We are gathered here this week in Belize for the 15th annual permaculture design course at the Maya Mountain Research Farm. I have blogged in past years from this place, set upon an ancient city ruin from the Classic Maya Era, surrounded today by a multi-strata agroforestry example of the human potential for antifragile, harmonious living with élan in the uncertain and ominous Anthropocene. I’ll not do that again just now. Instead I want to mention something I delved into during our first day of class — a bit of climate science confusion that needs to be corrected and nipped in the bud.
The ecologist Walter Jehne is particularly guilty of spreading this particular point of misinformation, and while I like Jehne and his work in general, he does the world a disservice when he tries to opine on atmospheric science.
Jehne correctly reports that humans — primarily by land use change — have altered Earth’s water cycle in some very profound ways. He also correctly observes that the single largest greenhouse gas, by a sizeable margin, is water vapor. He then draws the conclusion that by restoring hydrological health to the land surface of the planet we will rapidly restore the natural climate that existed before the industrial age. This is a logical error in which coincidence is confused with causality, something we humans have a neurological propensity…