: re: Climate Tools Seek to Bend Nature’s Path

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 10:10 AM
Subject: re: Climate Tools Seek to Bend Nature’s Path
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Critics who whine that "Removing carbon dioxide from the air might be useful for some limited purposes [but close to impossible on a global scale]" ignore the fact that photosynthesis takes several times as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere hour by hour, year by year than all of man's activities add. Most of that is then turned into cellulose, to return to the atmosphere when it burns or rots or it broken down by an ungulate's gut fauna.
   There is no instant fix to the damage we have done in the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. But we can begin that repair today by sequestering some of that cellulose (straw, newsprint, bagasse, sawdust...) from the agents  of decay. Call it "anthropogenic peat" or "biochar". But it is within our technology today, and it is urgent.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/science/earth/climate-tools-seek-to-bend-natures-path.html