Climate Change; Man Made or Assisted by Man?

Most of the debate around manmade climate change revolves around whether or not the activities of man are responsible for climate change. It would seem the whole discussion needs to be reframed to look at man assisted climate change. We also need to re-examine the presumed man assisted causes, as well as differentiate, symptoms, causes and ways to minimize, and in some cases reverse the symptoms.

For some reason most of those researching climate change (in any form) are concentrating on greenhouse gasses and carbon dioxide levels. The "solutions" rest on things like regulating emissions by prohibition, trading "carbon credits" or taxation. Even causes stemming from land use seemingly concentrate on more gasses, with no thought to the condition of the land contributing to either rising oceans. It seems as if little or no thought is given to the conditions of the earth's surface in contributing to warming, changing weather patterns, contributing to flooding,  nor to rising ocean levels.

The possibility of regenerating grasslands has been largely ignored,  even though it reduces heat reflected into the atmosphere, captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, returns rainfall to aquifers, while increasing wildlife habitat and providing animal protein for human consumption.

Desertification of land is looked at as a symptom of warming, when it is actually a symptom of misuse, while at the same time, a cause of both atmospheric warming, and rising oceans. Completely ignored is just how fast desertification has happened in some places.

 To keep historical perspective, lets look at history in the terms of lifetimes. There has always been a few people living over 100 years. This would mean that, by cherry picking the right people, it has only been 20 lifetimes since Jesus Christ walked the earth. On a more personal level, my Great Great Grandmother was alive at the time of the Civil War and died in 1963 when I was 9 years old. Between the beginning of her life, and my life of 60+ years, we have seen the vast grasslands of the southwest United States and northern Mexico become barren deserts.  There are actually ranchers alive today who remember harvesting native grass hay in areas which are now mainly brushy and bare ground. Just how much of a difference can this make in changing our climate?

To demonstrate just how much the lack of grass cover reflects heat back into the atmosphere, I checked the air temperature, then checked the temperature on a patch of grass, and also a path of bare ground.

  Notice that the grass covered area is approximately eleven degrees warmer than the air while the bare ground is twenty five degrees warmer than air temperature.

A couple of hours later, the air temperature was 95 degrees. Rather than checking the temperature of the grassy spot first, we checked that same spot of bare ground, which was hot enough that it broke the thermometer. That would mean that the ground temperature was actually a minimum of 25 degrees warmer than the air temperature.

Adding to the heat absorption/reflection difference between bare ground and grass covered ground is the difference in water absorption. Rather than rain water absorbing into the ground (as it does when grasslands are intact,) precipitation actually starts running off with as little as 0.2 inches of rain. This means that a thunderstorm dropping an inch of water, loses half of aquifer recharge to run off. This run off goes into gullies, into small streams, river and lost into the ocean. This amounts to  13,577 gallons per acre run into the ocean from a one inch rain. In a drought like our most recent, where some areas only received 4 inches of precipitation, they lost 54,308 gallons of water per acre. There is roughly 293,000,000 acres of desertified ground between the southwestern United States and northern Mexico which have been degraded to this point. This results in 15,912,244,000,000 gallons of water returning to the oceans rather than recharging aquifers, in a year of severe drought. In a year of 10 inches (still just below normal of 11 to 12 inches of precipitation) we are looking at 135771.4 per acre (or 39,781,020,200,000 gallons for the region) flowing into the ocean rather than recharging aquifers. Take into consideration, this 39,781,020,200,000 gallons is only part of the water flowing back into the ocean rather than the ground on part of ONE continent. This isn't even taking into consideration of the addition of paved ground. 
 The first mile of asphalt paving was laid out in 1920 on Woodward Avenue, in Detroit Michigan.  Since then, asphalt and concrete paving has covered an estimated 29,000 square miles, or 18,560,000 acres. Taking into consideration that there are some roads in the country which the water ists in the bar ditch without emptying into a creek or river which eventually ends in the world's oceans, lets (for the sake of a conservative estimate) assume that only a third of our paved areas are draining directly into the ocean. That still leaves us with 6,186,666 acres of paved ground sending water into the oceans at a rate of 27154 gallons per inch of rain. This amounts to 16,7992,728,564 gallons running straight into the oceans per each inch of rain falling on our paved areas. In a drought year of only 6 inches of rain average across the country that comes up to an astounding 1,007,956,371,384 from our country alone from the addition of paved surfaces.

The combination of these two sources of water returning to the oceans rather than into the soil and replenishing aquifers comes to  a "mere" 5,658,029,305,640 gallons of water returning to the oceans from the United States and Mexico alone. Some will be quick to point out that a more accurate figure would be achieved by subtracting the acres of paved acres from the total of desertified areas, but this total would still be low when one figures out what has been left out of these figures.
The grasslands in the rest of the western half of the United States, while not considered to be desertified, have less than half their grass cover compared to the late 1800's, which is adding an a untold amount of water to the oceans. This is still not taking into account flood control systems, like the levee system on the Mississippi River which are adding more water rather than allowing it to spread out and fertilize the delta lands.  The total would certainly be result in an increase to  the 5,658,029,305,640 gallons in these figures. The worldwide total of water running back into the oceans rather than aquifers would dwarf what runs off from North America... Yet this is seemingly not taken into consideration by scientists studying climate change and rising oceans. A very few scientists are actually looking at the either the warming affects of these two things, nor the ramifications of reversing desertification through regenerative grazing.

In order for science to really get a grip on solving the problems of climate change, they need to ask a few more questions.

1. How much are precipitation flows being affected by the millions of acres of desertified land and the heat rising from them? 
2. How would the precipitation patterns change if grasslands were regenerated worldwide?
3. How much is atmospheric temperature being affected by the combination of paved surfaces and desertified land?
4. How much atmospheric carbon in the atmosphere would be sequestered by regenerating grasslands worldwide? 
5. How much water would flow into aquifers rather than the oceans if grasslands were to be restored?
6.  How much more animal protein could be added to the food supply by the increase in animals needed to restore and maintain grasslands through the proper grazing methods needed to restore them?

Until the scientific community starts acknowledging these things, and using them in computer models, how accurate can they really be? How can these scientists convince climate change deniers unless they acknowledge and differentiate between those events occurring naturally which change change climate, and the manmade things which assist the acceleration of changing climate? Until such time as these questions are addressed, and so long as the majority of the "solutions" are based on taxation, fines, and other financially inert things such as  trading carbon credits, a true solution will not be found.