Once upon a time on usenet Brooklyn1 wrote:
The following news release was issued by Macquarie University in
Australia. It describes a project incorporating data collected in
ecosystems around the world, including data from the Arctic tundra
acquired by Alistair Rogers, a biologist at the U.S. Department of
Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory as part of DOE's
Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE Arctic) project. For more
information about Rogers' work, see the accompanying sidebar and
links. Media inquiries about the overall study should be directed to
Amy MacIntyre at Macquarie University: +61 (2) 9850 4051,
.
[snipped]
Interesting, thanks. There's a factor in global temperture variation that's
rarely mentioned (and is often used to explain the Gaia hypothesis) - that
growing plants cool the area in which they are growing due to transpiration,
sequestering and slowly releasing water and absorbing solar radiation (that
otherwise just heats the ground up). This was mentioned here;
"Vegetation plays a really major role in the Earth system, by storing
carbon, moving water around the landscape and cooling the planet's
surface.
It's always amazed me how, as a race we seem to be fixated on reducing
carbon emissions only as a way of preventing a large swing in global
temperatures. Surely another useful method would be to start to replace all
of the large swathes of vegetation that the planet has lost in the last few
millenia?
England used to be covered almost from coast to coast in forest if we go
back six or seven thousand years. Here in New Zealand it's been much more
recently that the forests that cloaked the country have been decimated (only
six or seven hundred years since polynesians arrived and started
deforestation, there are artists here who specialise in making furniture and
objet d'art out of 500 year old wood sourced from tree stumps dug out of
farm land. The last remains of some of the giants which dominated this
land). We all know about the decline of the South American rain forest and
the way the South-east Asian rain forests are being cleared to grow oil
palms....
Heck, in old testament times large areas of the Middle East was largely
'forested' - or at least covered in scrubland Goats were the biggest agents
of 'deforestation' there, grazing on young trees until there wasn't enough
re-growth and the old trees died off. Goats raised by humans for food.
Ok, we need to reduce the amount of carbon that we're putting into the
atmosphere but that's going to happen as we run out of fossil fuel anyway.
More importantly we need to get into massive planting programmes so that the
plants will sequester the excess carbon that's already there as quickly as
possible and get the planet back into the state of balance that it was at
before we started geoscaping.
Anyone who's kept a (semi)closed aquatic system knows that for every gram of
animal life you need 50g of plant life to keep things in even a semblance
of balance. With the human population growing exponentially (and meat
animals being raised to satiate our destructive desire to eat too much
flesh) we *really* needed to be increasing plant growth on the planet.
Instead we've reduced it to maybe 10% of what it was 10,000 years ago. How
much would we all weigh? Then add in our food beasts....
The only significant large masses of vegetaion left on the planet (other
than remnants of forests) are the algal masses in the oceans and, while they
*do* sequester carbon they don't contribute to global cooling.
We've just had the hottest, driest January and Febuary on record in NZ (yet
again!) with major horticultural irrigation systems around the country
having to be shut down due to reservoirs running dry. I wonder why?
I suggest that we need to start growing forests and, when we've got enough
start 'ploughing (some of) them under' then re-planting. Put all of that
carbon back underground where we got it from. Or (and this just popped into
my head) use it for making massive amounts of cheaper (goverment/s
subsidised? Economy of scale?) carbon-fibre and use it to make light strong
structural materials that will last for a very long time.
shrug Sorry for the OT stream-of-consciousness writing provoked by that
one sentence.
--
Shaun.
"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)