While browsing around New Scientist today, I found several articles related to climate change. Unfortunately, two are bad news, and one is mixed.

Some coal is mined by removing entire mountaintops, dropping jumbled rock into the adjacent valleys. This amazingly destructive practice was banned by a US district court in March 2007. But now a Court of Appeals has reversed the decision. The article does open on a hopeful note: "Even as public opinion in the US turns against coal..."

The second article is about warming in the Arctic. It's been known for a while that the disappearance of the ice cap is exposing darker water, which absorbs more sunlight. This is bad. But recent climate model studies indicate that two other effects are even stronger. First, exposing more water leads to more evaporation - and water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas. The more humid the atmosphere, the more heat it traps. Second, the exposed water radiates heat to the atmosphere at a higher rate than ice would.

Finally, it seems that Amazon rain forests are soaking up carbon. We learned in grade school that plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is only half the story, because when plants die and are eaten, all that carbon goes right back into the atmosphere. In theory, a mature forest should be carbon-neutral. But the Amazon forest is absorbing 0.6 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. The article proposes two explanations: first, the rain forests may be still recovering from the effects of earlier pre-Columbian human activity. Second, the forests may be growing more because of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. I can hear the Business As Usual talking points now: "This means we don't need to save the forests because they're not really old growth, and besides, the extra CO2 is all being taken up by the plants." Sigh...

Imagine that you are sitting in a roller coaster. The train has just left the station and is heading up the long hill. Your seat has tipped back, and all you can see is the sky ahead... except that your eyes are closed tight with fear...

You can't close your ears, so you hear the sound... click... click... click... as the train is pulled ever-higher up the hill. click... click... click... You are frozen, waiting for the clicking to stop and that indescribable stomach sensation when the train starts to pick up speed. click... click... click...

350 PPM, 370 PPM, 390 PPM... click... click... where is the top of the hill?

You don't know where the top of the hill is. You just know you don't want to be on this ride. You can't get out. You could yell "Stop the ride!" and someone might listen, and shut off the engine... but once the clicking stops, it will be too late. Definitely too late. Once the train starts rolling downhill, there is no hope of control.

The top of the hill, in this little visualization, is any process that can be started by excess carbon dioxide, and perpetuates itself once it's started. For example, once the Greenland ice cap melts, it won't reform till the next ice age; the darker land and lower elevation will keep enough snow from sticking. Even a partial melt will be enough to accelerate the melting process. If we want the Greenland ice cap to survive, we have to shut down the roller coaster... before the serious melting starts.

Another hill we probably don't want to fall down is permafrost melting. It's bad enough that this would release methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas - on the time scale of decades (which may be all the time we have left to repair the atmosphere), it's many times worse than carbon dioxide. But I just heard today something that scares me even more. Once permafrost melts and starts to decompose, the heat of decomposition will keep it thawed and rotting - even in temperatures which would have kept it frozen. Once the rotting gets underway, the roller coaster is over the hill.

Click... click... click... wait for the sick drop as the bottom falls out...

Or yell "Stop the ride!" loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine.

This is exciting - the launch of my biochar-focused website.

Biochar is perhaps the only technology existing today that can actually reduce atmospheric CO2, if used along with large but feasible emission cuts.

In contrast to proposed sequestration technologies that store massive amounts of the gas and hope it never escapes its high-tech prison, biochar simply puts charcoal in the soil, where it will never decay... and it improves the soil!

If the politics are done right, biochar can provide a "money pump" to farmers and workers in developing nations, as they earn carbon credits while improving their farmland (and clearing less rainforest).

Biochar is a win-win-win-win. The idea is ready to grow, and Carbon For Life is dedicated to doing what we can to help. The vision of its founder, Chris Phoenix, is that biochar can and should increase by a factor of ten each year, until ten billion tons of carbon per year are sequestered.

We're not a non-profit yet, but we expect to be soon. The website will host a wiki for biochar work of all kinds, as well as a blog with multiple contributors.

A major biochar effort will require engineering, politics, economics, and agronomy to work together, in a variety of different settings. The first goal of Carbon For Life is to identify where biochar projects make obvious sense, and all that's needed is someone to point out the opportunity.

(The website design was created and installed by the volunteer effort of Andrea Lemon. Many, many thanks, Andrea!)