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."

Comments

Freebreeze to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

So we just need to produce pine fresh aerosol to fix the global warming? Well thats ironic to say the least.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[alzoron]

Actually, it's not aerosols that were bad for the ozone layer but rather the chlorofluorocarbons used as a propellant to aerosolize the contents most spray cans up until the late 1970s. The most well known of these was freon, created by DuPont.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[taiwanjohn]

weve already been warned that GLOBAL warming causes LOCALIZED cooling.

FTFY.

Seriously, what about the polar vortex don't you understand? Although the eastern USA had historic lows last month, the global average temperature was the hottest January on record.

If you really want to understand how the science works (which I doubt), watch Peter Hadfield's excellent series of YouTube videos. He cuts through the hype on both sides of the debate. This should be required viewing for policy makers and "armchair experts" alike.

It's also fairly entertaining.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[Jarik C-Bol]

Yes, the climate is changing, and evidence suggests it is following a warming trend. However, I *personally* do not fully attribute that change to anthropocentric causes. In light of these three statements, I am firmly opposed to knee-jerk high cost outcome-vague reactionary measures that serve to drastically affect the economic stability of the nation, or even the world. I am however, in favor of further study, while implementing 'gentle' changes, ie, more efficient power generation, reduction of emissions as quickly as is cost feasible, development of more efficient homes, tools, and machines to reduce our energy needs, etc. The bizarre and potentially harmful ideas people are floating as serious solutions to global warming are absolutely terrifying. I have seen serious proposals ranging from genetically re-engineering cows and kangaroos(?) to produce less methane, to blanketing the seas with iron oxide to cause algae blooms to absorb carbon, to anchoring giant mylar bags of C02 to the ocean floor, to scattering reflective particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space. These, along with a host of other ideas, are beyond insane. I don't claim that global warming is a complete farce, but ideas like this, in the off chance that we are actually *wrong* could do immense and possibly irreparable damage to the environment in their own ways. Effectively, in terms of climate change 'repair' we need a planetary version of the Hippocratic oath. "First, Do No Harm." any corrective action we take simply must not put the planet at further risk down the road. However, that is not an excuse to do nothing, greater energy efficiency across the board, and cleaner energy production are a must, and a long term benefit to humanity, no mater the final result of 'climate change science'. All that said, Planting more trees is about the most sound and reasonable activity we can take to help balance our planets climate. Macedonia probably should be the figurehead for this. http://www.reuters.com/article...

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[dkf]

Check the math. This is not actually true.

Link please. While I'm happy to check math, computing it all from the raw data (which I don't know the locations of in the first place) is rather more effort than I've got time for.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

"However, I *personally* do not fully attribute that change to anthropocentric causes."

Argument from personal incredulity is a fallacy.

"I am firmly opposed to knee-jerk high cost outcome-vague reactionary measures that serve to drastically affect the economic stability of the nation, or even the world."

However, you have no idea whether these claims

1) knee-jerk
2) high cost
3) outcome-vague
4) reactionary measures

are actually the case. Care to cite any that are any of these?

You also presume without evidence they will serve to drastically affect the economic stability of the nation or the world.

According to an ACTUAL investigation into the costs, it'd cost 2% of global GDP (at the time of the report: your procrastination has increased the costs and reduced the mitigation) to fix.

Comare to the US DoD military budget and it's a pittance.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[Rob the Bold]

You must be new here, or don't you remember the whole Aerosols are bad for Ozone and contribute to global warming form the 80's and 90s.

An aerosol is "a colloid of fine solid particles or liquid droplets, in air or another gas". The particular aeorsol (CFCs) referred to by parent is explained by a sibling post, so no need to repeat here. Point is, that an aerosol can be almost anything gaseous or that can be made fine enough to behave sort of "gas like", including dust, VOCs, smoke, etc. That's how the term is used in TFA: terpenes -- not CFCs -- are the substances "dissolved" in air.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[kimvette]

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/14/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/s...
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/s...

You're welcome.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[Immerman]

>If people were really concerned about the environment then it would be irrelevant if global warming was man made or not, if a natural climate changed with lead to catastrophic consequences we would still have to do something about it.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees - if global warming were not man-made then it would still be a crisis, but a crisis we would have no particular reason to believe we could fix - after all we're talking millions(billions?) of times more energy per year being added to the system than produced by all of humanity. As it happens though we can see that virtually all of that extra energy is being added as a direct result of the greenhouse effect of human CO2 emissions, and anything we do we can stop doing. So we *know* we can stop global warming, and do so without resorting to any potentially catastrophic geo-engineering projects. Or at least we could have 50 years ago, the exact location of the tipping point is still somewhat in question.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[Curunir_wolf]

Prepare to get roundly vilified for your reasonable approach to climate change. The Priests of AGW don't take kindly to heretical thinking such as reason and logic.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[mark-t]

This article shows us how we've already destroyed ourselves.

May I introduce you to the concept of verb tense. "Destroyed" is past tense, and connotes something that has occurred in the past. If, in fact, we had destroyed ourselves in the past, for any reasonably accepted definition of destroyed, I highly doubt that you or I would be in any state to talk about the matter since we would, in fact, be destroyed along with the rest of the human race.

Whether or have already done things that may have made our future destruction certain and imminent is immaterial to the fact that such destruction still hasn't happened yet.

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[Curunir_wolf]

I've just spent 20 minutes perusing the links you've provided. Thus far, I'm not terribly impressed. Tell you what... I'll spend an hour reading/viewing whatever source(s) you want, and in exchange, you spend an hour with the video series in my post above.

Deal?

I post links to peer-reviewed scientific research papers and excerpts of peer-reviewed science (with links to the original papers), and you want me to watch a bunch of propaganda videos headlined by the discredited hypocrite Al Gore?

No deal

Re:Freebreeze to the rescue

[Mashiki]

Seriously, what about the polar vortex don't you understand? Although the eastern USA had historic lows last month, the global average temperature was the hottest January on record.

Odd, it seemed like a normal localized cold snap that hits anywhere between Washington State, and as far south as Florida on a semi-regular basis. Hell, I remember being in Florida a few years back during a similar cold snap where they were spraying the citrus trees to stop crop damage. And of course, I didn't hear anything about this "polar vortex" when it was blanketing Europe and Russia a few years ago, and we had a luckily and remarkably mild winter for the first in 3 odd years. The winter before that, we had snow in places in Southern Ontario nearly 18' deep. And of course, if you jump back to the '20's and 30's you'll see that *was* the normal weather in this area.

Luckily, we've had a decade or two, or so, of more mild winters globally. That isn't a trend, seeing as how before that it was bitchingly cold, with winters right about on par with what we've had in the NE, central and western part of the country.

Complicated

[tsa]

The world keeps amazing us because the way it works is ever more complicated than we thought.

Re:Complicated

[bunratty]

No, science never proves things correct. The point of science is to try to prove things wrong. You come up with a testable hypothesis and try to make an observation that disagrees with a prediction that it makes. When you fail to do so, you have gathered evidence that the hypothesis is correct, but you can never prove the hypothesis is correct without a doubt. This is why intelligent design (God did it), the idea that climate "just changes" (Nature did it), and string theory can be considered not science, because they make no predictions that can be tested -- any observation we can make is consistent with the hypothesis so it cannot be falsified.

Mother Nature Seems To Love Irony

[Freshly Exhumed]

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/...

Re:Mother Nature Seems To Love Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Aha! So it's actually ENTOMOgenic climate change.

Someone get the torches and the pitchforks, we've got some scapebeetles to lynch.

Re:Mother Nature Seems To Love Irony

[drinkypoo]

Aha! So it's actually ENTOMOgenic climate change.

Nope. Those beetles are able to survive in these regions because of the lack of hard freezes to kill them back (global warming) and they're able to attack the trees because they have been weakened by drought (global warming, deforestation).

The pines are losing out to man-made climate change like everything else.

From my house, you can see somewhere from dozens to hundreds of dying pines. I can see a lot of pines from here on a hill in Lake County, CA. None of them look good.

Re:Mother Nature Seems To Love Irony

[TapeCutter]

Trees all across the globe have been "migrating" pole-wards (and upwards) since about 1970, however insect pests can migrate faster. It may be just coincidence but the notorious tree-ring proxy record becomes unreliable around 1960 ( in that it diverges from the instrumental record ).

Last I heard there were over 30 thousand species of plants and animals where the records are good enough to show they have significantly shifted their range in response to the warmer climate. Trees on low plains will need to (rapidly) adapt to dryer conditions, trees on the coast will have to adapt to rising salinity. Our crops and the infrastructure used to grow them will also need to either rapidly adapt or migrate.

If humans were rabbits we would have eaten ourselves to extinction by now. Rabbits and other mammals such as deer, when left unchecked on an island will breed and eat until the entire population collapses in a mass famine. Humans however go to war over resources so total population collapse is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. The famous humans on Easter Island did not die out when they cut the last tree down but they did have a very violent disagreement that reduced their population by about 90%. When Europeans first arrived the population still had not recovered, there were a few hundred people living on the island, compared to a few thousand in its heyday.

There's no escaping the fact that the Earth is one big fucking island floating around in space. The fact that we can't find aliens with something like SETI kind of disturbs me, it seems at odds with what we know about the chemistry of life and its subsequent evolution into multicellular critters. Maybe the answer to the question "where are they" is that technological species that can make radio telescopes only last a few centuries/millennia?

Woohoo, I'm AGW-neutral!

[srussia]

Pine tree air-freshener in my Range Rover!

From anyone who's ever hiked - duh

[Gothmolly]

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 learned 2 things from this article...

[tlambert]

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!

Re:Ha ha ha!

[flyneye]

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.

Where's the news in this?

[TapeCutter]

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.

Re:Ha ha ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Fucking Asians.

Mmmm. One of my favourite hobbies :)

Re:Ha ha ha!

[budgenator]

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.

Re:"Bored Indians"? Please explain

[ShanghaiBill]

Can you show that "bored indians" are significant contributors to forest fires any more than "bored white men", "bored black men", "bored Hispanics", etc.??

It is well established that fire significantly changed North American ecosystems following the arrival of native Americans around 12000 BCE. For instance, the tall grass prairie was created and maintained by fire, creating ideal grazing for bison, but pushing many other megafauna to extinction. Although there is no solid evidence that these native Americans were acting out of boredom, it is highly unlikely that they were white, black or Hispanic.