Lack of understanding besets climate change debate

IHAVE followed with interest and incredulity the ignorance displayed in the correspondence of “knowledgeable scientists”, Dr Marc Swanepoel, in particular, and others who refute what he has to say about “climate change”, especially Peter Hill.

Although I am in agreement with Peter Hill about rising levels of CO2 and the rise of methane in the atmosphere exacerbating the pace of climate change, neither Swanepoel or Hill, nor indeed, any other contributors, exhibit an ounce of understanding at how greenhouse gasses were held in check or balance by nature’s recycling of billions of tons of carbon and animal waste each year on grasslands, sequestrated naturally by hundreds of millions of grazing animals in the dormant seasons.

Today, except for pockets of large grazing herds of wild herbivores, the great wild herds of the past are no more and therein lies the rub. We burn “excess” vegetation releasing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The solution to climate change is easy, but we have to forget about rigid technological solutions or “rigid scientific minds” that are paradigm-prone to the idea that it is not the number of animals on a given piece of land that causes the damage to plants and soil, but indeed the amount of time they are allowed stay on it, that does.

A great deal of the orthodoxy of our day is that life is “fundamentally mechanistic and not fundamentally biological”.

This “machine” paradigm has taunted mankind’s “lack of humility” throughout modern history, about three hundred years, to no avail. It has obscured the bitter irony of the incredible rate of desertification and its corollary, massive biodiversity loss, the major symptoms that reveal to us mega climate change.

Symptoms? Well, yes, because symptoms are merely the visible windows of a deeper underlying cause. Climate change is thus the consequence of human management – the deeper underlying cause – that never questions the veracity of the decisions we make or fail to make.

The solution to climate change is there, staring at us through the eyes of “ruminant animals” (with apologies to Peter Hill) that evolved over millions of years within and over the grasslands of the world that sustained them. And how, they were sustained! It is estimated that each person alive today requires 500kg of produced food per year.

Between world wide agriculture, floods and droughts, we produce 75 billion tons of dead eroding soil every year, which is more than 10 tons a year, per person alive today. That is the loss of 20 times the amount of eroding soil per year as food we need for every person. Heavens above!!!

If scientists like Swanepoel and the entire scientific community don’t wake up – and not in forty years from now – the media may as well put a cap on their “opinion and analysis” page, because we are not gonna make it.

My question is: “What is the point of all the “damned science and research”, billions and billions of wasteful scientific endeavour, if scientists or environmentalists can’t establish or distinguish the “wood from the trees”?

The fact is that 80 percent of the grasslands covering two thirds of planetary land surface is in an advanced state of desertification. It is the grassland biomes or environments, where the bulk of global food is produced, that is in dire straits, as a result of worldwide use of fire as a tool, to sequestrate billions of tons of carbon trapped in drying vegetation at the beginning autumn.

The problem is that fire used on grasslands cannot put the carbon back in the soil where it belongs. Add to this the advanced biological simplification or biodiversity loss stemming from desertification, and the massive dislocation of the global water and nutritive cycles as a result, and you have the full range of “symptoms” driven by one deeper underlying cause of climate change.

Correct human management or mismanagement, which is as natural as a moose conducting a philharmonic orchestra, when it comes to management of our biological planet. That human management of grasslands and forests is the only cause of massive climate change cannot, surely, be in dispute by the scientific community of both (mechanical and environmental) “experts”.

The answer to getting the planet back to pre-industrial revolution levels can be found in a 22 minute video on YouTube if you care to search for: Allan Savory - TED talk.