Climate & Climate Change

Norman Endacott sent in the following comment in response to yesterday’s post on this issue.

I am sure there is another perspective and invite someone (perhaps Steve) to send me a piece that is supportive of the Greenfleet initative that I could post perhaps as ‘Feeling Good About Emmissions (Part 3)’.

Norman writes:

I wish to comment on Greenfleet’s naive efforts to compensate for the world’s excessive fossil fuel consumption by landscape-scale tree planting.

They should realize that Nature, in collaboration with Murphy’s Law, is lined up against them.

These are the problematical facts about tree/forest growth and carbon sequestration:

1. Though their life cycle, trees photosynthesize and absorb CO2 , lock up carbon in their tissues and expire oxygen. That is great, but simultaneously they respire and convert some of their carbohydrates back to CO2. It is a balancing act (CO2 versus O2) which fluctuates dramatically daily (night versus day) and more subtly and inscrutably over the decades of the tree’s life.

2. As the tree passes through its juvenile phase and into middle age, its rate of wood increment accelerates, remains at a high level, plateaus out and after maturity (100 years plus) starts to decline, becoming virtually zero when the assault of wood-destroying fungi and insects take their toll, cancelling out the miniscule annual wood accretions of which the veteran tree is capable. Then the inevitable failure of the life processes leads to death and disintegration and reversion of all that sequestered carbon back into CO2. (Refer to the condition and fate of the revered Monarchs of the Forest in Tasmania’s Midlands and Victoria’s Central Highlands, observed over the past 100 years.)

3. The greater the compatibility between soil and climate and the tree species chosen, the greater the success in maximising annual wood increment (carbon sequestration). Impoverished sites and arid or unreliable rainfall profiles lead to poor or mediocre growth and wood increment, and accentuate attacks by insect pests. In those situations, languishing and mere survival are all that may be expected. (I’m sure that Greenfleet’s expectations go beyond this).

4. Insect and fungal attack throughout the life cycle of the forest are an actuarial unknown. So are forest fires. Past successful carbon sequestrations may be wiped out with little or no warning.

5. There is no free lunch in this tree planting caper! If success is achieved, and cleared farmland has been converted to vigorous young forest , the conclusion that may be drawn is that good quality agricultural land in a good climate has been used, and high OPPORTUNITY COST attaches to this operation. (Which prompts me to ask – what land is being used by Greenfleet to create its new forests, and produce the promising young forested landscapes depicted in the photographs on its website?).

6. I gather that Greenfleet occupies the high moral ground, and its plantations will never be used for the sordid business of producing timber crops. Those new forests will remain sacrosanct for ever more. But if such new forests have commercial forestry intent, it’s a different carbon cycle ballgame. The forests will be periodically harvested (20 years or 50 years, depending on management objectives). The carbon sink will be reduced to zero, and replanting or regeneration will take place. One must presume that for practical purposes, the harvested produce will finally revert to CO2, given time. I have no idea how the mathematics of ‘carbon trading’ will handle this puzzle. Possibly somehow the continuum of carbon sequestration figures for an idealistic , high-minded, sacrosanct-in-perpetuity , carbon-dedicated plantation may have to be divided by a factor of two , to cover commercial plantations.

8. Likewise, how will the carbon-trading caper get its head around the question of ‘perpetuity’? If the new forest, planted specifically for creation of a carbon sink, goes through its life cycle of say 200 years, then dies and disintegrates and becomes CO2 again, calling for a regeneration process, how can all that complexity be anticipated in the mathematics of 2005 carbon trading? Or is Greenfleet’s programme entirely pro bono (apart from Premier Beattie’s largesse and the donations of the gullible public)?

9. There is another OPPORTUNITY COST burden. The idealogues have only in recent years discovered that forests consume soil moisture in the course of tree metabolism and physiology. What’s more, the faster the growth and the more carbon sequestration that occurs, the greater the water uptake, and the greater the loss to urban and rural water supplies. This should be factored into Greenfleet’s rosy-tinted view of the situation.

Greenfleet is milking the Queensland Government of large sums of money, and also appealing to the community for financial support.

We are entitled to confront them with the above complexities, and find out how rigorously they have thought through the whole process, its uncertainties, economic and social cost/benefits, growth limits and practicalities. One of the most important things we would wish to know is the foreshadowed end-game. How much non-forested land is available thoughout Australia which is of suitable quality and is available. Then, an idealistic scenario to be set out, covering a reasonably short project period. Then some pretty good mathematics indicating what sort of a dent that effort would put, in the overall (alleged) global warming problem.

Ends.

“For a small donation, we can all feel a little better about driving our cars knowing that we are doing our bit to reduce the threat of global warming,” suggests Peter Brock at the Greenfleet website.

The idea is that for $40 (tax deductible), Greenfleet will plant 17 native trees on your behalf. These trees will help to create a forest, and as they grow will absorb the greenhouse gases that your car produces in one year (based on 4.3 tonnes of CO2 for the average car).

Greenfleet runs advertisements in The Age, and reader of this blog Norman Endacott had the following comment which was included in a letter to the Editor but not published: “The very modest carbon sequestration achieved by these post-Kyoto activities will always be insignificant in comparison with the huge inexorable fossil fuel usage. Even if those trees survive and prosper, their carbon benefit will reach its plateau or peak within a century, and millions of other people of goodwill will then be asked to cough up their contributions. In any case, what is special about native trees, in this context?”

The largest subscriber to Greenfleet appears to be the Queensland Government. “QFleet has contributed more than $714,000 in Greenfleet subscriptions, which will fund the planting of 433,500 trees in Queensland, re-establishing more than 400 hectares of native habitat,” said Minister for Public Works, Housing and Racing Robert Schwarten on 30th March 2005.

This seems like an expensive way to re-establish native habitat in a State where, according to reader of this blog Graham Finlayson, “Just scratch a stick in the dirt and a tree will come up.” (Comment made by Graham in the context of carbon credits and tree clearing restrictions in western Queensland, see post 2nd June.)

Since Norman sent off his letter, Greenfleet have started promoting a new idea, trees to offset airtravel. Greenfleet is now offering to offset greenhouse gas emissions resulting from a one-way flight from Sydney to Melbourne by charging $2.35 (tax-deductible) or one tree.

I wonder where they are going to plant all the trees?

When I see people holding ‘stop climate change’ placards, I wish for a new environmental movement. One that understands and accepts planet earth. An environment movement that understand, whether or not we do something about carbon dioxide emissions, there will be climate change. There has always been climate change on planet earth.

Interestingly, a Queensland University of Technology study released today has concluded that climate change during the latter part of the Pleistocene, not the arrival of aboriginals, drove the extinction of Australia’s megafauna.

“That culprit is climate,” Mr Price said. “It does appear that climate change was the major factor in driving the megafauna extinct.”

Mr Price says the dig has revealed dramatic changes in habitat – and consequently fauna – during the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch, which stretched from 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago.

“It tends to be the case that over the entire period of the deposition, the faunas and the habitats were changing so it reflected the contraction and possibly local extinction of different sorts of habitats, mainly the woodland and vine-thicketed habitat,” he said.

“That’s associated with different species going at least locally extinct over that same period.”

He says that in the oldest sections of the dig, which date back about 45,000 years, species that depended on woodland and vine thickets dominated.

In the mid-section, there was a mix of species that were either “habitat generalists” or preferred open areas, which Mr Price says suggests the environment was evolving toward grasslands.

“By the latest Pleistocene, species dependent on wetter conditions disappear from the fossil record, while animals such as long-nosed bandicoots that aren’t habitat-specific remain,” he said.

And I say,Greenpeace and WWF may be rich, may be multinational corporations, but the bottomline is, they can not stop climate change.

And at last, a new progressive and evidence-based environmental organisation, the Australian Environment Foundation (the AEF), will be launched this Sunday and almost has a website.

Furiously preparing a powerpoint presentation for tomorrow from a hotel in Dubbo, I have stumbled across the following information:

Australia is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs)per capita in the world, using figures from the US Energy Information Administration website.

The four highest figures for 1990 appear to be: Australia, 27.7 tons CO2 equivalent; United States, 25.2 tons; New Zealand, 24.8 tons and Canada 21.2 tons.

In 2002, Australia was still highest, but down from 27.7 to 26.8 tons; then US, down from 25.2 to 24.2 tons; then Canada, up from 21.2 to 23.4 tons; and New Zealand, down from 24.8 tons to 19.8 tons.

The reason that New Zealand is so high (though down by 20% between 1990 and 2002) is because of their large emissions of CH4 (methane) and N2O (nitrous oxide) in agriculture. In NZ, agricultural emissions from these sources amounted to two-thirds of their total emissions in 1990 – 16.5 tons per head from agriculture alone in New Zealand, compared with an average for the EU for all six Kyoto GHGs of only 11.1 tons.

If one deducted the emissions arising from exports of agricultural products from New Zealand from the NZ total, and added them to the emissions of the countries that imported those products (the EU countries being among the largest importers), the picture would be quite different.

Australia’s emissions of CH4 and N2O from agriculture are also high – 10.1 tons in 1990. Again much of the produce is exported. And of course this country also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of coal, iron, bauxite & alumina & refined metals such as aluminium, nickel, lead, zinc and copper.

Nearly the whole of the output of these industries is exported to other countries for use in a variety of manufacturing industries, which again leads to emissions. Then the Swiss, who make no cars, buy their Mercedes and BMWs and show the rest of the world how easy it is to be rich and clean.

One of the reasons that Canada’s emissions went up and the US went down between 1990 and 2002 is that the integrated operations of Ford and GM led to more of the North American production being on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes and less in Detroit.