Reposting Allan Savory’s talk on cattle and climate above.
The Weather Channel has profiled ranchers on the American plains trying to replicate his ideas – they say successfully.
Not everyone agrees.
To hear Mimi Hillenbrand tell it, American bison are more than just the majestic creatures that once graced the grasslands of the Northern Great Plains by the millions until we nearly wiped them off the face of the earth. They may very well play a role in saving us from ourselves.
“They’ve have been around for millions of years …” Hillenbrand says. “They are just so American, so us.”
Hillenbrand owns and manages 777 Bison Ranch in Hermosa, a 26,000-acre ranch that has been the site of the several movie productions, including “Dancing With Wolves” and “Wyatt Earp.”
The ranch has been in her family since the 1970s, when it was still a cattle ranch. The land, at the time, was in bad shape and overgrazed, she told weather.com.
For a time, the family grazed both cattle and bison, but a particularly brutal blizzard in the 1980s prompted her family to make the switch completely to bison and to employ different grazing methods that has made a difference in the health of the land. They now grass-feed just under 2,000 bison.
“The switch fits our goals of trying to bring back native grasses and trying to leave the land in a better state for the next generation,” she said.
One of the added benefits of making the switch, she said, is what she learns from the massive animals that at one time numbered upward of 60 million in North America but have now dwindled to some 400,000.
“They teach me something every day,” she said, adding that she admires the animals named America’s national mammal by Congress last year because “they are still wild, they are intelligent and curious, and they know the land and the weather,” perhaps even better by instinct than humans.
They may also have a role in healing the land and reducing global warming.
Average temperatures in South Dakota have already shot up by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, and the number of triple-digit temperature days is poised to double by 2050, Wright reports. The concern is that these rising temperatures will lead to more severe droughts, which in turn will harm the livestock this state relies on heavily for its economy.
South Dakota has about five beef cattle for every one of its 865,000 residents, and they’re worth almost $2.8 billion to the state’s economy.
And using bison as a proxy for cattle, one study found that every degree Celsius of average temperature rise would cost the livestock industry an additional $1 billion as the market weight of cattle declines.
Projections show that under a business as usual trajectory for greenhouse gas emissions, the region will see average temperature rise by 4.65 degrees Fahrenheit by 2065, which will take a big bite out of the state’s cattle industry. Continue reading “What Can Bison Teach us About Carbon and Climate?”
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revealed that Administrator Scott Pruitt faced profanities and confrontations while traveling after controversy surrounding his use of first-class flights.
The director of the EPA’s Office of Criminal Enforcement, Henry Barnet, told Politico that Pruitt was “approached in the airport numerous times” and had profanities “yelled at him” during his travels.
Barnet told the publication that one specific incident saw a person approach Pruitt and shout “Scott Pruitt, you’re f—ing up the environment” while recording it on a cellphone.
“The team leader felt that he was being placed in a situation where he was unsafe on the flight,” Barnet told Politico.
“We felt that based on the recommendation from the team leader, the special agent in charge, that it would be better suited to have him in business or first class, away from close proximity from those individuals who were approaching him and being extremely rude, using profanities and potential for altercations and so forth,” he continued.
The EPA’s defense of the administrator’s traveling habits comes after The Washington Post reported Sunday that Pruitt frequently flies first class on official trips, costing taxpayers thousands of dollars.
I posted the other day on massive new cuts to the National Weather Service. Science, of course we knew, is not a priority for the Trump Administration.
Apparently, Oklahomans hadn’t given it much thought.
Oklahoma voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump and now the Republican leader is hitting back against his most loyal supporters, KFOR news reported.
In his budget, Trump has proposed gutting the National Weather Service in an area of the country that depends on forecasters and meteorologists to protect them from extreme weather events.
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“For some bizarre reason, the president is proposing to cut 248 forecasters,” National Weather Service Legislative Director Richard Hirn told KFOR.
“Should the public be concerned about these potential staff cuts? I think the answer is yes because – even though you see things coming down the pipe for days, sometimes weeks in advance – even those last few minutes or hours can make a huge difference on the outcome as to what type of severe weather in this particular case that we may receive,” KFOR meteorologist Mike Morgan explained.
The NWS could lose more than 350 staffers, the vast majority of which would be forecasters.
“The Trump administration has proposed to effectively eliminate 20 percent of the forecasters or front-line operational employees at the 122 forecast offices around the country,” Hirn said.
There were plenty of striking things about Monday’s budget news, given that it contained lots of draconian cuts that were simultaneously restored because Congress had boosted spending the week before. But perhaps the most striking among them was an item in the proposed budget for NASA: Trump wants to block the follow on to a highly successful NASA mission.
To truly appreciate just how awful this is, you have to understand the history of that satellite and what it means to the scientific community as a whole. So let’s step back and take a look at why the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (or OCO) exists in the first place. It turns out it was built specifically to handle some outstanding questions of the sort that people in the administration say are important, and killing its successor would mean the existing mission never lives up to its full potential.
Real uncertainty
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory’s primary job is to see what’s happening to the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere. You may think that’s a solved issue: we’re emitting a lot, and levels are going up. And that’s true to a point. But once you pass that point, you enter a world where there are lots of details, and many of them matter.
#MAGA
Humanity, it turns out, is just one of a huge number of sources of carbon dioxide—and there are things that remove it as well. Plants, for example, remove so much carbon dioxide through photosynthesis that we can track the seasonal appearance of leaves in the Northern Hemisphere because the process removes so much of the gas from the atmosphere. Some of that gets held for the long-term as wood; another portion returns to the air when the leaves drop in the autumn. Other processes cycle carbon through vast amounts of plankton in the oceans. Geological processes also act as sources and sinks for the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide.
So much is going on that one source described the carbon cycle as including “every plant, animal, and microbe, every photosynthesizing leaf and fallen tree, every ocean, lake, pond, and puddle, every soil, sediment, and carbonate rock, every breath of fresh air, volcanic eruption, and bubble rising to the surface of a swamp, among much, much else.” Humanity’s fossil-fuel burning isn’t so much a direct pipeline putting carbon dioxide into the air as it is a subtle lever that’s pushing off the balance of a complex system.
Although the carbon cycle is complex, we have a relatively good idea of how it works. And, plus or minus a few gigatonnes here and there, we know the volume of carbon dioxide handled by most of the sources and sinks.
That said, this is still an area where there are significant uncertainties. People make a big deal about false uncertainties in climate science—we know the temperature’s rising, and we know human carbon emissions are the primary driver, but people keep trying to pretend there’s uncertainty there.
But the carbon cycle is a case where the uncertainties are real, and scientists will tell you as much. We don’t have as good a handle on some of the sources and sinks as we’d like. And, more importantly, these things are dynamic and change with time. To give one example, water dissolves more gas when it’s cold. We’re warming the oceans, which means they will be able to dissolve less carbon dioxide. Are the oceans starting to weaken as a sink? We don’t really know at this point. Continue reading “Problem Solving Denial Style. Lobotomize Science”
No, really. Well vetted AP Story made it verbatim onto the Fox News site.
Significant trend I’ve been tracking – truth about climate leaking into Fox News reports – spotty so far, but clear upward curve, kind of like creeping tidal flooding.
I’ll be interviewing the study author soon to find out more.
Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are speeding up the already fast pace of sea level rise, new satellite research shows.
At the current rate, the world’s oceans on average will be at least 2 feet (61 centimeters) higher by the end of the century compared to today, according to researchers who published in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
Sea level rise is caused by warming of the ocean and melting from glaciers and ice sheets. The research, based on 25 years of satellite data, shows that pace has quickened, mainly from the melting of massive ice sheets. It confirms scientists’ computer simulations and is in line with predictions from the United Nations, which releases regular climate change reports.
“It’s a big deal” because the projected sea level rise is a conservative estimate and it is likely to be higher, said lead author Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado.
Outside scientists said even small changes in sea levels can lead to flooding and erosion.
“Any flooding concerns that coastal communities have for 2100 may occur over the next few decades,” Oregon State University coastal flooding expert Katy Serafin said in an email.
Of the 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) of sea level rise in the past quarter century, about 55 percent is from warmer water expanding, and the rest is from melting ice.
But the process is accelerating, and more than three-quarters of that acceleration since 1993 is due to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the study shows.
Like weather and climate, there are two factors in sea level rise: year-to-year small rises and falls that are caused by natural events and larger long-term rising trends that are linked to man-made climate change. Nerem’s team removed the natural effects of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption that temporarily chilled Earth and the climate phenomena El Nino and La Nina, and found the accelerating trend.
Sea level rise, more than temperature, is a better gauge of climate change in action, said Anny Cazenave, director of Earth science at the International Space Science Institute in France, who edited the study. Cazenave is one of the pioneers of space-based sea level research.
The greatest foreseeable near-term risks of climate change are not giant swings in the earth system, but rather what will happen as slow, incremental change – in things like sea level, and increasing large precipitation events – suddenly reach the limits of legacy infrastructure, and overwhelm longstanding defenses against natural threats.
The Trump infrastructure blueprint is almost certain to call for expensive new roads, bridges, airports and other projects in areas that are increasingly vulnerable to rising waters and other threats from a warming planet. Engineers and researchers say that construction plans should consider these design constraints at the outset. Their concern is that a plan led by a White House that has both discounted climate science and weakened climate change regulations could mean that costly projects may be vulnerable to damage or, in a worst-case scenario, quickly rendered obsolete by the changing environment.
“The impact of not considering climate change when planning infrastructure means you end up building the wrong thing, in the wrong place, to the wrong standards,” said Michael Kuby, a professor of geographical sciences and urban planning at Arizona State University and contributing author to the National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s most comprehensive scientific study of the effect of global warming on the United States. “That’s a whole lot of waste.”
Climate change already poses one of the most significant threats to the nation’s infrastructure, according to dozens of scientific and engineering studies, including several prepared by the federal government. A 2017 report by the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that, through the end of the century, up to $280 billion will be needed to adapt the nation’s roads and railways to the effects of a warming climate.
