Letter: Greenhouse action

From Lewis Cleverdon, Global Commons Institute

Chris Freeman observes that, due directly to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, the world’s peat bogs “are going into solution” and releasing rising volumes of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) into watercourses, which in turn emit increased CO₂ to the atmosphere (10 July, p 9). With this phenomenon evidently having begun about 40 years ago, and if it is true that global river-borne DOC has been rising exponentially by about 6 per cent per year, the prognosis on this trend is of “ex-peat” emissions reaching 7 gigatonnes per year by 2060 – equal to society’s present global carbon emissions.

Freeman’s findings strengthen the case for multilateral action on carbon emissions and set a new goal for the stabilisation of atmospheric CO₂ at perhaps 320 parts per million by volume.

Secondly, the urgency is changed: on this evidence we appear to have less than three decades to displace the use of fossil fuels if we are to avoid positive feedback from increased atmospheric carbon swamping the carbon sinks and committing us to a global climatic destabilisation and consequent catastrophic crop failure, geo-economic collapse, contested mass-migration and so on.

Thirdly, the urgency dictates that policies for cutting carbon emissions must be complemented by the recovery of gigatonnes per year of carbon from the atmosphere. Numerous techno-fixes have been proposed to achieve a fraction of this recovery, none of which are self-funding.

An obvious, long-proven and long-ignored option is for a global effort to develop coppice woodland to produce methanol. This would entail widespread deciduous reforestation, particularly of upland regions, with plots of woodland being felled and regrown from the stump in cycles ranging from 7 to 20 years, and their produce being used as feedstock in village-scale methanol refineries.

This option could recover airborne carbon both during coppice development and in their root growth thereafter. It could displace fossil fuels in internal combustion engines, fuel cells and gas turbines. It could, if applied sustainably, help communities and ecosystems adapt to climate change by helping to mitigate flooding, supplying rural jobs, stabilising hill soils, buffering old forests, reconnecting forest that is now fragmented and so on.

I suggest that the uplands of the UK are as much in need of it as anywhere.

Kington, Herefordshire, UK