The World's Largest Environmental Experiment

Roland Piquepaille writes "The Amazon in South America is more than a forest or an habitat. It's a climate regulator which has to absorb between 200 and 300 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions produced by the 8,000 square miles of destroyed forests every year. In 1998, the Brazilian community, helped by many international institutions, launched the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment (LBA). The LBA Experiment is made up of 120 projects, 61 of which are already complete. The status of these projects is currently being reviewed by 800 delegates from 170 Brazilian and foreign institutions at the III LBA Scientific Conference held in Brasilia between July 27 and 29. NASA says it plays a key role in the LBA experiment through the use of its satellites and its computer scientists. But Inter Press Service reports that the Mega-Amazon Research Project Holds Surprises -- Good and Bad: good because it provides opportunities for 400 researchers to work on postgraduate studies in the area, bad because it's still not known if the forests absorb enough carbon to compensate the emissions caused by deforestation, therefore contributing to global warming. Please read this overview for more details, references and a map of the LBA sites spanning the Amazon."

Comments

Moo

[Chacham]

The status of these projects is currently being reviewed by 800 delegates from 170 Brazilian and foreign

This makes me wonder. How can 800 delefgaters agree on anything? Sure, their intentions may be right, but wouldn't a group of closer to five or may be ten people be better?

Perhaps, this ought to be interesting.

Re:Moo

[Marxist Hacker 42]

This makes me wonder. How can 800 delefgaters agree on anything?

Mythical Man Month or Congressional Record? Either could lead you to this conclusion, so I'm curious.

Re:Moo

[Bearpaw]

This makes me wonder. How can 800 delefgaters agree on anything?

Why would they all need to agree on anything? This being science, a rough consensus on tentative conclusions and furthur efforts needed would be the reasonable expectation.

Sure, their intentions may be right, but wouldn't a group of closer to five or may be ten people be better?

Five to ten people to review the status of 120 projects, conducted along a river that is over 6,000 km long and up to 10 km wide? (Of course, that's just the river itself. The relevant area is much bigger than that.) IANAEnvironmentalScientist, but I suspect that 800 reviewers is not too many.

Re:Moo

[Chacham]

Congressional Record

But C-SPAN is so much more *fun*. :)

Re:Moo

[Chacham]

This being science, a rough consensus on tentative conclusions and furthur efforts needed would be the reasonable expectation.

The problem is that there ends up being 800 *separate* people. Ten people are more likely to come to a consensus, or at least see each other's points.

Re:Moo

[some guy I know]

How can 800 delefgaters agree on anything?

More importantly, is the rain forest, in its current state, able to absorb the prodigious amount of carbon dioxide produced by 800 delegates?

Re:Moo

[Chacham]

Now that's pretty funny. :)

Bad Surprises

[fredmosby]

Mega-Amazon Research Project Holds Surprises -- Good and Bad: good because it provides opportunities for 400 researchers to work on postgraduate studies in the area, bad because it's still not known if the forests absorb enough carbon to compensate the emissions caused by deforestation

I would hope the amount of carbon absorbed was not known, otherwise there wouldn't be much need for the experiment.

Subject: Sad news ... Francis Crick, dead at 88

[orthogonal]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - DNA co-discoverer/founder of molecular biology Francis Harry Compton Crick OM (Order of Merit) was found dead in Thornton Hospital, San Diego this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to science. Truly an icon of our modern era.

Re:Subject: Sad news ... Francis Crick, dead at 88

[Anonymous Coward]

Francis who?

Re:Subject: Sad news ... Francis Crick, dead at 88

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, there is a slashdot article about that above this one on the front page.

Forests

[bartok]

I'm always amazed at the hypocrisy of north american countries when they denounce the deforestation in the south. It's not like we haven't been doing the exact same thing with our own forests.

This is a classic case of "Do like I say, not like I do".

Re:Forests

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Oregon has required, since Gov Tom McCall's bill in 1973 on this issue, replanting 3 trees for every tree cut down within 3 years. Which goes to show that it's the stupidity of Bush, not being Republican like Tom McCall who thought that conservation and being a conservative went hand in hand (something about the root word?), that has led to the Biscuit Fire Cut.

Given today's employment problems in Oregon, I'd vote for an old true conservationist conservative in a split second. Just imagine telling all the H-1bs "You are welcome to visit, but you can't stay".

Re:Forests

[GoPlayGo]

Sometimes after experience has shown some of the risks, it is wise to say "Do as I suggest, not as I did". History is history: it is meant to be learnt from, not to be hung like a millstone around the neck.

North American deforestation has had many downsides. Human beings, regardless of the continent, are advised to not make the same mistakes.

Looked at N. America lately?

[Engineer-Poet]

The failure of farms all over the USA (beginning in places like Vermont, but hardly confined to that region) plus deliberate conservation efforts have led to a re-forestation of the continent. River-bottom land in some areas has been removed from farming and returned to oak forest. Michigan was clear-cut in the 19th century, and it's once again heavily forested in many areas.

We could do more, beginning with discouraging (instead of subsidizing) excess agricultural production and returning that land to forest - but that doesn't mean that a lot has not already been done.

Re:Looked at N. America lately?

[Bearpaw]

The failure of farms all over the USA (beginning in places like Vermont, but hardly confined to that region) plus deliberate conservation efforts have led to a re-forestation of the continent. River-bottom land in some areas has been removed from farming and returned to oak forest. Michigan was clear-cut in the 19th century, and it's once again heavily forested in many areas.

What's the ratio of forests to tree farms? That ratio may be relevant, as I'd guess that tree farms probably aren't nearly as good at carbon-fixing and oxygen production as forests are. (The difference between a tree farm and a real forest is like the difference between a field of wheat and a meadow.)

Re:Looked at N. America lately?

[Ayaress]

I can't speak for the country as a whole, but mid-Michigan is mainly natural forest now. There's not much of it, especially sine the Tri Cities and Flint have been building out, but they aren't farm trees. Much of it is abandoned farmland. Some from the Depression, when farmers started letting land fall into disrepair and only growing enough to support their community instead of growing food they can't sell, and a lot of it from people moving into the cities to work for GM and Ford. Thomas Township, near Saginaw, used to be all farmland. At the start of the 1900's, there was barely a tree standing. However, there's almost no farmland there now. Most of it grew back into pine forests. They're clearing a lot of it for the commercial district along Gratiot, Tittabawasee and US-10, but even now, there's heavy trees right up to the edge of the parking lots. A few years ago, there was even a deer that wandered into a supermarket and caused some moderate chaos.

Re:Looked at N. America lately?

[SEWilco]

I'd guess that tree farms probably aren't nearly as good at carbon-fixing

But what happens to the carbon?
The carbon locked in a tree farm's wood gets harvested. If it becomes building material and is sealed inside a wall then that carbon has been removed from the atmosphere. If a tree falls in the forest and rots, some of that carbon is released to the atmosphere.

Plankton

[kippy]

I was under the impression that the oceans are overwhelming larger carbon sinks than surface forests. Wasn't that part of the reason that carbon credit trading was scoffed at by some scientists?

Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that the sheer volume of the oceans supports the idea. Between the plant life filling that volume and the fact that the water itself dissolves a good deal of CO2, it seems like promoting artificial blooms of plankton and algae would sink a lot more carbon.

Re:Plankton

[Bearpaw]

Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that the sheer volume of the oceans supports the idea. Between the plant life filling that volume and the fact that the water itself dissolves a good deal of CO2, it seems like promoting artificial blooms of plankton and algae would sink a lot more carbon.

I don't know whether you're wrong or not, but I don't think you can simply count the sheer volume of the oceans. (1) There is insufficient sunlight penetration for photosynthesis below about 200 meters and (2) the most life-productive areas of the ocean are over the continental shelves. (That's still a lot of volume, to be sure, but small compared to the total volume of oceans.)

Forests vs. tree farms

[Engineer-Poet]

I'm not sure you can draw a clean line between them. On the one extreme you have old-growth in places like Alaska, and on the other you have conifer or aspen pulpwood plantations. But how do you classify all the various national forests? Even a roadless area can be turned into clearcut, at least if certain interests have their way. Much of Maine is owned by private companies and managed for wood production, but it seems to have more of the characteristics of a forest.

People like to live among trees. How do you classify "urban forests"?

I wish it was easy, but it doesn't appear to be.

Plankton fix carbon after oceans absorb it

[Engineer-Poet]

You're making an incorrect distinction between absorption and fixation. Whether or not the carbon is fixed in organic matter, it can go into the ocean; unfixed CO2 will exist as carbonic acid, dissolved CO2, bicarbonate ion or carbonate ion.

Adding CO2 means reducing alkalinity, which makes carbonate less stable in the oceans. This may have serious effects on marine organisms which use carbonate in their skeletons; see here for a brief news item. Science News has run several articles on the subject, but none appear to be on-line; here are the references from one of them.

Beg to differ...

[jo42]

The World's Largest Environmental Experiment is humanity living on Earth. Period. We use, abuse and expell. Someday this planet of ours will be un-inhabitable if we keep on going the way we are...

Iron

[sybert]

Iron is the limiting factor for most ocean biomass growth. A pound of iron in any form added to the ocean can yield new life enough to sequester anywhere from five to fifty tones of carbon.

North America is also a huge carbon sink.

Not just iron

[Engineer-Poet]

The utility of iron fertilization to "solve" atmospheric CO2 issues is being questioned. Ask for support of all claims.

The carbon-uptake of N. American landmass may be due in large part to the adoption of zero-till farming; here is an article on it.

Re:Not just iron

[SEWilco]

Ask for support of all claims.

Remember to ask for support of claims that the temperature history resembles a hockey stick, that there is significant warming, and that climate simulations show how the real world behaves.

Answer To The Largest Experiment

[Wandering Wombat]

42

Grain of Salt

[Mirkon]

Even with 800 delegates, if even one of them is Pauly Shore, the whole thing is buggered.

Note to moderators: I'm not sure myself if this is an insight or a cheap joke.

Half-truths and other nonsense

[prof_peabody]

I hate to say it, but most of the insightful comments here are only half true, and some of the answers provided only scratch the surface and miss ALL the important complications. I have spent years reading scientific literature on these topics, and the conversations here highlight 1) the complexity of the problem; 2) the quick/poorly thought out solutions offered; and 3) our lack of understanding of the Earth system.

Go read some more on ocean chemistry and biology folks...
I'd explain GEOCARB II, but I don't think most people want to hear anout the modelling side of things!

Watch for self-interest too

[Engineer-Poet]

Note that the Greening Earth Society is founded and financed by companies with an interest in unrestricted CO2 emissions (the Western Fuels Alliance is mostly coal-mining interest). If you are looking for scientific truth-seeking or even fairness and balance, don't look to them.

Re:Watch for self-interest too

[SEWilco]

Look at the research, it is in several places.

You may have trouble finding it on IPCC pages, as the IPCC states it is interested in human-caused warming. So be careful what you look for from them too.

Re:Watch for self-interest too

[Engineer-Poet]

If you had links to some of this research, perhaps you'd be willing to share them and spare me the effort?

I'm particularly interested in the sources of funding for this research. Research sponsored by the coal and oil industries can be expected to be suppressed if it supports actions contrary to their interests. (One would also expect research sponsored by left/socialist organizations to be suppressed if it didn't support their agenda, which may be neutral or anti-corporate.)

If the IPCC's research is as you describe, that's fine. If human activities are warming the planet in addition to the effects of solar changes, we probably want to act to reverse the human contributions.

Re:Watch for self-interest too

[SEWilco]

If you'd do the effort to click on the original link above, there are several links scattered in the article. If you want the original research, try looking at references at the bottom.

Here's the hard part: Hold down that left mouse button and highlight what you think might be the title of the paper. Then let go of that mouse button.

After a nap, try Control-C to copy the title. Go to Google and use Control-V to insert the title. Put it inside quotation marks ("). Click Search.

Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation.
Disparity of tropospheric and surface temperature trends: new evidence.
Impact of urbanization and land-use change on climate.