As per John’s request, here is the climate change guide produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association:

A guide is now available to help individuals of all ages understand how climate influences them — and how they influence climate. A product of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, it was compiled by an interagency group led by NOAA.

“The Essential Principles of Climate Science” presents important information for individuals and communities to understand Earth’s climate, impacts of climate change, and approaches for adapting and mitigating change. Principles in the guide can serve as discussion starters or launching points for scientific inquiry. The guide can also serve educators who teach climate science as part of their science curricula.

“As climate policy is being discussed, it is very important for the citizens of our nation to have an appreciation for some of the fundamental aspects of climate and climate change,” said Tom Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., and lead for NOAA’s climate services. “This guide is a first step for people who want to know more about the essential principles of our climate system, how to better discern scientifically credible information about climate, and how to identify problems related to understanding climate and climate change.”

“There is so much misinformation about climate. We want to provide an easily readable document to help everyone make the most informed decisions,” said Karl. “Having one product endorsed by the nation’s top federal science agencies, as well as leading science centers and associations, makes this document an essential resource.”

The 17-page guide includes information on how people can help reduce climate change and its impacts. It also defines important terms and concepts used when talking about climate and approaches to adaptation and mitigation. For print copies of the guide, e-mail NOAA Outreach outreach@noaa.gov or call 301-713-1208.

NOAA, the National Science Teachers Association, and TERC, an educational non-profit organization, are working with education leaders to revise state standards using this framework. The materials also will provide the basis for educator resources and professional development.

Development of the guide began at a workshop sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Multiple science agencies, non-governmental organizations, and numerous individuals also contributed through extensive review and comment periods. Discussion at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NOAA-sponsored Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Literacy workshop contributed substantially to the refinement of the document.

For further information regarding the Climate Literacy document, please contact Frank Niepold at frank.niepold@noaa.gov . Please include “Climate Literacy info” in the subject line.

Michael Collins Climate change Climate change

Quick bit of information on Copenhagen:

1. The world will meet in Copenhagen in December 2009 for the COP 15 of the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The expected outcome is a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol as the world’s response to climate change. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Copenhagen Conference but it is also wrong for us to put all our hopes into this one meeting. The best case is for the World to use Copenhagen to focus attention everywhere on this issue and to emerge with a workable global strategy. Everyone on Earth has a stake in the outcome of this meeting and we all have both the right and the responsibility to participate.

2. Two strategies will be strongly represented at Copenhagen. One of these can be described as enhanced CDM to continue and expand the support of energy efficient technology, energy from renewable sources, and carbon credits to offset emissions in one place with capital to support reductions elsewhere. The other is under the banner of Reduction of Emissions by the Decrease in Deforestation and Degradation or (REDD). REDD is essentially conserving the last remaining forest ecosystems. These positions have strong lobbies and are expected to be part of any agreement that emerges from Copenhagen.

3. While both enhanced CDM and REDD are needed and important initiatives there is a flaw in the logic of depending on Enhanced CDM and REDD as a global response to Climate Change. When analyzed dispassionately it is fairly clear that the best these strategies can accomplish is to lower human impact on climate (which is an admirable goal), but they cannot rebalance the carbon cycle or address the fundamental issues of human impact on Climate change. This suggests that while necessary these measures are insufficient to be called a solution.

4. The question of what to do about anthropogenic influence on climate change has to a large degree been focused on the notion that human impact on the climate is simply the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions into the Atmosphere. As long as the attention of the world is focused solely on CO2 emissions then CDM and REDD seem logical and adequate. As soon as the question is reframed in a more accurate way then these quite worthy and important efforts must be seen as only part of the eventual solution.

5. When we look at the CO2 emissions we are basically looking at human impact since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is possible to see ecological trends with a much longer time frame and in much greater complexity. We can look much further back in human history and see that human beings have caused massive impacts to the Earth’s ecosystems over our entire history. Imagining the distant past it seems that the earliest impacts began with the reduction of biodiversity. At some point in the distant past tens of thousands of years ago, human beings as social animals learned to hunt in packs and eventually drove certain species to extinction and altered the food chain. Then approximately 400 to 500 generations ago many human beings began to live by settled agriculture. Cultivation further lowered biodiversity reducing diverse forests and grasslands to a few food crops and domesticated animals. While it is scientifically arguable that reduction of biodiversity does not necessarily lead to reduction in biomass, the fact remains that in many parts of the world it did. Reducing biomass means that photosynthesis is lessened, altering the exchange of gases, reducing carbon uptake, reducing accumulated organic matter, reducing fertility and lowering the infiltration and retention of rainfall. This development trajectory can be shown in many places around the world, the constant across all regions is the lowering of ecosystem function, the alteration of weather patterns and ultimately changes in the climate. This type of development eventually led to several accelerated impacts, including urbanization, the industrial revolution, dependence on fossil fuels and the widespread use of industrial agriculture. This progression describes human impact on the Earth’s ecosystem and climate that is historic as well as contemporary and that is accumulative in that it is a much more accurate picture of human impact on the climate than simply the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

6. When we analyze human impact on Climate in a comprehensive way we see that human beings have actually altered several vital systems including the carbon cycle. The hydrological cycle jumps immediately to mind. In the face of the overwhelming evidence that we are effecting the climate, the real question that we should be asking, is it possible to restore large-scale degraded ecosystems? And the answer to this question seems to be yes.

7. It is possible to increase infiltration and retention of rainfall. If I were forced to choose one thing that I think is the determining factor for sustainability I would have to say “Infiltration and Retention of Rainfall in Situ”. In other words if the rain when it falls infiltrates where it comes down then I think we will survive. If it doesn’t then it looks very bad for human beings and for the planet. If the rainfall infiltrates where it comes down then you know that the vegetation cover, the soil organic matter, and microbial communities are intact. If it doesn’t infiltrate then you can extrapolate that these things have been disrupted.

8. This suggests a global strategy at a species and planetary level to respond to climate change. We can consciously and actively restore all degraded lands wherever they are in on Earth. We are forced to react but can use this as an opportunity to address many of the problems that have long plagued humanity. We can address biodiversity loss, fresh water stress, soil fertility, poverty, disparity, population growth, and conflict simultaneously with human impact on climate change because in actuality, they are all part of one phenomenon.

9. The Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP) and the Earth’s Hope Project are working to convey this message through public speaking, broadcast and educational films. We have documented compelling evidence on broadcast video all over the world to help tell this message.

You can help. Contact Johnliu@earthshope.org or Linda Sills at lindasills@earthshope.org

John D. Liu Climate change Climate change

This is one of John’s old posts:

The IPCC has concluded its work, shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore, and concluded that human activity is in fact altering the climate.  The report also tells us that what we do now will determine what the world will be like in the future.  If you want to read the report yourself it is available online.  There is also a shorter version for policy makers with no time to pour through the full document.  The links below are to the IPCC website where the documents are downloadable.  This effects everyone on Earth.  You are highly encouraged to read and contemplate the meaning of these documents.

All reports can be found here at the IPCC site.

Here we have the short executive summary version of the IPCC Synthesis Report.

Michael Collins Climate change Climate change, Global warming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC

Reblog from John from the old Earthshope.org site:

On November 10, 2007, I traveled with colleagues to the edge of the remnant Gishwati Forest in Northwestern Rwanda.  What we found was heart wrenching.  It’s taken some time to write this.   I needed to come to grips with my feelings about what we had seen and what I thought about it.

In Rubavu District - Kazenze and in Nuyabihu District at Bigogwe, Jenda and Mukamira there were 9 days of heavy rain between Sept 12 and Sept. 20.   Twenty people, mostly children and the elderly were killed in floods and mudslides that flowed down from the hillsides.  It was the young and the old who couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the flood.

We arrived almost a month after the event but the place was still in ruins.  The water and mud was everywhere.  The survivors were sifting through the wreckage to salvage what they could.  The children of course crowded around us when we came with our Jeep and cameras but they seemed somewhat subdued as if they had seen too much.  They pointed to where their friends and family members had died and seemed to feel that such events were inevitable.   Are they?

This was once the Great Gishwati Forest the second largest Forest in Rwanda.   Now the Forest is just a tiny remnant of what it once was.   Even this has been fragmented into small patches.  Most of the trees have been cut and in their place are fields planted on the hillsides.  Many are not terraced at all and the rows are sometimes even planted vertically up the hillside.  There is no way that these hillsides could ever be extremely productive land.  The result of trying to force these unsuitable areas to agriculture is a complex series of events that leads to flooding and mudslides.

The first result is the loss of ecosystem function.  This is not a single thing but a complex web of interactions.

First to go is the massive generation of biomass (including the ability to sequester carbon), followed by the loss of necromass (the decaying plant litter) that would accumulate continuously.  This means a loss of biodiversity with less flora and fauna and the genetic wealth that they represent, and this means less carbon uptake and less oxygen production.

The next loss is soil fertility.  Within a very few seasons the natural fertility has been leached out of the soil and without the annual creation of biomass and necromass replenishing the soils, the nutrient cycle is broken.

Then the erosion begins in earnest and the top soils with the remaining organic matter and fertility flow off into the streams.  Each time you look at the river systems in places where this is happening you see brown heavily silt laden waters.

This is the wealth of the nation flowing downstream.  And sadly it won’t necessarily even enrich those downstream because the other major disruption is to the ability to infiltrate water during rainfall and retain it through the seasons.  So this type of disruption heralds another problem.

Flooding causes drought.

When the waters rush off during the rainy season without infiltrating and being stored in the biomass and the necromass, then there is no absorption into the plant material and no respiration by the plants, not only altering the carbon uptake and oxygen levels but changing the soil moisture content and the relative humidity in the air.  All this because the people of this region felt that they had no choice but to cultivate the land.  And they are right - alone, left to their own devices and needing to survive they have little alternative.

But something has changed.

Thanks to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the Stern Report and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, we know that human activity has disrupted ecosystem function on a planetary scale and that if we don’t restore these functions we will all suffer.  The climate change debate’s focus may be on Greenhouse gas emissions but I can make a strong case that this is just one symptom of a much larger problem.   The fact is that not only are we emitting carbon and other greenhouse gases but we have degraded vast areas of the planet ensuring that the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon, has in many places and to a large extent, been lost.  Invariably, where this function has been lost you will find large numbers of poor people living hand to mouth in degraded ecosystems and not surprisingly these are the same places where flooding and mudslides can and do occur.

It seems to me that all the information we have points to the fact that the future of everyone on Earth will be determined by functional ecosystems on a planetary scale.  This means that the people of Rwanda are not on their own in needing to protect these ecosystems.  We are right there on the front line with them.  The stakes are just too high to ask desperately poor illiterate people to take on the major responsibility.  If you ask the question “Do they have the scientific understanding, technical ability, management capacity and capital to restore these areas?”   The answer is no.

But interestingly, if you contemplate again the fact that everyone’s future depends on functional ecosystems on a planetary scale, and then you ask the question; “does the world have the scientific understanding, technical ability, management capacity and capital to restore these degraded lands?”  Then the answer is most definitely, YES.

The pictures below are freeze frames from our documentation of the rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau in China.  The screen on the left is the Ho Jia Gou Valley in 1995 and the one on the right is the same valley in 2005.  We have seen and documented that it is possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems including restoring ecosystem function that had been lost over large areas and long periods of time.

Re-vegetating large areas of the planet offer us a huge opportunity.  In China, it was necessary to move the people away from subsistence agriculture and to provide sufficient external investment and technical support.  It worked and it can work elsewhere.  If you understand the principles of ecosystem function (vegetation cover, soil microbiology, organic matter, carbon cycling and natural hydrological regulation) and you design human systems to interact but not disrupt these systems then it is possible to stop degrading and begin to restore functionality.  This is exactly the knowledge we need right now to address climate change and a plethora of other problems.

So where do we start?

One idea might be to look at where there are high siltation rates from disrupted soils because the vegetation cover has been compromised.  The very good people at Dartmouth Flood Observatory, using data from NASA, European Space Agency, JAXA and others have created maps and charts showing exactly where these areas are.  There have been 231 floods worldwide so far in 2007, there are five flood events happening right now.   Although some of the most devastating are Typhoons and Hurricanes, the impact from these types of storms would also be theoretically lowered by massive revegetation, especially the restoration of Mangrove forests along coastlines.

Find out more about the excellent work taking place at Dartmouth by clicking on the image.

I had to get my mind around what we saw in Rwanda because the tragedy of 20 people while quite terrible enough is only a small fraction of the problem.  According to the Dartmouth data 8350 people have already died from flooding this year and 10’s of millions of people have been displaced (a nice way of saying - made homeless).

The photo on the left is of a flood that killed 10 in Costa Rica.  The Photo on the right is of a flood that killed 45 in Haiti.   Thousands were made homeless.

Many of these deaths and “displacements” can be avoided.  The interesting thing about the fact that much of these problems are “human induced” is that if we learn and change our behavior we can change the outcome.

There is sufficient data to understand that re-vegetation of large areas of the planet would lessen the impact of storms reducing the severity of floods and mudslides.  This would also help to sequester carbon.  Especially in large fundamentally degraded ecosystems there is a very high up side.  There would be many other positive benefits.

The world’s scientists are telling us that we can expect more and more extreme weather because we have so degraded ecosystem function on the planet.  If you reverse the logic coming from the climate change warnings, then taking the concepts of re-vegetation, increasing organic matter in the soil, increased infiltration of moisture into soils and biomass, increased respiration by plants and soil organisms, to a massive scale; would help stabilize the weather.  And theoretically, if we fully restored functionality should even be able to reduce the incidence of these types of events.

These things are measurable.  We have excellent measurements of the level of degradation.  What we need to be looking for is the inverse.  The potential of rehabilitation and executing this on a planetary scale.  When we get our minds around this then we can actually see that this is our opportunity to end poverty and restore many, if not all of the degraded landscapes wherever they are on the planet.

This seems to me to be the central issue of our time.  We will either get this right or future generations will condemn us for having been so selfish and shortsighted that we did nothing.

Human understanding grows.  This is true for individuals and for the species.  In many cases it can take its time.  But that does not seem to be the case with this knowledge.  We are called upon to learn this immediately and heal our relationship with the planet.

Whatever we do we are determining what the future will be.  If we ignore this then we are consciously accepting the suffering of millions of people, institutionalizing poverty and inequality and condemning our children and our children’s children to living in a dangerous, degraded world.

But if we embrace this knowledge and accept our responsibility, history will look back at this time in gratitude and admiration.

This is “Earth’s Hope”.

John D. Liu

December 11, 2007

Beijing

Michael Collins Uncategorized Climate change, Greenhouse gas, John D. Liu, Loess Plateau, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Rwanda

I came across this headline in my Google Alerts on China this morning: “China Order $13-Billion Drought Relief for Wheat Growers“.    What the LA Times outlines in the article is pretty self explanatory.  Reduced rainfall across China’s main wheat growing provinces has decimated crop yields and forced the government to take emergency action to support the farmers in these regions. Climate change takes the blame for the lack of rainfall.

What has really happened across many of these regions includes but goes beyond climate change.  Employing inefficient, short-sighted farming techniques to this land over many generations has led to ecosystem destruction.

We’ve seen this happen before in a region of China called the Loess Plateau.  Land degradation led to a predictable and terrible set of outcomes: climate change, desertification, loss of soil stability, loss of natural fertility, disruption of natural water infiltration and retention, loss of biodiversity, flooding, drought, poverty.  But what we learned from the Loess Plateau is that it is possible to undo this damage and rehabilitate large scale ecosystems.  This process of rehabilitation takes time, but it can fundamentally improve people’s lives in a lasting way.

Below I’ve embedded our video Lessons of the Loess Plateau in six parts.  (If there’s a way to upload clips longer than 10 minutes to YouTube, please let me know.)  Just under an hour in total, it will change the way you think about solving the most crucial problems of our time.

Lessons of the Loess Plateau Part 1

Lessons of the Loess Plateau Part 2

Lessons of the Loess Plateau Part 3

Lessons of the Loess Plateau Part 4

Lessons of the Loess Plateau Part 5

Lessons of the Loess Plateau Part 6

John Liu, the creator of this film writes:

“Essentially, the documentation shows that it is possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems, that it is possible to restore ecosystem function in areas where they were lost and that it is possible to fundamentally improve the lives of people who have been trapped in poverty for generations.  ”

Comments are open.  Let’s talk about the film.

Michael Collins Lessons of the Loess Plateau, Video Library China, Climate change, Drought, Video