Green House Gas – Giving Nature

We may think of them as villains, but what we call Green House Gases, or GHG’s for short, are really just a part of the Earth’s ecosystem.

Water vapor is a GHG and is created by the Sun’s heat evaporating moisture on the Earth’s surface and it’s bodies of water. It composes the clouds in the sky. Others are less visible to the human eye like Carbon Dioxide and Methane.

Once in the planets atmosphere, these particles capture some of the excess sunlight energy the Earth couldn’t absorb before it radiates back into space. The particles store and emit that captured heat in all directions with some of it directed back towards Earth.

This emission action increases climate temperatures depending upon their level in the atmosphere. Higher levels create a warming effect, hence the name Green House Gas. Also, some of these GHG’s like CO2 and Methane remain in the atmosphere longer than others, giving them more potency. It’s the higher levels of the longer lasting ones that are causing global warming.

Water vapor resides for just a short amount of time in the atmosphere anywhere from a few hours to a few days when it forms clouds and falls to the Earth as rain, snow or some mixture in between.

There’s some things not commonly known about Water Vapor. One is that it actually composes 95% of all Green House Gases in the atmosphere. Or that it also interacts with Earth’s healthy soils to create what’s known as a “Soil Carbon Sponge”. Among other important functions, a Soil Carbon Sponge withholds and stores moisture in soil that it absorbs from water vapor in the atmosphere. It’s this retention of moisture that helps keep the Earth at a relatively cooler temperature than what we are now facing with global warming.

CO2 is one of the longer lasting GHG’s in the atmosphere that we’ve mentioned and, and while it performs differently than water vapor, it too has a cycle of earth/atmosphere interaction. Some of it has been there for perhaps a thousand years or more. Most of it hangs around for 20 to 200 years.

Methane resides in the atmosphere for less of a time than CO2 but longer than water vapor and it radiates heat 30 times greater than CO2. So you can see that if the levels of these two GHG’s in the atmosphere increase or decrease quickly it effects Earth’s temperatures and climate dramatically.

For instance, too little GHG’s and the Earth can become too cold to sustain most life. The average Earth surface temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit without them.

We can look to Venus for an example of the other extreme. Venus once possibly had plenty of water on its surface and oxygen in its atmosphere. Along with carbon, these are among the essential building blocks for life.

Eons ago, a runaway buildup of Carbon Dioxide in Venus’ atmosphere caused the planet to overheat to a point where even it’s oceans boiled away. Today, it’s atmosphere is composed predominantly of CO2 and its average surface temperature is 864 degrees Fahrenheit.

These scientific calculations and observations are important to consider as we now experience rapid global warming on our planet from a growing excess of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere.

So where do these two GHG’s come from and how do we get them back into a human sustainable balance?

While Methane is a sizable contributor to global warming, CO2 is more well known so let’s talk about It first.

First, CO2 is short for Carbon Dioxide. It’s composed of one Carbon molecule and two oxygen ones. There are two types, Organic and inorganic. Organic Carbon resides in anything that’s alive and is in the remains of anything that has lived. Inorganic Carbon is in rocks and minerals and has no association with living things.

Our focus is on Organic Carbon so when we use the word Carbon throughout this article we’re referring to that one.

Because Carbon is an essential part of all living things, there’s a lot of it left over when living things die and decay. Through decay, the carbon within them is slowly released into the atmosphere and bonds with two oxygen molecules, becoming CO2. Its drawn back into the Earth by various means and repurposed to build life or to sustain an environment that makes life possible. This is called the Carbon Cycle.

For this process to work effectively enough to sustain life as we know it, there must be large ecosystems known as Carbon Sinks that draw large quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere so it doesn’t overheat the planet. There are three main Carbon Sinks; Forests, Oceans and Soil.

Forests

We all are familiar with Forests but few of us known that they grow both above land and in the oceans

As plants live and grow, they absorb the CO2 created from decaying matter (much of that matter coming from the plants themselves that have died) and extract carbon as energy through photosynthesis, causing plants to grow. This steady, slow cycle of release, absorption and reprocessing of CO2 through plant photosynthesis is crucial to our existence .

For it to be adequate enough to sustain human life there have to be a lot of large CO2 absorbing plants. As with all Carbon Sinks, their strength lay in size or numbers. So trees or kelp, one on land the other in the ocean, when densely packed together in what we call forests, are vital Carbon Sinks.

Oceans

Deep water covering large amounts of the Earth like oceans dissolves CO2 and captures more Carbon than it expels into the atmosphere. Oceans are the largest of carbon sinks on the planet.

Soils.

The earth above sea level is a major Carbon Sink. Healthy vital soil full of biomes, good bacteria, that promotes robust plant growth, draws water vapor and carbon from the air keeping the planet at a cooler, human healthy temperature.

Just as important to remember as you read on is that these Carbon Sinks release large quantities of oxygen that’s free of carbon back into the atmosphere, making the air we breath.

While massive generators in the Carbon Cycle we’re now finding that Carbon Sinks are gentle giants that can be easily destroyed.

Burning fuels made from oil and coal have diminished their effectiveness. Carbon Sinks are no longer able to process all of the ever expanding amount of CO2 resulting from burning oil and coal fuels and why we must greatly reduce using them.

We’re going to have to take better care of our Carbon Sinks and try to make more of them if we’re going to turn things around.

To understand this we need to begin by looking far back into the Earth’s past.

Millions of years ago, decayed plant matter formed peat bogs. Overtime, some of them became coal deposits when over millions of years the bogs were gradually covered with layer upon layer of earth, pressurizing them into black rock that contained unreleased high concentrations of carbon.

Also, millions of years ago when tiny plants and animals like zooplankton and algae reached the end of their natural life cycle, they died and drifted to the bottom of ancient sea beds where they came to rest just as they do in today’s oceans.

Once settled in, their decaying matter also came under increasing pressure, as over eons, mounting layers of sandy sediment covered, condensed and heated the material through pressurization. Only this time it created a liquid we call oil. It lies trapped in reservoirs below layers of earth and, like coal, it possesses high concentrations of carbon.

Since the organisms that eventually became coal and oil lived in the time from which the fossil record derives they have been named fossil fuels.

In simple terms, carbon plus oxygen plus an igniter creates fire. Carbon, while an essential part of all living things, is also the essential substance in any material for fire. Lots of Carbon is released into the atmosphere when burning them.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, let’s talk first about how it all got started.

Our Adaptive Nature achieved its greatest triumph around 400,000 ago when we discovered how to make and use fire to enhance our life span and ensure greater survivability of our species.

We also discovered that the best things to burn were dried plant matter free of moisture that would inhibit their burning Especially wood from trees. We didn’t understand it at the time, but wood from trees had large and denser amounts of carbon, making it capable of higher heat yield than other plants. An average tree contains 400 lbs of Carbon.

For hundreds of thousands of years wood was our go to fuel to make heat, cook foods, manufacture tools etc… Civilization would never have happened without it. But more carbon was being released than through the natural process previously described and it created CO2 in the atmosphere at faster rates.

As civilization advanced, we began experimenting with different fuels other than fire to aid us further in our adaptive conquest.

Unknowingly, we were on our way to being a formidable force of nature that would threaten the existence of all living things on the planet including our own. A tipping point was on the horizon. Less than 300 years ago it began to arrive.

Beginning in the late 1700’s, we discovered we could refine and control the burning of coal and then later oil. These fuels had much greater density of carbon than wood and could exponentially produce far greater heat temperatures. They literally sparked tremendous innovative and inventive strides in agricultural and industrial production.

We call this historic event the Industrial Revolution. It marks the time we started mining as much coal and pumping as much oil as we could out of the Earth and burning it.

The Industrial Revolution has created an unprecedented standard of living unseen at any other point in human history.

Yet, as is often with all things in nature, when anything extraordinary happens there are unforeseen consequences. Along with this great leap in fuel efficiency and potency came greater and greater amounts of CO2 entering the atmosphere as we burned far greater amounts of Carbon at a rate rivaled by only a few other natural events.

For example, scientists think a Meteor striking the Earth and a Volcanic eruption were two events in the history of life on Earth in which large coal and oil deposits were ignited within a short period of time, causing megatons of CO2 to be spewed into the atmosphere. They caused two of the five mass extinctions that have happened since multicellular life began on Earth 600 million years ago.

But this time it’s we humans alone, as a force of nature ourselves, that threatens starting a sixth extinction.

Through burning fossil fuels we’ve been releasing Carbon at hyper speed into the atmosphere, causing CO2 to build up far beyond the capacity of Nature’s Carbon Sinks to process them and keep them from overheating the planet.

But our first steps towards this problem didn’t begin with them. Ironically, it began with tree forests and how we utilized them.

Ten thousand years ago when humans moved from being hunter gatherers to using agriculture as their primary source of food, trees were a major obstacle and a major source of energy. When it came to making way for crops, pasturing animals, acquiring building materials and providing heat for hearth and home, any dead tree was a good tree. Two thirds of all forested land on the planet removed by human activity occurred prior to the Industrial Revolution.

When the Industrial Revolution began we were really off to the races.

It enabled unprecedented expansion of agricultural activity related to the raising of livestock, most of it being cattle and cows.

To make way for the land needed to grow their feed crops and the pastures for them to roam, millions of forested acres around the world were wiped out in just a few hundred years in order to supply our large appetite for beef and dairy products.

Most recently, such as in Brazil, some of that destruction has been by human’s intentionally burning thousands of rainforest acres to make way for planting grain and providing pasture for cattle.

The burning of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest has double the tragic consequences of modern agriculture expansion as this activity releases more Carbon that gets turned into CO2 while at the same time destroying one of the worlds biggest Carbon Sinks in one fell swoop.

The problem is remarkably clear, if there are now less trees due to a an expanding livestock agricultural industry then there’s less CO2 scrubbed from the atmosphere by forest Carbon Sinks. Add to that the annual spewing of more and more CO2 into the air by human activity within the last 150 years than over the last 400,000 years before the Industrial Revolution and you get Earth’s temperatures rising at an alarming rate with no end in sight.

This problem also cascades into the other Carbon Sinks.

The Ocean Carbon Sinks can’t process all the CO2 we need them to because there’s just too much of it. This overload throws Carbon Cycle out of balance. The oceans are too warm and acidic, threatening all ocean life including Kelp forests, diminishing their capacity produce oxygen.

And then there’s soil.

Through intensive farming practices, soil too has lost its edge. Under mono agricultural systems focused on producing the two main ingredients for livestock feed, soy beans and field corn, farm fields are overworked by tilling releasing carbon that would be normally be sequestered in healthy soils and degrading the soils ability to capture CO2 from the atmosphere for Carbon Cycle processing at the same time.

We need some different equations and we need them quick.

The problem of too much CO2 in the atmosphere is difficult to solve in the short amount of time left to do it. It’s projected that we have to achieve a zero GHG emission level by at least 2050 if not sooner just to stop directly expanding the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by using fossil fuels. Major technological advances and political will world wide must occur for that to happen.

Food choices hold the brightest hope to begin a faster turn around and to discuss that we should begin by discussing the other highly problematic GHG, Methane Gas. Couple that with something called Biochar added to farm fields and we can make a big difference in a short amount of time.

Here’s why:

Methane does not stay in the atmosphere nearly as long as CO2 and only accounts for 10% of all GHG’s, so at first glance it appears to be a secondary problem compared to CO2. However, as said, it radiates heat 30 times more than CO2, making it the most potent of all GHG’s and its impact nearly as dangerous as CO2.

The sources for Methane are found both below and on the Earths surface. Sources below find their way into the Earths atmosphere by natural openings from earth quakes, volcanic eruption etc.. or from man made ones such as drilling for oil and natural gas.

It’s formation below the Earth’s surface comes from a similar sequence of geological events as those of oil and coal.

On the Earth’s surface it comes mostly from composted garbage in landfills, agricultural activity and from melting permafrost near the polar ice caps that are melting from global warming.

It’s in the realm of Methane from agriculture where PATHS hopes to help.

Cows emit large amounts of methane through their digestive function known as Enteric Fermentation. A whopping 14% of GHG impact on our climate could be directly reduced just by limiting beef and dairy in our diets. And the benefit wouldn’t stop there.

Aside from their methane emission problems, beef cattle are terribly inefficient as a food source. As said, huge amounts of forest Carbon Sinks have been destroyed because of that inefficiency.

Compared to other animal sourced foods like chickens and their eggs, Cattle require 8 times as much grain to make the feed they eat. That means millions of forested acres have been cleared to raise those feed crops. The same is true for the pastures the cows graze upon to provide for their ruminant diet and activity. These dual demands upon nature are driven by us producing a food that grows with gross inefficiency. It has resulted in wiping trees off of much of the Earth surface in order to make room for feeding an animal we choose to eat but do not have to.

If we just cutback on eating beef and consuming dairy products, we could begin afforestation, the growing of new forests on land freed from growing ruminant feed grain and freed from providing ruminants with their pasture.

A simple decisive shift in diet like this could restore and expand Carbon Sinks, providing one of the paths to the proper balance of GHG’s in the atmosphere.

So when it comes to what we think is the new equation for how agriculture can make a significant contribution to reducing GHG’s it goes something like this:

Healthier Soil Carbon Sinks + (poultry & eggs)+(more vegetables)-(beef and dairy)= Human Sustainability

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions