permaculture

["Laurence Gaffney" <lgaffney@bigpond.com>]

Thank you Travis
The Ruddiman Paper is the kind of thing I was after.

1.    A quote from the Website of the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology:-
"While it might seem simple to determine cause and effect between carbon 
dioxide and climate from which change occurs first, or from some other means, 
the determination of cause and effect remains exceedingly difficult. 
Furthermore, other changes are involved in the glacial climate, including 
altered vegetation, land surface characteristics, and ice-sheet extent." 
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html

2.    The Ice Core Data confirms the Link between Temperature Change & CO2. 
This is not an issue.
But it is fair to say that their is still some discussion as to why 
historically at least CO2 appears to lag behind temperature. 

3.     A  Theory that proposes that Life on Earth of which Forests are/were a 
largish subset may have something to do with regulating Global Climate makes 
this Permaculturalists Antenna stick up. 

Any other contributions relating to the specific theory?


Laurence Gaffney


Message: 6
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:00:45 -0400
From: Travis Miller <wyrdbrew@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] GLOBAL WARMING:- A different 'take' on it
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <FAF88E16-04B3-4906-993A-86B5920EED40@gmail.com>
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I recently read a paper on a theory that anthropogenic warming  
actually started thousands of years ago.  The gist of the paper is  
that anomalous quantities of CH2 and CO2 have been  dated to the  
early part of the holocene period.  The methane increases are along  
the same timeline as the increased use in domesticated ungulates and  
the CO2 increases are on the same timeline as deforestation by humans  
for use as farmland.  The hypothesis is that the domestication of  
animals and clearing of land got the global warming ball rolling and  
extended the cyclical warm period between glaciation and that we'd be  
well into an ice age if it wasn't for human activity.  Essentially,  
agriculture created global warming and industrialization made it more  
severe.  I'm not a climate scientist but the data and the basic  
premise seemed to make sense.

Here is a link to the paper on Stanford's website.

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/ 
Ruddiman2003.pdf

This may have some bearing on discussion of how Permaculture can and  
should be used as part of a mitigation response to climate change.

Travis

"It is never to late to be what you might have been."
- George Eliot


Message: 2
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 09:28:12 +1000
From: "Laurence Gaffney" <lgaffney@bigpond.com>
Subject: [permaculture] GLOBAL WARMING:- Is CO2 the Primary Cause?
To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <002901c77afe$be0d6820$0200000a@default1zw8fr1>
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Hello All

Over the past couple of months I have come across a different take on the 
cause of global warming.
 
Essentially the Theory is that deforestation is destroying the Earths Ability 
to regulate temperature.

Mollison has long argued that forests have an effect locally on weather (See 
TREES AND THEIR ENERGY TRANSACTIONS in Chapter 6 of his Permaculture 
Designers Manual) 
Some of this chapter was sourced I think from the 1983 article titled Forest 
Weather by Bayard Webster (see Link)
http://idrinfo.idrc.ca/Archive/ReportsINTRA/pdfs/v12n4e/110782.pdf

At a Mollison /Lawton Permaculture Design Course in Melbourne Australia (Jan 
07) students were referred to the following Article:-
http://www.stevenbloemen.be/downloads/files/WaterAgainstGlobalWarming.pdf

This is not a good article and is wrong in fact in a number of places. It may 
suffer from poor translation. However it does outline the Theory.

More significant is an article entitled "The Biology of Global Warming and 
its Profitable Mitigation" published in the SUSTAINABILITY NETWORK UPDATE - 
No 64E funded by the Australian CSIRO.
http://www.bml.csiro.au/SusnetNL/Network%20Letter%2064E.pdf

This Theory seems to make "Common Sense" to me.

Can anyone out there debunk this Theory for me please?.

Laurence Gaffney
Australia