Arctic Melt

This recent release gives us the current take on pending sea ice behavior. I am not anticipating a major continuation of last season’s abrupt ice removal. In fact, I think that a small accumulation is much more likely.

But I emphasize small approaching unnoticeable. As of a week ago ice coverage remained above normal in the Western Arctic but remember that it is thinner than usual so will soon disappear at least on schedule.

In the Siberian Arctic, ice removal is ahead of schedule, perhaps reflecting strong wind activity. It is early enough and strong enough to make one think that we have a chance this year for a cleared Eastern sea route this year. There is plenty to watch.

Since the Northern Hemisphere had the close equivalent of a normal cold winter this year, it appears unlikely that there is any available excess of heat to dump into the Arctic this year. So we need expect little beyond a clearing out of last winter’s sea ice.

In the mean while, since 1980, the sea ice in the Antarctic has expanded 140 plus percent over 28 years. This again suggests that at least on that the basis of that rough measure alone, that the net global heat equation variation between hemispheres approaches zero.

The challenging question is what switches the poles? I am asking that because of the evidence we have of the little ice age and similar past events of sustained cooling that is best explained by such a switch in the Atlantic.

I am reasonably convinced that left to itself, the Northern Polar region would be a couple degrees warmer matching the apparent temperature regime of the Bronze Age. Perhaps we will find out in a couple of hundred years.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Arctic sea ice, sometimes billed as Earth's air conditioner for its moderating effects on world climate, will probably shrink to a record low level this year, scientists predicted on Wednesday.
In releasing the forecast, climate researcher Sheldon Drobot of the University of Colorado at Boulder called the changes in Arctic sea ice "one of the more compelling and obvious signs of climate change."

If that prediction holds true, it would be the third time in the past five years that Arctic sea ice retreated to record lows, the scientists said in a statement. That retreat is caused by warming temperatures and the spread of younger, thinner, less hardy ice in the region.

Based on satellite data and temperature records, the researchers forecast a 59 percent chance the annual minimum sea ice record would be broken again in 2008.

In the past decade, Arctic sea ice declined by roughly 10 percent, with a record drop in 2007 that left a total minimum ice cover of 1.59 million square miles. That represented a decline of 460,000 square miles from the previous record low in 2005 -- an area the size

Three more chunks like that and there is no sea ice at all!

of Texas and California combined. Scientists measure ice cover at its low ebb at the end of summer.

"The current Arctic ice cover is thinner and younger than at any previous time in our recorded history, and this sets the stage for rapid melt and a new record low," Drobot said.

Overall, 63 percent of the Arctic ice cover is younger than average, and only 2 percent is older than average, he said.

If Arctic sea ice keeps melting, it could hurt local wildlife, including polar bears, walruses and seals, the scientists said.

For humans, however, larger areas and longer periods of open Arctic water could make for cheaper merchant shipping between Europe and North America.

Arctic sea ice helps cool the planet with its usually reliable stores of white, sun-reflecting sea ice.

Sea ice melts and refreezes seasonally, but recent years have shown a smaller area of maximum sea ice in the winter, which suggests it is more difficult to restock the supply of polar ice after a record summer melt like last year's.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

Green Fungi

I am posting here an article that generated media interest the last two days with the headline ‘Green algae’

When I first reviewed what work was been reported on regarding the processing of cellulose I came away rather pessimistic. What makes it so enticing is the fact that cellulose is a string of glucose molecules tightly tied together. In other words, all the wood in a tree is on one level, pure glucose. What is also wonderfully obvious is that Mother Nature did a great job keeping it all together. It was not going to be solved by something easy.

Since then I reported that a research group was studying how termites pulled it off with the idea of isolating the right enzymes. It was nice to see this promising work started. It will surely take years to produce a viable protocol out of this form of basic research.

Now we have work commenced on a well known fungus with a previous history of converting cellulose into simple sugars. This appears most promising of all since a lot of prior work has gone into this particular fungus.

It is suddenly no longer far fetched to envisage grinders chewing up corn stover and the like to be fed into a continuous process vat in which the sweetened fluids are drawn off to the fermenter. This technology surely lends itself to small scale processing operations.

This is a potential protocol that can be adapted to the farm gate with very little fresh labor input and would add a useful new revenue stream beside internalizing the energy needs.



In a paper published today in Nature Biotechnology, researchers led by Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute announced that the genetic sequence of the fungus Tricoderma reesei has uncovered important clues about how the organism breaks down plant fibers into simple sugars. The finding could unlock possibilities for industrial processes that can more efficiently and cost effectively convert corn, switchgrass and even cellulose-based municipal waste into ethanol. Ethanol from waste products is a more-carbon-neutral alternative to gasoline.

The fungus T. reesei rose to dubious fame during World War II when military leaders discovered it was responsible for rapid deterioration of clothing and tents in the South Pacific. Named after Dr. Elwyn T. Reese, who, with colleagues, originally isolated the hungry fungus, T. reesei was later identified as a source of industrial enzymes and a role model for the conversion of cellulose and hemicellulose—plant fibers--into simple sugars.
The organism uses enzymes it creates to break down human-indigestible fibers of plants into the simplest form of sugar, known as a monosaccharide. The fungus then digests the sugars as food. Researchers decoded the genetic sequence of T. reesei in an attemptto discover why the deep green fungus was so darned good at digesting plant cells. The sequence results were somewhat surprising. Contrary to what one might predict about the gene content of a fungus that can eat holes in tents, T. reesei had fewer genes dedicated to the production of cellulose-eating enzymes than its counterparts.

"We were aware of T. reesei's reputation as producer of massive quantities of degrading enzymes, however we were surprised by how few enzyme types it produces, which suggested to us that its protein secretion system is exceptionally efficient," said Los Alamos bioscientist Diego Martinez (also at the University of New Mexico), the study's lead author. The researchers believe that T. reesei's genome includes "clusters" of enzyme-producing genes, a strategy that may account for the organism's efficiency at breaking down cellulose. On an industrial scale, T. reesei could be employed to secrete enzymes that can be purified and added into an aqueous mixture of cellulose pulp and other materials to produce sugar. The sugar can then be fermented by yeast to produce ethanol.

"The sequencing of the Trichoderma reesei genome is a major step towards using renewable feedstocks for the production of fuels and chemicals," said Joel Cherry, director of research activities in second-generation biofuels for Novozymes, a collaborating institution in the study. "The information contained in its genome will allow us to better understand how this organism degrades cellulose so efficiently and to understand how it produces the required enzymes so prodigiously. Using this information, it may be possible to improve both of these properties, decreasing the cost of converting cellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals."

Commodities and Oil

The press is slowly catching on to the global commodity story and the expanding impact on people’s lives. The real story is still the fact that the price of oil has increased four fold over the past decade, yet global production is clearly stalled at 87,000,000 barrels per day. If anything, it is getting less elastic as the industry is scrambling to patch over localized declines.

The current headlines are about food prices and that is more a scare than a tangible problem. A huge investment is taking place this spring and we can count on bumper crops this fall and a return to normal pricing there or at least a sharp increase in stocks.

Other commodities are all ramping up production and we have already seen price abatement. They will get cheaper with any slowdown or just the advent of new supply already financed into the pipeline. As far as they are concerned we should be more concerned with China’s and India’s ability to absorb the planned increases.

This all means that everything except oil will be in a strong supply position after the next three years of investment build out. We can actually dismiss them unless we have to buy potash this year at $400 per ton. Don’t worry though, they are doubling capacity.

Oil is the problem. We are going to displace at least 15,000,000 per day of oil production somehow over the next three to five years one way or the other. I must admit this is more a gut figure rather than a brilliantly calculated estimate based on doubtful statistics. I am also putting out a scary time frame to underline that this is not necessarily caused by dropping production as by reallocation.

It will happen very painfully if oil abruptly runs up to $300 per barrel. In that case the private car everywhere will be run of the road to release the oil for necessary industrial and agricultural use. It is our real strategic reserve. If this type of oil shock materializes, it seems likely to happen this summer. It will start with a production shortfall of a couple million barrels that is impossible to cover.

In the mean time, the trucking industry is preparing to switch over to LNG fuels which will not be short supply for a long time. I suspect that many other diesel based operators will do the same. This will single handedly switch out millions of barrels of oil from the market and may account for much of that 15,000,000 per day reallocation that is needed.

The auto industry is already switching over to hybrids and other patches that can reduce the reliance on oil. Most of our current rolling stock is destined to be either scrap a lot earlier than usual or hanger queens. Do not be surprised if rationing becomes necessary.

I am currently optimistic that this can all unwind slowly over several years. It then allows all the adjustments to be made in a normal flow of business mode. It also allows huge additional oil resources to be brought on stream to cushion the developing transition to a non hydrocarbon sustainable energy world. The very best solution is maintaining the current level of 87,000,000 barrels per day over a couple of decades while the resource is continuously reallocated by price to the most important uses and slowly squeezing out inefficient uses like the automobile.

In that case, we could expect oil to be completely out of the transportation business fairly quickly. Let us hope it does not turn out to be a crash program.

Dry Land Biochar

I had a very revealing discussion with an old acquaintance today that drifted into the possibilities of biochar and proving that you never know who your informants might be. He grew up in Cyprus and is of Turkish ethnicity. When I shared with him a description of the earthen corn kiln method, he pointed out that the making of charcoal for fuel is done traditionally by building a tight packed heap of wood that is then covered by slapping wet mud over the outside. A small hole is left in the bottom were a fire is started and another small hole on the top creates the chimney.

Hearing this, the only remaining question is how could they not form earthen kilns to produce valuable biochar the exact same way? In the Amazon, the extra step could well have been slapping wet clay on top of the outer shell formed by the roots. It would take a little extra effort, yet even better burn control could be achieved. Plenty of pottery like shards would also be produced over the decades as has been discovered.

Obviously the natives fully understood the value of the method if only because this biochar product from corn stover served no purpose other than somewhat convenient disposal and soil enhancement. However, the work load change was trivial as the corn was been pulled in any event and needed to be burnt. This was not a valid value proposition for wood which is very costly to cut and pack and was done only to provide a valuable fuel.

I also learned something very important about dry land agriculture. If you form a seed hill, normal planting usually provides erratic results. If ash is added to the hill, or zeolite for that matter, moisture is drawn in during the night supporting vigorous growth. He was able to plant melons side by side with dramatic results.

This informs us that the additional strength of biochar as a water attractor is been underestimated. I would now like to see the three sisters method applied in places in Africa were common sense suggests otherwise. One could even begin seed hills with wood ash to get it all going and then follow up each year with a dressing of biochar.

I also understand better the importance of squash to the three sisters system. The broad leaves of the squash would shade the intervening soil between the seed hills keeping it cool and speeding up the absorption of moisture from the atmosphere were possible.

As I have posted in the past, activated carbon, zeolite and ash form a class of substances that are called solid crystalline acids. They are all strong absorbers of water and the free ions of nutrients. This is why they create and sustain fertile soils.

I do not yet understand why the three sisters culture has not been adopted worldwide among subsistence farmers. Most of it has to do with the advent of draft animals that enforce a row cultivation system and the three sisters simply do not accommodate that. Most small plots are done with hand seeding anyway, which again begs the question. It seems little to ask to stand over a three foot seed hill and to plant a handful of corn and bean seeds properly spaced with a couple of squash seeds every third hill. In fact it would be fast and economical of effort.

Crustal Drift

With my last two posts on the Pleistocene Nonconformity we have built up a much clearer picture or event hypothesis. It also largely removes the single most important problem with a crustal shift. How is it accomplished without completely sterilizing Earth in the process? In my article I showed one way that I thought was feasible. I still thought that it would be far too shaky to be easily survivable.

What we now have is an ordinary meteor with enough mass and velocity to strike the polar region with enough energy to initiate crustal movement in a world that was already unstable due to ice accumulation at both poles over a million years. Once moving, however slowly, it repositioned itself in such a manner as to rebalance the crust. A major tangential impact anywhere in the polar region would have served.

The meteor may even have been a comet not unlike the one that whacked Jupiter, but certainly much smaller. The bulk of the mass may even have been frozen liquids leaving little evidence except the already recognized dust evidence of iridium. This supported by the explosive arrival.

Slamming into the Ice sheet and exploding is an energy event that would scour the Northern Hemisphere leaving perhaps small blast shadows where survival was possible. The ice was a mile thick almost everywhere so penetration was very unlikely even of the ice for a low density object. The point that must be made is that the dynamic effect of an impact is going to be hugely abated without necessarily lessening the imparted vector to the crust itself. I think that it will turn out to be an unexpectedly neat solution to the problem of imparting thrust to the crust at the pole requiring vastly less energy than previous calculations showed.

Those that have read my article know that it is only necessary to jar the crust into motion. Recall that the crust is already moving freely to accommodate the continental drift of plates against each other. It is not sticky down there at the interface.

What I have been sharing with you is a radical new rethink of the crustal shift hypothesis espoused by Einstein and a few others back sixty years ago. They could not resolve the two key problems the idea faced. One was the problem of slipperiness which I address in my article and is empirically resolved with continental drift. The second was who pushed and where? We now are building the library of evidence for this event.

I invite everyone to keep an ear to the ground to pick up additional supporting evidence. Let your imagination work a bit. Locate Pleistocene strata anywhere and ask if there is a charcoal layer. There are never enough eyeballs and a river bank with a history of mastodon bones is a great start. Let us know. The entirety of the USA is very prospective.

Of course this all fleshes out the events that most likely are reflected in the Bronze Age tales of the great global flood. The idea of weeks of rain resulting from the initial impact is a natural consequence of the now observed heat event which dissipated over the seas boiling off huge amounts of water vapor. It would not easily be forgotten. The rise of the sea level over at least a thousand years and probably a lot longer for the most northerly remnants would have been unmistakable and again easily remembered in lore. The surprise is that these memories were successfully transmitted for ten thousand years.

The great importance of this hypothesis to the present day is that it puts to rest the idea that we can slide once again into a new ice age. Our current crustal configuration is very robust and is preventing a polar ice cap forming. We are good to go for the next million years or so. In fact, we are close to reinstating Bronze Age conditions in the Arctic. That would actually be nice.

Pleistocene Event Horizon

I have had a better chance to review the data provided by the paper I posted last Thursday on the evidence for a meteor blast approximately 12,900 years ago. It is extraordinarily compelling. As my readers know from my previous postings, the presence of charcoal is not a natural event, even though common sense suggests that it should be. The temperatures required to reduce carbon based material to elemental carbon is very high and typically well in excess of the natural ignition temperature of carbon in the presence of oxygen. That is why forest fires fail to cover the ground with a thick layer of carbon rather than ash.

So when the geological record shows a layer of carbon over an entire continent, that means that an extreme heat event took place in such a way as to also minimize the effect of available oxygen. This really means no more than that the volatiles produced burned away from the carbon which is what one could expect from an external continental heat event.

Not surprisingly the extinction of the mega fauna and Clovis culture clearly coincides with this particular event horizon. We can expect to find that this also coincides with the abrupt extinction event that also overwhelmed Siberia wiping out the mammoths apparently there in a single day. The carbon dating ranges between 12.7 through 13.5 which is well within the expected scatter for a geographically distributed event taking place over twelve and a half thousand years ago. We are actually almost at a time range in which any resolution is breaking down and we must be extremely wary of any single data point.

What has been shown is that just like the dinosaur event horizon, the post event strata have no mega fauna or Clovis artifacts. The distribution of the charcoal horizon is so far all of North America east of the mountains and south of the ice sheet. It also includes a locale in Belgium were the surrounding area was still I think largely locked in ice also.

Imagining a thermonuclear blast centered on the western Arctic and traveling in the southeast direction is an excellent analogy. The battering of the Carolinas with ice chunks creating the impact bays rounds out the story. The heat blast would have swept the continent and likely dissipated only on traveling over open water. If the impact was in the mile thick ice then the crater may have lacked a scaring event on the underlying rock. I rather imagine that there is a lot more evidence to be found in the form of ice generated impact events.

What we have just described is a sharp tangential blow to the polar icecap and crustal area. This was enough to get the crust moving and a lot less than otherwise required which has been recognized by other commentators to be problematic as to survivability. Once the crust was moving, the polar center of mass shifted to the current configuration thirty degrees off the original axis, which is just about were you would expect it to end up.

This placed the northern ice cap firmly into the northern temperate wind belt commencing the melting process and the immediate temperature drop for the global climate since called the Younger Dryas. This melting took place over the next twelve hundred years. During this time the Gulf Stream was established and the Scandinavian ice sheet destroyed. A monster onshore sea was created against the melting ice waiting to break out into the Atlantic. Its collapse sped the final collapse of the remainder of the polar icecap.

It is possible that the sure knowledge of the pending collapse of great onshore sea was culturally remembered giving rise to the legend of the flood. Through all this the sea level rose three hundred feet, flooding the continental shelf for the first time. But once complete, the Younger Dryas abruptly ended and the world has settled down into the most stable climate seen the emergence of the Panama Isthmus. This is natural since the Gulf Stream now dumps enough heat directly into the polar region to make sure of it.

It was a great global catastrophe but also the harbinger and creator of the Northern Temperate Zone that we have relied on for the past ten thousand years. We now have the critical evidence to support my original hypothesis of a Pleistocene event. That the event was clearly an amazingly well directed meteor strike was more than I for one was prepared to anticipate. That it hit as it did saved most of humanity and life on earth in general while releasing the crust to settle in a very advantageous location.

And that children, is a problem. We have several incredibly unlikely coincidences. That alone opens the door to whether our ancestors or someone else planned this event as a direct act of terraforming. I could only speculate on what was possible, but never a precisely targeted silver bullet that got the job done with no waste. It is a bit too good to be true.

The apparent recent emergence of the planet Venus is also another act of very convenient world building or at least the preparation for such. This is controversial of course, but the evidence to date supports just that proposition and certainly does not rule it out. Read Pleistocene Nonconformity.

If we had proper space propulsion tomorrow, we could immediately start to terraform Venus with little difficulty. We just need to move comet junk out of the Kuiper Belt and bombard Venus.

Potatoes for Ethanol

I copied this from Jerry Pornelle’s web site from his quick forum on corn and ethanol.

This is the first that I have heard of displacement hydroponics. I also find the 200 tons per acre a bit hard to swallow, however achieved.

What we need, I suppose is a completely new starch crop that can prosper in this hydroponic environment. Since tomatoes work so well, then perhaps we can do this with potatoes. The only modification would be to prevent any light getting on the roots. Potatoes are also a preferred feedstock for ethanol anyway. In fact, why the hell are we producing corn to make ethanol anyway?

Corn produces ten tons of stover to produce perhaps one ton of starch in the form of corn. The complete reverse will be true for potatoes. We must be crazy!

So a hydroponics operation producing 200 tons of potatoes per acre per year certainly competes with the current state of algae production.

It also strikes me that the bulk of the nutrients will be in the plant itself and open to recovery.
So a simple hydroponic potato protocol may be just the ticket for the mass production of ethanol. It should operate with a minimized water and nutrient loss while producing essentially pure starch on a fraction of the land demanded by any other protocol.

We may even breed a consumer version with non toxic skins as they will not have to fight the soil.

This all achievable right now and ethanol producers can start by encouraging potato crops with their local suppliers since the subsidy game is not likely to last long with all this recent heat. Even field potatoes are a better production deal than corn once you decide to buy starch. Half the acreage will produce as least as much as corn.

The only problem with potatoes is storage which is much fussier than corn.

Subject: corn, food, and ethanol

Hi, Jerry - first, thank you so much for printing the entire exchange. I think you fairly represented my views, and I greatly appreciate your doing so.

I had intended to follow your site closely this week, but my evil overlord masters - AKA customers - demanded that I actually work for a living. Hence I've put in about 50-ish hours in the last 3 days, and today I am both frazzled and out of touch. But let me touch on a comment or two regarding our discussion.

Jim comments that "food availability is decreasing because food is being diverted to fuel production". I would disagree with that assertion; in fact, food is plentiful. There have been no riots due to lack of food; the riots have been caused because the food, although plentiful, was too expensive to purchase. That is a very, very important distinction. I state again: There's lots of food on the shelves. There is no shortage of food. The problem is not the availability, but the price.

In the United States, we have lots of land that is not in production, simply because there is no demand for the food that it could grow. If ethanol production increases, I would expect that the quantity of land not currently in production would decrease; but until it hits zero, diverting food to ethanol production will have no measurable impact on food costs.

Bob Ludwick offers some figures regarding the water requirements of corn growing. Well, he's right, sort of; but you wouldn't grow corn in the desert the way its grown in Nebraska.

What you would do is grow corn using a displacement irrigation hydroponics system. The way I did this, to grow tomatoes in January in my apartment 20 years ago, was to start with a tray filled with gravel. Below that, I had another sealed container with the nutrient solution; and every hour, a timer would start a pump which would pump the nutrient solution from the lower tray up to the gravel filled tray, which contained my tomato plants. When the upper tray was flooded, the air between the gravel was forced out; and when the timer kicked off, the pump would stop and the solution drained back into the lower tray. This sucked fresh air back into the spaces between the gravel, thus providing oxygen for the plants (plant roots require oxygen, or they rot).

This proved to be an amazingly efficient way to grow tomatoes. There was virtually no water lost due to evaporation; all I needed to do was add a tiny quantity of water to the lower tray every few days. (I also added fresh nutrient solution).

In fact, most conventional irrigation - just setting up a great big lawn sprinkler, which is essentially the way commercial irrigation is achieved - results in 90% water loss due to evaporation. This is why drip irrigation systems are so dramatically effective at growing plants, yet use virtually no water. And displacement hydroponics systems are considerably more efficient than drip irrigation.

Here's a quick quote from an article on hydroponics in the desert, from a quick google search:

"Naturally, the weather is hot and dry. The average yield for vegetables in the field is about 5 tons for each acre used (85,000 acres in all). Yet in the greenhouse at Riyadh, the American company gets more than 200 tons for each acre planted! No wonder the Saudis are impressed and keep urging the Americans onto higher achievements."

You can read the article at http://www.mayhillpress.com/arabian.html . There are probably better sources of information, but I'm too crusty and burned out this morning to hunt for them.

We will need water to do a lot of things, including growing crops. And given the importance of water, we should shift over to hydroponics for all our food production. If we could save 90% of the water used for irrigation currently, it would take a lot of the load off our current water woes.

But more generally: we need to confront all our challenges with a positive, 'can do' attitude. If we stop, throw down our tools and quit every time we bump into a problem, we will die. We'll die as individuals, and we'll die as a nation.

But America is a 'can do' nation. Or at least, it used to be; just a few weeks ago I was going through some old black and white photos from my youth, and discovered pictures I'd taken of the screen of our television, as one of the Apollo moonships lifted off. With the American flag billowing gently in the foreground, in the corner of the shot - I stopped, and looked at that shot for a long time. It brought tears to my eyes.

Jerry, we were once a nation that could do anything. We've walked on the soil of another planet. We've sent probes to Mars, not once, but many times. We invented nuclear plants, and every watt of power generated from nuclear energy on planet Earth today, owes its heritage to American Ingenuity.
Surely to hell we can figure out how to grow corn.

Take care, my friend - Charlie

I did some experiments with hydroponics back in survivalist days. We used hand labor -- lift the buckets by hand to make the hydroponic fluids flow -- and got amazing crops of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash; indeed a lot of edibles from a small shed in my back yard. The structure was plastic tubes, heavy plastic covering, some netting to provide wind strength, and some nylon line to anchor the whole system. It did use electricity in that there was an exhaust fan. I wrote it up in both Survive Magazine and in A Step Farther Out, the Galaxy Column. Hydroponics farming gives a huge return on time investment, and most of the work can be done by minor children. In my case it was labor intensive, but not horridly so. The boys were able to lift the buckets twice a day (that was our schedule as I recall; I would have to find the log books from 30 years ago to be sure). But one thing is certain, we got a lot of fresh vegetables from it. Another certainty: it wasn't worth the effort to keep it up once Lucifer's Hammer hit the best seller list and we wanted the back yard for a pool.

I still have room for a hydroponics shell (a small one) and if it comes to a real crunch on food I'll look into that again. Actually the proper time to look into it is now. The equipment isn't cheap but it's likely to be really expensive if we go into depression times. A vegetable garden in your yard is already a reasonable investment. If you want a lot of yield, look into hydroponics. It worked for me anyway.

As to whether American ingenuity can use that technology to help win us energy independence, I have to say it again: cheap energy will cause a boom. The only cheap energy I know of is nuclear. Three Hundred Billion bucks in nuclear power will do wonders for the economy. We build 100 1000 MegaWatt nuclear power plants -- they will cost no more than 2 billion each and my guess is that the average cost will be closer to 1 billion each (that is the first one costs about 20 billion and the 100th costs about 800 million). The rest of the money goes to prizes and X projects to convert electricity into mobility.

Of course we won't do that. - jp

Major Meteor Blast 12900 BCE

Those of you who have read my article on the Pleistocene nonconformity will understand my interest in the attached article. My article was posted last July and since published in Viewzone.

In Pleistocene Nonconformity we argue that the Ice age was ended by a crustal movement of thirty degrees south along longitudes passing through Hudson Bay. See my article for all your immediate objections. This put the polar icecap into latitudes wherein it would obviously chill the atmosphere. This chilling lasted for two thousand years until the ice was removed and is known as the Younger Dryas. All this coincides with the worldwide climate, sea level and geological record although the exact timing of each may not yet be precisely synchronized.

The point I am making is that the earth's crust moved. Once this is accepted, all the unexplainable features in the record of conflicting geology disappear. Remember that an icecap at the latitude of New York or at least close by, means a huge global climate impact into the tropics, which is contradicted by the record. Again, read my article to work through the details.

My own suggestion for the motive impulse was the advent of a fast moving very dense meteorite close enough to the pole to impart sufficient power to get the crust moving. The other option was that an excess of ice was inherently unstable, except the icecap had been stable for a million years. A good blow would change that. It just seemed far less probable. Perhaps it was an accident that waited a million years to happen.

Now we have extremely tangible evidence of a major meteorite event that appears to have been explosive, causing a major burn off at the correct time slot. The extensive presence of soot and charcoal strongly suggests that the explosion itself released huge amounts of direct heat to produce the elemental carbon form.

I suggested in the article that Iceland sure looks like a good prospect for a meteor event if it were not ruled out for other good reasons. And I really prefer not to penetrate the earth’s crust just to see if it can be done.

The idea of a comet smashing into the icecap and jarring the crust loose is much more acceptable and even survivable in highland earth. The craters in the Carolinas may even be caused by massive chunks of ice been blasted out and crashing back to earth. Having fun yet?

Anyway, the Carolinas would only have been thirty degrees from the poles, so a shock there or further north would have plenty of vector. Once the crust started moving, it seems likely that the icecap mass determined the final thirty degrees off center resting position.

The extent of the event horizon is obviously huge covering the area of Clovis culture. The abrupt extinction of fauna is also strongly indicated. This at least fills in an important blank for the theory presented in my article. There is no reason to look for a bear when a lion is eating the meal. And as usual, it looks more interesting than anything I imagined.

By the way, that event ushered in the incredibly stable Holocene in which we now reside. We are good to go for millions of years without a polar icecap.

Published online before print September 27, 2007
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0706977104
OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE

Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling

R. B. Firestone a,b, A. West c, J. P. Kennett d, L. Becker e, T. E. Bunch f, Z. S. Revay g, P. H. Schultz h, T. Belgya g, D. J. Kennett i, J. M. Erlandson i, O. J. Dickenson j, A. C. Goodyear k, R. S. Harris h, G. A. Howard l, J. B. Kloosterman m, P. Lechler n, P. A. Mayewski o, J. Montgomery j, R. Poreda p, T. Darrah p, S. S. Que Hee q, A. R. Smith a, A. Stich r, W. Topping s, J. H. Wittke f, and W. S. Wolbach r
aLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720; cGeoScience Consulting, Dewey, AZ 86327; dDepartment of Earth Sciences and eInstitute of Crustal Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106; fNorthern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011; gInstitute for Isotope and Surface Chemistry, H-1525, Budapest, Hungary; hDepartment of Geological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912; iDepartment of Anthropology and Museum of Natural and Cultural History, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403; jEastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM 88130; kSouth Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208; lRestoration Systems, LLC, Raleigh, NC 27604; mRozenstraat 85, 1018 NN, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; nBureau of Mines and Geology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557; oClimate Change Institute, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469; pUniversity of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627; qDepartment of Environmental Health Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095; sP.O. Box 141, Irons, MI 49644; and rDepartment of Chemistry, DePaul University, Chicago, IL 60614

Communicated by Steven M. Stanley, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, July 26, 2007 (received for review March 13, 2007)

A carbon-rich black layer, dating to 12.9 ka, has been previously identified at 50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at 12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period. Clovis-age sites in North American are overlain by a thin, discrete layer with varying peak abundances of (i) magnetic grains with iridium, (ii) magnetic microspherules, (iii) charcoal, (iv) soot, (v) carbon spherules, (vi) glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and (vii) fullerenes with ET helium, all of which are evidence for an ET impact and associated biomass burning at 12.9 ka. This layer also extends throughout at least 15 Carolina Bays, which are unique, elliptical depressions, oriented to the northwest across the Atlantic Coastal Plain. We propose that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering YD cooling. The shock wave, thermal pulse, and event-related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in

Global Vulnerability

The media has allowed just about everyone who has a message to tie it blindly to the global warming mantra with it seems little critical editing. We could say that the story line is now very mature. In the meantime we are coming out of a very normal long cold winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. Also Australia has had an early cold snap setting the stage for one of their own.

Unless I have missed something, we are going to have a well watered growing season and universally bumper crops this fall. Since every farmer has gone all out this year, it is safe to assume that we are about to make up fully for the past two years of poor crops. Sell your crops forward guys!

In the meantime, the arctic sea ice will bear watching. Spring will not be early this year and the winds will likely stay home. I expect the thin one year ice to breakup and melt at least. It seems unlikely that more will happen.

I wish that our Arctic data was better than it is, but serious work has only gotten under way in the past two decades with the establishment of ample data collection systems and satellite coverage. That is the one compelling reason to wait patiently another twenty years to see the real story unfold. The constant hand wringing misses another critical point. Humanity simply does not have the resources to proactively change a thing.

We have chosen to blame a wobble in the heat content of the Northern Hemisphere on the excess production of CO2.

We could just as easily and with as much rigor have blamed the huge increase in human population over the past century and the related hot air.

We likely could make an equally good argument that a fifty percent drop in CO2 production will lead directly to a fifty percent drop in the population. This certainly would happen if we were in a hurry.

The point is that we are vulnerable to that sort of population collapse, because most of the global population is no longer growing their own food and has no such security. A mega volcano blast or a large comet bombardment would collapse the food supply system quickly with no room for recovery. We even have evidence that this has happened once in the lifespan of humanity.

The survivors would inevitably be those able to protect crop lands from marauders as civilization disintegrated. It takes about two years for the worst of the dust created effects to dissipate and the food reserves simply do not exist to carry over a population. The events described are also highly survivable by all the population. And with our space gear we could even predict the impact targets and evacuate successfully.

In those horrific conditions, the world would experience an orgy of cannibalism and general barbarism. These are unpleasant thoughts but I cannot imagine a concerted remedy to such a risk. Right now we still have not really mapped the contents of the solar system, nor are we likely to for a long time. The Kuiper belt can throw something our way anytime. Hopefully we can protect ourselves long before we ever need to.

Commercial Fertilizer Reformulation

I added a couple of items on commercial fertilizers today to clarify the current status of the industry. Yesterday’s article on the practicality of using elemental carbon from coal got me thinking of the commercial fertilizer industry itself and the realization that at the least a transition to carbon based fertilizers may be the revolution that the industry has been looking for.

I quote the following short item which clearly outlines the problems every farmer knows.

Commercial fertilizer, especially nitrogen, is easily washed below the level of the plant's root system through the leaching of rain or irrigation. An application which is too heavy or too close to the roots of the plants may cause "burning" (actually a process of desiccation by the chemical salts in the fertilizer). As well, overly heavy applications of commercial fertilizers can build up toxic concentrations of salts in the soil, thus creating chemical imbalances. If organic materials are readily available and cheap, the expense of the commercial fertilizer should also be considered.

It has been the practice to blend the nutrient components of fertilizer with a neutral carrier that provides most of the actual weight of a fertilizer blend. This particularly applies to urea which needs to be blended and prilled. I am not so sure about potassium and phosphorus but you get the idea. Fly ash and various earths seem to be commonly used. They are all typically neutral to the overall process of fertilization.

They are all soluble salts and are obviously vulnerable to been leached out. This has been the monkey on the fertilizer industry from the very beginning.

Past work in Cuba, made an effort to abate this problem by blending with volcanic zeolites. They had measurable success. It has also been applied elsewhere in a piecemeal way due to the limited availability of zeolites.

So where are we? Powdered elemental carbon can be used in the same way as the zeolites for the same reasons. The material grabs the nutrients and holds them until a plant root is able to extract them. This is why the terra preta soils are so fertile in rain forest ecology.

The real break for the farmer is that only enough carbon is needed as a nutrient carrier, rather than the tons per acre suggested by the Amazon. The carbon will still persist and accumulate. Biochar can still be practiced as a way to better remove plant waste and sequester CO2. But today, the same sack of fertilizer is doing the same job as a sack last year. The difference is that there is a reduction in leaching and perhaps a large nutrient carryover into future crops.

Without anything other than an incremental modification to the manufacturing process and little change in the cost structure, we are suddenly implementing terra preta culture everywhere industrial farming is conducted.

The open question, that can be only resolved with multiyear field trials, is whether this is a cheaper way to deliver nutrients to our crops. We have eliminated a portion of nutrient wastage. How much we actually wasted is open and how much can now be retained is also open. The swing might totally surprise us and also steadily improve as more carbon is added to the soils.

I added this FAQ from the Canadian Fertilizer Industry which catches us up to current practice which has obviously been steadily improving. Every farmer knows that a nutrient that escapes his roots is a nutrient lost that he paid coin for. Now if we can bind all nutrients with carbon, we may be able to end nutrient loss.

This also suggests that a mature terra preta soil will simply adsorb any nutrients thrown into the mix to the long term benefit of the farmer.

It goes without saying that such a blatantly commercial product will have to go through extensive testing before it replaces the decades old protocols that are currently with us.

Fertilizer & the Environment

Is fertilizer harmful to environment?

Commercial fertilizer has become an indispensable tool in today’s high-yield farming. Its misuse, however, can damage our environment. Fortunately, advances in agricultural techniques are enabling farmers to apply soil nutrients with pinpoint accuracy, minimizing or avoiding altogether any damage to soil, water, and air.

New soil sampling and tillage methods, use of starter fertilizers, and better timing and placement of nutrients mean producers are getting more bang for the buck from fertilizer. For example, farmers today are producing one-third more corn for each pound of nitrogen they apply, compared to 20 years ago.

Commercial fertilizer is also helping to conserve land. Without it, we’d be forced to plow up parks, wildlife habitats, and parks so we could produce enough food to feed the world’s growing population. And by improving plant nutrition, fertilizers help reduce global warming. Experts estimate that American crops give off as much as 500 million tons of oxygen every year.

Wouldn’t it be better for the environment to use less fertilizer?

As a result of advances in agricultural practices, farmers have been cutting back on the amount of fertilizer they use. We’ve made great strides in gaining maximum efficiency from the amount we do apply. There’s a fine line though, between using just the right amount of fertilizer, and not replenishing the nutrients needed to keep pace with today’s high-yield farming.

Last year, farmers only replaced 75% of the phosphorus their crops removed from the soil, and just over 50% of the potassium plants used. More of both nutrients are needed, or yields will fall.

But that’s not the only problem associated with depleting nutrient reserves. An insufficient supply also saps plants’ ability to withstand harsh weather, disease, and other stresses. Nutrient-starved plants cannot maintain soil moisture, which leads to soil erosion from wind or water.

Although dry weather played a key role in the “dust bowl” conditions of the 1930s, insufficient levels of nutrients were at the root of the vicious cycle of problems that plagued Depression-era farmers. Plants could not help the soil hold enough moisture, which in turn caused increased wind erosion.

Isn’t organic farming better for the environment, since it doesn’t use fertilizer?

Most organic growers use fertilizer too. It comes from different ingredients, such as livestock manure or sewage sludge.

However, these natural fertilizers are not available in sufficient quantities to meet the demands of today’s high-yield farming, nor do they provide nutrients in the ideal balance made possible with commercial fertilizers. For example, using enough manure to provide the soil with an adequate supply of nitrogen would mean adding four to five times more potassium and phosphorus than a crop needs. So it’s easy to over- or under-fertilize in this type of farming.

As well, organic crop yields are only one-third to one-half as high as those from farms using conventional fertilizers. So we’d need to turn millions of additional acres of land over to farming, and still end up with less food.

What is runoff from fertilized land doing to our lakes and streams?

It’s true that phosphorus and nitrogen can harm water quality. Thanks to advances in agricultural techniques though, farmers are now able to precisely tailor nutrient amounts to their specific soil conditions — so nutrients are either taken up by crops or stay in the field.

The foundation and others in the fertilizer industry are committed to promoting practices that protect and enhance the environment, including use of conservation buffers. These strips of land along the edges of bodies of water are planted with permanent vegetation designed to slow runoff and soak up nutrients before they run into streams, lakes, and rivers. Studies have shown that these buffers can remove more than 50% of nutrients in runoff from farms.

Industrial Carbon for making Terra Preta

I set out in this article to address the industrial production of carbon for agriculture. I am treating it as an industrial process in order to establish the most cost effective way of getting the task done. The reason that I do this is that is that will always be the prime competition for other industrial methods. We have already done this for the subsistence economies were we applied onsite earthen kilns using the unique nature of corn culture.

I am not constraining myself to sustainable methods for this article, although I certainly think that all agricultural carbon should be made from agricultural waste where possible. It will not be possible for a large portion of the earth’s croplands simply because biomass production is way too low for it to be feasible. If you cannot grow corn for lack of moisture, then you surely cannot make an earthen kiln or even hope to gather enough biomass to make a difference. This describes a lot of good farm land in Africa, to say nothing of the grain lands of western America and Australia.

I also think that the principal benefit of terra preta soils is totally a function of the elemental carbon, rather than any other carbon form. This is because of the long lasting fertility to this day, of terra preta soils, centuries after any other carbon compound was destroyed. It is unlikely that any other factor matters.

So let us stop dragging vast amounts of wet wood waste out of the forest in monster convoys of trucks to the central processing plant. We start instead with bituminous coal. This coal does not even have to be the highest quality because a good chaser of shale may even be a good thing. That also means that huge reserves of poorer quality coal can be exploited. There is plenty of that to do the whole job once and for all.

The coal is then coked in coking ovens which are fueled by process gases and produces a highly porous product of virtually pure elemental carbon. This then has to be crushed into a finely powdered form for agricultural use. It makes very good sense to also blend in fertilizers during this powdering stage. If we are fortunate it should produce a possible non corrosive product that does not damage equipment. At least that should be the objective.

It may prove better to pregrind the coal before it is roasted for forty eight hours. This form of carbon has high crushing strength and this must mean a high wear rate on the grinding equipment. It makes one appreciate the elegance of reducing corn stover to elemental carbon which must naturally produce a finely subdivided powder.

We now have an agriculture ready product that can follow current fertilizer distribution channels.

There is no need to attempt to match terra preta in a single year obviously, but even putting in five hundred pounds per acre, will easily get us there in three generations. Integrating properly with the fertilizer industry facilitates the whole process and allows a slow transition for the soils. Even a hundred pounds per acre as part of the fertilizer blend will put a ton per acre into the ground every twenty years.

Field experiments will need to be done, if only for safeties’ sake. We all know, thanks to the Amazon that the end product is fantastic. However, a hundred pounds even of completely activated charcoal may be simply too aggressively reactive to easily be accommodated.

This or a similar low level can then be even mandated by regulation without putting the industry out of sorts and assuring that soil futility will henceforth be improving no matter how incompetent the individual farm.

This would establish pricing benchmarks that a wood waste charcoal industry must work towards in terms of their feasibility. Biochar kilns on the farm should still produce a better product, but the commercial carbon fertilizer industry can establish a price point for farm labor input.

What I have just described could be implemented today with very little fuss. Experience only has to be gained in grinding coke and blending the various forms of fertilizers to see what is quickly practical.

I want very much to convert atmospheric CO2 into soil carbon by way of carbonizing agricultural waste and thus resolving the CO2 issue. That desire is however equal to the desire to do everything possible to hasten the evolution of global agriculture to sustaining highly fertile soils everywhere and reversing the massive destruction of good farmland everywhere. I even suspect that the soils of the Fertile Crescent can be brought back to ancient fertility and perhaps even reversing the salinity problem there.

The damage done by ten thousand years of often lousy agricultural practice is a problem that puts the current damage of pollution and industrial practice in the shade. We are actually doing a better job as we have industrialized agriculture over the last two generations.

A really great and overly ambitious experiment would be to take a barren field no longer productive because of salinity and attempt an irrigated crop using a ton of carbon fertilizer. It should not work at all, but changes with adjacent untreated plots should inform us if we are onto something. I am optimistic that at some point we will be able to actually produce sweet soil.

Most importantly, the conversion of the industrial fertilizer industry over to carbon based application protocol will assert the primacy of terra preta style soils everywhere and greatly facilitate the adoption of other protocols achieving the same objective.

Kelpie Wilson on Global Food Shock

The press is full of reaction to the suddenly emerging food repricing going on. There is a wide range of opinion, but no real panic or even response from the political crowd yet. I found this by Kelpie to be a good stab at getting the broad picture and she weighs in with a spot for the coming biochar agricultural revolution.

Policy makers need to move toward complete liberalization of the globalization of the agricultural industry, since it must be free to reallocate resources as fast as Mother Nature wishes to throw curveballs. The thin justification for protectionism in agriculture will evaporate now that the reality of a global population transitioning into a middle class lifestyle begins to really take hold.

This current uproar is really the first shot in a global shakeup of food production that has actually been long overdue. It will be sustained for the years needed to implement the trade and technology solutions. The end result is inevitable of course, but so is the shouting and screaming.

Recall the unending battles that ensued in Europe integrating their agricultural policy between the first six members. When the mutual benefits became totally clear, the rest of the countries yelled ‘yes sir’ and jumped aboard. It just took sixty years and there is still plenty to be done, but no one is held up much by agricultural lobbies anymore.

It is outrageous to me that we control the sugar business through quotas when we do not grow much our selves. This is just another Royal monopoly designed to gouge the American people while suppressing the cost of production offshore at the direct expense of the subsistence farmer. Seventeenth Mercantilism is very much alive and well and it still does not work except to distort the market for the direct benefit of those with the Royal writ.

The restructuring of global agriculture will create a sustained attack on these hindrances to global agricultural efficiency and wealth creation.

Why more food is not the answer

by Kelpie Wilson

With food riots across the globe in the news, the immediate cause of food shortages is simply this: grain prices have doubled over the last year and poor people can no longer afford to buy enough food. There is no one single cause for the price rise; it is a combination of supply and demand.

Steady population growth means there are about 70 million new mouths to feed every year, and increasing affluence is also spurring more people to buy more meat. Meat is grain-intensive - it takes about seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. Biofuels are another new demand on grain stocks, and a potentially insatiable one. The grain used to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.

There is more than enough grain to feed every hungry human on the planet, but the poor cannot compete with wealthier buyers of meat and biofuels. Markets are not interested in feeding hungry people - they want to make money, so from a capitalist point of view, the only solution is to increase supply in the hope that it will drive prices down.

However, on the supply side, serious limiting factors are coming into play: dwindling water supplies and increased drought exacerbated by climate change; increasingly degraded land and soils; the rising cost of energy used for everything from water pumping to transport, and the growing cost of fertilizer and other inputs.

The world wants more food - a lot more food - but the planet will not be able to provide it. For this reason alone, more food is not the answer - it cannot be the answer.

Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the book "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization," says that while there have been food price spikes in the past, "This troubling situation is unlike any the world has faced before." Brown doesn't use the term, but it is likely that we have reached "peak food," the moment when world grain output has achieved its maximum and we will have to work very hard to keep it from declining.

One of the top reasons to believe we have reached peak food is that we have apparently reached peak oil. In his book, "Eating Fossil Fuels," Dale Allen Pfeiffer shows how utterly dependent modern agriculture is on fossil fuels, not just for the machinery that plants and harvests, but for the energy to irrigate fields, and for fertilizers. About 30 percent of farm energy goes to fertilizer, much of which is made from natural gas. Like oil, natural gas is becoming increasingly expensive as production nears peak. Without oil, we might not drive cars, but without fertilizer, we might not eat.

Food and fuel are intimately connected. Not only is fuel essential to produce food, but because food can substitute for fuel, the price of food is now locked into the price of oil - a price that is going nowhere but up.

A Timely Report Shows the Way Forward

Globalization has promised to lift every person out of poverty by growing the economy so large that wealth will eventually trickle down to all. But this is a false promise that ignores physical limits to planetary resources.

A groundbreaking United Nations report that presents a serious challenge to the promises of globalization and biotech was released last week at a very timely moment. The IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development) is directed by Robert Watson, a former director of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and it shares some similar features to the UN Climate assessment reports.

Most importantly, the IAASTD report says that agricultural systems cannot go on as they have. They are failing to feed the poor, wrecking ecosystems, exacerbating global warming and are far too dependent on fossil fuels. Just as everything about the way we produce and use energy must change in order to avoid climate catastrophe, so everything about the way we produce and use food must change in order to avoid a humanitarian and ecological disaster.

Watson said, "If we do persist with business as usual, the world's people cannot be fed over the next half-century. It will mean more environmental degradation, and the gap between the haves and have-nots will further widen. We have an opportunity now to marshal our intellectual resources to avoid that sort of future. Otherwise, we face a world no one would want to inhabit."

As with climate change, the solution to the food crisis will not be found in some miracle new technology. On the contrary, the report identifies a need to reconsider many traditional crops and methods for maintaining soil fertility and coping with drought. These traditional technologies need to be integrated with modern ones to achieve the best of both worlds. Currently there is little support for this approach to crop science.

British economist Nicholas Stern called climate change the biggest market failure in history. The IAASTD report also indicts markets with failing to eradicate hunger and poverty. Watson said, "The incentives for science to address the issues that matter to the poor are weak ... the poorest developing countries are net losers under most trade liberalization scenarios."

Agribusiness Reacts

The IAASTD study involved more than 400 authors and took four years to produce. However, not everyone stuck with the process till the end. Representatives from the biotechnology industry walked out in protest, complaining that GM (genetically modified) crops were being unfairly overlooked in favor of organic agriculture. The New Scientist (5 April 2008) presented a point counterpoint between participants Deborah Keith, a manager for Syngenta, one of the world's largest biotech companies, and Janice Jiggins, a social scientist. Keith complained that the draft document was unscientific and that "too often it treated fears and prejudices against technology and business as fact ..." Organic agriculture was not subjected to the same scrutiny, she said.

Jiggins' account of the process noted that traditional farmers at the table "took deep offense at hearing technologies ... building on centuries-old traditions dismissed as 'anecdotal' and of no value."

At heart, the debate is over what is considered "scientific" agriculture. The discussion of biotechnology in the final report summary peels the "anecdotal" label off traditional agriculture and slaps it back on genetic engineering, saying that "assessment of modern biotechnology is lagging behind development; information can be anecdotal and contradictory ..."

Jiggens notes that, among other problems, "the capacity to monitor and regulate GM has failed to keep up."

In reaction to the IAASTD report, some commentators have leaped on the idea that people who are "afraid of science" are irrationally keeping biotech and companies like Monsanto from saving the world.
Oxford professor Paul Collier, writing in The London Times, said that Europe and Japan are "befuddled by romanticism" for subsidizing inefficient small farms. "The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply," he said, and the only solution to the food crisis is more food produced by "unromantic industrialized agriculture."

He also said, "The most realistic way is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies that supply the world market. There are still many areas of the world - including large swaths of Africa - that have good land that could be used far more productively if it were properly managed by large companies. To contain the rise in food prices, we need more globalization, not less."

Brazil - Big Ag Set Up to Fail?

Taking a closer look at the Brazilian model shows why the IAASTD authors overwhelmingly rejected the big business model as a way to sustainably feed the world.

Brazil's Mato Grosso region is the world's most active agricultural frontier. Satellite photos show the relentless push of soybean monocultures and cattle grazing into the Amazon rainforest. Forest ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center, says that soy agriculture in the Mato Grosso has "greased the skids" for deforestation of the Amazon.

The success of soy farming in Mato Grosso is based on two advantages: the region's abundant rainfall and the discovery that heavy applications of fertilizer, especially lime and phosphorus, could impart impressive fertility to the tropical soils. Both of these assets are likely to be short-lived.

First and foremost is the rain. Nepstad's research focus is drought in the Amazon. He has found that after only two years of drought, trees begin to die and the forest fires start. Once a regular fire regime takes hold, a tipping point is reached that rapidly converts rainforest to dry scrub. The consequence is not just losing the rainforest, but losing the rain. Through a process called transpiration, trees in the Amazon seed the clouds that water the fields and pastures of South America and the Caribbean. Researchers are finding that clouds and air currents that originate in the Amazon can drive weather patterns as far away as the North Atlantic. As the forest evaporates, so does the rainfall.

The second factor, a reliance on heavy applications of fertilizer, is also bound to be a temporary phenomenon. Little noted in the popular press, fertilizer prices have skyrocketed in recent months. Reuters reported on April 16 that Chinese fertilizer importers have "agreed to pay more than triple what they did a year ago to reserve tight supplies of potash, sending the shares of global fertilizer makers to record levels."

Phosphorus, like potash, is mostly produced by mining mineral deposits and there is a limit to global reserves - a limit that we are rapidly approaching. Patrick Dery and Bart Anderson looked at phosphorus production data in a report for Energy Bulletin titled "Peak Phosphorus." They concluded that the world has passed the peak of phosphorus production and is already in decline.

"In some ways," say Dery and Anderson, "the problem of peak phosphorus is more difficult than peak oil. Energy sources other than oil are available..." But, they point out, "Unlike fossil fuels, phosphorus can be recycled. However if we waste phosphorus, we cannot replace it [with] any other source."

The main way to recycle phosphorus is to reclaim it from sewage and animal waste. The need to do this will bring us full circle from modern high-tech agriculture back to traditional practices that used animal manure and human "night soil." Researchers in Sweden and Australia are already working on a new toilet design that would siphon off human urine to use as a source of phosphate. It would be stored in tanks for supply to farmers. What will happen to the farms of Mato Grosso when the price of phosphorus doubles, quadruples, and then doubles again? For that matter, what will happen to the fields of Iowa?

Brazil and the New Agriculture

It is the specter of resource limits that has led the authors of the IAASTD study to recommend that traditional practices be studied and adopted where they make sense. One of the most promising traditional practices that is now being studied at Cornell and other major agricultural research institutions has its origins in Brazil.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been on the defensive for his government's role in deforesting the Amazon. Most recently, critics have attacked Brazilian agriculture for diverting capacity from food to biofuels. Lula has countered the criticism by insisting that Brazil will expand its agriculture without further encroachments on the Amazon. One of the best ways to do that, and conserve scarce fertilizers like phosphorus at the same time, might be to adopt a practice used by an ancient civilization that occupied the Amazon before Columbus.

The practice is called terra preta, Portuguese for "dark earth." These dark earths are highly fertile soils that were created by burying charcoal along with manure and other organic wastes. Charcoal is a porous material that is very good at holding nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus and making them available to plant roots. It also aerates soil and helps it to retain water.

Some terra preta fields are thousands of years old, and yet they are still so fertile that they are dug up and sold as potting soil in Brazilian markets.

Because making charcoal from biomass releases energy, researchers today are looking at integrated biomass energy and food production systems using "biochar" - the modern term for terra preta. For more details on these efforts, see my report for Truthout on the first biochar conference in 2007. There is also a good account of the terra preta in Charles C. Mann's book, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus."

Biochar may be the answer that Lula is looking for. Biochar could be a great gift from Brazil to the rest of the world. Charles C. Mann notes that "it might improve the expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa - a final gift from the peoples who brought us tomatoes, maize, manioc, and a thousand different ways of being human."

Biochar is just one of the traditional agricultural practices that a world running out of fossil fuels and cheap fertilizer may be very grateful to rediscover in the coming years. The IAASTD report, if acted upon quickly, could jumpstart this research.

Roadmap Needed

The IAASTD report does not go so far as to provide a road map or an action plan, but the various private-public partnerships that are working to implement its goals are already finding it useful.

Inter Press Service reports that a delegate from Costa Rica said "These documents are like a bible with which to negotiate with various institutions in my country and transform agriculture." Benny Haerlin, the representative from Greenpeace, sees the document as a blazing signpost, lighting the way. He said: "This marks the beginning of a new, of a real Green Revolution. The modern way of farming is biodiverse and labor intensive and works with nature, not against it.

Erich Knight's Biochar list

As long time readers know, I have been promoting terra preta steadily since just after I started this blog. Erich Knight has constructed an inventory of pertinent sites and articles for this topic. Since I started posting, the volume of interest has expanded hugely. I recently posted on the terra preta forum and the response volume was overwhelming. I found myself with dozens of comments as follow up with a lot of good information and thinking.

Anyway this list he has constructed is a good snapshot of the best current sites. I suspect that next year, the number will be much larger.


The best Win Win Win solution is Biochar.

The current news and links on Terra Preta (TP) soils and closed-loop pyrolysis of Biomass, this integrated virtuous cycle could sequester 100s of Billions of tons of carbon to the soils.

This technology represents the most comprehensive, low cost, and productive approach to long term stewardship and sustainability.Terra Preta Soils a process for Carbon Negative Bio fuels, massive Carbon sequestration, 1/3 Lower CH4 & N2O soil emissions, and 3X Fertility Too.

UN Climate Change Conference: Biochar present at the Bali Conference

http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/steinerbalinov2107SCIAM Article May 15 07;

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=5670236C-E7F2-99DF-3E2163B9FB144E40After many years of reviewing solutions to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) I believe this technology can manage Carbon for the greatest collective benefit at the lowest economic price, on vast scales. It just needs to be seen by ethical globally minded companies.Could you please consider looking for a champion for this orphaned Terra Preta Carbon Soil Technology.

The main hurtle now is to change the current perspective held that the soil carbon cycle is a wash, to one in which soil can be used as a massive and ubiquitous Carbon sink via Charcoal Below are the first concrete steps in that direction;

S.1884 The Salazar Harvesting Energy Act of 2007

A Summary of Biochar Provisions in S.1884:

Carbon-Negative Biomass Energy and Soil Quality Initiative for the 2007 Farm Bill

Bolstering Biomass and Biochar development: In the 2007 Farm Bill, Senator Salazar was able to include $500 million for biomass research and development and for competitive grants to develop the technologies and processes necessary for the commercial production of biofuels and bio-based products. Biomass is an organic material, usually referring to plant matter or animal waste. Using biomass for energy can reduce waste and air pollution. Biochar is a byproduct of producing energy from biomass. As a soil treatment, it enhances the ability of soil to capture and retain carbon dioxide.

http://www.biochar-international.org/newinformationevents/newlegislation.htmlThere are 24 billion tons of carbon controlled by man in his agriculture and waste stream, all that farm & cellulose waste which is now dumped to rot or digested or combusted and ultimately returned to the atmosphere as GHG should be returned to the Soil.

If you have any other questions please feel free to call me or visit the TP web site I've been drafted to co-administer.

http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=nodeIt has been immensely gratifying to see all the major players join the mail list , Cornell folks, T. Beer of Kings Ford Charcoal (Clorox), Novozyne the M-Roots guys(fungus), chemical engineers, Dr. Danny Day of EPRIDA , Dr. Antal of U. of H., Virginia Tech folks and probably many others who's back round I don't know have joined.

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) conference held at Terrigal, NSW, Australia in 2007. The papers from this conference are posted at their home page;

http://www.biochar-international.org/home.html.Nature article, Aug 06: Putting the carbon back Black is the new green:

http://bestenergies.com/downloads/naturemag_200604.pdfHere's the Cornell page for an over view:

http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/Biochar_home.htmUniversity of Beyreuth TP Program, Germany

http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=taxonomy/term/118This Earth Science Forum thread on these soils contains further links, and has been viewed by 19,000 self-selected folks. ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):

http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-terra-preta.htmlTerra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.

All the Biochar Companies and equipment manufactures I've found:

Carbon Diversion

http://www.carbondiversion.comEprida: Sustainable Solutions for Global Concerns

http://www.eprida.com/home/index.php4BEST Pyrolysis, Inc. Slow Pyrolysis - Biomass - Clean Energy - Renewable Energy

http://www.bestenergies.com/companies/bestpyrolysis.htmlDynamotive Energy Systems The Evolution of Energy

http://www.dynamotive.com/Ensyn - Environmentally Friendly Energy and Chemicals

http://www.ensyn.com/who/ensyn.htmAgri-Therm, developing bio oils from agricultural waste

http://www.agri-therm.com/Advanced BioRefinery Inc.

http://www.advbiorefineryinc.ca/Technology Review: Turning Slash into Cash

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17298/3R Environmental Technologies Ltd. (Edward Someus)

WEB: http://www.terrenum.net/

The company has Swedish origin and developing/designing medium and large scale carbonization units. The company is the licensor and technology provider to NviroClean Tech Ltd British American organization WEB: http://www.nvirocleantech.com and VERTUS Ltd.

http://www.vertustechnologies.comGenesis Industries, licensee of Eprida technology, provides carbon-negative EPRIDA energy machines at the same cost as going direct to Eprida. Our technical support staff also provide information to obtain the best use of biochar produced by the machine. Recent research has shown that EPRIDA charcoal (biochar) increases plant productivity as it sequesters carbon in soil, thus reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

http://www.egenindustries.com/If pre-Columbian Kayopo Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 15% of the Amazon basin using "Slash & CHAR" verses "Slash & Burn", it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.

Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of energy return over energy input (EROEI) for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.

Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
1047 Dave Berry Rd.
McGaheysville, VA. 22840
(540) 289-9750
shengar@aol.com

Mono Cock Dreaming

I am sure everyone is aware that the price of oil has ended up at a price of around $114 a barrel after climbing steadily through the slow season. This surely means that the summer market will bring prices running between $120 and $140 a barrel. This means that the pump price is going to be between $4.00 and $5.00 per gallon.

This has all happened without an oil shock anywhere. In fact it is amazing how quiet all the global oilfields are. It is as if they are all trying to keep their heads down. Right now the market smells a million barrels per day short with more to come. This current price adjustment is meant to contract demand. Do you feel contracted yet? Right now the industry is working harder and harder to maintain the current supply volumes.

I personally wish the shoe to never drop. The red hot problem is that we can expand production in only a very few locales. This is while global production is setting up to actually tumble. Current global production is 85 million barrels per day. A mere ten percent decline over the next three years which is totally likely plus a modest bit of fresh production means global production is suddenly below 80 million and steadily declining.

That pending decline is going to come straight out of the personal automobile. That is our real strategic reserve. Ration coupons for all is on the way. As I have said before, the price of oil will get worse and stay bad for a long time. A shock will put it over an unsustainable $300 per barrel for a brief spell. In the meantime, start thinking defensively about your use of gasoline. My own family shifted our own usage sharply downward over the past three years and we are glad we did.

We have now reached the threshold for wholesale conversion to better methods and technologies distained in the past. The news is now full of fresh new engineering advancing efficient new strategies. So the cavalry is on the way at a gallop. So let us give them free rein for they will replace that faltering production with solutions that have nothing to do with another oil well.

While this is all happening, the single best thing that industry can do is to shift fully over to mastering high volume carbon fiber fabrication technology, ending the default use of steel in all traditional manufacturing. Yes, I love steel, but that is because I can mold it under my hands with hammer and anvil. I have not had to do that however, since I left the nineteenth century behind and went to University.

Clever module making with carbon fiber means that we can assemble an automobile from a handful of precision fitted units (try that with steel panels!) that are themselves nearly indestructible and can be even reused over several models and over perhaps decades. After all, if an extra effort is made to be perfect, it is very close to been immortal. Carbon fiber demands nothing less to begin with.

The object of course is to rip as much weight out of the automobile as possible. Carbon fiber can bring the weight of the vehicle down to a level that makes even present hybrid technologies and electric cars competitive. It is not hard to trick out a battery driven system that is good for almost a hundred miles. Carbon fiber could easily double or triple that range.

The auto industry has embraced change and is working on many possible improvements, particularly in propulsion which they know their manufacturing ability gives them a huge edge. After all, a small efficient gasoline engine is ideal for powering a light weight carbon fiber vehicle.

The point I want to emphasize is that very strong carbon fiber laminates can be used to make super strong vehicle shells that can handle both high performance and safety. Why should not every passenger in a vehicle be in a carbon fiber mono cock. It only needs the desire to accept long operational lives to amortize the initial expense.

How about making a fitted mono cock that is good on any running gear for the life of the user and easily mounted. A bit crazy and obviously impractical but should we try to go there? I think we should.

I like the idea of locking in my personal shell onto a road car that is capable of letting me survive a high speed crash. It would be perfect for the autobahn.

We need to explore ways in which a couple of hundred pounds is sufficient to carry a two hundred pound driver at speed on the highway. Do this and even do it cheaply and the use of gasoline must plummet. Many good design concepts have already been played with. They just have not been picked up on by manufacturers who really want to sell you a boat and cannot stop their engineers from adding weight.

It is worth recalling that many designs that are apparently flimsy in steel are very sturdy as carbon fiber.

Albedo and Earthshine

Richard A. Lovett has an article in the June edition of Analog Magazine wherein he discusses various anomalies about the solar system. In particular, he reports on Philip Goode’s work at California’s Big Bear Observatory.

They realized that light reflected onto the moon was an excellent proxy for variation in the Earth’s albedo and have been measuring Earthshine for several decades. What they did discover is variation on an apparent decadal cycle. The variation is sufficient to match the magnitudes assigned to global warming. This all runs in the 2 to 4 watts per square meter range and of course, they have not been coincidal.

Obviously this is a factor able to make a difference as around thirty percent of incoming solar radiation is reflected back out. So what is the source of the variation? Again, it is obviously cloud cover that does vary and this is actually a good way to measure that variation.

One other factor enters the equation. Low clouds promote cooling and high clouds promote warming. Getting a headache yet?

The article speculates furiously on what all this may mean, but I suspect we are not much further ahead. While we have isolated variables that need to be measured, we are far from any conclusion except to warrant expanding the data collection.

That can be affected by the creation of a global chain of observatories measuring earthshine on the moon. If that can also be tied into satellite monitoring, then perhaps we can actually understand the impact of manmade aerosols. I suspect high resolution data will turn out to be illuminating. With Earthshine we have the other side of an albedo summation equation.

The point I want to make is that we have here an order of magnitude calculation for variation in the Earth’s albedo. This can be compared to solar radiation variation of 1.2 watts per square meter due to sunspots which exhibits a ten plus year cycle and has also been blamed for climate change. Variation of the albedo is easily twice that of the Sun itself.

This also begs another question. In a perfect world, increased warmth will produce more water vapor and therefore more clouds and therefore a higher albedo with a corresponding drop in absorbed sunlight. In any event, this all shows that net albedo is a much more important player than anyone thought.

Once again the CO2 conjecture remains buried in a medley of other active variables, sporting the same magnitudes and happily going whatever direction they seem to like.

We are however, uncovering apparent decadal cycles, like the sunspot cycle, the hurricane cycle, the drought cycle and the albedo cycle that all seem to be expressed in cloud variation and therefore local climatic variation.

This laid overtop a recovery from the little ice age that has been underway for two centuries and little except speculation that any of this is linked.

We can make three assertions: (1) In the long run the northern hemisphere left alone will warm to Bronze Age conditions.

(2) Eventually, an unknown event will cause the waters of the Atlantic to be chilled, precipitating a long period of cold conditions focused in Europe.

(3) Neither event has any likely relationship to these cyclic changes. We will let the jury stay out on the CO2 conjecture.

Current Polar Sea Ice Maps 2008

Current Polar Sea Ice Maps 2008

One of my favorite sites is:

http://www.socc.ca/seaice/seaice_current_e.cfm

We get a map of current sea ice coverage and a second map showing the variation from the thirty year medium and is vastly more significant.

Last year we got a huge surprise when an unexpected wind system emerged and helped shift a lot of perennial ice out into the Atlantic and opened the Northwest Passage. We can reasonably conjecture that this was a release mechanism whereby surplus heat already built up in the higher latitudes as shown by unusually warm winters over the past five years, is suddenly disposed of. A result is the return this winter of rather cold conditions with plenty of snow.

After all this activity and speculation we come to the 2008 season which should help answer a few questions or prove that we are still clueless. Although we have had a very unusual winter, I see little reason to see that it was colder than the averages set before the turn of the century. That grants that the several years since have been warm and that was the source of the heat buildup that discharged last summer.

If that model holds up, then we should expect several years of heat recharge before we see another strong attack on the Artic sea ice.

This brings me to another issue. We know that the globe has been slowly warming since the onslaught of the little ice age whose cause has been attributed to the sunspot minimum and other non earthly causes. We know this because worldwide glaciers have been retreating for the past two hundred years.

The only way in which this is possible is for the atmosphere to get warmer. That does not necessarily mean hotter at surface so much as more heat is contained in the air mass itself. Presumably that also means a very slight increase in sea temperatures.

An increase in sea temperature is usually concentrated in the tropics and is discharged by increased hurricane activity. This system seems to have a thirty to forty year cycle by itself, and yes, we caught a peak with Katrina.

In the meantime the atmosphere is able to deliver extra heat onto the glaciers, or perhaps less than sufficient snow onto the glaciers. Of course it will take years to figure out which is correct. Myself, I hope enough snow landed on the Columbia snow field this winter to cause an advance.

The sea ice should breakup quickly this year and while it has the potential to be pushed back to the same line as last year, I am expecting a lot less and that a lot of this winter’s ice will get to be two year ice. We shall see.