‘Earthworm Dilemma’ Has Climate Scientists Racing to Keep Up

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/earthworms-soil-climate.html

by malshe • 7 years ago

88 79 7 years ago

What's perhaps more alarming in the original paper [0] is that earthworms were shown to increase nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions even more than they increased CO2 emissions from soil (42% and 33%, respectively).

In terms relevant to the greenhouse effect, N2O is 298 times more potent than CO2 in the atmosphere [1]. I wonder about how increasing the entire boreal forest's emissions of N2O by 42% would affect the current projections. Seems...bad.

There's perhaps a silver lining here though: earthworms "unlock" stored nutrients in soils, making them easier for plants to access. This might spur growth, thereby storing atmospheric carbon in the process.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1692 [1]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases

whatshisface• 7 years ago

According to this paper, about 10,000 times as much CO2 is emitted by the forest floor than N2O. So, even though N2O is more potent, the CO2 is a bigger deal (and changes in it are therefore a bigger deal as well).

https://academic.oup.com/forestry/article/90/4/541/3064404

See table 4. Note that NO2 efflux is measured in mg and CO2 is measured in g.

tony_cannistra7• 7 years ago

Hey, thanks for that reference. You're right, but the 300x potency of N2O vs CO2 and the sheer unknowns lurking in our understanding of the "earthworm problem" still make this worth investigation, in my opinion.

Additionally, at the risk of being pedantic and because I'm a stuck-up academic, I want to point out that your reference is studying a temperate forest. This is relevant not only because species composition and climatic regimes present in temperate forests (decidious trees, high species diversity, high nutrient availabilty, moderate climates) differ markedly from those of boreal forests (coniferous trees, low species diversity, low nutrient availability, extreme climatic seasonality). There's good reason to believe that this difference has a corresponding shift in the GHG emission regimes of the respective forestlands, which you can see here [0]. Additionally, boreal forests are the earth's largest terrestrial ecosystem [1], which makes this potential difference quite relevant.

Your point is well taken, though -- it's important to triage effort in facing a complicated global challenge.

[0] https://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/10.1139/X08-209#.XOLSAF... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiga

seren2• 7 years ago

It depends on how big is the base rate of emission of N2O for boreal forest, if it was negligible before an increase of 42% is certainly not good but might not be catastrophic.

macspoofing6• 7 years ago

Can we please start investing in nuclear power again. Pretty please? We've already lost 50 years due to anti-nuclear policies that effectively killed nuclear power in every developed nation not named 'France'.

Wind/Solar necessarily implies doubling-down on natural gas as this is the standard (and only) way to get around the intermittency issue of those renewables. It's no surprise that natural gas companies now lobby for Wind and Solar deployments, and Germany signs multi-decade deals to import Russian gas as they increase their Solar and Wind footprint.

So nuclear, apart from being capable of cutting our CO2 emissions to 0 for power generation, also requires two orders of magnitude less land-use than Solar and Wind deployments. This does nothing for CO2 emissions, but I'm sure wild-life will appreciate less encroachment.

What will it take for environmentalists, and progressives (who push the anti-nuclear Green New Deal) to support nuclear power?

jedberg3• 7 years ago

What will it take for environmentalists, and progressives (who push the anti-nuclear Green New Deal) to support nuclear power?

Better marketing. Back in the 90s, the GOP hired a PR firm, who came up with the idea of renaming the estate tax to the death tax. In doing so, they managed to get even hardcore liberals on board with "eliminating the death tax", even though those same people were very much for increasing the estate tax.

Nuclear needs a similar PR boost. Call it something else and get the environmentalists and progressives on board.

The new marketing would have to tout both the newer "meltdown free" reactors as well as put a new spin on the Yucca mountain storage facility.

macspoofing6• 7 years ago

Call it something else and get the environmentalists and progressives on board.

You think so? Because I would think they would see through the attempt if tried. And it would simply lead to conspiracy theories of big-nuclear trying to put lipstick on a pig - in the same way that 'clean coal' branding didn't really get any environmentalists/progressives on board for coal power.

layoutIfNeeded• 7 years ago

Since fission is triggered by neutrons we should call it “neutral energy”.

Diederich• 7 years ago

I've been worried about climate change, CO2 emissions and related material for quite a number of years now, and I've believed that we should have been pushing hard into nuclear power for a long time.

However:

Wind/Solar necessarily implies doubling-down on natural gas as this is the standard (and only) way to get around the intermittency issue of those renewables.

Can we so lightly dismiss battery storage? It has a ways to go, but its price continues to improve exponentially.

folli2• 7 years ago

No we can't dismiss it lightly, because there won't be a sole solution to tackle CO2 increase, but we need to leverage and improve all existing technologies.

macspoofing6• 7 years ago

Can we so lightly dismiss battery storage?

We can because there is no battery storage technology today, nor is one upcoming, that would work on city scale (i.e. store enough energy to power a city and industry outside of ideal wind/solar times). For example, the Tesla-style deployments are only there to even out supply on the order of milliseconds and maybe seconds. That's still something, and does replace natural gas in those specific use-cases, but that's not what we need.

Worse, we don't even know of a battery technology that would be able to store power across seasons or years, as Wind and Solar are very seasonally dependent and may vary in output by an order of magnitude between, say, Summer and Winter. Furthermore, for wind deployments, you usually need to sample multiple years to figure out if the site is good enough because wind output can vary across multiple-years.

That's why wind/solar/natural gas is a package deal today and for the foreseeable future.

folli2• 7 years ago

I don't understand why this is being downvoted, apart from non-scientific resentments. Nuclear power will be needed, together with renewables (hydro, wind, solar), to massively increase the chance to shift away from fossil energy.

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

I would like to see an honest accounting of the costs of nuclear power including decommissioning and waste storage. I am also skeptical that a world wide increase in nuclear power usage can be done in a safe way. Somebody somewhere will take shortcuts over time.

macspoofing6• 7 years ago

I would like to see an honest accounting of the costs of nuclear power including decommissioning and waste storage.

Does it matter? If the game is to cut CO2 emissions, and nothing else can cut CO2 emissions - we're out of options.

Tell me honestly: is there anything that would convince you or are you just saying things? I ask because I do wonder what kind of answer you are looking for that we don't already know. It isn't like nuclear technology is brand new. There's a 5 decades of history behind it and it has been studied exhaustively. We know the risks, the costs, the capabilities, the safety record. Everything. What more do you need before you accept it?

781• 7 years ago

No mechanism exists to eradicate earthworms from the boreal forest

Surely there must be an worm-eater somewhere.

mikestew• 7 years ago

Due to pollution and habitat encroachment, early birds are becoming endangered in many parts of the world.

marapuru• 7 years ago

No flame intended here, but have to state this.

Worm-eater. That's such a typical solution. The cause of this migration should be given a solution, not the effects or result of the migration.

empath752• 7 years ago

https://youtu.be/P9yruQM1ggc

strainer• 7 years ago

The UK has been alarmed by the "New Zealand flatworm" threatening its earthworm population - some places have lost all of their worms, though it seems to be under control. On the other hand at a push, it may be possible to deliberately seed forests with them.

I think this article is quite hyperbolic though. It talks about a researchers "horror" at theoretical possibilities, but the latest literature review cited is 6 years old and it did not resolve any definite effect.

Our results suggest that although earthworms are largely beneficial to soil fertility, they increase net soil greenhouse-gas emissions.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1692

rckclmbr• 7 years ago

This is where it gets hard to fight climate change. As awareness increases, so does funding for "climate change". Now everyone environmental scientist with an issue will link that issue with climate change, with the hopes of drawing press, awareness, and funding. It may or may not actually be an issue, but I think we need to focus on the top causes of climate change first.

seren2• 7 years ago

I am not sure more science can be an issue, it is still a ridiculous small amount of money compared to defence, debt servicing, etc.

Who knows, someone might find a negative feedback loop for climate change that we could leverage, even in something as improbable as mycology ?

(Likely increasing defence budget is also another way to mitigate climate change if we don't do it in a more civilized way...)

achenatx• 7 years ago

the best negative feedback loop is a depression. Kill the global economy for 20 years and CO2 production will crash.

Ironically trumps tariffs are likely to do more to slow climate change than any other policies.

Circuits• 7 years ago

Idk, I feel like it's all been watered down. It use to be global warming, now it's climate change... none of the old predictions have come true and now everyone and their mother uses the buzz word to hype up whatever it is their interested in getting funded for.

jniedrauer• 7 years ago

none of the old predictions have come true

[Citation needed]

someonenice• 7 years ago

And in other parts of the world, earth worms are dying in large.. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/after-the-deluge-k...

Earthworms more important than panda if you want to save the earth... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/earthworms-are-mo...

JoshTko• 7 years ago

Earth will be fine, people will not. Climate change sounds innocuous as daylight savings and needs to be rebranded in order to resonate with more people.

te_chris• 7 years ago

The Guardian has decided to do just that https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-.... Now it's 'Global Heating' and 'Climate Crisis'

vixen99• 7 years ago

No need to rebrand. Simply stop using the vacuous phrase 'climate change' (Thomas Sowell has commented to the effect that you won't find a single rational person on Earth who denies that the climate changes) and replace it with actual referenced data (temperature, sea level, state of the poles etc.,) together with a non-cherry-picked historical context so that anyone can see for themselves what is actually happening climate-wise.

Resonance & rebranding would hardly be needed to alert the public if an asteroid was found to be on a trajectory for earth.

misterzip4• 7 years ago

Not sure I have too much to add to the discussion but I do have a question – what do the people who know the most about climate change think we (consumers) should do? There seem to be few coherent lobbying efforts; the people best known for accurate science (IPCC) have no information that I can find about what an average human should be doing to help fight the good fight; it all just feels so impossible.

Does anyone here have any links or suggestions? I've done a small amount of work on "raising awareness" (https://twitter.com/ipccbot) but it seems like everyone either knows and cares or knows and doesn't care. A lot of the climate news feels like climate news porn – so the earthworms are freaking scientists out, what does that mean for me? Can I help the scientists? Are there places I can donate? Or specific calls to action I can follow to help advocate for saner climate policy? What is that policy?

morley• 7 years ago

The most common refrain I've heard is to reduce meat consumption, and to shift from high-carbon-output meats to lower-output ones. I think the rough order, from highest to lowest, is:

  - Beef 
  - Pork
  - Seafood
  - Chicken
  - Non-meat diet

misterzip4• 7 years ago

I'm willing to believe you (and I am already doing this!) but can you show me where any climate scientists advocate for consumers to take this kind of action? And model out how supply of these high-carbon-output food sources will be affected by this depending on how many consumers take action? If you don't have the time or interest that's totally fine, but I'm trying to make the point that it's really confusing for me as a consumer to understand what to do about climate change. I really wish the IPCC or other climate groups would get together with a list of actions for regular people, along with the predicted effects of those actions.

mrec• 7 years ago

Interesting; I hadn't seen that list before.

Annoyingly, most of it goes directly against arguments I have seen [1] about how best to reduce animal suffering in the human food chain without everyone going full vegetarian, since one suffering cow can replace an awful lot of suffering chickens even if you percieve individual chickens as "less conscious".

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat...

PorterDuff• 7 years ago

What happens when you have 15 billion people eating a non-meat diet?

mikorym2• 7 years ago

Many high-level decisions fail to take into account lower-level intricacies.

For example, assuming you live in Germany (for the sake of concreteness) and you want to move down the chain from pork to seafood.

1. Are you aware of fish rated as green, yellow or red?

2. Are you aware of other consideration, such as logistics and methods (e.g.: aquaculture vs. wild)?

3. Do you have access to local and sustainable pork (but perhaps not seafood)?

discreteevent• 7 years ago

The order in that list may depend on how the animal is farmed. For example, in some countries the beef is raised outdoors on grass and the pork is raised indoors.

ckarmann• 7 years ago

Off the top of my head:

- Only take a plane when absolutely necessary.

- Live in a city, sell your car and take public transport

- Reduce meat consumption (at least beef and lamb which are a lot worse than the others). You don't need to eat meat every single day. Also try tofu, tempeh and seitan; you may find you like them.

- Vote with this topic in mind, even if it might hurt you financially.

tony_cannistra7• 7 years ago

That last one, x1000

empath752• 7 years ago

Individual action will barely make a dent, to the point where it’s nearly pointless to bother. We need global collective actions and a worldwide tax on carbon emissions.

tony_cannistra7• 7 years ago

Climate scientist here.

I really resonate with the "climate change porn" bullshit. Drives me crazy, and just makes people numb to it.

The best thing you can do is the thing you're best at doing, and that you're motivated to do. You'll do it well, and others will follow.

If that's too vague, here are some objective suggestions. Might get in trouble for this, but individual action isn't going to fix this problem. I don't really care if you are a vegetarian or a vegan, or whether you buy carbon credits or offset your airplane tickets or whatever other bullshit Wall Street is pushing to get around this problem.

What you should be doing is encouraging systems-level thinking. Get people to understand how top-level governmental decisions (or lack thereof) can lead to a system where carbon is entirely written off as irrelevant in our current economic and political system. Encourage people to think of ways in which, to the best of our ability, lifestyles for all people can be maintained or improved while severely regulating the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

misterzip4• 7 years ago

Love that idea, but again it's this abstract "change how people think" – who is organizing this collective action? How can I join their existing efforts? My comparative advantage is not public relations / marketing / persuasion, and while I'm going to of course keep trying to make sure the people around me understand the seriousness of the issue, I'm at a loss for how to have a larger impact.

1000% agreed that individual action is not enough, and that we need to get the corporations and governments of the world to make serious changes. But I have no idea what those changes are, or like you say, how we can make them while maintaining or improving lifestyles for all people.

Also, thank you for answering kindly and collaboratively. For some reason I'm just feeling really fed up with climate news porn today and these are all the frustrations and questions I've always wanted to ask.

istjohn2• 7 years ago

Individual action will not in and of itself solve the climate crisis, but I believe it could be a powerful lever to build the critical mass needed to put global warming at the top of our politicians' agendas. We need to convince our families, friends and neighbors that the climate crisis is a big deal. Words are cheap. But if people see us actully making substantive personal sacrifices in our own lives, sacrifices that cannot be merely written off as performative signaling, but that can only be explained by a strongly held belief that climate change is a BIG DEAL, our exhortations will be far more persuasive.

Noos• 7 years ago

They can't be maintained or improved. People will be forced to accept a lower standard of life as they are switched to less environmentally impacting methods, and will be punitively taxed to cover for the things that it's simply impossible to remove.

We won't see everyone tooling around in their autonomous electric cars. the rich will have Tesla's, and everyone else will probably split the massive cost of an ICE car four ways instead of owning one, or walk everywhere.That's assuming we didn't kill half the jobs off in the USA because now a Burger King Value Meal costs $20, due to cigarette-style sin taxes.

You can systems level think all you like, the problem is when it gets expressed into concrete things. I think people would have to admit that it would be a pretty big qol step down for people...it's just that their solutions dovetail neatly with the way they live their lives already.

graenxa4• 7 years ago

CCL https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ in the US is working towards something, albeit in a mild and incremental way.

They're pushing a carbon tax policy in the house right now https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbo.... It's a little silly since it seems like there's little appetite for a bill like this with conservatives. I still think it's important to try.

I'd say there's a lot of opportunity to do things on a state or local level. Reducing your state's carbon emissions has a real impact. Push for renewable energy sources. Fight to make the process of rezoning for higher density housing easier in your community and improve public transit.

RenRav• 7 years ago

Do the benefits earthworms provide for the soil/plants outweight the negatives?

war10252• 7 years ago

The world is a dynamic system. You can't wind back the clock on anything. People need to let go of their static worldview and accept that change happens. We are continually poking Pandora's Box. What has been let out cannot be put back in.

graenxa4• 7 years ago

I think you're right, the question now is do we learn from how it's changed and how we're changing it?

Do we continue to make the planet an ever more unlivable hell-hole because "the world is a dynamic system."

Or do we look at what's happening, learn from it, and try to prevent things from getting worse.

war10252• 7 years ago

Absolutely we should be trying to do better. But we do that by steering towards a future that is acceptable, not by trying to turn back time to somewhere we used to be.

VBprogrammer• 7 years ago

I wonder how this interplays with anaerobic decomposition which would produce CH4 (which is many times more potent as a greenhouse gas). I'd expect that the worm activity encourages oxygen consuming bacteria which produce CO2.

‘Earthworm Dilemma’ Has Climate Scientists Racing to Keep Up

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