CLIMATE CHANGE AND WATER

            Yesterday I challenged the greenhouse gas orthodoxy regarding global warming, noting that GHG only has a 4 percent bearing on temperature while water is 96 percent.  Don't worry, I'm not on a multi-day global warming kick, but today I want to address the flip side of desertification.

             With the Colorado River drying up, Australia drying up, the Sahel's expansion and southern Spain experiencing extreme drought, it's easy to focus on planetary desertification. 

             But remember, the hydrologic cycle, starting with soil organic matter and then going up through plants and evapotranspiration and then condensation, cloud formation and rain is like a huge thermostat on planetary warmth.  If it overheats in some places (drought, desertification) then it's going to compensate somewhere else.

             And so isn't it interesting that yesterday's news about the Colorado basin desertifying in other places carried the news about eroding banks on the Great Lakes and the flooding devastation along the Mississippi.  The climate change naysayers laugh about heat and drought concerns because in other places we see unprecedented flooding.  And so to buffoons who hate anything environmentalists say this is simply irregular weather patterns that don't mean anything.

             Actually, they confirm exactly what Australian climate guru Walter Jehne so eloquently expresses:  as the earth radiates heat in some areas, it will compensate with violent cooling in other places.

             How is the planet supposed to maintain heat equilibrium in the face of massive desert dust clouds expanding over Asia?  Dust is thermal mass that heats up; it holds atmospheric heat so condensation can't occur, which in turn eliminates clouds and rain.  Planetary energy is generated by solar, gravitational, spinning dynamics. 

             As a result, if desertification can't bleed off enough energy, then compensation occurs elsewhere.  Where's elsewhere?  Places where condensation can occur due to more vegetation and naturally more temperate climate.  In other words, when some areas stop the radiator, the earth's engine compensates with other radiators.  Those are in the more vegetated parts of the world.  Hence, flooding along the Mississippi and Great Lakes water elevation due to historic rains.

             It's like balancing a math equation.  This is why you can have two seemingly contradictory weather patterns occurring simultaneously.  They don't prove contradictory scientific evidence; they simply prove nature's attempts to balance out anomalies.

             One of the most spiritually moving experiences I ever had was visiting a preserved 2 acre tall grass prairie at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.  I walked out in that 8 foot tall grass, thick as hair, stems half an inch thick.  In a few feet I was swallowed up in a sea of vegetation.  To imagine that kind of vegetation as far as the eye could see is almost impossible.  And yet that is what greeted Laura Ingalls Wilder as her family traveled west.  The sheer evapotranspiration of that massive billion-plus acre prairie is practically unquantifiable.

             Similar vegetation was all over the planet. Iliad and Odyssey author Homer walked across today's Sahel in Northern Africa and said he never left the shade of a tree.  The Arabian Peninsula was a massive wetland.  Libya was a silvopasture growing exotic animals for the pleasures of Rome.  Australia measured more than 12 percent organic matter and massive prairies of tall grass with routine typhoons.

             I don't know how much of the present global climate situation is human caused.  But I know if we humans have one responsibility to our nest, it is to increase vegetation.  Really, it's that simple.  That means letting grass grow in our suburban lawns.  Like grow 2 feet tall.  Planting fruit trees, nut trees in a silvo-lawn symbiosis.  Ideally, all that biomass would be converted to manure, meat, and milk with herbivores.  The millions of acres of dead and dying forests along the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains need to be cut, chipped, and the old diversified forests allowed to regrow--and intermittent pastures. We need water-holding cathedrals in the soil and leaves in the air; it's that simple.

             What can you do to create more leaf area where you live?