Article: Are water cycles the missing piece of the climate crisis puzzle?

The most prestigious sources of climate “news” and “information” miss the biggest part of the puzzle. They are not even talking about the role of water cycles and ecosystems. Here’s why.

This is an excellent article on the connection between water and climate. One of the best I’ve seen. Very lucid prose. And it covers a lot of ground. 

Article: Are water cycles the missing piece of the climate crisis puzzle? | Euronews 

Key quote from the article:

Plants suck up water from the soil and “sweat” it out through their leaves as they photosynthesise. A big tree can cycle a lot of water this way — as much as 100s of litres a day — but all plants contribute. They also release microscopic particles that “seed” the rain; motes that condensing water vapour can coalesce around and form raindrops. No plants, no rain. Water begets water, say hydrologists; soil is the womb, vegetation is the midwife.

It’s great to see this kind of clear and no-holds-barred analysis in the mainstream media. Without being critical of scientists or unduly strident, the article suggests reasons why water is not incorporated into the climate models … it’s too complicated to do so.

At least that’s how the story goes. I don’t buy it. I think it would be easy enough to make assumptions about the cooling effects of plant cover. It would be easy enough to measure the cooling effects of plant cover. It would be easy enough to speculate as to the total volume of water being transpired and evaporated in any particular place.

Does transpiration (water from plants) not have a measurable cooling effect? Does this cooling effect not correspond to a measurable number of kilowatt hours per liter of water evaporated?

Do real scientists not love to quantify and monitor such things? Then why don’t they? Some do, but they are not getting support or recognition from the major institutions.

Photo: Plants, trees and especially mature forests play a key role in every stage of the water cycle, including evaporation, condensation, cloud formation and precipitation. Most rain that falls on land originated from the water vapor produced by plants, not bodies of water.

We could at least talk about how CO2 is NOT the only factor in the greenhouse effect. Hot surfaces are a factor. That includes pavement, concrete, bare crop fields and the sand of every man made desert. 

Water plays a tremendous role in cooling our surroundings. But we’re not going to talk about this in polite company.

Water transfers heat from the surface to the cloud layer and from the cloud layer into outer space. But we’re not going to allow readers of the United Nations climate literature talk about this or think about it.

In the course of a year, a tree will transpire about 11,000 gallons of water, according to the US Forest Service. But we’re not going to talk about the effects this has on our climate, locally or regionally, let alone globally.

It’s not that the good people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (of the United Nations) are incapable of thinking about such things. But it just wouldn’t do for too many people to get the wrong idea.

If we talked about the heat transfer properties of water, and if we observed that water operates within land-based ecosystems, then we would begin to question the wisdom of innumerable land-based projects that destroy these ecosystems. This would call into question numerous profitable industries and what they do to land-based ecosystems, such as forests,  grasslands and wetlands.

The profitable industries that would face limitations include real estate development, road construction, military operations, data centers, automakers, petrochemicals, and just about the entirety of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We would have to expand our horizons and not just offer glib proclamations about the evils of fossil fuels and meat … two safe targets in the prevailing conversation about climate change.

If we identified the true culprits in proportion to their harm, then politicians would have to do something for a change. They would have to advocate for the public interest vis-à-vis big business and the ruling elites. This would represent real change, not merely the appearance of change.

If we seriously advocated for land-based ecosystems, we would have to rethink industrial agriculture. We would have to ask, to what extent is Big Ag making actual food, as opposed to junk food, ecologically destructive biofuels and fossil fuel intensive livestock feed? To what extent is Big Ag making war on the soil and leaving deserts in their wake, while polluting every major waterway?

If we seriously advocated for land-based ecosystems, we would have to practice the principles of soil health. We would acknowledge that every 1% increase in soil organic matter in the top six inches increases the capacity of soil to hold water by 22,000 gallons per acre, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. That’s a lot of water. That’s a lot of water for plant growth. That’s empowering soil to do its job. But instead, we destroy the soil via plowing and agrochemicals, causing erosion and water pollution. All of these worst practices are subsidized by the US taxpayer.

If we seriously advocated for land-based ecosystems, we would have to ask what role could livestock play in restoring some or all of our man made deserts? Grazing animals evolved with grasslands. Our grasslands are suffering because they have too few grazing animals, not too many.

But agribusiness corporations make good money under Business As Usual. That could be part of the reason you will not—with any regularity—read about any of this in the United Nations or the New York Times. They know who signs their paycheck. They know how not to bite the hand that feeds them.

To their credit, the Union of Concerned Scientists has written with clarity and nuance about the problems in agriculture, for example in this article: What’s the Problem with Fossil Fuel–Based Fertilizer? 

I wish they (the UCS) would go further and be more critical of fertilizers and industrial agriculture. But they identify a number of major problems and solutions, which is more than I can say for most major sources of climate “news” and “information.”

Conclusion: It’s not that I have all the answers or expect anyone, even major news outlets, to have all the answers. But we should expect them to be asking the right questions. It is not helpful or laudable to have all the right answers to all the wrong questions, which is what we have now, where our climate modeling exercises strenuously disregard major problems and major solutions.

It’s not as if the New York Times and the United Nations have asked and answered the question of how water cycles and ecosystems play a role in climate change and how they could be part of the solution. It’s that they are not asking these questions at all.

And you have to wonder why.