Re: Save planet, win $25 mil
On Feb 10, 2007, at 4:30 PM, Bill Bartlett wrote:
Gore and Branson said that although scientists are working on technologies to capture carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at power plants and other industrial sources, no one has developed a strategy to remove gases already released into the atmosphere.
Easy, plant lots of trees. Gimme my $5 million deposit you wankers.
Actually it may not be so simple.
http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/324200.pdf
Climate Effects of Global Land Cover Change S. Gibbard, K. Caldeira, G. Bala, T. J. Phillips, and M. Wickett
Abstract
There are two competing effects of global land cover change on
climate: an albedo effect which leads to heating when changing from
grass/croplands to forest, and an evapotranspiration effect which
tends to produce cooling. It is not clear which effect would dominate
in a global land cover change scenario. We have performed coupled
land/ocean/atmosphere simulations of global land cover change using
the NCAR CAM3 atmospheric general circulation model.
We find that replacement of current vegetation by trees on a global
basis would lead to a global annual mean warming of 1.6 C, nearly 75%
of the warming produced under a doubled CO2 concentration, while
global replacement by grasslands would result in a cooling of 0.4 C.
These results suggest that more research is necessary before forest
carbon storage should be deployed as a mitigation strategy for global
warming. In particular, high latitude forests probably have a net
warming effect on the Earth’s climate.