Save the climate now

August Raggam is one of the few great realists of our time

who has got to the bottom of the climate problem and its solution. I have valued and respected him for more than 15 years and am always impressed by his many fundamental and very valuable expert opinions. Only through them could I understand the complex relationship between climate, humus, CO2 and more.

Perhaps together we can bring this burning issue further into the public eye. It would be an enormous opportunity for agriculture as a whole, through massive humus building on its arable land, as well as for saving our global climate, for all of us …

We urgently need this climate protection programme from all farmers’ associations, politicians and decision-makers. They should play a decisive part in it and implement it.

Dear reader, Einstein said that the universe and human stupidity were infinite, but that he was not sure about the universe.

Since 1980 we have known that of the 5 billion hectares of grassland used for agriculture, we have already devastated 69%, that is, stripped them of humus.

In 2011 the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry pointed out that ten times more CO2 enters the atmosphere from the earth’s humus layers than from the energy turnover of oil, gas and coal. The climate experts around the IPCC have still not recognised this (Figs. 11 to 14). At the same time, the CO2 storage capacity of forests was underestimated by a factor of 40 (see page 35/4.).

Because the forests now lack the evaporated water from agricultural land, they have been drying out and dying for a few years. If we stopped fossil CO2 immediately but let the forest wither, we would have a good 850 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2040. Without an immediate stop to fossil CO2, we would have around 900 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2040. Please study Figure 12. This is no longer about climate protection but about the bare survival of us humans. Since climatologists have identified only about 10% of CO2 emitters and sinks, emitting a little less CO2 to stay within a maximum of plus 1.5 °C will not help us (Fig. 12).

An international turnaround in knowledge about healing our earth’s fever could start from the universities of Styria. Once farmers have restored the original water storage capacity of our soils with charcoal, catch crops and organic farming, our forests and glaciers will recover, sea levels will fall again, and the frequency of storms, flash floods and droughts will settle back to pre-industrial levels. So help us save humanity!

August Raggam

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