~misfit~ wrote:
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.
Don't be sorry for that. This kind of thing is on topic because too few
gardeners understand very much about how plants work.
At least you are not rambling about the latest social issue (that may be
very noble and worthwhile) but that has absolutely nothing to do with
gardens.
I think I have seen some studies that considered how much carbon could be
sequestered by re-planting forests but I can't recall where. IIRC the
conclusion was that it would help but it would not be sufficient.
--
David
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Corporate propaganda is their
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