Climate Strategist. Rain Maker. Green Up To Cool Down! Let's stabilize the climate. Get onboard!
IT'S THE WATER, STUPID! It’s 2030, and the world is on the brink of collapse. Governments and corporations have spent decades running large climate conferences, signing complicated treaties to decarbonize the economy, believing it is the only way to solving the climate crisis. Yet, temperatures continue to rise, droughts and floods become so frequent that normal life is a thing of the past. Ecosystems collapse everywhere, food prices soar. In India, as predicted in the book “Ministry of the Future,” millions of people die during summer heatwaves. People riot, and governments in dozens of countries collapse. The streets of Bogota, Cairo, and Karachi are governed by warlords, modeling their reign on the handbook of the Taliban. In Europe and the US, fascist dictators rule with an iron fists. Their armies watch the borders with a shoot-to-kill order for anyone wanting to come in. Boats with refugees are routinely bombed by air force jets. The cost of food in Europe is so high that half the population depends on soup kitchens. In the Amazon billions of dead trees form an eerie landscape. In São Paulo, Cape Town, Mexico City, Bangalore and other cities around the world, water is sold by the liter to those who can afford it. Our movement, #GreenUpToCoolDown, has been shouting for years that, while carbon does heat up the atmosphere, the cooling is done by water, driven by healthy plant life. Still, we keep burning trees for electricity and cutting forests to put solar panels in fields. Even groups like Extinction Rebellion don't get it. And the solution is so simple: "It's the water, stupid!" Our planet is cooled by water cycles, driven by the biosphere. Without healthy forests, wetlands, and oceans, we cannot regulate Earth's temperature. The carbon cycle follows the water cycle. The water cycle is regulated by healthy biomass, photosynthesising solar energy and we have destroyed 550 Gigatons, half of it! Yet, in small islands of sanity, sprinkled around the world, holding out in ecological niches, communities grow their own food with permaculture, keeping their lands fertile, moist, and cool enough to survive. These communities understand the vital role of biodiversity and healthy soil. By mimicking natural ecosystems, often based on indigenous insights, they create resilient landscapes that retain water, support wildlife, and moderate temperatures. While the rest of the world grapples with escalating climate chaos, these pockets of green thrive, showcasing that the true path to survival lies in working with nature, not against it. These remote places become a beacon of hope, inspiring others to embrace sustainable living. In some places where the movement spreads, rain returns to parched lands, aquifers refill, and the planet's natural cooling system is reactivated. Slowly, the world learns a crucial lesson: focusing solely on carbon is a fatal mistake. It is Nature, playing with water, that keeps Earth alive and beautiful!
For me the context for CO2 and water having climate impact is that it’s obviously not either or… it’s both. Pulling carbon from the air into veg and soil at once sequesters carbon and reboots the small water cycle if designed strategically. The question becomes how do you strategically rehabilitate landscapes for more veg and soil carbon at scale and speed, whilst maintaining food production. I think this is eminently achievable with smart landscape designing that deliveres eco system services to the landholder who are producing food & fibre and legally control the land, coupled with support from the global carbon and biodiversity markets to help create strong economic signals to drive adoption. Retrofit the landscape & reboot the climate system. If we can do this at the speed at which we did the destruction, which was pretty quick, we are in with a chance. We have all the knowledge and market systems to do this. What an amazing healthy landscape we could create!
Jonathan Foley - this is what you are missing and blocking/deleting people about (although I seem to be able to tag you again, so maybe that's been reversed?). It's COOLING. Not just REDUCING THE RATE OF HEATING by incremental carbon emissions. Oh, and yes, it can also leads to the DRAWDOWN of carbon and far more than your spreadsheets show but that isn't the primary impact on reducing temperatures.
Fortunately, all climate activist organizations that I know of (the leading 30?) in the US all agree with the necessity of protecting and restoring forests as well as soils, grasslands and wetlands. While some of them emphasize emissions reductions, they all support habitat conservation and restoration as essential to arresting global warming. Which organizations are "focusing solely on carbon"?
Well Rob, looks like you need a real sexy movie about water. Not enough people even read anymore. That's why movie Common Ground wildly popular. I find your message spot on in many respects. Where's even an animation? I'm a huge biochar fan and we saved 50% on all outdoor landscaping water usage for the City of Thousand Oaks when you combine biochar and compost. However, we have no real film messaging on this to date. Only news clips and tasty treats that rarely go viral. Regenerative soil building in all it's forms, could save trillions fo gallons of water...
🤔 I don’t think the laws of thermodynamics are on your side. But I do like the sentiment.
Wonderful narration. How I wish this was done in decades ago. Malawi is inline with this.
Over my dead body. Let's talk we are setting up a global ethical empire to stop this happening by 2030. Venture capitalists and preferred 'sole sector partner NEED to APPLY this is the opportunity of our life time. This is 1 shot deal 30 % ROI in 5 year is guaranteed. £1,000 to £1 million USD is the barrier 5million required minimum for us to rival every unethical company bar none by 2029. Interested?
We can see how the terrestrial biosphere regulates temperature through energy and water cycling. A wide variety of studies have looked at this. The effects are strong locally, and regionally it depends on the situation. Some ecosystems have a much bigger role in modulating local and regional climate patterns. The Amazon and other tropical forests do a lot of this through water and energy cycling. Boreal forests do this mainly through changing albedo in the springtime. There's a lot of literature in this. Here is a little (quite dated now) overview of the topic: https://nature.berkeley.edu/biometlab/espm298/Foley%20et%20al%20%202003.pdf
It's the ecosystems, stupid; it's the race for unfettered growth, stupid; it's the values, stupid; it's the loss of community, stupid; it's the scale, stupid.
Climate Strategist. Rain Maker. Green Up To Cool Down! Let's stabilize the climate. Get onboard!
1moInspired by your piece in Mongabay Judith D. Schwartz