The National Weather Service is describing Hurricane Florence, currently bearing down on the Carolinas, as the storm of a lifetime.

When measuring soil carbon sequestration, there will be anomolies. For example biochar soil additives are becoming more common, and will result in powdered carbon granules in the soil. Though technically these are increases in the carbon level of the soil and should be beneficial to plant growth, they do not represent new carbon sequestration. In terms of a carbon credit schedule, soil additives don’t count.

The pets vs cattle analogy is often used to explain cloud computing and modern datacenters. If a server is unique, loaded with important data, fitted out with special peripherals or computing, or otherwise special then we end up treating it like a pet. It is carefully monitored and if something goes wrong we swing into action to repair it and restore it to service. By contrast, datacenter servers are cattle. If something goes wrong with a server its workload gets shifted to one of the other servers while the original is slated for replacement.

Topsoil across the land areas of the planet holds substantially more carbon than the entire atmosphere, but over the past several hundred years we have released at least 50 percent of the carbon formerly held in agricultural lands. This is primarily because of tilling, which disturbs the deeper soils and kills the roots and fungi which reside there. Tilling is necessary for modern agricultural practices using fertilizer and insecticides, which can improve yields substantially until the soil has become substantially depleted of carbon. Then the land becomes gradually less productive.

The Y2K problem was a formative period for the modern technology industry. Software developed prior to the 1990s often used only two digits to store the year, for example ‘87’ to mean 1987, and would not properly handle years after 1999. Living through this time, the progression of attitudes twoard the Y2k problem in the mass culture progressed from:

Decarbon Earth is in the business of ameliorating climate change via technology, in several possible areas:

• carbon capture from the air and ocean
• mechanisms to verify carbon captured via other methodologies, such as regenerative agriculture or afforestation
• HVAC efficiency improvements to reduce energy use and reliance on refrigerants