Thanks for citing my post. I couldn't find it on the linkyou gave, so here it is for anyone else who can't find it.

Time to Master the Carbon Cycle

Man has been controlling the carbon cycle , and there for the weather, since the invention of agriculture, all be it was as unintentional, as our current airliner contrails are in affecting global dimming. This unintentional warm stability in climate has over 10,000 years, allowed us to develop to the point that now we know what we did,............ and that now......... we are over doing it.

The prehistoric and historic records gives a logical thrust for soil carbon sequestration.
I wonder what the soil biome carbon concentration was REALLY like before the cutting and burning of the world's virgin forest, my guess is that now we see a severely diminished community, and that only very recent Ag practices like no-till and reforestation have started to help rebuild it. It makes implementing Terra Preta soil technology like an act of penitence, a returning of the misplaced carbon.

Energy, the carbon cycle and greenhouse gas management
http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Fora%20Input/CCC2006/Energy%20Paper%2006_05.htm

On the Scale of CO2 remediation:

It is my understanding that atmospheric CO2 stands at 379 PPM, to stabilize the climate we need to reduce it to 350 PPM by the removal of 230 Billion tons.

The best estimates I've found are that the total loss of forest and soil carbon (combined
pre-industrial and industrial) has been about 200-240 billion tons. Of
that, the soils are estimated to account for about 1/3, and the vegetation
the other 2/3.

Since man controls 24 billion tons in his agriculture then it seems we have plenty to work with in sequestering our fossil fuel co2 emissions as charcoal.

As Dr. Lehmann at Cornell points out, "Closed-Loop Pyrolysis systems such as Dr. Danny Day's are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative". and that " a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year-an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions! "
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/l...ochar_home.htm

Terra Preta Soils Technology: Carbon Negative Bio fuels and 3X Fertility Too

This new soil technology speaks to so many different interests and disciplines that it has not been embraced fully by any. I'm sure you will see both the potential of this system and the convergence needed for it's implementation.

The integrated energy strategy offered by Charcoal based Terra Preta Soil technology may
provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, other than nuclear power.

The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place:

Terra Preta soils I feel has great possibilities to revolutionize sustainable agriculture into a major CO2 sequestration strategy.
I thought, I first read about these soils in " Botany of Desire " or "Guns,Germs,&Steel" but I could not find reference to them. I finely found the reference in Charles Mann's "1491", but I did not realize their potential .

I have heard that National Geographic is preparing a big Terra Preta (TP) article.

Nature article: Putting the carbon back Black is the new green:
http://bestenergies.com/downloads/naturemag_200604.pdf

Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/Biochar_home.htm

This Earth Science Forum thread on these soils contains further links, and has been viewed by 13,000 folks. ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-terra-preta.html

Terra Preta Discussion , central data base, and Mail list : http://info.bioenergylists.org/?q=about

There is an ecology going on in these soils that is not completely understood, and if replicated and applied at scale would have multiple benefits for farmers and environmentalist.

Terra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.

Here is a great article that high lights this pyrolysis process , ( http://www.eprida.com/hydro/ ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 , Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.
Soil erosion, energy scarcity, excess greenhouse gas all answered through regenerative carbon management http://www.newfarm.org/columns/research_paul/2006/0106/charcoal.shtml

All the Bio-Char Companies and equipment manufactures I've found:

Carbon Diversion
http://www.carbondiversion.com/

Eprida: Sustainable Solutions for Global Concerns
http://www.eprida.com/home/index.php4

BEST Pyrolysis, Inc. | Slow Pyrolysis - Biomass - Clean Energy - Renewable Ene
http://www.bestenergies.com/companies/bestpyrolysis.html

Dynamotive Energy Systems | The Evolution of Energy
http://www.dynamotive.com/

Ensyn - Environmentally Friendly Energy and Chemicals
http://www.ensyn.com/who/ensyn.htm

Agri-Therm, developing bio oils from agricultural waste
http://www.agri-therm.com/

Advanced BioRefinery Inc.
http://www.advbiorefineryinc.ca/

Technology Review: Turning Slash into Cash
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17298/

Korea:
International K&K Enterprise Others
http://www.alibaba.com/company/10406050.html#companyprofile

The upcoming International Agrichar Initiative (IAI) conference to be held at Terrigal, NSW, Australia in 2007. ( http://iaiconference.org/home.html )
.

If pre-Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.

Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of EROEI for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.

We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.

I feel Terra Preta soil technology is the greatest of Ironies.
That is: an invention of pre-Columbian American culture, destroyed by western disease, may well be the savior of industrial western society.

Thanks,
Erich

Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar at aol.com
(540) 289-9750

To answer your question, No, geo-engineering is not the answer to global climate change.

Why do I say this? Well there are a number of reasons it will not work.

Firstly, it is wrong to assume that the only harmful effect of increasing CO2 levels is a rise in global temperature. That is only one of the effects. Just as much of a concern is the increasing acidity of the oceans as more CO2 dissolves thus lowering the pH and inhibiting many of the key organisms at the foot of the food chain.

Secondly, there is no good evidence that higher levels of CO2 will be beneficial to plants. Many field experiments contradict growth chamber experiments and show that higher levels may in fact have deleterious effects on some key plants.

Thirdly, how much will this cost and who will pay for it? What happens when people get tired of firing ever-increasing amounts of sulphate aerosols or whatever into the atmosphere and it is stopped or curtailed? Temperatures will take one major increase on cessation of the experiment.

No, if CO2 is a problem, and I sincerely believe it is, then the answer is to reduce the amount being put into the atmosphere not trying to mask its effects.

I am pleased that Richard Littlemore has chosen to take the dynamic approach to the challenge I was issuing and truly hope that this can be the start of a new period of the climate change movement not being on the defensive against hypocritical or ill-informed ‘sceptics’.

Indeed my hope is that they can be removed from the debate entirely so that the new debate can become the real debate: i.e. a debate between climate change activists and scientists and “conspiracy theorists” about whether geoengineering should be banned or legalized. The very existence of this terrible debate will be evidence of the delusionary thinking of the ‘sceptics’ and hopefully enough to awe them into silence.

.

But I am not too happy about Richard Littlemore choosing, perhaps as a form of revenge for the sharp tone I adopted with him, to represent me as an ADVOCATE of the geoengineering “solution”. What I advocate is an end to self-defeating hypocrisy and the opening up of a debate that should have been public from the beginning. Doubtless one of the reasons it has not been is because of the involvement of Cold War leftovers from the heyday of the superpower nuclear arms race, such as the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, themselves responsible for a huge proportion of the damage that these techniques are purportedly, among other things, meant to ‘rectify’. People with guilty consciences are not those to whom the ‘solutions’ to these problems, if they exist, should be left.

The idea of weather modidction is totally foolish! How dare we think we can use chemicals, HAARP technology or other half brained schemes to fix the problem we created. If we were truly smart we would never be in this situtation~!

The question Richard Littlemore should be asking is ‘whether humans have the stomach and discipline for to get off the fossil fuels and stop their self distructive behavior so we dont have to even consider the crazy concept of weather modification’.

We have already caused so much damage. Why is it so hard for people to give up the old fashoned burning of fossil fuels? There is no guarantee that we can fix this mess with weather modification.

How have we become so arrogant to think we are smart enough to use weather modidication to fix the problem that we were so stupit to creat int eh first place. By our track record we have screwed more things up than we have ever fixed/helped. It is only humans who are so self-rightous to think we are smarter than monther nature and that we are so smart. Lets look at our track record for a moment and any fool can see that humans have caused more damamge and suffering to the enviormant and living things than we have helped.

It is time to put the oil industry in its place and get off the fossil fuel drug! So the question Richard Littlemore should be asking is ‘whether humans have the stomach and discipline for to get off the fossil fuels and stop their self distructive behavior so we dont have to even consider the crazy concept of weather modification’.

My hope is that some day soon we will respect the enviorment and other living creatures enough to put our selfish desires for gas burning cars and plastics the aside and do what is right for all living things to coexisit. Humans are not smarter than other living things just stronger than most.

Might does not equal right~

Richard Littlemore says that we “are right about one thing. We should be talking about it.”

It was in this context that when Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-Prize winning atmospheric chemist who has worked on the problem of the damaged ozone layer, made his intervention last summer proposing the spraying of sulphates in the stratosphere to mitigate global warming, our group in Athens, Greece approached the Hellenic-American Union in Athens to propose the organization of an international video conference including Crutzen and the American agricultural activist Rosalind Peterson, who has researched the effects on the environment of activities that may well be explicable as “geoengineering”.

The Hellenic-American Union agreed in principle to the idea of the videoconference, on the proviso that both participants agreed to participate. Rosalind Peterson accepted, but Paul Crutzen, in a telephone conversation with him at the Max-Planck institute in Germany, said that he was too busy to be able to participate. When asked to delegate someone to speak on his behalf he said that he spoke for himself.

Science is a collective enterprise and I think it is reasonable to say that scientists working in institutes do not only ‘speak for themselves’ when they publish their findings.

It would greatly help the project of ‘talking about’ geoengineering if this debate between Paul Crutzen and Rosalind Peterson could take place. Paul Crutzen said in the much-discussed article he published last summer that it is important for scientists making proposals such as his to ‘gain the trust of the public’. If this is something that is really desired then the representatives of ‘the public’ with whom debate is carried out should be the best informed, with the coolest heads, not people who persist in stances either of politically orchestrated denial or of hysterical rejection, as if these terrible issues can be exorcised through hand-wringing and mea culpas about the human race.

Paul Crutzen can be contacted at the Max Planck Institute for anyone who wants to try to persuade him to change his mind about the debate with Rosalind Peterson (why doesn’t Richard Littlemore try, for example?)

And http://www.holmestead.ca/chemtrails/nbc-toxicsky.html >this link is a good starting point for learning about Rosalind Peterson.

It is interesting to keep in mind that a stated purpose of the U.S. Military is to “control the weather by 2025” The timing of the IPCC report, the upcoming piece on the Discovery channel on “chemical trails” feb. 8th, and the stated preference of bush to develop geoengineering rather than energy conservation all plays into the hands of the military industrial complex. Billions, trillions into the coffers of the M.I.C. while they develop and weaponize the weather for their own ends. we shall be terrified into embracing those strange configurations that obliterate our skies, kill our trees, our kids and us.