Even our climate "solutions" are delusions

Composite: Alex Mellon for the Guardian: Getty Images/Tetra Images RF/Alamy

From The Guardian

We now face, on all fronts, a war not just against the living planet and the common good, but against material reality. Power in the United States will soon be shared between people who believe they will ascend to sit at the right hand of God, perhaps after a cleansing apocalypse; and people who believe their consciousness will be uploaded on to machines in a great Singularity.

The Christian rapture and the tech rapture are essentially the same belief. Both are examples of “substance dualism”: the idea that the mind or soul can exist in a realm separate from the body. This idea often drives a desire to escape from the grubby immanence of life on Earth. Once the rapture is achieved, there will be no need for a living planet.

But while it is easy to point to the counter-qualified, science-denying fanatics Donald Trump is appointing to high office, the war against reality is everywhere. You can see it in the British government’s carbon capture and storage scheme, a new fossil fuel project that will greatly raise emissions but is dressed up as a climate solution. And it informs every aspect of this week’s Cop29 climate talks in Azerbaijan.

Here, as everywhere, the living planet is forgotten while capital extends its frontiers. The one thing Cop29 has achieved so far – and it may well be the only thing – is an attempt to rush through new rules for carbon markets, enabling countries and businesses to trade carbon credits – which amount, in effect, to permission to carry on polluting.

In theory, you could justify a role for such markets, if they were used only to counteract emissions that are otherwise impossible to reduce (each credit purchased is meant to represent a tonne of carbon dioxide that has been reduced or removed from the atmosphere). But they’re routinely used as a first resort: a substitute for decarbonisation at home. The living world has become a dump for policy failure.

Essential as ecological carbon stores are, trading them against fossil fuel emissions, which is how these markets operate, cannot possibly work. The carbon that current ecosystems can absorb in one year is pitched against the burning of fossil carbon accumulated by ancient ecosystems over many years.

Nowhere is this magical thinking more apparent than in soil carbon markets, a great new adventure for commodity traders selling both kinds of carbon market products: official “credits” and voluntary carbon offsets. Every form of wishful thinking, over-claiming and outright fraud that has blighted the carbon market so far is magnified when it comes to soil.

We should do all we can to protect and restore soil carbon. About 80% of the organic carbon on the land surface of the planet is held in soil. It’s essential for soil health. There should be strong rules and incentives for good soil management. But there is no realistic way in which carbon trading can help. 

Here are the reasons why.

First, tradable increments of soil carbon are impossible to measure. Because soil depths can vary greatly even within one field, there is currently no accurate, affordable means of estimating soil volume. Nor do we have a good-enough test, across a field or a farm, for bulk density – the amount of soil packed into a given volume. So, even if you could produce a reliable measure of carbon per cubic metre of soil, if you don’t know how much soil you have, you can’t calculate the impact of any changes you make.

A reliable measure of soil carbon per cubic metre is also elusive, as carbon levels can fluctuate massively from one spot to the next. Repeated measurements from thousands of sites across a farm, necessary to show how carbon levels are changing, would be prohibitively expensive. Nor are simulation models, on which the whole market relies, an effective substitute for measurement. So much for the “verification” supposed to underpin this trade.

Second, soil is a complex, biological system that seeks equilibrium. With the exception of peat, it reaches equilibrium at a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 12:1. This means that if you want to raise soil carbon, in most cases you will also need to raise soil nitrogen. But whether nitrogen is applied in synthetic fertilisers or in animal manure, it’s a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, which could counteract any gains in soil carbon. It is also one of the most potent causes of water pollution.

Third, carbon levels in agricultural soils soon saturate. Some promoters of soil carbon credits create the impression that accumulation can continue indefinitely. It can’t. There’s a limit to how much a given soil can absorb.

Fourth, any accumulation is reversible. Soil is a highly dynamic system: you cannot permanently lock carbon into it. Microbes constantly process carbon, sometimes stitching it into the soil, sometimes releasing it: this is an essential property of soil health. With rises in temperature, the carbon sequestration you’ve paid for can simply evaporate: there’s likely to be a massive outgassing of carbon from soils as a direct result of continued heating. Droughts can also hammer soil carbon.

Even under current market standards, in which science takes second place to money, you need to show that carbon storage will last for a minimum of 40 years. There is no way of guaranteeing that carbon accumulation in soil will last that long. But as a new paper in Nature argues: “A CO2 storage period of less than 1,000 years is insufficient for neutralising remaining fossil CO2 emissions.”

The only form of organic carbon that might last this long – though only under certain conditions – is added biochar (fine-grained charcoal). But biochar is phenomenally expensive: the cheapest source I was able to find costs roughly 26 times as much as agricultural lime, which itself costs too much for many farmers. There’s a limited amount of material that can be turned into biochar. While making it, if you get the burn just slightly wrong, the methane, nitrous oxide and black carbon you produce will cancel any carbon savings.

There is a kind of substance dualism at work here, too: a concept of soil and soil carbon entirely detached from their earthly realities. This bubble of delusion will burst. If I were a devious financier, I would short the stocks of companies selling these credits.

All such approaches are substitutes for action, whose primary purpose is to enable governments to avoid conflict with powerful interests, especially the fossil fuel industry. At a moment of existential crisis, governments everywhere are retreating into a dreamworld, in which impossible contradictions are reconciled. You can send your legions to war with reality, but eventually we all lose.

[Read more here]

90% of carbon credits/offsets are a furphy.  A lie.  Greenwashing.  So our companies and our politicians can pretend that they're doing something about the climate crisis.  One carbon capture and storage process seems to be genuine, provided all the energy used is green, and that's turning Co2 to rock.

Nature's carbon sinks start to fail

Firefighters battling the Tsah Creek wildfire in British Columbia. Last year’s wildfires in Canada released as much carbon as six months of US fossil-fuel emissions. Photograph: J Winter/Guardian

From The Guardian

It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.

But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down.

In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

“We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September.

“Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said.

The 2023 breakdown of the land carbon sink could be temporary: without the pressures of drought or wildfires, land would return to absorbing carbon again. But it demonstrates the fragility of these ecosystems, with massive implications for the climate crisis.

Reaching net zero is impossible without nature. In the absence of technology that can remove atmospheric carbon on a large scale, the Earth’s vast forests, grasslands, peat bogs and oceans are the only option for absorbing human carbon pollution, which reached a record 37.4bn tonnes in 2023.

At least 118 countries are relying on the land to meet national climate targets. But rising temperatures, increased extreme weather and droughts are pushing the ecosystems into uncharted territory.

The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted.

For the past 12,000 years, the Earth’s climate has existed in a fragile equilibrium. Its stable weather patterns allowed the development of modern agriculture, which now supports a population of more than 8 billion people.

As human emissions rose, the amount absorbed by nature increased too: higher carbon dioxide can mean plants grow faster, storing more carbon. But this balance is beginning to shift, driven by rising heat.

“This stressed planet has been silently helping us and allowing us to shove our debt under the carpet thanks to biodiversity,” says Rockström. “We are lulled into a comfort zone – we cannot really see the crisis.”

Only one major tropical rainforest – the Congo basin – remains a strong carbon sink that removes more than it releases into the atmosphere. Exacerbated by El Niño weather patterns, deforestation and global heating, the Amazon basin is experiencing a record-breaking drought, with rivers at an all-time low. Expansion of agriculture has turned tropical rainforests in south-east Asia into a net source of emissions in recent years.

Emissions from soil – which is the second-largest active carbon store after the oceans – are expected to increase by as much as 40% by the end of the century if they continue at the current rate, as soils become drier and microbes break them down faster.

Tim Lenton, professor of climate change and Earth system science at Exeter University, says: “We are seeing in the biosphere some surprising responses that are not what got predicted, just as we are in the climate.

“You have to question: to what degree can we rely on them as carbon sinks or carbon stores?” he says.

A paper published in July found that while the total amount of carbon absorbed by forests between 1990 and 2019 was steady, it varied substantially by region. The boreal forests – home to about a third of all carbon found on land, which stretch across Russia, Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska – have seen a sharp fall in the amount of carbon they absorb, down more than a third due to climate crisis-related beetle outbreaks, fire and clearing for timber.

Combined with the declining resilience of the Amazon and drought conditions in parts of the tropics, the hot conditions in the northern forests helped drive the collapse of the land sink in 2023 – causing a spike in the rate of atmospheric carbon.

“In 2023 the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is very high and this translates into a very, very low absorption by the terrestrial biosphere,” says Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the French Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, who was an author of the most recent paper.

“In the northern hemisphere, where you have more than half of CO2 uptake, we have seen a decline trend in absorption for eight years,” he says. “There is no good reason to believe it will bounce back.”

The oceans – nature’s largest absorber of CO2 – have soaked up 90% of the warming from fossil fuels in recent decades, driving a rise in sea temperatures. Studies have also found signs that this is weakening the ocean carbon sink.

“Overall, models agreed that both the land sink and the ocean sink are going to decrease in the future as a result of climate change. But there’s a question of how quickly that will happen. The models tend to show this happening rather slowly over the next 100 years or so,” says Prof Andrew Watson, head of Exeter University’s marine and atmospheric science group.

“This might happen a lot quicker,” he says. “Climate scientists [are] worried about climate change not because of the things that are in the models but the knowledge that the models are missing certain things.”

Many of the latest Earth systems models used by scientists include some of the effects of global heating on nature, factoring in impacts such as the dieback of the Amazon or slowing ocean currents. But events that have become major sources of emissions in recent years have not been incorporated, say scientists.

“None of these models have factored in losses like extreme factors which have been observed, such as the wildfires in Canada last year that amounted to six months of US fossil emissions. Two years before, we wrote a paper that found that Siberia also lost the same amount of carbon,” says Ciais.

Mankind has been spewing CO2 into the atmosphere for more than a century, confident that Nature would deal with it.  But this is no longer happening.  We need to accelerate our efforts to slash carbon emissions.  Meanwhile at the COP29, the latest climate gabfest, lobbyists from oil and gas companies continue to try to stop moves away from carbon fuels, and governements pretend to care.

‘Minimal progress’ made this year on curbing global heating

Source: NOAA

From The Guardian

World leaders have promised to try to stop the planet heating by more than 1.5C (2.7F) [since pre-industrial times, which in practice is defined as 1850-1900]. But current policies put the temperature rise on track for 2.7C, a report has found.

The expected level of global heating by the end of the century has not changed since 2021, with “minimal progress” made this year, according to the Climate Action Tracker project. The consortium’s estimate has not shifted since the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow three years ago.

“We have clearly failed to bend the curve,” said the lead author of the analysis, Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, from Climate Analytics.

The expected level of warming is slightly lower when considering government pledges and targets, at 2.1C, but has also not changed since 2021. Warming in the most optimistic scenario rose slightly from 1.8C last year to 1.9C this year, the report found.

Changes in average global temperatures that sound small can lead to massive human suffering. Last month, a study found half of the 68,000 heat deaths in Europe in 2022 were the result of the 1.3C of global heating the world has seen so far. At the higher temperatures that are projected for the end of the century, the risk of irreversible and catastrophic extremes is also set to soar.

The findings were released as climate negotiators converge on the Cop29 summit in Azerbaijan for fraught negotiations over greenhouse gas pollution and the money needed to deal with it. The flatlining of progress comes despite the world seeing breakneck change in the rollout of clean technologies that can replace coal, oil and gas.

The report found fossil fuel subsidies have also hit all-time highs, and funding for such projects quadrupled between 2021 and 2022.

Prof Niklas Höhne, a climate scientist at the NewClimate Institute in Germany, said it was “not a paradox” to see rising emissions while renewables boomed. “In recent years, fossil fuels have won the race against renewables, leading to increasing emissions,” he said.

Still, he added, “renewables surprise us each year” with faster growth than expected. He said they would soon crowd out fossil fuels. “It allows a much faster decline in emissions than we thought only three years ago.”  [I've been optimistic for years, believing that because of the obvious need, and the raoid cost declines in renewables, emissions would peak soon.  And they still haven't. ]

Climate scientists say every fraction of a degree matters for the health of people and the planet.

The researchers warned their median warming estimate of 2.7C by 2100 had a wide enough margin of error that it could translate into far hotter temperatures than scientists were expecting.

“There is a 33% chance of our projection being 3C or higher, and a 10% chance of being 3.6C or higher,” said Gonzales-Zuniga. The latter would be “absolutely catastrophic”, she added.

A handful of world leaders at Cop29 expressed frustration at the slow pace of progress after 28 UN climate summits.

“What on earth are we doing in this gathering?” the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, asked his fellow heads of state on Wednesday. “What does it mean for the future of the world if the biggest polluters continue as usual?”

Others pointed to progress made despite the shortcomings.

“Meetings like these are often perceived as talking shops,” said the Belgium prime minister, Alexander De Croo. “And yes, these strenuous negotiations are far from perfect. But if you compare climate policy now to a decade ago, we are in a different world.” [Really?  Where is the progress?  Forgive my cynicism.  COP29 will be just another gabfest, where promises are made for far-future virtue, while no action is taken now, and in fact the USA, the world's second-largest emitter, wants to stop any reduction in emissions and reverse the steps it's already taken.]