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Thursday, March 24, 2022

Forests

 Guardian UK: The world’s forests do more than just store carbon, new research finds - New data suggests forests help keep the Earth at least half of a degree cooler, protecting us from the effects of climate crisis By Nina Lakhani

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3 comments:

Glynn Kalara said...

I'm not at all surprised. Most of the things we need to be doing to slow the change will require expanding forests and upgrading soil management. Of course if we don't immediately transition off of fossil carbon as the basis for our energy it will all be for naught. We're also going to have to remove the enormous overhang of extra carbon we've pumped into the air this last 300 yrs. The average CO2 no.ppm for CO2 should be around 275-285 ppm during a warming period or interglacial as they're called and 190 ppm in the heart of an Ice age. At present we've put 415+ ppm up there and the excess 140 ppm needs to be removed, or else. The or else are a variety of tipping pts. that can kick in in the climate system that will themselves make things worse. A good example if the melt down of the Ice caps rising sea levels and swamping our coastal communites and islands. Another major tipping pt. is the melt down of the multi-year Arctic Sea ice, thus opening huge dark ocean areas that will start absorbing sunlight when it should be reflecting it back into space cooling the planet not heating it. This is already happening sadly and the effects are being reflected in our climate and weather. There are many others known and unknown and they are interact and all make things worse.

12:31 PM
Jim Sande said...

I have a friend who is in academics and he insists that these issues will be addressed and can be addressed. Looking into it further there are many young people undertaking the issue of living on Earth in a way that does not destroy it. I attended a webinar on the issue of dealing with waste and dumps from Stanford U. and I left very impressed with the degree of science and understanding that is now being applied. Very bright intelligent young people are really working at a circular and healthy economy. The brain trust is there now, how it percolates into the main stream is probably a matter of time. In 1976 I managed an organic health food co-op, only place around where one could get natural unprocessed food. Now every supermarket has an organic food section. That took a lot of years to see the transitions from what we knew about food in the 70s to seeing it on TV now. I suspect the race to tackle climate change is many years further along. We need to do as much as we can to try and limit our CO2 output. I have a neighbor who is in the process of putting up a solar array in their backyard. This is progress.

5:41 PM
Glynn Kalara said...

Solar, wind, geo-thermal even Fusion if we ever achieve it are parts of the solution, but I'm afraid even with all that we are still going to need to figure out ways to sequester and remediate the huge excess of CO2, CH4 and all the refrigarents we've poured into the atmosphere. If we don't do both we're going to fail because of all the tipping pts. built into the natural climate system. Once they all fire up were doomed.

2:53 PM

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