"... but store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests. Lokolama’s swamps, it turned out, are part of the biggest network of tropical peatlands in the world, covering over 55,000 square miles of Central Africa and storing more than 30 billion tons of carbon. This vast peatland is relatively undisturbed, for now. But should that carbon vault be opened, it could have catastrophic consequences for the planet. In those peatlands are stored the carbon equivalent of 20 years of U.S. fossil fuel emissions. Roads could be built giving loggers better access to the forest. Politicians could decide to convert peatland into farms. In these scenarios, the peat would dry out and release carbon into the atmosphere and, the researchers warned, become not only endangered but dangerous.... Outsiders have long exploited Congo’s wealth of natural resources — rubber, diamonds, gold and, most recently, cobalt. While these new outsiders said peat had value only if it remained in the ground, to the people in this region, known as the Cuvette Centrale, the sudden interest suggested someone would be making money...."
From "What Do the Protectors of Congo's Peatlands Get in Return?" (NYT).
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31 comments:
peat == coal
“But should that carbon vault be opened....”
“But if Mount St. Helens were to erupt ....”
“But if Mt. Aetna were to erupt....”
>This vast peatland is relatively undisturbed, for now. But should that carbon vault be opened, it could have catastrophic consequences for the planet.<
"Could." Oh my god, I'm simply frantic over this! Again...
Peat is a really awful growing medium.
Coconut fiber works much better in pretty much every way.
It is really hard to over water with coco fiber and there is a range of pests that grow in peat that do not grow in coco fiber.
If you use coco fiber you have to supplement calcium though.
If it's going to be the End of the World as we know it, let's put all that peat to its highest and best use: making Scotch. At least we can drown our sorrows as we witness the end of Mother Earth.
Wow! Something else for liberals to get scared to death about.
That must make them very happy.
"Give us your money --your power-- or the planet will burn: either because we fail to stop it, or because we light the match." That's the message these clowns have been sending for the past three-plus decades, based on the warmunist religion. A religion in which humans are an oozing sore on the face of Gaia, and CO2 --plant food-- is pure poison.
I do get tired of this.
There is no climate crisis. If all of that peat bog land was instantly converted to carbon dioxide, there would be only a minor increase in temperature. We don't need complex climate models to tell what will happen with increased carbon dioxide concentrations. All we have to look at is the absorption characteristics of the green house gasses. Doubling CO2 concentration results in only a small change in the standard day temperature. We are not going to die if that temperature changes from 59-deg F to 60- or 61-deg F. The globe will not spontaneously combust.
Interesting, the NYT article has zero mentions of China, the nation state or its government, and mentions "Chinese" just four times, mostly to describe the nationality of a few traveling businessmen.
But should that carbon vault be opened, it could have negligible consequences for the planet.
Fixed it for them. I don’t know which is more tiresome, the people who push junk science or the gullible nitwits like Althouse who apparently fall for junk science so readily.
I don't have a subscription so I can't read the entire article. Does it end by calling for more nuclear plants to generate lots of clean energy, fresh water and fertilizer?
I associated peat with Ireland. At one point 60% of Irish electricity came from peat. Now much reduced because of pollution, and concentrated effort underway to restore the bogs.
'Outsiders have long exploited Congo’s wealth of natural resources — rubber, diamonds, gold and, most recently, cobalt.'
So the locals are too dumb to make money from these resources themselves?
Sounds racist.
It's always someone else's fault.
I blame white supremacy...
Two years until it will be too late, right? Maybe we could start repeating everywhere to soak up carbon!
Mike of Snoqualmie @ 10:48: What you said. I would love to confront these Greens with a simple question: do they understand what a logarithmic curve looks like? That doubling the CO2 from 200 to 400 ppm over the past several hundred years might have produced a 1 degree C increase in "global temperature" (itself a contrived statistic under the control of the Greens)? And that therefore the same 1 degree C increase might occur if we double it again, to 800 ppm? Which will take many hundreds of years and probably consume most of the planet's fossil fuels?
We could go on --with the shaky quality of the temperature record itself, with the fact that 95% of the "greenhouse gas effect" is due not to CO2 or cow burps, but to water vapor. Over which we have absolutely no control. Which transports heat almost instantly into the stratosphere and thence to space, acting as a gigantic negative feedback mechanism.
But all this is wasted on these people. Most are caught in their cult. The rest are there for the graft.
I am sure the Chinese will mark this article. Another piece of Africa worth having.
Good old peat. Peat unites my German and Scots ancestry.
Some of my German forebears dug and burned peat in the Bokelheide; we don't have as much knowledge of the Scots side, which may have expressed itself in an unhealthy fondness for a wee dram or nine of the peat-juice.
Once again, third-worlders are to remain impoverished so the laptop set at NYT can signal their virtue.
It does get old.
Jersey Fled said...
Wow! Something else for liberals to get scared to death about.
That must make them very happy.
===========
the fear is sham
real goal is Africans must remain poor
Ah, the carbon in babies... fetuses... peat.
That said, ethanol, bovine and vegan emissions are first-order forcings of [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] global cooling, warming, change that is undeniable, unfalsifiable truth or article of faith in a normally chaotic system. The anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide is a fraction of a fraction of the total atmospheric gases, and a model (i.e. hypothetical) of efficacy and sustainable warming. Carbon dioxide is a first-order forcing of a green, not Green, and viable planet.
Some peatlands are also a natural source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with the warming potential up to 100 times stronger than carbon dioxide.
But generating methane actually requires the opposite conditions to generating carbon dioxide. Methane is more frequently released in water-saturated conditions, while carbon dioxide emissions are mostly in unsaturated conditions.
This means if our peatlands are getting drier, we would have an increase in emissions of carbon dioxide, but a reduction in methane emissions.
...
In these experiments, we reduced water under different climate, soil and environmental conditions and, using machine learning algorithms, disentangled the different responses of greenhouse gases.
Aha! Machine Learning.
Peatlands worldwide are drying out ...
Interesting, our local paper ( a subsidiary of USA Today) had an article this morning on burning dung for fuel. Are the journalists hyping alternatives to oil?
I’ve never had an Islay style Congolese scotch, but I’ll wait.
Peat Bogs?
Scotland, savior of the world. And not just the whiskey this time.
C'mon, Owen--everyone knows that "THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!"
(I randomly listen to Joe Rogan podcasts while driving and doing chores. Just listened to Stanley Koonig, who wrote "Unsettled," and the guy who Rogan interviewed as a "rebuttal," Andrew Dressler.
The science is never settled. However if the "rebuttal" were the equivalent of giving the other team the ball on the 25 after Koonig had driven down the field and scored in OT, Dressler threw a pick-6 from the 5 after being sacked twice.
Outsiders have long exploited Congo’s wealth of natural resources
Why don't the people living there exploit their own resources?
Clearly, we need a crash program getting people in Africa to mine cobalt and leave the peat alone. The cobalt, mined increasingly in Chinese owned mines of course, will be used for batteries for our electric cars, which will make us all feel so much better about the child labor that will be exploited in the process. And even though the batteries and vehicles still will require nasty sources of electricity generation, such as coal, gas, nuclear, etc. The Climate Catastrophists are religious fanatics, and their hampering of our fracking, oil drilling and pipeline constructing has among other things made it easier for Putin to sell his high-priced oil (to us as well as others) and easier for him to attack Ukraine. But like the child slave labor in Congo's mines, what do the tax-subsidized electric car woke care?
“Water vapor accounts for about 97 percent of the total (natural plus man-emitted) greenhouse warming of the planet. See, e.g., John Houghton's ‘The Physics of Atmospheres, 3rd edition,’ Cambridge University Press, 2002.”
Seems to me the water vapor is a far bigger problem if you're into climate alarmism. Why are we fighting over 3% of the problem instead of addressing the other 97% of the problem?
"Why don't the people living there exploit their own resources?"
They do...by accepting the money and jobs provided by the more technologically advanced outsiders. NYT just wants the natives to stay backwards and poor and virtuous.
Oh, For Peat Sakes! Peat (or else bituminous coal) cooks into pure carbon coke. Coke fueled American iron and steelmaking beginning in 1817 - and we ain't dead yet.
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