Cool Yourself, Your Neighborhood, and the Planet with the Water-Harvesting Soil-Carbon Sponge

The clouds created by the process described above are very different from haze, which is created by water vapor collecting around airborne dust particles, aerosols, and pollutants. Heat reflected off the earth’s surface up into the air is reflected back down to the earth’s surface by haze—the planet-heating greenhouse effect. Haze does not generate rain, so haze lingers much longer, and unlike clouds, which disperse after a storm enabling rising heat to escape to space (especially felt at night), haze does not disperse, but instead continues to trap heat in the atmosphere.

As Peter Donovan states in his essay “Recognizing the Soil Sponge,”

“Deforestation, fire, and agriculture have tended to move landscapes leftward (figure 1), baring soil, increasing fine dust particles that nucleate haze but not rain, planting short-season annuals, shortening the length of the green season and the sugary plant root exudates that feed soil porosity and aggregation. Bare soil heats up, radiates, and some of this heat is re-radiated back from greenhouse gases. Regular fire or tillage bares soil and prevents the soil carbon sponge from developing. High-pressure domes over large expanses of hot bare ground repel rain. These landscapes multiply heat and aridity.

On the right (figure 1), the formation of high-albedo rain clouds from abundant transpiration with bacterial precipitation nuclei helps recycle water locally, while the pressure drop from large-scale condensation drives the biotic pump, which brings in moist air from the oceans. When the clouds clear, heat can escape. Abundant plants harvest atmospheric moisture as dew (figure 2). More solar energy is dissipated upwards by transpiration, and less by sensible heat [heat that changes temperature]. These landscapes multiply rainfall and cooling…

…Carbon embodies the solar-powered circle of life, the great biogeochemical carbon cycle powered by photosynthesis and governed by the metabolisms and choices of zillions of self-motivated living organisms, most of them microbes. Though the work of carbon cycling is tiny compared to the work of water cycling, carbon cycling wields enormous leverage with its complex and transformational chemistry, leading to a coupled carbon and water cycling that governs the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing long wave radiation. In the soil, the decomposition of living things forms the soil-carbon sponge, which can resiliently sustain plant life, affect the earth’s hydrology and heat balance, and may give humans the near-term leverage we need to avert catastrophic climate change, restore hydrologic function, maintain our economies and civilizations, and maintain and enhance human health.”4