b2g: Bid-To-Goodbye World Vs Brown-To-Green Revolution

MANILA: Climate scientists are alarmed that the Earth's atmosphere has reached what they believe is its carbon dioxide threshold of 400 ppm, which to them is the tipping point to the end of the world. Lauren Tousignant says, "This is the worst news for life on Earth" (29 September 2016, New York Post, nypost.com). Ophelia Benson simply says (28 September 2016, butterfliesandwheels.org): "Bye world." Citing Ralph Keeling, who runs the Scripps Institute for Oceanography's carbon dioxide monitoring program, Brian Kahn says, "Even if the world stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, what (man) has already put in the atmosphere will linger for many decades to come" (scientificamerican.com).

To solve a problem, change the problem! What if all the carbon dioxide emitted tomorrow can be captured tomorrow? My photograph has taught me how it can be done.

Clue: Keeling's pessimism stems from the fact that climate experts are clueless about an inclusive and rapid-enough technique to capture much if not all of the carbon dioxide the Earth (Man) emits into the atmosphere.

I don't blame those scientists; I blame their mentors who did not teach them to think creatively, to think out of the box of scientific biases. That's because science is always that of a closed mind; it has to be, as it is all logic, all reason, all chronological, sequential or hierarchical thinking.

One of these scientific biases is that you need forests as giant carbon sinks to offset the total volume of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere as people expend energy in day-to-day activities. In photosynthesis, plants need from the sun energy, from the soil water, and from the air carbon dioxide (CO2), which thereby reduces the CO2 in the air; trees max out photosynthetic activities, as the woody species naturally absorb the gas for photosynthesis to make food and wood for themselves. So, the logic goes, given their vast canopies, old forests and emerging forestlands are man's main allies against the greenhouse CO2. I will show you that that is BS, biased science.

If your thinking as a scientist is limited to forestlands as carbon sinks, that's what I call BS, boxed science. All you have to do is change your perspective. As a scientist, you should practice BS, broad-minded science.

To help you along with that, look at my image again.

That should remind you of Michelangelo's fresco painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – "The Creation Of Adam." I say my photograph is even better. In Michelangelo's work, there is no spark of life; in my image, you see a new spark of life from an old crop, corn. A brown forefinger points to a yellowish silk coming out of an emerging green corn ear, and the leaves of the corn plant are green and wide. It is one of several shots I took at a little farm in Laguna 27 August 2016 at 1743 hours, and promptly forgot about. Today, as I write the first draft of this, on 29 September, or 35 days later, via Picasa 3, I find it among hundreds of my images filed in folders, and it's beautiful. This, as you will see, is BS, bright science. Brown pointing to green, b2g.

If you look beyond the corn leaves, you see the brown soil and, as I will show you in a little while, this is another b2g: brown to green.

And that is the beginning of this short story that actually began about 28 years ago.

In 1989, former US President Al Gore began making slide show presentations on global warming (Wikipedia), which subsequently the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, based on the slide show, presented as pointing to a "planetary emergency"– climate change altering the world at catastrophic levels, pointing to another extinction of the species, including Homo sapiens. The film was an astounding success in the box office and minds of critics.

In 2007, Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) won jointly the Nobel Peace Prize for their works on climate change, Al Gore for raising everyone's consciousness in the first place and the IPCC for coming up with the numbers that essentially corroborated Al Gore's story on global warming.

Also in 2007, the concept of carbon footprint began to be used as a measure of the carbon dioxide emissions "to develop the energy plan for the City of Lynnwood in Washington (Wikipedia). Your carbon footprint is the calculated amount of carbon dioxide your activities emit into the atmosphere. That is to say, the ecological damage you create on Earth as you use energy is your carbon footprint. Your hand constructs, your foot destructs.

In 2011, the Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty (COTAP) initiative began its carbon offset projects in Nicaragua. What you do to match your carbon footprint is called carbon offset. COTAP aims "to empower individuals and organizations in developed countries to address both climate change and global poverty," and "COTAP counteracts your carbon emissions through certified forestry projects (that) create transparent, accountable, and life-changing earnings for rural farming communities" (cotap.org). Rich forests for poor people.

In 2012, as internationally scientists looked at forests as crucial in man's fight against climate change, FAO says (15 June 2012, fao.org):

Forests have four major roles in climate change: they currently contribute about one-sixth of global carbon emissions when cleared, overused or degraded; they react sensitively to a changing climate; when managed sustainably, they produce woodfuels as a benign alternative to fossil fuels; and finally, they have the potential to absorb about one-tenth of global carbon emissions projected for the first half of this century into their biomass, soils and products and store them – in principle in perpetuity.

The point of all that is that forests are important 4 times more than you think. One, forests contribute to your carbon footprint when you clear them or abuse them. (So don't.) Two, forests are sensitive to climate change, which makes them valuable allies in combating global warming. Three, forests produce wood that are a good alternative to pollutive energy. Four, forests can absorb 1/10th of the Earth's carbon emissions.

That looks like good science. There's more. On 01 April 2016, Scientific Reports published a paper by Robert J Zomer et al dealing with "the contribution of agroforestry to global and national carbon budgets" (nature.com). Kristen Satre Myer points to that study and says, "Scientists uncover surprising source of carbon storage hidden in plain sight" (19 September 2016, ensia, ensia.com). That source? Agroforestry, with which you can mistake the trees for the forest.

Kristen says:

Using estimates of global farmland tree cover derived from remote sensing observations, a team of researchers from Asia, Africa and Europe calculated the amount of carbon captured and stored by trees growing on farmland. When carbon stored by these trees was included, total carbon storage for agricultural land measured more than four times higher than current IPCC default values.

That means that aside from forest lands, you now have to consider agroforest lands as good carbon sinks. The tree crops growing with farm crops enable those fields to capture 4 times more carbon higher than the IPCC estimates. The leaves capture carbon dioxide from the air during photosynthesis; trees have much more leaves given their space than any other crop.

Kristen also says:

In addition to being an efficient strategy to offset carbon losses due to deforestation, the researchers noted that integrating trees into the agricultural landscape also benefits small farmers around the globe by helping to optimize soil moisture, boosting soil nitrogen, and in general encouraging a more diverse, productive, profitable, healthy and sustainable use of land.

I know. I was the Chief Information Officer of the Forest Research Institute from the middle 70s to early 80s, and I visited forest concessions from Luzon to Mindanao for my stories. I was and am a wide reader too, googling also while writing.

Trees in the forests and trees in the farms sequester carbon dioxide, that is, drink it as raw material for photosynthesis to produce and reproduce themselves. They are vital in the arsenal of man fighting climate change. Agroforestry encourages the use of farmland that is richer and more rewarding to the pocket as well as the body.

Granting all that, granting the value of trees such as measured by experts in serving as carbon offsets, that is, as carbon sinks. Yet, as you may have guessed it by now, today, Thursday, 29 September 2016, at 1100 hours, a little child spoke to me. If you change perspective and think of a Green Sink instead of simply a Carbon Sink, you'll get the message.

If you look at the image above again, as the right forefinger of the boy's brown hand points to the yellow green silk emerging from the young corn ear, they are surrounded by healthy and large green leaves. I shall refer to it now as my brown-to-green (b2g) photograph, with the acronym b2g showing the ascender (upper part) of the lower case b indicating the promise of a crop above the soil, and the descender (lower part) of the lower case g implying that growth must begin beneath, with the soil. The b stands for both boy and brown, the g stands for ground.

What I have just experienced is an awesome paradigm shift:

In combatting climate change, it is the leaves that are important, not the trees in the forest!

Those climate change experts never gave importance and neither did I until now that collective broad leaves such as those of corn serve as huge carbon sinks; they are better as carbon dioxide catchers because you can grow corn to maturity in 100 days but not trees.

So now I say: Forget the trees.

Trees as carbon offsets is blah science, if not bad science. They cannot grow fast enough to offset any carbon footprint immediately. Tall tree seedlings planted to create new forests are long in hype and short in hope.

The acronym b2g is also a symbol; brown also refers to the brown soil and green also refers to crops other than corn. That is The b2g Revolution. That is to say:

If we pay attention to bare soils and plant them all with crops that not only survive but thrive under awful growing conditions such as infertility, lack of irrigation or rain, attack of pests and diseases, flooding, saline or alkaline soils, and otherwise under degraded status – then we can grow fast enough green to serve as the carbon sink all over the world in no time at all, not possible with new forestlands or new agroforestlands.

I call it then a Green Sink. The scientists have taught us about the forest as a carbon sink; a child has just taught us that the bare lowlands and uplands when cropped become an immeasurable green sink.

To make sure there is no bare soil in between the growing plants, we must practice green mulching or intercropping with creepers like bitter gourd and sweet potato.

Immediately, I know rice can be planted in problematic soils, with the Green Super Rice (GSR) varieties produced via interlocking conventional breeding by IRRI & multi-national partners. IRRI says of the GSR rices (August 2016, irri.org):

GSR varieties are a mix of more than 500 promising rice varieties and hybrids that are tolerant of different abiotic stresses, such as drought, floods, and salinity. They have been proven to perform well even with less inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides, that are costly and, sometimes, harmful to people and the environment.

Collectively, these varieties are called Green Super Rice because they are good for the environment, that is, they do not call for soil amendments such as chemical fertilizers and for chemical pest control measures such as weedicides and pesticides (irri.org/rice-today). Now, to pass b2g standards, rice will need to be planted with an intercrop.

So I say: Remember the crops.

That's the big lesson that little boy in my little b2g photograph taught me. And that is why I'm calling for The World's b2g Revolution right now! @

02 October 2016. Essay word count, excluding this line: 2016