Allopathic Environmentalism ~ Water
The water cycles
Part 1. — Fundamentalism, the lipid cycle, and how nutrition is essentially about communication.
PART 3. — THE WATER CYCLES
Part 4. — Conclusions and strategies ~ resilience
Now the sun, moving as it does, sets up processes of change and becoming and decay, and by its agency the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapour and rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth (Aristotle, Meteorologica).
I have spent a great deal of my writing arguing that focusing on ingredients in isolation leads us to faulty conclusions. Not only are the ingredients typically vilified (sometimes glorified), but we misunderstand the root of the problem. For cholesterol, in A. E. Part 1, our fear of this vital lipid ending up as plaque within our arteries led nutritional guidelines to advocate the avoidance of eating anything containing cholesterol. Meanwhile the guidelines promoted the exact foods that broke down the lipoprotein communication pathways, which eventually led to a vast increase of atherosclerosis. A similar tale occurs with carbon, as in A. E. Part 2. Rather than understanding that life depends on the cycling of carbon between the earth, the atmosphere, plants, animals, and soil, we make sweeping claims to mitigate it indiscriminately. Consequently, we waste vast amounts of energy and time vilifying ruminants because their burps contain methane. The irony is that ruminants are possibly the most powerful tool, in conjunction with grazed plants, to draw down carbon and store it in the soil. Meanwhile, the actual damage that is caused by extracting fossil fuels and burning them is obscured and left unchecked.
This myopic focus on individual ingredients apart from any context also has the effect of muting discussion concerning many other intertwining issues. Ingredients do not function in isolation, and nor do systems. In other words, the carbon cycles are interrelated with many other essential systems that are ignored on the whole. For as much attention as it gets, carbon is only one factor of climate change among many. Supposing we managed to keep global temperatures down, there are still a hundred more ways we seem to be poisoning our environment, killing off species, and making our lands infertile and inhabitable. A great many of these are tied in with the issue of water.
In the atmosphere, the relationship between carbon and water is very important. Referring back to the description of the slow carbon cycle (in A. E. Part 2), a small portion of atmospheric carbon dissolves into rainwater, making carbonic acid, which then chemically weathers rock. With more carbon in the atmosphere, there can be a slight increase in the amount of carbonic acid accompanying rainwater, but for the most part, excess carbon that is not used by vegetation, stays put for a very long time. With all the focus on excess atmospheric carbon, it is worth noting that the long term characteristic of atmospheric carbon is what keeps the atmospheric water cycle intact and is one more system that ensures our planet remains inhabitable. NASA’s website puts it this way, “…these non-condensing greenhouse gases provide the temperature environment that is necessary for water vapor and cloud feedback effects to operate, without which the water vapor dominated greenhouse effect would inevitably collapse and plunge the global climate into an icebound Earth state (NASA.gov).
Water vapor, in contrast to the more steady carbon dioxide, typically cycles out of the atmosphere within ten days. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere at a given time is dependent on temperature, with hotter air able to hold more water molecules than cold air. In an oversimplification, the temperature dependent dynamic of water amplifies any temperature increase from the rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. With CO2 as the “control knob”, the feedback loop of water roughly doubles the effect of carbon dioxide. If we look at climate change from the isolated lens of the greenhouse effect, it is a natural and logical step to focus on the control knob of carbon, as the greenhouse effect of water will follow suit. However, widen the parameters, change the resolution, and water suddenly plays a much more complex and far-reaching role.
As far as the greenhouse effect goes, the science is robust, forcing climate deniers to get more and more creative in their attempts to poke holes in it. Yet despite the accuracy of the facts, I would argue, this continued emphasis on atmospheric carbon and the amplifying water vapor is inappropriate. In one sense, it is a error of resolution. Consider how (in A.E. Part 2) the two carbon cycles are often thought of in one vague mathematical problem. Carbon in, carbon out. Because folks do not understand the unprecedented flow of carbon out of the slow cycle into the fast one, we are led to believe naive notions that planting trees can truly compensate for pollution. A sharper resolution shows the distinction between the two carbon cycles and provides a clearer picture of what actually needs to be addressed. A discussion of climate change focused solely on greenhouse gas and the interplay between atmospheric carbon and water vapor suffers the same blindness due to inappropriate resolution.
Before I jump into the technicalities of water and its cycles, I want to reiterate the necessity of appropriate context. Clearly, there are errors in how we think about systemic issues such as environment and ecology. However, more often than not, it is our intuitions of how facts interrelate and how to prioritize them that needs restructuring, rather than the validity of the fact themselves being in error. Something other than a propositional and factual approach to science is required in addition to solid data if we are to navigate the crises of our time. This is another way to express what Lewis was arguing for in his approach to scripture (A. E. Part 1). Facts or rules of morality are dangerous and destructive if they are not subservient to a sagacious internal map or intuition of when and where they are appropriate.
A quick example might help. Say your eight year old daughter is celebrating her birthday. Her four year old brother is slightly jealous of all the attention she is receiving. After a jolly rendition of “Happy Birthday” the little brother blurts out, almost as a demand, “I have a birthday, too!…” We smile and forgive the cute kid because he is so young and it is quite hard at that age to see beyond one’s ego. Yet if Uncle Ted were to have such an outburst, we would be quite worried. What Uncle Ted said would be factually true, but it would be inappropriate to solipsistically take the attention away from the one we were celebrating. Context is everything. This is, indeed, the struggle of those with autism. The autistic individual struggles to frame their decisions and actions within a narrative that involves relevant emotional context. Many who are on the autistic spectrum, in fact, are more logical and more factual than the average person (“framing effect” and autism). Despite the occasional advantage, logic and facts without relevant context can make everyday living quite difficult, where the decisions and actions of the autistic individual are frustratingly mismatched with those around them. I find a similar mismatch due to non-contextual logic within the general approach to environmental issues.
This misalignment of context and information is what I understand Nassim Nicholas Taleb to be saying when he writes in The Bed Of Procrustes:
I have respect for mother nature’s methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naive pseudoscientific autism.
Reductionism within science fits Taleb’s description quite well, as it is particularly prone to a blindness concerning context. One problem with seeing climate change solely through the lens of temperature is that the focus of water is drastically shrunk to primarily underscore its function as a greenhouse gas with the same naivete of viewing a tree as a unit of carbon sink. As with lipids and carbon, we need to understand water at different resolutions where it regularly cycles through different types of systems and ecosystems.
Bear with me as I present a good amount of material necessary to provide a broad enough context to truly appreciate the role of water within the complex issue of climate change. A knowledge of a proper contextual framework can save us from wasting vast amounts of energy on ineffectual and possibly disastrous strategies. Water, an element as essential as carbon, must be approached and interacted with in the most appropriate and relevant manner possible.
My knowledge of the water cycles is deeply in debt to a group of Europeans that wrote a lengthy paper called Water for the Recovery of the Climate — A New Water Paradigm. It is free on the web as a pdf, and I encourage anyone who has the time, to give it a read. The authors found it useful to divide water into four ‘environments’ — that in the oceans, the land, the atmosphere, and the biosphere.
The first water environment is the oceans, which covers around 70% of the Earth’s surface and makes up around 97% of the volume of all the water on Earth. This massive amount of water changes temperature only very slowly and serves as a global thermoregulator, keeping our temperatures from fluctuating into extremes that would make our planet practically uninhabitable. It would be irrelevant if our global yearly mean or average temperature was what it is today by means of the carbon “control knob”, if we did not have the oceans to stabilize us from the extremes. This stabilizing effect is due to the fact that water, in the temperature ranges found on the Earth, can naturally be in all three states of solid, liquid, and gas. Water has the ability to absorb, release, transfer, reflect, or diffuse energy, especially as it transitions from one state to another. We will return to these abilities shortly.
The second water environment is that which is on land. The stats here are actually quite different from what we might expect, so I have included a graph from Kravkic et al (2007).
As might be expected, glaciers and icebergs make up over two thirds of land water at 2.05% of the grand total of water. But notice how lakes and rivers make up only 0.0101% of the grand total, whereas ground water, and soil moisture add up to a remarkable 0.685% (translated to 9.565 million kilometers cubed!) of the total. We will explore the significance of this in a bit.
The third water environment is that in the atmosphere coming in at 0.001% of the total. Relatively small compared to groundwater, but still ten times that found in rivers. This is the water that greenhouse gas discussions are concerned about.
The fourth water environment is that in living things, the biosphere. Some of this moisture is found in our own bodies, but in light of environmental temperature, the most functionally significant of this water is that which is in plants. Numerically, it is the lowest at 0.00004, but in many ways, it plays as vital a role as the other three water environments.
Before we can truly understand the importance of the water contained within the biosphere, particularly that within plants and trees, we must explore an intermediary cycle between carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). Within both of these nomenclatures is the vital element of oxygen. Like most things in ecology, oxygen is in constant flux.
Let us return to the tree-as-Lego solution for carbon sequestration. I made the point (in A. E. Part 2.) that the carbon sequestration ability of trees is essentially a function of building their bodies and is a byproduct of the much more essential functions trees perform within ecosystems. What are these other essential functions? If we listen to the generally spouted wisdom, particularly during fires raging in the Amazon, we might end up thinking that forests are the ‘lungs’ of the world. Perhaps if the metaphor was simply to refer to the pump-like rhythm of the lung organ there might be some truth in this metaphor, but, unfortunately, we have been severely misled. Yes, trees give off oxygen during photosynthesis, but this does not logically lead to the misleading statement that the Amazon forest supplies us with oxygen.
Typical stats claim the Amazon produces 20% of oxygen from worldwide photosynthesis. Newer studies put the amount of oxygen produced by the Amazon closer to around 6% of all production and somewhere around 16% of all land photosynthesis. Even more to the point, these figures do nothing to increase the overall net oxygen in our atmosphere. Like the carbon cycle, the importance of the oxygen cycle is the flux, or how it travels through the systems of plants, animals, and soil. The overall quantity within our atmosphere is a completely separate issue. Trees, it turns out, consume oxygen as well, and during the night, when photosynthesis is not happening, the Amazon will reabsorb over half of that 6%. The remaining oxygen is used up by animals, and, in particular, tiny microbes that use oxygen to decompose dead leaves and trees. Oxygen cycles make up an intricate part of the ebb and flow within the massive fast carbon cycle (www.nationalgeographic.com).
Over the eons, the narrative of the separate issue of the accumulation of atmospheric oxygen goes back to the oceans. The lion’s share of the oxygen produced through photosynthesis is done by the tiny plants on the surface of the ocean called phytoplankton. Just like the carbon of decomposing organisms is returned to the atmosphere and completes the cycle without throwing off the overall atmospheric carbon concentrations, if all these phytoplankton were to be eaten or to decompose, the net gain of overall atmospheric oxygen would also be zero. When the carbon in the bodies of plants decomposes, the carbon joins the oxygen to make CO2 and returns to the atmosphere. This cycling of carbon and oxygen is true whether it is within the trunks of trees of the forests, the methane of swamps and cow burps, the plankton of the ocean, or our very own bodies. However, every season, a tiny portion of plankton (along with an even tinier portion of land organisms) does not decompose and the carbon of their bodies does not combine with the oxygen in the air. Rather, this plankton falls to the bottom of the ocean, some of which is the very fossil fuels we are extracting and burning. The oxygen that would have otherwise combined with the carbon of the sunken plankton slowly accumulated, over the course of millions of years, into the 21% of our air that it is today (theconversation.com).
This explanation of the oxygen cycle is to debunk the generally accepted notion that we need trees to maintain the overall quantity of oxygen. Not only would other plants photosynthesize plenty of oxygen if there were no forests, but the net difference of oxygen in our atmosphere would hardly be affected. In fact, if all the vegetation of the entire globe were to burn, we may very well die of starvation, but there would be plenty of atmospheric oxygen to breath (TheAtlantic.com). This is to emphasize that it is the flux, or the pumping of oxygen that is of vital importance. Not only is oxygen cycling but this pumping is what gets the life-essential molecules of carbon into the earth from the air. Carbon is not just pumped into the earth, but also cycled into the bodies of animals since plants, including trees, are the foundation of the food web.
On top of being carbon sinks, oxygen and carbon pumps, and food for untold numbers of animals, trees provide habitat and unparalleled biological diversity. And yet, there is another function of trees that is just as crucial, but often overlooked. This is where water comes in.
One of the crucial concepts in the Water for the Recovery of the Planet, is that of the difference between sensible and latent heat. Think of a paved driveway and imagine the sun pounding down on the dark, hard surface. The driveway will heat up as it absorbs the radiation of the sun. Touch the surface and you can feel/sense that heat immediately — sensible heat. Hook up a hose and spray down that hot driveway and the water will quickly absorb some of the heat, cooling the pavement. Water has the highest specific heat (amount of heat required to raise a substance one degree Celsius) of all liquids and nearly all common substances, which means the water will absorb a great deal of the driveway’s heat and only increase its own temperature by a little. As the temperature increases, so does the evaporation. But if you remember your high school chemistry, water, once boiling, stays at the same temperature — 100 degrees Celsius. That means the energy is transferred to the water vapor molecules rather than registering as a higher temperature. To help myself remember, I think of the energy in water vapor as waiting to be released later, thus it is considered latent heat. In physics, latent heat is the energy which is required to convert liquid to vapor, without change of temperature. This is why water is absolutely central to mitigating temperature fluctuations. Wherever the surface of the land is bare, rocky, or covered in concrete, the sun’s radiation will be converted to sensible heat, causing rapid temperature changes. On the other hand, if the incoming energy of the sun is converted into water vapor, temperature flux is kept at a minimum, keeping the earth from becoming too hot (or cold) for ideal living conditions. Later, when it is cooled in the atmosphere, the water will give up the energy and condense into rainfall.
The difference between sensible heat, like that absorbed by the paved driveway, and the latent heat that occurs from evaporation, is magnified many times over by trees, and in fact, by all vegetation. Let’s take a given plot of land — an acre or so. Turn it into a mall or whatever, and we cover all that soil with concrete (or asphalt) — just like the driveway. For the moment, I will put aside all the trillions upon trillions of lifeforms that are lost when we cover up the soil, and focus solely on temperature. Unless that concrete happens to be covered in snow, the large majority of the sun’s radiation will be absorbed as sensible heat and the concrete’s temperature will quickly rise. It is also worth noting, that when night falls, the concrete will give up its heat just as quickly. Sand acts much the same way, which is why the desert is both super hot during the day and extremely cold at night.
Now, if that same acre is covered in vegetation, rather than concrete, the temperature flux is completely different. First off, the plants, especially trees, provide shade and the ground is spared the brunt of the sun’s direct radiation. Remember that the paved driveway cooled down when we sprayed it with a hose as the water evaporated and absorbed the heat. On the driveway, or concrete-covered mall, very little water will be accessible for the mitigation of temperature, mostly because the water runs off into the sewers as soon as it falls from the sky. On the other hand, healthy soil, with healthy plants on it, holds a great deal of water — providing a reservoir available for continuous evaporation. Remember from Tab. 1, soil moisture makes up twice as much as the Earth’s rivers. And ground water is many times more.
Vegetation is the perfect intermediary between the ground and the air, in part because of its ability called “evapotranspiration”. Through the holes on their leaves, called stomata, plants ‘sweat’ and keep themselves and the ground around them cool. As long as they have access to water, plants and trees will convert most of the sun’s energy into latent heat rather than temperature-increasing sensible heat. This has the equivalent effect of us spraying down hot concrete with a hose all day, every day. Naturally, not all plants are equal, with wetland vegetation capable of evapotraspiring the most, as they are accustomed to thriving in an environment inundated with water. The Water for the Recovery of the Planet cites one source saying that “Some plants, so long as they have sufficient water available, are able to evaporate in the course of a sunny day more than 20 litres of water per square meter” (27). For reference, the paper quantifies an average tree and compares it to the equivalent of ten air-conditioning units. Trees, simply by doing what trees do, mitigate temperature without dependence on fossil fuels, and with all the other benefits vegetation offers. Suddenly, when not viewed solely through the lens of carbon sequestration (A. E. Part 2 ~ CarbonCure), concrete proves to be detrimental in numerous ways, while a tree becomes so much more than just the quantity of carbon found in its trunk and branches.
At a different resolution, we can fill in the picture even more. Globally, we can think of water working its way through a large water cycle. Of global evaporation of water into the atmosphere, only 14% is from the land, while 86% is evaporating from the oceans. However, precipitation (when the water in the atmosphere returns to the Earth) has different proportions. 74% falls back into the oceans, while 26% now falls on the land, essentially moving a portion of the Earth’s water from the oceans to the land. Some of this excess precipitation is stored in ground water reservoirs and in soil. Another portion is used by all forms of life for the makeup of their bodies as well as all their functions. One such function is the evapotranspiration of vegetation. The rest of the excess works its way into rivers and eventually back into the oceans to complete the cycle.
Smaller cycles can be thought of regionally, and many of these complete their entire cycle on land alone. While the ocean does provide land with some of its evaporated moisture, most of the water precipitating back onto the ground originally came from that region’s land, particularly if it was hydrologically healthy in the first place. The high prevalence of ground water and soil moisture is a mark of true health and resilience. Water for the Recovery of the Planet puts it this way,
“In a country saturated with water and water vapor, water circulates in small amounts and for relatively short distances…The majority of water that evaporates condenses again in the given region or its surroundings. Frequent and regular local precipitation retrospectively maintains a higher level of groundwater and with it also vegetation and further evaporation, so that the whole cycle can be repeated again and again (pg 17).”
On the other hand,
If, however, there is an extensive disruption of vegetation cover (for example, by deforestation, agricultural activities, urbanization), solar energy falls on an area with low evapotranspiration and a great part of it is changed into heat. This leads to a significant divergence of temperatures, and the differences in temperatures between day and night or between localities with other thermal regimes increase. Air currents increase, water vapor is taken further away by the warm air and the majority of evaporated water is lost from a country.” (pg 18)
As the authors point out, there are numerous ways to disrupt local and regional water cycles and the consequences are devastating. All of these disruptions impede water’s ability to be stored in our soils and groundwater as reservoirs for the evapotranspiration and cooling of the Earth, sending vast areas of land down the spiraling feedback loop of aridity. Because of the extremes in temperature, what water was available for cooling is often blown away by the ensuing increase of air currents. This is why when our lands become dryer as a whole, there are still some areas that have increased rainfall.
Deforestation, apart from all the other functions of trees and forests, means less water is retained and less is used in evapotranspiration. Agricultural practices that don’t care for the soil and don’t increase its capacity to hold moisture also diminish the amount of water kept in regional circulation. Yet more than anything else, urbanization and its practices to cover over all the soil, suffocating it with concrete, affects this dis-balance. Not only do we take out the natural “air conditioners” of vegetation, but then we cover the ground with material that has the opposite effect of evaporation. This concrete not only serves as a venue to accumulate sensible heat, but is then the vessel and pathway for water to be carried into drainpipes and sewers that bypass the soil. The water proceeds on to the oceans without replenishing the second water environment, that of the ground and soil. Cities quickly become hot islands that drive greater extremes in weather and temperature. When we literally take water out of the equation, its mitigating abilities cannot keep the regional ecological spheres regulated and healthy.
I have argued in previous essays (Devastating Omission & Beyond Mitigation) that rotational grazing is critical to building humus, the life-sustaining matrix within our soils whose physical make-up is based on carbon. Because of its stability — when not being destroyed by plows or chemicals — humus is a form of carbon sequestration that can remain intact for millennia. Intricately tied to the carbon sequestration inherent in building up humus, is the greater capacity to hold water. This means building and ameliorating our soils is not just about having enough of this medium to grow our food, but to retain a greater reservoir of requisite moisture as well. The cycling of carbon, the cycling of oxygen, the cycling of water, along with many other cycles we have not discussed, is about pumping these elements through the mediums of air, animals, plants, and soils. Reductionistic extraction of resources has shifted the balance of these elements into the atmosphere or the ocean with no thought of the return process. Having technologically advanced ourselves into an ecological corner, we now need to focus on mitigating the extraction everywhere we can, while drawing down carbon and water back into the earth and soil where we have burnt or used it up. Drawing down carbon and sequestering water is precisely the niche that ruminants fill as they graze on grasslands. In essence, the ruminants are what keep the vegetational “air-conditioners” honed at full capacity (A Devastating Ommission).
As much as the continuous effect of evapotranspiration is essential to keeping our lands cool, water in the soil is also needed for even more drastic times. While I am writing, vast areas of the western states are being consumed by uncontrollable fires. We know the answer is to allow for smaller, regular fires as these ecological environments have long evolved with this dangerous element. Decision makers fear these prescribed burns will get out of hand. With the reserve of water that rotational grazing provides, pastures wisely grazed have proven more resistant and resilient to fire (Landscape Rehydration).
Climate change is a great deal more nuanced than the simplistic narrative that atmospheric carbon is causing global warming. Much like the allopathic doctor who chases numbers to regulate symptoms at the cost of overlooking root causes, our approach to carbon is a similarly contextually-blind pursuit — allopathic environmentalism. Even if we were able to magically bring down the quantity of CO2 in our atmosphere, yet not address the ecological damage done to the water cycles, we would still be wrestling with the chaos of climate change.
