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REVERSE CLIMATE CHANGE? WITH AN THE ELEPHANT?
Dear people, we are running out of time to reverse climate change and soon the world will go into cascading collapse if we do not act now at the scale and speed to reverse the damage. The Secretary General of the United Nations, my hero, Antonio Guterres said we are committing collective suicide if we don’t act NOW! But HOW?
SAVED BY THE ELEPHANT
Suddenly a Great Green Elephant enters the climate room. His name is the biotic pump. We modern humans are so obsessed by looking at separate elements, we do not see that nature in her wisdom has created a symphony of cooperation, called biodiversity, to interact with water and the atmosphere to balance the climate and temper the weather. Please watch this 3-minute brilliant video by Jimi Sol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8B4tST8ti8 and you will start to understand that our problems are caused by the disruption of the water cycle, which we can restore through a Great Earth Generation: protecting remaining forests, reforest a billion hectares with new diverse forests and agroforestry. If we want to really start to do global climate repair over land, we need to restore the damaged water cycle. Here is my list of global priorities (more needs to happen everywhere of course):
GLOBAL CLIMATE REPAIR PRIORITIES
1. Avert the dieback of the Amazon Rainforest
2. Finance a Great Regeneration Africa paying hundreds of millions to plant trees, harvest water and transition to climate smart landscapes that allow nature to thrive and create food in agroforestry/silvopasture/permaculture settings.
3. Rehydrate South-West USA and Northern Mexico with the same techniques
4. Reforest the Thar desert, large parts of the Indus valley all the way to Iran along the dried out riverbeds and onwards to Oman and Yemen
5. Restore forest cover and transition to agroforestry in large parts of India to strengthen, smoothen and lengthen the monsoon to increase precipitation of over the mountain chain and restore the glaciers.
FOREST REALLY COOL THE PLANET
Let me add one more thing. In my previous article ‘’Are fish the last ones to discover water’’ https://robdelaet.medium.com/are-fish-really-the-last-ones-to-discover-water-601831fc2d48 I have shown that the climate models miss one large element of cooling which is triggered by the biotic pump: around half of latent heat that dissipates when water vapor sent up by the trees recondensates, escapes to space through photons that are hardly reabsorbed in the higher atmosphere.
Yes, we need to continue with the decarbonization of our economy, the energy transition and going circular and localize and decrease the amount of animal protein in our diets. But if we want to get ourselves out of the climate mess on time, we need to trigger a Great Earth Regeneration that everybody can join: protecting biodiverse forests, restore them and transition to agroforestry where possible. Oh, I almost forgot to mention this, if done at scale, that much revegetation can potentially sequester half of current global emissions. Oh, so the great regeneration can be largely financed with carbon credits, so the bill can be paid.
Thank you,
Rob
Amsterdam 8 August 2022
