Health and Diet Scottish Recipes Ferret for Ferrets


[pf] a bit of Bill McKibben's report (& my comments).
by David MacClement
25 November 2000 01:38 UTC

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· (some notes at the bottom.)

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http://web.archive.org/web/20030424032245/http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/maindish/mckibben112000.stm
  has McKibben saying:

The U.S. Senate is of course on record as opposing a Kyoto-like agreement.
American negotiators insist that even the modest 7 percent cuts it pledged
at Kyoto in 1997 will only be ratified by the Senate if most of the
emissions can be gained painlessly -- not by asking Americans to drive more
efficient cars, say, but by counting our forests as "carbon sinks" and
allowing us to buy cheap emissions credits abroad.

 Fumbling Towards Bethlehem 

 And U.S. senators are on hand to prove the delegation's point. Chuck Hagel
(R), the Nebraskan arch-opponent of the Kyoto Protocol, has journeyed here
with a band of like-minded colleagues. They are more genial than they were
three years ago in Japan, ... mostly because they're winning the bulk of
their battles to weaken the treaty.

 "We are fumbling our way towards finding a world community in which our
sovereignties are held whole," Sen. Larry Craig (R - Idaho) said during an
afternoon press briefing on Monday. ... Craig said ..., "I believe we ought
to stay engaged with the rest of the world on this because science is
starting to tell us we have a problem."

 An incredulous journalist at the press hearing, who identified himself as
a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, rose to defend the
true faith. "Given that the science is still uncertain," he huffed, how
could the senators be backing away from a _pure_rejectionist_ stance? Craig
responded that five years ago he would have agreed. "But I think there is
now a coalescing of the science."

 Language like that leads some in the environmental community to think they
might have a prayer of Senate ratification, albeit some time in the
distance after the Europeans and Japanese go first and a deal is brokered
with the Chinese and the Indians to bring them into the process.
Environmentalists are unwilling to surrender the Kyoto process. In the
words of Environmental Defense senior scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "It
might take 10 years to get some kind of process started again."

 And with that as the context, many American environmentalists and
international scientists seem willing to go along with loopholes they admit
are way too broad, simply to get the process underway. Robert Watson, the
head of the U.N.-sponsored scientific Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, said in a briefing today that he thought scientists could work out
a method to measure changes in the amount of carbon that forests were
storing, allowing those "sinks" to be included in the treaty.

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· As I've said, there's just enough reason, now, to consider growing
forests as carbon "sinks", to take that line
_on_a_5-to-15-year_time-scale_. The "sink"-effect diminishes after the
trees have bulked-up, in 15-30 years.

· 1. Large areas of forests of initially-fast-growing but long-lived
species, left untouched for at least 15 years, but more likely 40-to-100
years (for other emissions to fall far enough for the wood to be used or
left to rot), would indeed "sequester" carbon out of the atmosphere, and on
that basis, could balance-out or trade-off-against present emissions. The
reason that's effective is because there's been such devastating
de-forestation over the last 50 years; there's a real lack of natural
carbon sinkage now - it was hardly needed 50 years ago.
  2. Short-lived species like crops are not sinks, averaged over 1-to-3
years and more. The technology that keeps a little of it out of circulation
for 20-to-50 years is no longer used on a large scale: adobe made of clay
and horse-shit.
  3. Returning soils to their original healthy condition
_and_leaving_them_like_that_, would take carbon out of the air and keep it
out, but the industry wanting to use that as their CO2-emissions-balance
would have to go out of business in a short period of time (2-5 years),
equal to the short time it should take to get the soil back to what it was
before it was mined by current industrial agriculture. Basically, letting
it lie fallow, though growing widely-spaced-tree crops would be possible,
with a slower recuperation and lesser "carbon credit" per year.


· The number to keep in mind is: 1/3. Our 1990 carbon dioxide production
was about three (3) times higher than would produce a stable climate (1990s
average world temperatures). That production was about 6 giga-tons (don't
remember the units) of carbon emitted, when the current understanding tells
us that about 2 giga-tons was being taken out of the atmosphere by the
various natural processes acting in 1990, i.e. the economy could produce
that much and have it taken-care-of by Nature.

· So not only are the 5.2%- or 7%-reduction Kyoto Protocol goals laughable
(since 66% reduction is needed, to get down to the 1/3 described above),
there's no real intention to stay at the present emission levels, already
10-20% _above_ 1990!

· The reasoning pointed out by Bill McKibben is that _anything_ that gives
promise of getting the current excess-over-1990-emissions reduced to even
that high level is worth getting a binding agreement on _now_; getting the
ship stopped first, _then_ using the time gained by doing that _now_ to get
the next stage ("turning around to go in the right direction") agreed by
highly-polluting nations like the USA and China.

· As usual- my caveat: this is a result of my keeping up with the global
warming situation over the last ~10 years, but I could be wrong. I'm
staking my reputation (such as it is) that I'm not far wrong.


· And don't anyone think that _any_ political agreement can mean we can sit
back and relax; that would be the first step towards real progress.

David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz