 We've got an equation that tells you how to do that because if you keep your soil moist and cool, okay, you can reduce that re-radiation 80-90 percent, okay, so you can turn down the greenhouse effect. You can do it in days. It's as simple as not mowing your lawn. Everybody, because as you all know, these are trying times, but there are all these alternatives that we can do in our own homes, in our communities, in supporting people around the country and around the world. So Walter Yena, who I asked him what I should tell you about him, and he said nothing. So I'll tell you next to nothing. He is a soil scientist, microbiologist, and a climate scientist, and he's got a vast knowledge of the planetary situation and has been traveling around the world talking to people high and low. That's not a good scale. People with big mouths and people who listen, it's more like it, to present them with the the solutions that they really don't know about. And these solutions are inexpensive. Anybody can do them. It's just a question of cultural and mindshift. So without further adieu, Walter Yena. Right, look, thank you very much. Can you hear me okay with this, Mike? Right, wonderful. Look, thank you very much for coming this evening and let's have a big discussion about this, because basically, as Adam said, there's a major crisis that we're facing, but there's also really beautiful natural safe solutions. So it's, in a sense, exploring that reality that we're facing after 40 years of basic inaction. But then let's look at that potential for what we can do to safely naturally cool the planet in time, but also rebuild biosystem, rebuild, revitalize communities, rebuild a healthy future for everybody. So there's a really positive upside. A bit of background. I mean, I just wanted to say, look, let's talk for about, you know, 40-fold minutes, but then really, I'd like to have a Q&A. I'm going to spend most of the time listening to what you're saying, the questions, and then sort of coming back and saying, look, here's the answers and perhaps outlining details and stuff like that. So I'll be going over fairly quickly initially as key, you know, key basis of what we're talking about, but then really want to explore your specific questions and then explain things in detail. At the end, I think it'd be really nice to have a sort of a bit of a panel discussion because I don't come from Boston. I come from Down Under. You have to drill quite a bit down in 12,000 kilometers. You get to Australia where I come from. And so, you know, like basically then let's have that panel discussion and really get through all those questions. But in terms of just background, look, I'm a soil microbiologist from Down Under, sort of, you know, Under. And basically, yeah, I spent my initial, you know, 15 or so years as a research scientist with our government, but then moved into actually innovation, the strategic sort of innovation, commercialization issues. But about 15 years ago, I retired and went back to working with farmers and really innovative leading farmers, initially in Australia, doing absolutely stunning things. We're generating the earth, we're generating biosystems, we're generating the earth, soil, carbon, sponge. Okay, so that's one big word, very important. All our discussions really range and focus on, okay, how do we regenerate the earth, soil, carbon, sponge? Because that's the solution to take down message. Okay, and so basically initially working with these innovators in Australia also work very much at a fairly senior policy level in government, sort of bringing this whole debate into policy, strategic policy directions. But basically that's excellent. But in a sense, politics talks a talk. And it's really the people you on the ground, who are actually implementing the change. So the change has to come from the grassroots community groups implementing change. And then very quickly, the logic, the compelling evidence of that change becomes apparent. And that in the sense what drives and catalyzes that bigger policy agenda. So it is very much about empowering the grassroots. And this comes back to Paul Hawkins and the whole idea of blessed unrest, where basically it's literally millions of NGOs and groups around the world who are driving this change. And you're part of it because just by participating in these discussions, this is the frontier. Okay, so that's basically the picture. Now more recently, actually, we've gone in a sense global with a new NGO called Regenerate Earth. And that NGO is really now networking with a whole lot of people, different meetings and basically all continents of the planet, driving again, this change, but again, all focusing on the sponge, right? So never lose a sponge. Okay, to start the sort of story in a way, I suppose it comes back to you or us collectively, there are now 7.5 billion people on this planet. Okay, we're going to expect 10 billion people by mid centuries. And in a sense, that's unavoidable. And 8 billion of those will be living in cities. And so as we already know that the water, the food, the habitat, the safe climate, the social stability for those 10 billion people is critically. Okay, and in a sense, I don't know if any of you've got some of these strategic connections, but really globally, that's been the key issue that we're concerned. Okay, how do we meet the needs of those 10 billion people, whether it's a UN sustainability development goals, or actually if it's strategic interest, you know, how do we actually keep social stability and the risk of seven missed meals between social stability and chaos? Okay, and that's the spring or Syria, it's very real. And that's in a sense, what in a sense society has to avoid. The beautiful news is we can avoid it. But then we have to sort of say, Well, look, what are the realities that we're facing? And Adam's already raised them. And of course, we've had, you know, about 50 years since limits of growth, you know, and that whole message that, Hey, resources don't basically last forever. You know, we can't sustain a linear extractive, exploitative economy. But now 50 years later, something more serious has happened, because now we're getting nature coming back with feedbacks. Okay, you stretch a system too far, and nature starts signaling very, very initially subtly, but very, very firmly that, Hey, things aren't as they should be. And we're getting those feedbacks already. And these are the dangerous hydrological climate extremes. Okay, and we see them all around us, they're tensifying now, whether it's hurricanes, floods, erosion, damage, sea level rise inundation. But also, as we have a flood, that's lost water. And of course, we're getting the exact parallel with every flood, it's followed by a drought, because that water's no longer in the landscape. Okay. And so basically, the flood creates the drought creates your riddification, desertification. And of course, from that, we face the next really serious prospect of wildfires. And of course, we're getting that message loud and clear, whether it's paradise is burning in California, Alaska, Northern Canada, Siberia, Brazil, Africa, Australia, we've had fires for a long, long time. So we know what the basic destructive fires are. But mostly, it's the actual collapse of biosystems because of fires, the desertification of landscapes before because of fires. See, and so we can come that and, and basically, there's some very beautiful, simple, little stories that we can tell about this. And again, this is what's called a hygrograph. And in a sense, it's telling us exactly what's happening and what we need to do because basically, this measures flow, in a sense, runoff flow. And this is of course, time. And if we get a rain event to say two inches of rain in a landscape, if we have a concreted catchment, a degraded concreted catchment, we already know what will happen. We get this massive flood peak. And then it basically disappears. And of course, this flood peak is really basically all about risk, damage, and of course, really causing a lot of destruction. Of course, this is major costs to the community, to the individual, or to insurance industries, for example. But what people in a sense don't see that this is also really creating in a sense to drought that follows. Okay, because that water that basically flooded off is now no longer there. So you're getting not just drought, but loss of productivity. And the whole buyer system, in a sense, comes to collapse. And in a sense, lapse. And that's in a sense, the story we're facing. And why because basically, we have degraded or concreted that catchment. And often we've got soils now around the world with less than half a percent carbon notes, about 0.8% organic matter in the soil, that soil can't hold water. So that's point 8% organic matter. Okay, percentage. But of course, if we look at what happened in nature, we've got a completely different story, because while the soils in a sense were in their natural healthy estate with a sponge, and again, we bring this up, and even just 3% organic matter in the soil, then we can create a completely different hydrological profile, because the same storm event will now create, in a sense, an infiltration water retention event. Okay, so if we say here's point three, yeah, you'll get some run off. Okay, but most of that water has gone into the sponge, and then into the in soil reservoirs. And the powerful thing about these in soil reservoir, it avoids all these problems. So we've got massive savings, whether it's in risk and damage and cost. Okay, massive savings. You basically, you know, you will live in cities, you will live in counties, 90% civil engineering, you don't need the stormwater concrete, the drains, all that capital expenditure. So in a sense, you're having these savings. But you've got another thing now what happens, because now you have longevity of green. So I'm a bit scrappy here, buddy, longevity of green growth, which means that in a sense, our forests, our pastures, our fields are able to extend the length of their growing season because this soil water was here, of course, it very rapidly bank went back to desert. And we can get basically, you know, rather when having three or 10 days of water supply under this system in that soil, we can get 100 150 days water supply. And so now we're talking about 1000% or more of green productivity response. And that's mind blowing because in a sense, all our green revolution science, I was part of that, never got beyond 3050% growth response. But here we're talking about 1000 plus, just through nature, longevity of green through the sponge. So when we talk about these dangerous hydrological extremes, we've got to really focus on the key thing of yeah, here's buffering and resilience. Okay, and that really becomes the key part, the key part of our challenge is as simple as this little graph, obviously, this is a simple area, there's one storm on a landscape. And here are two contrasting A and B, basically totally different responses. And so the question really is to anyone who'd rather live in a would rather live in B. You see and who's going to survive under a and who's going to survive under B. And it's that fundamental, we see. Of course, it's all about, you can all say it aloud, rebuilding the earth, soil, carbon, sponge. Okay. And in a sense, that then steps it back on pretty old. But microbiology is even older. And when you think how did nature actually create the bio systems that we fundamentally depend on? You think of it all she had was sunshine, CO2, water and stardust, which then collapsed to make nine planets. But the bureaucrats have dropped Pluto off the list, but we don't worry about that. Okay, stardust, nutrients, elements, the periodic table. And then of course, basically, nature sort of 3.8 billion years ago took those elements, and evolved the first living microbial cell of bacteria around no hydrothermal vents in the ocean from the best of our understanding. About 3.5 billion years ago, nature took the next step, invented photosynthesis, the capacity to capture solar energy by blue, green algae to convert that solar energy CO2 and water into sugars. Of course, since then, that had that energy source to drive life through photosynthesis. But the real step for terrestrial life, you know, for life on land was really 420 million years ago, when all we had is ocean and bear hard arid rock, no life on land. But the oceans were limited by nutrients leaching from the rock because we'd had the Cambrian explosion. So there was lots of animal life in the oceans. So there was a major competitive advantage of basically getting minerals from the land to, in a sense, drive bioproductivity in the oceans. Of course, to do that, fungi, tubes, mycelial tubes, you know, membrane tubes, roofing the estrine edges onto the rock to solubilize nutrients, because that's what the fungi are excellent at doing. They've got all the enzymes for doing that. But fungi are like us, you know, they basically are proto animals, and they can't photosynthesize. So they had to basically make a partnership with blue, green algae, and of course, form lichens. And everywhere around Boston and New England, every rock, every forest tree, every bit of concrete, every bit of asphalt, you'll see these lichens. They're solubilizing all that rock, all that hard edge stuff to get nutrients. But as they grow, they also leave behind organic detritus, which of course mixes with the mineral detritus, and forms the first soils, the first sponge. Okay, so there's the in the sense, the pedogenesis process, the soil forming processes, basically microorganisms, fungi, and algae in lichens forming organic detritus to create the sponge. And in a sense, that sponge very, very rapidly gave rise to that soil being able to hold water, infiltrate, retain water. As you can see on most rocks out here in New England, very rapidly go from okay, supporting lichens to mosses to liverworts to ferns to cycate, or you don't have cycates, we have cycates. But the point is, you know, then gymnosperms, angiosperms and fairly recently grasses. So that whole rapid succession and evolution of life on land was all driven by pedogenesis, earth, soil, carbon, sponge. Okay, and very rapidly, the whole earth surface, the 14 billion hectares of land on this planet was then covered by vegetation through this soil forming processes. So soils are fundamental. But more importantly, the sponges fundamental. So you create the sponge. And here we can create life, we can regenerate the hydrology of that landscape. We'll come to that later, we can also restore the natural safe cooling of the landscape. Because it's basically as the biosystems evolved. So did the obviously the sponge, so did vegetation, and so do a whole sequence of natural cooling processes. Okay. Okay, so so really, what we've gone through is in a sense, yes, what the sponge is about, how nature in a sense evolved the sponge. And I suppose we now have to say, Well, look, what, what is, what have we done to this? You know, where are we now? And what's the sort of consequence of what we've done? Because then that can actually tell us also, you know, like, in a sense, what we have to do to fix things. And I've been talking earlier, so we already drew this thing. And the message came very clearly, you know, 1958, Charles Keeling, right? And in a sense, we had speculated on this, or not speculate, we've done calculations of hunters, Arrhenius, a Swede back in 1896. But basically, he for the first time made that sort of hard evidence to say, Look, here's CO2, here's time. And of course, here's CO2 going up. Okay, so Charles Keeling 50 years ago gave us that first hard evidence. Here is CO2 rising, initially from the 300 parts per million, or 280 parts per million pre previously, they've been going up from about 1750, last 250 years. And of course, we now know it's what 410 parts per million might be one or two higher. Probably people got an accurate, more accurate figure. But the point is that we raise the CO2 up. And again, that's what we've focused on. Yes. And of course, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Definitely CO2 basically is about 11% of the greenhouse gas effect. And certainly it drives about 4% of the global heat dynamics. But we'll come on to that later as well. But what Charles Keeling really sort of told us something much, much more important, because you've all see the Charles Keeling graph, you know, the steps, I mean, I've accentuated them on this for illustration purposes. But every winter in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly, we've got basically emissions, right? So we've got about 100. We've got about 130 billion tons of carbon per annum that is being emitted globally. In a sense, every Northern Hemisphere winter, I mean, the opposite happens in the Southern Hemisphere, but it's not as marked. So we've got this massive emission of CO2. And then every year in spring and summer, when in a sense vegetation comes out, we have about 120 billion tons of carbon being drawn down by the residual bio systems that still exist on this planet. We'll come back into that in a minute or so. And so that's giving us about a 10 billion tons carbon per annum deficit. Because that deficit is happening every year, that's in a sense why CO2 is going up. Okay, and so we've basically spent, you know, 40, 50 years focused on, yes, we've got an abnormal CO2 rise. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, no argument about the science is absolutely hard and peckable. And basically, everyone's focused, okay, we've got a sort of innocence, the verse, the emissions of CO2. We've also basically had the picture that, yeah, we've got about 10 billion tons per annum deficit. And we've got about 8 billion tons of emission from fossil fuels. So people have really taken the analogous straight look, okay, if we reduce or eliminate fossil fuels, we can actually do a lot of this, you know, a lot of this gap we can address. And in a sense, that's where we've been stuck in climate change, right? We've been basically focused, okay, we've got a deficit, we've got this fossil fuel use. Hey, how do we stop fossil fuel? But we have a problem, you see, because as I said, in the beginning, there are 7.5 billion of us, 10 billion expected in 30 years time. Because we all like to eat. And at the moment, we're using 10 units of fossil fuel energy to produce every unit of food energy we eat from the industrial food system. You see, and so the question is, have we got, have we got 6 billion volunteers who want to drop off the perch amongst homo hubris? Now, you see, and that's a trouble. See, how do we actually now this issue of social stability, and strategically planning, right, we've grown the population, it was 3 billion when I started as a researcher, it's now 7.5. But yeah, we've got to look after 7.5 to 10 billion people. So how do we do that? Because if we kill all fossil fuel use, then we're in real, we can't sustain this population. There's no one saying that we mustn't reduce the fossil fuel potential. And we've done a lot of work, whether it's solar energy or renewable energy. But yeah, one to two billion tons of carbon would be a champion effort to reduce that. But of course, it's nowhere near enough to drop that 10. So what we've simply done, and it's very simple, logical. See, basically, science has said, look, see this 250 billion ton dynamic that nature has, they sort of said, look, that's nature's problem, right? And they've just focused on this. But if we look at this thing, the question is, can we can we intervene? Can we naturally regenerate? Can we actually intervene in this process, these 250 billion tons, not just to get 10 billion tons, but can we actually get 20 billion tons of carbon in a sense, emission reduction and drawdown to take CO2 back to negative or, well, basically, former stable levels. Let's do it, Jim. Yeah, absolutely. Good. Now that comes the next point, you see, because then the answer is, how do we do it? And we had some of those discussions earlier because see, basically, every year, we've got 350 million tons of forest with between 50 and 200 tons of carbon emitted every time they burn. So that's what we're burning globally. It's about 10% of the global forest residual forest area. And we're burning 10% of it, whether it's in Paradise, Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Africa, the Amazon. Okay, so the amount of emissions depending on how severe the fires and what forest are immense, they actually can exceed the fossil fuel emissions. On top of that, every year, 2 billion tons of grassland, grass, grassland burns with about three tons of carbon per hectare emitted. Okay, so there's another 6 billion tons of carbon being emitted just through grassland and crop waste burning. Okay, and so what we're doing, Jim, is just sort of saying, look, hey, there's all areas where we can intervene in this game to get to that 20 billion tons. So the regenerator story, it's all positive. If we just say limit wildfires, you know, in these areas, yes, we can get there. And of course, you ask, how does nature limit wildfires? Guess what? It uses fungi. It rots down that forest fuel, that grass fuel, rots it down into sponge, stable soil carbon in your soil, which holds more water, which stops the wildfires. So you both remove the fuel. But also you create a more music, a more better water, higher soil moisture level with less fire risk. Now, no one's going to say we're going to stop all fires. It's wrong. But how much can we actually help there? And of course, if we can put that carbon that we're losing in fire into the actual soil to rehydrate, and we're back into this longevity green story, it's green, so we can have a green thing. See, then the answer is, we've got forests. We've got 3.5 billion hectares of forest. This is the residual forest we have. We used to have 8 billion hectares 10,000 years ago. We cleared 6.3 billion of it, but about 1.8 billion is regenerated, largely here in New England. Okay, and other parts of the world, Europe. But basically, there's 3.5 billion hectares. But can we actually add another 20% carbon drawdown in that forest if we actually regenerate the sponge? The answer is, of course, the forest tools. Yes, we can. Easy, easy. Can we have, in a sense, running out of colors, but can we have grazing management, right? Can we have grazing management, wise, holistic grazing, ecological grazing, and basically not over overstock and overgraze and desertify land, but use those grazing animals as tools to actually optimally manage that range land. And of course, we've got 5 billion hectares of grasslands and range lands that have been grazed by herbivores. And the optimal management of those ecosystems, again, can put an extra one to two tons of carbon per hectare into that land. Okay, one to two tons over 5 billion hectares. Again, there's 5 billion tons adding to our 20 billion tons. Okay, wetlands, right? We've got basically half of Eastern North America, or not half, but vast areas were wetlands, but we can restore vast areas of these wetlands naturally. Used to have 200 million beavers in North America, building wetlands, building sponges, because that's all the wetland ends up wonderful sponges. We drained those wetlands because that was where the beautiful organic soils were that we could go on and straight away grow potatoes and corn and all the crops for colonization in the sense needed to survive. Drain beaver meadows. Okay, but can we bring that back and then how much extra carbon could we store? How much extra water can we store? As I said, we've got 14 billion hectares of land on this planet. They're not making any more of it. Someone's going to go under with sea level rise if we don't get our act together. Okay, but basically, we've created 5 billion hectares of manmade desert and wasteland. And again, what can we do? Arid zone, regeneration, rehydration, revegetation. You in America get 40% of your food from the Central Valley in California. Okay, it's within 10 years of desertifying, kaput. No more snowmelt. You drain the aquifers. You stop the humid, moist air inflows the biotic pumps from the Pacific oceans. It's cactus. 10 years, Central Valley 40% of US food. Unless we pull our finger out. The answer is yes, how do we rehydrate, regenerate and build the sponge, rebuild the sponge, rebuild this ecology on the Central Valley California. Didi and team have been there. Can we asking the question, can we redirect direct California workshopping at the local level and looking at yes, we can. But it all involves a change. Okay, and so basically, I mean, there's more detail here, you know, we can keep on going, you know, cement manufacturer and savings there. I mean, just here, look, we're using massive amount of cement in urban infrastructure, pavements, roads, sewerage, drainage, dams massively. Okay, all that cement is calcium carbonate that they have to burn heat to emit CO2 from it to form calcium oxide. And all those emissions, you know, two to three billion tons of emissions every year from making cement. And how much can we actually save just by having a sponge? Okay, so that story is basically, we've got dangerous hydrological extremes, they're going to really impact severely in the next 10 years, you know, like whether it's Irene or Sandy or Katrina or droughts or fires, right? Really severely. We're in Australia, we're under systemic eridification. Okay, we're getting 30% less rainfall, and basically 50% less runoff. Now we've had peasants walking off the fertile crescent in Syria for the last 20 years, because they basically degraded and desertified their soils, had to walk into Damascus, walk into Aleppo, and we know the sorry sad, sad civil war and stuff that follows. Okay, and that's Syria. I mean, there's other factors there, of course, but the same issue is now happening, we're just actually a conference. And there's people from Southern France and Spain. And it's real, it's happening. It's happening in California. So we've got to really think we've got 10 years. So how do we do it? And what we're saying is yes, Charles Keeling, but nature really has told us we have 250 billion tons of carbon. We've got to start changing our mindset. This carbon isn't a problem. The carbon is a symptom of our land management missed opportunities. More importantly, the carbon is a resource, the building block to rebuild the sponge. Because all the sponges is basically mineral detritus, glued together with bits of carbon, 3% carbon, just gluing that together. And then a healthy soil is in a sense, a matrix of voids and spaces and air, okay, in a soil and it's that air those voids those cathedral of voids and spaces in that soil, which is where the water infiltration, where the root ability of that soil to depth, where the nutrient availability and biofertility is enhanced because the vast surface areas are exposed. Okay. And basically, it's the sponge. And just simply putting that 3% of carbon into that soil, through biological processes that in a sense can get that 20 billion tons, drawn down, rebuild healthy resilient systems. Okay, so that sounds like a good story, doesn't it? I mean, that's really quite exciting. But I hate to disappoint everybody. It's just it won't help us at all. It's far too little. Because as we already know, and science has no questions about this, you see, every bit of carbon that we draw down will be re-equilibrated by the world's oceans. Okay, the oceans contain 38,000 billion tons of carbon dissolved CO2. And as they warm and as they acidify, they're in a sense re equilibrating that carbon back into the air. And of course, every bit that we draw down, they will simply, you know, re buffer, re equilibrate and say thank you very much. The oceans at the moment are absorbing 93% of the extra heat we're retaining on this planet. Okay, so it's a very, very slow, you know, heating, degradation, degradation and collapse sort of situation. So even if we pull down carbon valiantly at 20 billion tons a year, by itself, it's not going to save us. It'll take us literally centuries, centuries to have that effect. So we've got to do something smarter, don't we? Much smarter. But in a sense, nature has given us a sponge. So in a sense, we do already have the solution. But to do that, we have to actually do what Einstein told us, we have to look at the problem in the sense you can't solve any problem with the same thinking that created it. Okay, we've got to get outside our existing paradigm, just as we did here. It's not CO2 emission, I mean, deficit and fossil fuels, we've increased the whole paradigm to say let's, let's play in this bigger sandpit of nature. And then we can solve it. But the same comes with cooling, right? Because now we've got to find a way how do we safely naturally cool the climate to offset in a sense the warming, but to offset these dangerous hydrological climate extremes that are impacting now. So in a sense, the whole paradigm has changed. It's really quite interesting because we've been talking about this cooling hydrological cooling for about 10 years. And invariably, you know, like at first, it was just hey, what are those wackos on about, right? But then progressively, I mean, there's a bit of rubbishing, the academic says, oh, where's all the published papers that haven't been funded, but they still expect them. And then basically now it's coming. Hey, can you come to a UN conference and talk to this or can we have a think tank exploring this possibility? So we're now at that tipping point of change because the realization globally in the climate debate, at that strategic senior levels, yes, it's all about dangerous hydrological extremes. And it's no longer good enough to just talk carbon, we've got to go into a new paradigm, how do we safely naturally cool the planet? So again, we simply ask the question, you know, how do we do that? How do we cool the planet? And again, we can just sort of go through what is the actual reality that we're facing as far as global warming. And of course, we've got this guy, or her, she's a son, okay, there's a son. Okay, and we've got we'll make that blue because we're talking about the blue planet. Okay, and there's in a sense of planet. And of course, every, every day continually or continually, basically the sun is giving us 342 watts per square meter of continuous solar incident solar energy coming into the earth, right? And to have a stable climate, it's no question we need to have 342 watts per square meter of solar energy going out. Otherwise, this guy's cooking, right? But in a sense, yeah, so that's in a sense, simple, natural physics and balance. But what also the earth has got, it's got an atmosphere around it. Okay, and it's also got a natural greenhouse effect. And what the natural greenhouse green. So what a natural greenhouse effect does, it basically, you know, heat comes in, but then it reflects a certain amount of heat back. So it actually retains extra heat in the atmosphere. And that's been critical for the last four billion years on this planet. We've basically maintained a temperature that is 33 degrees centigrade greater than if the earth was just a simple mineral ball stardust in space. Okay, so this atmosphere, this natural greenhouse effect has been absolutely fundamental in raising the temperature that planet 33 degrees above baseline. Okay, it's about sort of 17 degrees now. And it will be, you know, basically minus, what is it, minus 16, minus 16 degrees or something if it wasn't. And in a sense, it's that 30 degrees warming by the natural greenhouse, which is really fundamental because that's kept the oceans liquid. And of course, that's allowed life to evolve and survive in those oceans, right? And of course, the terrestrial biasing. But what's happened is, of course, we've stuffed that up a bit. And we've basically enhanced that greenhouse effect. So what we've done is we've increased increased. Okay, we've done two things. We've increased the amount of gases. Okay, in the atmosphere. So we've got a thicker blanket. But we've also actually driven up, driven up more heat coming from the Earth's surface, which we'll talk about later. And so now, instead of basically 342 watts going back out to space, we end up with a situation where 339 watts per square meter is getting back out to space, but an extra three watts per meter squared is being obtained in the atmosphere. Okay, so 342 in balance. Now we've in a sense put that extra blanket on three watts. But what what you really have to say, this is less than 1% of the incident solar radiation. Okay. And so the question is, hey, what's the natural processes that regulated this system? And what is that we can do to basically bring it back to stability where again, we are basically moving 342 watts per square meter back out to space. Okay, so in a nutshell, hey, guys, that's the problem. No, we've been focused on CO2. But basically, it's a simple matter of heat balance on this planet, right? And it's a lesson 1% increased escape again of heat from the earth. So the question is, how do we do it? How does nature do it? And of course, nature does it very, very nicely, very simply. I mean, I say simply, but we're going through the details in questions and elaboration, if you like, but it does it through a whole sequence of hydrological processes. I mentioned before that the CO2 component of the greenhouse effect governs 4% of the heat dynamics of the blue planet, 4%. 95% of the heat dynamics of the blue planet is driven by water. Okay, and so really, it's a case of force multipliers. If we've got to cool this sucker, 1%, you know, get 1% of heat back out. And here is in a sense, nature's tool, driving 95% of the heat dynamics, it stands to reason, even very, very modest balance, careful ecological restoration factors can do that. Okay, I'll go very quickly now, because we can elaborate this in detail to question stuff. But in a sense, there's a whole sequence of processes that actually govern the natural heat dynamics of the planet, and of course, govern its natural safe cooling. And we can actually restore those processes to pretty modest factors. And we'll come back because they all revolve around, you'll say the word sponge. Okay, regenerating the earth, soil, carbon, sponge, and the happen naturally. Okay, let's get started. So the thing starts with a sponge. Because if we're talking about hydrological processes, guess what? We need water. Okay, goes without saying. And the first thing is like, okay, we have roots taking water from the sponge, tree trees are green, not black. Okay, and so here we have green leaves. And of course, we know green leaves transpired, don't they? And so these guys are transpiring water vapor into the air. That's water vapor. But we also know for water to go from a liquid spun soil, into a gas water vapor, we need to, in a sense, have latent heat, or we've got to have enough heat to, in a sense, take it from liquid, from the liquid phase to the gas phase, right? Simple physics, you've got to, before you can boil off water on a pot on the stove, you got put a lot of heat in. And it takes 590 calories of heat per gram of water to take water from liquid to gas. There's a slight variation here, depending on what temperature it starts at. But it's all in that 585 90 category. Okay. And so there's a massive amount of heat needed to transpire water. And of course, where does that heat come from? It has to come from the environment down here, where the trees growing. Okay, some of it comes from the solar radiation, not onto the leaves of the trees, sure. And that's why trees in high latitudes up in the Arctic are so dark, because they've got to capture as much light and heat as possible, to be able to function and transpire. Okay, but basically, by transpiring, you're basically cooling the surface. I live in a city called Canberra, that's Australia's natural capital. It was built 100 years ago by Walter Burley Griffin, Marion Mahoney, you know, designed, I mean, Australians built it. But the point is, we've got an urban forest, you know, the whole thing was on a dry arid clapped out sheet paddock, pretty in hospital site for natural capital as they would. But basically, they built an urban forest. Now it's seven degrees centigrade cooler. On a hot summer's day, then the neighbouring sort of concrete jungle suburb, the new suburbs next door, you know, three kilometers away, right? Of course, we've got that story all over the world, you know, in Malaysia, they can get up to 17 degrees centigrade difference between rainforest and cleared bare land, and Tom might have sort of data equivalent in the Amazon and what have you, right? So it's really amazing. So the cooling effect, okay, the actual cooling effect of this latent heat fluxes, right? Latent heat fluxes. Okay, they're so powerful that 24%, 24% to 25% of the incident solar radiation is naturally taken back into the upper atmosphere by these latent heat fluxes. And that's only with basically the residual forests, the residual transpiring green, which is less than half there was naturally. Okay, so if we can take 24% of that incident heat back up to space through these latent heat fluxes, it's a very simple calculation. I mean, it's one factor and nature's a bit more complicated, there's many factors, but theoretically a four to five percent increase in green transpiration by vegetation would cool the planet back to that three watts per square meter that we need to cool it. Okay, so very, very simple, powerful factors. There's a bit of a, not a problem, it's just nature, it's a bit more sophisticated because when this water vapor goes up into the air, it also can nucleate or it can be condensed again as humid hazers. And of course when it does, basically it releases that 590 calories of energy, but a lot of that up high because there's less gas above dissipates out to space. But these humid hazers are actually a bit of a problem because they absorb incident solar radiation while they're in the liquid form. And then because they're absorbing that incident solar radiation, they actually go into water vapor, okay, so they again reabsorb 590 calories and go into water vapor. And of course this is the water vapor greenhouse gas effect. And in the sense this, sorry, and this is 80 percent of the greenhouse gas effect compared to CO2, which has got about 11 percent. Okay, this is the greenhouse gas component effect rather than before when I said 4 percent, which was the percentage of the global heat dynamics. But all I'm just saying that water vapor is a dominant greenhouse gas, but these humid hazers in a sense because they're absorbing incident solar radiation, then make this water vapor. And so because this is a greenhouse gas, what's also happened or what also is important, that the level of humid hazers and the persistence of humid hazers in the air is a very, very important factor in this case in warming the planets. But in a sense here's a process that's cooled it. Here's another, in a sense, sequential process that's in a sense warming it. I mean nature works through fairly sophisticated cooling warming balances, right? So it's not just one thing switch on off. There's a whole dynamic. And what we're saying is the persistence and the level of humid hazers increases. We're getting a lot of warming and in fact a lot of the greenhouse warming that we're getting is because of the extra water in the air. We'll come into how to remove that in a minute, but in a sense is that extra water in the air that's a big part of our problem. And the question is why is there more water in the air? Because we're putting vast quantities of these haze aerosol, micronuclei, into the air. Okay? So nature put these up. I mean dimethyl sulfide from algae or isoprene from forests, terpenes, pineanes from forests, you know these all natural aerosols that actually form these hazers. But we have massively increased those because by creating five billion hectares of man-made desert wasteland, we're putting about four billion tons of clay dust into the air every year. We're burning the fossil fuels, so that's putting vast quantities of carbon particulates into the air. We're putting a lot of pollutant poly aromatic hydrocarbons into the air. So we have massively increased these nuclei and of course they're then forming these persistent humid hazers that are actually driving the higher humidity in the air. And that's going from you know haze droplets to water vapor droplets. There's vast parts of the planet now from Cairo through to Beijing that are basically covered by a toxic brown humid haze. In some parts, in summer now you're getting sort of yeah 45, 50 degrees centigrade temperatures 95 plus relative humidities way beyond the threshold for humans and mammals to survive because we need to perspire to keep cool but you can't perspire and keep cooling those temperatures. So this is becoming a major health effect. So I mean it's more complicated than just cooling there's a whole lot of processes. But the next step in this actual ecology is actually coming to the rescue because we want the good news here we don't want to just have bad news. And so the question is how do we take these these humid hazers out of the air? Okay there's our humid hazers with their nuclei and as we say we've basically vastly increased that because we can measure that with of think or global dimming. Okay because basically less solar energy is reaching the ground surface because it's being absorbed by these increased haze levels right and in some parts this is really quite significant it's up to 20% less incident solar radiation reaching the surface. But we didn't want to talk about that. We wanted to talk about like how does nature remove these warming humid hazers out of the air? And of course it does that very very very very simply it just basically turns them into these guys called clouds okay into high albedo dense clouds. Of course high albedo dense clouds are absolutely effective at reflecting incident solar radiation back out to space. Okay half the planet at any one time is covered by clouds dense high albedo clouds and they reflect up to 120 on average watts per square meter back out to space. So roughly a third of the incident solar radiation is naturally being reflected it doesn't even get to the surface and you know that when the cloud comes over dense clouds guess what you put a jump on it because it's got cooler right very simple happens in minutes. Okay so up to 120 watts this is the average obviously it goes much higher you know depending on where you are and stuff. And so again they're very simple if we have to sort of cool this planet by three watts per square meter okay we have to rebalance the temperature yeah look a you know two percent increase in clouds in a sense is that three watts per meter squared okay so again I mean it's more complicated but here is a single factor process simply increasing the cloudiness or the formation of these hazes the warming hazes and the cooling clouds can actually sort of very rapidly significantly cool the planet. So the question is well how do that how does nature do this and of course it does this by this very special thing which are called hygroscopic precipitation nuclear precipitation nuclei now these are much bigger these are about one micron in size whereas the others were much much smaller but basically they're hygroscopic which means they suck right they're just really very very high osmotic or you know suction potential and they're basically caressing about a million of these haze micro droplets to make a cloud droplet and in that way bringing these warming hazes into cooling clouds. There are three forms of hygroscopic precipitation nuclei that we know of in nature right the first of course are ice crystals and you know that when you're drinking you know scotch or something and then ice water forms on the outside of glass because it's hygroscopic precipitating that water and so in high latitudes high altitudes cold fronts you know these ice crystals are very important in forming these clouds because of this coalescent effect over the ocean we've got the same thing with salts sodium chloride because again you know that on the beach you try to have some fish and chips and the salt won't shake because it's hygroscopic and again it's doing the same thing right it's simple physics isn't it it's it's really no problem but the most important and the most interesting and that drives about 50 percent of the cloud formation and rainfall in tropical inland area in fact bacteria these are highly hygroscopic bacteria some of the highest hygroscopicity you know automatically that we know of in nature and these are bacteria formed in the stomatal cavity of forest trees certain forest trees that transpire up with a latent heat flux transpiration and of course basically nucleating these things into clouds we'll come back the next all to put it on this slide actually next thing but basically again driving this nucleation of clouds this cooling process and of course as you can logically expect this hygroscopicity keeps on sucking bringing them together and okay they'll produce these guys right rain okay because basically if you take about you know what varies depending on the size a hundred to a thousand of those cloud droplets and make them then this rain drop is big and heavy enough to fall out under gravity okay so I mean we've got lots of data on this some 10 to the 32 bacterial cells are being released by these forests that's 10 to the power 32 so that's a big number but you know plus or minus a few orders of magnitude of course but the point is over half the rainfall in tropical warmer inland region from our understanding on isotope measurement data is actually driven by these hygroscopic bacteria from forest so again here's nature and this is really the point go on a bit further but the real critical point here is nature evolved in a sense a balance of two processes right it's evolved a balance of the haze micronuclei aerosols dimethyl sulfide to in a sense create the warming hazes that were a key part of the greenhouse effect remember we had it up here we won't go back but it's basically creating the water vapor that was part of the greenhouse effect so in a sense nature through the production of these aerosols creating hazes water vapor warming the planet 33 degrees but at the same time through the production of these microbial precipitation nuclei basically creating the opposite cooling effect so here we are a feedback balance between haze generation cloud generation rainfall generation and cooling so warming and cooling totally regulated by these microbial precipitation either haze or precipitation nuclei okay so we're coming to this really amazing question that yeah basically how much is rain and the hydrology of the atmosphere actually driven by a biological process you know a biological balance in this hydrology to what extent is rain in these forests above these forests like the amazon actually a symbiotic process where the trees are actually generating these precipitation nuclei that are creating the rain so we've always known that trees need rain now we're asking the question does rain need trees okay whole new paradigm hey opens it all up actually very important to understand that even over the world's deserts there's rivers of water flowing across them continually up to 50 000 parts per million of that desert air whether it's navada or death valley can be water vapor five percent by weight water flowing across these deserts 50 centimeters of water up to right no not always but 50 up to 50 centimeters so nature in a sense again has harvested this water whether it's cacti or special foliage on sequoias for example right they get 70 percent of their moisture from harvesting this humid airflow why can't we you know because basically we've got five billion hectares of man-made desert and wasteland we need water we need sponge we need cooling okay story goes on but i'll go a bit more quicker but i mean we can i mean how are we going for time actually 10 to go okay okay we'll look just very quickly i mean i'll go more quickly we can come into once we have rain we do another thing we reopen the nighttime radiation window that sounds sweet and it is basically 60 percent of the warming that we recorded to date under you know climate change is actually due to increased nighttime minimum temperature why because the re-radiation from the earth can't get back out to space okay but of course once we have rain through the precipitation nuclei we have clear skies in the tropics you know that's where summer certain morning and moonlight and stars you know like it's early evening and all that massive re-radiation of heat going up into the air and again by removing those humid hazes by removing that water vapor we're reopening those nighttime radiation windows and again they can be depending where you are 30 to 40 watts per square meter of cooling effect so very very powerful in the tropics another thing i wanted to mention which is really actually much much more fundamental if we have a soil surface and we have this soil covered with vegetation right and we have this soil which is moist because it's got a sponge okay then what we have is basically yep we've got solar energy coming on to that soil surface reflecting in an albedo effect and that can be sort of from 20 to 70 percent depending how white and reflective the surfaces are but the point is that because of the moisture and of course these moistures is is creating late need fluxes you know as we said before this soil very rarely gets above 20 degrees centigrade right and it's quite consistent even in tropical regions right because basically we've got cooling processes both reflections and late need fluxes conversely where we leave that soil bare dry exposed and we've got the same incident solar radiation hitting it that heat will all just absorb into the soil and these soils will often go we can actually confirm it's higher than that 60 degrees centigrade okay so we can really sort of cook those soils i mean basically they're really inert because they're bare dirt they really got to mineral you know desert and there's a very very very powerful thing that happens and it's a simple rule of physics we can't escape but it's a bit like gravity that's called the Stefan Bolson equation right and the Stefan Bolson equation says the amount of re-radiation from the earth is proportional to a constant times the fourth power the temperature in degrees kelvin okay physics 101 you guys got it but the real guts of the thing is this guy you see because basically kelvin is minus 270 so you got to calibrate the temperature but basically it's temperature times temperature times temperature times temperature okay so the amount of energy being re-radiated from the earth's surface is fundamentally higher here right okay because basically this fourth power function in that black body radiator right can't escape it and see that's in a sense so so profound because if you guys realize what the greenhouse effect you've never been told this so hey you're the first to know the greenhouse effect is driven by two factors and this is hard science nobody would argue with you the first one is the amount of re-radiation the amount of heat going up right and the second factor is the amount of basically re-radiation absorbed by gases greenhouse gases and the key one is of course water vapor which does 80% as we said before CO2 which does 11% and then you know your methane and nitrous oxide etc etc right and they do about 8% and then there's CFCs and others right so there that's what the greenhouse effect is all about guys okay so it's amount of re-radiation and then the amount of absorption and so far we've been talking here to say look we can reduce that water vapor greenhouse because we can turn it to clouds conventional science has really been locked into this game hasn't it can I basically play around reducing that 11% but we've already agreed this will take a century 100 years plus right okay because the ocean re-radiation but if you really want to get smart if you really want to cool the planet you just turn the stove from high to simmer right you basically reduce this and how do you reduce that you already know how to reduce it because you've got physics you've got stimulus come on guys paper paper paper okay you see we've got an equation that tells you how to do that because if you keep your soil moist and cool okay you can reduce that re-radiation 80 90 percent okay so you can turn down the greenhouse effect you can do it in days it's as simple as not mowing your lawn sponge okay that's the key thing the sponge so you've got to rebuild that soil carbon sponge to one have the moisture to have the green to have the transformation so it all comes back to the sponge rebuilding the earth's soil carbon sponge okay so look I think I'm gonna wind up there really you can go there's more processes and more exciting stuff but I think the guts of it we can understand that we can naturally safely cool this planet hydrologically safely natural I've said that so basically we can cool this thing but it's all about rebuilding this hydrological cycle now rebuilding the sponge aerosols for hazes precipitation nuclei they all come back from what we add here you see because as we basically look at this 250 billion tons of carbon dynamics see this is when we don't burn those forests we don't putting up those carbon particulars we're not putting up those aerosols when we extend the longevity of green don't we again sort of basically putting up more precipitation nuclei so really this is revitalizing regenerating that biosphere that we all evolved in we all depend on fundamentally innovative farmers the guys that we involved with yeah they're doing 10 tons of carbon per hectare per annum sustainably productively back into their land okay so there's 20 billion tons of carbon drawdown you know it's it's two billion hectares you know of the 14 billion hectares of the planet at that rate but even if we're doing a fraction of that in the bottom line we can do it all ourselves we can have power source whether it's a balcony or courtyard or urban agriculture or forestry or grazing we can regenerate green and we can safely hydrologically cool the planet thank you very much the eight billion tons of fossil fuels that's in that curve what's the other hundred and twenty two okay no very good question i mean basically as we said forest fires you know that's about another 10 cement manufacture but it's also you and me right because and it's nothing bad about it we've got a we've got a respire right we basically are using sugars all the time and as we burn those sugars in our body we breathe out co2 so i breathe out you breathe out about a thousand parts per million co2 right no problems the plants need that so it's a balance always right but basically all that some 70 80 billion tons is respiration is natural biological breathing okay this is my second question i watched your youtube presentation of this as well so i'm you know getting more and more foggily a little bit understanding of your situation your description however they say we have like 10 years to solve this problem but i'd like to hear you say is here's what i would like to see happen this is the plan because when where i live when i said i'm going to this talk and it's so interesting and you know carbon dioxide is really only part of the problem they said you know what that kind of talk just keeps us from the real work which is carbon dioxide and what i would like to say is no here is the plan here is the way forward right thank you and look i two points first well no one's saying we mustn't reduce carbon dioxide or negate that effort right but we're just lifting the context of it into 250 billion tons of dynamics not just the eight billion tons in fossil fuel right so we're just extending the potential but no the bottom line is we're absolutely committed in regenerators to 20 billion tons of carbon draw i mean that that 20 billion target very very tangible strategic committed actions but the real message tonight was yes that has to go into the sponge it's only if we can put it into the soil to rebuild the hydrology to build rebuild the cooling and you know that hydrological thing that we've got a chance to avoid those dangerous hydrological extremes as far as the 20 billion tons yes we can partition it you know the detailed papers yes so much from forest fires so much from cement so much from reforesting you know um you know the 3.5 billion i mean regrowing that 3.5 billion or increasing growth so much from shelter woods extension into arid land so much from ecological grazing so yeah there's about eight key components and they all add up to over 20 billion tons but basically we're saying conservatively practically yeah we're doing that and yes there are strategies in play to actually do each of those components so for example we've got a major fire versus fungi initiative and that's really taking off basically in Australia where I live but also it's being picked up in places like Spain Portugal you know other places now quite frankly New England very very quickly has you've had the story now in New Hampshire where you are going to sort of basically have a bioenergy burning of those forests and hey what consequences does that have so yes there's an action agenda sure it's not out necessarily fully documented in public because this is basically working with those innovative groups you know doing all those initiative but are there other comments people I just um I lived in Texas for a lot of my life and Texas started dehydrating about the time the beaver disappeared and I would like to say I like what he did here with this idea of the difference between land that is covered with vegetation and the land that is exposed three quarters of Texas now is exposed to sunlight and there's no way to to do anything right and it's kind of like when the rain does come down we have to hold the rain in place and not let it get away and let the vegetation come back so I think this is a huge this is a huge opportunity because he's bringing the water cycle into it more but if we if we have bare ground dominating the you know and this is California too if 10% of the Central Valley was beaver managed wetlands Central California wouldn't have a problem absolutely so that's yeah some some of the things that we were proposing when we were speaking with communities Walter said you know mulling your lawn last or letting it grow a little taller so in terms of that increasing the transpiration increasing any kind of acreage leaf area height or longevity of green is going to is going to be cooling through those latent heat fluxes and that's local cooling you can benefit from right away same thing any area that was bare whether it's bare pavement or bare soil that you have now green plants growing on is all is not only going to cool through the latent heat fluxes but also dramatic cooling because of that lesson re-radiation so those are two really low-hanging fruits both in urban areas and in agricultural areas for example the the Central Valley in California one of the things we're proposing is that if if all of those farms simply use cover crops a 20 25 percent increase in green transpiring growth on agricultural lands alone you know in in theory in the sense of just that that part of the whole equation would reduce the the warming that we've already seen so is that doable to have 25 percent more less bare ground if you look at google earth at agricultural land and look at how much of it is brown on the solstice the summer solstice you'll see that yes we could do a lot a lot more green so and that's not a big ask of farmers so they're they're a big cultural they're a big cultural economic policies dumbling blocks in the way sometimes but a lot of those are being addressed through soil health bills just a very quick factual thing to increase the this the sponge effect I've never heard it talked about this sponge so I understand we have to increase the ground cover and you also mentioned increasing fungi and I wonder if you just say in very specific terms what exactly needs to be done on a vast scale to to increase the sponge effect thank you that now going for look very simply the sponge and we talked about these cathedrals of the cathedrals of voids in this in the soil hey we've got a blank page way right okay so look it's actually quite exquisite and beautiful okay if you have a rock if it's a sandstone it's got a bulk density of about 2.6 grams per sea if it's an igneous rock 3.5 right that means it's all mineral particles no air no voids but if you've got a healthy soil coming to sponge it's got 1.1 grams per cc right in terms of density which is telling you that 66 percent of it is basically voids nothing so you build healthy soils by adding nothing easy yes easy it doesn't cost the thing okay but the healthy soil is like this okay there's mineral particles okay and and basically these are sort of glued together and held apart by these organic matter matrices okay and this only has to be three percent but because you've got those you can actually end up with massive voids capillary water voids right and so it's here where water infiltrates it's here where roots proliferate down instead of being stuck with 20 centimetre soil or root growth at the surface or less hey these are natural soils your prairie soils going down five meters so the volume of soil resource that you are empowering and you know creating through the sponge is enormous so basically the sponge is just adding nothing right this is nothing this is voids okay but it's basically the fungi that really are the things that in a sense one create these organic matter or the carbon from organic matter but they also glue these soil particles together as in a sense builders and build this sort of loose matrix of three-dimensional soil right and also what happens this is really critical in terms of the biofertility of soil okay 90 percent up to 90 percent of the biofertility of soil it's got nothing to do with more on agriculture and how much you add to it it's all got to do with the surface area of exposure because here's where your calcium your magnesium your zinc all those essential cations and micronutrients are basically on that stardust on that mineral particles and now they're exposed available to roots and fungi for uptake as biofertility before they were unavailable locked up inaccessible okay so the sponge very quickly gives you water it gives you nutrients it gives you rootability it gives you microbial ecology and there's there's 10 times more life biomass weight but no but lower feet than there is above it okay and it gives you then the productivity and the resilience and yeah this is the sponge so in terms of in terms of how to build that sponge there if you look up soil health principles online there are various groups including my website that has versions of that the the nrcs which is a branch of the USDA US Department of Agriculture has really taken this up they have a whole soil health team that's working with farmers but the essence of it is that plants when they're photosynthesizing they're taking at co2 taking water and and turning it into themselves and then the extra sugars that they make they feed out through their roots to feed the biology of the soil and part of the biology of the soil is the fungi the mycorrhizal fungi that have a symbiotic relationship with the plants go access those nutrients bring them back to the plants in exchange for sugars so you so simply having plants growing long-term in the soil and not disturbing it will will feed that underground life there are things you can do to speed it up there's you know certain inoculants compost etc but you know sometimes that's more complex than it needs to be because you'll see that you know if you go anywhere in nature that if you leave things alone and in in an environment like the northeast things will start growing we call them weeds but those weeds are the are the first responders they are true they are there because the soil is bare they're they're they're like a scab like a bandaid trying like a first responder trying to quickly pump some sugars down into the ground and you'll see the weeds the weeds are often the ones that have the biggest leaves that can access the most light like uh what's the one that everybody's so upset about around river river yeah japanese beautiful photosynthesizer or and or they have deep tap roots they can break down to that compacted soil like dandelions bird off etc the other things that we say get these out of here but why do you have something with big leaves or a deep strong root growing there because the soil isn't a sponge so or because or poison ivy growing on the roadside because it's very sandy and salty and nothing else can grow so whatever will grow will grow and it's trying to grow the sponge if you last the last point here that if you take you take so i like to compare degraded soil with flour water runs off you can blow it away doesn't hold together no matrix and healthy spongy soil with bread imagine pouring water on the bread if you throw that bread in a blender do you still have that sponge effect no so tillage eliminating or not minimizing tillage rhodotilling is a really key piece to long-term building this sponge i just want to add that we're finding out that there's an economic system below the surface uh plants half the carbon they make or more in healthy systems they're giving it to fungi fungi are taking a lot of that and giving it to microbes that are make the acetic acid to to actually drill into the little minerals and find the phosphorus or whatever when we add nitrogen fertilizer like they did in west texas to grow corn or whatever cotton they turned it to concrete because it became a bacterial soil you know it was just uh you know it just killed the the fungi networks the another system is as as stuff as all the worms and nematodes and whatever in the soil consume all this carbon and redigest it redigest it redigested they're cooking it again and again and again what comes out is something that's very much like it's it's very humus like it's very high in carbon it's got a lot of surface area it's like this biochar that we talk about that was done naturally and uh that'll hold on to all the minerals you know it's it's very electron dense so minerals are attracted to it so this whole system is uh you know we're just starting to learn about it and what we're finding out is our our industrial agriculture is killed a lot of it so that's kind of why we're in a little bit of trouble and just in terms of things that we can be doing there are 42 million acres of lawn in this country everybody has the potential to get some deep-rooted perennials growing and that helps to build the soil carbon sponge depaving which would not be a bad thing for us to consider doing on whatever scale we can but getting rid of the surface that we've put over the soil you one of the leaders of that movement with one of the founders of D. Pave Somerville is here in the audience but as but as soon as you take that concrete away you don't have to throw any seeds down the seeds are there and they start to grow they have just been waiting to be freed so we do have a great deal that we can do locally yeah okay i think the support with walrus says with that historical analogy now sorry that's a lot enough you know the historical analogy now that the thing is that worldwide would destroy more than half of the biosphere cut down the trees the carb is gone it's oxidized turning to CO2 now the amount of carbon that was in the biosphere was more than the atmosphere the joint was less now okay because we transferred back up but the amount of carbon that was in soil there's a lot of controversy about that traditionally people would say it was three or four times more carbon in the atmosphere that's because people didn't want to dig very deep there's a lot of hard work to dig a hole you know 10 feet deep and measure the carbon so that only go down this far you know that measure the top 10 centimeters or so and that was that three or four times more carbon was now that people dig deeper of course there's all this carbon they didn't measure before and now you know the the view is that it's five or six times more carbon in soil than there was in the atmosphere um some people say that's a flat earth hypothesis because that's just a surface area but in fact you know the earth is not flat it's up and down so that about doubles surface area so maybe it's really 12 times more carbon controlled in the atmosphere so you don't need to increase it very much to ignore that excess now um sorry so we've done a huge deal we've wiped out half the carbon in the soil in every place we've converted from forest to agriculture or pastoral organization so that's you know maybe five or eleven ten times more carbon in the atmosphere than we've lost from the soil already well a lot of that has wound up you know going from the atmosphere to the ocean but we're really disturbed this is in a great deal now um third right yes okay um so if we would generate the carbon cycle how would it affect the climate 35 years ago i was working in the amazon in brazil and i was i set up the first lab in brazil to measure greenhouse gases of high precision i was measuring the effects of amazon before a station to chemistry the atmosphere and we were measuring greenhouse gas emissions in undisturbed amazonian jungle and places been clear cut that were 100 meters away same forest same climate right next to each other if this would went in with the chainsaws they cut everything down the rains came before they could burn it down so they walked away and abandoned it as virgin amazon jungles turned into a pile of rubble and and they just abandoned it they didn't burn it they couldn't bring cattle in they just walked away from it now i was measuring temperature in the air and in the soil through day night cycles night and day and when we were in the jungle in the jungle the temperature differences of you know less one and a half degrees centigrade from day to night was always cool and present in the present in the jungle there was always green vegetation on the ground and so forth in the clear cut the temperature fluctuation from day to night was something like about 18 degrees centigrade instead of one and a half or two more than 10 times greater but much hotter and it's unbearably hot in the same area that area the soil had baked into concrete like hardness all the vegetation was brown and dying this was you know short dry season but there was severe drought going on in the clear cut areas and the temperature was unbearable you walked into the forest was cool the difference is the evaporation because most of the solar energy as water said that was on the land goes into evaporating water and about 90 percent of that water that's evaporated isn't evaporated it's transpired through plants it's not physical evaporation like what happens in the ocean that's water that the plants are sucking out of the ground passing through roots and releasing and every every molecule of water they release their sucking heat out of the ground out of the leaves and releasing that into the atmosphere because that's the heat to vaporize the water when that water condenses and falls in the rain that that heat gets released and then that drives the circulation of the atmosphere so the forests are driving about 90 percent of the water vapor transport from from the land from the ground into the atmosphere and they're responsible for about 90 percent of the heat transfer really important so now what has happened worldwide is every place we cut down the forest it became unbearably hot and you have to have been there at the time of deforestation at that time to have experienced it because the next generation never remembered and every place in the world where people encountered deforestation every place they tell the same story the land was cool and green in the waters the rivers flowed year round and we cut down the forest and it became unbearably hot unbearably hot the springs and the streams dried up and we ran only in the rainy season the land was big brown almost all the year people tell that story every place you know Plato and Aristotle tell that story above deforestation of Greece thousands of years ago so it's in the human experience of every single culture that they they made their land hotter but you had to been there at the time to experience that but now everyone who plants a garden in an area that's barren and turns it back to green into life with those plants sucking heat out of the ground it's just pleasant to be in those it's just so much cool in the swatting area everyone can see and experience that i would like to understand more about flood and the consequences to the soil how for example flood creates drought okay well look yeah it's it just goes automatically you see because if you have a storm and just say there's one inch of rain and the question is yes if it's flooded off you don't have that inch of rain in the soil and so your soil has got no water to keep growing so by definition you've got a drought so a drought is an automatic reverse of the flood right you have a flood you've lost the water because you've lost the water you've got a drought and it's a paradox because we always see them reporting the newspaper oh we've got floods disaster disaster hey we've got droughts disaster disaster they're one thing right and really what nature does in a sense it conserves that water in the soil infiltrates it through the sponge retains it in the in soil reservoirs and deeper aquifers and that extends the longevity of green growth which in a sense avoids the drought so as we had in this graph here behind tom you see that red line hang on here we are this red line is in a sense extending and as i said we're continuing green growth sometimes for yeah 10 20 times longer than the amount of time in a flood situation right so it's it's yeah it's it's that simple it's inescapable you've lost the water you've got a drought let me add to that because it's organic carbon the organic material it holds almost all the water in the soil the more carbon you have the more you retain water in the soil the more you extend your growing seed and i'm going to tell just a story from his country because i was in australia last year i was in queen's land on the hottest day they'd ever had in their history and it had the worst drought that ever had in queen's land all with all the sugar farms with fake brown no no vegetation completely you know the soil had crumbled and in that area i went to visit an organic fruit farmer who plows all his carbon back into the soil his neighbors had one percent carbon in their soil the soil was dry crumbled it it fall fell apart his soil had six percent carbon trees were green it was cool and pleasant to be in his yard now when the rain comes to the neighbor's yard what happens is all that soil washes away so the rivers are filled with mud and i work with the aboriginals i've filmed with the aboriginals on the coral reefs downstream from those rivers but they they live off fishing those those reefs they're now piles of mud these have been completely killed by the mud coming off that agricultural line management on the other hand my friend who's the organic farmer and i know well um you look at the rivers flowing off his land and they're not full of mud there clean clear because the organic matters holding in retaining it and releasing that water very slowly you can see a huge difference from one you know garden to another good anyone can do it absolutely yep didi if you go back to the bread and flour analogy i know those some of you have seen me do this hundreds of times if you haven't seen it you can look at um rehydrate california.org and there's a video there that of a talk that walter and i gave at piscinas ranch in california and essentially this is a fun thing you do to a dinner party of a plate with a pile of flour and a plate with three slices of crappy gas station bread and poke some holes in a cup talk about the flour is just the mineral portion of soil there's no organic matter there's no carbon there's no biology no light sticking those mineral particles together you can blow on the flour it'll blow across the room poke some holes in a dixie cup and rain on it and it's going the water's going to run off you can have erosion you're gonna have muddy streams around the edge of the plate a flood around the center and around the edge and a drought in the center of the plate right if you have a stick a little piece of grass in there the roots aren't in anything there's no water there then what do you do to to take flour and turn it to bread you add biology in in a landscape that's the plants feeding the microbes feeding the fungi and feeding all of that whole soil food web up to earthworms up to all the other life that lives in soils that the roots are going through making passageways these little particles are getting stuck together there's those voids and cathedrals in the soil if you rain on that bread where's the rain going it's going down through those pores all the way down to the bottom of the plate and if you have the streams around the edge they're getting refilled year round from the bottom from springs coming up out of the ground so that's why you don't have a drought there is because of those voids in the soil because the water can sink down and stay down and come come sideways into the rivers and streams and lakes okay yeah addition to that in terms of your flooding if you've got an area that's flooded many times and you've got big gullies well that means that the water table is going to drop to the lowest point of that gully every time you know because that's a way to get out so what you want to do is stop you know the gully that's that's what the beaver roll was or whatever but if you stop that water in the gully you let it build up and raise that water table a little bit and then you can start rebuilding the sponge because the water will stay in your area for longer the beaver plant is to if you get fresh water the beaver plant is to keep it on the land as long as possible until it turns into vegetation the human planet seems to be to get rid of it as fast as possible and this isn't working very well for us so um can i ask one last another question or yeah okay welter i would nominate you and i would vote for you right now as czar of the world because i actually hey i'm an innocent bystander from daranda i actually think that if you were the czar then i would feel very hopeful about what you said tonight it turns out that i missed physics i transferred schools and never took physics so i feel very privileged to have sat through this tonight um and it's been tough for me to follow with that lack of physics but you know i've spent an hour listening to you very few people in this country are going to spend an hour whether it's physics or not physics listening to you so i think if you were the czar and you could do this on your own and you could make the earth do what you've just said it can do very simply i'd have great faith that this is a solution the problem is like in the end of lion king we find out that humans are the most violent and most feared species and in fact everything we've talked about tonight the amazon doesn't light itself on fire people light it on fire the uh forest in uh you know southeast asia don't get lit just on their own very unlikely some lightning strikes but mostly it's human beings so didi touched on this where she kind of just went into the cultural political economic and we can go on and on you know in terms of what are the factors that lie against this the last thing i'll add to it is when i hear that era stottle was observing and saying the same things that we're feeling now it does not give me a lot of hope that there's suddenly going to be a change in human nature and all these human factors that deal with nature without a czar who just says this is what you're going to do and people do it so i'd like to have an answer to the first question here which is what do we say to people when we say how is this change going to happen i'm going to interrupt here because bioforclimate we wrestle with this we've been wrestling with it for six years which is not a very long time in the scheme of things but we're really pretty wrestled up and i i've gotten to a point where i don't i don't blame humans anymore uh i think we're all biological creatures and we react according to our biology and we can make some changes and i think we are making some changes apropos of people here in walter we have something like 220 videos from all of our conferences on youtube and walters talk from last year at harvard is very near the top of the list even though he was a latecomer to that list in that respect so people are listening to him we've had over 150,000 views of our our videos and we we are reaching people and people are being ready to be reached and um because what's doing the talking now is nature yeah and that changes everything yeah and adam may i just quickly i look it's not me this is all about empowering you you know basically this is very simple basic empowering everybody every child on the planet to say yes they can build the sponge simply to compost weeds and those processes and you'll write it was Aristotle and others your president said a nation that destroys destroys itself that was Franklin Roosevelt dust bowl so you know we've had those warnings but also you're absolutely right look there's no problems on earth nature will fix it you know nature's fix this as in pedogenesis every time there's been a meteorite or big volcanic the only question is will we actually wake up and help her do it or will she basically do it after himahupers is gone so the only thing i disagree you with walter is that you're not going to do it for us and we have a whole bunch of lawns that are waiting for you tomorrow before your plane takes off that that you will responge for us yeah okay politics the soil health movement in the united states is actually bringing together very conservative people and very liberal people towards a single aim and it's a it's a beautiful thing to go to some of these conferences yeah bless it unrest and that's a terrific point this is not political you can talk to people all across the political spectrum and have lunch and dinner and sing songs and it doesn't matter who you voted for or who you will vote for because earth abides forever yeah it's a sponge right the sponge so thank you all for coming tonight