Organic No-till

Here are two more 2% Solutions that I wrote, one about farming and one about an olive ranch:

Organic No-Till Farming

Rodale Institute, north of Philadelphia, PA.

Many farmers consider organic no-till the ‘holy grail’ of regenerative agriculture because it combines the best of both worlds: reduced soil disturbance and no chemicals. Its development, however, came about as innovations so often do: by accident.

Conventionally, a modern farm requires a tractor and a plow in order to turn over the soil and furrow the land in preparation for seeding and fertilizing. In a no-till system, however, a farmer plants the seed directly into the soil, usually with a mechanical drill pulled behind a tractor. A thin slice is made in the soil by the drill as it moves along, but nothing resembling a furrow. The soil is not turned over and whatever is growing on the surface is largely left undisturbed. In fact, many no-till farmers plant a cover crop, usually in the fall, so that the soil will be kept cool, moist, and protected from the elements as the cash crop emerges from the ground in the spring or early summer.

One of the major disadvantages of no-till, however, is its lack of weed control. Without a plow, the weeds say ‘thank you very much’ for all that undisturbed soil and start growing vigorously, sometimes elbowing out the cash crop. To check weeds in a no-till system, many farmers apply synthetic herbicides to their fields. They’ll also spray pesticides to keep the bugs in check. Additionally, many conventional no-till farmers will use genetically-modified seeds, often in combination with chemical herbicides. All of this is verboten in an organic farming system, of course.

This is where the happy accident comes in.

One day, Jeff Moyer, the long-time Farm Director at the Rodale Institute, noticed that as he drove in and out of a field on his tractor, the wheels had crushed and killed a plant called hairy vetch along the field’s edges. Vetch is a winter-tolerant legume that organic farmers often plant as a cover crop in their fields. Seeing that the vetch was still alive where he had not driven over it, Moyer realized he had ‘crimped’ the plants with the tractor’s wheels, causing them to die without causing them to detach from the soil, as cutting or harvesting would do. This intrigued Moyer because by remaining attached the dead vetch became a type of ‘in situ’ mulch for the soil. Normally, cover crops are harvested, composted, and returned later to the field as mulch. Moyer’s accidental discovery changed this equation dramatically: he could now crimp the cover crop instead!

However, no mechanical piece of equipment existed to do this job. Jeff took the initiative and after lots of trial-and-error, he and a colleague, John Brubaker, settled on a design for what they call a roller-crimper – a hollow metal cylinder to which shallow metal ribs have been welded in a chevron design (like tractor tires). The roller-crimper is mounted in front of a tractor and as it rolls along through a field it crimps the cover crop, breaking the plant stalks and killing it. The weight of the crimper can be adjusted by adding or subtracting water into the cylinder in order to achieve the desired effect.

As developed by Moyer and others, there are four basic steps to organic no-till: (1) to protect the soil and keep down the weeds, a winter-hardy cover crop is planted in the fall, such as vetch, barley, wheat, or rye; (2) when the cover crop reaches maturity in the spring, the farmer knocks it down with a roller-crimper; (3) the farmer plants a cash crop into the crimped cover crop with a no-till drill or planter, usually at the same time (crimper in front of the tractor, drill pulled behind), and then the cash crop grows up through the crimped cover crop; (4) after harvest in the fall, the organic residue of both crops can be disked into the soil, if the farmer wants, as next year’s cover crop is planted. All together, the use of a cover crop and a roller crimper creates a dense mat of organic material on the soil surface that smothers weeds while providing nutrients, shade, and moisture to the cash crop.

Voila, the holy grail!

The many benefits include: soil is built by the decomposing cover crop; erosion is reduced substantially; nearly all annual weeds are smothered; cover crop roots increase nutrient cycling in the soil, including carbon and nitrogen; biodiversity is increased; greenhouse gas emissions are reduced; costs are low; and the roller-crimper is easy to use and maintain. Better yet, if the tractor is run on farm-produced biodiesel or pulled by horses, it eliminates dependence on fossil fuels, creating a positive energy balance.

There are downsides: cover crops are extra work and an extra cost; they require water, sometimes a lot of it (which makes the practice problematic in arid environments); perennial weeds can be a nuisance; choosing the correct cover crop for your land and matching it to the needs of the cash crop can require a lot of experimentation; rolling the crimper too early in the season can be a costly mistake if the cover crop doesn’t die completely; and like anything new, success requires lots of patience.

The advantages far outweigh the downsides, however, which is why the practice is spreading rapidly. According to Moyer, there are now hundreds of roller-crimpers at work on hundreds of farms and research stations across the nation.

There’s one more benefit: research at Rodale shows that plowing releases large amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere, adding to the planet’s greenhouse gas problem. When soil is turned over, the sudden access to oxygen speeds up the biological decomposition process, by which microbes eat up organic matter and ‘burp’ carbon dioxide into the air. In contrast, organic methods sequester carbon by improving biological life in the soil. When combined with no-till, according to data, the system has the potential to sequester 1000-2000 lbs of carbon per acre per year – pulled directly from the atmosphere.

That’s a holy grail that we can all appreciate!

Here’s a photo of a roller-crimper in action (Jeff Moyer driving):

What’s in a Olive?

McEvoy Olive Ranch, near Petaluma, northern California

Can the carbon content of soil be doubled in less than ten years? It has on McEvoy Ranch, a 500-acre organic olive Ranch, with benefits including increased soil fertility, water holding capacity, and carbon sequestration.

Settled in the mid 1800’s by Swiss Italian immigrants, the native hardwood rangelands that defined the area were well suited to small-scale dairying. In the early years, many of the abundant oaks and bays were harvested for firewood to help meet the growing demand for fuel in nearby San Francisco, and for the needs of the farm itself. Very little of the farm was actually tilled, due to the predominantly steep terrain, though hay and other field crops were grown on the more level meadow areas.

When Mrs. Nan T. McEvoy purchased the farm in 1991, the infrastructure of the dairy was rundown, but the land itself was in good shape. Abundant water, extensive stands of native perennial grasses and mature woodlands that characterize the landscape were in good condition. With a love of Italian cuisine, Mrs. McEvoy soon decided that rather than continue with livestock production, her goal would be to produce one of the finest olive oils in the world. With a commitment to not to remove any of the trees on the property, she began to plant olives on about 80 acres on the less-steep areas of the ranch.

Dr. Jeffrey Creque came to the project in 1997 to address the question of what to do with the waste products from the ranch’s new olive oil mill. With a Ph.D. in rangeland ecology and decades of experience as an organic farmer, Jeff set out to help Mrs. McEvoy accomplish her goal with a goal of his own: raise the carbon content of the soil from less than 2% to 4%.

Creque and his co-workers embarked on a soil- building strategy that included: (1) applying lots of compost, made on-farm from olive mill waste + livestock manures + landscaping debris harvested on the ranch; (2) avoidance of tillage via the maintenance of a permanent cover-crop beneath the olive trees; (3) seasonal rotational grazing of sheep through the orchard; and (4) riparian area restoration, to address downcutting gullies on the property.

Only 15-20% of an olive is oil, Jeff said, the rest is water and solids. Historically in the Mediterranean region, this organic material would accumulate at the milling site or be dumped into a nearby river or the sea – until the practice was banned in the 1970s. Today, handling and disposition of olive mill waste remains a challenge for olive oil producers. Jeff’s idea at McEvoy was simple: compost all of that material and return it to the soil of the olive orchards, increasing their fertility. In this way, a problem became a benefit.

“Olive oil is like butter,” Jeff said, “meaning it is produced from the current season’s photosynthetically-derived carbon. If the farm exports only oil, it essentially removes nothing permanently from the soil. By avoiding tillage and returning all residuals to the land, the olive oil agroecosystem takes in more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits.  Done well, olive oil production can be an essentially permanent, regenerative form of agriculture.”

Data backs him up. Dozens of soil samples are taken every year from all over the farm and sent to a laboratory for analysis. While results have shown year-to-year fluctuations in the organic matter content of the soil, due to weather and sampling variables mostly, the trend has been clear: upward. In fact, after ten years the carbon content of the soil began hovering around 4%. This means the farm is sequestering more CO₂ than it did back in 1997, it’s more productive and it’s holding more water in the soil.

Jeff doesn’t want to stop there. With the restoration of the ranch’s riparian areas, a new challenge – and carbon sequestration opportunity – has emerged: managing surplus riparian vegetation (especially willows) for compost production. As the overall productivity of the ranch has increased, the volume of carbon sequestered in standing biomass and soils, and potentially available for composting, has also increased.

“There’s no reason to think that we can’t increase soil carbon in our agricultural systems to levels above those that would occur without management,” Jeff told me. “Besides, there are no downsides to trying and lots of upsides, especially for agricultural productivity, sustainability and climate change mitigation. If we can manage our soils to store more carbon, we’ll also enable them to store more water, while reducing the volume of CO₂ in the atmosphere. That’s a BIG upside.”

Jeff notes that millions of tons of organic waste – food, grass clippings, branches, manures, – go into landfills every year across the nation. Why not compost them instead and divert them to farms and rangelands where they could provide multiple benefits? There’s a cost to hauling this material around, of course, but it could be offset by increased ecological productivity + potential carbon credits, not to mention benefits to the Earth’s climate system.

McEvoy also employs renewable wind and solar thermal energy on the farm. However, accomplishing energy self-sufficiency has proven to be more difficult to achieve than the carbon work.  “Increasing soil carbon,” Jeff said, “is relatively easy. Overcoming the bureaucratic challenges to installing sustainable energy systems has proven much more difficult.

As for the economics of it all, McEvoy olive oil and associated products (including a body care line) are high-end goods that have established themselves in the marketplace.

What’s in a little olive? A lot.

Here’s a photo of Jeff Creque and a compost pile:

 

 

2% Solutions

Mitigation or adaptation? It’s usually an either/or choice: either we work on ways to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or we find ways to adapt to new conditions created by climate change, including reducing society’s vulnerabilities and raising its resilience. Fighting to close a coal plant or developing green energy alternatives, for example, is a different job than translocating an imperiled species or planning for inevitable sea level rise. Same problem, separate responses. Different tribes. Mitigation and adaptation even have separate conferences!

Complicating matters, mitigation and adaptation strategies are often set against one another in a kind of “Sophie’s choice” of unhappy outcomes. Save the endangered desert tortoise in southern California, for instance, or allow its habitat to be destroyed by vast arrays of solar panels? Save a critical wildlife corridor or convert it to food production in order to help feed a global human population that is racing toward nine billion by 2050? Manage land inside a national park for carbon sequestration, or stick to its original leave-it-alone conservation purpose? Light a prescribed fire to restore a forest to health, adding CO2 to the atmosphere, or do nothing and hope for the best?

Mitigate or adapt? Choose!

Fortunately, there is a third path. A significant amount of overlap between mitigation and adaptation exists, especially in the realm of agro-ecology. You just don’t hear about it very often. It doesn’t get much play in the media or in big reports, such as the recently released National Climate Assessment (http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/). Even when it is mentioned it’s often in the dry jargon of research, including the frequently used term “co-benefits.” For example: mitigating atmospheric carbon dioxide by sequestering it as soil carbon via plant photosynthesis has the co-benefit of improving soil fertility and increasing water-holding capacity. Cool stuff! But that description is too wonky for a general audience and too abstract for many landowners, which is a shame because there’s a lot of good news going unreported.

To help spread this good news (as well as push back against either/or thinking, which is a particular peeve of mine) I decided to start writing a series called ’2% Solutions for Hunger, Thirst, and CO2.’ These are short case studies of innovative practices that soak up carbon dioxide in soils, reduce energy use, sustainably intensify food production, and increase water quality and quantity. The idea is that a 2% increase in soil carbon produced by only 2% of the nation’s population for 2% of the GDP can make all the difference in the world!

That’s the idea. Here are two examples, both from the dry – and getting drier –Southwest:

 ’Healing the Carbon Cycle with Cattle’

In 2004, cattle ranchers Tom and Mimi Sidwell bought the 7,000-acre JX Ranch, south of Tucumcari, New Mexico, and set about doing what they know best: earning a profit by restoring the land to health and stewarding it sustainably.

As with many ranches in the arid Southwest, the JX had been hard used over the decades. Poor land and water management had caused the grass cover to diminish in quantity and quality, exposing soil to the erosive effects of wind, rain, and sunlight, which also diminished the organic content of the soil significantly, especially its carbon. Eroded gullies had formed across the ranch, small at first, but growing larger with each thundershower, cutting down through the soft soil, biting into the land deeper, eating away at its vitality. Water tables fell correspondingly, starving plants and animals alike of precious nutrients, forage, and energy.

Profits fell too for the ranch’s previous owners. Many had followed a typical business plan: stretch the land’s ecological capacity to the breaking point, add more cattle when the economic times turned tough, and pray for rain when dry times arrived, as they always did. The result was the same: a downward spiral as the ranch crossed ecological and economic thresholds. In the case of the JX, the water, nutrient, mineral, and energy cycles unraveled across the ranch causing the land to disassemble and eventually fall apart.

Enter the Sidwells. With 30 years of experience in healing land, they saw the deteriorated condition of the JX not as a liability, but as an opportunity. Tom began by dividing the entire ranch into 16 pastures, up from the original five, using solar-powered electric fencing. After installing a water system to feed all 16 pastures, he picked cattle that could do well in dry country, grouped them into one herd and set about carefully rotating them through the pastures, never grazing a single pasture for more than 7-10 days, typically, in order to give the land plenty of recovery time. Next, he began clearing out the juniper and mesquite trees on the ranch with a bulldozer, which allowed native grasses and forbs to come back.

As grass returned – a result of the animals’ hooves breaking up the capped topsoil allowing seed-to-soil contact – Tom lengthened the period of rest between pulses of cattle grazing in each pasture from 60 days to 105 days across the whole ranch. More rest meant more grass, which meant Tom could graze more cattle – to stimulate more grass production. In fact, Tom increased the overall livestock capacity of the JX by 25% in only six years, impacting the ranch’s bottom line.

Another significant positive impact of their management was on the carbon cycle.

By growing grass on previously bare soil, by extending plant roots deeper, and by increasing plant size and vitality – all as a result of good stewardship – the Sidwells are sequestering more CO₂ in the ranch’s soil than the previous owners had. The process by which atmospheric CO₂ gets converted into soil starts with photosynthesis, which transforms sunlight into biochemical energy using CO₂ from the air and water from the soil. Then through a complex sequence of chemical reactions, this energy is resynthesized into carbon compounds, many of which are exuded directly into soil to nurture the microbes that grow plants and build healthy soil. Round and round. It’s an ancient equation: more plants mean more green leaves, which mean more roots, which mean more carbon exuded, which means more CO₂ can be sequestered in the soil, where it will stay.

In other words, if bare, degraded, or unstable land can be restored to a healthy condition with properly functioning carbon, water, mineral, and nutrient cycles and covered in green plants with deep roots, then the quantity of CO₂ that can be sequestered is potentially high.

There’s another benefit to carbon-rich soil: it improves water infiltration and storage, due to its sponge-like quality. Recent research indicates that one part carbon-rich soil can retain as much as four parts water. This has important positive consequences for the recharge of aquifers and base flows to rivers and streams, which are the life bloods of towns and cities.

It’s also important to people who make their living off the land, as Tom and Mimi Sidwell can tell you. In 2010, they were pleased to discover that a spring near their house had come back to life. For years, it had flowed at a miserly rate of ¼ gallon-per-minute, but after clearing out the juniper trees above the spring and managing the cattle for increased grass cover, the well began to pump 1.5 gallons a minute 24 hours a day!

In fact, the water cycle has improved all over the ranch, a consequence of water infiltrating down into the soil now because of the grass cover, rather than sheeting off erosively as it had before. This is good news for microbes, insects, grasses, shrubs, trees, birds, herbivores, carnivores, cattle, and people.

What the Sidwells are doing on the JX is reassembling the carbon landscape. They have reconnected soil, water, plants, sunlight, food and profit in a way that is both healing and sustainable. They did it by reviving the carbon cycle as a life-giving element on their ranch, and by returning to nature’s principles of herbivory, ecological disturbance, soil formation, microbial action, and good food. In the process, they improved the resilience of the land and their business for whatever shock or surprise the future may have in store.

 

‘Water for Bats – and Cattle’

It’s getting harder to find a good drink of water in the arid West, even if you’re a bat.

Over the course of twenty years in the field, bat biologist Dan Taylor has watched natural water sources, such as creeks and ponds, shrink and decline across the region. By some estimates 80-90% of the West’s riparian (water associated) habitats – by far the most important to wildlife – have been degraded, mostly by human activity, including a lot of overgrazing by cattle. He believes this downward trend of water availability will continue as climate change raises temperatures and alters precipitation patterns, hurting the chances of survival for wildlife and domestic livestock alike.

However, contrary to author Mark Twain’s famous quip that “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting” in the West, Taylor and his employer, Bat Conservation International, have found a way for bats and cattle to coexist in a hotter and drier West. And not only coexist – but depend on one another for survival.

Bats, like most mammals, need water everyday, especially during hot weather when they can lose 30% of their body weight in a single afternoon. Bats are the slowest-reproducing mammal on the planet for their size, averaging just one young per year, which means reducing environmental stress is critical. Bats depend on free water for their survival – they don’t get enough from the food they eat – and it must be pooled water. Bats drink on the fly and thus require a “swoop” zone, just like airplanes do at airports, of a sufficient length and free from obstacles. The depth of the pooled water isn’t important, just the access for swooping.

Which is where livestock (and humans) come in.

Hundreds of thousands of water developments for livestock have been put in place across the West since the 1950s, many in the form of stock troughs. Most, however, are not bat-friendly. Obstacles, such as wire fences and cross-braces in the swoop path can prove deadly to a bat in flight. If a bat strikes one and falls into the water it will drown without an escape ramp. Some bat species can maneuver in small spaces (e.g. 3×4 feet), but most need a pool at least ten feet long, and a few require a path 50-100 feet long (like a river or stock pond) to get a drink. Humans can enhance stock troughs for bats at minimal cost by: (1) maintaining a steady water supply (i.e., don’t turn the water off when the cows leave); (2) keeping the water’s surface as free of obstructions as possible; and (3) providing permanently installed wildlife escape ramps and ladders made from long-lasting material, such as expanded metal.

“As these livestock water developments increasingly replace or augment diminishing natural sources,” said Taylor, “they have become crucial for many species, especially when animals are stressed by drought, high temperatures or rearing young. Without reliable sources of water, wildlife must either leave or die – to the long-term detriment of rangelands and forests.”

Bats are essential both to healthy ecosystems and human economies. They pollinate plants and disperse seeds, for example. Some plants, including the wild agave, require bats for pollination and thus for reproduction. No bats, no wild tequila! Bats also eat tons and tons of night-flying insects, including beetles, moths, grasshoppers and crickets, many of which cost American agriculture billions of dollars annually, such as army cutworm moths and leafhoppers. There are forty-five bat species across the U.S., twenty-five of which are found in the Southwest. Improving their access to safe watering sources is thus critically important, especially in dry times.

This work also benefits other birds that drink in flight, including swifts, swallows and nighthawks. Pollinators of all types like pooled water too, as do many other wildlife species, from javelina to cougars. It’s not just troughs – enhancements to stock ponds are critical as well. The federally-listed Chiricahua Leopard Frog, for example, has come to depend on stock ponds for its survival in certain parts of the Southwest. Of course, enhancing this type of water is beneficial to livestock as well.

In fact, Taylor believes that well-developed stock ponds could be key to climate change adaptation for many species in the arid West.

“Stock ponds capture surface runoff and have been used to water livestock for more than a century,” Taylor said. “They’ve also become an essential source of water for countless species of western wildlife including big game, birds, bats, other small mammals, and amphibians. But many are dry or degraded today. We can restore them, but do it in such a way that we create a kind of wetland pond, which will be good for all animals.”

This restoration involves lining the bottom of the old stock pond with clay soil and compacting it, which will prevent water leakage; lessening the slopes of the pond and rebuilding spillways in order to reduce erosion and give the pond a more natural appearance; and installing large woody debris (such as logs), constructing small coves along the water’s edge, and planting native species in order to create a diverse habitat for wildlife. Fencing is modified so that cattle have access to the pond at only one point – which is hardened by gravel or other material to reduce erosion.

“The end result of these improvements is much higher quality water for livestock, more reliable water for livestock and wildlife, and the creation of high quality wetland habitat,” said Taylor. “It’s a classic win-win, especially as these areas get hotter and drier under climate change.”

For more 2% Solutions see: http://www.awestthatworks.com/ Or: http://www.carbonranching.org/Solutions.html

I’m writing more – and I’ll post them here as they arrive.

Here’s a preview:

 

 

Tweak or Transformation?

“There are no experts.”

This was my biggest take-away message from the inaugural National Adaptation Forum, held in Denver recently. Although it was my second major climate change adaptation conference in three weeks, I wasn’t sure what to expect. In Europe, there’s no need to whisper the words “climate change” in large gatherings for fear of offending someone, but America is different. Would people even attend a three-day conference on adaptation? And what would the presenters talk about in the sessions? I jumped into a rental car and drove to Denver to find out.

The Forum’s organizers were curious too – to the point of being fretful. One organizer told the large crowd that filled the hotel ballroom on the opening day that registrations lagged so badly that one point she worried that the conference would be a failure. Then a last-minute rush of sign-ups occurred and suddenly the event was sold out! Over 500 people were in attendance, she said, with many more people on a waiting list. The excitement and relief in her voice were palpable (emotions I know well from hosting our own big conference). It reminded me of a satirical Onion piece titled: Owner of Children’s Hospital Thrilled That Every Bed Is Full! Welcome to the first-ever national conference on how bad things are getting out there! We’re thrilled you’re here to share your adaptation anxieties and tales of woe!

When it comes to climate change, we want the beds to be empty, not full. Alas, the beds are filling up fast, as I heard over and over.

What is adaptation anyway? One speaker usefully described it as a type of first responder – i.e., individuals, groups, communities, and cities who see the early effects of a warming world, sense an emergency in the making, and are taking action. First responders aren’t particularly interested in why the emergency happened. Their job is to deliver aid, fix things that are broken, troubleshoot, and deal with the mess generally. Many of the presenters at the Forum, for example, accept the inevitability of sea level rise and reported on a variety of plans by cities to adapt to the situation, however incrementally. Other speakers discussed faster-acting effects of climate change, particularly on plants and animals. Heat-induced stress or a lack of food brought on by drought conditions are beginning to impact a wide variety of species, they reported. In these cases, triage might be an appropriate metaphor.

Which raised a question in my mind: are we first responders to a roadside accident or a battlefield? Both, I learned. Accidents are happening now, but battlefields are coming. And it was made very clear that if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t curbed soon we are all going to be living in battlefields of large proportions.

In other words, the effects of climate change are both acute and chronic, requiring different sorts of adaptation responses. On the acute side of the spectrum are: hotter weather, bigger storms, and more frost-free days. Triage here includes: maintaining human well-being day-to-day, dealing with natural disasters, repairing infrastructure, adjusting to distorted rhythms of nature and coping with the cost of it all. On the chronic side are: drought, sea level rise, acidifying oceans, rising risks of wildfire and disease outbreaks, and reduced values associated with nature. Adapting to these latter challenges is much more complex, partly because they are so unprecedented. An acidifying ocean? What’s the proper adaptation to that?

Adaptation is hard even when solutions are present. Translocation, for example. I attended a session that focused on the practice of moving animal species from one habitat to another in order to boost their chances of survival. It’s been done before, mostly with birds, including the endangered California condor, which had a population successfully translocated to southern Utah. Under climate change, however, the complicated job of introducing plants and animals to new habitats will grow long, daunting, and pressing. And that doesn’t even touch the moral quagmire of deciding which animal ‘gets on the ark’ and which stays behind. Talk about triage!

Sometimes, adaptation means coping with loss. I listened to a heart-breaking presentation by a member of the Snohomish tribe, many of whom live on a low-lying island northwest of Seattle. Storm surge and sea level rise threaten the existence of the island’s oyster and clam beds, which are a vital source of physical and spiritual sustenance to tribal members. Translocation isn’t an option for the shellfish (to where?), which means that sooner or later the tribe will have to make do without this critical resource. The speaker’s voice cracked as he described the oysters’ eventual demise, reminding his listeners that adaptation is as much about responsibility as it is about vulnerability.

Speaking of food, I didn’t see a single cowboy hat in the course of the three days. Worse, out of 100+ individual concurrent sessions, only one focused on agriculture – and it had only a dozen participants. During an evening plenary session, I stood up and told the audience that first responders need to think about farmers and ranchers too.

Although there was a great deal of talk about risk, vulnerability, resilience, planning and stress during the conference, by the end I had the distinct impression that we are very ill-prepared for the messy battlefield ahead. “There are no experts,” was a common refrain during the conference. We’re in uncharted water, dealing with unprecedented conditions, and trying to imagine the unimaginable. In engineering terms, we’ve left “stationarity” behind – which is the assumption that natural systems fluctuate within an unchanging envelope of variability. In other words, we can no longer use historic experience to plan for future scenarios. The term “100-year flood,” for instance, doesn’t mean what it used to. Instead of stationarity, we need a new paradigm that emphasizes flexibility in management practices and legal processes. We’ll need a new type of first responder too.

That’s why it wasn’t a coincidence that the formation of a new organization was announced at the Forum. It’s called the American Association of Adaptation Professionals. I bet its ranks will fill quickly.

They’ll have an important question to answer: tweak or transformation?

In most of the sessions, the speakers pitched only tweaks to the Status Quo – a water conservation plan here, a ‘green’ building there, a research study in this place, a task force in that place. Representatives from major cities especially seemed reluctant propose any sort of major overhaul of Business-as-Usual despite, say, the inevitability of substantial sea level rise. It was good and important that the crisis was acknowledged by the speakers, and everyone seemed quite earnest in their concern, but most of their adaptation strategies fell short of the mark, in my opinion. In contrast, a few speakers and audience members argued that only transformational change – how we live, where we get our food and water, what type of energy we use – would adequately prepare us for the challenges ahead. In one session, a listener grew agitated at what he considered to be a band-aid approach to the developing catastrophe. “Without wholesale change,” he said, “we’re just fooling ourselves into a false sense of security.”

I agree. But how? And who do we trust to lead the way? Tweaks are necessary in the short run, as the effects of climate change begin to bite down, but ultimately we must challenge fundamental assumptions about our lives – before they’re made for us. We’re leaving stationarity behind in more ways than one, whether we like it or not, and that means we’re all first responders now.

Here’s a humorous image from a presentation by one of the speakers on drought:

 

By the way, everyone should read the new National Climate Assessment. It’s a congressionally-mandated, federally-directed scientific analysis of the extent and impacts of global warming on the United States. See http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/

Here is quick summary of its Findings:

(1) Global climate is changing and this is apparent across the U.S. in a wide range of observations. The climate change of the past 50 years is due primarily to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels. Some extreme weather and climate events have increased in recent decades, and there is new and stronger evidence that many of these increases are related to human activities. Human-induced climate change is projected to continue and accelerate significantly if emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to increase.

(2) Impacts related to climate change are already evident in many sectors and are expected to become increasingly challenging across the nation throughout this century and beyond. Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including impacts from increased extreme weather events, wildfire, decreased air quality, diseases transmitted by insects, and threats to mental health. Infrastructure across the U.S. is being adversely affected, reliability of water supplies is being reduced, and adverse impacts to crops and livestock over the next 100 years is expected.

(3) Natural ecosystems are being directly affected by climate change, including changes in biodiversity and location of species. As a result, the capacity of ecosystems to moderate the consequences of disturbances such as droughts, floods, and severe storms is being diminished. Life in the oceans is changing as ocean waters become warmer and more acidic.

Continued warming and an increased understanding of the U.S. temperature record, as well as other multiple sources of evidence, have strengthened our confidence in the conclusions that the warming trend is clear and primarily the result of human activities. Heavy precipitation and extreme heat events are increasing in a manner consistent with model projections; the risks of such extreme events will rise in the future.

Carbon dioxide is not reactive, so it does not have a “lifetime.” It persists in the atmosphere until it is absorbed by the oceans or taken up as part of the carbon cycle. About half the CO2 emitted at any one time is removed from the atmosphere in a century. However, around 20% continue to circulate for thousands of years. Stabilizing or reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, therefore, requires very deep reductions in future emissions to compensate for past emissions that are still circulating in the Earth system.

“The amount of warming over the next few decades is projected to be similar regardless of emissions scenario.”

Sounds like job security for Adaptation Professionals!

It’s not all gloomy news, as I’ll to explain in the next post. There are things we can do in the short run that have substantial co-benefits for all living things.

But we should be careful as well about the opposite of gloomy: overconfidence. We can’t sit around waiting for technology to ride to our rescue. Nor can we rely on precedent and instinct to get us through, as it has in the past. We need to be careful. Here’s why:

The Other Job

This is a blog about carbon, and by extension climate change mitigation, but there’s another big job that’s rising fast on a lot of people’s To Do lists. It’s called adaptation, and suddenly everyone’s talking about it – for good reason as I learned last week. And the reason is this: the future is now. Climate-related changes are bearing down on us faster than many scientists expected, requiring action by individuals, communities, cities, and nations to reduce their effects. Inaction (like so much else connected to climate change) will only magnify the challenges, making them much harder to solve later.

In other words, our collective To Do list just got a lot longer.

Before I explain what I learned, however, I want to back up for a moment and review the overall troika of action required by climate change: (1) Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale; (2) Mitigation of atmospheric greenhouse gases through strategies that capture and store them long-term; and (3) Adaptation to ongoing effects of climate change as well as planning for new or increased effects in the future. Of the three, reducing emissions is by far and away the most critical. If the arrow of greenhouse gas production doesn’t turn downward, then we’re ultimately spitting into a hot, dry wind. However, as a result of decades of inaction by polluting nations, the other two strategies are rising in necessity as well. We need mitigation in order to soak up as much excess pollution as possible, as I’ve tried to describe here, but we need to adapt to changing conditions too – and quickly. Look at what hit the U.S. in 2012, for example, or Australia’s just concluded record-breaking heat and floods, dubbed the Angry Summer by the government. As I said, the future is now.

Just how now hit home over the course of three days in Hamburg, Germany, last week when I attended the European Climate Change Adaptation Conference. I and 700 others, mostly researchers, heard report after report about how the social and environmental stresses caused by climate change are bearing down across the globe right now. We also heard about the significant planning and other actions taking place in response to these stresses. In fact, I was very impressed by all the work going on worldwide.

The conference was dominated by scientific research on adaptation, and many of the 20-minute papers were delivered by professors or grad students, but there were a number of non-academic perspectives as well, including some from nonprofit organizations. It was clear that the various challenges posed by adaptation are complex, costly, and pressing. And it’s way too early to know if any particular effort will be sufficient in the long run (much depends on the reduction of greenhouse gases). But one thing was clear: this topic is rising fast.

I learned that all nations in European Union have created, or are creating, national Adaptation Strategy plans and on April 29^th, the European Union itself will release its long-awaited continent-wide Adaptation Strategy, which will drive many policy decisions and most of the funding connected to climate change planning among EU members.

What the planners said they need most from researchers is what they called “fit-for-purpose” data, meaning they need to know about risk, vulnerabilities, and possible scenarios as localized as possible so they can ‘fit’ it to their needs. There was a general lament that this information is not available yet in sufficient amounts for city leaders, policy makers and others to make firm plans about adaptation. Models are fine, they said, but we need to know about the real risks. This is a huge need and it is driving much of the research work underway right now. Flood planning, for example, due to rising sea levels and intensifying storms is a major area of research.

The #1 job of adaptation research, I learned, is to reduce uncertainty – i.e., what are the range of impacts to be expected? What exposures and disruptions might we expect? And perhaps most importantly, what adaptation means under rising global temperature scenarios: 2 degrees Celsius? 3 C? 4 C? 5 C? What do these numbers mean for heat, precipitation, floods, etc?

This issue struck home in a graphic provided by Michael Morecroft, of Natural England, in his talk. It showed an arrow, running left to right, through a list of global temperatures: 1 C, 2 C, 3C, 4 C, 5 C. Beneath the 1 C and 2 C part of the arrow was the word Resilience. Below 3 C and 4 C was the word Accommodation. And below the 4 C and 5 C part of the arrow was the word Transformation. His point was this: we can do resilience until temps reach 2 C – meaning we can try to ‘bounce back’ to conditions that we consider relatively normal. After 2 C, however, we must accommodate ourselves to a changing world. After 4 C, the world will be transformed into something else altogether.

His point is that adaptation right now is largely about maintaining the resilience of a system. The planet has warmed a little less than 1 C to date, with another 1 C on the way. Adaptation planning, he said, should focus on this 1-2 C scenario while we redouble our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Beyond 2 C, however, adaptation means something else. What that is exactly, scientists don’t know yet, he said. He also said that mitigation takes longer than people expect, research is showing. That’s why an emphasis on adaptation in the short run is so important.

Here’s a PDF of a paper by Morecroft et al on this topic: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02136.x/pdf

 As an illustration, here’s a photo of heat in Australia recently:

I learned also that case studies are critically important to planners. It helps them understand the issue of adaptation in real terms. Copenhagen, for example, has embarked on an ambitious plan to become a major “Blue-Green city” down to the household level, including ideas like placing washing machines on top of toilets to recycle water.

Here are a few others that I heard:

• Dislocation (Taiwan). Climate change is predicted to dislocate large numbers of people, including whole villages. Challenges include: no legal authority; few precedents; insufficient funding; unanticipated consequences; unrealistic expectations; no guidelines; lots of disagreement; underestimated costs; social and economic stress; social justice questions; and what if villagers refuse to move? On the other hand, disruption could be balanced by innovation as creative minds work together to solve problems.

• Australia’s Angry Summer. 123 records were broken in 90 days (heat & floods); incidents of domestic violence and homelessness spiked; charismatic leadership made a big difference in the quality of the adaptive response and the degree to which suffering was reduced; new funding sources are required for this type of emergency; it brought home the critical need to move from emergency response to long-term adaptation planning; at the same time, ‘climate fatigue’ is settling in, Australians are getting tired of hearing about climate change all the time and wish the topic would just “go away.”

• The Role of New Technology (Austria). Researchers are trying to determine what types of technology can help cities adapt to climate change (software and hardware). Is it more useful to look at high tech, or low tech solutions?

• Flooding and Erosion (Nigeria). Intense storms are causing gullying and other types of severe erosion in villages and fields in rural Nigeria. The photos were amazing. The speaker advocated for a return to ‘traditional knowledge’ practices in response to this situation.

• Adjusting Agricultural Practices (Ecuador). Farmers in a highland village are seeing climate change affect them via higher temperatures, more extreme weather, increased seasonal variability; and prolonged drought, all of which expose vulnerabilities. Effects include: increased (and new) pest attacks, water scarcity, heat stress on plants and farmers, increased erosion, deteriorating fieldwork conditions, seed storage loss, rot, plant dessication, and poor animal performance. Solutions include: increased use of pesticides, earlier harvest dates, development of new water sources, buying seeds from corporations, moving farm fields to higher elevations, planting more drought-tolerant plant species, moving planting dates.

• Coastal Defense (Germany). The term “coastal defense” has a very different meaning today under climate change than it did in the past. Hamburg in particular is worried about sea level rise and flooding from storms. It is the second busiest port in the world, after Shaghai, and it is actively engaged in climate change adaptation planning in this regard.

Finally, there was a great deal of discussion during the conference on how to put research into practice. It was one thing to create ‘models of vulnerability,’ as many scientists have done, and quite another to translate them into plans of action. People want (and need) to make informed decisions, especially since adaptation can be so expensive to do, but getting useful information into the hands of implementers and regular folk has been slow to date. Local governments are on the front lines, but they often don’t know what to do. Scientists can help by making a range of options available to local leaders, who then have to sell the options to a reluctant and skeptical citizenry. It’s a difficult but urgent task.

As one speaker put it: “People want to live normal lives, they don’t feel responsible for the problem, they’ve not been well led, and they’re generally ignorant of the seriousness of the problem that’s approaching. Research can help will all of these areas.”

But time is getting short. The effects of climate change are happening faster than anyone really expected. One conference organizer said: “This conference would not have happened even five years ago.” The urgency is real, but so are the efforts of a great deal of people. Clearly, a lot of important work is underway and I was impressed by the seriousness and dedication of all the speakers.

Here’s a photo of an Ecuador farmer (courtesy of National Geographic):

A Carbon Sweet Spot

For a minute, I thought I had stepped into that scene from Lawrence of Arabia where T.E. Lawrence, approaching the Suez Canal, sees a ship sailing across the sand. Only I saw it in a farm field with cattle.

I had parked on a levee at the north end of Twitchell Island, in the middle of the great Sacramento-San Joaquin river Delta, east of San Francisco. In front of me was prime farmland – a busy mosaic of pasture land and row crops as far as the eye could see – and just beyond a slight rise in the distance I saw a big cargo tanker plowing its way slowly across the farm field. Of course, it was plowing the middle of the San Joaquin River instead.

Like the ship in Lawrence, there was a great deal of symbolism in that image, including what it said about human industriousness. I didn’t drive all the way out to Twitchell Island, however, to park on a levee and muse on Progress – I went there to see a fascinating carbon experiment.

Once upon a time, the Delta was a vast freshwater marsh thick with tule reeds, cattails, and abundant wildlife. At least six thousand years old, the marsh caught sediment that washed down annually from the Sierra Nevadas, building up soil that eventually extended sixty feet deep in places. And what soil it was! When the delta began to be settled in the 1860s following John Marshall’s famous gold strike on the South Fork of the American River, the farmers couldn’t believe their luck. Since the soil had been often submerged, a consequence of flat terrain, frequent flooding, and tidal action, it had essentially become peat, rich in carbon and other organic minerals. Crops grew quickly and vigorously in this rich soil, and its owners grew equally rich. Soon, a new gold rush was on – to claim land in the Delta, drain it, and grow row crops by the bushel-load.

Here’s a photo of the Delta today:

Fast-forward to today, and the Delta is in big trouble. Innumerable dikes, ditches, and levees have broken up the marsh into 57 separate islands, 98% of which are now below sea level. Pumps work continuously to keep the roots of the crops dry enough to grow. Salt intrusion from the Bay is creeping inland, threatening not only the crops but the drinking water supply for two-thirds of all Californians and much of its agriculture in the Central Valley. Not many people know that California is a vast plumbing project, cris-crossed by a complex network of canals, ditches, water pipes, and pumping stations – and most of the water in this plumbing system has its origin in the southern part of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. That means keeping saltwater away from these metal ‘straws’ is of paramount importance.

However, the islands are sinking, sea level is rising, and the 1100 miles of levees that protect it all are feeling the stress, literally. It’s called ‘subsidence’ and it places tremendous hydrostatic pressure on the levees, requiring that they be constantly raised and endlessly maintained – creating perpetual anxiety. What if a California-like earthquake struck the region? What if the levees were breached by a massive flood? What if salt water poured through, ruining crops and drinking supplies?

It’s the sort of scenario that keeps water managers up at night.

In an attempt to alleviate these worries, in 1997 a group of scientists with the U.S. Geological Service in Sacramento came up with a novel idea: employ nature, not technology, to reverse the subsidence. Here was their bright idea in a nutshell: when the early farmers drained and ditched the Delta, they exposed the peat soil to the atmosphere, causing the organic material – previously under water – to oxidize rapidly. The carbon in the soil literally blew away (adding to the CO2 load in the atmosphere, by the way), causing the land to compact and subside over time. That’s how the islands ended up below sea level – as much as 25 feet in some places! The scientists wondered: could this process be reversed? In other words, could the land be built back up if the marsh ecology, including periodic flooding, could be resurrected?

To find out, the scientists implemented an experiment on two 7-acre, side-by-side plots of farmland adjacent to a ditch that bisected Twitchell Island. They flooded the western plot to a depth of 25cm, and the eastern plot to 55cm. Tules were planted in a small portion of both plots. By the end of the first growing season, cattails had colonized both plots (the seeds arriving on the wind), which provided a screen for other plants, including duckweed and mosquito fern. Then things really took off. After just a few short years, the western plot had developed a dense canopy of marsh plants, as did the eastern plot, though it maintained some open water.

Then they took measurements of the soil. Peat is formed in an anaerobic (oxygen-less) environment – i.e., underwater – which means not all the plant material is “eaten up” by soil microbes. Some stays in place. A lot, in fact. The scientists were amazed to discover that after seven years the soil in both plots had risen 10 inches, the result of 15 tons of plant material growing and dying per acre per year, according to a report that I read. This answered their question: subsidence could be reversed by returning natural marsh processes to the land, quickly too. Here’s how one scientist put it: “Our results show that restored non-tidal, impounded wetlands with managed hydrology can produce large short-term rates of land-surface elevation gain.”

But the good news was just beginning. The researchers next tested the amount of CO2 that had been sequestered in this new soil as a result of their experiment. They suspected that 10 inches of dense, carbon-rich peat soil likely soaked up a lot of atmospheric CO2 – and they were right. In fact, as much as 25 metric tons per acre per year were sequestered in the study plots, according to their analysis. In comparison, a typical passenger vehicle emits 5 metric tons of CO2 per year. So, the fourteen acres in the study plots sequestered the equivalent emissions of 70 passenger vehicles per year! And that doesn’t even count the CO2 emissions eliminated by not farming the land. And that doesn’t count all the other ecosystem services generated by a functioning marsh, including water purification and wildlife habitat.

Of course, there are a lot of “what ifs” raised by this project, including a big one: why would a farmer trade profit-making farmland for a “valueless” marsh? The quick answer is: pay him or her to sequester CO2 instead. The researchers called what they did a “carbon-capture farm” and hoped that the project would demonstrate that it is highly feasible to use managed wetlands to sequester carbon and reduce subsidence at the same time. The key word is managed, which raised another big “what if.” As a USGS briefing paper said in a typically understated way: “Large scale efforts to manage the environment have a decidedly mixed record of success.”

The results of this project are also likely limited to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which is a phenomenally productive patch of the planet, requiring that inferences to other locations be made carefully. Nevertheless, it is a very good example of a “sweet spot” – a place where one can get a huge carbon return for a small investment. For example, the Twitchell Island project (1) reversed subsidence; (2) reduced the risk of levee failure; (3) demonstrated carbon sequestration; (4) provided wildlife habitat, especially for birds on the Pacific flyway; and (5) pointed the way for significant economic returns to the private landowner by growing carbon. If we can figure out a mechanism by which a landowner could be paid for doing this things, rather than paid to continue depleting the land of its carbon, then we could be looking at a whole different type of economy.

Right now, however, that sort of economy is a mirage, though perhaps no more so than a ship sailing across a farm field.

Here’s a dramatic photo of a Twitchell study plot:

The Third Option

Is there another way?

My trip to California last month raised in my mind once more the Gordian Knot of our times: how to incentivize the marketplace to respond to the climate crisis.

The European Union, Australia, and California have all implemented some version of a cap-and-trade program in an attempt to kickstart market forces in the service of carbon pollution reduction; and way back in 2009 Congress briefly considered national legislation to do the same. I’m not an expert, and I won’t go into the details, but I can say that cap-and-trade was sold to the public as a preferable alternative to what has become a modern-day bogeyman: unilateral government regulation. If the voluntary free market can’t lower greenhouse gas emissions, it’s argued, then sooner or later they’ll be reduced involuntarily. In fact, this latter approach is under consideration by the Obama administration, which was given the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act by the U.S. Supreme Court. Will Obama, or won’t Obama? No one knows for sure.

Whatever the administration decides to do, I’m certain it won’t be enough, especially if the President approves the Keystone pipeline. Even with mild regulation and modest targets, American greenhouse gas emissions won’t decline meaningfully – nor are such actions likely to inspire other governments. The cap-and-trade approach, however, isn’t doing enough either. This week scientists announced that carbon dioxide levels rose by 2.67 parts per million in 2012 to just under 395 ppm – the second highest annual rise since Dr. Keeling began keeping his famous record in the late 1950s. From 2000 to 2010, the yearly rise averaged just under 2 ppm, and in the 1960s it rose by less than 1 ppm per year. In other words, the rate of rise is speeding up. Whatever we’re doing to slow climate change, it isn’t working.

Of course, this is exactly what critics said would happen, including NASA’s James Hansen, the nation’s top climatologist. Hansen thinks cap-and-trade is a shell game designed largely to enrich middlemen at the expense of ordinary citizens without the possibility of meaningful reductions in emissions. During a public appearance last December at the Commonwealth Club in California, he called the state’s program “half-assed.” While praising the state’s leaders for understanding the danger posed by the climate crisis, he admitted he was “very disappointed when they choose a half-baked system like cap-and-trade with offsets.” Offsets allow industry to meet emissions “caps” by purchasing credits on the market. “That’s been tried in Europe and it didn’t do much,” Hansen told the audience. “What you want is a system which is very simple.”

Does such a system exist? Yes, in theory. Dr. Hansen certainly thinks so. He has been pushing a third option that features (1) a direct tax on the sources of carbon pollution; (2) a slow but steady rise in this tax over time; and (3) a redistribution of the revenue raised by this tax evenly among every adult American. He argues that a rising tax would force markets to respond with innovation, and higher prices for fossil fuels, as well as the cash citizens could potentially put in their pockets from an annual dividend, would incentivize people to reduce their use of dirty energy or seek clean alternatives. It’s an intriguing idea, and Dr. Hansen has been pushing it for a while now (see his testimony to Congress in 2009: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2009/WaysAndMeans_20090225.pdf). However, I always assumed it would never see the light of day in Washington despite its obvious merits (obvious to me, anyway).

Then came the news in mid-February that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and California Senator Barbara Boxer had introduced legislation to do something similar to what Dr. Hansen had been advocating. Called the Climate Protection Act, the bill would impose a carbon fee of $20 a ton on carbon, rising by 5% per year for ten years, and apply to thousands of oil refineries, coal mines, ports, and other sources of hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, 60% of the revenue raised by the fee would be returned to all U.S. residents ala the Alaskan model that pays a dividend to its citizens from oil royalties gathered by the government (a big part of the other 40% would disappear into the black hole of trying to “pay down the national debt,” alas). The bill has other notable goals – and some shortcomings, according to carbon tax advocates. Check it out for yourself: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/0121413-ClimateProtectionAct.pdf

The chances of this bill passing in Congress, naturally, are nil. Republicans won’t give it a second thought, but most Democrats won’t consider it either. Cap-and-trade is as far as most of them are willing to go, despite the mounting evidence it won’t get the job done. Still, at least a high-profile third choice has been proposed – and that’s a hopeful sign. There is another way.

Here are Senators Sanders and Boxer introducing their bill:

Unfortunately, the hopefulness embodied in the Sanders-Boxer bill was largely dissipated last week when the State Department issued a draft environmental impact statement that said the Keystone pipeline would have minimal impact on climate change. This isn’t what scientists have said, and it appears to contradict President Obama’s pledge in his State of the Union address to take action. “I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change,” he said. “But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

Squaring these words with approval of Keystone isn’t possible, I think. But I’m no expert. Instead, I’ll turn someone who is: Dr. Hansen. Here is an op-ed that he authored last summer on the danger poised by Canada’s tar sands. It explains our predicament far better than I can. It’s worth reading again.

 Game Over / James Hansen

“Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.

We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.

But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.

The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.”

Here is a photo of tar sand:

Hot Carbon

Carbon is hot.

This was the main message of a conference on climate change and agriculture that I attended last week in Davis, California. Everyone was talking about carbon, either as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or soil carbon below our feet. Farmers, scientists, policy-wonks, regulators, graduate students, activists and many others all had something to say about carbon. Mitigation, adaptation, sequestration, cycling, credits, services, allowances, plant productivity, scientific inquiry, data – you name it and carbon was there. By the end of the one-day event, I was soaked in carbon. Luckily, I had left my rental car back at the hotel, necessitating a long walk across campus. By the time I reached my room, I had cleared my head of carbon thoughts.

It wasn’t this way two years ago while attending a similar event in exactly the same venue. Both events were organized by the California Climate & Agriculture Network (CalCAN), which is a nonprofit dedicated to making sure sustainable ag has a seat at the carbon table in policy debates. Some years ago, the California legislature passed, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed, a bill creating a process by which a cap-and-trade system would be established in the state. The bill then had to run a gauntlet of legal and electoral challenges, but it emerged intact. The process was completed last fall when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that officially implemented a cap-and-trade market.

Last Tuesday, California held its second-ever carbon emissions auction (by which companies can buy allowances that keep their pollution levels under specific caps) and it was a big success. Not only were all credits sold – all thirteen million of them – but the price per credit was nearly $14, which was considerably higher than experts predicted. The money raised by the auction will be used by the state in a variety of ways, including paying farmers and ranchers to sequester carbon in the soil of their land. That’s the hope of CalCAN anyway, which is fighting to make sure good stewards get a piece of the carbon pie.

According to a representative of the Environmental Defense Fund, which is following this cap-and-trade business closely, the auction demonstrates that California is “a strong and viable carbon market.” Naturally, the California Chamber of Commerce disagrees – and continues to pursue a lawsuit against the state over the auction – indicating that the process is not out of the woods just yet. Still, California has the potential to become the second largest carbon marketplace on the planet, behind one set up by the European Union.

I’ll come back to cap-and-trade in a moment, but first I want to return to the conference. Despite the good news, there was a palpable sense of urgency to this gathering that I didn’t detect two years ago. For example, an organizer asked the opening panel of farmers to relate how climate change was already affecting their lives – something I don’t remember her doing before. The farmers quickly rattled off a laundry list of anxiety, from reduced water availability, increased temperatures, trouble with pollinators, and declining productivity. Audience members then pitched in with their observations – and thirty minutes later I felt pretty overwhelmed. The challenges cataloged by the speakers were serious and complex – and proliferating. I hadn’t quite realized the extent of the concern, but now I did.

But that’s why we had gathered together, and why the room was full – we were here to talk about adaptation to a rapidly changing world. Two years ago, the talk was mostly about mitigation, or how we can slow climate change with certain practices and behaviors, such as storing carbon in the soil. Two years ago, presentations by speakers, and conservations during the breaks, still largely employed the future tense when discussing climate effects. Changes were still abstract – time was still on our side. Not anymore.

Take stone fruits, for example, which include apricots, cherries, and even walnuts. A bountiful harvest requires at least 1000 hours of ‘chilling time’ during the winter, when temperatures drop below 40 degrees. I don’t understand the biology, but apparently if fruit trees don’t achieve the proper amount of chill hours they won’t produce quality fruit. You can guess the rest – the number of warm winter nights is on the rise, and predicted to keep rising. The minimum number of chill hours were barely achieved this winter, said a presenter. The stone fruit industry, as a result, is beginning to feel a sense of panic.

They aren’t the only ones – which is why there was so much talk about carbon: how to repair a broken carbon cycle, how to improve the carbon content of the soil, how to get farmers paid for carbon credits, and so on. It was both fascinating to hear and chilling to contemplate, pun intended.

Here’s a picture of good-looking apricots:

If carbon is hot, I’m not so certain about the carbon marketplace.

In Europe, the price of carbon has collapsed, prompting a crisis that still unfolding as I write this. In January, the trading price for a tonne (European) of carbon fell below $6 (E5) for the first time, having fallen 70% in value since mid-2011. In business circles this is apparently called a “rout” and it signals a collapse in market confidence as well as market price – all bad stuff for a market that has been operating for more than a decade, with a ripple effect that is being felt around the world.

The reasons for the collapse in Europe include weak demand, a still-stuttering economy, a glut of already purchased carbon credits, and – most ominously – a slackening of will among European governments to enforce a reduction of fossil fuel use. In fact, fossil fuel consumption is on the rise in Europe, and there are plans to build new, big coal-fired electrical generating plants. A decision by Germany recently to phase out nuclear power is apparently influencing the return to carbon-based power generation, despite the rapid rise in renewable energy production in a nation known for its gray, cloudy skies.

It gets worse. According to a news report, the Swiss banking giant UBS warned last fall that European consumers had spent $287 billion on the carbon market “for almost zero impact.” Had that money been spent directly to replace the European Union’s dirtiest power plants, UBS said, emissions could have been reduced by 43 per cent by now.

The collapse of the European market is also putting a great deal of pressure on the other new carbon marketplace, in Australia, where the government promised a price of $23 a tonne to buyers and sellers. Moreover, this price is supposed to rise to $37 in just a few years – a promise that is beginning to look shaky. This uneasy situation is fueling political opponents who have vowed to repeal Australia’s carbon tax the minute they get their hands on the reins of government, which might happen this fall.

Watching from the sidelines is China, which is said to be considering a cap-and-trade marketplace of its own. As the Number One carbon polluter on the planet, what the Chinese do – or don’t do – has a tremendous amount of significance for all of us. Of course, another player watching the developments in Europe nervously is California. The success of its recent carbon auction could quickly be reversed if the global market for carbon credits collapses.

Mindful of these implications, the European Parliament is weighing a critical vote on whether to salvage the EU’s carbon market with emergency measures. Mark Nicholls, editor of Environmental Finance Magazine, says a great deal is riding on the vote. “There’s lots of interest in emissions trading as a solution to climate change,” he said, “but if the EU’s system is seen to be collapsing, it could damage the credibility of the approach.”

Complicating the issue is the lack of an international agreement on greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, which many in Europe had assumed would be in place by now. An agreement, in fact, was key to the creation of the EU market in the first place (and possibly California’s as well). By having definite emission targets, markets would know the necessary goals to be achieved and could have responded accordingly. But no agreement has been achieved, of course – and none looms on the horizon. This has roiled the carbon marketplace, helping to drive down the price of carbon to crisis levels.

It’s all very complicated. Still, California is surging ahead and so far the signals appear to be good ones. What happens over the course of the next year, however, will be crucial, and not just to California.

In the meantime, let’s keep talking carbon!

Here’s a picture of solar panels at the Vatican:

Life is a Force

If the origin of life on Earth is a mystery wrapped inside a black box, then so is the great explosion of life that happened during the Cambrian period, beginning 540 million years ago, when carbon went wild.

Nearly four billion years after Earth’s formation, life was still mostly bacteria, plankton, and algae. Complex, multi-celled organisms developed only 600 million years before today, during the Precambrian period, just as the planet emerged from a long period of intense glaciation (Ice Age). A mini-explosion of life swiftly followed, including the appearance of soft-shelled tubular and frond-shaped organisms, all of which lived in the sea. Although it is not clear to scientists what caused this mini-explosion, it is probably not a coincidence that it occurred as a massive supercontinent called Rodinia began to break up, likely causing temperatures on the seafloor to warm.

Whatever the reason, it was just the opening act to the Main Show.

Early on, geologists recognized that the sudden appearance of complex animals with mineralized skeletons in the fossil record of the Cambrian period represented a ‘explosion’ of life. Further research revealed it to be a biological eruption of extraordinary diversity and quantity (“radiation” is the scientific term). All major animal body plans and most of the major animal groups that we know today (i.e., every extant phylum) appeared during this unprecedented event. To many scientists, it was the most important evolutionary transformation in the history of life on Earth, which is why it is sometimes called the “biological Big Bang.” Of course, this event didn’t take place overnight – ten million years is more accurate – but in geological terms it was still a blink-of-the-eye. And it was never repeated again on this scale.

The creatures that came into existence during the Cambrian Period were relatively small, widely dispersed and entirely aquatic. Thanks to their reproduction in school books, the exotic shapes of these creatures are familiar to us, including brachiopods, with their clam-like shells, trilobites, which were armored arthropods, early mollusks and beautiful echinoderms, known today as starfish. Despite their proliferation, however, many Cambrian creatures eventually went extinct, including the exotic Opabinia, which had five eyes and a nose like a fire hose, and Wiwaxia, an armored slug with two rows of upright scales.

Along with all this biological diversity came a radical new ecological development: predation. The fossil record clearly shows that some creatures were hunters and some were prey – a development that had profound evolutionary consequences for life from this point forward. Ecosystems became much more complex as a result and many animals moved (or were chased) into a variety of new marine habitats. Soon, Cambrian seas teemed with animal life of various sizes, shapes, and ecologies; some lived on the sea floor, while others swam around in the water. By the end of the period, a few animals had also made revolutionary (and temporary) first forays onto land, soon to be followed by plants, changing life on Earth profoundly once again.

All of this was a great worry to Charles Darwin, who fretted that his theory of evolution, which postulated a steady, gradual process of change over the eons, would be attacked by religious critics who believed that such an explosion of life was indisputable evidence of God’s hand at work – a belief that persists to this day. Darwin assumed the answer to his concern lay in the sketchy Precambrian fossil record (soft-shelled creatures make poor fossils). He hoped new discoveries would eventually support his theory – which has more or less happened. Meanwhile, a theory of rapid, or ‘punctuated,’ evolution was put forward in the 1970s by biologists as an alternative to Darwin’s ‘gradualism’ thesis. This theory argues that evolution can happen in bursts when conditions are right. Others argue that the Cambrian Explosion was just too huge to be explained this way – and the debate goes on.

Why did life explode like that? Some scientists point their finger at a rise in oxygen levels that started around 700 million years ago, which might have provided ‘fuel’ for an evolutionary explosion. Others believe that a biological extinction event just prior to the start of the Cambrian opened up ecological niches for new creatures (the way that mammals filled the big niche left by the sudden extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago). Others point at the ‘stitching together’ of the supercontinent Gondwana at this time (today’s South America, Africa, Antarctica, and Australia) as the likely stimulant. Then there was the so-called ‘carbon anomaly’ at the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary, in which the normal ratio of carbon isotopes in the carbon cycle were dramatically upset by something, possibly a result of the earlier extinction event. Other researchers say the animals themselves were responsible. One of the evolutionary consequences of predator-prey behavior, for example, might have been the development of shells and bony skeletons for protection. Maybe creatures were forced into ‘marginal’ ecological niches where they had to adapt to survive, creating new body types where none existed previously. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was all of the above.

It’s certainly a fascinating mystery still.

Here’s a fossil of a trilobite:

 

One thing is clear: life is a force that will not be denied.

Four billion years ago, against every conceivable odd, life came into being where no life existed previously. Chemistry yielded biology, and once life gained a perch it tenaciously clung on, enduring billions of years of environmental stress. Seas boiled and froze; land flooded, rose, sank, and rose again. Oxygen levels – essential to life – were dangerously low for much of Earth’s history, an issue that was only resolved in favor of existence by the miracle of photosynthesis – an invention of life. Life perpetuating life. Undaunted by circumstance, biology pushed forward, urged on by evolution, overcoming whatever physical challenge or toxic condition chemistry could throw at it. Life endured because it had one overriding purpose: to keep living. To keep going; to adapt, change, respond – whatever you want to call it – and not stop doing so. Then suddenly, 540 million years ago, the conditions became optimal for a massive bloom of life.

In my unscientific opinion, the real reason why the Cambrian Explosion happened is this: life finds a way. We can debate the triggers, whether it was a flood of oxygen, the arrival of predators, or the great mash-up of continents, but the result was the same – life found a way to take off. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about it, I think, nor do we need to resort to divine explanations. What happened in the Cambrian Period wasn’t magical, inexplicable, or miraculous. Life finds a way, that’s all. Roughly 500 million years later, for example, the greatest biological extinction event in Earth’s history took place, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when global temperatures spiked 6 degrees Celsius over a period of only 20,000 years, apparently as a result of a sharp rise in greenhouse gases. Life on Earth crashed and might have been extinguished – except it didn’t. Life hung on, rebounding steadily over time, growing into the modern profusion we know today, refusing to be denied.

Life is a force is be reckoned with – and this gives me hope. Knocked to the mat, life gets up to fight again. It may not look the same, it may have changed in some fundamental way, but it will find a way to continue.

Human beings, on the other hand, may be another story. That’s because species come and go. By one estimate, there have been 100 million species on the planet since Cambrian times, though I suspect that does not include the myriad of bacteria and other critters that live in the soil. The best guess (mathematically) for the quantity of species alive today is 9 million, according to a recent study. The average life span of any one species is five million years. So, our odds of continuing much longer maybe aren’t so great. We’re just one species in 100 million, and we’re about five million years old. And look at what we’ve done to the place!

Whatever happens to us, it seems certain that life will continue with or without us. Always has, always will. We might be denied – by our own hand too – but the force that created us will carry on – and I find that an encouraging thought.

And carbon has been there from the start.

Here’s a drawing of the Cambrian Explosion:

What is Life?

Imagine the origin of life on Earth four billion years ago as a kind of ‘black box’ floating in the air. Below the box, earliest Earth is all chemistry: rocks, gasses, liquids, and other physical (inorganic) elements. Above the box, biology has appeared in the form of rudimentary cellular (organic) life. The box blocks our view of what links the two, hiding an extraordinary mystery: how did life happen when no life existed previously? How does chemistry, in other words, produce biology? Scientists don’t know the answer yet, but they are getting closer. In Charles Darwin’s day, the black box was huge; today it has shrunk dramatically, thanks to countless experiments and hundreds of researchers. While its contents are still a mystery, two theories have emerged about what happened inside the box all those years ago.

Let’s take a step back first.

The basic unit of all life is the cell, the smallest unit on the planet classified as a living thing. Cells have the same essential parts: interior and exterior membranes that regulate molecular traffic into and out of the cell; proteins that catalyze chemical reactions; a ‘library’ of information in the form of DNA which the proteins continually consult; and RNA, errand-runners who provide blueprints for the formation of new proteins. A cell is a complete package – it has everything it needs to grow and reproduce, provided it has access to minerals and energy in its immediate environment. The chemical process that enables a cell to transform these elements and energy into action is called metabolism. Its presence, along with replication and evolutionary change, is the foundation of life on Earth.

A cell is a sophisticated organism, but in the early, harsh days of Earth’s history, life had to be much simpler – but not too simple. It’s the Goldilocks Principle: organic life had to be simple enough to be created by inorganic processes and yet complex enough to replicate itself and initiate evolution. Life had to be just right – ‘hot’ enough to be weaned from the physical processes that gave it birth, but ‘cold’ enough to synthesize molecules and tap chemical nutrients and solar energy in order to fuel its cells. The just right part was the creation of metabolism, scientists say. But how did metabolism come to be?

One theory targets RNA as the likely suspect. Experiments have demonstrated that in the presence of certain mineral catalysts, nucleotides, which are molecules that form the building blocks of life, can join together to form RNA (though nucleotides themselves have not yet been built from scratch in a laboratory). Furthermore, it is has been observed that relatively short RNA molecules can author their own replication, which is the first big step toward metabolism. However, a second theory says proteins can do the same thing – as the famous Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated back in the 1950s when it proved that amino acids can form under inorganic conditions. This is another path to metabolism. Thus, depending on environmental conditions, RNA and/or proto-proteins could have evolved in primeval oceans.

Not surprisingly, there’s a third theory: metabolism came first, followed by RNA and proteins. This theory, which was considered quite radical when it was first proposed a few years ago, involves thermal vents, deep undersea, where hydrogen sulfide from a vent reacts with iron monosulfide, lying around, to create pyrite, a common mineral commonly called ‘fool’s gold.’ It is a process that allows the fixation of carbon dioxide, found in the seawater, forming organic compounds on the pyrite, leading to the creation of the basic functions of metabolism. The nucleic acids and proteins came later.

And of course, carbon is involved in nearly every stage of these processes.

The riddle of life’s origin is a classic chicken-and-egg question: were RNA and proteins required to create metabolism, or was it the other way around? Which came first? Complicating matters further is the question of where DNA originated. Molecular ‘cross talk’ between nucleic acids and proteins, necessary for a cell’s growth and replication – and with it the emergence of complex life – is mediated by its genetic code. But where did DNA come from? There is no evidence (yet) that it can be created by the same inorganic process that jump-started metabolism. Dr. Francis Crick, one of the two scientists who discovered DNA, believed its creation had to be a cosmic “accident” – possibly the result of a DNA-carrying meteor or comet hitting the planet during its formative years. The only thing scientists can say for certain is that the origin of DNA is a holy grail still locked deep inside the black box.

Here’s a picture of a thermal vent on the ocean floor:

 

Is a computer alive?

After all, a computer is a type of cell. It has a membrane through which energy and bits of data flow; it has DNA-like coded instructions in the form of programs and files that are constantly being changed and updated; its codes and files can be copied and shared with other computers; it has RNA-like wiring that carry electrical messages; it has a kind of metabolism, consuming electricity from its environment, generating paper printouts and creating heat as a waste product. And there’s lots of carbon in a computer – silicon too. It’s a carbon-and-silicon-based life form!

Of course, a computer is not alive. For one thing, it can’t reproduce itself, not yet anyway. Cells make copies of themselves, which is how an organism grows, and computers cannot do this, or else Apple and Dell would be out of business. Robots might be a different matter, however. Science fiction is littered with dark fantasies about self-reproducing robots run amok, usually the violent expense of humanity. Is it a possibility? Here’s a list of what biologists consider the basic ingredients of life: living things take in energy; they get rid of waste; they grow and develop; they respond to their environment; they reproduce and pass their traits onto their offspring; they evolve in response to their environment. Sounds like a robot to me! Yikes! But are robots alive? This question might be moot if one were coming at you with a laser gun in its metallic (inorganic) hand.

What is life?

It’s not a philosophical question. Recently, scientists have developed the ability to transfer DNA from one cell to another, changing its genetic makeup and creating an organism didn’t exist before. This new cell functions exactly like every other cell found in nature according to the definitions of life. And this is just the tip of a very large iceberg too. Teams around the planet (often working for profit-making private firms) are trying to create life in a variety of forms, including from inorganic sources. They’re trying, in other words, to shrink down the black box to zero. The best guess is they’ll accomplish this goal in less than ten years.

At the same time, scientists are hard at work trying to redefine death. What does it mean to die? Is it simply the opposite of life? Can it be delayed, interrupted, or stopped? Is this even a good idea?

Beats me. Intuitively, I suspect these developments are not good things, or at least not in the long run. We’re likely to provoke the Law of Unintended Consequences by playing God, reminding me of a classic satirical Onion headline: “New Technological Breakthrough to Fix the Crisis Caused by the Previous Technological Breakthrough.” I suppose at the rate we’re going, we’ll know soon enough.

In the meantime, I’ll settle for lyrics written by former Beatle George Harrison in his 1970 hit What is Life?

What I feel, I can’t say
But my love is there for you anytime of day
But if it’s not love that you need
Then I’ll try my best to make everything succeed

Tell me, what is my life without your love
Tell me, who am I without you, by my side

What I know, I can do
If I give my love now to everyone like you
But if it’s not love that you need
Then I’ll try my best to make everything succeed

Tell me, what is my life without your love
Tell me, who am I without you, by my side
Tell me, what is my life without your love
Tell me, who am I without you, by my side

Listen for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eEQ4J6Lnrs

 

 

Carbon Soup

Before scientists discovered that comets and meteors carry the elemental building blocks of life – carbon-based amino acids – the best guess for the origin of life on Earth was the ‘primordial soup’ theory. Its progenitor was none other than Charles Darwin, who in an 1871 letter to his close friend and fellow scientist Joseph Hooker speculated that life may have begun in a “warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, so that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes.”

Darwin’s idea lay dormant until the 1920s when two researchers, Alexander Oparin and J.B. Haldane, working independently of one another, asserted that the Earth’s original oceans were a vast “primeval soup” of non-organic molecules that bubbled and stewed for millennia, absorbing the energy of sunlight, until it “grew” organic molecules that could survive and reproduce on their own – as some molecules (bacteria) do today in hot springs and volcanic vents. Oparin argued it only had to happen once; life, once started, could take care of itself. The first living organism, they said, would be little more than a few chemical reactions encased in a thin membrane to keep them from being destroyed. These organisms would grow by absorbing organic molecules around them, grow, divide, and grow again. Eventually, photosynthesis would arise and the oxygen it created would change the Earth’s atmosphere, making it amenable to further life. Haldane called this process biopoiesis – a name that didn’t catch on. His description of the oceans as a “hot dilute soup” did, however.

In 1952, this powerful metaphor received a significant jolt, literally. University of Chicago graduate student Stanley Miller and his professor, Harold Urey, decided to test the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis in what became one of the classic experiments of post-war science. Their goal was to recreate the prebiotic conditions of Earth’s early oceans and atmosphere in the laboratory to see if they could generate organic compounds from inorganic ones. Speculating that volcanic activity would have released methane, hydrogen, and ammonia into the Earth’s proto-atmosphere, they sealed these gasses in glass piping, built in a closed loop. On one end of the loop was a flask filled with water, which was boiled to create water vapor, on the other side were two electrodes – representing lightning. After sparking the vaporous mixture with the electrodes, the gasses were cooled and allowed to “stew” for a few weeks before being analyzed.

What they discovered made headlines around the world – and still forms the foundation of most scientific inquires into the origin of life on Earth.

They discovered that as much as 10–15% of the carbon in the system had formed simple organic compounds, and 2% had actually become amino acids – essential to life. In an interview at the time, Stanley Miller said: “Just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment will yield 11 out of 20 amino acids.” More remarkably, in 2007 scientists reanalyzed the sealed vials from the original experiment, discovering that there over twenty different amino acids in the mixture. In this way, the experiment strongly supported the Oparin-Haldane “primordial soup” theory, showing that simple organic compounds could be formed from gases with the addition of energy. Lightning, their experiment suggested, had provided the original spark of life on Earth.

Recent research has challenged parts of their conclusion, however. Investigations into the actual composition of the Earth’s atmosphere during its proto-development phase, called the Hadean Period (after the Greek god of the Underworld), reveal that its chemical composition was more complicated than Millar and Urey envisioned, including the presence of oxygen, which would have hostile to the formation of organic compounds. While complicated, the picture emerging is one of an extremely turbulent, mostly liquid planet subjected to intense ultraviolet radiation, massive undersea volcanic eruptions, and frequent bombardment by rocky debris from outer space. These impacts would have kicked up large amounts of steam which eventually blanketed the entire planet with hot, smelly clouds. Rain – and lightning – followed. It is quite possible, under this scenario, that additional amino acids arrived on Earth hitched to meteorites and comets – tossed into the bubbling primordial soup like cosmic potatoes or carrots. Directions for Life: add carbon and let stew for a few hundred thousand years!

Here’s a diagram of the famous Miller-Urey “soup” apparatus:

 

This raises a question: is life possible without carbon?

Yes, said a group of scientists in a report published by the National Research Council in 2007. They call it “weird life” – life with an alternate biochemistry than what’s found on Earth. According to the report’s authors, the fundamental requirements for life as we know it – water-based biosolvents, a carbon-based molecular system capable of evolution, and the ability to exchange energy with the environment – are not the only ways to support phenomena recognized as life.  “Our investigation made clear that life is possible in forms different than those on Earth,” said lead author John Baross, professor of oceanography at the University of Washington. But we’ll never recognize it, he continued, if we’re only searching for Earth-like life in outer space.

“No discovery that we can make in our exploration of the solar system would have greater impact on our view of our position in the cosmos, or be more inspiring, than the discovery of an alien life form, even a primitive one,” wrote the report’s authors. “At the same time, it is clear that nothing would be more tragic in the American exploration of space than to encounter alien life without recognizing it.”

The astronomer Carl Sagan once referred to this situation as “carbon chauvinism,” arguing that life could alternatively be based on silicon or germanium. This may have been the inspiration for a famous Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk and Co. explore a planet dominated by aggressive and gooey silicon-based life forms called Horta (an encounter with one prompts a memorable mind-meld with Mr. Spock). The trouble with silicon, however, is its powerful attraction to oxygen. Life, as we define it, requires a respiratory process, which removes waste. In carbon-based life forms, the waste product is a gas, carbon dioxide, which is easily dispatched. The waste product of silicon, however, is sand – a solid. This means, according to biochemists, that it would be very difficult for silicon to provide a basis for viable life, even “weird” life.

As for the report’s authors, they point to ammonia and formaldehyde as possible biosolvents that could support a home for “weird” life. They also noted that recent experiments demonstrate that DNA could be constructed from nucleotides based on sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid – meaning that an organism could have an entirely non-carbon-based metabolism. Weird life might even exist on Earth, they argued. We’ve just not tuned our minds to the possibility. Field researchers should therefore seek out organisms with novel biochemistries, they said, to better understand how life on Earth truly operates. This improved understanding will help us in our restless search for life beyond the confines of our blue-green planet.

It’s all food for thought, whether carbon or silicon-based. Here’s a humorous take on the soup theory: