Trees Could Change the Climate More Than Scientists Thought
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Whether you believe it or not, it is just as easy to create a desert from a forest as it is to do the reverse [1], it can even be a passive process [2]. Deserts rain occasionally, and when they do, it becomes a flash flood. If you tame the flash flood [3][5], you can change deserts. There are projects that do this and have proven its effectiveness, while also being able to solve the water crisis in arid lands in Africa [6].
Trees are incredibly important not necessarily for their reduction of carbon dioxide, but because of the microclimate each tree creates. They filter harsh light for the undergrowth, they cool the general area, and they transpire around 99% of the water they get, leading to more clouds and then more precipitation in other areas [4].
The reason why projects like this aren't so popular and aren't subsidized is not because they aren't effective, but because it is hard to make money from actually saving the environment.
[1] https://youtu.be/3RqsUD6fyGk [2]https://youtu.be/ZSPkcpGmflE [3] https://youtu.be/zqKaRg3GTqg [4] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/trees-amazon-make-th... [5] https://youtu.be/_4oKKs8FfI0 [6] https://thewaterproject.org/sand-dams
Post war became concrete and optimisation of how many plots you could pack in. First things to go were anything green. The temperature difference between the two approaches is easily noticeable. UK railways and towns are still reducing the amount of trees - mainly to eliminate the need to send some contractors out occasionally to tend to trees and bushes.
It's yet another case of humanity sawing the branch they're sitting on for $2 more.
The silliest part is the older developments, even former public social housing, are now often the valuable areas as they are nicer to live in.
This. I've been hearing for 30 years how important trees are, and that we should plant way more of them. It is just not happening in any significant way. Politician's talk.
Makes me feel old and tired, when I keep reading this same conclusion over and over, and "We should take action now", but nothing much happens on the action side.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/pakistan-s-billion-tr...
[2] https://nation.com.pk/03-Sep-2018/10-billion-tree-tsunami-dr...
Oh? We are making good progress in cutting it all down, you say? Makes sense.. all that beautiful hardwood just standing there is just a waste of cold, hard wealth /s
Today, we make price-support payments to farmers if grain prices drop below the support trigger. We require corn-derived ethanol in gasoline even though the energy economics of it make no sense. It's mildly nuts.
Let's just put some of that land back to trees. I mean really, instead of paying people to grow an over-abundance of feed grains, pay them to grow organic carbon sequestration units.
America's fetish with the preservation of small family farms is incredibly destructive both environmentally and economically. People seem to have this romanticized concept of farmers as Ma and Pa working hard every day just to scrape by and raise their 6 kids. In reality these are businesses with massive amounts of capital tied up in businesses that are only sustainable with government subsidy.
Let these businesses fail, create economic incentives to use the land for more productive purposes like carbon sequestration.
Farming is already not perfectly predictable yield to yield, when you add in even wilder price swings it only crushes farms under further financial risks and leads potential famine.
[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
I am not a farmer, so just giving the example I know about: In Holland farmers get 9ct/kg for potatoes. Then in the supermarket this becomes $1.80! Talking normal year here (last year). No long supply lines or nothing. How is that fair or even reasonable? How can they build the reserves to survive a bad yield? So, yes, they need subsidies.
It seems unlikely that it will be.
Creating highly flammable non native monocultures that support very little wildlife.
The reason for this is that smallholdings aren't viable, put down some eucalyptus, come back in 9 years, chop it down and get some cash. These used to be olive groves or just wild land for feeding goats etc. Sorry but the reforestation is largely a myth.
I totally agree with you that it's not the best way of reforesting... but baby steps. At least we have more trees now.
Do we actually have a good grip on emissions for industries yet? I though we were still at the stage of "CO2 has gone up by this much, let's allocate that to human activities according to some metrics we made up based on guesses about emissions", but I could be wrong...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_image_of_I...
"As we get closer, I can feel the temperature change. Here it's not just cool, it's actually a little cold."
Well no shit; those mountains you're strolling through peak at 7000 feet and higher [0].
This is very hyperbolic. Yes it is helpful but desert are deserts.
Californians have been planting and watering huge in-land areas for decades. All these areas have reverted to pure desert every time there is a drought and water quotas.
Reforestation (and saving the rain forests) are x10 easier and cheaper in rainy regions !!!
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-ora...
“The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes.”
[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-about-s...
Freeman Dyson in the same article is also talking about "abiotic oil and gas", which is another one of those things that the oil industry would definitely know if it was true because it's worth billions of dollars in exploration results.
Frankly, I'm stunned. How can you stand behind the integrity of your model(s) knowing that you excluded key components? Mind you, you could argue that they weren't aware. But that makes it an known unknown, not a false assumption.
Editorial: This is a perfect reason why "science" is trusted less and less. You cannot pound fist to desk demanding respect for your authority and then be intentionally negligent (just so your paper fits a narrative on the path to being published).
And, frankly, if you're going to produce a model that simulates something that is measuring risk (i.e., global warming), then I'd much prefer you leave out features that would understate the risk. Give me an upper bound on risk so we can see how bad it could get. If the worst isn't worth worrying about, well, then that missing feature didn't really matter. If it is worth worrying about, we can improve the model.
What is reasonable to demand, and in fact fundamental to the institution of science itself, is that scientists operate with the humility necessary for a discipline that is fundamentally open to new evidence and revised theories.
Instead what we are treated with (from climate science in particular) is “Science”, supposedly ordained as hard truth by an infallible “peer review”, and we are told we may not question the data itself, nor the statistical models, not even the draconian government interference into our lives conveniently suggested by the government sponsored “Science”, lest we be castigated as knuckle dragging “science deniers” with some secretive motivation to defend the fossil fuel industry or some other conspiratorial accusation based on zero evidence.
The Science part was full of error bars and "probably" and "estimated". Generally good science being done by people trying to discover the truth, though there was a noticeable hesitance about publishing any implication that the models might be wrong.
The Political part was full of certainty and unambiguous calls to action in the face of overwhelming evidence that the world was going to hell in a decade.
The media only ever reported on the Political part. The Science part was worth reading to get some perspective.
Moreover, climate science is in the hard science phase of maturity now. Which means that its unlikely that new data or new theories will results in major changes to what we think will happen. In other words, new data and new theories will only make minor course corrections to what we predict about the future. Earth's climate is still headed towards catastrophic changes due to human activity and anyone sane should be willing to bet their live savings on this.
Um. Well. I'm glad you said that. It's not any more stupid than ignoring data sources and producing model after model that only aimed to confirmed the prevailing narrative. "See we were right" but failing to list the caveats - as ALL data has - is negligence. With that said, I'm not going to bother with your second paragraph. It's absurd.
Science's #1 job is to ask "What did we miss?" Failure to intentionally not do so - so that hard becomes easy, my peers remain esteemed, my career nudges upward - isn't only stupid, it's lazy and actually violates the definition of Science. You just can't act like a hobbyist and demand the respect of a scientist. That's unreasonable, at best.
Yes. I think it's perfectly fine not to trust someone who deceived me, is lazy and is unapologetic on both accounts. As good Science already tells us: Trust is earned.
Perhaps we could plant Azolla in some big enclosed water bodies like the Black Sea?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
Azolla uses only the upper two cm of the water but takes all the light and 'kills' the 99,9999% of the water volume for other purposes. Would be like painting a building with a glowing paint and then stop people to enter and use the whole building so they do not damage the paint layer.
If we block the light we are excluding the effect of 5m of algae for example, killing the fishes that need this algae as larvae and also messing with the oxigen interchange in the water. Is not the perfect solution that we need
If I were to model the solar system and leave out the sun, it would be laughable and I would quickly find myself out of funding.
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_d...
Also note that as the AR reports get published, the models consistently get more complicated and improve. It turns out that you can get a fair amount of headway with a simplistic model (CO2 will generally drive the temperature up), but if you want to explain the variation that is observed, it gets more complicated. Given that the amount of warming has been consistently underestimated by the IPCC reports[1], it's fair to say that, for the most part, scientists are aware of the failings of their models and are being cautious in how dangerous the potential outcomes are.
The press, being the press, tends to sensationalize science with "Conflict! Intrigue! Breakthrough! Physicists vs Biologists! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!". I suspect that these misleading characterizations have a bigger impact on people's perception of Science than the actions of scientists themselves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
I think you mean overestimated. The IPCC reports have consistently predicted more warming than has actually occurred; by now the actual warming is outside the lower end of the IPCC's confidence interval. The IPCC AR5 responded to this by no longer claiming that its predictions of warming were based on climate models; instead it said they were based on, in effect, the personal opinions of the report writers. This does not strike me as a valid scientific method.
> The press, being the press, tends to sensationalize science with "Conflict! Intrigue! Breakthrough! Physicists vs Biologists! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!". I suspect that these misleading characterizations have a bigger impact on people's perception of Science than the actions of scientists themselves.
While I agree that the press likes to blow everything out of proportion, I think scientists have to bear the blame as well. Scientists do not do a good job of conveying the relative levels of confidence in different claims; to the public, they portray every claim as being made by Science, with the same authority, regardless of how solid it actually is. It is hard to blame lay people for losing trust in science when so many of these claims turn out to be wrong. What scientists should have done is to not have made those claims with the authority of Science in the first place.
The recent "replication crisis" is an example of this. The reason all those findings weren't replicated is that they weren't valid in the first place; they were only indications that needed further investigation. The scientists publishing them should have known that and should have said so. The narrative that should have been given to the public is "these are interesting indications but that's all, they might not pan out, more research is needed...well, we did more research and it didn't pan out.". But the narrative that was actually given to the public was "WoW! Great new finding! Everybody change everything you're doing!...oh, wait, turns out it wasn't true after all." After enough iterations of this, naturally nobody trusts what scientists say any more.
What confidence interval is that? What prediction was much higher than the +1C that has occurred? Looking up the 1990 IPCC report I see +1.5 to +4.5 between 2025 and 2050. We seem to be within that prediction.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/1992%20IPCC%20Supplement/IPCC...
+1 C from 1990 to now? It's not +1C, it's +0.61C, according to NASA's smoothed data:
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
The temperature anomaly (quoted on that page as 0.9C) is not based on 1990 as the zero point, so that's not the relevant number. The actual numbers are in the data behind the smoothed curve shown on the right of the page (click the "HTTP" link next to "Get Data").
> Looking up the 1990 IPCC report...
The relevant prediction in that report is for the "business as usual" scenario for CO2 increase, since that matches pretty closely how CO2 has actually increased since 1990. The prediction for that scenario is +0.3C per decade.
However, there are other comparisons that can be made, which make the models look even worse. See, for example, here:
https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli...
This is comparing the IPCC AR5 model runs with balloon and satellite data. (And note that, unlike the comparison I did above, the "model runs" curve in this graph averages models for all of the CO2 increase scenarios, not just the "business as usual" one; just showing the "business as usual" model prediction curve would increase the gap between the models and the data.
+1C from pre-industrial times. Apparently we are at +0.8-1.2 in that measure.
>The prediction for that scenario is +0.3C per decade.
The report says 0.2-0.5. The +0.6 from 1990 to today is at the lower end of that range. It seems to me you're splitting hairs when the models are doing alright.
Which all depends on how you choose "pre-industrial times" and how accurate you think temperature readings from those times are. Since even today's thermometers are only accurate to within half a degree or so, I'm not sure how we can even know the change from "pre-industrial times" to within less than half a degree (four tenths of a degree according to your statement).
> The report says 0.2-0.5. The +0.6 from 1990 to today is at the lower end of that range.
Yes, that's true. But as I noted, that's not the only comparison between models and data. Looking at comparisons overall, the statement I made, that the data is outside the lower end of the models' confidence interval, is correct.
The predictions of doom that are driving the public policy changes being demanded by climate change alarmists do. And the models are wrong.
This is because the climate has gone through major changes before, and we can see how much of an initial push it took, and what happened afterwards.
Trending to a local minimum or maximum in modeling can be caused by small changes at certain points dependent on time and be completely negligible at other points. Without understanding the model: 1. We can't even pretend to understand causality 2. We can't infer the complex state at an individual time or even the magnitude of a push.
This is not correct. There is plenty of data in climate science. There just isn't a good enough understanding of the underlying mechanisms to make predictions that are accurate enough to drive multi-trillion-dollar public policy decisions.
If the unaccounted for factor starts changing significantly over the time frame you are modelling, this will not work well and then you have to understand that factor and build it in.
From the article, the impression I get is that we are now learning the trees and other plants affect climate more than we might have thought, but I don't see anything suggesting that the amount of the affect is changing much and so it would likely be the kind of thing that gets accounted for in the tunable parameters of the climate models.
They don’t know everything but their approximations are really good for getting a lot of stuff done. That we know more and more over time is why they keep getting smaller.
If you want to reject how far we’ve come, that’s fine, but it’s a bit hypocritical to use all the medicines and high speed travel and telecommunications and the pocket supercomputer.
It is easy enough to make the assumption that technological advancement comes out of the study of science. However, if one looks back at history, one sees that technological advancement was the driver for science and not the other way around.
When it boils down to it, the more we learn about the universe around us, the less we really know. There are more and more areas which we are finding that just don't fit into the existing models.
I believe that our current climate modelling efforts leave much to be desired. Planetary climate is an incredibly complex set of interactions and we have only just started to scratch the surface of those interactions. Let alone understanding what all the relationships are and how they affect all the various feedback circuits (both positive and negative feedback).
Back to the article, the thinking that went on prior to the Dustbowl was that 'the rain follows the plough'. Not the same as 'the rain follows the tree'. It was no accident that there were not a lot of trees in the Dustbowl areas. The indigenous people that lived there before the Columbus rocked up had cultivated the land by clearing it with fire. This created tasty pasture for buffalo to graze on.
Meanwhile, out of computer models and in real life, there is an interesting bit of progress going on in Ethiopia right now. The aid agencies and their ideas on having people eat imported maize were booted out to be replaced with proper crops and some proper land management. These efforts put to shame 'Band Aid' and, odd as it seems, I really would like to go there for the cuisine. I never thought I would be thinking that Ethiopia - of all places - could be a place of fine, wholesome dining with the most amazing markets.
Everything is low-tech in this DIY reboot, there is lots of teamwork and quite a Garden Of Eden is being made. The soil has fertility, rain does not wash away the topsoil, the tree-line has gained altitude and it is all going very well. I do not know if there is a micro-climate with extra clouds, however, this improvement in circumstance has not been dependent on work done 'a continent away' to magically make clouds. Ethiopian people outside of this huge 'trial area' and still farming boring crops resent missing out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983–1985_famine_in_Ethiopia
Emergency aid isn’t development aid.
If you mess around in a big way with something that is really complicated, and has evolved over (at least) millions of years, and there are so many factors that you are unable to take them all into account ...
the consequences may not be predictable.
The greenhouse effect, however, is quite easy to establish. Perhaps it's time to stop experimenting, for a century or ten.
I thought climate science was settled science?
This statement causes alarm bells to ring inside my head. The calamitous warnings that we hear are based on predictions that are based on climate models that are claimed to be nigh on rock solid. The advice that we are given is based on theories about how the climate works that are meant to be highly accurate. The numbers we have are based on measurements that statistically are highly accurate and methodologically very sound. The impression we are given is that the models and theories and numbers and measurements are mostly a done deal bar a little tweaking here and there. What we are doing now is just refining the models and acquiring more data and plotting ever more accurate graphs.
If it is true that at least one major factor has not been taken into account that truth to my mind does a lot to damage the credibility of those making the predictions and peddling advice. And if there is one major factor, why could there not be another major factor?
I have long wanted to know why – if climate change be such a serious concern – we don't try to reduce desertification on a global scale, in addition to tackling our over-reliance on hydrocarbons. But no, it's all "coal is bad, diesel is bad, oil is bad, natural gas is bad, you name it is bad", but where are all the state-sponsored projects to green the Sahara and the Arabian peninsula? Immigration from North Africa and the Middle East is causing political unrest in Europe. If the land was better over there they wouldn't need as badly to come over here. It feels to me that even though climate scientists claim to be rational actors they are being motivated by guilt rather than reason. I know it is heresy at this point to question climate science but for me the science has never been anything remotely as clear cut and settled as CFCs and the Ozone layer. For a while there about a decade go we collectively were way more concerned about the rain forests and the rate at which they were being cut down. Can we not at least agree that two things need to happen: (1) we need to reduce our dependency on hydrocarbons (2) we need to plant trees.
I think we also need to acknowledge that "green technologies" (there's a loaded term is ever there was one) are anything but – producing solar panels and wind turbines at a massive scale is not all upside and no downside. The processes that make up green tech are not magically immune from having a harmful effect on the planet.
Ultimately what I think we should be doing is building nuclear power stations and planting billions, if not trillions, of trees. Everything else is window dressing.
Saudi Arabia actually had a number of projects for this kind of thing, but they were focused on dairy and grain intensive farming propped up by "fossil water" that was either extracted from wells or from oil-fuelled desalinisation. It didn't last long.
I remember learning back in the 90s that the climate models of the time did not include cloud cover, and was immediately sceptical of any predictions the models produced.
Sounds like the models are still pretty bad. How can we be confident of IPCC warnings if the models still can't accurately factor in couds and vegetation?