I think this is absolutely the only chance we  have to re-stabilize world weather. Every Australian Federal Member and every Federal Senator has a copy of this paper, and a copy of my book on preventing climate change.

                   the AUSTRALIAN SOLUTION to                             ending global warming

                                                                                           Allan Yeomans February 2011 ©  

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere directly and through feedback mechanism controls the temperature of the atmosphere, the oceans and the Earth's near surface structures.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have now risen to approximately 386 parts per million, up from the million year average of 270 ppm. That's over four blankets warming the planet now, when for a million years we had three. Modern humans have existed on Earth for less than a quarter of that time. At 270 ppm, that's three blankets, the world and its weather systems were stable and liveable. Our current four plus blankets is rapidly destabilizing world weather systems

In simple terms, sunlight passes through the atmosphere unimpeded. The Earth's surface warms and reradiates the energy back into space as infrared light. The movement of infrared light is notably impeded by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So the carbon dioxide content acts like blankets on a bed. It's a meaningful and accurate parallel.

Mitigating carbon dioxide emissions, however enthusiastic and successful we might be, merely slows the creation of a forth blanket. Mitigation won't solve anything. Mitigation without constructive sequestration is a pointless endeavour.

It's also pointless to impose an arbitrary and complex tax on the mining and/or use of geological carbonaceous materials, mainly the geocarbons oil, gas and coal. The tax is supposedly supported by the highly debated marketing presumption that some arbitrary increase in their costs will materially slow the weaving of blanket number five.

It's also pointless to impose an arbitrary and complex tax on the mining and/or use of geocarbon materials, mainly oil, gas and coal. The tax is supposedly supported by the highly debated marketing presumption that some arbitrary increase in their costs will materially slow the weaving of blanket number five.

The excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now equates to 180 billion tonnes of pure carbon. It's what's accumulated in the atmosphere over the last 75 years. To end global warming and totally fix the problem necessitates the removal of that excess from the atmosphere. That carbon, as carbon dioxide, is this fourth blanket. Sadly, examples of the risks and dangers in leaving that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be seen on every continent, on every island, in every ocean and in every sea, on Earth.

After we remove it, then we keep it out by switching to biofuels for transport, and replacing coal and gas power generation with nuclear energy along with whatever other low cost non-geocarbon fuel system currently available.

Firstly we need to remove the accumulated excess. To do so we have two, and only two basic and realistic concepts worth considering. One is to modify the chemistry of the ocean surface waters so as to have it absorb far greater quantities of carbon dioxide. The other is to modify the land surfaces of the planet so as to encourage the absorption of carbon dioxide out of the air by converting it into soil organic matter, in particular stable soil humus. Human agricultural endeavours control approximately 30% of the Earth's land area. But fortunately that is enough to fix the problem.

The ocean idea has problems we can't even imagine. Currently no system that is inexpensive and even remotely practical has been discovered that accelerates the absorption of CO2 into ocean water. And we can't delay and hope for future miracles.

To eliminate global warming and put an end to climate change the sequestrating of atmospheric carbon dioxide into soil organic matter is humanity's only option that has a high probability of success. So we use soil sequestration and hope it works or we give up and suffer the increasingly apparent and incredibly expensive consequences.

(Soil carbon sequestration is a process that uses atmospheric carbon dioxide to create rich fertile soil. Plants absorb the gas from the air. They use it to manufacture leaves, roots, fibers etc. Through its life cycle the plant regularly sheds unneeded materials. It eventually dies. Bacteria, fungi, earthworms, soil microbes consume the waste material and convert it into chemical stable, carbon based humus. The term “Soil organic matter content” is both the humus content and the soil activity producing it. Trees and forests add very little humus to soils and at best are slow producers. In a mature and stable forest humus levels are static. Humus production happens fastest in managed grass pastures and grain cropping. Humus production never happens with chemical based agriculture.)

For soil carbon sequestration a nation's importance and significance is determined by its managed agricultural land area. The nations with the biggest agricultural land areas are in order, China with 560 million hectares, Australia with 446 million hectares, then the United States with 412 million hectares. The next few nations down have barely half that of even the US.

It is probable that if those three countries do nothing about global warming then the rest of the world's nations will give up, and give in.

China has already recognized the seriousness of the Earth's overheating and although (I believe) not as yet appreciating the importance of soil carbon sequestration is nevertheless switching, as fast as practical to non-fossil fuel industrial power sources with hydro and nuclear predominating. It can be expected that China will modify its agricultural systems towards those that significantly sequester CO2 into soil when China's hierarchy recognize its significance. We in Australia can do little to influence China at this stage and, hopefully it will never be needed.

The United States is the biggest single market for oil and gas in the world so logically the marketers of oil and gas must devote an enormous effort to convince Americans that global warming is not yet a problem, and or, never will be a problem, at least for Americans. It must be conceded that those marketing efforts have been astoundingly successful.

To change American thinking from within would be, and actually is, exceedingly difficult and expensive. But with workable concepts of encouraging farmers coming from Australia it might be different. If Australia, with an agricultural land area bigger than the US, starts sequestrating carbon dioxide into soil in a big, sensible, practically and profitable way, then US agricultural practices and legislation could very easily change.

US thinkers on sustainable agriculture already see Australia as very advanced in such fields. The Keyline system in the early 1950s and Permaculture in the early 1970s came from Australia. Both are taught in universities and agricultural colleges in the US. Most recognize that the concept of sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide into agricultural soil to combat global warming also originated in Australia.

It is necessary and inevitable that Australia becomes the proving ground for implementing a new era for agriculture. Its role is showing the world that humanity can beat global warming simply by creating rich fertile soil.

Existing American organizations, promoting the soil concept will then have powerful arguments to have US agricultural practices and allied legislation modified to combat global warming.

As the US changes, so too will Europe. Justifiable trade barriers could easily force other nations to change their agricultural practices.

Tunisians started the fight for democracy in the Middle East. (And we all hope it's successful.) Australians have to start the fight against global warming, for the world.

It starts here in Australia, on Australian farms and properties. And to make that happen two things are required and both are absolutely essential.

FIRST; farmers must receive a significant financial benefit that is real, simple and desirable. I propose that the financial benefit be in the form of either a direct payment of $10 dollars per tonne for carbon dioxide sequestered into soil organic matter. Alternatively farmers could receive a tax credit of $10 per tonne on income received from their farming venture. The tax credit concept obviously requires the farm to be run efficiently and profitably. That is, in itself a national benefit. Tax credits are more attractive financially to a diligent farmer. Also tax credits are a cost to government only if and when the farm is both profitable and significantly sequestration occurs.

Imposing an arbitrary and complex tax on the mining or use of selected geocarbon fuels without insisting that the collected funds be used to support the removal of carbon dioxide from the air, or to materially prevent the addition of more to the air, is quite illogical.

When powerful agrochemicals are part of the farming system it is virtually impossible to increase the humus content of soil. The chemicals kill the bacteria and soil life that digest the dead plant material. The marketers of these generally oil derived agrochemicals know that and it's a major worry to them. They therefore claim organic type produce doesn't taste better, isn't healthier and cannot be produced economically. And that's not true. The Rodale Institute in the US is just one organization that disputes those agrochemical platitudes.

The use of geocarbon fuels and agrochemicals created the overheating problems the world is now burdened with. They, more than anyone else, understood the seriousness of the inevitable consequences. And like the cigarette companies the oil industries emulate, they too systematically fund and foster lies, doubts and confusion.

Simple calculations show that the release into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide from the breakdown in the fertility of the soils of the US Great Plains is close to that coming from every car ever used in the United States. Original prairie soils often had a 10% organic matter content; the equivalent of 200 tonnes of straight carbon in every hectare of farmland.

Consider if the 412 million hectares of American agriculture soils had their humus levels raised back up to 10%. 412 million hectares times 200 tonnes gives us 80 billion tonnes. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC shows that - America contributed 27% or 48 billion of that 180 billion tonnes of excess carbon now in the air.

Australia is responsible for 1.17%, or approximately 2 billion tonnes of excess atmospheric carbon. Give Australian farmers a decent incentive and they could sequester that quantity in the blink of an eye.

I also suggest that the tax deductibility applying to the use of agrochemicals be stopped. This would materially offset government payments to farmers sequestrating carbon dioxide into soil while increasing those farmers competitiveness in the marketplace.

SECOND, and it's important, individual farmers must be allowed to use whatever means they chose and use whatever techniques that appeal to increase the carbon levels of their soils. What they do and how they do it must not be predicated by the beliefs and theories of universities, governments departments and academics. The planet does not have the time to wait the ponderings, the reportings and the theoretical confirmations of government departments and academic research institutions. Sadly, such organizations are all too easily influenced by oil industry money.

It must be acknowledged that the process of rapidly increasing the carbon content, and the fertility of our agricultural soils, to a considerable extent, requires the ability to irrigate at selected and strategic times.

The capacity of state funded large irrigation water storage and reticulation systems is limited and extremely expensive, and time consuming to create.

Irrigation systems supplied from on farm earth dams are the fast, sensible, practical and economical answer. Their use results in the massive sequestration of carbon dioxide, the enrichment of the nation's soils and a huge increase in the productivity of our agricultural lands.

The quagmire of current government regulations effectively removes the rights of a farmers to store the water that falls on their own land, and to use that water to irrigate and enrich the soil.

Such a nonsensical legislative philosophy must be reversed. And the laws recinded.

Common sense says we must reinstate the very wise and successful tax incentives once operating in Australia; or alternatively create new tax incentives that encourage farmers to actively remove carbon dioxide from the air.

No two farms in the world are exactly the same. An individual farm is as unique as an individual person. The geology of the subsoil varies, rainfalls vary, weather patterns vary, farm sizes vary, shapes vary, paddock sizes vary, topographies vary, cropping systems vary, and of course, every farm has its own farm management history.

Likewise there are many systems we know of right now for enhancing the fertility of the soil. Likewise there are many we don't know of and many that individual farmers will invent or discover. Such inventions and discoveries must not be hindered and hobbled by regulations, compliance requirements and needless paper work. We just don't have the time. Leave the farmer in peace, that way, every family farm becomes a research facility.

We need the farmers to fight and win the battle against global warming, for all of us. Because, unfortunately, nobody else can. It's therefore essential we let them have their heads - free, unrestrained and unfettered. And pray they are successful.

                           Allan Yeomans   Surfers Paradise February 2011 ©

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THE CLIMATE WARS.           Allan Yeomans May 2011

The problem is that, right now, we are engaged in World War III. It's THE CLIMATE WARS. It's all human societies against Big Oil, coal and gas. Their weapons are their huge incomes, and the propaganda, the influence, the confusion and the people that money buys. And because we believe the disinformation they feed us, we are losing the most destructive war in all human history. The destruction will last centuries and is irreversible.

If a foreign country was doing this much damage to us as is global warming and climate change we would go to war to protect ourselves. And it would be justified.

Like all wars we pretend or hope it might just go away. But it hasn't and it won't. This time the stakes are higher than they have ever been in any war, ever. Loosing means centuries of hardship for dozens of generations starting with ours.

It's the Global Warming War, the Climate Change War, the Atmosphere War or a war against fossil fuels or whatever you wish to call, but it's a deadly serious war. Even James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Hypothesis finally relented, and in 2003 conceded that global warming has to be considered as being potentially as damaging as a world nuclear war.

Reality is that winning the war to save the world's weather stability means putting the oil and fossil fuel industries out of business. And that's not an option they happily support.

In this war the battlefield is the world media. Which way public perceptions of climate change issues go, determines the winner. Politicians tend to follow public opinion, not create it.

To an outsider from another planet it would seem that humans are willing to play a game of Russian Roulette with their entire planet – and apparently all for no sane nor logical reason.

In this Climate War a small, but rich and powerful group of people, consisting of the shareholders and sheiks that own the oil and gas and fossil fuel industries are on side of the battle lines. On the other side is us, and the health, and wealth, and well being of the majority of the population of this very Earth of ours.

Why are our causalities already so high? What's happening? Why is it happening?

Trapping heat near the Earth's surface simultaneously reduces heat input to the upper atmosphere and cold temperatures are generated at much higher altitudes than previous. Hot air at the bottom, colder air up top, the warm air rises to greater altitudes and accelerates as it does. Sharply increased velocities in vertical air current are the automatic result. The velocity and violence of storm type activity is in consequence, dramatically increased.

Along with this, the changing relative ground temperatures around the world creates different, unpredictable and unreliable weather patterns. Farming can't plan its crops. Their risks get out of hand. Droughts and floods occur where they have never been seen before.

Sea levels rise firstly from the simple volumetric expansion of ocean water as sea temperatures slowly and inexorable rise. The now obvious melting of the world ice fields adds more water to generate yet higher sea levels. Coastlines and low level adjacent land areas will continue to experience escalating ocean related catastrophes with ever increasing violence and severity as sea levels continue climbing. Also frightening is that major world ocean currents seem to be destabilizing. What will that mean and who will be affected and how much will that cost us?

The frequency, the death rates, the material cost and the hardships of freakish world weather will continue to escalate as we continue to lose the Climate War.

It's time to fight back.

Technically ending global warming and halting climate change is actually easy, it's also practical, it's cost effective and it's safe. No esoteric, hypothetical Star wars inventions are required. We can do it. In a nut shell we switch our civilization over to nuclear energy for power and we switch to biofuels for transport. And concurrently, to remove the excess carbon dioxide that has already accumulated in the air over the last half century, the carbon dioxide that is now causing our immediate problems, we switch, large scale, to a chemical free soil fertility enhancing type of agriculture ; worldwide. Enhancing soil fertility automatically sucks carbon dioxide out of the air. Fundamentally that's what rich soil humus is made of. Fixing soil is totally feasible and so terribly necessary

For the oil and other fossil fuel producers and for the agrochemical companies, these are not options they happily support. Logically they would never graciously permit such scenarios to come into being. Tactics for the creation of a compliant public perception that suited and suits their agenda have been operating for over 40 years. With nuclear energy the public perception now sees nuclear power stations as more dangerous than coal or oil or gas, and more dangerious it seems than even global warming with its catastrophic climate change.

Their public relations gurus have been clever. Nuclear waste is now seen as an horrific, dangerious and deadly commodity, and its disposal as a totally unsolvable problem. It is endlessly promoted and now blithely believed that nuclear waste has subtle and unknowable dangers. Horrors that will last for countless millennia. Yet when compared to almost all other power generation systems these portrayed dangers are minute and meaningless, and are based on doctored and massaged facts and fictions. They have been clever for these images are trusted and believed by almost all who are unfamiliar with the actual science and engineering technology involved in nuclear power generation.

It would be actually much safer for us to have terrorists take over a nuclear power station than for terrorist to take over a major city oil and gas terminals.

“The great mass of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one” - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kamph (1925).

The oil industries program to eliminate the biofuel threat is currently in full swing. Initially there was a public relations campaign, saying automobiles would be somehow damaged fueling up on biofuel blends. Signs were posted “guaranteed not to contain ethanol” to reinforce doubts. That campaign has been moderately successful and a lot of motorist now harbor a lingering and nagging suspicion that biofuels have some inherent but unspecified “problem”. But continued promotions on that theme is itself risky as back up evidence is too hard to fabricate, disputing the danger claims is too easy, and automobile manufactures themselves claim otherwise. So prolonged insistence on vague inherent dangers has ceased; probably to avoid sacrificing oil industry credibility.

Influencing governments to legally limit ethanol content in motor fuels to less than 10% to “protect motorists” has had notable success. Laws specifically limiting ethanol content in fuels now exist in many countries.

It is strangely logical for the oil industry to refrain from objecting, or even to give active support to grain ethanol production. Grain is a nutritious food crop. Grain ethanol production takes food out of the mouths of the poor. Or at the very least it increases the price of food products. A public relations issue on food shortages and pricing can follow and public opinion can blithely accept the anti-ethanol public relations campaign. Cane sugar, because we harvest sap not nutritious editable seeds, is a huge threat to the oil fuel industry. In the wet tropics it's also cheap and easy to produce. Two thousand gallons to the hectare is common. The oil industry's best answer is to have tropical rainforest land quarantined off from such use. So we are encouraged, and legislation is regularly enacted to “protect tropical rainforests”. To assist in this quarantine process tropical rainforest are promoted as active carbon dioxide sinks and also producers of free oxygen. Biology says otherwise. Biology says tropical rainforests are nett producers of greenhouse gasses – notably methane. They are not absorbers.

It is also wise for the oil industry to fund and support any academic researcher who suggests rainforest ecosystems are necessary for human survival.

It would also be logical to manufacture and image that biofuel production is somehow dependent on fossil fuel and petrochemical inputs. Have tame scientists promote these views in respected and supposedly factual and unbiased scientific journals. And that seems to be the case. Science, (the journal of the American Society for the Advancement of Science), Scientific American and the UK publication New Scientist appear to be compliant publications in their criticism of biofuels production.

It is also logical to back the major world environmental movements to ensure they keep global warming and climate change out of their agenda and absent even from their mission statements. Read them for this is what they have done.

It would be marketing madness for the oil and other fossil fuel industries to not do whatever they can to win their war to survive and prosper. It has worked for the tobacco companies but tobacco companies are very small by comparison.

We have to decide now, for we can stop it. We may lose some biodiversity in the Amazon.

And then, as with any industrial enterprise, nuclear energy will have its accidents. But we have already seen the worst possible. Which we now know was caused by incredibly lax management, under apparently idiotic circumstances, coupled with incredibly irresponsible design. But even then, compared to fossil fuel accidents, the death from Chernobyl was minuscule. But the payoff is that global warming will end quickly; and all it entails can no longer hurt us.

Or we can stay with oil, and the other fossil fuels, and save the wealth and power of the oil companies and oil producing countries. And pretend we are staving off the disasters of climate change by playing with a better light bulb and chasing three extra miles per gallon of gasoline.

Do so and we let them win.

Do so and YOU let them win.

Allan Yeomans