From a press release from the Union of Concerned Scientists, we learn that you don’t need to worry anymore about global warming, we can just garden our way to carbon nirvana, that is, if the bugs don’t eat it. -Anthony
WASHINGTON (April 26, 2010) Home gardeners can avoid contributing to climate change by using certain techniques and tools that are more climate-friendly than others, according to a new gardening guide released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The science-based guide explains the connection between land use and global warming, and offers recommendations for conscientious gardeners to maximize the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide their green spaces store and minimize the other global warming gases gardens can emit.
“Many Americans understand that powering our cars and computers overloads our atmosphere with heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide,” said Karen Perry Stillerman, a senior analyst with the UCS Food and Environment Program. “With the right practices, farmers and gardeners can lock up some of that carbon in the soil.”
When too much carbon dioxide and other global warming gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are released into the air, they act like a blanket, trapping heat in the atmosphere and altering weather patterns around the world, Stillerman explained. Unchecked climate change will have serious consequences for public health and the environment.
Although agriculture can store carbon and reduce other emissions on a much larger scale, gardeners can help. The Climate-Friendly Gardener: A Guide to Combating Global Warming from the Ground Up (www.ucsusa.org/gardenguide) offers five recommendations for gardeners.
1. Minimize Carbon-Emitting Tools and Products. Gasoline-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers are obvious sources of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. A typical mower emits 20 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon. Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which require a lot of energy to produce, also contribute to global warming. The new guide provides several tips for avoiding garden chemicals and fossil-fuel-powered equipment.
2. Use cover crops. Bare off-season gardens are vulnerable to erosion, weed infestation and carbon loss. Seeding grasses, cereal grains or legumes in the fall builds up the soil, reduces the need for energy-intensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and maximizes carbon storage. The guide recommends that gardeners plant peas, beans, clovers, rye and winter wheat as cover crops and explains the specific advantages that legume and non-legume cover crop choices have for gardens.
3. Plant Trees and Shrubs Strategically. Planting and maintaining one or more trees or large shrubs is an excellent way to remove more heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over a long period of time. A recent study estimated that the trees in U.S. urban areas store nearly 23 million tons of carbon in their tissues every year. That’s more than all of the homes, cars, and industries in Los Angeles County emit annually, or about as much as all of the homes in Illinois or Pennsylvania emit every year. Well-placed trees also shade buildings from the summer sun or buffer them from cold winter winds, reducing the need for—and cost of—air conditioning and heating. UCS’s guide discusses the most suitable types of trees for a climate-friendly yard.
4. Expand Recycling to the Garden. Yard trimmings and food waste account for nearly 25 percent of U.S. landfill waste, and the methane gas released as the waste breaks down represents 3 to 4 percent of all human-generated heat-trapping gases. Studies indicate that well-managed composted waste has a smaller climate impact than landfills. The UCS guide describes how to create a climate-friendly compost pile.
5. Think Long and Hard about Your Lawn. Residential lawns, parks, golf courses and athletic fields are estimated to cover more than 40 million acres—about as much as all the farmland in Illinois and Indiana combined. A growing body of research suggests that lawns can capture and store significant amounts of carbon dioxide, but some newer studies warn of the potential for well-watered and fertilized lawns to generate heat-trapping nitrous oxide. The science is unsettled, but there are practical things gardeners can do to maximize lawn growth and health with a minimum of fertilizer and water. The new UCS guide summarizes the science and offers tips for homeowners to make their lawns truly “green.”
“Gardening practices alone won’t solve global warming, but they can move us in the right direction, just like installing super efficient light bulbs and using reusable bags,” said Stillerman. “Seventy percent of Americans garden, and they can have a positive impact. Our guide shows them how.”
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h/t to WUWT reader Milwaukee Bob
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The Union of Concerned scientists is a group that thinks being able to clone chess pieces makes them chessmasters.
bubbagyro says:
May 11, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Gail Combs says:
May 11, 2010 at 11:34 am:
In reply to you, I invented a drug called albendazole in the 70s. It is now the 8th most used drug in the world, especially for parasites in humans. It is the drug of choice in the southern hemisphere for sheep and cattle.
The brand name for cattle is Valbazen….
________________________________________________________________
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you
I take it it also works on goats at 1.5 times the dose for sheep?
Speaking of worming: I now sequester my animals (horses, sheep, goats) in a sacrifice area, worm with fenbendazole to wake up the encysted larvae -[encysted strongyles for horses & Haemonchus contortus for sheep & goats] wait a few days and then worm with ivermectin or Cydectin wait another 48 hours and then move them to a relatively clean pasture. I do this first thing in the spring. I am fencing in several acres of new virgin pasture so I want my animals with as few worms as possible when I move them onto it. Any other advice?
Anyone want to start a Union of Concerned Gardeners? Our platform could constist of the following:
1. Fertilizer is good. C02, chemical, animal excrement, or rotting vegetation is all good. They all make gardens grow.
2. Warmth is good. It is illogical to fight warmth, especially when its imagined.
3. Plants growing where they are not wanted is bad. They take up the space and nutrients of plants that are desirable. RoundUp is good.
4. Insects eating people food or property is bad. Insecticides are a boon for the human and animal competition with insects. Humans should embrace insecticides. (Death to insects, long live humans and bring comfort and tenderness to their meat foods.)
5. Time is precious, therefore all methods which elimitate the wasting of time is good. Gasoline powered machines save time, allowing for more gardens and longer lives.
6. Truth is good. Without truth and facts, we will waste precious, finite time on non-problems.
Life is too short to waste time on people who purposely devise ways to demonize and overcomplicate a simple, voluntary. pleasurable pastime. And yet they can’t even leave us alone to tend our tomatoes and petunias. Everything is politicized and every aspect of our private lives is under attack. Every single thing we do is up for scrutiny and all recommendations point in one direction, more government oversight of our lives.
Gail:
You don’t have to worm that much. FBZ is not as good for parasites as ABZ, but is slightly better for liver flukes. I doubt you have those, mostly just the large and small strongyles and ascarids, but ABZ gets these at 15 mg/Kg. For goats, same as the sheep on a per Kg basis with the paste. ABZ is safe up to 3X. No tissue residue after 7 days. Follow label directions for cattle, sheep, goats, or deer. Helminths have 31 day cycles from egg to mature. So a 31 day cycle with ABZ gets each new generation. It has some ovicidal activity, so the worm burden can be reduced on pasture. Like I said, the good “poop” insects are safe.
I developed a cattle bolus (pill) that was electronic for cattle, giving three automatic doses every 31 days while in the rumen so that you did not have to touch them in pasture and it would be good for the whole grazing season. It was not developed in the late 80s for mostly internal political reasons, but funny you should bring this to mind, because I got a call to rejuvenate it under a new improved device patent I have just filed. It would use ABZ (or other wormer – each of the three automatic doses could be a different drug, also); it would enable cattle to be raised in Africa and other tropics where parasites make it near impossible to raise cattle without intensive manual labor now.
Anyhow, this is off-topic, I apologize to the others here. Look me up on Google, R. J. Gyurik.
Interesting article in the Chicago Tribune about the effect of agriculture on regional cooling:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-weather-crops-20100511,0,3679184.story
@Gail Combs, May 11, 2010 at 2:47 pm
“The December avg minimum temp is 31F/ max 52F, January is 29F/49F and February is 31F/56F so winter rye grows quite well and so does winter wheat and oats.”
We call those temperatures “it’s going to be summer soon” 🙂 … our minimum this winter was -5F, and we had 5F for almost a month, without the windchill … I’m no longer into farming, but I grew up on a farm: winter crops were a gamble, and topsoil erosion during winter a non-issue, since the earth was frozen solid since the end of November until March.
My computer causes global warming? I don’t think so, my home electricity comes from a nuclear power plant. I do agree though that lazy folks should use an old fashioned rake and get rid of those obnoxiously noisy leaf blowers.
Modern hybrid plants, fertilizers and pesticides have been responsible for eliminating famine in many areas of the world with crops producing multiple yields from the same acreage. I have no problem want to pay more for “organic” food which is indistinguishable from non-organic except in price. Hey, it’s their money to waste as they see fit.
Not to recognize and even rabidly advocate against modern agriculture is wishing for pain and suffering and untold deaths from starvation, worldwide. Denying animals antibiotics when they are sick and allowing them to suffer is cruel leaving the alternative of destroying animals unnecessarily or selling to commercial operations who will use modern medicines to cure the disease.
we have the safest, most productive farms in the world and much of it is due to modern techniques. the one thing that is not sustainable is our food supply if we listen to those who would have us utilize “sustainable” techniques that are anything but.
I wish these “scientists” would make up their minds! Yesterday I read this:
Carbon dioxide is not just making the atmosphere trap more heat, they say. It also enables plants to absorb CO2 more efficiently, so they don’t have to open stomata (pores) in their leaves as much, and they evaporate less water.
That should be good news, as it enables plants to survive better under dry conditions, even in desert areas where they couldn’t before. Any botanist or visitor to CO2science.org knows this. Indeed, hundreds of experiments show how growth, water efficiency and drought resistance of crop and wild plants are enhanced by higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. So more CO2 and better plant growth should be celebrated – not serve as another “climate crisis” to further the political goal of ending hydrocarbon use and controlling our factories, jobs, cars, lives and living standards.
But the Carnegie folks turned this good news into bad, ominously saying the reduced evapotranspiration means plants don’t cool down as much, and that supposedly raises global temperatures slightly.
The above “science’ was posted here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/23/cause-for-alarm/#more-19831
So, maybe we should actually destroy all plant life on Earth. That seems to be the goal of this loony climate cult anyway.