verging_on_random

The confusion warms

April 11, 2007 on 8:54 pm | In Uncategorized |

Planting trees is good in the fight against global warming, right? I mean carbon trading schemes say so, Al Gore absolves any guilt when he pays his electricity bill by buying lots of tree credits … I mean cutting down trees = Bad and planting them = Good. Wasn’t it Bob Hawke who said we were gunna plant a billion of the friggin’ things?

The trouble is … it turns out trees might not inhibit global warming so much as, ummm, make it worse. It all depends on where the tree is apparently.

In tropical zones, forests have a significant, overall cooling effect. The soil is very wet and, so, via evotranspiration, the trees are covered by low-lying clouds that create a small albedo (power of light that is reflected by a surface). In nontropical areas, Caldeira explains, “the real significant factor is whether there’s snow on the ground in the winter.” If a forest covers a snowy expanse, “that has a strong warming influence,” he notes, because of little cloud cover resulting from less efficiency in evaporating water. The poor cloud formation coupled with the intense absorption of light by the trees “far overwhelms the cooling influence of the carbon storage,” he says.

So there you go … we should cut down every tree above the snow line.

Like I keep saying … the idea that the human race can fix its impact on the planet with scientifically planned solutions is absurd.