Slashdot Mirror
Pine Forest Vapor Particles Can Limit Climate Change
Solo-Malee writes "New research suggests a strong link between the powerful smell of pine trees and climate change. Scientists say they've found a mechanism by which these scented vapors turn into aerosols above boreal forests. These particles promote cooling by reflecting sunlight back into space and helping clouds to form."
So we just need to produce pine fresh aerosol to fix the global warming? Well thats ironic to say the least.
So pine forests actually fight Tropical forests?
I wonder who'll be the first to make it into a holywood movie.
The world keeps amazing us because the way it works is ever more complicated than we thought.
-- Cheers!
Am just wondering do the trees sense the amount of sunlight or stress from heat lack of water?? Or do they always release the smell??? In which case it isn't really be done to prevent climate change.
The blight of the Mountain Pine Beetle has caused collosal damage to the pine forests of western North America, thwarting any supposed vapor particle limitation of climate change:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Pine tree air-freshener in my Range Rover!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Still retains that pine fresh smell
or myst as it may be; http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=weather%20manipulation%20spraying&sm=3 or twisted as it may be; http://www.globalresearch.ca/weather-warfare-beware-the-us-military-s-experiments-with-climatic-warfare/7561
Everyone knows this - it's why you see that bluish haze above northern forests (Maine, looking at you) in the summer, the turpenes coming off the trees make natural smog in the sunlight.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Of course. That's why so many people demand cutting grants to climate scientists.
a rough draft then; http://youtu.be/CEdOqYEwcT8
"Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."
Terpenes are a well known component of aerosol away from cities, and studied since many years. Nothing new in the headline, after all...
I learned 2 things from this article...
(1) Apparently cars with pine tree air fresheners really *are* cool...
(2) The actual cause of winter is all the christmas tree smell caused by growing them in the first place, and winter goes away after we cut them down, hold them hostage for a couple of weeks, and then release them, after which it starts warming up again...
Science: It's not just for breakfast any more!
As a Luthier, I can heartily suggest planting more HARDWOOD forests. To balance nature a bit from the overplanting of pine by the lumber industry and to ensure a future supply of hardwood for NICE things like furniture, guitars, baseball bats, etc. quit planting damn pines! Hardwoods are dissappearing in favor of the quicker growing weed; the pine tree. In nature, we had forest fires from dry weather, lightning strikes and bored Indians to control pine forests. Now we are out of balance and the price of hardwood is a sure reflection of that. Houses need to be built from better materials anyway, papercrete, dirt,rock,recycled materials and things more suited to lasting construction than found in stick houses.
Think Hardwood.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
And here it seems the whole human population went with 'New Car Smell' instead of 'Pine Forrest'. Now you tell us it was a big mistake.
Some trees emit a huge amount of water vapor which acts as a cooling agent and also causes clouds to form. Some trees can pump 30,000 gallons of water a day into the air. I would suspect that these trees are even better than pine trees at keeping things cool. Some of the invasive species that florida tries to hold back use copius amounts of water. The dreaded kudzo vine is also one heck of a water pump.
like snowmonkeys http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=polar%20vortex%20weather%20modification%20&sm=3 we can admire ourselves & them until we melt down? pretense is useless,,, never a better time to consider ourselves in relation to one another & our surroundings...... Slashdot only allows....
The clouds can only be helped forming in conditiions where these aerosols are introduced in an area where there's not enough cloud condensing nuclei for the available water to accrete around.
Shit, boy, this is schoolyard physical geography here.
Read the abstract, I'm not sure what's news here? It's certainly not the discovery that "trees make their own rain". Nor is it news that light coloured aerosols tend to reflect sunlight back into space, whereas dark coloured ones tend to absorb it and deposit most of it as heat into the ocean. Both those things have been known for decades, maybe the news is something to do with the chemistry or a better estimate of the aerosol's effect on climate, the later of which is notoriously difficult.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I thought we cut all of those trees down to make newspaper - before the newspapers went away
Does this affect the CO2 produced by combustion of HC in an O2 atmosphere? No.
Does this affect the IR properties of the CO2 interatomic bonds? No.
Does this affect thermodynamics? No.
Does this affect radiative physics? No.
Does this affect the Hadley Cell? No.
Storm formation? No.
How clouds form? No.
Stop warmer air holding more water? No.
.
.
.
Do you actually know what this science even IS?
The Asian pine beetle might take out a significant portion of the U.S. pine forest. We'd need a replanting effort to fill in the gap. Good luck getting that through our scientifically illiterate Congress. And the accountants masquerading as CEOs won't find next quarter's profit in replanting hardwood.
Why new research into climate change? Haven't we been told the science was settled?
We still need to refine the climate models so we can predict exactly how big a disaster the idiots are going to create.
No sig today...
That all we need to do is to replace existing robots with Robot 1-X?
Fucking Asians.
Although I have built instuments out of pine (pinecaster anyone?), I also prefer hardwoods, even basswood, over pine.
"Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working." -Pablo Picasso
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
If we don't know all there is to know about what can effect climate, how can the "science be settled"?
> Fucking Asians.
Mmmm. One of my favourite hobbies :)
The haze you see in the NE is largely that it is a smog trap for pollution from the rest of the country. Pine aerosols may be a very small and beneficial part of an otherwise asthmatic toxic soup.
Interesting thing: If the disaster prediction differs from the actual outcome just a few decimals after the period, scientist still will be told: "I said so, you were wrong from the beginning!"
Shouldn't it be "Pine Forest Vapor Particles Can *Cause* Climate Change"?
Can you show that "bored indians" are significant contributors to forest fires any more than "bored white men", "bored black men", "bored Hispanics", etc.??
The nannies do not want you or your trees vaping as the young'uns might start smoking.
Of course the reason that hardwoods are rapidly disappearing is because their wood is so popular with craftsmen, and they can't grow or reproduce fast enough to keep up with demand. It often takes centuries to grow the same amount of hardwood as pine can produce in a few decades, and almost nobody cares about planting a crop that won't be ready to harvest for at least several generations. Hell, I had a great-(great-?)-grandfather who planted a Walnut "plantation" as a family investment. The plan apparently didn't get passed down well enough though, the grandkids sold the whole place off as undeveloped land.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
To balance nature a bit from the overplanting of pine by the lumber industry and to ensure a future supply of hardwood for NICE things like furniture, guitars, baseball bats, etc.
We'll have plenty of cardboard from Ikea, plenty of plastic guitar hero guitars, and plenty of aluminim for bats for the next few centuries. No problem that I can see.
"The problem is that there is a political movement that is more concerned with reducing human impact on the environment than with actually saving it"
WRONG.
Those greenies you are infering to here are not doing that. You're just pretending they are so you can continue to hate them for not believing like you.
For a start: are there already clouds there? If so, how will more clouds form if the water vapour is already condensing to clouds? The aerosols can't suck water out, and no matter how much aerosol you drop into a chamber with less than 100% RH, NO WATER VAPOUR CLOUD WILL FORM.
Secondly, what do you think these aerosols will do? Are they chemically neutral? No. So they'll infect the soils (making them more acid, therefore less fertile for other plants, such as food plants). Are they able to fit in your brachea? Yes. So they'll cause repiratory failuyres, just as if these particulates were the PM10s et al from those smelly dirty diesels.
Thirdly, pumping out aerosols is not putting brakes on, it's opeining the doors in the knowledge that it will increase air resistance. Since our "accelrator" here is our increasing use of fossil fuels, braking would be reducing our use of fossil fuels.
But there is a political movement that is more concerned with reducing the interference in the pursuit of profit than with actually pursuing happiness.
Did anyone tell those impatient spoilded brats those trees were likely worth 5000.00 - $10,000.00 each standing? A slab of curly walnut 2.5 X 40 - 56 X 103 inches retails for $2690.00! Even a pine log cut from old-growth climax forrests are worth big bucks, you'd be amazed at how many scuba divers root around in the muck looking for dunderhead logs that were too dense to float from logging a century ago.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Turns out that all those past doom and gloom climate simulations didn't account for all the factors, and never will.
Anyone that thinks they can model the climate over the long term is simply wild ass guessing due to over simplification.
Call it 'Global Warming'. The climate is, was, and always will be changing.
A Tree Farm is not a forest
The Asian pine beetle might take out a significant portion of the U.S. pine forest.
One reason for the spread of pine beetles has been mild winters over the last few decades, allowing more larva to survive. The harsh winter of 2013-2014 may have put a serious dent in the pine beetle population.
If you've ever been in the chipper room at a pulp plant, you can appreciate how wonderful that smell is, much better than PineSol or anything else that ever came out of a bottle.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I've been faithfully following science stories on the BBC site for years now, and this one stands out like a sore thumb. Until now, they almost always interviewed independent UK scientists to help them interpret the impact of the original research in a new and noteworthy publication. Specifically, they almost always interview a scientist who downplays the impact, and usually also one who is more excited about it. I've always assumed this was part of their journalistic standard, and a shining example for a lot of other news outlets; interpreting scientific papers is tricky, and including varying opinions of independent scientists is paramount to giving the audience the full picture.
Now here, there's suddenly none of that; they only interviewed the first author of the paper, who naturally has a tendency to exaggerate the the impact of their research. No ill will, mind you; being passionate about one's work is a prerequisite to stay motivated as a scientists in the face of frustrating work and inhumanely long working hours. This passion will naturally bias any scientist in favor of their own research. Moreover, this kind of exaggeration is implicitly required by most granting agencies: they almost always require applicants to demonstrate wider impact, which in the case of fundamental research implies wild speculation.
Either way, since the BBC didn't do its job, allow me to cast myself in the role of the "skeptical" scientists they failed to interview. My field of research is not athmospheric science, but I'm familiar with both the underlying physical mechanisms and with fields that rely heavily on models. Here is what I learned by reading some of the paper and references. The problem they sought to tackle is that (local) athmospheric models fail to to accurately predict the amount of aerosols produced in the atmosphere from the low-volatility organic compounds emitted by boreal forests. This appears to be a well-known problem in their field, as testified by the cited references (especially ref. 2, Hallquist et al. in the open access journal "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics" 2009, vol. 9, pp. 5155–5236). So all TFA does is provide new insights in the underlying physical processes that could likely be used to rectify the (local) athmospheric models; this is nice work and worthy of publication in Nature. As customary, the authors begin and end their paper by speculating about the wider impact of their research, which is a natural thing to do, as explained above. In this case, they speculate that (global, long-timescale) climate models may suffer from the same flaw as the above athmospheric models, and that adjusting them accordingly will lead to less extreme climate change predictions (note how nobody spoke of qualitatively different outcomes). This sounds very much unwarranted to me; in my field, coarser, higer-level models are not build on lower-level models, but on the empirical observations the latter try to explain, and judging by the Hallquist paper, the fact that boreal forests produce more aerosols than expected has already been part of our empirical knowledge for many years. Which is unsurprising: we have satellites in space that very accurately measure the planet's local albedo.
TL;DR version: the authors speculate that their cool fundamental findings might have impact on a different subdiscipline (climate science), but from the information I could find, this speculation seems both unwarranted and unlikely. Not being deeply familiar with the science, the journalist converts this speculative part (of an otherwise good paper) into a misleading headline. They make the capital mistake of only interviewing the paper's first author, who does a poor job at putting their speculation into perspective. This is particularly unfortunate because it's such a sensitive subject; given this curious break of routine practices, the journalist (and by extension, the BBC) is exposing themselves to accusations of politically/financially motivated bias.
"bored Indians"... Really? In what sense is a "bored Indian" more natural than a lumberjack going about his business? The only sense I can think of is when one chooses to use "Indian" to mean "a savage" or some such similar nonsense.
The selling of the undeveloped land almost definitely included reaping quite a load of money for some lumber companies when the hardwood was sold.
you'd be amazed at how many scuba divers root around in the muck looking for dunderhead logs that were too dense to float from logging a century ago.
For their sake, I hope they have salvage rights. Without them, they're undoubtedly breaking the law if they remove the logs, or anything, including old Coke bottles, etc.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Yet hare-brained
Of course the reason hardwood is disappearing so fast IS supply cant grow fast enough to meet demand. Period.
Some do care and do plant hardwood trees, hardly enough.
Sorry to hear about the Walnut plantation. Walnuts are pretty susceptible to disease if not located in just the right conditions.
I have a few hundred board feet of rough cut walnut, aged 20+ years, bound for Telecasters, archtop backs and center stripes on 3 piece necks not to mention lovely veneers.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Yes, but in a few months all those things are useless crap on their way to the dump. Not so with hardwood. In fact it may even increase in value.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Indians burned pines for tribal entertainment to watch the pretty colored fire. Not all Indians, but enough to start far more forest fires than nature.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
They make for a good laugh all of the time they open their mouths! I love the way it starts...."New research suggest"
My family owns 160 acres of forest in the George Washington NAtional Forest: a "working" forest with a high proportion of hardwood. The problem is more complex than anyone wants to touch here. Basically though, trees are cut at "maturity" which is determined to be about 50 to 70 years. I was retiring up at the cabin there when a local woodcutter came by to "warn" me that I would need to cut my pine because of the pine bore beetle infestation that was sweeping the forest. Not only would I lose money, but I would be a disease vector if I didn't let him cut the trees and pay me buckets of cash for them.
So I called in an old family friend, a retired forester from the old school. He called bullshit on the whole thing and I told the woodcutter to f**k off.
10 years later, I was overseas and my little brother was stopped on the road and told the same story by another wood cutter. The value had almost doubled at that point. He took it and let them cut the little bit of pine we had. Stupid, but it did help to care for our mother in her final days, even though we didn't really need the money at that point.
Anyway, everyone around us now has had their land "selectively cut." That means that they take the best and leave the rest. The recovery is ugly. Since I have held firm against any wood sales since then the value of some of our hardwood is doubling each decade. My great-great grandchildren will be able to live off the sale of a tree. And they will be some kind of awesome trees at that point as well. We already have oak and maple that can't be wrapped by a tall man's arms.
The deal is that the woodcutters equipment is setup for the logging of trees of the expected size, we can't really expect that trees of the size that ours will be in a hundred years will be an easy cut and haul, but when you do it will be worth it.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.