The Living Climate
By Lynn Jones and Ole Hendrickson
In honour of Earth Day this year – a positive, hopeful message about our climate. Here it is in a nutshell:
A stable climate on Planet Earth is largely maintained by living beings. Healthy soils, mature forests, diverse plants, animals, fungi and microbes, all work together to cycle water and heat around the planet in ways that support life. If we nurture these lifeforms, they can and will repair the Earth’s climate for us.
There are many ways that living beings maintain a stable climate on Earth. Here are just a few examples:
Plants and trees are natural air conditioners. Using solar energy they pull water from deep soil and release it through their leaves as water vapour, cooling the land surface in the process. In this way they send a lot of the incoming heat from the sun back up into the atmosphere where some of it escapes to outer space. Without the natural air conditioning provided by plants, parking lots and other inert surfaces can get very hot on a sunny day in summer.
Mature forests and plants bring rain and maintain small water cycles. The water vapour sent skyward by forests and wetlands condenses and falls as rain, nurturing life and replenishing soil moisture and aquifers. Large, natural forests suck in moist air from the ocean, effectively watering the interior of continents and regulating Earth’s climate.
Healthy soils hold water in the landscape longer and provide it to growing plants during dry periods, enabling them to grow and transpire water vapour. In doing so, healthy soils reduce both flooding and droughts, and reduce the likelihood of forest fires.
Fungi and fungal networks act like a hidden “sponge and plumbing” system beneath the soil surface. They help soil drink in rain, and store moisture. The stored moisture can then be transpired by plants to cool the local area and contribute to clouds and precipitation locally.
Bacteria, sent skyward from forests, and from the ocean, serve as “cloud condensation nuclei.” They enable clouds to form and rain to fall down and cycle around more locally. When condensation nuclei are in short supply, huge quantities of moisture accumulate in the atmosphere leading to extreme rainfall events and flooding.
Animals such as groundhogs and beavers increase water in the landscape by digging holes for water infiltration and expanding wetlands thereby contributing to water holding, local water cycles and cooling from evapotranspiration. Other animals fertilize the soil with their dung and increase its capacity to hold water.
Related:
- Clouds, trees, and rain: Important new research suggests how we can help Nature make more rain, and bring more life to thirsty lands.
- How to be an energy superpower: Our real energy superpower is Mother Nature.
The Beaver is one of many animals that help to maintain a stable climate on Earth, if we let them. Photo, Grant Dobson. The beaver (Castor canadensis) is also the official national animal of Canada.
Unfortunately humans have been rapidly replacing living surfaces with inert, manmade objects like concrete, asphalt, bricks, metal and plastic, also known as “antropogenic mass.” According to a recent paper in the scientific journal, Nature, antropogenic mass has outstripped the mass of all living things on Earth and is continuing to grow rapidly. This replacement of climate-regulating lifeforms with inert, human-made objects, is destabilizing our climate.
Experts say water cycles are broken, soil moisture is declining rapidly, cloud cover is shrinking and groundwater is depleted. Burning of fossil fuels adds insult to injury by injecting large quantities of heat-trapping gases like CO2 into our atmosphere.
These are serious problems but they can be reversed using strategies that are known and in use currently. We can take inspiration from the many People around the world (See: globalearthrepairfoundation.org) who are demonstrating that water cycles can be restored, rain can be brought back to dry watersheds, the soil carbon sponge can be regenerated, groundwater can be recharged, and mature forests can be protected and expanded.
On Earth Day this year, let’s come together and affirm the wonderful ways that Earth’s life forms take care of us, if we let them. Let’s commit to protecting and enhancing the climate-stabilizing roles of plants, animals, forests, wetlands, and healthy soils.
If you’d like to know more, please check out these “Living Climate” resources:
- Clouds, trees, and rain: Important new research suggests how we can help Nature make more rain, and bring more life to thirsty lands.
- How to be an energy superpower: Our real energy superpower is Mother Nature.
- Transformative change in nature begins with us: Large issues like the climate crisis can seem daunting to take on, but there are ways each of us can take part in transformative change.
- Technofixes won’t save the world. Nature will – if given rights: Hoping that technology can deliver us a quick fix to the climate crisis is understandable, but hardly practical. Preventing climate disaster will instead require hard work and deep societal changes.
- A unified approach on biodiversity and climate: A recent survey shows that media literacy and disinformation continue to have a negative impact in the broader public’s understanding of the climate crisis.
- Water for a thirsty land: Canada’s forest industry is making us more vulnerable to wildfires and increasing our greenhouse gas emissions as a result.
- Forests make rain; we can’t afford to lose them: The federal government has another chance to get it right with its 2030 Biodiversity Strategy for Canada. To prolong human habitation of this continent, we need to do better.
- Biodiversity loss at the heart of climate crisis: Removing vegetation for urban development, spraying herbicides, mowing lawns, and clear-cutting forests all destroy plants and the food webs they support.
- Excellent Introductory article: (features a Spanish scientist, Millán Muñoz Millán, who spent considerable time in Canada, obtaining his Ph.D in atmospheric physics from the University of Toronto in 1972.) The article explains how the extensive body of scientific literature on the contributions of land use patterns to climate, got forgotten about. Millan Millan and the Mystery of the Missing Mediterranean Storms
Eight page PDF from the UN Environment Program
Review articles on the science of the role of land use in climate
- Compendium of Scientific and Practical Findings Supporting Eco-Restoration to Address Global Warming
Short videos
- How Plants Cool the Planet (5 minutes)
- Climate Change: The Water Paradigm (3 minutes)
The film, Regenerating Life
The film provides an excellent introduction to the living climate paradigm. It can be streamed for around $7 and there is a series of 36 short clips available to watch for free on YouTube here.
Substack with many interviews and thought provoking articles:
Ottawa River Institute Watershed Ways articles published over the last two years: