Put it back.

If you're anything like me you're a little tired of bad news on the climate front. In the last two weeks Greensburg Kansas was leveled by a rare F5 tornado, wildland fires raged in Georgia, Florida and California, tropical storm Andrea showed up two weeks before the start of hurricane season and Australian announced that their farmers would get no irrigation water. Honeybees are mysteriosly disapearing from thier hives and not returning.

The planet is not dying; the planet is largely a pile of rock. The biosphere, that thin little film of life that you live in; that is dying. The IPCC, Al Gore, the US Congress and the European Union think that if we cut emissions by 80% by 2050 things should be ok. They seem to think that those changes will cost an average of $10 US for every living person. Just $10; ignoring the fact that 1/3 of the worlds population on a dollar a day or less.

That's bullshit. The atmophere and the oceans cannot sustain existing ecosystems with the CO2 levels in the atmosphere now. Adding more greenhouse gases for another fourty years is not going to help matters at all. In the coming months you will hear repeated stories about war, hurricanes, disease, drought, species extinction, heat storms, dust storms and god knows what else caused by climate change. Your life is truly in danger no matter where you live.

There is a ray of hope. We have all the technology to have comfortable lives without polluting the atmosphere further. Some things will have to go. I think jet aircraft will cease to be a means of normal travel. Automobiles will have to go electric but the roads they drive on will be in bad shape. Houses and businesses can be made comfortable using solar power and geo-exchange heating and cooling. Food can be grown locally and luxury items can be shipped by sail and rail. We get to keep the net and cable tv.

The most important thing is that we can take that carbon back. All the CO2 that we put in the air can be put back in the ground as charcoal. The process is called Terra Preta, named for the Amazonian dark earths that were found to be packed with charcoal. Naative peoples long dead, people using tools of wood and stone, have taught us how to put our carbon back in the ground.

That's what this blog will focus on. Putting the carbon back into the ground. We all will become aware of this as the years pass and our children's children for a hundred generations will have to help clean up our mess but it can be done. We can put the carbon back.