Climate change

My response to climate change is to support farmers who grow carbon by buying carbon farming credits; growing agricultural or forest soils is by far the quickest and surest way to take carbon out of the atmosphere - you can see how I do this by taking the link to Carbon Farmers of Australia.

Is this urgent and my main priority?

Yes. Everything I do at work is to cut climate change. Perhaps the best recent article about the urgency, and how last year's science on climate change has underestimated the urgency, is by George Monbiot in this article: One shot left. It seems none of the climate models have counted the impact of the frozen soils (permafrost) melting as they are now.

Where does my money go?

My money goes to a carbon farm near Mudgee and the November 2008 report on my monthly financial contributions says:

"Your contribution is being used in the water sequence in the $40,000 'wire and water' installation that involves turning 8 paddocks into 26 by dividing them with fences and running water to toughs. The aim is to implement the grazing management techniques taught to us by Holistic Management International. We recently paid another $15,000 to install a water tank on a hill to gravity feed troughs in one sector. (The tank is so big it had to be constructed on the site)

"Having such a choice of paddocks enables us to rest each unit for long enough to give the vegetation a chance. to recover. Tim Flannery is in the Land newspaper today [07 Nov 2009] promoting this approach."

What information has convinced me to take existing and new carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by carbon farming?

The information I rely on is the unanimous opinion of the 2000 scientists who published reports for the UN in November 2007, extracts from which can be found below.

Warming of the climate system is “unequivocal”, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which it claims is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.

The report, a synthesis of the three reports released since February 2007, acknowledges that sea level rise estimates in the original reports are likely to have been conservative, as ice melt is accelerating much faster than had been expected when the science was collated over 12 months ago.

It sets out a variety of climatic impacts, including likely temperature rises of up to 4 degrees Celsius, and potentially up to 6C. It predicts that Arctic summer sea ice will disappear by 2080 and that weather patterns will change globally. Such changes could include heatwaves, droughts, an increase in heavy rain and more intense storms.

It notes that feedback loops that had been expected some decades down the track, including a drop in the oceans’ capacity to absorb carbon emissions, are starting now, and may blow out even the worst case scenarios the IPCC has modelled; and it confirms that there is a wide range of cost effective emissions reductions options available and that even deep cuts scenarios will reduce GDP growth by less than .12 percentage points.

"Countries have to act to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions start dipping by 2015 if temperatures have to be stabilised and climate change risks reduced.  I hope collectively this will lead to at least realization that the problem is extremely serious. That the impacts of climate change could be devastating in some cases and that the costs of taking action to manage this problem are really not high" said Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman, IPCC.

The report is designed to provide the scientific basis for the Bali conference on climate change, which opened 3 December 2007."

The report can be found at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change website.