
Trees Could Change the Climate More Than Scientists Thought - ciconia
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/how-forests-affect-climate-change/572770/?single_page=true
======
wlib
This is extremely obvious and it's surprising how long it took for this to be
noticed. If you clear a section of a forest, the area becomes as hot as a
desert because of the lack of shade. This is a "microclimate". The more area
you clear, the larger this hot microclimate becomes. This is the reason why
there is desertification all over the globe.

Whether you believe it or not, it is just as easy to create a desert from a
forest as it is to do the reverse [1], it can even be a passive process [2].
Deserts rain occasionally, and when they do, it becomes a flash flood. If you
tame the flash flood [3][5], you can change deserts. There are projects that
do this and have proven its effectiveness, while also being able to solve the
water crisis in arid lands in Africa [6].

Trees are incredibly important not necessarily for their reduction of carbon
dioxide, but because of the microclimate each tree creates. They filter harsh
light for the undergrowth, they cool the general area, and they transpire
around 99% of the water they get, leading to more clouds and then more
precipitation in other areas [4].

The reason why projects like this aren't so popular and aren't subsidized is
not because they aren't effective, but because it is hard to make money from
actually saving the environment.

[1] [https://youtu.be/3RqsUD6fyGk](https://youtu.be/3RqsUD6fyGk)
[2][https://youtu.be/ZSPkcpGmflE](https://youtu.be/ZSPkcpGmflE) [3]
[https://youtu.be/zqKaRg3GTqg](https://youtu.be/zqKaRg3GTqg) [4]
[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/trees-amazon-make-
th...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/trees-amazon-make-their-own-
rain) [5] [https://youtu.be/_4oKKs8FfI0](https://youtu.be/_4oKKs8FfI0) [6]
[https://thewaterproject.org/sand-dams](https://thewaterproject.org/sand-dams)

~~~
rapnie
> The reason why projects like this aren't so popular and aren't subsidized is
> not because they aren't effective, but because it is hard to make money from
> actually saving the environment.

This. I've been hearing for 30 years how important trees are, and that we
should plant way more of them. It is just not happening in any significant
way. Politician's talk.

Makes me feel old and tired, when I keep reading this same conclusion over and
over, and "We should take action now", but nothing much happens on the action
side.

~~~
wlib
This dynamic could change if previously arid land can be put to agricultural
or residential use. But that requires a lot of initial investment. The first
step I think is to convince people that the problem _can_ be fixed - and be
_profitable_ at the same time.

~~~
dbcurtis
So I grew up in fly-over land. That part of the USA where in Daniel Boone's
time "A squirrel could go from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River
without ever touching the ground.", but today is horizon-to-horizon corn and
soybeans.

Today, we make price-support payments to farmers if grain prices drop below
the support trigger. We require corn-derived ethanol in gasoline even though
the energy economics of it make no sense. It's mildly nuts.

Let's just put some of that land back to trees. I mean really, instead of
paying people to grow an over-abundance of feed grains, pay them to grow
organic carbon sequestration units.

~~~
mulmen
I am from a rural area of the country and paid for college in part by working
for a farmer up to and during wheat harvest for several years. I completely
agree with you.

America's fetish with the preservation of small family farms is incredibly
destructive both environmentally and economically. People seem to have this
romanticized concept of farmers as Ma and Pa working hard every day just to
scrape by and raise their 6 kids. In reality these are businesses with massive
amounts of capital tied up in businesses that are only sustainable with
government subsidy.

Let these businesses fail, create economic incentives to use the land for more
productive purposes like carbon sequestration.

~~~
AngryData
Farm subsidies are still important, they are what stabilizes our food supply
so we don't pay 5x as much for bread when we have a bad year for wheat. Its
main purpose is more like food supply insurance, if you only produce EXACTLY
what you need/get paid for, then even say a 5% less yield in a large area than
expected, maybe from weather, storm, or other environmental conditions, could
result in food shortages and huge price spikes. You always plant extra to keep
you from starving, but if it was completely unregulated, nobody would ever
want to overproduce what they could sell or it is pure lost profits. If you
couldn't sell 5% of grain last year, you plant 5% less this year, but if this
year was a bad season for other farmers, now you don't have enough to meet
demand and the prices skyrocket, good for you personally but bad for thousands
of other people that need to eat.

Farming is already not perfectly predictable yield to yield, when you add in
even wilder price swings it only crushes farms under further financial risks
and leads potential famine.

~~~
mrep
This! At 5.5% of USA GDP [0], some oversupply to avoid supply shocks causing
famine is a totally acceptable cost to me. Hell, look at server supply before
AWS came along: everyone bought way more servers to account for peak demand
and now we can amortize those demands across thousands of different customers.
Another example is utilities in how electric supply is way overbuilt with peak
generators that are cheap and inefficient to run only sparingly during heat
waves in the summer when everyone's AC is on.

[0]: [https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-
statistic...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-
charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/)

------
xefer
I’m reminded of Freeman Dyson’s essay in Edge some time ago. [1] I was struck
by this statement:

“The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically
important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing
in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide
within a meter of the ground in about five minutes.”

[1] [https://www.edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-
about-s...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-about-
science-and-society)

~~~
pjc50
This sounds like the "CO2 is plant food" argument, which carefully overlooks
all the other effects of CO2 and even the nutritional implications:
[https://phys.org/news/2018-05-co2-rice-
nutritional.html](https://phys.org/news/2018-05-co2-rice-nutritional.html)

Freeman Dyson in the same article is also talking about "abiotic oil and gas",
which is another one of those things that the oil industry would definitely
know if it was true because it's worth billions of dollars in exploration
results.

------
chiefalchemist
Re: “Many of us are surprised at what a powerful role plants actually play,”
said Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University. “The influence
of Earth’s surface on large-scale climate is currently a really booming
topic...

Frankly, I'm stunned. How can you stand behind the integrity of your model(s)
knowing that you excluded key components? Mind you, you could argue that they
weren't aware. But that makes it an known unknown, not a false assumption.

Editorial: This is a perfect reason why "science" is trusted less and less.
You cannot pound fist to desk demanding respect for your authority and then be
intentionally negligent (just so your paper fits a narrative on the path to
being published).

~~~
eximius
Science is hard. Scientists are people. People make mistakes. Not trusting
'Science' because scientists produced a good model that wasn't perfect is a
stupid regression.

And, frankly, if you're going to produce a model that simulates something that
is measuring risk (i.e., global warming), then I'd _much_ prefer you leave out
features that would understate the risk. Give me an upper bound on risk so we
can see how bad it _could_ get. If the worst isn't worth worrying about, well,
then that missing feature didn't really matter. If it _is_ worth worrying
about, we can improve the model.

~~~
ibeckermayer
Nobody is demanding science be perfect, scientific knowledge is gained and
revised through inductive leaps based on new evidence, hence it by definition
can never be considered perfect.

What is reasonable to demand, and in fact fundamental to the institution of
science itself, is that scientists operate with the humility necessary for a
discipline that is fundamentally open to new evidence and revised theories.

Instead what we are treated with (from climate science in particular) is
“Science”, supposedly ordained as hard truth by an infallible “peer review”,
and we are told we may not question the data itself, nor the statistical
models, not even the draconian government interference into our lives
conveniently suggested by the government sponsored “Science”, lest we be
castigated as knuckle dragging “science deniers” with some secretive
motivation to defend the fossil fuel industry or some other conspiratorial
accusation based on zero evidence.

~~~
marcus_holmes
To be fair, the IPCC reports were (I haven't read the latest one yet) broken
into the Science and Political parts.

The Science part was full of error bars and "probably" and "estimated".
Generally good science being done by people trying to discover the truth,
though there was a noticeable hesitance about publishing any implication that
the models might be wrong.

The Political part was full of certainty and unambiguous calls to action in
the face of overwhelming evidence that the world was going to hell in a
decade.

The media only ever reported on the Political part. The Science part was worth
reading to get some perspective.

------
vondur
Historians have surmised that ancient Germany was as cold as current day
Canada due to the massive forests that used to exist. The Romans considered
everything north of the Danube/Rhine as a frozen land.

~~~
Theodores
The Romans also had a special 'tree line' of their own, so anywhere further
north than where olive trees could grow was the land of the Barbarians. I
can't remember what this 'olive tree line' was called or find a link to it, or
even remember at what stage of the Roman Empire that the 'olive tree line' was
a thing.

Back to the article, the thinking that went on prior to the Dustbowl was that
'the rain follows the plough'. Not the same as 'the rain follows the tree'. It
was no accident that there were not a lot of trees in the Dustbowl areas. The
indigenous people that lived there before the Columbus rocked up had
cultivated the land by clearing it with fire. This created tasty pasture for
buffalo to graze on.

Meanwhile, out of computer models and in real life, there is an interesting
bit of progress going on in Ethiopia right now. The aid agencies and their
ideas on having people eat imported maize were booted out to be replaced with
proper crops and some proper land management. These efforts put to shame 'Band
Aid' and, odd as it seems, I really would like to go there for the cuisine. I
never thought I would be thinking that Ethiopia - of all places - could be a
place of fine, wholesome dining with the most amazing markets.

Everything is low-tech in this DIY reboot, there is lots of teamwork and quite
a Garden Of Eden is being made. The soil has fertility, rain does not wash
away the topsoil, the tree-line has gained altitude and it is all going very
well. I do not know if there is a micro-climate with extra clouds, however,
this improvement in circumstance has not been dependent on work done 'a
continent away' to magically make clouds. Ethiopian people outside of this
huge 'trial area' and still farming boring crops resent missing out.

~~~
barry-cotter
Band Aid was emergency aid to keep people from starving to death because of
Soviet encouraged collectivisation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983–1985_famine_in_Ethiopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983–1985_famine_in_Ethiopia)

Emergency aid isn’t development aid.

------
thrower123
So, if you look at the east coast of the US, we've actually done an incredible
job of reforesting the landscape over the last 100 years by accident. If you
had aerial photos of New England from 1900, everything is pasture and
farmland, vs now, its almost all grown back in. If you go poking off through
the woods, chances are extremely good that you can blunder on a stone wall
that used to mark the edge of a field.

------
8bitsrule
It shouldn't be a surprise that ...

If you mess around in a big way with something that is really complicated, and
has evolved over (at least) millions of years, and there are so many factors
that you are unable to take them all into account ...

the consequences may not be predictable.

The greenhouse effect, however, is quite easy to establish. Perhaps it's time
to stop experimenting, for a century or ten.

------
DoreenMichele
That's why I thought it would be good to promote this idea, which sadly did
not go viral and make me world famous for saving the environment:

[https://peeonatree.blogspot.com/2018/09/pee-on-
tree.html](https://peeonatree.blogspot.com/2018/09/pee-on-tree.html)

------
olivermarks
I wish tree planting had the same stock market attraction as Tesla creating
EV's as a 'green' company.

------
shard972
Don't remember reading this in the IPCC report...

I thought climate science was settled science?

------
oxymoran
Now why would you go and settle the science without even accounting for
vegetation? Now we can never go back...

------
igravious
"" Yet the computer models that scientists rely on to predict the future
climate don’t even come close to acknowledging the power of plants to move
water on that scale, Swann said. “They’re tiny, but together they are mighty.”
""

This statement causes alarm bells to ring inside my head. The calamitous
warnings that we hear are based on predictions that are based on climate
models that are claimed to be nigh on rock solid. The advice that we are given
is based on theories about how the climate works that are meant to be highly
accurate. The numbers we have are based on measurements that statistically are
highly accurate and methodologically very sound. The impression we are given
is that the models and theories and numbers and measurements are mostly a done
deal bar a little tweaking here and there. What we are doing now is just
refining the models and acquiring more data and plotting ever more accurate
graphs.

If it is true that at least one major factor has not been taken into account
that truth to my mind does a lot to damage the credibility of those making the
predictions and peddling advice. And if there is one major factor, why could
there not be another major factor?

I have long wanted to know why – if climate change be such a serious concern –
we don't try to reduce desertification on a global scale, in addition to
tackling our over-reliance on hydrocarbons. But no, it's all "coal is bad,
diesel is bad, oil is bad, natural gas is bad, you name it is bad", but where
are all the state-sponsored projects to green the Sahara and the Arabian
peninsula? Immigration from North Africa and the Middle East is causing
political unrest in Europe. If the land was better over there they wouldn't
need as badly to come over here. It feels to me that even though climate
scientists claim to be rational actors they are being motivated by guilt
rather than reason. I know it is heresy at this point to question climate
science but for me the science has never been anything remotely as clear cut
and settled as CFCs and the Ozone layer. For a while there about a decade go
we collectively were way more concerned about the rain forests and the rate at
which they were being cut down. Can we not at least agree that two things need
to happen: (1) we need to reduce our dependency on hydrocarbons (2) we need to
plant trees.

I think we also need to acknowledge that "green technologies" (there's a
loaded term is ever there was one) are anything but – producing solar panels
and wind turbines at a massive scale is not all upside and no downside. The
processes that make up green tech are not magically immune from having a
harmful effect on the planet.

Ultimately what I think we should be doing is building nuclear power stations
and planting billions, if not trillions, of trees. Everything else is window
dressing.

~~~
pjc50
> where are all the state-sponsored projects to green the Sahara and the
> Arabian peninsula?

Saudi Arabia actually had a number of projects for this kind of thing, but
they were focused on dairy and grain intensive farming propped up by "fossil
water" that was either extracted from wells or from oil-fuelled
desalinisation. It didn't last long.

------
perilunar
"For more than a decade, climatologists have seen clouds as the biggest source
of uncertainty in models."

I remember learning back in the 90s that the climate models of the time did
not include cloud cover, and was immediately sceptical of any predictions the
models produced.

Sounds like the models are still pretty bad. How can we be confident of IPCC
warnings if the models still can't accurately factor in couds and vegetation?

