Kits (2)
Discussions

Here are a few good articles on why all this soil-carbon-sequestration-by-changing-agricultural practices stuff should be met with skepticism, along with some notes from me: Quanta: A soil-science revolution upends plans to fight climate change – Humus is dead, but the climate community doesn’t really seem to know it? World Resources Institute: Regenerative Agriculture: Good for Soil Health, but Limited Potential to Mitigate Climate Change – Some good links to other resources in this one, as well as examples of papers making claims about the capacity of soils to offset emissions that just don’t make sense/aren’t defensible. MIT Technology Review: Why We Can’t Count on Carbon Sucking Farms to Slow Climate Change – This one has a good treatment of the variability problem (also a fun account of CarbonPlan taking down Climate Action Reserve— CarbonPlan is good at debunking BS climate solutions and CAR is good at developing them). CarbonPlan: Getting Soil Carbon Right – And here is their overview; covers some of the same territory as the above. Earther: Soil May Not Be Able to Keep Storing Carbon Dioxide as Emissions Increase – Summary of Nature paper casting doubt on another sanguine assumption in the soil carbon world. Anthropocene: The hype behind carbon farming comes down to earth – This one’s pretty succinct and covers a lot of problems with the soil carbon hype. CDR Primer: Soil Carbon Sequestration – A more technical overview that isn’t as negative but does introduce the issues and discusses the likely implementation costs (which was one of your original questions). Fuss et al.: Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects – Covers several negative emissions technologies (NETs), including soil carbon sequestration (SCS). They look at a bunch of other studies and land on 5GtCO2/yr as the annual C storage potential from SCS— far below the 31GtCO2/yr this Guardian article is talking about. Also, the authors note that permanence is a big issue with SCS. Paustian et al: Soil C Sequestration as a Biological Negative Emission Strategy – Also lands on 5GtCO2/yr “as an upper limit for global biophysical potential” of soil carbon sequestration, upping the number to 8GtCO2/yr in the best case scenario for development of current frontier technologies.  This is all from my husband’s list of resources… there is more, if you want, but I figure this is a good start!

Okay, conferred with the household expert and he confirmed all of my initial thoughts: First, no, changes to ag practices alone will not keep us below 1.5° of warming. I couldn’t find a hyperlink to a paper (so don’t even know how they made these estimates and if it went through peer review) and don’t have time to dig in anyway. (My husband and I did this once on a report that made some big claims about the emissions reductions potential of sustainable forestry in a Western state I won’t name; it took weeks to really understand how they got those numbers, though in the end we were convinced that the numbers they got were wrong.) BUT, that headline is a major red flag to me.  As for what seems legit: Reducing the use (and waste) of manufactured fertilizer will reduce GHG emissions just because producing that stuff emits a lot of GHGs, and we do use too much of it. I can get on board with that; it’s just not going to keep us at 1.5° of warming. Of course, the researchers aren’t claiming that reduced reliance on manufactured fertilizers will do that; the rest of the climate benefits of ag reform the study is touting would come from enhancing the capacity of agricultural soils to store carbon. And this is exactly the kind of thing where the enthusiasm has been way out ahead of the science for a long time— in large part, I suspect, because of the recent centrality of agriculture to environmental advocacy, environmental research, and public conversation about the environment, and because of the immense appetite for red-blue, urban-rural, enviro-grower collaboration that could deliver win-wins and incremental movement. A lot of this is arguably fine at the end of the day, even if the climate benefits are overstated, because there are other environmental and social benefits to ag reform (for nutrient cycling, food safety, rural economic development, etc.), HOWEVER, that all changes the moment modeled or estimated C storage from ag starts getting factored into claims about achieved emissions reductions or compensated as actual avoided emissions through offsets. The moment things like that start happening (and they usually happen almost immediately), we’re on really thin ice unless we’re sure that the storage and avoided emissions (1) are actually happening, (2) wouldn’t have happened anyway (they’re “additional”, in the parlance of the field), and (3) are permanent. (2) and (3) are huge problems with offsets generally (and why a lot of people in the environmental field, including me, don’t support them, and hold an extremely low opinion of entities like the Nature Conservancy that have a history of selling bogus offsets), and I think (1) is a MUCH bigger deal with ag, because there is so much variability across crop systems and soil types (including with regard to the permanence of C storage). It seems like this study/report is basically claiming that they’ve solved that problem with new technology, but I’m guessing they’ve probably just made refinements on models that turn remote sensing data into estimated C storage, and it would take a lot more than “research” by someone who has a financial interest in this being true to convince me that this is solid.  Another big problem with ag-based solutions is that rotations are (typically) so short, which makes it easy to change practices on the ground or let good practices lapse or implement good practices incorrectly. At least in forestry (the home turf of problematic offsets), the rotation is really slow, so there is more opportunity to track what’s happening (also, a lot of the C storage is in the wood rather than the soil, which means it’s easier to quantify and permanence is more easily measured or at least estimated). I have seen the good that forest carbon offsets can do for ecosystems and rural communities, but I still think there is no place for offsets of any kind in meeting climate goals, just because the potential for miscalculation is so high and the incentive structure favors optimism rather than accurate measurement. Also, I want to be clear that I don’t think researchers and advocates are knowingly trying to mislead anyone. (Researchers are usually pretty transparent about their assumptions and the limitations of what they’re exploring.) I just think that a lot of people really want to believe in these fixes, the science is really complex, and the advocates who want to believe aren’t necessarily credentialed in the areas that would allow them to understand the science. You can absolutely get a PhD in an ag- or environment-related field without understanding the global carbon budget or the specific kinds of methods that are used to estimate soil carbon storage, and you can certainly get a master’s or have a multi-decade career in advocacy without knowing the details of these things. One of the hard things about climate is that it touches literally everything, and nobody can be an expert in everything, so it’s a bunch of experts in something working together and/or stretching to be generalists. … and to that end, I should emphasize that this is not where my training is, either. I did work on forest carbon offset policy briefly a long time ago, and detecting bogus climate solutions is kind of my husband’s superpower, but neither of us have actually researched soil carbon fluxes. So we could be missing something. I’m just saying, this seems wrong, AND it would make sense for it to be wrong based on the kind of stuff that happens in the enviro-climate world all the time. Again, if I have time later I’ll do some further sniffing and maybe I can put some resources on Discord?

Did you ever end up spending more time on this paper (in the last half a year)? No, and now I don’t have to, because you just did it— THANK YOU for saving me the trouble! (I am not a modeler and I really do not enjoy reading modeling papers, both because I have to work so hard to understand them and because that engenders some regret about how I approached building my methods toolkit in graduate school.) The candidate factors you distilled match my memory of the language in the paper that made me think we could pull “factors” from it; part of what I had intended to do was pull out more “factors” (which you’ve done here); the other part was to re-read the language around those “factors” to see how much the paper even supports their use as such. The tricky thing, of course, is that at this stage of the endeavor, we’re not going to get anything better than a “these findings suggest”, so a deep dive into the methods is really necessary to figure out how strong the suggestion is. I did…. not want to do that at all, and now you have done it, so, excellent! If I seem very happy about the fact that my original plan for figuring out when to evacuate is now voided, that’s because I got to the same place just by living through these past couples of weeks in California and reading the news and watching CalTrans road closures and local evacuation orders. This series of storms has demonstrated that even if Huang and Swain had identified a set of factors that they were comfortable characterizing as strongly predictive of an ARkStorm-caliber event, it would still be really tough to evacuate on time: Roads are going to be trashed here long before it’s clear that we’re facing a megaflood-producing storm series. I recently read somewhere (I thought it was Swain’s blog, but I can’t find it there now) that we’ve had maybe 1/3 of the precip that an ARkStorm would produce, and it has been two weeks, compared to the month of ARs in the ARkStorm scenario. What we’ve had has been more than enough for landslides and downed trees everywhere. We’ve had exactly one clear day this year that was forecast as such. This may not be true for folks in the Central Valley, but for those of us in the 1 and 101 corridors (closer to the coast), I can’t see driving around in the Coast Ranges to evacuate as a particularly good idea. I feel kind of dumb for not having thought of this earlier: I have lived in NorCal most of my life, and I know how things tend to go to pieces when it rains hard after a drought, but I’ve been out of state for the last three years, and the way these storms have come in on top of each other is pretty rare…  So my current evac strategy is “hope for a couple of decades’ worth of research advances before I need to have one.” For our household personally, that isn’t totally unworkable: These storms have demonstrated that our neighborhood is extremely unlikely to flood, so preparing becomes a matter of keeping a lot of food and water around, which is something we do anyway. For those in low-lying areas, though? I don’t know. Again, my sincere thanks to you for doing an incredible job on a task I had been putting off!


Load more...

Here are a few good articles on why all this soil-carbon-sequestration-by-changing-agricultural practices stuff should be met with skepticism, along with some notes from me: Quanta: A soil-science revolution upends plans to fight climate change – Humus is dead, but the climate community doesn’t really seem to know it? World Resources Institute: Regenerative Agriculture: Good for Soil Health, but Limited Potential to Mitigate Climate Change – Some good links to other resources in this one, as well as examples of papers making claims about the capacity of soils to offset emissions that just don’t make sense/aren’t defensible. MIT Technology Review: Why We Can’t Count on Carbon Sucking Farms to Slow Climate Change – This one has a good treatment of the variability problem (also a fun account of CarbonPlan taking down Climate Action Reserve— CarbonPlan is good at debunking BS climate solutions and CAR is good at developing them). CarbonPlan: Getting Soil Carbon Right – And here is their overview; covers some of the same territory as the above. Earther: Soil May Not Be Able to Keep Storing Carbon Dioxide as Emissions Increase – Summary of Nature paper casting doubt on another sanguine assumption in the soil carbon world. Anthropocene: The hype behind carbon farming comes down to earth – This one’s pretty succinct and covers a lot of problems with the soil carbon hype. CDR Primer: Soil Carbon Sequestration – A more technical overview that isn’t as negative but does introduce the issues and discusses the likely implementation costs (which was one of your original questions). Fuss et al.: Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects – Covers several negative emissions technologies (NETs), including soil carbon sequestration (SCS). They look at a bunch of other studies and land on 5GtCO2/yr as the annual C storage potential from SCS— far below the 31GtCO2/yr this Guardian article is talking about. Also, the authors note that permanence is a big issue with SCS. Paustian et al: Soil C Sequestration as a Biological Negative Emission Strategy – Also lands on 5GtCO2/yr “as an upper limit for global biophysical potential” of soil carbon sequestration, upping the number to 8GtCO2/yr in the best case scenario for development of current frontier technologies.  This is all from my husband’s list of resources… there is more, if you want, but I figure this is a good start!

Okay, conferred with the household expert and he confirmed all of my initial thoughts: First, no, changes to ag practices alone will not keep us below 1.5° of warming. I couldn’t find a hyperlink to a paper (so don’t even know how they made these estimates and if it went through peer review) and don’t have time to dig in anyway. (My husband and I did this once on a report that made some big claims about the emissions reductions potential of sustainable forestry in a Western state I won’t name; it took weeks to really understand how they got those numbers, though in the end we were convinced that the numbers they got were wrong.) BUT, that headline is a major red flag to me.  As for what seems legit: Reducing the use (and waste) of manufactured fertilizer will reduce GHG emissions just because producing that stuff emits a lot of GHGs, and we do use too much of it. I can get on board with that; it’s just not going to keep us at 1.5° of warming. Of course, the researchers aren’t claiming that reduced reliance on manufactured fertilizers will do that; the rest of the climate benefits of ag reform the study is touting would come from enhancing the capacity of agricultural soils to store carbon. And this is exactly the kind of thing where the enthusiasm has been way out ahead of the science for a long time— in large part, I suspect, because of the recent centrality of agriculture to environmental advocacy, environmental research, and public conversation about the environment, and because of the immense appetite for red-blue, urban-rural, enviro-grower collaboration that could deliver win-wins and incremental movement. A lot of this is arguably fine at the end of the day, even if the climate benefits are overstated, because there are other environmental and social benefits to ag reform (for nutrient cycling, food safety, rural economic development, etc.), HOWEVER, that all changes the moment modeled or estimated C storage from ag starts getting factored into claims about achieved emissions reductions or compensated as actual avoided emissions through offsets. The moment things like that start happening (and they usually happen almost immediately), we’re on really thin ice unless we’re sure that the storage and avoided emissions (1) are actually happening, (2) wouldn’t have happened anyway (they’re “additional”, in the parlance of the field), and (3) are permanent. (2) and (3) are huge problems with offsets generally (and why a lot of people in the environmental field, including me, don’t support them, and hold an extremely low opinion of entities like the Nature Conservancy that have a history of selling bogus offsets), and I think (1) is a MUCH bigger deal with ag, because there is so much variability across crop systems and soil types (including with regard to the permanence of C storage). It seems like this study/report is basically claiming that they’ve solved that problem with new technology, but I’m guessing they’ve probably just made refinements on models that turn remote sensing data into estimated C storage, and it would take a lot more than “research” by someone who has a financial interest in this being true to convince me that this is solid.  Another big problem with ag-based solutions is that rotations are (typically) so short, which makes it easy to change practices on the ground or let good practices lapse or implement good practices incorrectly. At least in forestry (the home turf of problematic offsets), the rotation is really slow, so there is more opportunity to track what’s happening (also, a lot of the C storage is in the wood rather than the soil, which means it’s easier to quantify and permanence is more easily measured or at least estimated). I have seen the good that forest carbon offsets can do for ecosystems and rural communities, but I still think there is no place for offsets of any kind in meeting climate goals, just because the potential for miscalculation is so high and the incentive structure favors optimism rather than accurate measurement. Also, I want to be clear that I don’t think researchers and advocates are knowingly trying to mislead anyone. (Researchers are usually pretty transparent about their assumptions and the limitations of what they’re exploring.) I just think that a lot of people really want to believe in these fixes, the science is really complex, and the advocates who want to believe aren’t necessarily credentialed in the areas that would allow them to understand the science. You can absolutely get a PhD in an ag- or environment-related field without understanding the global carbon budget or the specific kinds of methods that are used to estimate soil carbon storage, and you can certainly get a master’s or have a multi-decade career in advocacy without knowing the details of these things. One of the hard things about climate is that it touches literally everything, and nobody can be an expert in everything, so it’s a bunch of experts in something working together and/or stretching to be generalists. … and to that end, I should emphasize that this is not where my training is, either. I did work on forest carbon offset policy briefly a long time ago, and detecting bogus climate solutions is kind of my husband’s superpower, but neither of us have actually researched soil carbon fluxes. So we could be missing something. I’m just saying, this seems wrong, AND it would make sense for it to be wrong based on the kind of stuff that happens in the enviro-climate world all the time. Again, if I have time later I’ll do some further sniffing and maybe I can put some resources on Discord?

Did you ever end up spending more time on this paper (in the last half a year)? No, and now I don’t have to, because you just did it— THANK YOU for saving me the trouble! (I am not a modeler and I really do not enjoy reading modeling papers, both because I have to work so hard to understand them and because that engenders some regret about how I approached building my methods toolkit in graduate school.) The candidate factors you distilled match my memory of the language in the paper that made me think we could pull “factors” from it; part of what I had intended to do was pull out more “factors” (which you’ve done here); the other part was to re-read the language around those “factors” to see how much the paper even supports their use as such. The tricky thing, of course, is that at this stage of the endeavor, we’re not going to get anything better than a “these findings suggest”, so a deep dive into the methods is really necessary to figure out how strong the suggestion is. I did…. not want to do that at all, and now you have done it, so, excellent! If I seem very happy about the fact that my original plan for figuring out when to evacuate is now voided, that’s because I got to the same place just by living through these past couples of weeks in California and reading the news and watching CalTrans road closures and local evacuation orders. This series of storms has demonstrated that even if Huang and Swain had identified a set of factors that they were comfortable characterizing as strongly predictive of an ARkStorm-caliber event, it would still be really tough to evacuate on time: Roads are going to be trashed here long before it’s clear that we’re facing a megaflood-producing storm series. I recently read somewhere (I thought it was Swain’s blog, but I can’t find it there now) that we’ve had maybe 1/3 of the precip that an ARkStorm would produce, and it has been two weeks, compared to the month of ARs in the ARkStorm scenario. What we’ve had has been more than enough for landslides and downed trees everywhere. We’ve had exactly one clear day this year that was forecast as such. This may not be true for folks in the Central Valley, but for those of us in the 1 and 101 corridors (closer to the coast), I can’t see driving around in the Coast Ranges to evacuate as a particularly good idea. I feel kind of dumb for not having thought of this earlier: I have lived in NorCal most of my life, and I know how things tend to go to pieces when it rains hard after a drought, but I’ve been out of state for the last three years, and the way these storms have come in on top of each other is pretty rare…  So my current evac strategy is “hope for a couple of decades’ worth of research advances before I need to have one.” For our household personally, that isn’t totally unworkable: These storms have demonstrated that our neighborhood is extremely unlikely to flood, so preparing becomes a matter of keeping a lot of food and water around, which is something we do anyway. For those in low-lying areas, though? I don’t know. Again, my sincere thanks to you for doing an incredible job on a task I had been putting off!


Load more...