Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Luke Walker

Soil Carbon: Just Another Dirty Greenhouse Deal? A Note from Luke Walker

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This blog’s fraternity of AGW denialists (climate realists) would be dismayed to learn that their good friend Al Gore was in Sydney yesterday to open the Financial and Energy Exchange (FEX). Another good friend, Bob Carr introduces the “big man” here.

Their web site states: “FEX Climate Pty Ltd is the carbon and environmental arm of Financial and Energy Exchange Ltd a new platform for trading sustainability and cleantech stocks, financial, energy, carbon and environmental commodities and derivatives. The Financial and Energy Exchange (FEX) is supported by significant international investment and global partners including sharing its headquarters at 5 Bridge Street in Sydney with business news broadcaster CNBC. Internationally renowned derivatives trader, Brian Price, is the founder and CEO of FEX. FEX Climate has been built from the ground up a dedicated group, lead by CEO Fiona Waterhouse, who believes the market has an important role to play in directing investment towards businesses which use and produce sustainable technologies, products and services.”

But the real action was happening quietly up in the grazing paddocks of central Queensland. Bypassing the political debate over recent vegetation legislation and scientific researchers dreaming of a rural carbon market, Terry McCosker has established the CarbonLink company , a sister company, to the well known grazing consultancy, Resource Consulting Services (RCS) . RCS being a big advocate of the somewhat controversial cell grazing technology.

Carbonlink (CL) has developed enough credentials to be part of FEX. CL can estimate soil carbon reserves and their improvement through better grazing management. The company acts as an aggregator combining carbon on offer from various graziers, into packages large enough to be of interest to European or US emitters for a sale through the FEX. In a lead from private enterprise FEX seems to also have bypassed the government debate on possible trading systems.

Despite the Greenhouse Office and Minister McGauran being bearish over the prospects for sequestering carbon in Australian soils, McCosker is upbeat saying that grazing systems have plenty of capability compared to cropping lands, and that there are secondary improvements in pasture production, soil structure, and improved pasture quality resulting in less methane emission from grazing cattle.

CL hopes to have a 100,000 tonnes of CO2 for sale on FEX by Christmas.

CL press release says ” CL is in the process of verifying its first packages of soil carbon from several properties in eastern Australia.”

This carbon is expected to be available for trading in the coming months.

“When people think carbon they usually think trees,” according to CL chief executive, and soil and agribusiness consultant Rod Rush.”

“But in reality 75pc of carbon in and on the earth’s land mass is in the soil. We have a tremendous opportunity to utilise soil’s ability to absorb additional carbon through the right land management practices.”

“There is good evidence to suggest that the practice of cell grazing will facilitate soil carbon sequestration.”

“It is an added bonus of this managed pasture process under which livestock come on and off the pasture in a controlled fashion, with the pasture grazed for short periods, spelled while root reserves rebuild, regrow and are then grazed again.”

“Producers who have made good land use decisions in the past and those who choose to adopt these practices in the future will capitalise on that because soil carbon is poised to become a tradeable resource.”

“The good managers are running their farms in a manner that maximises root deposition in their soils and hence fixes much more soil carbon than is held in soils grazed traditionally.”

“Soil carbon can be measured by soil sampling and analysis and then traded as carbon credits,” he said.
“The bigger the active root matter of pasture, the more carbon is fixed.”

“The great thing is that cell grazing, unlike tree planting as a carbon-fixing option, does not lock up land and make it non-productive.”

“We are still verifying our processes, but CL plans to aggregate carbon, sequestered by groups of producers who commit to grazing management practices, that over the subsequent 10 years will sequester and maintain the resource.”

“For example, a 1pc increase in organic matter over a 10-year period may capture about 50 tonnes of CO2 that is worth about $1,000/ha gross before costs, at current retail prices.”

“There will be a proving period for each producer about how much CO2/hectare is being sequestered, with soils analysed in the first year of a commitment and then measured again in, for example, the 5th and 10th years to calculate any gains. ”

You can listen to McCosker advocate the scheme.

CL is the second carbon accreditation scheme to be launched in Australia over the last year – with Christine Jones launching Western Australia’s Australian Soil Carbon Accreditation Scheme (ASCAS) in March 2007.

Of course innovative graziers like Alan Lauder have been advocating carbon grazing incorporating saltbush as a philosophy for land management for over a decade but it’s McCosker who’s trying to break into the big international trading markets.

Industry commentary on rural carbon trading is available here and if you’re really keen rock up to the big carbon farming expo at Mudgee in November 2007. (IPA and denialists apply hard hats before entering these web sites)

So Queensland Country Life ran today with “CARBON: Why there’s real money in dirt”

OK are “dirty” greenhouse deals in dirt the way to go. It’s a long term commitment. Many decades. Does it add up? Are there side effects? Will global warming increase microbial activity and work against the sequestration? Can you realistically account for something you can’t see? How do emitters know what they’ve really got? Do you believe the sampling and science. Has Steve McIntyre audited the system personally? (Or has Hansen adjusted it?)

But it’s innovative. It’s not whinging. Don’t have to put up with touchy forestry types. It has positive land management benefits. It gets a new income stream into remote areas and extensive grazing. It’s free enterprise. And it does unify the city and bush. Needs good science input. It’s Australian high tech low tech hybrid !! Many things I’m passionate about. Oh yea – and it might help with CO2 sequestration too. What’s McCosker up to next – surely this isn’t just the limit – Aaron Edmonds must be out there somewhere.

What do you think: is there money in dirt or is it a dirty deal?

New Future for the Last Great Savanna: A Note from Luke Walker

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A new report The Nature of Northern Australia** advocates responsible conservation and development of one of the world’s great ecological treasures – the northern Australian tropical savanna. This vast area represents some 25% of the world’s remaining tropical savanna woodlands and is still in good ecological condition, some 1.5 million km2 extending from Cairns and the Cape York Peninsula, through the Northern Territory to the Kimberley in north west Western Australia.

The Nature of Northern Australia is the result of almost three years of intensive research by authors Dr John Woinarski, Professor Brendan Mackey, Professor Henry Nix and Dr Barry Traill

Not only does the north have two thirds of Australia’s freshwater resources, it also contains abundant minerals, energy, unique iconic landscapes, including Kakadu and the Kimberley and unique aboriginal heritage.

Some of Australia’s largest, most undisturbed rivers, an abundance of plant and animal species not found anywhere else in the country, and nationally important areas of rainforest, mangroves and tropical heath lands are also located in the north.

Recent pressures with water supply and drought in southern Australia have refocused national development attention again on the north with a joint government and industry taskforce reviewing options for the future.

“In other parts of the world, tropical savanna is in decline due to land clearing, unsustainable grazing regimes and over population, but this vast area of northern Australia is remarkably intact,” co-author Professor Brendan Mackey from The Australian National University said.

However, there are mounting concerns about the biodiversity assets of this region documented in surveys in the report. Ecological threats such as changing fire regimes, overgrazing, feral animals, exotic weeds and climate change remain unresolved issues.

Scientists have singled out cattle grazing, above climate change and mining, as the most threatening process to northern Australia.

In an ABC interview Professor Brendan Mackey said 70 per cent of northern Australia is held under pastoral lease and cattle stations should do more to protect the ecology of tropical savannas.

“So what pastoralists do or choose not to do will have enormous bearing on the environmental health of northern Australia and its wonderful globally significant natural assets,” he said.

“What we are asking for is for what we call best management practice.”

Despite the difficulties associated with pastoralism in the north the report documents exciting developments at Trafalgar, at Charters Towers.

Joe Landsberg is demonstrating the benefits of ecological grazing in a most difficult environment. He says “we reduced our stocking rate by 60%. Then by spelling at least 20% of the property every wet season, we were able to restore native pasture species to greater than 80% within a few years. These lessons have now led us to our current management regime, where spelling 20% of the property annually, strategic use of small areas of exotic pasture, conservative stocking rates and intensive herd management have increased our productivity (i.e. higher calving rates, earlier and heavier turn-off weights, better meat quality) and therefore profit. Monitoring sites on the property also confirmed the improvement in pasture quality, soil health and water quality. We also have an annual control program for exotic weeds. Current research in natural resource management also confirms these strategies lead to improved biodiversity and ecosystem health. “

Premonitions of intensive irrigated agriculture development in the north have brought back memories of insect plagues and high pesticide use in the sensitive tropical environment.

Professor Henry Nix, another of the authors behind the report with Professor Mackey, says critics of the cotton industry are not aware genetically modified cotton has overcome challenges faced over a decade ago.

He says genetically modified cotton has proved it is sustainable.

“Cotton is regarded as a monster, and it certainly was 10-15 years ago, because of the very large amounts of chemicals – 17, 18 sprays per crop,” he said.

“Now that’s down to as low as one spray. Eighty per cent of their cotton crop is now a GMO crop.”

CSIRO has developed an entirely new 21st century agronomic package for cotton production in the Ord irrigation area using off-season production, transgenic cotton and beneficial insects

Another remarkable innovation for use of the savannas is a practical reduction in greenhouse emissions from a modified fire regime that reduces high intensity late season burning.

The SMH reports that Conoco, which operates a liquefied natural gas plant in Darwin, had entered into an agreement to offset some of the greenhouse gas emissions produced at its plant. In return for carbon credits, Conoco pays the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement partners more than $1 million a year. Some 100,000 tonnes a year of greenhouse gas emissions can be saved by this approach which is verified by satellite monitoring.

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** The Nature of NorthernAustralia – Natural values, ecological processes and future prospects
By John Woinarski, Brendan Mackey, Henry Nix & Barry Traill
2007 ANU E Press Australian National University E Press
ISBN 9781921313301 (pbk.) ISBN 9781921313318 (online)
Read the e-book here: http://epress.anu.edu.au/nature_na/pdf/whole_book.pdf

The Language of Climate Change: A Note from Luke Walker

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Last night Australia’s “premier television current affairs program” Four Corners showed a documentary purportedly about the “campaign to deny the science of global warming”.

A regular reader and commentator at this blog, Luke Walker, emailed me the following comment on the program:

Hi Jennifer,

ABC Four Corners last night aired CBC’s news magazine show The Fifth Estate which panned Dr. S. Fred Singer, Dr Tim Ball, Exxon, APCO and others in the ” Denial Machine” a 40-minute documentary that gave context to anti-AGW politics in the USA and Canada.

Of particular interest was the careful use of language by media analysts and opinion pollsters. For example, a once Republican media strategist Frank Luntz dispassionately laid out how to use framing and language to create uncertainty from certainty and create public opinion on issues such as climate change.

Chomsky would have had a field day. We don’t say “global warming”, we say “climate change”. Global warming is too scary for the poll groups.

We were shown how words like “energy intensity” get seamlessly inserted into the rhetoric while having a different meaning and different outcomes to reductions in greenhouse emissions but the same public perceptions.

For Aussie audiences there was plenty of US style journalism and ‘Denial Machine’ had plenty of not-so-nice evidence, told-you-so’s and tut-tut’s for the AGW converted.

Indeed the AGW cheer squad would have loved it.

But in the end the issue of global warming/climate change has become a right versus left issue. Good versus evil, or evil versus good. The end of the world versus the end of the economy. Conservatives versus liberals. Dirty denialists versus scary alarmists.

Bizarrely the show’s last word was from the once Republican media strategist Frank Luntz who has incredibly become a convert to AGW. He now believes that the science is conclusive and that we must do something about it.

“Conservatives need to make much greater effort to talk about what’s happening in the environment, and Liberals should acknowledge the serious economic consequences of Kyoto,” Luntz said. He continued, “If you really care about global warming, take it out of the political sphere, don’t beat each other over the head, be honest, don’t yell, and focus on solutions that make a difference. Not everything in life is about politics”.

Global warming is too important an issue to be run by public relations, language manipulators and partisan politics.

Take note say the converted – and so – a very long road to travel, including for the inhabitants of this blog.

Cheers, Luke.

Killer Greenhouse Effect (or Pardon my Anoxia): A Note from Luke

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Luke Walker reminds us that geological history includes evidence of mass extinctions from “killer greenhouse conditions”:

“Readers of this blog are often witness to accusations of alarmism by those opposed to scenario projections using contemporary anthropogenic global warming theory.

Comfort is often taken in the world having survived substantial climate swings in geological time and that some species such as reef building corals have come through that turmoil.

So it is with some irony that the October 2006 issue of Scientific American has a major article by Professor Peter Ward at the University of Washington suggests that extinction events in geological history have been caused by killer greenhouse conditions. What’s this – geological alarmism? Is nothing sacred?

“More than half life on the earth has been wiped out, repeatedly, in mass extinctions over the past 500 million years. One such disaster, which includes disappearance of the dinosaurs, is widely attributed to an asteroid impact, but others remain inadequately explained.

New fossil and geochemical evidence points to a shocking environmental mechanism for the largest of the ancient mass extinctions and possibly several more: an oxygen depleted ocean spewing poisonous gas as a result of global warming”

Apparently five times over the last 500 million years most of the world’s life forms have ceased to exist. End of the Ordovician 443 My ago; close of the Devonian 374 My; the Great Dying at the end of the Permian 251 My where 90% of ocean dwellers and 70% of land dwellers were obliterated; the end of the Triassic 201 My; and the end of the Cretaceous at 65 My with a likely asteroid impact.

However, new analyses are showing that some sudden extinctions were not that sudden lasting several hundred thousands of years.

It theoretically works something like this:

1. Volcanic activity releases carbon dioxide and methane

2. Rapid global warming occurs

3. Warm ocean absorbs less oxygen

4. Anoxia destabilises the chemocline where oxygenated surface waters meet H2S permeated waters in the ocean, anaerobic bacteria flourish

5. Hydrogen sulphide gas (H2S) gas upwells through the ocean as the chemocline rises to the ocean surface

6. Green and purple sulphur bacteria in the surface ocean thrive while oxygen breathers suffocate

7. H2S gas kills land animals and plants.

8. H2S destroys the ozone shield

9. Ultra violet radiation from the sun kills remaining life.

“A minor extinction at the end of the Palaeocene 54My ago was already – presciently – attributed to an interval of oceanic anoxia somehow triggered by short-term global warming.” Evidence is also present at the end of Triassic, middle Cretaceous, and late Devonian.

So are these extreme greenhouse effect extinctions possibly a recurring phenomenon in the earth’s history. Atmospheric CO2 was 1000ppm when extinctions began in the Palaeocene. “

So if the modern earth got close to 1000ppm this might represent something for our children to deal with. But maybe that’s just geological alarmism for you.

I’m getting a Lotto syndicate going called “Killer Greenhouse”.

More reading:

Climate simulation of the latest Permian: Implications for mass extinction by Jeffrey T. Kiehl & Christine A. Shields Climate Change Research Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, Colorado 80305, USA

Abrupt and Gradual Extinction Among Late Permian Land Vertebrates in the Karoo Basin, South Africa
Science 4 February 2005:Vol. 307. no. 5710, pp. 709 – 714 by Peter D. Ward,1* Jennifer Botha,3 Roger Buick,2 Michiel O. De Kock,5 Douglas H. Erwin,6 Geoffrey H. Garrison,2 Joseph L. Kirschvink,4 Roger Smith3

Photic Zone Euxinia During the Permian-Triassic Superanoxic Event, Science 4 February 2005:
Vol. 307. no. 5710, pp. 706 – 709 by Kliti Grice, Changqun Cao, Gordon D. Love, Michael E. Böttcher, Richard J. Twitchett, Emmanuelle Grosjean, Roger E. Summons, Steven C. Turgeon, William Dunning,Yugan Jin

Massive Release of Hydrogen Sulphide to the Surface Ocean and Atmosphere during intervals of Oceanic Anoxia. Kump, L.R., Pavlov, A., Arthur, M.A. Geology: 33:5:397-400. May 2005.”

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Thanks Luke. And I’m going to add to your reading list: The Past is the Key to the Present: Greenhouse and Icehouse Over Time by Prof Ian Plimer, IPA Review, Vol 55, No. 1. March 2003, pgs. 9-12.