Carbon Sinks Are Becoming Carbon Sources
This means that regenerative agriculture systems WILL NOT cool the planet, period. Overshoot must be reduced first before climate change or any other symptom predicament can be reduced. Certainly regenerative agriculture, permaculture, and other specialized forms of agriculture are better than today's industrial agriculture. But they won't "solve" and reverse climate change. Notice that I said that climate change is a predicament...this means that it does not have a solution. It instead has an outcome. This makes these kinds of statements one of the most popular forms of hopium. The picture below was what was posted along with this link:
Needless to say, I was surprised to see such a statement on this friend's timeline, since normally he has far more accurate posts. This post is really "out there" with several demonstrably false statements just in the picture alone. The idea that we can "regenerate high biodiversity" during a mass extinction (another symptom predicament of overshoot) that we promulgated is just more denial. Organisms, like all dissipative structures, consume exergy, transforming useful energy into less useful energy. No dissipative structures go backwards. Once a vibrant community of organisms is wiped out so that land can produce what humans want from it, very rarely does the biodiversity which once existed there ever again equal what it once did before humans cleared it for our own uses. Tom Murphy explains it well in this article here, quote:
"What matters, here, is that the agricultural method is not vetted by multi-level selection (evolution) to be a viable way of living in stable relationship with the community of life. Besides the fact that agriculture tends to build surplus, which fuels population growth, hierarchy, armies, etc. (see post on the river metaphor), and therefore sets up an unsustainable growth train, it appears to fail even without those elaborations just based on what the land can support, long term, without being monotonically degraded by the effort.
Forests and other ecological arrangements can indeed self-sustain “indefinitely,” but only because they self-select a diverse complement of organisms that perform all the necessary functions to keep the cycle going—in everybody’s mutual interest. It’s not “survival of the fittest,” but survival of the collective that matters. Agriculture is an artificial approach that might try to mimic some vital ecological functions, but incompetently and without the benefit of many millions of years of self-tuning. It can appear to work for a time, and get a major extension by being propped up on fossil-fueled fertilizer and labor—further distorting our narrow perspectives. Given the brevity of the experiment, we certainly cannot proclaim the practice to be sustainable, especially when evidence points to the contrary."
To be sure, overshoot, once again, would have to be reduced first before the mass extinction we are in could be reduced. It isn't going to happen while population growth is still happening. It isn't going to happen while emissions are still rising. It isn't going to happen while global temperatures are still rising. The associated article attached has no evidence to back up the claims made in the picture. While the article brings up some accurate science in the text, it doesn't back up how regenerative agriculture can remove more than current emissions of carbon dioxide, how it will regenerate biodiversity in a mass extinction, and/or how it it will reverse climate change. Sorry, folks, but this is pure hopium.
Now, onto the bigger issue that I think more people need to know about, considering the type of trash that is getting posted all over the place similar to that above. I have posted most of this before in several different articles, so now I shall provide it all here as well. The bottom line is that we are losing the carbon sinks that have absorbed much of the carbon we have released into the atmosphere over the past couple of centuries (most over the past 3 decades). Many people talk about planting trees, and I love planting trees. However, I hold no unrealistic illusions about trees being able to mitigate climate change when so many species are in serious decline and even threatened with extinction. So, this information-rich article about trees will have your head spinning. Trees just aren't going to cut the mustard, sorry.
How about the cryosphere and more specifically, permafrost? Methane emissions are a very serious threat that haven't been taken as seriously as they should. So much information is constantly growing about the cryosphere that quite frankly it is difficult to keep up. Here is a considerable amount of info, albeit slightly outdated now. This file is for methane alone. I don't intend for this article to be comprehensive, as I would need a book rather than an article; but suffice it to say that this is a start for those interested in researching further. Here's one more article about the "Doomsday Glacier" just for fun.
How about the oceans and phytoplankton? I could go on and on for a considerably long time here, but this file should help. I've written quite a few articles delving into all of this, and many cross over from one area to another. However, one article stands out in my mind as being mainly about the oceans (and how extinction and hydrogen sulfide are linked). More files related to this topic are here and here. This article here is about seagrasses. This article is about how carbon emissions from the destruction of mangrove forests are predicted to increase by 50,000% by 2100. I wrote about the AMOC last week and here is more from Leon Simons. I really like this quote from the end of it:
In conclusion, previous sinks are turning into sources globally as detailed by new evidence from NASA. These are self-reinforcing positive feedback loops, and they will remove huge areas of land from being able to support agriculture altogether. I have frequently posted this article from John Gowdy. Beware if you haven't seen it before; the implications are not pretty. It's really important that folks start to get real with regard to the predicaments we face. Again, I only scratched the surface here. Yet, as usual, this article turned out to be considerably longer than I originally intended. There's really only one way to explain to people what the facts are - give them the material to read for themselves. If they are interested, they'll read it. If not, they'll remain ignorant. Facts generally won't change people's minds - only experience or emotions will. Regardless of one's worldviews and beliefs, when disaster strikes, it's better to be mentally prepared for likely possibilities than having a false sense of security. Physically preparing is also good, but one can only prepare so much - there are always things that nobody thought of that can happen and according to Murphy's Law, will happen.
So, what should we do? See Part One and Part Two and Part Three and Part Four for details.
Once again, as I usually point out at the end of my articles, Live Now!
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