This is the second part of a three-part series that reviews and expands on “Regenerating Life – How to cool the planet, feed the world, and live happily ever after”. For me, this documentary tells the story why  my studies of the Earth System, and how humans modified it, directly led to becoming an ecological farmer.

Why did the Climate Community become one-legged?

John Feldman’s new documentary describes a dramatic shift in scientific paradigm. These are not uncommon: For thousands of years, Western academics and clerics insisted that the world was flat. During the enlightenment period, the Copernican Revolution shifted our understanding and now we see that Earth is actually round. This physical insight shifted the European understanding of their place in the universe dramatically – they no longer were located at creation’s center and had to redefine their very identity and role as human beings. And they did: they learned how to colonize the globe; they learned to understand the human body as “the most complicated machine that is known” with mechanical parts; and they decided to eradicate indigenous knowledge that treated the Earth as our mother and humans as wholes, and burned tens of thousands of knowledge keepers as witches. The era of reduction-ism and the mindset of the machine had begun, and imposed globally through colonialism.

We are currently going through a similar scientific revolution as we start to understand the living world’s regulatory roles in ecosystems, soils, water cycles, and weather formation. Until the mid 1990s, scientists mostly understood soil by its physical and chemical properties, while its microbiological vibrancy was mostly disregarded. The biological interactions between mycorrhiza, bacteria and plants were only known to an academic fringe, and soil biology was considered “too complex”, “too variable”, and simply too tedious for any larger-scale environmental analysis. And until today, storm water management is not considering soil health when estimating water retention of a landscape ([1])! So it is not surprising, that the immense breakthroughs in how the living world shapes the functions of soils and watersheds also expands our understanding of the climate system. And once again, the ongoing “2^nd Copernican revolution” (or rather the “Margulisian revolution”) fundamentally redefines our place as humans in this living, self-regulating, and amazingly beautiful world. A world that is not just more complicated than we think, but indeed is more complex than we can think.

Narratives change slowly and there is significant resistance from many sides. So what is driving this resistance? Drawing from Feldman’s investigation and my own observations, I would like to offer five reasons:

• Epistemic/technical difficulty: Atmospheric water, vapor, and associated energy dynamics are very complicated and variable. Water vapor is actually the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere: water vapor concentrations in the atmosphere vary between 0% and >4% (about 100 times higher than CO₂). Vapor is also the most potent of all the greenhouse gases that makes up ~66% of the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect (^[2]).
  Yet, for reasons of simplicity, climate models assume that changes in atmospheric water vapor generally “follow” the rise in CO₂. And this is valid if everything else stays constant – in particular the biosphere! But this assumption breaks down once the biosphere changes in parallel to the atmosphere. In fact, several biological processes impact the global climate: clouds reflect around 30% of incoming solar radiation and are heavily modified by vegetation, especially forests. Forests ([3]), wetlands, and beaver dams all significantly impact the water cycle and climate ([4]). Even bears and salmons change regional climate: by transporting nutrients upstream, they enable lush temperate rain forests in British Columbia that “carry” water over the Rockies. No salmon -> no bears -> no nutrient transport -> no trees -> drought in the Prairies.
  Until today, the intricate and complex relationships between soil, vegetation, nutrients, water vapor, clouds, plant exudates, wetlands, and near-surface heat dynamics cannot be reflected well in grid-based climate models. Landuse change is already considered as “boundary parameter” that drive all global climate models – computer simulations could not reproduce today’s observations without considering landuse. Yet, adding these biological processes dynamically would increase model uncertainty, reduce consistency of model results, and undermine confidence by decision makers.
• Political: John Feldman reminds us that, though an academic body, the IPCC operates within a narrowly defined political mandate: governments reduced IPCC’s scope of work to exploring the physical (and later chemical) characteristics of the climate, and in particular on how human-generated emission of greenhouse gases impacts these physics. In protection of their national sovereignty, governments kept local landuse decisions such as zoning, development, or resource extraction out of international legal negotiations. So they limited intergovernmental climate negotiations to a short list of greenhouse gases. Governments also excluded water vapor from these greenhouse discussions, even though water makes up two thirds of the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. This means that the IPCC and UNFCCC regard land only from the narrow perspective of greenhouse gas fluxes, and leave out non-radiative processes like energy flow itself.
• Funding: While substantial funding is available for climate research, much of this is directly tied to contributing to the IPCC process. The growth of knowledge within the IPCC’s research scope is thus impressive. Meanwhile, our learning about bio-meteorological feedbacks lag behind and are mostly driven by the personal dedication of few individuals.
• Strategic: Fossil fuel groups started to develop strategies to undermine climate science, and a greed-motivated climate denial-ism emerged and spread with corporate-funded campaigns. At the same time, climate advocates moved together around the “scientific consensus” – group conformity became important on both sides of this war over the dominant public narrative on climate. As such, the intensive and critical debates around scientific biases, flawed assumptions, and false causal connections waned – I still experienced these during my own education and career. Now, the climate change community presents itself as unified in their understanding that greenhouse gases are the main drivers of global warming. Unfortunately, climate activists sacrificed a more complex truth for a clear strategy.
• Psychological: In response of corporate-funded climate denial, Climate scientists had to move together and communicate conformity toward the public and politicians. This conformity replaced diversity and turned a vibrant community of ideas into a dogmatic monoculture. But this is not good for the scientific method, and led to the rejection of new insights. For example, a leading meteorologist Prof. Millan Millan showed, with empirical observations, how deforestation along the Spanish coast has severely impacted local weather, reducing rain-bringing summer storms, causing drought and wildfires, and even shifting larger weather patterns. Millan believes that the same biological feedbacks shape weather around many regions of the world. Yet, climate modellers have rejected these observation-based findings for decades, because their physical models cannot reproduce the biological feedback between landuse, water cycle, clouds, and weather ([5]) – computer simulations are now more important than real-world observations. Furthermore, there are individual merits in complying with a dominant dogma: it is far easier to launch an academic career within the current model-centered paradigm, funding is more readily available, and peers support like-minded peers.

In my opinion, the outcome of technical/epistemic, political, funding, strategic, and psychological biases of our climate analysis has severely skewed academic attention and blinded us to the living landscapes. While we now understand a long list of separate mechanisms how the biosphere’s influences the climate, we are still stuck with the mechanistic Descartes’ worldview that visualizes Earth as a machine, and reduces Earth’s ills to our carbon dioxide emissions. We now fight about the repair of this broken part and how we manipulate it in separation from the whole. For example, many geoengineering proposals are driven by this flawed worldview, and from new opportunities of profiteering from our scientific confusion.

In the reality that Feldman shares with us, living landscapes are not just model parameters that confine our chemical-physical computer simulations. Living landscapes are climate magic that drive our climate, and once again redefine the Western understanding of our human position in the universe. And somehow, this new story looks very much like the indigenous insight that we humans are tasked to be caretakers, stewards of the living world.

The third and last blog of this miniseries will explore the Margulisian revolution in more detail.

[1] Fu B, Horsburgh JS, Jakeman AJ, Gualtieri C, Arnold T, Marshall L, Green TR, Quinn NW, Volk M, Hunt RJ, Vezzaro L. Modeling water quality in watersheds: From here to the next generation. Water resources research. 2020 Nov;56(11):e2020WR027721.

[2] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Water_vapour

[3] Ellison D, Morris CE, Locatelli B, Sheil D, Cohen J, Murdiyarso D, Gutierrez V, Van Noordwijk M, Creed IF, Pokorny J, Gaveau D. Trees, forests and water: Cool insights for a hot world. Global environmental change. 2017 Mar 1;43:51-61.

[4] Dewey C, Fox PM, Bouskill NJ, Dwivedi D, Nico P, Fendorf S. Beaver dams overshadow climate extremes in controlling riparian hydrology and water quality. Nature Communications. 2022 Nov 8;13(1):6509.

[5] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-07-17/millan-millan-and-the-mystery-of-the-missing-mediterranean-storms/