Climate Red - News and Views on Climate Change Issues.

Trials of agrichar - a product hailed as a saviour of Australia’s carbon-depleted soils and the environment - have doubled and, in one case, tripled crop growth when applied at the rate of 10 tonnes per hectare.
Agrichar is a black carbon byproduct of a process called pyrolysis, which involves heating green waste or other biomass without oxygen to generate renewable energy.
Tim Flannery is a major advocate of agrichar and pyrolysis. In The Bulletin magazine, Flannery recently ranked “fostering pyrolysis-based technologies” fourth among his five steps for saving the planet, because they convert crop waste into fuel and agrichar which can be used to enhance soil fertility and store carbon long-term.

NSW DPI senior research scientist Dr Lukas Van Zwieten said soils naturally turn over about 10 times more greenhouse gas on a global scale than the burning of fossil fuels. “So it is not surprising there is so much interest in a technology to create clean energy that also locks up carbon in the soil for the long term and lifts agricultural production,” he said.
The trials at Wollongbar have focused on the benefits of agrichar to agricultural productivity. “When applied at 10t/ha, the biomass of wheat was tripled and of soybeans was more than doubled,” said Dr Van Zwieten.
“This percentage increase remained the same when applications of nitrogen fertiliser were added to both the agrichar and the control plots.
“For the wheat, agrichar alone was about as beneficial for yields as using nitrogen fertiliser only. And that is without considering the other benefits of agrichar.”
Regarding soil chemistry, Dr Van Zwieten said agrichar raised soil pH at about one-third the rate of lime, lifted calcium levels and reduced aluminium toxicity on the red ferrosol soils of the trial.
“Soil biology improved, the need for added fertiliser reduced and water holding capacity was raised,” he said.
The trials also measured gases given off from the soils and found significantly lower emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas more than 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide).
NSW DPI environmental scientist Steve Kimber said an added benefit for both the farmer who applies agrichar and the environment is that the carbon in agrichar remains locked up in the soil for many years longer than, for example, carbon applied as compost, mulch or crop residue.
“We broadly categorise carbon in the soil as being labile (liable to change quickly) or stable – depending on how quickly they break down and convert into carbon dioxide,” he said.
“Labile carbon like crop residue, mulch and compost is likely to last two or three years, while stable carbon like agrichar will last up to hundreds of years.
“This is significant for farmer costs because one application of agrichar may be the equivalent of compost applications of the same weight every year for decades.
“For the environment, it means soil carbon emissions can be reduced because rapidly decomposing carbon forms are being replaced by stable ones in the form of agrichar.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says Australia is on track to meet its Kyoto targets for greenhouse gas emissions, but the nation has a lot more work to do.

Ms Wong released a government report which found Australia's emissions in 2007 were 585 million tonnes, or 106 per cent of 1990 levels.

This meant the country was on track to meet its Kyoto commitments, she said.

But she noted emissions were continuing to rise, saying this was a concern.

Emissions were 1.6 per cent higher than the previous year, according to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory 2006 report, issued by the Department of Climate Change.

"What (the report) shows is that Australia, while still on track to meet our Kyoto target, it's clear we have a lot of work to do when it comes to reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions," Senator Wong told reporters.

She reiterated the government's commitment to an emissions trading scheme.

"What we know is climate change is happening. The economically responsible thing to deal with it is to introduce an emissions trading scheme," she said.

"We have to tackle it."

Senator Wong would not be drawn on whether petrol and agriculture would be covered by the scheme, which is to start operating in 2010.

But she did take aim at the opposition for "scare-mongering" over the impact of the ETS on petrol prices.

The opposition raised concerns on Monday that petrol could rise by as much as 25 cents a litre in the short-term, and questioned whether a new tax on petrol was the best way to go.

The report showed Australia was only on track to meet its Kyoto targets because of "land-use changes", which outweighed significant increases in emissions in almost all other sectors.

Emissions from transport and energy soared 40 per cent between 1990 and 2006.

Electricity was the worst offender with emissions jumping 47 per cent since 1990.

Transport was next in line, with emissions rising 27 per cent in that time.

The report found Australia generated 1.5 per cent of global emissions.

Meanwhile, The federal coalition says it is committed to an emissions trading scheme but remains concerned about the Rudd government's ability to implement it without "crashing the economy".

The government's response to climate change was based on ideology and spin, it said.

The coalition wanted an environmentally and economically responsible approach to dealing with climate change, treasury spokesman Malcolm Turnbull said.

"The emissions trading scheme was part of our policy last year and remains our policy today," he told Sky News.

"The implementation of it is something that has to be fine-tuned to ensure that you get the right result for the environment, but you don't crash the economy.

"The concern that I have is that the Rudd government's response to climate change is essentially ideological, it's based on ideology and it's based on spin."

Who Murdered the Virunga Gorillas? extract from National Geograhic
Heavily armed militias shatter the stillness in this central African park. Desperate refugees crowd park boundaries. Charcoal producers strip forests. Then, last summer, someone killed seven of these magnificent creatures in cold blood.
By Mark Jenkins
Photograph by Brent Stirton
The killers waited until dark.

On July 22 of last year unknown assailants crouched in the forest, preparing to execute a family of gorillas. Hidden on a side slope of the Mikeno volcano in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, armed with automatic weapons, the killers had hunted down the twelve-member Rugendo family, well-known among tourists and well loved by the rangers of Virunga National Park. The patriarch of the gorilla family, a 500-pound silverback named Senkwekwe, would have sensed that the assailants were near, perhaps wrinkling his wide, black nose at their unfortunate smell, but he would not have been alarmed. Senkwekwe had seen thousands of people and had come to accept their proximity as irritating but unavoidable. So habituated to humans was the Rugendo family that the gorillas would occasionally wander out of the forest into cornfields for an impromptu picnic, angering local farmers.

Park rangers at the nearby Bukima barracks said they heard shots at eight that night. On foot patrol the next morning they found three female gorillas—Mburanumwe, Neza, and Safari—shot to death, with Safari's infant cowering nearby. The following day Senkwekwe was found dead: blasted through the chest that same night. Three weeks later the body of another Rugendo female, Macibiri, would be discovered, her infant presumed dead.