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Sandy’s sister is coming to blow your house down. What can you do
about it?
Read my new books on Amazon - then tell you friends.
Resolving Climate Change 1 How innovation can help us
solve climate change
I, like many people was concerned about climate
change - but in a rather abstract way, it was something that was going
to happen way into the future. But when the Queensland floods struck
with water running under my house (fortunately a high set Queenslander)
I realized that the increase in temperatures - way into the future - was
not the real issue, it was the increase in extreme weather, floods and
droughts, which are a here and now issue, which are the real danger.
Action is needed now – but what did I find when I investigated further? We are
simply not winning the climate change war. The Kyoto targets for the
developed countries were based on what was politically acceptable rather
than what is needed. But even if they did achieve these targets emission
from the developing countries would more than offset any saving. We are
putting tens of billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere every year, and despite all the efforts to reduce our
emissions they grow every year. Sustainable
technologies like wind and rain could potentially supply enough energy
to meet all our needs but until someone invents a way of storing the
energy they cannot provide a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
It all looked totally depressing until I came across a startling
piece of information. Vegetation is absorbing some thirty times all man
made emissions. So why is there a
problem? Simple, virtually
all of that carbon goes back into the atmosphere by oxidation and
decomposition. The largest
emitter of carbon is not electricity generation or transport as we are
told - it is simply rotting vegetation. So why
cannot we divert that carbon so it goes back into the soil, and stays
there? I am an innovator. My most socially important
innovation is a system which has the potential to remove large, e.g.
gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
It also improves soil quality to make food production more
resilient in a changing climate. This innovation would enable the wealthy countries
to continue to enjoy the modern life style and the developing countries
to expand their economies so they too can enjoy this life style without
inducing catastrophic climate change. Does that all seem too simple? Removing gigatonnes
of carbon from the atmosphere is hardly a trivial technology and
requires logistic as well as technical solutions.
That is what this book is all about.
Resolving climate change 2 How the eco corporation
will emerge to fight climate change
Imagine if thirty years ago someone had predicted that in thirty years time (e.g. now) the largest most successful companies would not be the auto makers or the oil industry but companies with odd names like Apple, Google and Face Book who made their serious money not from physical products but from providing services. These services would seem totally unbelievable at that time but would include ways in which people could locate, communicate and share massive amounts of information with other people anywhere in the world by something called the internet. Friends would be looking up the local mental institution.
Key words
- climate change, soil, carbon, science, innovation, greenhouse,
sequestration
Resolving Climate Change 3
How science can fail us
Don’t think for a moment that with a title like ‘How science can
fail us’ that this is a climate deniers delight. It’s exactly the
opposite - climate change is real and happening now - it is about how
the reductionist approach of modern science is hindering finding
solutions to climate change and how the speculative approach of the
innovator, using the systems approach can provide solutions.
The problem is
clear. Resolving climate change requires a dramatic reduction in fossil
fuel use. The economic needs of developing countries and the wish to
maintain a comfortable life style in the affluent countries means that
simply stopping using coal and oil is not an acceptable option in the
short term.
There is an abundant
supply of sustainable energy in wind, solar and wave power but these
have the immediately practical problem that they cannot be controlled,
the energy cannot be stored and released when needed. Given time the
technology could be developed but that could take up to fifty years.
Until this technology is developed cutting back on greenhouse
gases by abandoning fossil fuels simply will not happen.
Embedding carbon in
the soil provides an effective way of giving us a breathing space for
this technology to emerge. The reductionist approach of science,
examining every aspect of embedding carbon in the soil is not going to
give us the perfected technology in the short term.
But the techniques of capturing carbon in the soil have already
been solved by the innovators approach of developing a system. Even if
every minute detail is not understood, the system can be refined over
time.
Embedding carbon in
the soil means that agricultural practices need changing.
Raising the organic content of soil also has benefits in food
security and quality. Changing agricultural practices is easily achieved
by developing suitable financial incentives for the farmer.
There are many ways of achieving this, carbon trading is
currently the most fashionable but the mechanics of carbon trading
schemes have to be simple and accessible for the farmer.
It may be helpful
for our policy makers to consider the similarity between the development
of the steam engine and resolving climate change.
The steam engine was
developed to solve an immediate and practical problem, the flooding of
mines. We have an immediate
and practical problem with food production and managing the impact of
the increased flood and drought cycle from climate change.
The early steam
engines did their job of pumping out the mines, the mine owners did not
wait for the science to catch up they acted. Later steam engines were
refined by the scientific understanding of thermodynamics developed by
Carnot.
Right now we have
the technology of how to embed carbon in the soil - it works and can
offset carbon emissions. Scientific understandings of the complexities
of soil microbiology will no doubt improve with time but we should not
wait - we need to act now.
You can see these at ;-
Or simply goto
and search for ‘resolving climate
change’ or Colin Austin |
