Russ Smith

I mentioned this a few weeks ago and someone asked for a reference, this was in my morning paper today.

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_5...nclick_check=1

Planting trees falls short at saving the world
By Julie Sevrens Lyons
Mercury News
Article Launched: 04/10/2007 01:43:26 AM PDT




Plant a tree, save the world?

Not exactly, according to Bay Area researchers who studied the role trees can play in slowing down global warming.

Although a tree can remove more than a ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during its lifetime - reducing the amount of the most common greenhouse gas behind the planet's warming - planting trees willy-nilly may not be the best strategy, researchers from Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said Monday.

"Only tropical rain forests are strongly beneficial in helping slow down global warming," said Govindasamy Bala, an atmospheric scientist at the Livermore lab and one of the study's authors.

While the study suggests it is more important than previously recognized to preserve and restore tropical forests, trees in snowy regions may actually increase local warming, the researchers said. It may sound counterintuitive, but forests in snowy latitudes absorb solar energy that would otherwise be reflected back out into space, producing a heating effect, said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist with the Carnegie Institution at Stanford who also wrote the report.

The finding, which appears this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, only adds to the confusion about how best to minimize the impact of global warming. But one thing is clear, Caldeira said: The study shouldn't be cited as a reason to chop down trees in the
world's coolest locales.

"I would hate to see these results used as an excuse to cut down forests in snowy areas and saying, `We're helping to cool down the environment,'" Caldeira said. "A primary reason we are trying to slow global warming is to protect nature. It just makes no sense to destroy natural ecosystems in the name of saving natural ecosystems."

But, he added, efforts to increase the forested areas in northern regions may be ineffective in combating warming and can be a distraction from the real answer, which is the need to reform mankind's system of energy production.

"Trees, especially where they grow naturally, improve the environment. They provide shade. They're pleasant to be under. They provide habitat for lots of birds and animals," Caldeira said. "There are plenty of reasons to restore forests, but climate change shouldn't be one of them."

Steven W. Running, a professor of ecology at the University of Montana, praised the researchers but questioned their conclusion.

"I don't think the conclusions they draw are ready for prime-time policy, and particularly their conclusion that reforestation in high latitudes might be counterproductive," Running said. "What they are doing is sparking a lively scientific discussion that is very necessary, and I applaud them for that."

But until the scientific community can "chew this over," he said, it shouldn't be used in setting policy.




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The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact Julie Sevrens Lyons at jlyons@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5989

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Russ Smith

Couple of interesting points here.

1) I've thought all along that depleting the rain forests were the primary area where you can blame humans for warming, this study confirms what every other study does. It's indisputable you cut down rain forests, it gets warmer, almost overnight. There's no delayed reaction, no dispute over what came first or what else may have caused it.

2) This reinforces the notion that many carbon offset programs are complete bunk and designed to make wealthy people feel less guilty about their conspicuous consumption. Many carbon offsets are simply paying money to someone who promises to reduce your carbon footprint, and the most common way is to plant trees. The problem is this study affirms a few others that say only trees planted in the correct areas really impact warming. So you pay your money to someone who plants a tree but it's having no measurable effect.

Note, as the article says, there's nothing inherently wrong with planting trees, they're obviously a lot better to look at than no trees. But this is why one of the current theories for reducing CO2 involves artificial trees which look like bizarre giant tv antennas, it turns out they're more efficient in reducing Co2 than trees, and they don't absorb heat contributing to warming.

Most important thing we can do is save the rainforests and stop those people who are cutting them back to grow plants specifically to make ethanol.

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Dback Jon

Yup - Saving the Rain Forest should be one of the top goals.
The Boreal Forests have many other positive effects on the ecosystem, so saving them is worthy for other reasons.

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R.I.P Tim Minnick

The KING of Cards

40yearfan

I'm in on this. So how do we go about doing this? Can the US buy some of the land these forests sit on?

Heucrazy

80% of the CO2 consumed by plants and converted to oxygen is done by algae in the oceans.

Maybe focusing on dumping in the oceans which is harmful to algae should be the number one concern in the fight against global warming?

Nah, that makes to much sense.

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Russ Smith

nope there was an article in the paper Monday about ideas being worked on to fight warming etc. One of the ideas was a way to create algae blooms in the ocean to do just what you're talking about. it's the last one dumping iron ore dust in the ocean which leads to algae blooms(but possible red tides too).



http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_5625816


Wacky ideas to save Earth
By Seth Borenstein
Associated Press
Article Launched: 04/09/2007 01:31:50 AM PDT



WASHINGTON - Crazy-sounding ideas for saving the planet are getting a serious look from top scientists, a sign of their fears about global warming and the desire for an insurance policy in case things get worse.

How crazy?

There is the human-made volcano that shoots gigatons of sulfur high into the air. The space sun shade made of trillions of little reflectors between Earth and sun, slightly lowering the planet's temperature. The forest of ugly artificial trees that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Also the "Geritol solution" in which iron dust is dumped into the ocean.

"Of course it's desperation," said Stanford University Professor Stephen Schneider. "It's planetary methadone for our planetary heroin addiction. It does come out of the pessimism of any realist that says this planet can't be trusted to do the right thing."

NASA is putting the finishing touches on a report summing up some of these ideas and has spent $75,000 to map out rough details of the sun-shade concept. One of the premier climate modeling centers in the United States, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, spent the six weeks running computer simulations of the human-made volcano scenario and will soon turn its attention to the space umbrella idea.

In February, billionaire Richard Branson offered a $25 million prize to the first feasible technology to reduce carbon-dioxide levels in the air.

Simon "Pete" Worden, who heads NASA/Ames
Research Center at Moffett Federal Airfield, said some of these proposals, which represent a field called geo-engineering, have been characterized as anywhere from "great" to "idiotic." As if to distance NASA from the issue a bit, Worden said the agency's report will not do much more than explain the range of possibilities.
Scientists in the past have been reluctant to consider such concepts. Many fear there will be unintended side effects; others worry such schemes might prevent the kind of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are the only real way to fight global warming.

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conraddobler

I think we should all just leave and take a vacation for about 1000 years.

Someone just needs to find a suitable planet that needs more CO2 and a means for transportation of the entire human race to there and back, should be simple enough.

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At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

~Abraham Lincoln Lyceum Address