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Image: IPCC
To see this image full size:
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/graphics/2001wg1/large/01.05.jpg

The Vostok ice core and others from various places in Antarctica and Greenland show the direct correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the temperature of the atmosphere. Other fossil-reading methodologies have been able to discover and further correlate both the time scale and interpretation of the recorded events, including forminafera fossils, and dendochronology. In the last 650,000 years the CO2 in the atmosphere has never been above 300 ppm (parts per million.) Temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, the constancy of the nearby star, the Sun, are all reflected in the thousands of years of observational evidence.

Most people do not realize that with 380 ppm CO2(and climbing) in the atmosphere, it is going to take "agriculture" and biomass woody plants, trees, forests; and the ocean CO2 absorption much more than a thousand years to recover the climate to an ecologically natural state, removing the carbon from the air . . .eliminating what we, with the guidance of profit and population uncontrolled . . .have created as our legacy.
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California: a large Green (environmental) evaporative air conditioner.
Yes! It is a "swamper!" (Yes, it is a BIG swamper.)

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The article in ScienceNow Daily News: Cultivating a Defense Against Global Warming

Betsy Mason, writing for the 27 February 2007 issue of ScienceNOW Daily News reports on the temperature effects of water given to plants. It is evaporative cooling on a large scale. She writes:

California agriculture may provide more than just avocados, artichokes, and grapes. Crops [like these and others] could also be keeping the state cooler, according to a new climate modeling study.

Mason reports that much of the discussion to date about how "land use" can influence climate has focused on urban heat islands. City dwellers well know how the pavement absorbs and building's thermal masses trap the sun's warmth, block evaporation, and raising the local temperature.

Not surprisingly, other wide spread land uses may also have an impact on the local temperature; such as agriculture.

According to Mason,California is by far the U.S.'s largest agricultural producer: 13.5% of the state, or more than 34,000 square kilometers, is agricultural land, and the majority of that land is irrigated.

A team of climate scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led by ecosystems scientist Lara Kueppers, now at the University of California, Merced, wondered if all this water being sprayed around could have a measurable effect on climate.

The team used a regional climate model to compare temperatures in the state with and without agriculture between 1980 and 2000. For the agricultural scenario, the researchers plugged in urban and agricultural land use data from about 1990 and kept it constant for 20 years. For the non-irrigated scenario, they replaced urban and agricultural land with natural vegetation similar to neighboring areas. Kueppers found that irrigation can indeed have a significant cooling effect, particularly during the summer months. On average, the mean temperature during August was 3.7°C lower in areas with irrigated crops, and the maximum temperature dropped an average of 7.5°C.

For California as a whole, irrigation swamped the urban heat island effect, and the mean August temperature was on average 0.38°C lower than it would have been without farms. The same effect is likely to occur in any arid region where crops are irrigated, the researchers report in this month's issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

Kueppers, Lara M.; Snyder, Mark A.; Sloan, Lisa C.
Irrigation cooling effect: Regional climate forcing by land-use change
Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 34, No. 3, L03703
10.1029/2006GL028679
07 February 2007

(The authors refer to the global scale of agricultural irrigation and suggest that there has been some "masking" of the full warming signal of greenhouse gas warming, especially on the local scale.)

Mason writes that the findings indicate agriculture may have partially shielded California from global warming over the past 150 years, a period that coincides with the expansion of agriculture in the state. "Maybe things would have warmed much more if there hadn't been irrigation," says climate scientist David Lobell of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. Kueppers' modeling results match Lobell's own observations, which have shown warming for most of the state during the summer, except for areas with irrigated agriculture. This effect could explain why climate models get it wrong in those areas, he says.

But in the future, agriculture won't be expanding in California's expensive real estate market. So, the irrigation effect will likely flatten out while the greenhouse effect continues to intensify.

Use this site to check out the current humidity and other weather related conditions, as they show a relativity map on their site. Summer or agricultural growing season is the best time of year to look to this site for any agricultural anomalies to the cooling of agriculture.

http://www.usairnet.com/weather/maps/current/california/relative-humidity/

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[Okay. Granting the report shows that irrigation and farming have worked effectively as a "large evaporative air conditioner"(a swamper), and this has helped keep California "cool," how much "agriculture" would be necessary to offset what CO2 California drives into the atmosphere? After all, the evaporative cooling from agriculture might not be necessary to evaluate if it were not suspected that the temperature rise caused by greenhouse gas emission into the atmosphere was being masked by the irrigation in farming and plant transpiration. So, is there a point where currently practiced agriculture and irrigation might be able help with the cooling and remove carbon California has contributed to the air?]
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[Image US EPA]

In a study published last year by the Ecological Society of America (2006)California agricultural carbon sequestration for 21 years (1980-2000) was modeled and calculated:

"CARBON SEQUESTRATION IN CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURE, 1980–2000"

By David A. Kroodsma and Christopher B. Fielda

Kroodsma and Fielda report that on the 8.896 million acres of farmland in California, by combining the CASA (Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach) with models using harvest indices and yields, they calculated the carbon sequestration for California Agricultural soils. Over a 21-year period, they state, two agricultural changes caused an increase of 20% in plant biomass sequestered in the soil.

Kroodsma and Fielda found:

Carbon Sequestration:

Change of 741,300 acres of "field cropland" turned to orchards and vineyards increasing soil carbon.

Land switched from annual crops to vineyards sequestered 68 g C/m2 year.
Land that switched from annual crops to orchards sequestered 85 g C/m2 year.
Rice fields, because of a reduction in field burning, sequestered 55 g C/m2 year.(1990s)
Non-rice annual cropland sequestered the least, with the amount 9 g C/m2 year

Their model estimated California's agriculture sequestered an average 19 g C/m2 year.

Over the period, California's 8.896 million acres of farmland sequestered:

-11.0 Tg C within soils
--3.5 Tg C within woody types biomass
14.5 Tg C Total biomass Carbon sequestration.

[This is equal to 0.7% of the state's total fossil fuel emissions of 2070 Tg C over the same time period. That is 2070 million metric tons of carbon emissions -- and this is 7595 million metric tons of CO2, 7.6 billion metric tons in gaseous form. Realize that is a 21-year summation of pollutant emissions, so in an average year of that 21-year period, California does 362 million tons of CO2.

Kroodsma and Fielda conclude that if California's agricultural community adopted conservation tillage, and changed management of almond and walnut prunings, used all orchard and vineyard waste wood in biomass power plants in the state, California's agriculture could offset up to 1.6% of the fossil fuel emissions in the state.

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Doesn't sound like much, does it? But this sequestration by growth is one of the few tools nature has to work with in removing the carbon from the air. If nearly 9 million acres of perfect agriculture could be practiced in California sequestration how large would the area of farming need to be to absorb and sequester the emission output of the state?

It turns out to be 868,750 square miles -- an area 5.6 times as large as California, covered with conservation tillage kinds of crops. To recycle the carbon California puts into the air; to take it out of the air by photosynthesis -- requires an area 13 times the size of Florida.

If not Ag, what? The oceans do much but not all of the current work, and we are still seeing an increase; we never have seen 380 ppm in 650,000 years. (We have been around that long, you know, not very prominently, however.)

If all untamed wild and unfarmed land, wildernesses and all were brought under command of the carbon sequestration mandate plants are already under to a degree, do you suppose California could cover all the stuff pumped into the air from driving, automobiles? Not with Ag of course, but GM and the design of the perfect "California Environmental-Green Plant."

CALIFORNIA ENVIRONMENTAL-GREEN PLANT (design goals)

It runs on sunlight. (check)
It is efficient, withstanding drought. (check)
it is efficient at storing C. (check)
It must be designed for the long term. (? check?)
It's root's core are lignum vitae; trunk, and branches, from cambium to cambium, also lignum vitae (ironwood). (???ck ????)

Also a version for biomass power plant. (? ck ?)

Solar cells are getting better, but they do not sequester carbon. The hypothetical GM plant above does. Energy via sunlight limits aspects of volume capacity.

Nuclear is an option. The French took Westinghouse reactors and built 58 or 59 and pay attention to problems and are designing new and better reactors with a good record. They are working on the spent fuel, researching ways to use the spent fuel. No. It does not sequester Carbon either. But with enough energy, Carbon can be sucked out and solidified and stored 10,000 feet deep in the ocean. (Or separated into soot carbon black, separated from O2 and stored in fireproof oxygen free prisons. Immense cost. Those industries whose products released these greenhouse gases should get to pay a significant portion of the cost to recapture and sequester.)

Agriculture and green is just a slow tool. Any one recall the Carboniferous?

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In 2005, the US emitted over 8.130 billion tons of CO2.

Worldwide, the total emissions were over 30.0 trillion kilograms of CO2. That is, the US emitted 8.130 / 30.0 x 100% = 27.1 % of the total CO2 emissions. That is 8.13 billion tons of carbon dioxide divided over 300 million people, and that is 27.1 "tons!" for each person. That is: 5% of the worlds population produces more than a quarter of the pollution.

Most people do not realize that 380 ppm CO2(and climbing) is going to take "agriculture" and biomass woody plants, trees, forests; and ocean CO2 absorption much more than a thousand years to recover the climate to an ecologically natural state . . . if we were to instantly STOP CO2 emissions. . . . By then, with ocean waters rising at 2.5 to 4 mm per year, so 25 to 40 meters rise. . . if you live near or on the coast you will look back at the historical idiocy of a nation that led the world, through corporations and profit motive to the destruction and extinction of so many life forms that you might wonder you share their genes, and mentality. . .