COOLING THE CLIMATE
A GLOBAL CALL TO ACTION!
We can stabilize the climate and cool the planet within twenty years!
WHAT IS OVERLOOKED BY MAINSTREAM CLIMATE SCIENTISTS?
The cooling of the planet has been done for hundreds of millions of years through photosynthesis, the basis of almost all life on Earth. While most focus on the carbon absorption as the key cooling effect of photosynthesis, water, released through evapotranspiration through the stomata of plant leaves, does much of the heavy lifting in lowering temperatures. We calculated that the cooling effect through the water cycle in for instance the Amazon rainforest is at least a hundred times that of carbon sequestration. Once this is understood, fast solutions become available. But for this we need to see the planet and the climate in a new light. Thank you for reading this short document. Happy to hear your feedback.
HOW DO WE CREATE A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE?
“If you want to make major changes, you have to change the way you SEE things.”
Let’s start by understanding our planet differently: the Earth is alive, it is functioning as one huge organism, with all species and ecosystems playing a role in establishing the conditions for life to thrive in a hostile universe. The biosphere is responsible for creating and maintaining the atmosphere and a livable climate within which we’ve all evolved. Many Indigenous peoples have long held this story of a living planet and so has James Lovelock with the Gaia theory.
WATER COOLS
Greenhouse gasses trap heat in the atmosphere, but another major factor almost completely overlooked is the role of water. Water is Life. In its various states (ice, liquid water and vapour), water interacts with plant life and the atmosphere, driven by photosynthesis and sunlight, stabilizing the weather and cooling the climate. The destruction of ecosystems and living biomass all over the Earth is responsible for a lot of the temperature increases and extreme weather events we’re experiencing, because of the disruption it has caused to the water cycles. Anyone who understands the role of plants and the water cycle in stabilizing our climate will intuitively know that this is the case, and understanding this is crucial for addressing the climate crisis. Global warming is not just caused by CO₂. The other hugely important cause is the degradation of the cooling capacity of living ecosystems leading to the dehydration of the land masses and decrease in cloud cover.
Healthy ecosystems, soils, and plants stabilize weather and cool the planet, offering effective, tangible solutions that we can and must leverage to stabilize our climate. Once the damage to the biosphere is reversed, the planet regains its capacity to regulate its own temperature and other processes, attaining homeostasis. Ecological restoration, done by everyone, everywhere, is our fastest way out of climate chaos.This includes strategic restoration aiming to improve cloud production and bioprecipitation. For a more in depth understanding, read the book that Peter Bunyard and I wrote on the subject.
This five minute video we co-produced explains the story in animation:
HOW MUCH DO WE HAVE TO DO TO REVERSE CLIMATE CHAOS FAST?
To stop further warming within 20 years and reduce extreme weather events, we need a strategic plan involving the global population, powerful institutions (governments, armed forces, corporates, etc), and place-based solutions to correct the Earth Energy Imbalance (of about 1,8 Watt/m2) through a series of measures. The communication, monitoring and finance will be directed via satellite internet infrastructure.
Key priorities to cool the climate include:
Supporting hundreds of million indigenous and smallholder families worldwide, together with climate refugees to protect forests, grow back forests and transition to regenerative agroforestry food production and protect remaining forests and ecosystems NOW! This will restore small water cycles, regenerate soils, protect biodiversity and increase living biomass, while cooling the regions this work is done.
According to our calculations, regenerating vegetation on 2.8 million km2 of land in the tropics, transitioning to agroforestry or reforested areas will stop the planet from heating up further and in fact curb temperatures downward by 1 C. That is big (the size of Argentina) but not impossibly big.
A plan for this has been written. Together with other measures to transition the global food system towards climate resilience, an estimated cost of 0,3-0.5% of Global GDP or around 3-500 billion dollars per year for 20 years is needed. This equals 1 billion US dollar or roughly 12 cents per person per day.
Mobilizing large networks of organizations, such as Rotaries, Red Cross, Oxfam, and climate action groups, to support communities in regenerating local ecosystems and improving their well-being. Include armies and large companies, they have the logistical capacity.
Implementing an ocean and coastal marine ecosystem restoration program, delivering nearly immediate positive socio-economic results. We already know how to do this, with an estimated cost in the tens of billions of dollars per year but with huge returns through increase in fish, molluscs, crustaceans, seaweeds, marine mammals, while cooling the surface waters and sequestering gigatons of carbon and reducing ocean acidification. Restored coastal areas will get more clouds and gentle rains.
Restore the biosphere along the lines of bioregions by aligning human activity with natural boundaries like watersheds and ecosystems, emphasizing sustainability, local resilience, and Indigenous knowledge.
Develop a digital-financial full stack platform and application to support restoration efforts. An outline has been written, almost all parts already exist, with an initial launch cost of 10 million USD to run a pilot for proof of concept.
FINANCING A LIVABLE FUTURE An effective way to fund this planetary restoration project would be to introduce a Global Climate Tax, a 0,1% fee on all financial transactions happening globally. The money would go into large national and global climate repair funds focusing on reviving the biology of the planet. They would issue Green Bonds for projects at the right scale or invest in Natural Capital and Conservation Funds (NC&CFs), which creating tangible, tradeable assets for investors to contribute to environmental conservation while earning a return on their investment and a great chance to appreciate in value of the coming years as the world is waking up to the importance of protecting nature as a way to fight the fast accelerating climate crisis.
The green bonds and NC&CFs would provide a return on investment and be de-risked by guarantees from governments, philanthropy, investment programs and so on, to make them investment-grade for bundles of aggregated projects for pension funds, hedge funds, reinsurers and sovereign wealth funds as well as for smaller denominations for individual investors who would like to see their money work for a livable future.
The investments in these projects will be able to bring a return of investment through a combination of elements in the range of 5-10% per annum depending on context and risk profile. The massive investments will trigger many co-benefits and second round stimulative effects.
It will become profitable to invest in a livable planet! While reducing emissions remains important, we must focus as well on this second, even more important leg on which climate action must stand:
repairing nature and the water cycles it drives, worldwide, everywhere, by everyone.
Implementing regenerative agricultural practices and agroforestry (where appropriate), while reviving adjacent ocean and land-based ecosystems, will restore a balanced climate, mitigate extreme weather, and cool the planet and sequestrate tens of gigatons of CO₂ each year, contributing massively to our emissions-reduction goals.
Emergency priorities to stabilize the planet's climate:
We have max 5 years: Avert the tipping point of die-back of the Amazon rainforest and strategically reforest the biome to restore the full vigor of the biotic pump function over the area, for fast regrowth of huge forest areas in the Americas and a transition to agroforestry food production with similar programs for the rainforests of the Americas, Africa, India, SE Asia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia.
We have max 10 years: Create and apply a global plan for the fast revival of ocean biology in strategic locations including the restoration of ocean deserts to sequester carbon, restore the ocean food chain, increase vertical mixing of the water column, increase planetary albedo through increased bioaerosol production and cloud formation. It also includes the conservation of 164 million hectares that hold 16000 key locations to protect most species from extinction.
Green the desert areas from the Thar desert to the Sahara and the desertifying Mediterranean through strategic ecosystem regeneration connecting the Indian monsoon moisture streams with the West-African monsoon and the Mediterranean.
Strategic reforestation over the Indian subcontinent will likely increase precipitation on the Third Pole, securing water and food security for as much as two billion people in Asia.
Organize the best minds around the world to reverse polar amplification by reversing the melt of polar sea ice on both sides of the planet. Here also the boreal forests play a key role. We do not know how to do that yet but a lot of plans are forming both with Nature based Solutions and some more technical interventions that focus on vertical mixing of the water column, increased cloud formation, precipitation as well as stabilizing the jetstreams connected to reinforcing the biotic pump over large forest areas. In the video below you see the flow of precipitable water during a year. Imagine the biotic pump working at full force at key entrance points over the continents would help this a lot including a reforested west- and south coast of the USA, reforested coastal areas from Portugal to the UK and NW Europe and pulling the moisture in by reforesting Mesopotamia. The biotic pump does not need fully closed canopy covers and certain forest patterns are definitely more conducive of pulling in the moisture. The experiments going on in the Pleistocene Park to refreeze the tundras would definitely be part of this solution set.
2019: global, one year time lapse of precipitable water
Once these programs of emergency regeneration are well underway to correct the Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI), we can slowly relax and focus more on that amazing future we can create together on an abundant planet, which we are here to steward and create the conditions and a new human culture for it to thrive and further develop.
THE STORY OF A NEW BEGINNING
To create that sustainable and more equitable future, once we have gone past the emergency phase, we must transform the current economic and societal model, which has significantly contributed to planetary degradation. This transformation, a metamorphosis really, centers around a vision of a sustainable and resilient world, a story that inspires and unites people towards a common goal: a new sense of belonging and community in deep relation to our living planet and in harmony with the world.
Our innate qualities of altruism and cooperation can trigger collective action against climate chaos and the deterioration of the only planet we call home. Together we can restore the global commons and steward the rich resources our planet provides us tirelessly. The movement to restore the planet to its previous abundance must be inclusive, participatory and a call for a common goal: the creation of a beautiful future for generations to come. It will be a celebration of the great gift of life and to be part of the only living planet in the universe we are aware of.
If communities everywhere engage in local sustainable practices such as food production, ecological restoration, rehydrating the land and the protection of nature and sustainably shared use of resources, our movement for change will be a source of hope and guiding us on a path out of the mess we are in, into that brighter tomorrow.
We invite you to become the heroes of the new story to create that beautiful tomorrow and join the campaign to GREEN UP TO COOL DOWN!
Onward, because we have much to do and are running out of time to make the great transformation possible. We are nearing the point where wholesale collapse will accelerate and can’t be reversed anymore.
See below for more detailed information
For those who want a bit more background on how the climate really works:
Plants cool through evapotranspiration, turning water into vapour that rises up to the higher atmosphere, carrying large amounts of absorbed solar energy (in the form of latent heat) with it, preventing it from turning into sensible heat and thereby avoiding the warming of the lower atmosphere. At the same time, plants also send up a variety of biological aerosols together with the water vapour, which serve as the condensation nuclei for water droplets. With that, plants cool the Earth’s surface. So this helps the water vapor to condense on these aerosols, forming clouds, increasing albedo while enabling the transport of latent heat into the higher atmosphere, dissipating from there into space.
Plants seed clouds and rain!
Of the energy that the water vapor releases at the moment of condensation, at least half leaves the atmosphere into space. As vapor condenses into clouds, they cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space. Under certain conditions clouds can also warm the Earth’s atmosphere but on balance they cool. The condensation into clouds, while creating rain also produces wind. A volume of one thousand cubic meters of vapor becomes one cubic metre of rain, creating a sudden vacuum which draws in air from below and from the side, creating wind. Over large forests, these processes are so strong that they drive a powerful biotic pump, which draws in humid air from the oceans, bringing rains deep inland and enabling the forest to thrive thousands of kilometers away from the coast.
The condensation nuclei cause moderate rains, minimizing the potential for extreme flash floods. An intact biotic pump averts droughts by extending the rainy season while bringing moderate rains. This also increases the production of living biomass which in turn draws down carbon. Heatwaves, droughts and flash floods are avoided when the rain is created around these biological aerosols. When the rain falls on healthy soils, with thriving societies of bacteria and fungi, there is little or no erosion. Healthy soils work as sponges absorbing the water to be released slowly with some of it percolating into the aquifers, where it can be retained for a long time. This gives plants continuous access to water, maximizing photosynthesis and biomass production, burying carbon in the soils in a virtuous process storing water and making plant nutrients more available to the root systems, increasing fertility several times over. Especially large, old growth trees protect soils during droughts with their large canopies and deep roots to access aquifer water.
Meanwhile, the sedimentation from land-based erosion which can seriously inhibit marine vegetative growth, is reduced significantly. Phytoplankton, crustaceans, and various marine organisms play a crucial role in capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They use this carbon to create calcium carbonate, which becomes part of their carapaces and shells. Upon their demise, these calcium carbonate deposits accumulate on the ocean floor, eventually forming extensive reserves that, through geological processes, transform into the limestone mountains found on land. This metabolic activity is essential for mitigating ocean acidification. Therefore, it's imperative that we prioritize the protection and revival of ocean ecosystems as diligently as we do terrestrial ones.
We have started to apply this knowledge with the launch of the first phase to cool the climate, please take a look at the project website:
https://www.coolingtheclimate.earth
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A master piece of explanation in a short writeup. Loved it.