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Comment by chr1 | Hacker News Reader

And the only way to prevent this is for Russia to become a major meat producer and to convert northern forests into grassland, like they were before our intervention. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park. Sadly there are not enough people, and not enough economic freedom in Russia to make this into reality.

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How does converting forests into grassland help?

Answering my own question. From Wiki article:

> The primary aim of Pleistocene Park is to recreate the mammoth steppe (ancient taiga/tundra grasslands that were widespread in the region during the last ice age). The key concept is that animals, rather than climate, maintained that ecosystem. Reintroducing large herbivores to Siberia would then initiate a positive feedback loop promoting the reestablishment of grassland ecosystems. This argument is the basis for rewilding Pleistocene Park's landscape with megafauna that were previously abundant in the area, as evidenced by the fossil record.

> ...

> Zimov and colleagues argue for a reversed order of environmental change in the mammoth steppe. Humans, with their constantly improving technology, overhunted the large herbivores and led to their extinction and extirpation.[8][9][11][12] Without herbivores grazing and trampling over the land, mosses, shrubs and trees were able to take over and replace the grassland ecosystem.[8][9][11][12] If the grasslands were destroyed because herbivore populations were decimated by human hunting, then "it stands to reason that those landscapes can be reconstituted by the judicious return of appropriate herbivore communities."

> ...

> A secondary aim is to research the climatic effects of the expected changes in the ecosystem. Here the key concept is that some of the effects of the large herbivores, such as eradicating trees and shrubs or trampling snow, will result in a stronger cooling of the ground in the winter, leading to less thawing of permafrost during summer and thereby less emission of greenhouse gases.

Well, that's the question then: whether the globally negative effect of eradicating trees which bind CO2 isn't worse than the local positive effect of "trampling the snow [which] will result in a stronger cooling of the ground". My completely unqualified gut feeling: if the climate warms enough, no amount of trampling will save the permafrost...

The carbon storage of grasslands should not be underestimated however. Most of it is sequestered underground, where it is less vulnerable to wildfire too.

Grassland also sequesters CO2 - more than forests, by some measures. I'd be more interested in how much methane all these new ruminants were going to produce.

Most of the studies and methods suggest that rotational grazing or better yet, roaming herds, contribute far more in soils and biodiversity than methane production.

Any time you see cows standing in dirt and mud - that is absolutely not what we're talking about. We're talking about the original American Bison herds of (hundred-)thousands who would move across enormous ranges taking grasses from feet to inches, and fertilizing its re-growth as they move. It makes room for accelerated growth of the grass, right when it is most nutritious and stagnant. Prairie and Savanna ecosystems are far more complex than I initially thought. The large animals are not "big lawnmowers" and it isn't "just grass" that they are working with.

The soil is a huge ecosystem of its own, and what we're experiencing globally on many fronts (climate, food security, general increased toxicity of air and water) are largely connected to soil failure from our hubris at thinking we can cultivate the green stuff on top with little understanding of what happens underneath.

Intensive meat production as we know it isn't exactly all that great either due to all the methane it puts out there and i'd expect it to easily outstrip all the benefits gained from the trampling and cooler ground due to less shrubbery.

We need to pump less greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

I don’t see why it needs to be intensive meat production when it could be just introducing megafauna.

1. We do not have any megafauna to introduce yet

2. If we find a method to restore mammoths, producing large enough number of these animals will take hundreds of years

3. the meat that we do not produce in arctic, is produced in tropics at the cost of destruction of much more diverse and useful forests.

But it also doesn't need to be "intensive" and can be free range.

Mammoth would be great, but a few that would work there could be

Bison / Buffalo

Polar - Grissly bear cross

Horses

Wolves

Arctic ( Alaska ) paper from USGS - https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70115138

So bring the Wooly Mammoth back from extinction?

For the sake of the environment, of course.

There is a group actively working on this [1]. Most exciting part is the work on constructing an artificial uterus to gestate the embryos, which can be a first step for doing the same for people too.

[1] https://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-mammoth/progress/

Boreal forests have a complex interaction with the climate system. The masking impact of trees on the snow underneath means the albedo or reflectivity of a boreal forest during winter is quite low -> absorption of heat in contrast to a tundra where the snow is fully exposed -> reflection of heat. Bonan 2008 [0] is an excellent discussion of the land surface heat balance globally. A google search for the title should give you a few links to a readable PDF.

[0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/320/5882/1444.full

The general idea is that ecosystems consisting of grasslands with herds of large herbivores are better than any others at rapidly fixing carbon and building rich soils, significantly more so than forests. The way this works is that grasses have very dense root systems and grow fast, especially when they are being cyclically grazed down to a stub (but not totally removed... goats don't work here because they don't leave enough). The herbivores in turn process that biomass into high-quality fertilizer and spread the micronutrients around by migrating between areas of different soil composition. The result is that the top few meters of soil are filled with a mixture of living and aerobically decaying grass roots, creating relatively stable humic compounds which serve as long-term carbon storage.

There is quite a bit of evidence for that theory... it's not completely uncontroversial, but people who have tried it in practice, i.e. raising cattle by the Voisin method or using Alan Savory's "Holistic Management" or similar approaches, usually swear by it, and theoretically it makes makes enough sense to warrant further investigation.

Over-grazing and compaction of the soil can be a real problem however.

yep, exactly what humanity needs now to go to hell faster is less forests.

Do you have some data showing that the amount of carbon stored in Siberian forests has a more significant warming effect than the methane escaping from the warming ground?

More carbon in the air = bad.

More carbon in trees = good. Maybe we could have a chance.

I think that is not so difficult to understand the concept after so many decades talking about it.

Russia has a 23% of the forests in all the planet. Bigger than Amazonas.

More carbon in the ground is also good, and in arctic permafrost can store much more carbon than trees.

Russian and Canadian forests are bigger than tropical forests, but they are much less productive, contain much less life and therefore much less carbon than tropical forests. That's why restoring the native grasslands (which were destroyed by humans) would be an improvement.

The goal of this project is to replace tundra with grasslands. And tundra isn't a forest really, it's quite the opposite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra

Errr, the article you're quoting says:

> Tundra vegetation is composed of dwarf shrubs, sedges and grasses, mosses, and lichens.

So, they want to replace grassland with... grassland (maybe with less shrubs)?

The topsoil in tundra is really thin, is rock basically and is ultra-poor and acidic. Very different ecosystems.

To remove the layer of soil is easy but to make it appear again magically... not. You need thousands of years in some cases.

That's not so much about converting the forest as about restoring the old ecosystem that have been destroyed by people in stone age. Both tundra and taiga are very low productivity desert like environments that have replaced rich natural grasslands.

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