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Careful Where You Put That Tree
Ant writes "Wired News is reporting that according to Stanford University's atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, forests in the wrong location can actually make the Earth hotter. From the article: 'Plants absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, so scientists and policy makers have long assumed new forest growth helps combat global warming. At an American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco earlier this month, however, Caldeira rolled out a provocative new finding: Trees may be good at capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but their dark leaves are also very efficient at soaking up sunlight, which is later released as heat. At certain latitudes, the net effect of these two processes is warming, rather than cooling.'"
Do as before, it´s good what you do, do the best you can
.. rocks, pure rocks, hard to bring back, the rain-forest with it´s micro-climate .. so planting alternative trees,
- save energy
- use insulation, improve insulation, (it works as a two way effect,
a good insulation stops heat from escaping in the winter,
and in summer stops heat from wandering in (with a house with a good insulation
you need less power too heat up your house in the winter, and you need less
power for your aircooler in the summer, because the chill is preserved as in
a fridge )
The problem is, that the processes involved in trees and the hole climate
system are complex, and hard to understand, and so a single isolated findings
or fact might not concur with the system, even climate isn´t the same as weather, it´s the interaction between local processes and global processes.
On the one hand, tree-letters reflect light (as brigther the letters are, the more light is reflected) and trees also have a cooling ability too,
they transfer water from the roots to the letters where it evaporates and the process of evaporation transfers heat through the vapour, and so providing an insulating layer atop of the ground, preserving the humidity within the ground,
by limiting the vapour from the ground through the layer of trees.
Even trees/wood keep the surrounding area cooler, than bare rocks can do,
the darker the rocks the less they are reflecting the light, the hotter they are.
You can simply check this while walking in the wood and off the wood
on a hot summer day, under the trees it´s cooler, and if you ever made
a walk on rocky grounds on a hot day, you´ll starve too reach a wood or even a single tree to rest, but trees and especially their roots also have an anti-erosion effect, it´s visible there where wood got destroyed in favor
of agriculture, especially visible in brazil,
the ground under the rain-forest, is a 2-5(max) meters layer of earth,
when you burn all the trees you can do a 2 years agriculture,
furtilized through the charred trees, (the expensive trees are choped before)
but after the ground is degraded and leached, the countrymen leave the bare grounds.
Naturally in the rain-forest it rains, and so the rain erodes the degraded grounds and what you can see than is where the rain-forrest is based on
has a stabilizing effect on the global climate
is a try to substitute the binding of CO2 in biomass, but this must
be also said for a limited time, as long as the tree lives.
And there is even a historical missmatch, because in days before the
industrial revolution, there was extremly more wood, the rain forest in south america eroded dramatically over the years, even europe was widly covered with large compounding woods, there was less agrocultured land.
So you can plant the trees without worry, and without mentioning the environmental effects trees have, they are also good for children to
climb or to build a tree-house.
Since it is Christmas, I shall be kind to such a response. Mars is experiencing Global Warming.
So is NASA lying? Or don't you believe in their facts?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Climatologists have said that at the current rate of global warming a net change in hurricane severity is still quite a ways off.
Katrina was bad only because of where it hit. Any other category 3 would've done the same thing to the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was a category 4 and tore up large chunks of Florida. Not only would Andrew have done to New Orleans what Katrina did, it probably would've been worse, since Katrina was only a category 3 when it hit land for the second time (it was only a category 1 when it hit Florida).
The strongest recorded storm at the time of landfall between 1992 and 2005 was a category 4 (Andrew), not a category 3 (Katrina). Storm severity was worse 13 years ago, when the globe was marginally cooler. Katrina was not a direct result of global warming, it was just an average storm that hit a very ill prepared area.