27/10/2019

Earth's Rocks Can Absorb A Shocking Amount Of Carbon: Here’s How

National Geographic - Stephen Leahy

 The depths of the planet offer a rock-hard potential solution to climate change.
The Tungurahua volcano erupting at twilight. One of the ways the earth returns its inner carbon to the surface is through volcanic eruptions. Photograph by Mike Theiss, Nat Geo Image Collection
I’ve been toting around 27 pounds of carbon all of my adult life. You’ve been hauling carbon too: Approximately 18 percent of your body is made of carbon atoms. All of those atoms were once in the food we ate and, before that, in the air, oceans, rocks, and other forms of life. Carbon, an element born of exploding stars, is essential for all forms of life and so it may be surprising that more than 90 percent of planet’s carbon is underground.
Even more remarkable is the discovery that life, in the form of microbes and bacteria, thrives miles beneath our feet in such abundance that its total carbon mass is up to 400 times greater than all 7.7 billion of the humans on the surface. That one of Earth’s largest ecosystems lies deep inside the planet is just one of the many discoveries from the decade-long Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) project that brought together 1,200 researchers from 55 nations to explore the internal workings of our planet.
The DCO wraps up in Washington, D.C. on October 24 to 26 with hundreds of scientists from around the world meeting to share and celebrate results.
“We now understand that the Earth’s biosphere and its geosphere are one integrated and complex system, and carbon is the key,” says DCO Executive Director Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science. “This is a fundamentally new way of thinking about our planet,” Hazen says in an interview.
Over the last decade the DCO launched 268 projects and produced 1,400 peer-reviewed studies. Here are few highlights from the dozens if not hundreds of astonishing new discoveries about the deep Earth, including its role in kickstarting life.

Carbon In, Carbon Out
Carbon from plants and animals goes deep into the earth through the process of subduction—when oceanic plates sink below continental plates—over hundreds of millions of years. This once-living carbon has been discovered inside diamonds that formed 410 to 660 kilometers below the surface. Given enough time, that carbon, in the form of diamonds, rocks, or as carbon dioxide emissions emitted from volcanoes, returns to the surface, where the sun shines on it once more.
In other words, just like us, our planet is constantly ingesting and exhaling carbon, often in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2). This once-stable carbon cycle has been disrupted by our acceleration of the return of carbon to the surface by digging up and burning massive amounts of hydrocarbons: oil, gas, and coal. At the same time cutting down forests, building cities and roads, and otherwise transforming the surface has impaired the planet’s ability to ingest carbon.
This disruption of the carbon cycle is what we are calling the climate crisis, says Hazen.
One of 31 new carbon-bearing minerals discovered during the DCO's Carbon Mineral Challenge, triazolite was found in Chile. It thought to have derived in part from cormorant guano. Photograph courtesy Joy Desor, Mineralanalytik Analytical Services
“Climate change poses an existential threat to humanity, not in the far future but in the next generation or two,” he says.
In the next 20 to 40 years CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have to be eliminated and large amounts of CO2 already in the atmosphere need to be removed to prevent very dangerous levels of global warming.
However, new knowledge about the deep carbon cycle revealed by the DCO gives Hazen hope. There are natural carbon sequestration methods that are “incredibly powerful,” he says.

Watching rock grow
One of these sequestration methods involves a large slab of rock pushed up from Earth's upper mantle long ago in what’s now the country of Oman. Known as the Samail Ophiolite, weathering and microbial life inside the rock take carbon dioxide out of the air and turns it into carbonate minerals.
The process is so effective that “you can actually watch carbon dioxide being sucked out of the atmosphere and being deposited as rocks before your very eyes,” says Hazan.
Experiments pumping carbon-rich fluids into the ophiolite rock formation show that carbonate minerals form very rapidly. That could potentially remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, though it would be a huge project and very different for Oman, which is dependent on its oil revenues, he says.
Ophiolites are also found in North America, Africa, and elsewhere. Another natural form of carbon sequestration involves rocks from basalt formations like those found in Hawaii that can absorb CO2 from the air when crushed. In Iceland, another DCO natural sequestration project, CarbFix, involves injecting carbon-bearing fluids into basalt and observing their conversion to solids.
These new discoveries about the ability of the Earth to absorb carbon “give me tremendous optimism,” Hazen says.


I Didn't Know That: Diamonds

Insight into alien life
The DCO has also boosted optimism about the possibilities of life on other planets. Pure diamonds are made of nothing but carbon, but most contain small impurities. They may make poor jewelry, but they’re priceless in research. These impurities, called inclusions, have revealed "abiotic" methane as an energy source for life deep side Earth.
When water meets the ubiquitous mineral olivine under intense pressure, the rock transforms into another mineral, serpentine, while producing abiotic methane. If microbes can live using chemical energy from rocks under a range of extreme heat and pressures so deep, that may hold true on other planetary bodies.
The discovery also fuels the proposition that life first originated and evolved in the deep earth, not in oceans as widely believed.
“The Deep Carbon Observatory has produced important evidence” for this hypothesis, says Jesse Ausubel of The Rockefeller University and science advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Diamonds also provided DCO researchers with evidence that the deep earth has more water—mostly locked up within the crystals of minerals as ions rather than liquid water—than all of the world's oceans. As with carbon, subduction of the great continental and oceanic plates are thought to have brought water into the depths of the planet.

Earth's alarms
DCO projects monitoring gases coming from volcanoes resulted in the first-ever detection of a change in the ratio of CO2 to sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions prior to the eruption of a Costa Rica volcano, offering a potential early warning system.
“It was just a theory that the gas ratio might change before an eruption, but the DCO allowed us to go and find out,” said Sami Mikhail of the University of St Andrews. “This could be like a doorbell, telling us when someone is at the door.”
Several volcanoes near populated areas, including Tungurahua, Ecuador, Etna, Italy, and Soufriere Hills, Montserrat are now being monitored. Those and other volcano monitoring stations have also provided definitive evidence that CO2 emissions from volcanoes are a tiny fraction compared to those from burning fossil fuels. Some climate deniers have long blamed volcanoes for the rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Future of the DCO
While the DCO mandate has ended, the global community of deep carbon scientists will continue to pursue existing and new investigations with the support of grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, the German Research Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and other institutions.
The Institut du Physique de Globe du Paris will serve as a new headquarters.


The Deep Carbon Observatory is a global community of multi-disciplinary scientists unlocking the inner secrets of Earth through investigations into life, energy, and the fundamentally unique chemistry of carbon. In this video we dive deep into Earth, where most of Earth's carbon resides, and explore the core questions DCO scientists are asking. How much carbon is in Earth? Where did it come from and what does it "look" like? How does it move from deep Earth into our atmosphere and back again? And even, what are the origins of life on Earth?

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Why Keeping Mature Forests Intact Is Key to the Climate Fight

Yale Environment 360 - Fen Montaigne

Preserving mature forests can play a vital role in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, says policy scientist William Moomaw. In an e360 interview, he talks about the importance of existing forests and why the push to cut them for fuel to generate electricity is misguided.

William Moomaw has had a distinguished career as a physical chemist and environmental scientist, helping found the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and serving as lead author on five reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In recent years, Moomaw has turned his attention to working on natural solutions to climate change and has become a leading proponent of what he calls “proforestation” — leaving older and middle-aged forests intact because of their superior carbon-sequestration abilities.While Moomaw lauds intensifying efforts to plant billions of young trees, he says that preserving existing mature forests will have an even more profound effect on slowing global warming in the coming decades, since immature trees sequester far less CO2 than older ones. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Moomaw explains the benefits of proforestation, discusses the policy changes that would lead to the preservation of existing forests, and sharply criticizes the recent trend of converting forests in the Southeastern U.S. to wood pellets that can be burned to produce electricity in Europe and elsewhere.
William Moomaw
“The most effective thing that we can do is to allow trees that are already planted, that are already growing, to continue growing to reach their full ecological potential, to store carbon, and develop a forest that has its full complement of environmental services,” said Moomaw. “Cutting trees to burn them is not a way to get there.”

Yale Environment 360: How do you define proforestation?
William Moomaw: So I began looking at some of the data and some of the papers that had come out recently, and I found that if we managed our forests and grasslands in a different way they could be sequestering twice as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they currently do. One paper found in multi-aged forests around the world of all types, that half of the carbon is stored in the largest one-percent diameter trees. So I began thinking about this, and I realized that the most effective thing that we can do is to allow trees that are already planted, that are already growing, to continue growing to reach their ecological potential, to store carbon, and develop a forest that has its full complement of environmental services. We needed a name for that, so I began thinking about names. I actually sat down and went to Google and searched for prefixes, found a whole bunch of them, and the one that I settled on was pro. Proforestation. It’s not that we shouldn’t do afforestation [planting new trees] and we shouldn’t do reforestation. We should. But recognize that their contribution will be farther in the future, which is important. But in order to meet our climate goals, we have to have greater sequestration by natural systems now. So that entails protecting the carbon stocks that we already have in forests, or at least a large enough fraction of them that they matter. We have to protect wetlands, which are actually storing an amount of carbon in the United States that equals what’s in our standing forests. We need to protect and improve the carbon sequestration by agricultural soils and grazing lands.It’s taken a very long time for people to focus on something besides reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And to recognize that even though we’re putting almost 11 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, the increase is only 4.7 billion tons. So where is the rest going? It’s going into plants on land and plants in the ocean. And the largest single place that’s removing carbon dioxide [from the atmosphere] on an annual basis is forests. Even what we think of as mature forests are still accumulating carbon because carbon makes up about roughly half of the dry weight of wood, but it is also in the soils. Even older forests continue to accumulate carbon in the soils. In fact there are forests where there’s more carbon in the soils than there is in the standing trees. As trees get older, they absorb more carbon every year, and because they are bigger they store more carbon.
“The loss of forest canopy is the greatest in the Southeastern United States of any place on the planet.”
We’ve seen a lot of interest lately in planting more trees. And planting trees is great and it makes us all feel good and it’s a wonderful thing to do and we absolutely should be reforesting areas that have been cut. A recent paper talked about how we could plant more than a trillion trees on nearly a billion hectares of land and how much that would do to solve the problem. These are great things to do, but they will not make much of a difference in the next two or three decades because little trees just don’t store much carbon. Letting existing natural forests grow is essential to any climate goal we have.

e360: In terms of CO2 emissions, we’re putting 30 to 35 billion tons of CO2 from burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere every year, while at the same time there’s this dramatic destruction of forests in the Amazon and in Southeast Asia. What we’re looking at right now is really a perfect storm for soaring CO2 emissions.
Moomaw: That’s right. But don’t leave out the United States. The most disturbed forests in the world are in the United States, not the Amazon and not Indonesia. I don’t wish to lessen the significance of the Amazon and Indonesia. But the loss of forest canopy is the greatest in the Southeastern United States of any place on the planet.

e360: Let’s talk about what’s happening in the Southeastern U.S. and the wood pellet and biomass-burning industry that is driving that deforestation and what can be done about it.
Moomaw: Well, a little over a decade ago, as a result of a rule change in the European Union, they declared bioenergy, like burning wood pellets, to basically be a carbon-neutral and renewable energy source. But bioenergy is more expensive than all the fossil fuels, more expensive than wind and solar, and the industry would not be economically viable without huge subsidies. So the EU, particularly the UK, is giving bioenergy huge subsidies. The UK has reduced their coal use a lot, but their emissions have not been reduced at the same rate as their coal reductions would indicate because a big part of their replacement is from burning wood in the form of wood pellets that primarily come from the Southeastern U.S. The largest coal plant [in the UK], Drax, has converted half of its units to burning wood pellets instead of coal. And there are a bunch of other power plants in the UK that are doing the same thing, and the same thing is happening on the continent. And they claim it’s carbon-neutral.
An area of clearcut forest in the Tar-Pamlico River basin in northeastern North Carolina. Dogwood Alliance
The tragedy in the Southeastern U.S. [where large amounts of wood for biomass burning originates] is it’s the most biodiversity-rich region in North America and has more species of animals and plants than anyplace else. That is being decimated. For pellets, wetland, hardwood forests are preferable to the pines and the pine plantations, which don’t burn as hot, so those wetland hardwood forests are really being gone after. For a long time, the companies made the claim they were only using the residuals, the branches and so on. An NGO down there called Dogwood Alliance documented that that isn’t true. They’re converting whole trees [into pellets].

e360: What is the solution here, both in the U.S. and in Europe?
Moomaw: As you may recall, [former U.S. EPA administrator] Scott Pruitt made the declaration that all forest bioenergy was carbon-neutral. [U.S. Senator] Susan Collins of Maine actually introduced an amendment, which is still binding, that states that all federal agencies must consider all forest bioenergy from sustainably managed forests to be carbon-neutral. There have been lots of letters by scientists and statements that that is just false.
We’ll continue to need and want forestry products — that’s understood. But the attitude in much of the forestry industry is that all forests must be managed by principles that improve forests for timber production. But we have to recognize that there’s a distinction between industrial production forests and natural forests, and we must make clear that natural forests are managed for biodiversity and the full set of ecosystem services that forests provide. And, by the way, which biodiversity are we shortest of? The biodiversity that’s associated with older forests. We hardly have any older forests left in the Lower 48 states. It’s in the small single digits of our original forests. The Forest Service says that less than 7 percent of U.S. forests are over 100 years old.
“The forests in the range of 70 to 125 years are the ones that are going to add the most carbon in the coming decades.”
e360: Talk about the need to expand protections of forests that now have little or no protection.
Moomaw: Except for the designated federal wilderness areas in national forests, the rest of our forests are almost all devoted to timber production. And as you’ve seen, the Trump administration is now going after the roadless areas, as well. We need to have a conversation about which forests are most capable of sequestering carbon in the near term. And those are forests that are generally in the age range of 70 to 125 years — they are the ones that are going to add the most carbon in the coming decades. Unfortunately, 70 years, for many species, is the perfect size for the sawmill. So it is going to mean saying ,well, we’re going to not cut these. This has to apply to federal and state forests. In Connecticut, there is not a single acre of state forest that is not subject to being cut.

e360: And this is New England, the legendary home of reforestation in the last century.
Moomaw: That’s right. And that all happened by benign neglect, which worked out in our favor. The [U.S.] Forest Service has just moved into Massachusetts in an alliance with the state and is creating cooperative organizations that will lead to more cutting of this now very carbon-dense, rich forest that we have in this part of New England. The Department of Energy Resources in Massachusetts has put forth proposed changes and regulations that would increase the amount of forests that qualify for subsidies for bioenergy as a renewable resource, as an alternative energy resource. The outcry from the scientific community, the NGO community, and citizens has been enormous. There’s pressure to build a wood-burning electric power generating station in a low income neighborhood in Springfield, Massachusetts. And that’s being pushed back against very hard by the public. But the governor and his team are pushing forward to make it happen, with more subsidies — subsidies that come from our electric bills. That subsidy doesn’t go to solar panels, it goes to burning wood. We’ve got a real problem here.
A mature forest in the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. Liza Daly/Flickr

e360: So what policies do you pursue to have a sustainable forest products industry?
Moomaw: I think what you do is you concentrate it on an appropriate set of lands. [Biologist] E.O. Wilson argues that we need “half earth” — that is, half the world needs to be left to nature in order to function. I suppose with one kidney and one lung, we can make it.
One policy that I would suggest is that with privately owned forests and relatively small forest plots, people be paid for the ecosystem services of storing carbon and promoting old-growth biodiversity and the resiliency to climate change that these forests provide. We need to compensate private land owners for leaving their forests standing. Not everybody will do it, but that might get us a mechanism where we get closer to our goal.
The other thing — and there’s legislation proposed here in Massachusetts — is that there be no more timber harvesting on state forest lands. We now have a regulatory system that sets aside about 60 percent of forest lands as either parks or reserves. This would say that the remaining state woodlands would become reserves or parks and not harvested. Well, that would mean that 13 percent of the forests in Massachusetts would not be available for timber. The howling has been unbelievable — “This is the end of the world!” And yet, today, the regulatory system is not controlling this adequately at all.

e360: What about in the Southeastern U.S.? How do you slow down what’s happening with the wood pellet industry?
Moomaw: The best thing of course would be to remove subsidies. That would end it.
“Wood pellet plants are all being built in low-income, African American communities.”
The other thing is there’s a social justice issue here. The plants that make the pellets are all being built in low-income, African American communities that have five times the asthma rate as the state of North Carolina as a whole. These plants produce a tremendous amount of dust and particulate matter. Some of these communities are beginning to fight back. There’s a big push down there politically to deal with this. You know, it’s really amazing how short-term economic interest can dominate social justice, climate outcomes, everything else. So I think one way is to fight fire with fire and turn the subsidies around. Get rid of the subsidies for bioenergy, begin to support the maintenance of existing forests for private landowners, and really change our policies on state and federal public lands.

e360: Is there any progress in Europe in terms of recognizing that this is not a carbon-neutral source of energy and should not be supported or subsidized?
Moomaw: Yes, there are efforts. There’s an organization called Biofuelwatch in the UK. They are an amazingly well-informed, spunky bunch of activists. The scientific community in Europe is beginning to shift its views on this. It turns out that almost two-thirds of all the renewables used in Europe are bioenergy.

e360: If we do a better job of protecting these older forests, what difference could it make in moderating temperature increases?
Moomaw: If we get to net-zero emissions by 2050 and we continue to reduce our emissions after that, and if we continue to increase the biological sequestration — the nature-based solutions as they’re sometimes referred to — we would actually start reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 2050 and 2100. The more we can increase the sequestration rate and the faster we can reduce the emissions, the better off we’ll be. But cutting trees to burn them is not a way to get there.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Scott Morrison's Climate Pact With The Pacific 'Family' Exposes The Hollowness Of His Words

The Guardian - 

One small exchange in Senate estimates has exposed the measurable gap between the prime minister’s rhetoric and actions
Scott Morrison signed a document with Pacific leaders that suggests we are as one on the climate crisis, but in reality we have very different objectives. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
I pointed out last weekend Scott Morrison spends a large proportion of his time doing two things: talking about how bad Labor is in the hope voters will conclude they made the correct choice in returning him to government in May, and trying to be relatable to people who don’t like politics and tune in as little as they have to.
As a subset of these two objectives, Morrison speaks constantly about how stable and dependable his government is (as opposed to his political opponents, who are cast as reckless and engaged in headless chookery).
In order to nail the requisite talking point, backbenchers rise loyally, one after the other, every question time, and ask the dear leader and his cabinet colleagues to explain how calm and wise the government is. Morrison has these formulations read out each sitting day by willing automatons, who periodically inject a lilt or a Pinteresque pause into their questions, like they are at a Toastmasters session at the local Rotary club.
Those of us forced to watch this pantomime daily do periodically worry this could be a plot to drive us all bonkers; to force the journalists of the Canberra press gallery to flee, screaming, from the building, leaving them to whatever they want to cook up. But in reality the government couldn’t give a stuff about us, whether we persist or whether we flee – it is speaking over our heads, to the voters.
By hammering these messages, Morrison wants one thought to penetrate the great national switch-off: he wants voters to trust him. He wants voters to believe he is a man of his word, that he means what he says, and follows through on commitments. It seems an audacious strategy for a leader in an age when people are inclined to think all politicians stink, but that’s what Morrison wants.
Trust.
With that thought in mind, it was interesting this week to watch one small exchange in Senate estimates exposing a measurable gap between the prime minister’s rhetoric and actions.
Readers will remember Morrison took some heat at the Pacific Islands Forum earlier in the year when he presented as insufficiently empathetic about the threat the climate emergency posed to the region. There were some harsh words.
But at the end of the day, despite all the thundering and virtue signalling on the greatness of coal, Australia signed on to a communique that was actually pretty forward leaning on climate change.
As I noted at the time, despite all the arm twisting in Tuvalu, Morrison did, in the end, sign up to a statement that committed Australia to pursuing efforts to limit global warming to 1.5C, and to produce a 2050 strategy by 2020 – no small things. This 2050 strategy, the statement said, “may include commitments and strategies to achieve net zero carbon by 2050”.
Navigating that harmonious landing point with Pacific leaders was, presumably, an important gesture for an Australian prime minister fond of calling his counterparts in the region “family”.
But Labor’s Senate leader, Penny Wong, during this week’s Senate estimates hearings, decided to do a little bit of due diligence about what Australia had actually signed up to at the Pacific Islands Forum, and whether we actually meant it.
With foreign affairs department officials arrayed before her, Wong asked first whether or not Australia had sought any reservations or exceptions to the PIF communique (which just means did we opt out of any part of the statement). Kathy Klugman, the official responsible for Pacific strategy, said no exceptions had been sought. When it came to the PIF communique, Australia was all in.
Having established that we were all in, Wong professed some curiosity that the Morrison government had signed a communique declaring that a “climate change crisis” was facing Pacific Island nations, when the Coalition rejects that language at home as alarmism.
Were we on board with that bit – the climate crisis? Klugman replied that Australia had signed the declaration and “we associate ourselves with all parts of it, including that part”.
Wong then asked whether the government agreed that emissions needed to be reduced to net zero by 2050 in order to achieve the goals articulated in the PIF declaration. Things then got a bit stickier.
Clare Walsh, a deputy secretary of the department, joined the conversation. Walsh noted that achieving net zero emissions by 2050 was “an aspiration by some countries”. But the Australian government had not signed on to that “in terms of its domestic application”, she said.
Wong then translated. So we’ve associated ourselves with that objective internationally in this communique, but would not take the requisite action domestically? Walsh ploughed on. She said the PIF declaration recognised the importance of that issue to the Pacific and recognised net zero by 2050 as a “commonly referenced target – but it isn’t one that Australia has signed up to domestically, no”.
Wong then wondered why Australia had signed up to a document which said pursuing global efforts to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels was “critical to the security of our Blue Pacific” when Australia’s domestic emissions reduction targets – the ones we’ve signed on to as part of the Paris agreement – were not consistent with achieving the 1.5C objective.
Was the government planning to increase the level of ambition to square those circles, Wong wondered? “There is no change to the government’s policy senator,” noted the foreign minister, Marise Payne, who was at the table.
Wong evidently thought she’d reached the moment to deliver the moral of the story.
“So we go along to the PIF and tell them we think 1.5C is important but we are not prepared to put targets on the table that are anywhere near consistent with it – just so we are clear about what we are doing,” she said.
Payne replied that Wong could “put it in those terms” but the government had been very clear it was persisting with the policies it took to the election.
So, to cut a long story short, Morrison has signed a document with Pacific leaders, with the “family”, that suggests we are as one when it comes to managing the risks of climate change, yet in reality we have very different policies, goals and objectives.
It pays to remember things like this when our prime minister asks you to trust him.

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