Carbon

Let’s Take Another Look at John Talberth’s Street Roots Interview: Guest Post by Rob Freres

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(This is from Steve Wilent) Smokey Wire folks, I received an op-ed from Rob Freres, president of Freres Lumber Co. in Oregon, in response to our discussion. It’s long, but worth a read — and a comment or two. A friend had forwarded an email with part of our discussion to Mr. Freres. I invited him to join us and participate in this and other posts. I hope he’ll do so. The more viewpoints the better.

Let’s Take Another Look at John Talberth’s Street Roots Interview
By Rob Freres

Matthew Koehler recently shared a Street Roots News interview with the Center for Sustainable Economy’s John Talberth. The interview reveals the core arguments coming from the fringe of the environmental movement, that is: 1) nobody should make a dime in federal forest management; 2) new taxes and policies are needed to make private forest management unprofitable; and 3) taxpayer subsidies will be necessary once public and private forest management both become unprofitable.

Forestry is a big business. So is environmentalism. The environmental activist industry supports hundreds of well-funded and well-staffed organizations. These self-described “think tanks” and “watchdogs” are subsidized through preferential tax policies, and supported by deep pocketed foundations and millionaire “do-gooders,” and tax-sheltering benefactors – not to mention outdoor retailers that manufacture products overseas with non-renewable materials and questionable labor practices. Federal forest management alone has created a cottage industry as environmental litigation transfers millions of tax dollars to groups through the Equal Access to Justice Act. With so much competition in the industry, it’s hard to blame Talberth for producing provocative “research” that seeks attention, stirs controversy, and attracts funding.

Savvy environmentalists like Talberth understand Americans are wary of corporations, and are now especially sensitive to the influence of foreign actors in domestic affairs. That’s why Talberth expresses alarm over the ownership of industrial forestlands, and in particular the “growing share” of “foreign investors and foreign companies.” Talberth cites a USDA Farm Service Agency report indicating 555,134 forested acres in Oregon are foreign-held, though the report doesn’t delineate how much of that land is used for industrial timber production. To put this number in perspective, that’s just five percent of the 9.4 million acres of Oregon forests that are privately managed, and just a tenth of one percent of Oregon’s total forested land base.

The federal government owns 60 percent of Oregon’s forested land base and pays no property taxes. Large private landowners own 22 percent of the forests and pay a variety of taxes, so do the over 100,000 small private land owners who own and manage their own forests.

Talberth also understands Americans are increasingly concerned about climate change. He and others are aggressively pushing a narrative that “big timber” is a top carbon emitter, even surpassing the transportation sector. Every article and interview pushing this narrative cites research that has long been picked apart. Such agenda-driven science, perhaps more accurately described as “political science,” often doesn’t account for 1) the carbon that is stored in manufactured wood products (such as the wood in your home); 2) the replanting of trees after harvest (a legal requirement in the state of Oregon where more trees are planted than harvested); 3) the rate of carbon sequestration of young forests (a point that was intentionally and completely neglected by the infamous Bev Law “study”); and most commonly 4) “leakage,” where reduced timber harvests in the United States would simply be replaced by timber harvests in Canada, Asia, South American, and elsewhere.

Talberth, an economist by training, is familiar – or at least should be familiar – with the concept of elasticity of supply and demand. “Stopping” timber harvests on federal lands does not diminish worldwide demand for wood products. It would only change where the wood comes from. And there is never any recognition of the carbon emissions from catastrophic wildfires that often burn through unmanaged, overstocked and insect-infested stands on federally-owned forests. There are now national forests in the Rocky Mountain states that are carbon emitters exactly because management has been neglected and forest mortality exceeds forest growth.

Who really benefits from Mr. Talberth’s anti-forestry agenda? Aside from environmental organizations, the prime benefactors are the concrete and steel industries that emit far more carbon emissions than the forest sector. Foreign actors would only benefit from the transfer of America’s technological, engineering, science, and efficiency advantages – and the manufacturing and domestic jobs they support – to countries with less restrictive conservation laws and regulations. Once logs are no longer exported from North America, the fiber will be logged in other countries, such as the Amazon rainforest where loggers do not operate under strict regulations and environmental safeguards. Some members of Congress have sought to bring attention to the influence of foreign actors on the environmental movement itself. Maybe they’re on to something.

Since the 1990s “zero cut” activists have also pushed studies questioning “logging subsidies” on National Forest System lands. Talberth’s latest “report” doesn’t offer anything new and hasn’t gained much traction as Republicans and Democrats alike seek to accelerate forest management activities on federal lands. Just like agenda-driven studies on carbon emissions, it simply cherry picks data, and conveniently ignores variables relating to log markets and the economics of harvesting timber under the current process. In reality, federal timber purchasers have paid over $1.1 Billion for National Forest System timber since 2011, which by law is used to enhance resources on National Forest System lands, ensure reforestation, and provide safe ongoing access to fire suppression, recreational use, and future management. A portion of these logging revenues have also helped build and sustain rural communities and essential public services like law enforcement, education, and transportation for more than a century.

Talberth objects “to the very idea of using federal forest lands for private profit.” He must be referring to timber, because the recreation industry generates billions of dollars in profit off of utilizing these lands. Of course this statement ignores that fact that national forests, unlike national parks, were always intended to be managed for many purposes— timber, recreation, grazing, wildlife, fish and more. In some ways, environmental organizations have succeeded in making forestry on national forests unprofitable. This is especially true in the Southwest, where there is little forest infrastructure left to implement federal restoration projects that reduce wildfire risks, enhance wildlife habitat and protect watersheds. Just ask Arizona, which faces severe forest health and wildfire threats but does not have the infrastructure or workforce to complete the necessary work.

For an economist, Talberth betrays a misunderstanding of forest economics. He also misunderstands the science of forestry by proposing one-size-fits-all prescriptions, which make little sense across different forest types with different tree species. Variable density thinning may make sense in accomplishing specific objectives on certain forest types. But arbitrarily restricting the use of forestry tools and methods only leads to unintended consequences, in some cases the conversion of forests to shrublands, and in others the dominance of species that are less resilient to disturbances. Who would you trust to provide you with good information about how to manage a forest: a professionally trained and certified forester, or an economist and professional activist?

There are a lot of other things that Talberth gets wrong. For example, in attacking industrial landowners for receiving “tax exemptions” for road building and equipment, he misses the fact that most landowners do not own and operate their equipment. Logging and road-building equipment is most often owned and operated by small contractors, and accounting for tax depreciation often determines whether the contractor stays in operation or shuts down entirely. The tax policies that Talberth is proposing would only serve to destroy the small businesses that harvest and transport the wood, but maybe that’s his objective anyway.

Oregon’s system of taxing forestland and timber has evolved over the state’s history, and today is based on progressive property tax and forest practice laws that recognize different forest types, geographic areas, ownerships and forest management objectives. The “special rates” Talberth mentions were developed because past tax policies only served to encourage the liquidation of forest resources and the conversion of forest lands to other users. Private landowners also receive no compensation for the vast amounts of carbon stored on their lands, for opening their lands to the public for hunting and recreational purposes, or for often being the first line of defense for catastrophic wildfires exploding on public lands. Would Talberth suggest the public should pay landowners for these services and benefits?

HB 2659, which Talberth proposed in the Oregon legislature, likely failed to get traction because it would only increase the tax burden on small woodlands owner while repealing exemptions that promote the use of more modern and environmentally-sensitive logging equipment. Such poorly-written tax law would encourage lawsuits, create chaos in land taxation and assessment, impose costly red tape and- once again- encourage the liquidation and conversion of forest lands.

In the face of climate change, we should be pursuing solutions that maximize the carbon-sequestering potential of forests. We would agree with Talbert on that goal, but eliminating private enterprise from American forestry through illogical tax and regulatory policies would result in the opposite effect. America’s forest products industry is the green infrastructure that already supports thousands of “New Green Deal” type jobs that Mr. Talberth says he’s after. Attacking the forest products industry may be good for his business, but Talberth is targeting the very people who keep forests as forests, and are constantly innovating through modern science and technology to tackle some of our greatest social, economic, and environmental challenges. No amount of government subsidy can replace private enterprise.

Rob Freres is President of Freres Lumber Co., an Oregon-based premier wood products manufacturing company dedicated to bringing innovative, high-quality and environmentally sound wood products to market. The company’s operations support more than 450 employees.

Midwest timber wars revisited

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For the first time in nearly three decades, the Shawnee National Forest in Illinois has proposed a commercial timber harvest of mostly native oaks and hickories. And environmental activists whose high-profile fight against logging in the 1990s led to a 17-year moratorium are once again raising alarms.

Lisa Helmig, acting forest supervisor with the Shawnee National Forest, said the plan is rooted in the best available science about how to maintain the keystone oak ecosystem that is native to the Shawnee foothills.  “The oak ecosystem has been in place here in the central hardwood region for 5,000 years,” she said. But Helmig said the ecosystem is at risk due to a lack of natural or man-made disturbances, such as fire, storms and, yes, even logging. Without these disturbances, non-native, shade-tolerant sugar maple and beech trees sprout up and fill in the forest’s midstory, she said.

The activists have filed an objection, based largely on their past experience with timber harvest on the Forest.

The trees that have grown up to replace the harvested oaks and hickories are mostly 28-year-old stands of “undesirable” beeches and maples.  “When you think about how many oaks were here, it’s heart-wrenching,” Wallace said “Had they not cut the oaks, we’d have oaks here,” Stearns added. In addition to the Farview site, in their letter they write that we also returned to the North End Ecological Restoration project logged in Pope County in the late 1990s. “Little to no oak and hickory have been visibly restored.” They cited other examples, as well.

This is the root of their concern: What the Shawnee National Forest’s leadership claims is happening isn’t.

Asked about their concerns, Helmig said that her “gut reaction” is that the Forest Service likely didn’t follow through with what should be a multiphase treatment. Helmig said she’s confident that the Forest Service is committed to seeing (this) project through… “We have a wonderful silviculturist on staff now,” Helmig said. “He’s been here five years and is absolutely fantastic.”

Hopefully we can assume that there has been a science-based determination that ecological integrity requires regenerating some young oaks and hickories.  But implementation unfortunately still boils down to “trust us,” and “we’re different now.”   (But then the Forest evicted the media from the objection meeting, wrongly according to the Washington Office.)

Wood Pellets, Southern Forests, and Bottomland Hardwoods

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Enviva’s wood pellet production plant in Ahoskie, N.C., is booming because of the European Union’s aggressive renewable and low-carbon policies. Wood pellets are co-fired with coal to lower the carbon footprint of electricity. Photo: Enviva.

This is a follow up to a previous discussion about wood chips and the Southeast, including “logging and draining wetlands”. I found an interesting article from TreeSource. The author is Marcus Kauffman of the Oregon Department of Forestry. There’s quite a bit about the carbon angle and how that relates to wood pellets from the SE.

The author quotes Dr. Bob Abt of NC State:

A growing body of research shows that using low-value trees for bioenergy drives up the value of forested ground, which leads to increases in forest cover. Call it the price effect – or the classic principles of supply and demand at work.

“It’s the fact that when you’re increasing prices to landowners, that kicks in all the benefits that you need on the carbon side,” Abt said. “When prices go up, forestry becomes more profitable and there’s actually more trees on the landscape because of that extra demand.”

Abt explained that marginal land in the South fluctuates between agriculture and forestry. Landowners seek the use that will yield the best return.

The South has a long history where as demand increases for wood, forest land increases and with it intensive management, said Abt. “It’s been empirically shown in the South that increased demand for trees leads to more trees on the landscape.”

But then the article talks about the possibility of cutting trees where they otherwise wouldn’t be cut, in sensitive areas:

But does the price effect cut both ways? Do higher prices push ecologically sensitive lands to market when they would be better off left intact? Demand for wood pellets can lead to increased forest cover, but can it also lead to the destruction of valuable habitat?

That is the critique leveled by environmental groups concerned with protecting the Southeast’s bottomland hardwood forest, a unique forest type valued for its beauty and biodiversity.

“Intact bottomland hardwood forests are really cool,” said Amanda Mahaffey, Northeast region director for the Forest Stewards Guild. “They’re just beautiful primeval systems when they’re intact. When you lose them, then that’s really different. It’s a different visceral effect than harvesting a pine plantation.”

According to information provided by Enviva, in the first half of 2017 bottomland hardwood forests provided just 3 percent of the company’s supply. The remainder came from pine/hardwood forests (38 percent), southern yellow pine forests (31 percent), mill residuals (sawdust, shavings and chips) 21 percent, 6 percent from upland hardwood forests and less than 1 percent from arboricultural sources (urban tree trimming).

In response to concerns from environmental critics, Enviva partnered with a broad range of stakeholders to convene the Bottomland Hardwood Task Force and charged it with implementing ways to improve its sourcing from bottomland forests.

“I think Enviva was looking to improve their understanding,” said Mahaffey. “How could they be better forest stewards and help to sustain the resource while they are extracting from it? They are in it for good. They’re trying to sustain a renewable resource and lower the overall carbon output.”

For Enviva, the task force shifted the company’s procurement process from macro to micro – enabling managers to make better decisions about where to source raw materials and how to protect sensitive lands.

“As we evolve, we’ve moved from a macro-policy of simply avoiding sensitive lands to a much more micro-controlled process – land by land, tract by tract, GPS coordinate by GPS coordinate strategy to ensure we can actually influence outcomes,” said Meth, the vice president at Enviva. “We go to the micro-level [with the landowners] and sometimes we find areas that are literally along the river. The best outcome is not to harvest those lands and provide compensation to the landowner.”

The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities helped Enviva identify which sensitive bottomlands should be taken out of production via a conservation easement.

“For me personally, when you realize there’s a gap you are obligated to take a leadership position,” Meth said. “We have been heavily scrutinized and we intend to stay in those areas a long time. As leaders in the industry, we needed to bring people together and seek the knowledge that will create better outcomes.”

The company launched the Enviva Forest Conservation Fund in December 2015. During the first two years of the partnership, the fund committed $1 million to seven projects that, when completed, will protect 10,500 acres of sensitive wetland forest and other valuable habitats.

Clearly, forests and wood energy are playing important roles in our low-carbon future.

IPCC and Sustainable Forest Management

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The IPCC’s “Summary for Policy Makers” of its “Climate Change and Land” may offer guidance to the USFS and other forest managers:

B 5. Sustainable land management, including sustainable forest management, can prevent and reduce land degradation, maintain land productivity, and sometimes reverse the adverse impacts of climate change on land degradation (very high confidence). It can also contribute to mitigation and adaptation (high confidence). Reducing and reversing land degradation, at scales from individual farms to entire watersheds, can provide cost effective, immediate, and long-term benefits to communities and support several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with co-benefits for adaptation (very high confidence) and mitigation (high confidence). Even with implementation of sustainable land management, limits to adaptation can be exceeded in some situations (medium confidence). {1.3.2, 4.1.5, 4.8, Table 4.2}  [Emphasis IPCC]

 …

 B5.3. Reducing deforestation and forest degradation lowers GHG emissions (high confidence), with an estimated technical mitigation potential of 0.4–5.8 GtCO yr. By providing long-term livelihoods for communities, sustainable forest management can reduce the extent of forest conversion to non-forest uses (e.g., cropland or settlements) (high confidence). Sustainable forest management aimed at providing timber, fibre, biomass, non-timber resources and other ecosystem functions and services, can lower GHG emissions and can contribute to adaptation. (high confidence). {2.6.1.2, 4.1.5, 4.3.2, 4.5.3, 4.8.1.3, 4.8.3, 4.8.4}

B5.4. Sustainable forest management can maintain or enhance forest carbon stocks, and can maintain forest carbon sinks, including by transferring carbon to wood products, thus addressing the issue of sink saturation (high confidence). Where wood carbon is transferred to harvested wood products, these can store carbon over the long-term and can substitute for emissions-intensive materials reducing emissions in other sectors (high confidence). Where biomass is used for energy, e.g., as a mitigation strategy, the carbon is released back into the atmosphere more quickly (high confidence). {2.6.1, 2.7, 4.1.5, 4.8.4, 6.4.1, Figure SPM.3, Cross- Chapter Box 7 in Chapter 6}

 

Research: eastern forest old growth more resilient to climate change

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“Analyzing large amounts of field data from 18,500 forest plots – from Minnesota to Maine, and Manitoba to Nova Scotia – the study identifies priority regions for forest climate adaption efforts.”

A study funded by the Forest Service found that older forests in eastern North America are less vulnerable to climate change than younger forests in terms of the sensitivity of carbon storage, timber volume and species richness.  From the abstract (linked to this news release):

We found the strongest association among the investigated ESB indicators (ecosystem services and biodiversity) in old forests (>170 years). These forests simultaneously support high levels of carbon storage, timber growth, and species richness. Older forests also exhibit low climate sensitivity of associations among ESB indicators as compared to younger forests. While regions with a currently low combined ESB performance benefitted from climate change, regions with a high ESB performance were particularly vulnerable to climate change. In particular, climate sensitivity was highest east and southeast of the Great Lakes, signaling potential priority areas for adaptive management. Our findings suggest that strategies aimed at enhancing the representation of older forest conditions at landscape scales will help sustain ESB in a changing world.

Some of this sounds a little contradictory (maybe someone with more expertise and/or who reads the full article could explain), and I wonder if it has any application at all to more fire-prone forests.  But it is a different way of looking at climate change adaptation that could be incorporated into forest planning.

New Technology Grants: 79 Mill from DOE, Including Improving Wood Heating

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What NOT to do in fire country.

 

Whatever the  color of the Administration, the relatively obscure  wheels of scientific research and development continue along well-worn paths (whether the wording of the day is “low carbon” or “affordable, reliable and secure”). As I recall from my time in R&D, scientists readily change the title, and perhaps some introductory paragraphs, and voila! Thanks to the Forest Business Network for this link.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is providing up to $79 million in funding for bioenergy research and development including biofuels, bioproducts, and biopower. This funding supports DOE’s goal of providing consumers and businesses with a range of domestic energy options that are affordable, reliable, and secure.

Topics areas for the biofuel funding opportunity include the following:

  • Cultivation Intensification Processes for Algae: Develop technologies for outdoor algae systems that increase the harvest yield, reliability and quality of algae.
  • Biomass Component Variability and Feedstock Conversion Interface: Research to lower the cost and improve the reliability of biomass handling and preprocessing.
  • Efficient Wood Heaters: Develop technologies to reduce emissions and increase efficiency of wood heaters for residential heating.
  • Systems Research of Hydrocarbon Biofuel Technologies: Integrate new technologies and processes in experimental prototype systems to improve and verify real-world performance and lower the cost of drop-in biofuels.
  • Optimization of Biomass-Derived Jet Fuel Blends: Identify and develop cost-competitive drop-in renewable jet fuel with improved energy density and lower particulate matter emissions.
  • Renewable Energy from Urban and Suburban Wastes: Support academic research and educational programs that focus on strategies to produce bioenergy and bioproducts from urban and suburban waste feedstocks.
  • Advanced Bioprocessing and Agile BioFoundry: Reduce the time and cost of developing biological processes for biomanufacturing fuels and products through the use of synthetic biology, low capital intensity methods, and continuous production systems.
  • Plastics in the Circular Carbon Economy: Develop biobased plastics with improved performance and recyclability and lower the cost and energy-intensity of recycling  existing plastics through enhanced degradation.
  • Rethinking Anaerobic Digestion: Develop anaerobic processes or alternative strategies to enhance carbon conversion efficiency and lower costs of smaller scale wet waste systems.
  • Reducing Water, Energy, and Emissions in Bioenergy: Identify biofuels or bioproducts technologies with the greatest potential for reducing water consumption, energy consumption, and/or emissions relative to existing conventional fuels or products.

This FOA also supports the Water Security Grand Challenge, a White House initiated, DOE-led framework to advance transformational technology and innovation to meet the global need for safe, secure, and affordable water. In particular, this funding will support research and development focused on anaerobic digestion, a technology that can help achieve the Grand Challenge’s goal to double resource recovery from municipal wastewater.

 

I particularly like the “wood heaters” project because there are many low-income people already use this as a primary heating source. New cool technologies are cool, of course, but making old uncool but widely used wood heat work better is also important.

Behind the Science Curtain with One Carbon Science Study: III. Journals, Space and the Streetlight Effect

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Structural Problem: Using the Power of Hyperlinks in Scientific Publishing.. or Not.

For those of us who grew up with paper journals, journal article size was circumscribed by paper publishing. Now publishing in journals is online, but complex datasets may well require more “room” to get at how things are calculated and which numbers are used from which data sets. This seems especially true for some kinds of studies that use a variety of other data sets.  Without that clarity, how can reviewers provide adequate peer review?  As Todd Morgan says:

In some ways, I think journal articles can be a really poor way to communicate some of this information/science.  One key reason is space & word count limits. These limits really restrict authors’ abilities to clearly describe their data sources & methods in detail – especially when working with multiple data sets from different sources and/or multiple methods.  And so much of this science related to carbon uses gobs of data from various sources, originally designed to measure different things and then mashes those data up with a bunch of mathematical relationships from other sources.
For example, the Smith et al. 2006 source cited in the CBM article you brought to my attention is a 200-page document with all sorts of tables from other sources and different tables to be used for different data sets when calculating carbon for HWP. And it sources information from several other large documents with data compiled from yet other sources. From the methods presented in the CBM article, I’m not exactly sure which tables & methods the authors used from Smith et al. and I don’t know exactly what TPO data they used, how they included fuelwood, or why they added mill residue…

As Morgan and I were discussing this via email, Chris Woodall, a Forest Service scientist, and one of the authors of the study added:

“This paper was an attempt to bring together very spatially explicit remotely sensed information (a central part of the NASA carbon monitoring systems grant) with information regarding the status and fate of forest carbon, whether ecosystem or HWP.  We encountered serious hurdles trying to attribute gross carbon changes to disturbances agents, whether fire, wind, or logging.  So much so that deriving net change from gross really eluded us resulting in our paper only getting into CBM as opposed to much higher tier journals.  The issue that took the most work was trying to join TPO data (often at the combo county level) with gridded data which led us to developing a host of look up tables to carry our C calculations through. “

Woodall brings up two structural problems:

Structural Problem: NASA Funding and the Scientific Equivalent of the Streetlight Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

NASA has money for carbon monitoring based on remote sensing. Therefore, folks will use remote sensing for carbon monitoring and try to link it to other things that aren’t necessarily measured well by remote sensing. Would the approach have been the same if Agency X had funded proposals to “do the best carbon monitoring possible” and given lots of money to collect new data specifically to answer carbon questions?”

Structural Problem: Not all journals are created equal.
But the public and policymakers don’t have a phone app where you type in the journal and it comes out with a ranking. and what would you do with that information anyway? Also, some folks have had trouble publishing in some of the highest ranked journals (e.g., Nature and Science) if their conclusions don’t fit with certain worldviews, and not necessarily that they used incorrect methods, nor that the results are shaky. So knowing the journal can help you determine how strong the evidence is.. or not. But clearly Chris points out that in this case, the research only made it into a lower tier journal. Does that mean anything to policymakers? Should it?

Behind the Science Curtain with One Carbon Science Study: II. A Simple Suggestion For Improving Peer Review

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I found this in a paper about making bio jet fuel. I’m sure that’s not the original source.

 

Thanks to Matthew for pointing out that all kinds of scientists have conscious and unconscious agendas.  That’s why open QA/QC, collaborative design, public peer review, and other techniques can be so valuable for increasing peoples’ confidence in scientific products.  I think everyone agrees on that.  To that end, let’s talk more about the Harris et al. paper. Remember we are looking at it because I looked at Figure 3 and wondered about carbon emissions due to timber harvesting in Nevada and Southern California, places I thought I knew did not have much going on in the timber harvest biz.

Todd Morgan, whose data was used in the study (without asking him), raises some questions about double-counting emissions from mill residues. Now that’s a pretty technical thing. I can’t tell who is right, and I don’t even know the field well enough to know if there is a reviewer out there who a) knows enough to tell the difference, and b) does not have skin in the game (personality conflicts with authors, and so on), so I could ask that (unbiased) person for their point of view.  To know that, you really have to know the folks in a discipline. In many cases, it’s hard to find people like this willing to do reviews (not paid extra, some credit), let alone write a piece for The Smokey Wire (not paid extra, potentially negative credit).

Nevertheless, there is one very simple thing journal editors could require that would have an enormous positive influence IMHO.  If a paper uses a variety of datasets, I would require a letter from each source a) acknowledging that they were asked for data, b) and a finding or questioning whether their data were used appropriately.  These writeups then would be shared with all reviewers.

If I put on my reviewer hat, I would say “Hey, we can’t do that! We’d spend all our time waiting for people to write up their stuff, and we can’t force them to do that, and besides, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to tell who was right if they disagree.”

I don’t think most non-scientists understand how difficult it is to do quality peer review, nor exactly what peer reviewers do. They don’t (can’t) check data sets or calculations. They mostly see if the right techniques (appear to have been) used, the findings are plausible, and the right citations (the reviewers’ own work ;)),  and conclusions are drawn.  I think the whole biz was easier when I was a young scientist and perhaps disciplines were easier to understand, scientists perhaps tried harder to be objective, there was less emphasis on multidisciplinary big data manipulation studies, and findings were easier to ground truth by observation in the area studied.

You get what you pay for, and no one pays for peer review. I acknowledge that many scientists work their tushes off with little acknowledgement or support in this area, but if anyone really cared about good scientific products, we (society) could do a great deal more to support the quality process.

Here are Morgan’s specific concerns about mill residues in the paper:

“I’m skeptical of the methods that have led to such high proportions of carbon loss attributable to harvest (Table 5) – particularly in several western states.
One major concern I have is how/why mill residues seem to be counted twice.  My understanding of the Smith et al [31] publication is that mill residue (e.g., sawdust, etc) from processing timber products (e.g.,sawlogs) into primary products (e.g., lumber) is accounted for in the sequestered vs. emitted fractions for each product.  For example, we see that about 40% of the sawlog volume (in figure 6) is emitted, 40% is landfill, and 20% is in-use.  SO, adding mill residue is essentially double-counting the carbon emissions and sequestration associated with the wood harvested for products. Since the authors assume dispositions for mill residues which show 80-90% emitted (Figure 6), it looks to me like double counting of mill residue is causing much higher amounts of emitted carbon (loss) from harvesting.”

If you had reviewed the paper, wouldn’t you want to see the authors’ answer to this question? And perhaps involve Smith et al. in the discussion?

Validated Science versus Unproven Scientific Hypothesis – Which One Should We Choose?

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In a 6/13/18 article, David Atkins provides a critique of the assumptions behind the Law et al article titled: “Land use strategies to mitigate climate change in carbon dense temperate forests” and shows how hypothetical science can and has been used, without any caveat, to provide some groups with slogans that meet their messaging needs instead of waiting for validation of the hypothesis and thereby considering the holistic needs of the world.

I) BACKGROUND

The noble goal of Law et. al. is to determine the “effectiveness of forest strategies to mitigate climate change”. They state that their methodology “should integrate observations and mechanistic ecosystem process models with future climate, CO2, disturbances from fire, and management.”

A) The generally (ignoring any debate over the size of the percentage increase) UNCONTESTED points regarding locking up more carbon in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Reforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 5% improvement in carbon storage by 2100’
2) Afforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 1.4% improvement in carbon storage by 2100′

B) The CONTESTED points regarding locking up 17% more carbon by 2100 in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Lengthened harvest cycles on private lands
2) Restricting harvest on public lands

C) Atkins, at the 2018 International Mass Timber Conference protested by Oregon Wild, notes that: “Oregon Wild (OW) is advocating that storing more carbon in forests is better than using wood in buildings as a strategy to mitigate climate change.” OW’s first reference from Law et. al. states: “Increasing forest carbon on public lands reduced emissions compared with storage in wood products” (see Law et. al. abstract). Another reference quoted by OW from Law et. al. goes so far as to claim that: “Recent analysis suggests substitution benefits of using wood versus more fossil fuel-intensive materials have been overestimated by at least an order of magnitude.”

II) Law et. al. CAVEATS ignored by OW

A) They clearly acknowledge that their conclusions are based on computer simulations (modeling various scenarios using a specific set of assumptions subject to debate by other scientists).

B) In some instances, they use words like “probably”, “likely” and “appears” when describing some assumptions and outcomes rather than blindly declaring certainty.

III) Atkins’ CRITIQUE

Knowing that the modeling used in the Law et. al. study involves significant assumptions about each of the extremely complex components and their interactions, Atkins proceeds to investigate the assumptions which were used to integrate said models with the limited variables mentioned and shows how they overestimate the carbon cost of using wood, underestimate the carbon cost of storing carbon on the stump and underestimate the carbon cost of substituting non-renewable resources for wood. This allows Oregon Wild to tout unproven statements as quoted in item “I-C” above and treat them as fact and justification for policy changes instead of as an interesting but unproven hypothesis that needs to be validated in order to complete the scientific process.

Quotes from Atkins Critique:

A) Wood Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) Versus Non-renewable substitutes.
1) “The calculation used to justify doubling forest rotations assumes no leakage. Leakage is a carbon accounting term referring to the potential that if you delay cutting trees in one area, others might be cut somewhere else to replace the gap in wood production, reducing the supposed carbon benefit.”
2) “It assumes a 50-year half-life for buildings instead of the minimum 75 years the ASTM standard calls for, which reduces the researchers’ estimate of the carbon stored in buildings.”
3) “It assumes a decline of substitution benefits, which other LCA scientists consider as permanent.”
4) “analysis chooses to account for a form of fossil fuel leakage, but chooses not to model any wood harvest leakage.”
5) “A report published by the Athena Institute in 2004, looked at actual building demolition over a three-plus-year period in St. Paul, Minn. It indicated 51 percent of the buildings were older than 75 years. Only 2 percent were demolished in the first 25 years and only 12 percent in the first 50 years.”
6) “The Law paper assumes that the life of buildings will get shorter in the future rather than longer. In reality, architects and engineers are advocating the principle of designing and building for longer time spans – with eventual deconstruction and reuse of materials rather than disposal. Mass timber buildings substantially enhance this capacity. There are Chinese Pagoda temples made from wood that are 800 to 1,300 years old. Norwegian churches are over 800 years old. I visited at cathedral in Scotland with a roof truss system from the 1400s. Buildings made of wood can last for many centuries. If we follow the principle of designing and building for the long run, the carbon can be stored for hundreds of years.”
7) “The OSU scientists assumed wood energy production is for electricity production only. However, the most common energy systems in the wood products manufacturing sector are combined heat and power (CHP) or straight heat energy production (drying lumber or heat for processing energy) where the efficiency is often two to three times as great and thus provides much larger fossil fuel offsets than the modeling allows.”
8) “The peer reviewers did not include an LCA expert.”
9) The Dean of the OSU College of Forestry was asked how he reconciles the differences between two Doctorate faculty members when the LCA Specialist (who is also the director of CORRIM which is a non-profit that conducts and manages research on the environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal of forest products). The Dean’s answer was “It isn’t the role of the dean to resolve these differences, … Researchers often explore extremes of a subject on purpose, to help define the edges of our understanding … It is important to look at the whole array of research results around a subject rather than using those of a single study or publication as a conclusion to a field of study.”
10) Alan Organschi, a practicing architect, a professor at Yale stated his thought process as “There is a huge net carbon benefit [from using wood] and enormous variability in the specific calculations of substitution benefits … a ton of wood (which is half carbon) goes a lot farther than a ton of concrete, which releases significant amounts of carbon during a building’s construction”. He then paraphrased a NASA climate scientistfrom the late 1980’s who said ‘Quit using high fossil fuel materials and start using materials that sink carbon, that should be the principle for our decisions.’
11) The European Union, in 2017, based on “current literature”, called “for changes to almost double the mitigation effects by EU forests through Climate Smart Forestry (CSF). … It is derived from a more holistic and effective approach than one based solely on the goals of storing carbon in forest ecosystems”
12) Various CORRIM members stated:
a) “Law et al. does not meet the minimum elements of a Life Cycle Assessment: system boundary, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. All four are required by the international standards (ISO 14040 and 14044); therefore, Law et al. does not qualify as an LCA.”
b) “What little is shared in the article regarding inputs to the simulation model ignores the latest developments in wood life cycle assessment and sustainable building design, rendering the results at best inaccurate and most likely incorrect.”
c) “The PNAS paper, which asserts that growing our PNW forests indefinitely would reduce the global carbon footprint, ignores that at best there would 100 percent leakage to other areas with lower productivity … which will result in 2 to 3.5 times more acres harvested for the same amount of building materials. Alternatively, all those buildings will be built from materials with a higher carbon footprint, so the substitution impact of using fossil-intensive products in place of renewable low carbon would result in >100 percent leakage.”
d) More on leakage: “In 2001, seven years after implementation, Jack Ward Thomas, one of the architects of the plan and former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said: “The drop in the cut in the Pacific Northwest was essentially replaced by imports from Canada, Scandinavia and Chile … but we haven’t reduced our per-capita consumption of wood. We have only shifted the source.”
e) “Bruce Lippke, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and former executive director of CORRIM said, “The substitution benefits of wood in place of steel or concrete are immediate, permanent and cumulative.””

B) Risks Resulting from High Densities of Standing Timber
1) “The paper underestimates the amount of wildfire in the past and chose not to model increases in the amount of fire in the future driven by climate change.”
2) “The authors chose to treat the largest fire in their 25-year calibration period, the Biscuit Fire (2003), as an anomaly. Yet 2017 provided a similar number of acres burned. … the model also significantly underestimated five of the six other larger fire years ”
3) “The paper also assumed no increase in fires in the future”
4) Atkins comments/quotes support what some of us here on the NCFP blog have been saying for years regarding storing more timber on the stump. There is certainty that a highly significant increase in carbon loss to fire, insects and disease will result from increased stand densities as a result of storing more carbon on the stump on federal lands. Well documented, validated and fundamental plant physiology and fire science can only lead us to that conclusion. Increases in drought caused by global warming will only increase the stress on already stressed, overly dense forests and thereby further decrease their viability/health by decreasing the availability of already limited resources such as access to minerals, moisture and sunlight while providing closer proximity between trees to ease the ability and rate of spread of fire, insects and disease between adjacent trees.

Footnote:
In their conclusion, Law et. al. state that“GHG reduction must happen quickly to avoid surpassing a 2°C increase in temperature since preindustrial times.” This emphasis leads them to focus on strategies which, IMHO, will only exacerbate the long-term problem.
→ For perspective, consider the “Failed Prognostications of Climate Alarm”

Landscape Changes and Climate: Toward a Broader Climate Accounting

by
From Betts, 2000

Back when I was reading about the IPCC scenarios and what they included in this post, I thought “uh-oh, reforestation and afforestation, no one told us!”. As far as I know, though, the IPCC scenarios only include GHG based (I don’t know if they include other GHGs besides carbon), but not landscape changes that influence climate.

Here’s one 2000 paper by Betts of the UK on this topic. This paper is one of those that covers the whole world, uses remote sensing, uses a variety of datasets, makes a variety of assumptions, and may not relate well to more local studies, or even observations. For example, on soils like the Hayman, green trees vs bare soil post-fire may well impact albedo.. how much, is another question. Perhaps there are more recent and/or more local papers on this?

Still, it raises an interesting point. If you want to move from the general idea of afforestation (or changing crop back to forest lands, e.g. the Williamette Valley) how would the potential carbon sequestration and landscape change relate to each other? In the 2003 Marland et al. paper cited below (coauthored by several forest scientists), the authors consider a more holistic form of accounting for climate impacts beyond carbon.

It might even be appropriate to think of carbon management in the biosphere in terms of adjustment factors, or suitability factors, that capture other objectives of land surface change as well as carbon sequestration. These could include carbon leakage, other impacts on climate, ecosystem composition and structure, other impacts on hydrology and the environment, sustainability, and social and cultural objectives. Although this paper discusses changes in land surface entirely within the context of climate change, it is clear that changes in land surface have important considerations within other social and environmental contexts and within other international conventions. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, specifically notes that achieving mitigation objectives for climate change should be accomplished while
taking into account “relevant international environmental agreements; promotion of sustainable forest management practices;” and promotion of sustainable development. Relevant international agreements include the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (
IPCC, 2000 , p. 114). Alternatives for carbon management, whether protection of existing ecosystems or encouragement of more carbon intensive ecosystems, can have particularly important implications for biodiversity (Huston and Marland, 2003).

To fully consider the climatic effect of changing land surface and/or managing carbon stocks in the biosphere would require complex modeling of the interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface, Option 4. An international consensus would need to consider climate impacts that are both global and regional (multinational) in scale. Effects on the climate system could be expressed in quantifiable energy units such as joule or watt/m2 , perhaps normalized for the area affected (
Pielke et al., 2002 ). Both increases and decreases in energy flows would be recognized as impacts on the larger system. Such an accounting system could be equally rigorous, but would inevitably be more complex, than the evolving system based on tons of carbon equivalent.

I wrote one of the leaders in the field, Roger Pielke, Sr. and asked for a set of papers that would be helpful for readers to introduce them to this topic area. So here they are.they are accessible without a firewall (others are on his research website -https://cires.colorado.edu/research/research-groups/roger-pielke-sr-group)

Pielke Sr., R.A., R. Mahmood, and C. McAlpine, 2016: Land’s complex role in climate change. Physics Today, 69(11), 40. https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/r-384.pdf

Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., T.R. Loveland, and C.A. McAlpine, 2016: Climate relevant land use and land cover change policies. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 195-202,
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00221.1

Marland, G., R.A. Pielke, Sr., M. Apps, R. Avissar, R.A. Betts, K.J. Davis, P.C. Frumhoff, S.T. Jackson, L. Joyce, P. Kauppi, J. Katzenberger, K.G. MacDicken, R. Neilson, J.O. Niles, D. dutta S. Niyogi, R.J. Norby, N. Pena, N. Sampson, and Y. Xue, 2003: The climatic impacts of land surface change and carbon management, and the
implications for climate-change mitigation policy. Climate Policy, 3, 149-157. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-267.pdf

Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., K. Hubbard, D. Niyogi, P. Dirmeyer, C. McAlpine, A. Carleton, R. Hale, S. Gameda, A. Beltrán-Przekurat, B. Baker, R. McNider, D. Legates, J. Shepherd, J. Du, P. Blanken, O.Frauenfeld, U. Nair, S. Fall, 2013: Land cover changes and their biogeophysical effects on climate. Int. J. Climatol., DOI:
10.1002/joc.3736. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/r-374.pdf

Hossain, F., and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2012: A two-way street. Intl. Water Power & Dam Construction, 64:11, 26-28. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/r-373.pdf

Hossain, F., J. Arnold, E. Beighley, C. Brown, S. Burian, J. Chen, S.Madadgar, A. Mitra, D. Niyogi, R.A. Pielke Sr., V. Tidwell, and D. Wegner, 2015: Local-to-regional landscape drivers of extreme weather and climate: Implications for water infrastructure resilience. J. Hydrol. Eng., 10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0001210 , 02515002.
https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/r-380.pdf”

If you’re interested in this topic, you can also sign up for Dr. Pielke’s Twitter feed. There’s an interesting current study on the effects of irrigation in Nebraska going on right now.