Who is right? The climate alarmists? Or the Climate deniers?

Doesn’t matter. The metrics that matter are drainage during/after thaw and precipitation after thaw.

Pioneer grass species are what allow methane to escape soils. This study found that unless the area remains flooded, the pioneer grass species are soon replaced by shrubs and forbs that don’t allow much methane to escape. Then soil microbes turn methane into CO2 that didn’t escape enough to be measured in this study. Essentially what we assumed would happen doesn’t in most real world situations.

We underestimated the ability of nature to heal itself.

 

No, it didn't, because there is no evidence that it did.

 

Which is why periods of warmer climate were called, "optimums" before that term was ruled politically unacceptable.

 

On average, warmer will result in increased precipitation. It also depends on vegetative state of an ecosystem as well. And even on how much irrigation is happening in an area.

But yes, warmer means more precipitation globally for us to use for our great benefit.

 

And why human civilizations flourished in the last three optimums - Medieval, Roman, and Minoan.

 

That is just part of the thread I was responding to.

And yes, it actually can happen again on Earth. It would just take massive volcanology. Which is not very likely, but it is possible.

 

I am not even taking irrigation into account, as that is entirely manmade and has never happened before.

But the vegetative state does not drive the climate (unless you are talking about a temperate or tropical rainforest), but the climate drives the vegetation. If it warms and becomes humid enough to a degree that the temperate rainforest in Northern California starts to expand, then it may well without intervention resume its range south to below San Francisco. But no matter what, Los Angeles will not suddenly turn into a temperate rainforest because the conditions at this time do not allow that, no matter how much water we may pump into the ecosystem.

And the soil often has a hell of a lot to do with that. The soil on the west coast is mostly hard with little plant matter in it so is more likely to repel water than absorb it. That is why the area will flood under even moderate amounts of rain. Unlike the soil in say Alabama, which retains and can absorb so much moisture that you can almost literally pull it up in your hand and squeeze the water out.

It takes thousands of years to make that kind of an impact on the soil to allow such a transition.

This is one reason why I miss "real ecology". Where things like transitions from one environment to another were commonly taught. Not the hippy-dippy "stop destroying the planet" nonsense that has replaced it in modern times.

 

And especially the one that saw the greatest expansion and development of modern man, the Bronze Age Climate Optimum.

And a great many paleontologists are starting to tie the Late Bronze Age Collapse to the Iron Age Cold Epoch. Because the two periods do overlap, and rapidly changing conditions to a colder climate would explain the collapse of almost every civilization during that time period. And like during the later era of human migrations from Asia into Europe which were caused by the Mongols, many groups of humans that had become sedentary and farmers would have resumed nomadism and raiding when the crops failed for too many years in a row.

Oh, and the Minoan Optimum is also the Bronze Age Optimum. Two different names but the same era and conditions. Which ended with the Iron Age Cold Epoch.

 

Vegetative state certainly drives climate.

One example is loss of transpiration after deforestation that results in summer high temps several degrees warmer than if the forests remained.

Another example is the global warming hole in my part of the world. Growing crops have cooled the climate here in the summer in stark contrast to the rest of the planet. Also, in my immediate vicinity, irrigation has slightly decreased precipitation locally, but increased precipitation to the east.


Most climate related problems in countries like Bangladesh are a result of deforestation and desertification. The town on Maui that just burned up was once referred to as the Venice of the Pacific because there was so much freshwater and freshwater marshland around it. But the vegetative state was changed from dry land forest to the near desert conditions today. Vegetative state made all the difference.

But yes, climate can most certainly drive vegetative state as well. Humans are still doing their best to denude the planet. Yet the changing climate is resulting in a greener planet in spite of our efforts to stop it.

Recently the Netherlands had a big fit because trees are taking over heathlands. Heathlands are of course a product of deforestation and intentional stripping of soil nutrients and organic matter. Nature is trying to heal the soil with pioneer tree species, but those folks won’t have it. They love their infertile soils and don’t want any nasty organic matter there. They don’t want the climate driving vegetative state. They literally burn diesel fuel in heavy equipment to strip top layers of organic matter from heathlands to prevent the climate and nature from healing the land their ancestors destroyed.

Yep. Real ecology is a rare bird these days. When climate nutters in one of the most climate woke countries there is, the Netherlands, think heathlands are “natural” lands that must be protected, you can be sure real ecology hasn’t been taught there for decades.

 

That is also seen in areas like the Amazon. But that is loss of vegetation making the change, not vegetation bringing in a change.

Even the American Indians understood that. One thing that was commonly seen when Europeans first arrived was that many of the forests had large burned out areas. The Indians would purposefully burn a section of a forest because that created meadows which attracted deer. And deer collecting in meadows were easier to hunt than those living in a forested area. But those burn meadows were never more than a dozen acres or so, so it was not like the "slash and burn" agriculture of today.

But most regions will by nature try to advance to the stage of ecological development that the area will support if left alone. That is why ghost towns and abandoned areas will often rather quickly return to the condition they were in before man changed it. And it works both ways, as near Palm Springs on I-10 you can see where there used to be homesteads and businesses that have been gone for decades with a lot of dead palm trees. Palm trees can not survive their without human aid, so rarely last long after humans stop taking care of them. But the same property in Alabama will within a decade be a crumbling ruin as the foliage will soon consume it and it will look like nothing but a mound of brush.

https://redcanarycollective.org/magazine/eco-lit-bob-sipchen/

 

It’s illogical to believe loss of vegetation makes climatic change but addition will not. It’s also not based on evidence. I stated that vegetative state affects climate. It does, whether it’s loss or addition or species change of vegetation.

Native Americans understood that forest edge is the most productive and ecologically diverse terrestrial ecosystem in their geographical area. Just like water/terrestrial edge is the most productive aquatic environment.

If we want a healthy environment with less pollution, less erosion, more “green” and more pleasant weather we should listen to what nature tells us. We shouldn’t waste energy growing palm trees where water resources are scarce etc. Species that naturally thrive in the local area should be leveraged to accomplish our goals. Climate nutters keep fighting nature that is “trying” to heal itself.

This week I had a nutter claim large herbivores are detrimental because they produce methane—completely unaware that large herbivores are the best managers of soil carbon and nitrogen nature has come up with. Totally unaware the rainforests she advocates for instead produce massive amounts of both methane and CO2. Everything nature has provided us with has value if used appropriately where it’s advantageous. It’s a sad state of affairs where nutters want control but have zero knowledge of climate science.

The only thing worse than authoritarians is authoritarians that are ignorant of the things they want to control.

 

Not really, it is perfectly logical.

In short, it is almost impossible to "add" vegetation to an area that was never evolved to support it. We all know how a rainforest works. But if you take two thousand square miles of Western Mexican coastal land and plant a huge amount of tropical rainforest plants, you are not going to make a rainforest. And once you stop watering and caring for those plants, they are all going to die. With no rainforest ever being made.

Look at my above examples of date palms planted in California.

Humans simply can not add enough vegetation to impact the climate. We can't force forests to grow in deserts, we can't simply plant grass in tundra and permafrost and try to shorten that stage of the ecological evolution. Because it is not just the plants, one would have to import the entire ecosystem. And do a huge amount of preparation to the land to even have it able to support those new plants. As well as the insects, the birds, and the animals required to keep it alive and healthy. We simply can't do that over a large enough area for a long enough period of time to make any kind of change in the ecology.

But the opposite, we can do that damned fast. Slash and burn a forest, then plant crops that consume all of the nutrients in the ground before moving on and doing it again. We can move in with equipment and do like they do in China. Rip out thousands of acres of forest or grasslands, extract all of the minerals we want, then simply leave and do nothing to reclaim the land to the condition it was in before.

Loss of habitat and conditions to support vegetation is damned easy, we have been doing that for tens of thousands of years. But we have never once done the reverse. Where we took an area and forced it to evolve into the next abundant stage of ecological development. To where the environment would then take over and it would even become self-sustaining without actual human intervention. Let alone to the degree that it would start to affect the climate.

The absolutely closest I can think of would be the trees planted as windbreaks in the Great Plains in the 1930s. But those really did not change much other than lessening the power of surface winds. That is why you look around most farmsteads established before the 1940s they are generally bordered by trees. Primarily from North Dakota down to Texas, but farmers in almost all states did the same as the government was putting them in for free. And it did lessen the surface wind strength and helped stop the "dust bowl" effect, but there was really no other effect from that. They did not lower temperatures, or change humidity, or even lower the power of the winds. It only lessened them on the surface as the rows of trees every few miles acted like baffles and would not let them build up on the surface like they did at higher altitudes.

 

Nah. Even the current species of vegetation in the Amazon are a result of human selection.

Humans destroy much more than they create, this is true. But we have been changing climate by changing vegetative states for eons. And we can increase vegetation easily when we stop intentionally trying to destroy it like my Netherlands example.

We routinely change climate of cities by adding vegetation. Happens all the time. On small and large scale.

It’s rare indeed to find land not “evolved” to grow something.

 

What?

Sorry, calling coprolite on that one.

 

Call it what you want. I’m just reporting on the evidence. Here’s one study.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal0157

 

A basin of over 2.5 million square miles. And some plants that are already native to the region are found in higher concentrations near settlements.

And it is little surprise that domesticated species would dominate, they were engineered to be more productive and aggressive than their wild counterparts. Over the thousands of years many wild origin species have gone extinct, replaced by the species we bred to be better producers and heartier than the original plant was. But the fact it, they are simply newer variants of an old plant that was already abundant in the area, not a new species introduced.

And that did absolutely nothing to affect the environment they live in.

In much of the Great Plains, wild wheat and corn is now common. But neither has had any real impact on the environment. And the plants that were in most of those areas had already been destroyed by farmers, so it is only natural that is what is going to take their place when the land goes feral again.

This can be seen in Zea, which was the origin species that corn was developed from. It still exists, but is still much smaller, produces less seeds per plant, and is threatened by many insects that thrive on it. Corn by being larger and producing many times more seeds per plant is simply more successful and will replace it even though they are largely the same plant. One simply improved by thousands of years of selective breeding rather than evolution.

 

Yes, the species in the Amazon not only affect local climate but climate as far away as California it appears and the entire planet in a small way. Humans changed the vegetative state and that state affects climate. Simple stuff. We changed vegetative state of the central US as well and affected the climate.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL075604

Soil improvement was a big part of vegetative change people accomplished in the Amazon.

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/geoglyph/overview

The jungle/rainforest we think of as “natural” is a product of human meddling with vegetative state.

In the US we changed vegetative state but decreased soil quality.

 

You have adopted a minimax strategy: minimize the maximum loss. Others prefer a Maxima strategy. Maximize the maximum gain .

The loss from your strategy is certain. Climate apocalypse is far from certain.

 

Here is the funny thing, I think both are wrong.

And in reality, the majority speaking against AGW are not even "deniers". That is a meaningless slur that is spread for anybody that refuses to accept 100% the AGW believers.

That is like saying if somebody is not a "Far Left Progressive" they are by default a Republican. And if somebody is not a Far-Right Conservative, then they become a RINO or Liberal by default.

I dismiss most of the "climate alarmists", because they are by their very nature alarmists and fanatics. They are not talking science, so much as they are trying to spread a religion. Do not question, do not consider any information they do not approve of, genuflect to what they tell you to and spread the word.

Oh, and destroy any that oppose you.

Now most of those that actually are "deniers", they have as little or less understanding of actual science as the AGW fanatics do. And I find it interesting because in one thread I will have an AGW fanatic screaming that the warmest the planet had was 8,000 years ago and it has been cooling ever since until we messed it all up. Oh, and the various warm periods that have been recorded like the Medieval Warm Spell is a lie made up by oil companies. They never happened, not a one of them.

And in the same thread you will have some actual "deniers", who say the climate has not changed at all in the last 200 years. And will continue to remain the same for another 200 years.

Obviously, that shows how you have nuts who deny the science facts on both sides of the issue. Me, I have long made it my pattern to dismiss almost all fanatics, they never have anything of importance to add to anything, and tend to mess others up far more than anything else.

 

The global climate is always changing. We have had nine previous warming and cooling cycles in the past ~ 10,000 years (aka the Holocene Period after the ice age). That’s the natural climate variability which has not been quantified or accounted for in any IPCC (or any other analysis). If the natural climate variability can not be accounted for then attributing any change to a single factor is impossible.

 

It's about how does a policy maker legislate? What path should they take?

 

Sorry, I see something as "making policy" to try and affect the climate as about as stupid as screaming at the clouds.



Now, before you go and think this means I do not care, I very much do. In fact, the massive deforestation of our rainforests and the destruction of that landscape bothers me much more than "CO2 emissions" does. That is known as the "lungs of the planet" for a reason, and evolved specifically to remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it into the ground over time. And in past ages, when CO2 levels rose, the rainforests expanded and became larger and more dense.

And we will likely see more algae blooms in our lakes and oceans. Once again, those are plants that absolutely love warmer water, and have a voracious appetite for CO2.

I have long considered myself an "old school ecologist", and believe we should do as much as we can to preserve the natural balance of the planet. And if we do something like foresting or mining, it is our duty and responsibility afterwards to restore the environment as much as we can to the condition it was in before the area was exploited.

I actually spend as much time as I can "in nature", and have for most of my life. Backpacking in remote areas, even just spending a few hours walking through not sterile parks that are groomed and designed to be pleasing to people, but the wild areas that are exactly as nature intended. Be it the Mojave or Chihuahuan Deserts, the woods of California, Oregon, and Idaho, or the jungles of Panama and Okinawa. I honestly believe that if nature is left alone it will offset any changes humans might do naturally. It always has in the past, and our planet in the last 4 billion years has gone through changes from one extreme to the other.

And each time, nature adapted to try and bring things back into balance. That is why the destruction of the Amazon and other areas where the soil is being exploited to the point of complete depletion and no replanting is being done really worries me. And I think most are chasing a "red herring" by running in circles following "rising CO2". To me, they need to be far more concerned at the destruction of the system that has evolved over billions of years to thrive on increased CO2 and to keep it in check naturally.

And not just the rainforests, our gross megacities are doing the same thing. The area of LA alone is over 502 square miles. And that is not even counting the much larger "LA Metropolitan Area", which covers just under 34,000 square miles. And a huge percent of that is no longer plants that remove CO2, but asphalt, cement, and structures that remove nothing. In that city alone, around 200 square miles of what had once been vegetation that removed CO2 is now a concrete jungle. That is the loss of a hell of a lot of biomass in a single area. I honestly believe that humans need to disperse more, and end living in such massive cities that are destroying the environment.

This is why I laugh whenever somebody calls me a "denier". Crap, if anything I am far more radical than most of them would ever think of themselves when it comes to my honest concern for the environment. But you just can't "legislate" human nature. Hell, for most of the last 4 decades my main form of transportation has not even been a car, but a motorcycle. And for the exact same reasons. They have a higher fuel economy, take up far less space so much lower need for freeways, roads, and parking lots. And take only a fraction of the raw materials to produce than the SUVs that most seem to love. And I have not owned an RV in years (the only one I ever owned my wife bought without my knowledge). When I go camping, it's on a motorcycle with either a simple tent, or a pop-up tent trailer I tow behind it.





And those are not jokes, those literally are my last two "camping rigs". The top photo taken in the woods near Andersonville in Georgia, the bottom during a trip I took near Mount Shasta. A heavy fog moved in, and visibility dropped so low that I pulled into a parking lot for safety reasons for the night. How many of the "AGW crowd" do you think would even consider spending a week or more living out of a small A-frame tent in the woods of Georgia? Me, I relish things like that.

But I know it would be absolutely impossible to legislate that most simple commuting move from cars and trucks to motorcycles. And their bus sized motorhomes. But I do try to live as I believe as much as possible.

 

The problem is that the catastrophists want to put their thumb on the scale: "If you don't do exactly as I say, everyone will die; so to be on the safe side, you have no choice but to do exactly as I say." Sorry, that's not honest or rational.

 

In my opinion the best policy is to maximize economic growth by minimizing energy costs which raises everyone’s standard of living as well as maximizes the ability for local adaptation to a warming climate which has been warming and cooling throughout the last 10,000 years.

 

Nice! We are in Peru - did a five day Inca trail to Machu Picchu trek. Did Kilimanjaro last month after failing last year. The earth is a beautiful place.