Thursday, July 29, 2021

Climate is very poorly understood




[[It cannot be emphasized enough that climate is an enormously complicated result of very many factors, many of which are not well understood, ;et alone their combined effects. Here is a very recent example.]]

A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?zx=8nj49iv5nqad#search/quanta/FMfcgzGkZZpQrbrmcDWLGmgCHFnVpxNq

A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects.

One teaspoon of healthy soil contains more bacteria, fungi and other microbes than there are humans on Earth. Those hungry organisms can make soil a difficult place to store carbon over long periods of time.



Gabriel Popkin

Contributing Writer


Quanta Magazine


July 27, 2021







The hope was that the soil might save us. With civilization continuing to pump ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, perhaps plants — nature’s carbon scrubbers — might be able to package up some of that excess carbon and bury it underground for centuries or longer.

That hope has fueled increasingly ambitious climate change–mitigation plans. Researchers at the Salk Institute, for example, hope to bioengineer plants whose roots will churn out huge amounts of a carbon-rich, cork-like substance called suberin. Even after the plant dies, the thinking goes, the carbon in the suberin should stay buried for centuries. This Harnessing Plants Initiative is perhaps the brightest star in a crowded firmament of climate change solutions based on the brown stuff beneath our feet.

Such plans depend critically on the existence of large, stable, carbon-rich molecules that can last hundreds or thousands of years underground. Such molecules, collectively called humus, have long been a keystone of soil science; major agricultural practices and sophisticated climate models are built on them.

But over the past 10 years or so, soil science has undergone a quiet revolution, akin to what would happen if, in physics, relativity or quantum mechanics were overthrown. Except in this case, almost nobody has heard about it — including many who hope soils can rescue the climate. “There are a lot of people who are interested in sequestration who haven’t caught up yet,” said Margaret Torn, a soil scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

A new generation of soil studies powered by modern microscopes and imaging technologies has revealed that whatever humus is, it is not the long-lasting substance scientists believed it to be. Soil researchers have concluded that even the largest, most complex molecules can be quickly devoured by soil’s abundant and voracious microbes. The magic molecule you can just stick in the soil and expect to stay there may not exist.





Artificially colored scanning electron micrograph images of soils from the island of Hawai’i.

Thiago Inagaki, in collaboration with Lena Kourkoutis, Angela Possinger and Johannes Lehmann

“I have The Nature and Properties of Soils in front of me — the standard textbook,” said Gregg Sanford, a soil researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The theory of soil organic carbon accumulation that’s in that textbook has been proven mostly false … and we’re still teaching it.”

The consequences go far beyond carbon sequestration strategies. Major climate models such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based on this outdated understanding of soil. Several recent studies indicate that those models are underestimating the total amount of carbon that will be released from soil in a warming climate. In addition, computer models that predict the greenhouse gas impacts of farming practices — predictions that are being used in carbon markets — are probably overly optimistic about soil’s ability to trap and hold on to carbon.

It may still be possible to store carbon underground long term. Indeed, radioactive dating measurements suggest that some amount of carbon can stay in the soil for centuries. But until soil scientists build a new paradigm to replace the old — a process now underway — no one will fully understand why.
The Death of Humus

Soil doesn’t give up its secrets easily. Its constituents are tiny, varied and outrageously numerous. At a bare minimum, it consists of minerals, decaying organic matter, air, water, and enormously complex ecosystems of microorganisms. One teaspoon of healthy soil contains more bacteria, fungi and other microbes than there are humans on Earth.


The fine hairs surrounding roots are covered in hungry bacteria; soils slightly further away from the roots may have an order of magnitude fewer microbes.

Courtesy of Jennifer Pett-Ridge and Erin Nuccio

The German biologist Franz Karl Achard was an early pioneer in making sense of the chaos. In a seminal 1786 study, he used alkalis to extract molecules made of long carbon chains from peat soils. Over the centuries, scientists came to believe that such long chains, collectively called humus, constituted a large pool of soil carbon that resists decomposition and pretty much just sits there. A smaller fraction consisting of shorter molecules was thought to feed microbes, which respired carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

This view was occasionally challenged, but by the mid-20th century, the humus paradigm was “the only game in town,” said Johannes Lehmann, a soil scientist at Cornell University. Farmers were instructed to adopt practices that were supposed to build humus. Indeed, the existence of humus is probably one of the few soil science facts that many non-scientists could recite.

What helped break humus’s hold on soil science was physics. In the second half of the 20th century, powerful new microscopes and techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance and X-ray spectroscopy allowed soil scientists for the first time to peer directly into soil and see what was there, rather than pull things out and then look at them.

What they found — or, more specifically, what they didn’t find — was shocking: there were few or no long “recalcitrant” carbon molecules — the kind that don’t break down. Almost everything seemed to be small and, in principle, digestible.

“We don’t see any molecules in soil that are so recalcitrant that they can’t be broken down,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, a soil scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Microbes will learn to break anything down — even really nasty chemicals.”

Lehmann, whose studies using advanced microscopy and spectroscopy were among the first to reveal the absence of humus, has become the concept’s debunker-in-chief. A 2015 Nature paper he co-authored states that “the available evidence does not support the formation of large-molecular-size and persistent ‘humic substances’ in soils.” In 2019, he gave a talk with a slide containing a mock death announcement for “our friend, the concept of Humus.”

Over the past decade or so, most soil scientists have come to accept this view. Yes, soil is enormously varied. And it contains a lot of carbon. But there’s no carbon in soil that can’t, in principle, be broken down by microorganisms and released into the atmosphere. The latest edition of The Nature and Properties of Soils, published in 2016, cites Lehmann’s 2015 paper and acknowledges that “our understanding of the nature and genesis of soil humus has advanced greatly since the turn of the century, requiring that some long-accepted concepts be revised or abandoned.”

Old ideas, however, can be very recalcitrant. Few outside the field of soil science have heard of humus’s demise.
Buried Promises

At the same time that soil scientists were rediscovering what exactly soil is, climate researchers were revealing that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were rapidly warming the climate, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Thoughts soon turned to using soil as a giant carbon sink. Soils contain enormous amounts of carbon — more carbon than in Earth’s atmosphere and all its vegetation combined. And while certain practices such as plowing can stir up that carbon — farming, over human history, has released an estimated 133 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere — soils can also take up carbon, as plants die and their roots decompose.


Farming practices such as plowing can reduce the amount of carbon stored in soil.

Scientists began to suggest that we might be able to coax large volumes of atmospheric carbon back into the soil to dampen or even reverse the damage of climate change.

In practice, this has proved difficult. An early idea to increase carbon stores — planting crops without tilling the soil — has mostly fallen flat. When farmers skipped the tilling and instead drilled seeds into the ground, carbon stores grew in upper soil layers, but they disappeared from lower layers. Most experts now believe that the practice redistributes carbon within the soil rather than increases it, though it can improve other factors such as water quality and soil health.

Efforts like the Harnessing Plants Initiative represent something like soil carbon sequestration 2.0: a more direct intervention to essentially jam a bunch of carbon into the ground.

The initiative emerged when a team of scientists at the Salk Institute came up with an idea: Create plants whose roots produce an excess of carbon-rich molecules. By their calculations, if grown widely, such plants might sequester up to 20% of the excess carbon dioxide that humans add to the atmosphere every year.

The Salk scientists zeroed in on a complex, cork-like molecule called suberin, which is produced by many plant roots. Studies from the 1990s and 2000s had hinted that suberin and similar molecules could resist decomposition in soil.



José Graça

With flashy marketing, the Harnessing Plants Initiative gained attention. An initial round of fundraising in 2019 brought in over $35 million. Last year, the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos contributed $30 million from his “Earth Fund.”

But as the project gained momentum, it attracted doubters. One group of researchers noted in 2016 that no one had actually observed the suberin decomposition process. When those authors did the relevant experiment, they found that much of the suberin decayed quickly.

In 2019, Joanne Chory, a plant geneticist and one of the Harnessing Plant Initiative’s project leaders, described the project at a TED conference. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil scientist at the University of California, Merced, who spoke at the same conference, pointed out to Chory that according to modern soil science, suberin, like any carbon-containing compound, should break down in soil. (Berhe, who has been nominated to lead the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, declined an interview request.)

Around the same time, Hanna Poffenbarger, a soil researcher at the University of Kentucky, made a similar comment after hearing Wolfgang Busch, the other project leader, speak at a workshop. “You should really get some soil scientists on board, because the assumption that we can breed for more recalcitrant roots — that may not be valid,” Poffenbarger recalls telling Busch.

Questions about the project surfaced publicly earlier this year, when Jonathan Sanderman, a soil scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, tweeted, “I thought the soil biogeochem community had moved on from the idea that there is a magical recalcitrant plant compound. Am I missing some important new literature on suberin?” Another soil scientist responded, “Nope, the literature suggests that suberin will be broken down just like every other organic plant component. I’ve never understood why the @salkinstitute has based their Harnessing Plant Initiative on this premise.”

Busch, in an interview, acknowledged that “there is no unbreakable biomolecule.” But, citing published papers on suberin’s resistance to decomposition, he said, “We are still very optimistic when it comes to suberin.”

“THe also noted a second initiative Salk researchers are pursuing in parallel to enhancing suberin. They are trying to design plants with longer roots that could deposit carbon deeper in soil. Independent experts such as Sanderman agree that carbon tends to stick around longer in deeper soil layers, putting that solution on potentially firmer conceptual ground.

Chory and Busch have also launched collaborations with Berhe and Poffenbarger, respectively. Poffenbarger, for example, will analyze how soil samples containing suberin-rich plant roots change under different environmental conditions. But even those studies won’t answer questions about how long suberin sticks around, Poffenbarger said — important if the goal is to keep carbon out of the atmosphere long enough to make a dent in global warming.

Beyond the Salk project, momentum and money are flowing toward other climate projects that would rely on long-term carbon sequestration and storage in soils. In an April speech to Congress, for example, President Biden suggested paying farmers to plant cover crops, which are grown not for harvest but to nurture the soil in between plantings of cash crops. Evidence suggests that when cover crop roots break down, some of their carbon stays in the soil — although as with suberin, how long it lasts is an open question.
Not Enough Bugs in the Code

Recalcitrant carbon may also be warping climate prediction.

In the 1960s, scientists began writing large, complex computer programs to predict the global climate’s future. Because soil both takes up and releases carbon dioxide, climate models attempted to take into account soil’s interactions with the atmosphere. But the global climate is fantastically complex, and to enable the programs to run on the machines of the time, simplifications were necessary. For soil, scientists made a big one: They ignored microbes in the soil entirely. Instead, they basically divided soil carbon into short-term and long-term pools, in accordance with the humus paradigm.

More recent generations of models, including ones that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses for its widely read reports, are essentially palimpsests built on earlier ones, said Torn. They still assume soil carbon exists in long-term and short-term pools. As a consequence, these models may be overestimating how much carbon will stick around in soils and underestimating how much carbon dioxide they will emit.

Last summer, a study published in Nature examined how much carbon dioxide was released when researchers artificially warmed the soil in a Panamanian rainforest to mimic the long-term effects of climate change. They found that the warmed soil released 55% more carbon than nearby unwarmed areas — a much larger release than predicted by most climate models. The researchers think that microbes in the soil grow more active at the warmer temperatures, leading to the increase.



The study was especially disheartening because most of the world’s soil carbon is in the tropics and the northern boreal zone. Despite this, leading soil models are calibrated to results of soil studies in temperate countries such as the U.S. and Europe, where most studies have historically been done. “We’re doing pretty bad in high latitudes and the tropics,” said Lehmann.

Even temperate climate models need improvement. Torn and colleagues reported earlier this year that, contrary to predictions, deep soil layers in a California forest released roughly a third of their carbon when warmed for five years.

Ultimately, Torn said, models need to represent soil as something closer to what it actually is: a complex, three-dimensional environment governed by a hyper-diverse community of carbon-gobbling bacteria, fungi and other microscopic beings. But even smaller steps would be welcome. Just adding microbes as a single class would be major progress for most models, she said.
Fertile Ground

If the humus paradigm is coming to an end, the question becomes: What will replace it?

One important and long-overlooked factor appears to be the three-dimensional structure of the soil environment. Scientists describe soil as a world unto itself, with the equivalent of continents, oceans and mountain ranges. This complex microgeography determines where microbes such as bacteria and fungi can go and where they can’t; what food they can gain access to and what is off limits.

A soil bacterium “may be only 10 microns away from a big chunk of organic matter that I’m sure they would love to degrade, but it’s on the other side of a cluster of minerals,” said Pett-Ridge. “It’s literally as if it’s on the other side of the planet.”



Another related, and poorly understood, ingredient in a new soil paradigm is the fate of carbon within the soil. Researchers now believe that almost all organic material that enters soil will get digested by microbes. “Now it’s really clear that soil organic matter is just this loose assemblage of plant matter in varying degrees of degradation,” said Sanderman. Some will then be respired into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. What remains could be eaten by another microbe — and a third, and so on. Or it could bind to a bit of clay or get trapped inside a soil aggregate: a porous clump of particles that, from a microbe’s point of view, could be as large as a city and as impenetrable as a fortress. Studies of carbon isotopes have shown that a lot of carbon can stick around in soil for centuries or even longer. If humus isn’t doing the stabilizing, perhaps minerals and aggregates are.

Before soil science settles on a new theory, there will doubtless be more surprises. One may have been delivered recently by a group of researchers at Princeton University who constructed a simplified artificial soil using microfluidic devices — essentially, tiny plastic channels for moving around bits of fluid and cells. The researchers found that carbon they put inside an aggregate made of bits of clay was protected from bacteria. But when they added a digestive enzyme, the carbon was freed from the aggregate and quickly gobbled up. “To our surprise, no one had drawn this connection between enzymes, bacteria and trapped carbon,” said Howard Stone, an engineer who led the study.


Lehmann is pushing to replace the old dichotomy of stable and unstable carbon with a “soil continuum model” of carbon in progressive stages of decomposition. But this model and others like it are far from complete, and at this point, more conceptual than mathematically predictive.

Researchers agree that soil science is in the midst of a classic paradigm shift. What nobody knows is exactly where the field will land — what will be written in the next edition of the textbook. “We’re going through a conceptual revolution,” said Mark Bradford, a soil scientist at Yale University. “We haven’t really got a new cathedral yet. We have a whole bunch of churches that have popped up.”

Correction: July 28, 2021

This article was revised to credit a team at Salk with the idea of using suberin-enriched plants to sequester carbon in soil.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

The “Feminist Methodology” Muddle

 The “Feminist Methodology” Muddle


Susan Haack



[I]f I should ever attack that excessively difficult question, “What is for the true interest of society?” I should feel I stood in need of a great deal of help from the science of legitimate inference.—C. S. Peirce 


Should scientists and philosophers use “feminist methodology”? No; for more reasons than I can spell out here, but first and foremost because their business is figuring things out, not promoting social justice

“Methodology” is a much overworked and underspecified word; but “feminist methodology” is especially vague, ambiguous, and ill-defined. Even a brief survey of syllabi to be found online for courses on feminist methodology confirms this: one syllabus I found said that the students are to “design a feminist methodology” for their work themselves; and another that in the course “we” (i.e., presumably, the professor and the students) will try to answer the questions, “what counts as a feminist method?” and “who gets to say?”

Presumably, “feminist methodology” means something like “methodology informed by feminist values.” But this raises a whole raft of problems. In the first place, feminism is hardly monolithic, so we can expect there to be competing understandings of what values qualify as feminist. For a humanist, individualist feminist such as myself, a recognition of every woman’s full humanity and of each woman’s unique individuality will have priority; for many academic feminists today, apparently, it is what they take to be the shared oppression of women-as-a-class that matters. In the second place: however those feminist values are construed, though they may have some bearing on some issues in the social sciences and a few in the life and medical sciences, they are essentially irrelevant to physical cosmology, the theory of magnetism, quantum chemistry, molecular biology, etc., etc., and their relevance to philosophy seems even more limited. 

In any case, the idea that we should conduct scientific and philosophical work in such a way as to advance the interests of women faces an insuperable hurdle even within the limited sphere where it’s relevant: such advice could be followed only if we already knew what women’s interests really are, and what would really advance those interests; and to know this, obviously, we’d need serious philosophical and scientific work independent of any feminist agenda. So to urge that science and philosophy use feminist methodology is, in effect, to urge the deliberate politicization of inquiry, the deliberate blurring of the line between honest investigation and disguised advocacy; which both corrupts inquiry—which, as we should know from the awful examples of “Nazi physics” and “Soviet biology” is bound to be a disaster—and leaves advocacy without the firm factual basis it needs.

We can’t overcome the problem of limited scope by appealing to supposed “women’s ways of knowing” anything and everything, such as reliance on emotion rather than reason, or on the subjective rather than the objective—which just reintroduces old, sexist stereotypes under the guise of “feminist values”; nor can we avoid it by pointing to supposedly sexist metaphors in science or philosophy of science—which is, frankly, silly. And, of course, we can’t overcome the hurdle of identifying women’s interests and understanding what advances them by appeal to “feminist philosophy” or “feminist science,” or avoid the danger of transmuting inquiry into advocacy by suggesting that we are doing no more than detecting and correcting sexist biases in philosophical or scientific work. 

Am I saying that there have never been biases of this sort? No; I daresay there have. And such bias is, of course, regrettable—damaging not only to science and to philosophy, but also to women’s interests. Still, I very much doubt that sexist bias is the commonest form, or the most seriously damaging to inquiry—confirmation bias and bias in favor of an accepted theory are probably both commoner and more serious. And in any case the best way to avoid deleterious bias is simply to seek out as much evidence as possible, and to assess as honestly as possible where it points. 

Am I saying that advocacy is a bad thing? No, of course not; it’s often needed, and it’s fine in its proper place—in law, in politics, etc. The law relies on cross-examination and advocacy on each side; but the purpose of a trial is to arrive, within a reasonable time, at a verdict—a verdict warranted to the required degree by the evidence presented. Unlike a trial, however, scientific and philosophical work isn’t constrained by the desire for a prompt decision, but takes the time it takes; and often enough, the best “verdict” we can give is “as yet, we just don’t know.” 

Am I saying that I don’t care about social justice? No; though I do think the way the phrase combines highly nebulous content with strongly favorable connotation is potentially dangerous. Still, a society where everyone is free and no one oppressed is certainly desirable—unclear as it is how such a society might look in the specific, or how we might bring such a situation about. But I have to say that the idea that, at this point in time, women in the developed Western world are an oppressed class strikes me as a grave exaggeration—and a dangerous one, for several reasons. Rather as over-broad definitions of sexual harassment trivialize the serious offenses, this idea trivializes the real oppression that some classes of people are suffering: the Rohingya of Myanmar, for example, the Uighurs in China, the ordinary people of Venezuela or Syria, not to mention the Saudi women who have only very recently been permitted some of the many freedoms we take for granted in the West. At the same time, it encourages women in the developed Western world to be preoccupied with slights—“micro-aggressions” in today’s catchphrase—at the expense of getting on with their lives and with productive work. Moreover, by conveying the false impression that the sciences and philosophy are pervasively riddled with sexist bias, it probably encourages some women who might otherwise have made a real contribution to these fields, and found satisfaction in doing so, choose other, and perhaps less rewarding, occupations instead.

The anonymous author of the Wikipedia entry on feminist method speaks of “a sense of despair and anger that knowledge, both academic and popular, [is] based on men’s lives, male ways of thinking, and directed towards the problems articulated by men.” I think it’s long past time we put such factitious anger and such factitious despair behind us, and long past time we moved beyond thinking in terms of male and female ways of thinking to a fuller appreciation of the richness, variety, and potential of human intelligence, regardless of sex or any other irrelevant consideration.