enough scale to make a measurable impact? Nobody can say for sure, but Subodh Gupta, a chemical engineer at natural-gas giant EnCana Corp., says a good place to start is to turn municipal solid waste into charcoal.

Gupta presented a paper on the idea last Tuesday at the Canadian International Petroleum Conference in Calgary, calling it a "powerful concept" with "very significant potential."

Municipal solid waste makes sense for a number of reasons, he said. Thousands of municipalities across the continent have existing collection systems in place. The waste is not just free, but you get paid to take it. Also, there's no risk of running out.

His idea is to use a pyrolysis process to turn the organics (and potentially even plastics) into charcoal. The biogases released from the pyrolysis can be captured and used as fuel to run the process, eliminating the need for an external energy source.

The resulting charcoal is quite brittle and can be crushed or steamrolled to reduce its volume. It can then be safely stored in a landfill or even in bodies of water, where it will sit stable for hundreds of years without risk of rotting. It can even be scattered on topsoil to enhance nutrients of depleted lands.

In Gupta's view, this kind of charcoal sequestration is more practical and less expensive than the approach most pursued by the petroleum industry, which is the capture and underground storage of CO2 emissions from coal plants and other industrial facilities. He estimates that charcoal sequestration of municipal solid waste costs about $42 for every tonne of avoided CO2, compared to estimates as high as $150 a tonne for carbon capture and storage.

Link to article: http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/654444

Hansen: Never said biochar a miracle cure - Monbiot's implication that we believe biochar is miracle solution to CO2 reduction gross misunderstanding

We never said biochar is a miracle cure

George Monbiot's implication that we believe biochar is a miracle solution to CO2 reduction is grossly misunderstood

• 
• • by Pushker Kharecha and Jim Hansen, The Guardian, March 25, 2009

It is unfortunate that George Monbiot has insinuated that one of us (Jim Hansen) is a believer in biochar as a "miracle" solution for the climate crisis. If he is basing this on our published papers, then he has grossly misunderstood them. An attentive reader would know his insinuation is false by simply examining our land use-related assumptions in our recently published peer-reviewed paper, Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?

Broadly speaking, our climate change mitigation scenarios are strictly illustrative in nature, in other words, they serve to convey the types, magnitude and time frame of mitigation measures needed to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts. Although we do mention waste-derived biochar as a possible mitigation option, it certainly does not mean we are advocating that as the panacea. Indeed, as we very clearly outline in the paper, our scenarios assume waste-derived biochar provides only a very small fraction of the land use-related CO2 drawdown, with reforestation and curtailed deforestation providing a magnitude more. Nowhere do we assert or imply plantations should be grown specifically for biochar, or that reforestation should be at the expense of food crops, pristine ecosystems or substantially inhabited land. Furthermore, all relevant numbers used in our mitigation scenarios are derived from the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

On the issue of land use changes in general, our paper clearly states any biofuels approach must be very carefully designed, and we cite two major critiques of current biofuels approaches. We agree there are still fundamental uncertainties associated with biochar as a mitigation option, but the peer-reviewed papers we cite describe these uncertainties.

Monbiot's piece might leave readers with the impression that human-assisted reforestation is a lose-lose situation everywhere on the planet. However, there are numerous scientific assessments that indicate there are hundreds of millions of hectares of suitable, sparsely inhabited lands — lands degraded by human activities in the first place. Given that reforestation occurs on a large scale even in nature (for example natural succession), it makes perfect sense to promote sensible, anthropogenic reforestation, among other reasons to undo the damage caused by large-scale deforestation.

• Pushker Kharecha and Jim Hansen are at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University's Earth Institute.

Link to article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/25/hansen-biochar-monbiot-response

Biochar: Is the hype justified?

by Roger Harrabin, Environment analyst, BBC News, March 16, 2009

Biochar brings benefits to soils, boosting plant growth

Green guru James Lovelock claims that the only hope of mitigating catastrophic climate change is through biochar -- biomass "cooked" by pyrolysis.

It produces gas for energy generation, and charcoal -- a stable form of carbon.

The charcoal is then buried in the ground, making the process "carbon negative."

Researchers say biochar can also improve farm productivity and cut demand for carbon-intensive fertilisers.

There's a flurry of worldwide interest in the technology, but is the hype justified?

Fertile ground

A ripe whiff of sludge drifts across the sewage works in Bingen, Germany, as a conveyor belt feeds a stream of semi-dried effluent into a steel container.

Behind the container, the treated effluent emerges in the form of glittering black granules. In a flash of eco-alchemy, they are turning sewage into charcoal.

The charcoal is then buried to lock the carbon into the ground and prevent it entering the atmosphere.

Proponents of the technology say it is so effective at storing carbon that it should be included in the next global climate agreement.

Engineer Helmut Gerber from the University of Applied Sciences, Bingen explains how biochar is created.

Burying the biochar can also improve soil fertility, say experts.

Field trials are about to begin at Rothamsted, south-east England, to assess the benefits to soil structure and water retention.

Experiments in Australia, US and Germany are already showing some remarkable results -- especially on otherwise poor soils where the honeycomb granules of biochar act as a reservoir for moisture and fertilisers.

Could biochar be used to make plants grow faster?

A growing worldwide movement is now bringing together the soil scientists fascinated by the benefits of biochar, which was first discovered in Pre-Columbian Amazonia, and the engineers devising new ways of making the char.

They are being backed by activists who are concerned about climate change.

At Bingen, the design engineer for the biochar plant, Helmut Gerber, originally devised the pyrolysis equipment to overcome the problem of ash from sewage waste choking conventional boilers.

Normally, sewage treatment is a significant source of greenhouse gases. The waste is usually incinerated (with more emissions) and the resulting ash is used in the building industry.

At Bingen, 10% of the sewage stream is being diverted to the prototype pyrolysis plant, where it is heated with minimum oxygen.

Carbon monoxide and methane are driven off and burned to heat the pyrolysis process.

Mr Gerber claims his process radically cuts the fuel costs and carbon emissions needed to treat the sewage.

'Carbon negative' process

Working with Professor Winfried Sehn from Bingen's University of Applied Sciences, Mr Gerber calculates that 60% of the carbon from the sewage is locked up in the char.

The buried carbon will be kept from entering the atmosphere for a projected 1,000 years or more.

And as the sewage was originally created from plants, which removed CO2 from the atmosphere, the total process is described as carbon negative.

The pyrolyser at Bingen -- like others being developed elsewhere -- can transform any carbon-based substance, including some plastics.

That means pyrolysis can get energy from agricultural waste, food waste and biomass. But the catch is that it creates less energy than burning biomass in a conventional way.

Research by oil giant Shell, showing a keen interest in biochar as a carbon storage mechanism, suggests that it can capture half the carbon from the biomass by foregoing a third of the potential energy.

Now there is a lot of excitement about what biochar can achieve Dr Bruno Glaser

For all its apparent benefits, there are substantial barriers to the progress of biochar.

Perfecting and disseminating the technology at an affordable price will be an issue.

Moreover, current financial systems reward energy production from biomass and waste -- not carbon storage. Biochar would need clear global incentives.

One key to its progress will be ongoing research into the soil benefits.

The porous biochar attracts worms. It also captures nutrients that would otherwise run off the land, which reduces the need for carbon-intensive fertilisers.

Research at Cornell University in New York City suggests that burying biochar appears to double the capacity of soils to store organic carbon (compost releases its carbon in a few years).

Research in Australia suggests that biochar also reduces emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide from soil.

New studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, shows that biochar may almost double plant growth in poor soils.

"Research on biochar began back in 1947," says Dr Bruno Glaser, a researcher from the University of Bayreuth.

"But this has been forgotten until the 1980s. Now there is a lot of excitement about what biochar can achieve."

Dr Glaser is working on studies to see how effective it proves to be on poor soils in northern Germany.

At Newcastle University, Professor David Manning is also an enthusiast. He says with the right incentives biochar could perhaps lock up as much carbon as the amount generated by aviation.

Several biochar stoves have been developed for use in developing countries. Belize and a number of African governments are attempting to get biochar accepted as a climate change mitigation and adaptation technology for the post-2012 treaty to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December.

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7924373.stm

Chris Goodall, Johannes Lehmann, Tim Lenton, Chris Turney: 'Biochar' goes industrial with giant microwaves to lock carbon in charcoal

'Biochar' goes industrial with giant microwaves to lock carbon in charcoal

Climate expert claims to have developed cleanest way of fixing CO2 in 'biochar' for burial on an industrial scale

by Alok Jha, green technology correspondent, The Guardian, March 13, 2009

Burying charcoal produced from microwaved wood could take billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. Photograph: Rex Features

Giant microwave ovens that can "cook" wood into charcoal could become our best tool in the fight against global warming, according to a leading British climate scientist.

Chris Turney, a professor of geography at the University of Exeter, said that by burying the charcoal produced from microwaved wood, the carbon dioxide absorbed by a tree as it grows can remain safely locked away for thousands of years. The technique could take out billions of tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year.

Fast-growing trees such as pine could be "farmed" to act specifically as carbon traps — microwaved, buried and replaced with a fresh crop to do the same thing again.

Turney has built a 5-m-long prototype of his microwave, which produces a tonne of CO₂ for $65. He plans to launch his company, Carbonscape, in the UK this month to build the next generation of the machine, which he hopes will process more wood and cut costs further.

He is not alone in touting the benefits of this type of charcoal, known as biochar or biocharcoal. The Gaia theorist, James Lovelock, and Nasa's James Hansen have both been outspoken about the potential benefits of biochar, arguing that it is one of the most powerful potential solutions to climate change. In a recent paper, Hansen calculated that producing biocharcoal by current methods of burning waste organic materials could reduce global carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by 8 ppm (parts per million) over the next 50 years. That is the equivalent of three years of emissions at current levels.

Turney said biochar was the closest thing scientists had to a silver-bullet solution to climate change. Processing facilities could be built right next to forests grown specifically to soak up CO2. "You can cut trees down, carbonise them, then plant more trees. The forest could act on an industrial scale to suck carbon out of the atmosphere."

The biochar could be placed in disused coal mines or tilled into the ground to make soil more fertile. Its porous structure is ideal for trapping nutrients and beneficial micro-organisms that help plants grow. It also improves drainage and can prevent up to 80% of greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxides and methane from escaping from the soil.

In a recent analysis of geo-engineering techniques published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry, Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, rated producing charcoal as the best technological solution to reducing CO₂ levels. He compared it to other geo-engineering techniques such as dumping iron in oceans or seeding clouds to reflect the sun's radiation and calculated that by 2100 a quarter of the effect of human-induced emissions of CO₂ could be sequestered with biochar production from waste organic matter, giving a net reduction of 40 ppm in CO2 concentration.

Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University has calculated that it is realistically possible to fix 9.5 billion tonnes of carbon per year using biochar. The global production of carbon from fossil fuels stands at 8.5 billion tonnes.

Charcoal is usually produced by burning wood in high-temperature ovens but this process is dirty and only locks around 20-30% of the mass of the wood into charcoal. Turney's idea to use a microwave, which he found could lock away up to 50% of the wood's mass, came from a cooking accident when he was a teenager, in which he mistakenly microwaved a potato for 40 minutes and found that the vegetable had turned into charcoal. "Years later when we were talking about carbon sequestration I thought maybe charcoal was the way to go," he said.

A number of governments are investing their hopes for sequestering CO₂ from the atmosphere in large-scale carbon capture and storage projects. But Turney said this would not provide a full solution. "It's only for large single sources of emissions like large power stations and that accounts for about 60% of emissions. It doesn't deal with anything up in the atmosphere already which is driving the changes we see today."

Chris Goodall, writer of the Carbon Commentary blog, proposed biochar as a solution to climate change in his recent book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet. "The only big problem is organising it on a large enough scale," he said. "Organising it so that farmers get paid and put the charcoal in the ground rather than burning it for their own food is a big problem to organise on a global scale."

This could be done if biochar were incorporated into the carbon markets making it more profitable to bury rather than burn. There is an emerging campaign, he said, to get governments to recognise biochar in the post-Kyoto agreement on climate change that will be negotiated in Copenhagen later this year.

Link to this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/13/charcoal-carbon

Johannes Lehmann et at., Australian climate–carbon cycle feedback reduced by soil black carbon

Letter abstract

---

Nature Geoscience 1, 832-835 (2008)
Published online: 16 November 2008 | doi:10.1038/ngeo358

Australian climate–carbon cycle feedback reduced by soil black carbon

Johannes Lehmann¹, Jan Skjemstad², Saran Sohi³, John Carter⁴, Michele Barson⁵, Pete Falloon⁶, Kevin Coleman³, Peter Woodbury¹ and Evelyn Krull²

Annual emissions of carbon dioxide from soil organic carbon are an order of magnitude greater than all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions taken together¹. Global warming is likely to increase the decomposition of soil organic carbon, and thus the release of carbon dioxide from soils^{2, 3, 4, 5}, creating a positive feedback^{6, 7, 8, 9}. Current models of global climate change that recognize this soil carbon feedback are inaccurate if a larger fraction of soil organic carbon than postulated has a very slow decomposition rate. Here we show that by including realistic stocks of black carbon in prediction models, carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by 18.3 and 24.4% in two Australian savannah regions in response to a warming of 3 ^°C over 100 years¹. This reduction in temperature sensitivity, and thus the magnitude of the positive feedback, results from the long mean residence time of black carbon, which we estimate to be approximately 1,300 and 2,600 years, respectively. The inclusion of black carbon in climate models is likely to require spatially explicit information about its distribution, given that the black carbon content of soils ranged from 0 to 82% of soil organic carbon in a continental-scale analysis of Australia. We conclude that accurate information about the distribution of black carbon in soils is important for projections of future climate change.

1. Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
2. CSIRO Land and Water, Glen Osmond, SA 5064, Australia
3. Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, AL5 2JQ, UK
4. Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence, Environmental Protection Agency, Indooroopilly, Qld 4068, Australia
5. Bureau of Rural Sciences, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Canberra, ACT 2602, Australia
6. Met Office Hadley Centre, Fitzroy Road, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK

Correspondence to: Johannes Lehmann¹ e-mail: CL273@cornell.edu

Link to abstract: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n12/abs/ngeo358.html

James Lovelock says 'biochar' is the solution: One last chance to save mankind

One last chance to save mankind

by Gaia Vince, New Scientist, Issue 2692, 22 January 2009

With his 90th birthday in July, a trip into space scheduled for later in the year and a new book out next month, 2009 promises to be an exciting time for James Lovelock. But the originator of the Gaia theory, which describes Earth as a self-regulating planet, has a stark view of the future of humanity. He tells Gaia Vince we have one last chance to save ourselves -- and it has nothing to do with nuclear power

Your work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban that saved us from ozone-layer depletion. Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ourselves from climate change?

Not a hope in hell. Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It's absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt -- that's an awful lot of countryside.

What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?

That is a waste of time. It's a crazy idea -- and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.

Do you still advocate nuclear power as a solution to climate change?

It is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems, but it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.

So are we doomed?

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste -- which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering -- into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO₂ down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO₂ is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it.

Do you think we will survive?

I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90%. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.

I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.

I don't think we can react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up

It's a depressing outlook.

Not necessarily. I don't think 9 billion is better than 1 billion. I see humans as rather like the first photosynthesisers, which when they first appeared on the planet caused enormous damage by releasing oxygen -- a nasty, poisonous gas. It took a long time, but it turned out in the end to be of enormous benefit. I look on humans in much the same light. For the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.

How much biodiversity will be left after this climatic apocalypse?

We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO₂ was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive. When the planet cooled they moved back again. So there doesn't have to be a massive extinction. It's already moving: if you live in the countryside as I do you can see the changes, even in the UK.

If you were younger, would you be fearful?

No, I have been through this kind of emotional thing before. It reminds me of when I was 19 and the second world war broke out. We were very frightened, but almost everyone was so much happier. We're much better equipped to deal with that kind of thing than long periods of peace. It's not all bad when things get rough. I'll be 90 in July, I'm a lot closer to death than you, but I'm not worried. I'm looking forward to being 100.

Are you looking forward to your trip into space this year?

Very much. I've got my camera ready!

Do you have to do any special training?

I have to go in the centrifuge to see if I can stand the g-forces. I don't anticipate a problem because I spent a lot of my scientific life on ships out on rough oceans, and I have never been even slightly seasick, so I don't think I'm likely to be space sick. They gave me an expensive thorium-201 heart test and then put me on a bicycle. My heart was performing like an average 20 year old, they said.

I bet your wife is nervous.

No, she's cheering me on. And it's not because I'm heavily insured, because I'm not.

Profile

James Lovelock is a British chemist, inventor and environmentalist. He is best known for formulating the controversial Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, which states that organisms interact with and regulate Earth's surface and atmosphere. Later this year he will travel to space as Richard Branson's guest aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. His latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, is published by Basic Books in February.

Link to article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-chance-to-save-mankind.html