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Ozone hampering plants’ absorption of carbon dioxide
Amber Dance, Los Angeles Times
Pollution seems to limit the ability of flora to offset greenhouse gases.
—
Rising levels of ozone pollution near the ground are damaging the ability of plants to take up carbon dioxide, reducing their potential to act as a counterbalance to greenhouse gas accumulation, scientists said Wednesday.
When affected by projected high levels of ozone, plants can absorb up to one-third less carbon dioxide than healthy plants, the researchers found.
The finding adds a new component that will have to be factored into climate models used to assess the future effects of global warming, they said.
The study, published online by the journal Nature, was the first to consider the indirect effect of ozone on vegetation.
“It points out a real gap in our knowledge of climate change,” said David Karnosky, a global change scientist at Michigan Technological University who was not associated with the study.
Ozone forms when nitrogen oxides and volatile hydrocarbons meet in the presence of sunlight. The precursors to ozone come primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, although plants also emit carbon compounds that can participate in the reaction.
High in the stratosphere, ozone is beneficial, shielding Earth from harmful radiation. In the lower atmosphere, it functions as a greenhouse gas and is an air pollutant that can make it hard for people to breathe.
Ozone pollution is particularly high downwind of industrial areas across the eastern United States, Southern California and parts of Texas.
The gas attacks plants by breaking down their cells, reducing growth and causing premature aging.
(26 July 2007)
Meat production ‘beefs up emissions’
Ian Sample, The Guardian
Producing 1kg of beef results in more CO2 emissions than going for a three-hour drive while leaving all the lights on at home, scientists said today.
A team led by Akifumi Ogino at the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan, trawled through data on aspects of beef production including calf raising, animal management and the effects of producing and transporting feed.
They are calling for an overhaul of the beef industry, after their audit revealed producing the meat caused substantial amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
Most of the greenhouse gas emissions are emitted in the form of methane from belching cattle, but the meat production process also releases fertilising compounds that can wreak havoc in river and lake ecosystems.
The study, which is published in today’s New Scientist magazine, shows that the production of 1kg of beef releases greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 36.4kg of carbon dioxide.
The production process also led to fertilising compounds equivalent to 340g of sulphur dioxide and 59g of phosphate, and consumed 169 megajoules of energy.
Over two-thirds of the energy is spent on producing and moving cattle feed.
The emissions are equivalent to the amount of CO2 released by an average car every 160 miles, and the energy consumption is equal to a 100W bulb being left on for 20 days, says New Scientist.
But the total environmental impact will be higher than the study suggests because the calculations do not include emissions from managing farm equipment and transporting the meat.
The scientists behind the study are calling for a range of measures to reduce the carbon footprint of the industry.
These include better waste management and reducing the interval between calving by a month, which the authors say could reduce the environmental impact by nearly 6%.
A Swedish study conducted in 2003 claimed that raising organic beef on grass rather than feed, reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 40% and consumed 85% less energy.
(19 July 2007)
Review: Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
Matthew Korfahage, Willamette Week (Oregon)
In ancient Greek times Thales said that water was the primary element, and that everything else was derived from it. Anaximenes said no: It’s all condensed or thinned from soulful air. Heraclitus was a fan of fire. But no one, it would seem, ever made a case for dirt. It’s a bit too muddled and muddy, perhaps, to seem fundamental.
The most-publicized environmental movements of today seem to follow a similar pattern, safeguarding the purity of air or water, or fearing death by nuclear fire. Dirt has none of the same glamour, and it never seemed pure. It’s full of worms and rocks and dung and all the grungy junk little boys were supposed to be made out of.
But as David R. Montgomery suggests in his new book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (University of California Press, 285 pages, $24.95), the resource that’s most fundamental to the way we live—and potentially the most at risk—might nonetheless be the stuff under our shoes. To be blunt: Without it, we don’t eat.
Through much of the book, Montgomery charts how the fall of civilizations is often linked to the state of the soil, in particular its susceptibility to erosion. North Africa and the Middle East, now deserts of shifting sands, used to be the breadbaskets of the Mediterranean.
…So what’s the solution Montgomery proposes? It ain’t better fertilizer, and it seriously is not better irrigation (unless you want to turn our nation’s midsection into a salt flat). No, it’s pretty simple: Farm multiple crops on much smaller plots, which, believe it or not, have higher growth and cost efficiencies than the big industrial wheat fields.
(27 June 2007)
Review from New Scientist
NUMEROUS ancient civilisations crashed when their soils turned to dust under sustained cultivation. Not China. The Chinese have been farming their fields intensively for 4000 years. What did they do right?
The answer is night soil, says David Montgomery. They recycled the soil’s nutrients by spreading their excrement liberally across the land. After good harvests, farming communities deliberately stuffed themselves with extra helpings of rice in order to “reinvest in their stock of natural capital” and replenish the soil.
In the same mould as Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Montgomery’s Dirt: The erosion of civilizations is a compelling study on soil: why we need it, how we have used and abused it, how we can protect it, and what happens when we let it slip through our fingers.
The Mesopotamians, the Mayans, the Greeks and the Romans – possibly even the 20th-century Russian empire – all lost their grip when they lost … [the rest is behind a paywall]
(21 April 2007)
Review in Bookforum
“Predictably—and understandably— more pressing problems than saving dirt usually carry the day,” writes David R. Montgomery. But as his new book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, details, we are losing the brown stuff far, far too quickly. Unlike maritime dead zones and radical climate change, cases in which we have little historical knowledge on which to draw, we do have some sense of what happens to civilizations that abuse and lose their dirt. The book’s conclusion takes little comfort in history: “Unless more immediate disasters do us in, how we address the twin problems of soil degradation and accelerated erosion will eventually determine the fate of modern civilization.”
(June/July/August 2007)
