…
Look out, another knot of tortured researchers just went past. All this time we’ve been pouring money into planting trees and stealing land from farmers because we were sure that trees would cool the world. (Just like solar panels do, yeah?) But life is so complicated — for years now some researchers have been quietly wondering if more trees were actually going to warm the planet instead, but they didn’t want to say much. It turns out that while trees absorb the sacred CO2 (that’s cooling!) they also emit methane (that’s warming!), and terpenes (cooling) and isoprene (warming and cooling!) If that’s not complicated enough, then there is the albedo effect. Trees are dark, they absorb more sunlight than bare ground and snow. So depending on where they are planted, that makes for “warming”. Then some VOCs or volatile organic compounds also seed clouds.
So what’s the net effect? Who knows, it’s not like there are whole industries dependent on it…
Now they ask?
How much can forests fight climate change?
As usual, the debate is based on logic and death threats:
At the same time, some researchers worry about publishing results challenging the idea that forests cool the planet. One scientist even received death threats after writing a commentary that argued against planting trees to prevent climate change.
It doesn’t matter if the planet dies, editors don’t want to look stupid:
“I have heard scientists say that if we found forest loss cooled the planet, we wouldn’t publish it.”
Yay, free speech!
To greener types, it doesn’t matter if trees warm the world on net, because they cool the world as well. And if that makes sense to you, the UN has a job waiting for you:
Although the analysis relies on big assumptions, such as the availability of funding mechanisms and political will, its authors say that forests can be an important stopgap while the world tackles the main source of carbon emissions: the burning of fossil fuels. “This is a rope that nature is throwing us,” says Peter Ellis, a forest-carbon scientist at The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia, and one of the paper’s authors.
Australians should — in theory — care more about this than almost anyone. We are one of the countries that did count carbon storage. If it turns out that land clearing cools the planet, Australia is stuffed (carbon accounting-wise): Our emissions per person fell 28% since 1990, but the largest single factor there was “land use” — meaning we stopped clearing and let regrowth take over some farms and paddocks. Then we shafted the farmers who owned the land and couldnt use it.
The 1997 climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol allowed rich countries to count carbon storage in forests towards their targets for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. In practice, few nations did so because of the agreement’s unwieldy accounting mechanisms and other factors.
The albedo effect:
Researchers have known for decades that tree leaves absorb more sunlight than do other types of land cover, such as fields or bare ground. Forests can reduce Earth’s surface albedo, meaning that the planet reflects less incoming sunlight back into space, leading to warming. This effect is especially pronounced at higher latitudes and in mountainous or dry regions, where slower-growing coniferous trees with dark leaves cover light-coloured ground or snow that would otherwise reflect sunlight. Most scientists agree, however, that tropical forests are clear climate coolers: trees there grow relatively fast and transpire massive amounts of water that forms clouds, two effects that help to cool the climate.
This chemistry is so complicated, if only we had climate models that worked, we could figure out how much all this mattered:
Atmospheric chemist Nadine Unger, then at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, conducted one of the first global studies examining one part of this exchange: the influence of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, emitted by trees. These include isoprene, a small hydrocarbon that can warm the globe in several ways. It can react with nitrogen oxides in the air to form ozone — a potent climate-warming gas when it resides in the lower atmosphere. Isoprene can also lengthen the lifetime of atmospheric methane — another greenhouse gas. Yet isoprene can have a cooling influence, too, by helping to produce aerosol particles that block incoming sunlight.
Some people are very good at complaining:
[Unger wrote an] opinion piece in The New York Times entitled ‘To Save the Planet, Don’t Plant Trees’, which argued that the large uncertainties around the extent to which forests cool or warm the climate made tree planting a risky strategy for fighting climate change. The article, and especially the headline (which Unger did not write), triggered a tsunami of complaints from researchers, who disputed the science and said the piece threatened to undermine years of research and advocacy. A group of 30 forest scientists wrote a response on the environmental news website Mongabay, saying, “We strongly disagree with Professor Unger’s core message.”
Trees emitting methane? Shame no one knew this before: Ban trees!
The latest findings are piling on even more complexity. Ecologist Sunitha Pangala at Lancaster University, UK, spent much of 2013 and 2014 in the Amazon rainforest, where she placed gas-measuring chambers around the trunks of more than 2,300 trees. “What we were really surprised about was the magnitude at which these trees are emitting methane,” says Pangala. She and Vincent Gauci at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and their colleagues reported in 2017 that trees account for around half of the Amazon’s total methane emissions5.
h/t Pat
Ha! Were it ever so. A baseline of a wildly random chaotic open system…input any variable…result? Wildly random answers…all of which can be true or false. A soothsayer’s dream!
291
Right. It seems that the Green’s Perfect Climate is totally unachievable. Life in all it’s variety, shapes, forms, mobility and immobility will thoroughly sabotage any and every attempt at it. At least it shows that Human effects are just part of the overall noise. 🙂
30
More eco-peddled uncertainty and chaos. Deforestation was until now a keystone in the eco-arch … consider that the temperate zones were until relatively recently swathed in forests or covered in native bush.
There must be a brewing battle for funding with the realisation that the AGW nonsense is disappearing up itself.
Are the watermelons are turning against Gaia?
202
“Are the watermelons turning against Gaia?”
Yes.. case in point… Wind Turbines
152
Eventually labelling black as white has to mess with your head….people eventually realize they cant keep doing it, unless they have lost the plot and their minds have actually fractured….
Most people are sane, eventually it manifests itself as rational thought after a period of being mislead.
110
Cognitive Dissonance
‘In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.’ wiki
20
OS asserted (without any proof or scientific support!)
Optimist!
20
Andy, its time to get your coat;
“I met a guy with a didgeridoo and he was playing Dancing Queen on it. I thought, “That’s Aboriginal”…….
Tommy Cooper
Seriously folks – stop and consider the utter triviality of the core question exposed in this article and the imbecility it generates.
“The 1997 climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol allowed rich countries to count carbon storage in forests towards their targets for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions.”
It also allowed us in the UK to raze forests in the USA deep south, transport the wood to Yorkshire at great cost to burn it in a power station built on top the this nations largest coalfield and count this as “zero CO2 emissions”, ie “renewable
and; “Researchers have known for decades that tree leaves absorb more sunlight than do other types of land cover, such as fields or bare ground. Forests can reduce Earth’s surface albedo, meaning that the planet reflects less incoming sunlight back into space, leading to warming”
Of course they bloody do – how else can they absorb and store CO2 through photosynthesis so that they produce “renewable” fuel!
“Most scientists agree, however, that tropical forests are clear climate coolers: trees there grow relatively fast and transpire massive amounts of water that forms clouds, two effects that help to cool the climate.”
Have not the OCO2 satellites shown that tropical forests are major emitters of CO2, and that is why there has been little publicity to their findings for a couple of years?
“Yet isoprene can have a cooling influence, too, by helping to produce aerosol particles that block incoming sunlight”
Aerosols “block” sunlight by absorbing it – thus warming the atmosphere whilst “cooling” the
surface – also Ozone is a highly reactive gas which will oxidise and destroy hydrocarbons and other atmospheric organic particles. Do these people not know ANY chemistry?
“where she placed gas-measuring chambers around the trunks of more than 2,300 trees. “What we were really surprised about was the magnitude at which these trees are emitting methane,”
If she had placed one around her own trunk she would have got an even bigger surprise.
I’ll get my coat.
170
The world is very close to attaining peak stupid. Is this really what happens when we reach a point when all the basic needs of life are satisfied?
290
Then the Elite will start a war to send people backwards …..the Elite are IMHO, evil.
They thrive on death and misery…..demons seem to have a field day with them.
172
It’s certainly above all past `timberlines’ now!
20
But there is no way the world can actually reach peak stupid – someone (climate scientist) will always go one better.
10
Simply put
“Money cools our planet.” No money, the planet warms.
231
“Give me your wallet or the planet gets it!”
181
AL GORE DOES DAVOS:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Reuters/status/1087849892679053314
60
I’m a member of a 4wd (Brand x) website and someone has watched Attenborough at Davos and is convinced in CAGW , within seconds I get called a flat earther after putting forward rational evidence based arguments .
Sort of says it all but now some are saying if you own a 4by and are a true believer there is something wrong with you , sell the 4by and get it crushed so no one else can use it then buy a pushie .
40
Warning! Clear the failed 97% ‘science’ apocalypse and doomsday safe space …
“The New Zealand Government has an ambitious plan to plant 1 billion new trees by 2027, to help fight climate change, provide jobs and diversify the country’s economy.”
Aug, 2018: Contrary to popular belief, more of the world is covered in trees than 35 years ago, a new study has found.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2018/08/more-trees-thanks-to-humans-climate-change-study.html
NB: We’re gonna need a bigger safe space.
190
The billion trees should be easy to achieve, they could use the 850 million trees that Bob Hawke promised but did’t deliver on when he promised to plant a billion.
Labour Party New Zealand rehashing the Australian Labor Party promises.
121
There were rumours of the wealthy buying up south america and new zealand and building underground bunkers….if true, I wonder why?
30
Even wealthy people would probably feel a bit daft building above-ground bunkers.
50
There is always one in every crowd……
🙂
10
More trees… more methane… ’tis worser then they thunked! [sic/sarc per usual]
Stumbled onto Auckland University student radio 95bFM’s ‘Green Desk’ yesterday at lunch/smoko, as some young womyn-woke fresh from COP24 announced her Three Commandments To Save The Planet: Give up meat for a plant-based diet; Give up long-haul air flights; Give up personal cars – internal combustion AND electrics – and rely solely on public transport. This morning (on another radio station) I heard Princess Jacindarella in Davos, Switzerland say we must all “take action” because those who don’t will be on the “wrong side of history” [insert applicable expletive/s here * ].
NZ MetService 23 January 2019: Southern Alps, snow to 1,200 metres, gale force winds, -8˚C wind chill. Back in the 20th Century, January used to coincide with something called ‘summer’, not winter. There’s observed reality, then there’s absurd UN-reality, and I’m pretty happy with the side of history I, along with many here, am on. If only it was 2 degrees warmer but…
291
Greg, your young womyn-woke fresh from COP24, should indeed do what she wishes.
That is the shortest route to waking up about the stupidity of her ‘Suggestions’.
110
“because those who don’t will be on the “wrong side of history””
That sounded a little like a shot across the bow at sceptics…..
Or was it the sound of an imaginary round being chambered?
Not sure….
The Elite apppear to be a bit deranged ( witness the hysteria about Trump ), so who knows….
140
I won’t post a link – ew feel so dirty – PM Ms Ardern had Slur David Attenborough sitting on one side and the Most UN-Holy Reverend Al Gore Junior on the other, just like a holy trinity of the Church of Climastrology (donations always welcome). She’s come a long way – and flown a few filthy carbon air miles and enjoyed limousines and 5-star hotels and tea with old Lizzie – since her time as the President of the International Union of Socialist Youth [2008] and being a gofer for UK PM Tony Blair [during his ‘moral invasion’ period]. She loves Five-Year Plans.
60
You can judge someone by the company they keep….
“Can two walk together lest they be agreed?” (Amos 3:3)
Last i looked, the Nyew Zulund PM was a green commie….
20
Warning Update!
Get ready to laugh at the apocalypse …
Wednesday, 23 January 2019, 9:42a.m: Coal burning increases as NZ faces gas shortage
https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/mike-hosking-breakfast/audio/dwayne-cocker-coal-burning-increases-as-nz-faces-gas-shortage/
90
Beauty!
Anybody care to run a correlation on that with Average Global Temp increase over the same time period?
I get 0.97
That’s speared that CO2 man.
🙂
40
It’s the BURNING of the trees to grow palm oil plantations and soy crops–making soot[ black carbon] that deposits on the polar ice and blackens it … that reduces earth’s albedo….likewise incomplete combustion in older diesel engines and soot from China’s old coal plants blacken the polar ice…nothing to do with CO2.
They know it …warmists testified to Congress on it in 2010..estimated the black carbon and the GW Cycle it sets up…not just at the poles but on the glaciers and permafrost[whence it releases methane]….are responsible for half…maybe more of any global warming there is.
National Geographic has written about it extensively….with dire warnings…and nothing happens.
The burning goes on and the polar ice is black with soot. Mitigation of the black carbon would have almost immediate effect, but warmists never discuss it….or anything else but CO2.
IMO they don’t want the world to see the result of such mitigation because it would prove that CO2 is not the major cause of the slight warming there is.
Soot can’t be used for rejigging the world …destroying democracies and wealth redistribution for Global Socialism
00
Forests, now you see ’em, now you don’t:
Professor Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of BioGeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, wrote this in 2003:
“At the end of the last ice age, only some 12-18000 years ago, the tropics were covered by seasonal savannah grasslands, cooler and much drier than now. There were no rain forests in the Malay Peninsula and much of Amazonia, and, despite the increasing human development of forested space, there are still more rain forests persisting than existed then. As in Europe and North America, the forests came and went as climate changed; there is no Clementsian “long period of control” under one climate. Beneath many rain forests, there are sheets of ash, a testimony in the soil to past fires and non-forested landscapes.”
SOUTH AMERICA DURING THE LAST 150,000 YEARS – Jonathan Adams, Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
“In general, it would seem that 150-130,000 y.a. the continent showed the general glacial-age pattern of colder and more arid conditions. After about 130,000 y.a., climate warmed and moistened and the forests reached a similar area to the present. After 115,000 y.a., cold and aridity began to influence the vegetation, to an arid, cool maximum around 70,000 y.a., followed by erratic but generally fairly cool and drier-than-present conditions throughout the continent. A second cold, arid maximum began around 22,000 years ago and lasted until about 14,000 14C y.a., after which rainfall and temperatures increased and the forests returned over several thousand years.”
https://web.archive.org/web/19980704172829/http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercSOUTHAMERICA.html
00
Can’t do clouds,
Can’t do forests
Can’t do …
170
Can’t do nuclear,
can’t do coal,
can only do renewables,
hence this nation is stuffed.
Crash and burn here we come.
220
I know who I will be putting in the press gangs to fix the roads….greenies…lots of greenies, leftists, and anyone else who aided and abetted this nonsense.
They can literally fix the mess they have created.
50
I would not stop there. I would also include teachers, lecturers, politicians (of any persuasion) and scientists who believe in CAGW.
30
… ask them some simple question first and then shoot those who give the propaganda as an answer.
00
Renewable aren’t renewable when you do a whole of life analysis. Ie cradle to grave
40
Well, yes they are: they have to be `renewed’ or replaced/refreshed/renewed every fifteen to twenty years because they just don’t last. At least a coal station was good for over 50 years. That, by the way, is why it isn’t called `renewable.’
00
Australia’s eucalyptus trees are a health hazard and should be kept well away from humans.
120
Got help you if the California lawyer, stymied by the bankruptcy of PG&E find out that it is all your fault!
https://www.kqed.org/news/11644927/eucalyptus-how-californias-most-hated-tree-took-root-2
70
Just ship koalas to California! Problem solved! Seemples!
110
Do koalas eat blu gum leaves ? Not sure.
50
The problem is mind fumblingly simple to overcome. Just plant gums that have a high Alberto.
Ghost gums are white and would instantly address the problem. hello??
There…i saved the planet again today.
https://www.bobvila.com/articles/trees-with-white-bark/
Eurythmics – I Saved the World Today (Official Video) – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf052uxFF58
51
Snow gums also have a high Alberto.
61
Dead gums too.
“The stark white ring-barked forests, all tragic to the moon”
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/dorothea_mackeller/poems/7328
20
Nice find…ummm ‘correlation’
“The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.”
Dorothea Mackeller et all
10
Tragic indeed.
10
Poetic mastery…at an empirical objective level..wow
Thanks for bringing my attention to this.
10
Nope.
Rather, a product of being educated in Australia in the 1950s.
Truth will out.
20
On the subject of koalas, apart from Greens, they are the world’s most stupid mammal.
They are one of the few animals whose brain has actually shrunk due to evolution and their brain is significantly smaller than their brain case.
They are so stupid that if presented with leaves on a horizontal surface rather than their customary position on a tree, they won’t be able to understand to eat them.
Those facts used to be mentioned in the Wikipedia article on koalas but now appear to have been censored out.
130
Correction: fortunately those facts do still remain in Wikipedia, my mistake due to not fully expanding the article.
70
The Vegan in the Room relating to Koala intelligence is that they have massively undeveloped brains because their diet has all the nutrition and energy of, well, gum leaves. This is after all an animal that spends 20 hours a day asleep and most of the other 4 hours trying to remember what they were doing before they nodded off. They break up this cycle by suddenly turning incredibly violent for not logical reason and lashing out with their claws. Koalas, despite what the tourism industry likes to tell us, are actually vicious little pricks that will, if given the chance, totally Go Ya.
The Dropbear by comparison is a meat eater with a much larger and more advanced brain. This increase in intelligence has made them cunning little buggers that are exceptionally good at base problem solving, use of primitive tools and completely avoiding study by the academic community.
Clear moral to this story?
Eat plants? Small brain that is easily confused and vague but prone to irrational aggression.
Eat meat? clever little buggers.
There you go kids, don’t be a vegan or the best you can hope for in life is being cuddled by tourists. 😀
130
MudCrab
But remember that famous demonstration that, if you’re a koala, you do get the chance to piss on the tourists
30
“flea-ridden, piddling, stinking, scratching, rotten little things.”
John Joseph Brown (Australian Minister for Tourism) after one unleashed a stream of foul smelling pee all over his expensive Italian suit.
40
And, probably the best one the country has ever had.
00
Eating such coarse leaves means that most of it’s blood has to go to it’s gut so there isn’t enough left for the brain. men have a similar problem. 😀
91
Yes, but now we have new razor blades, so all problems are now solved.
20
Ah! Greens. Voters at least.
00
You’re not being at all nice to koalas … and too nice to Greens.
00
I’m assuming they mean fight global warming since as we all know here climate change is real and always has been real since year dot. We3ll as we all know here there has been no global warming for over a decade and more likely we are at the early stages of global cooling. It really is about time the people were told the truth.
120
This is the reality, there is nothing puny humans can do to stop global cooling.
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/mao-et-al.-figure-3.png
80
By the way, the Mao paper is a curve fitting exercise and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
60
Most of climate science is a curve fitting exercise and shouldn’t be taken seriously! Fixed it.
00
Pfft. “Climate Change”. So last Millennium.
Everyone knows the real enemies are sunrise and the tides.
These are the issues we should be bankrupting our civilisation over.
100
Only the West is mad since pretty much the rest of the world is not taking any notice of the CAGW nonsense and instead hurriedly building many hundreds of new coal fired power stations. Now if they all believed that CAGW were real they would not be building them and instead would be building nuclear power stations (on top of the ones they are already building). For whatever reason, and we can imagine at least a couple of valid ones, the West is deliberately committing economic suicide alone.
50
Just to complicate things more, I am sure you have noticed that it is cooler under a tree on a hot day. Much cooler if you are holding an iced drink or a chilled beer. Preferably one in each hand.
Much climate research must be written with their toes cause it sure sounds like they have a drink in each hand as well as a few in the belly.
70
That is quite amazing Jo, thank you.
I didn’t know enough about Kyoto, but when I looked through some Qld Govt info on vegetation management I realised the purpose – to facilitate dodgy “carbon accounting”.
Why isn’t that presented EVERY time people argue against the current restrictive land clearing laws?
91
Antoine
Note the headline in today’s on-line Courier Mail
“Residents shocked as bulldozer moves in”
https://www.couriermail.com.au/
Special state government wave through, no need for a clearing permit
10
I couldn’t read it because of a paywall. I get cheesed off when one of the online ‘papers’ won’t even let you read part of one article. Needless to say, it is not one to which I’d choose to subscribe.
10
Annie
But you got the idea from the headline
10
I did, thank you Another Ian.
10
Quite a few papers now wont even let you comment on stories unless you cross thier palms with silver….its a great way of making money from the true believers and keeping those of us who couldnt stomach giving the Moloch-Stream Media our hardearned…..
10
Of cause forests cause global warming, that’s why the Greens insisted Dogwood forests in the USA be cut down, transported across the Atlantic and used as fuel so as to save using the 600 million year old trees that Drax was using.
170
Quick, everyone in SA & Vic go cut some trees down and stop this hot weather. Oh, but I was sheltering under that tree.
Meanwhile, average wholesale electricity prices in SA/Vic for January have averaged $120/MWhr, and last two days averages have been Monday $187/167, Tuesday $271/255 with Adel max temps 34/38, and Melb 24/26.
Place your bets on what those prices will be for the rest of the week, with Adelaide forecast max temps 40/45/33, and Melb 25/38/41.
160
On ABC TV this they had a reporter saying Adelaide was forecast a record breaking heatwave over the next few days, and that he was talking to cafe owners who planned to shut up shop for a week.
But then he let slip the cafe owners said they just couldn’t afford to pay the electricity cost.
180
Here we go – likely “load shedding” (i.e. brownouts) over the next couple of hot days in SA/Vic.
From AEMO: Forecast LOR2 condition in the Victoria region.
1. From 1530 hrs to 1930 hrs 24/01/2019.
The forecast capacity reserve requirement is 1066 MW.
The minimum capacity reserve available is 180 MW.
2. From 1130 hrs to 1600 hrs 25/01/2019.
The forecast capacity reserve requirement is 1099 MW.
The minimum capacity reserve available is 622 MW.
Heard on radio that a couple of coal generators in Vic/NSW are down for maintenance.
70
And for SA, lack of reserve tomorrow: From 1800 hrs 24/01/2019 to 1830 hrs 24/01/2019.
The forecast capacity reserve requirement is 316 MW. The minimum capacity reserve available is 256 MW.
Hope those diesel generators are primed. SATGN1 delivered 15 MW for about 10 minutes yesterday afternoon.
30
On this topic does Global Warming(tm) make for shorter heatwaves?
While the forecast for tomorrow is listed as ‘Stinking Hot’, today has been a pretty normal summer day and the couple of days leading into this week have been relative mild (esp when compared to the couple of hot spells we got back in December.)
Friday and the weekend however are forecast to be almost jumper weather before the temp finally finds it way slowly back into the 30s early next week.
So… Summer, Summer, Summer, Stinking, Cool Change, Mild, Mild, Mild, Low Summer.
‘Heat Waves’ are about 20 hours long now, are they?
30
I have, for about a decade, pointed this out to people.
Large forest, with the way they release weather/climate influencing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like isoprene, methane, alcohols, water, and even pollen, allows them to very roughly control their local weather.
Also of note is this write-up of the work of Abigail Swann a professor at the University of Washington, where she runs the Ecoclimate lab. There’s a lot of information on how forest affects the water cycle not only in each individual forest but across the world.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/forests-emerge-as-a-major-overlooked-climate-factor-20181009/
161
But surely, if water was significant to climate their models would include it. Surely?? Well maybe. In the future. Sometime. Perhaps…
Cheers,
Dave B
PS interestingly, the spell checker changed my “climate” to “Climate”. Obviously I preferred my word. D
100
“albedo”.. My spell checker works for Alberto .. lol
90
decades ago an organic farmer on the SA Eyre Peninsular who planed large numbers of trees along his fence lines as windbreaks, found that rainfall increased by 10-15%.
Trees ‘en mass’ definitely influence rain by pumping moisture into the air as illustrated by the Amazon research.
That tends towards cooling local climate both directly through the moisture in the air and via the clouds providing more shade.
But do trees also release compounds that have other effects ? Why not. We hardly do any research into this.So it is the big known unknown.
120
Bill
Depends on where you are.
An experiment at Charleville had mulga from original population, several thinning densities and completely cleared, and monitored rainfall and water useage.
All treatments used up all available water.
Similar gutsa with the dryland salinity scare of a few years ago. What happens in a Mediterranean climate is totally different in Queensland. As “The Little Golden Book’ (aka the Qld Salinity Management Handbook) puts it
“In areas of under 600 mm rainfall in Qld the chance of dryland salinity is negligable”.
Summer storms, high plant water use, high evaporation, small chance of deep percolation. And this was in print before that beat-up.
30
Ian,the Amazon itself i the major example of trees effecting climate & rainfall..
Regions cleared in the Amazon for cattle farmimg tend to get less rain and become open savannah…
20
Maybe
https://www.cfact.org/2001/01/01/the-clearcutting-facts-about-the-rainforest/
00
Bill
“But do trees also release compounds that have other effects ? Why not. We hardly do any research into this.So it is the big known unknown.”
Down wind warnings of onset of grazing for an example. South African work IIRC
10
OOPS I just made similar comment below. )
20
Yes, it’s all a globalist conspiracy.
But to pull it off a generation had to grow up staring at little screens while clutching joysticks or playing with buttons and knobs. The goal was usually to save the solar system or the whole Milky Way from nasty invaders.
In real life it’s just one planet they have to save from the methane monsters and carbon invaders. Trouble is, there’s this employment system called Publish-or-Perish which means the good green buttons become the bad red ones after ten years. So confusing. Compact diesels green, then compact diesels very, very red. Trees always very green, now kind of red…
Fortunately, under the economic system called Fractional Reserve or Print-Some-More you can’t go for longer than ten years without making a whole lot of new stuff you don’t need to replace the old stuff you didn’t need. So Print-Some-More works quite efficiently with Publish-or-Perish.
But it can all get terribly confusing for Gabrielle Popkin.
110
I would just like to point out some stupidities of science in this matter, yes the darker color absorbs sunlight but is that light re-emitted as heat or turned into carbohydrates and oxygen through photosynthesis. Because of the huge leaf surface area much of this energy is released as enthalpy of water vapour.
I suggest the following experiment to the nutty professors, clear a 5 ha area in a rainforest and build a windmill in it. On a hot dry day in the middle of summer, go stand under the windmill, then go under the rainforest canopy and see what the net
Change in temperature is!
With all that back radiation from the terpenes and the methane the rainforest is bound to be so much hotter than the windmill (NOT)
At our house we make these cool micro climates all over our property, these intellectuals obviously live in city skyscrapers.
140
BobL
From observation vehicle engine temperatures seem to run somewhat higher here in western Qld where the road is going through mulga scrub than where it is through open mitchell grass plains.
And if your air conditioner is temperature marginal it will usually down tools in the mulga.
Just saying
40
Did I say mulga or rainforest?
00
Just to be clear here:-
“she placed gas-measuring chambers around the trunks of more than 2,300 trees”
So there was no way this carefully designed, “objective” scientific experiment was possibly measuring CH4 from the well understood biological breakdown of the vegetation detritus in the world’s largest Equatorial Rain Forest?
Is she per chance a student of fan of da Mann?
131
In other words insects ( termites etc) digesting woody materials for food and thus releasing methane. Now obviously those trees are the problem – NOT..
It’s the termites.
I wonder if she sprayed an area with some toxic chemicals to kill all the insects and then checked the methane levels.
70
“I wonder if she sprayed an area with some toxic chemicals to kill all the insects and then checked the methane levels.”
Hmm…well she surrounded them with gas chambers and that can’t be good. 🙂
20
Bill,
Methane is higher in infected trees. A fungal infection caused by methane-producing archaea.
Rainforest trees would be ripe with this!
Not one mention in the papers!
Here is the link!
40
The whole thing (of the article) is totally flawed.
Methane does NOTHING
CO2 does nothing.
Most of the abledo is from ice, surface snow etc. and ice crystals in the high cloud covers. This depends on the season and the circulation (cloud producing) at any given point. THEN you have to do the spectral analysis of exactly what range in the IR is reflected, by what mechanism.
Forests like the Amazon contribute to local water vapor production by aspiration in contrast to a desert with no vegetation. This produces clouds.
90
There is also a question on the amount of Methane, quoting the paper ‘The global significance of these findings is still unclear. Pangala and Gauci both estimate that the cooling effect of trees taking up carbon greatly outstrips the warming from tree emissions of methane and nitrous oxide’
It will be clearer as more studies are completed.
41
Did you read it?
This is the “if I think up a potential problem with the paper therefore it is a problem, even though I have no idea what was actually done sub thread”
51
not /sarc – the extract from the paper was in the post,viz
Trees emitting methane? Shame no one knew this before: Ban trees!
The latest findings are piling on even more complexity. Ecologist Sunitha Pangala at Lancaster University, UK, spent much of 2013 and 2014 in the Amazon rainforest, where she placed gas-measuring chambers around the trunks of more than 2,300 trees. “What we were really surprised about was the magnitude at which these trees are emitting methane,” says Pangala. She and Vincent Gauci at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and their colleagues reported in 2017 that trees account for around half of the Amazon’s total methane emissions.
which is fine, but it omitted the sentence that I posted, which throws the methane question into a different light
The global significance of these findings is still unclear. Pangala and Gauci both estimate that the cooling effect of trees taking up carbon greatly outstrips the warming from tree emissions of methane and nitrous oxide’
do you see?
20
this is a review paper. It is reviewing a bunch of other papers and pulling together some meta ideas. You, and others, are critiquing the primary research using the descriptions within the review when, clearly, the review is summarising and not just reporting every detail of the primary research. To critique detail of the primary research (like did they eliminate background methane from their analysis of tree output) based on the summary in the review is absurd.
And typical.
21
So what? Are you saying that the review is flawed? If so, whole point of the post is invalid. Secondly I’m not critiquing the research, I am saying that the effect of any methane release by the trees is insignificant, as quoted.
33
That’s poor comprehension. It is clear that I was saying your critique is flawed.
24
its a quote, comprehension is poor on your part.
30
Hey wait a minute even the trolls are arguing the point , what’s going on here ?
40
Love it when they demonstrate that the science is not settled.
20
Trees emit methane, CO2, and all sorts of wonderous hydrocarbons and other volatile gases, some of which undoubtedly would be classed as strong GHGs.
They have done so since the birth of the biosphere. !
Even the bassest of algae can emit some pretty noxious gases and liquids.
ITS ONLY NATURAL.. just like CO2 is.
91
There is something fundamentally wrong being preached here : that trees produce methane.
Methane is only produced in anaerobic environments.. Where is trees are there any anaerobic environments ?
– In leaves ? They are processing co2 with energy from sunlight and releasing oxygen through their stomato
– In the living cambium layer? It is busy bring moisture & dissolved minerals up to the leaves and taking nutrients down to the roots
– In the roots ? The growth of roots is fueled by the sap made in the leaves…and distributed to the roots..
But roughly 80-90% ( it varies by species) of a tree’s mass is made up in non living woody/cellulose tissues.
this woody material is subject to attack by white ants ( termites ) that feed cellulose t fungi to grow their own food..Now that process deep within the Earth generates methane and is anaerobic in nature.
And this is so for all woody plants.If this process did not happen the world would be covered with dead, un-decayed timber..
So our researcher has made the classic mistake of lots of scientists..for which the reply is “Correlation is Causation”
90
Peter:
“Trees emitting methane? Shame no one knew this before”
It was reported back in 2006!
30
I know, but I was quoting today’s post – blame it’s author
22
C’mon PF. How much methane is in the air anyway?
What’s it’s longevity? (ie, how long does it stick around for?)
So Trees emit methane … So What?
Peter Fitzroys emit methane … ooh, we’ll have to stop that!
They also emit CO2 … Right, gotta reduce those emissions to ZERO! Before the Climate Overheats! It’s gonna exceed 1.5 ° and catch on fire!
Yeah. Right. This thread is so funny: so much hot air and puerile utterances about nothing. Oh that’s right, it was about some puerile papers about nothing. Fancy that …
10
you can find the answer to that by reading the paper. read first, sarc second.
42
The paper had me until “using forests to fight climate change.”
Fighting climate change?
Oh wait, you are serious …
80
which paper? Are you talking about the Nature review piece or the original research that I was commenting on that pattoh is critiquing without reading?
15
Do me a favour and gives us a link?
30
they are all in the review
14
Yep, they are all there, had a look at a couple.
‘….did they eliminate background methane from their analysis of tree output…’
Good point, I dunno.
20
” less incoming sunlight” clearly written by the ill informed, sunlight (visible) doesnt HEAT only IR does! IR is not sunlight in the true meaning.
41
someone should send the study to the Davos mob:
21 Jan: Deutsche Welle: Elites on snowcapped peaks: Davos 2019
Top policymakers and business leaders have flocked to Davos again for the annual World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps. The meeting is overshadowed by trade conflicts and a resurgence of economic nationalism
by Andreas Becker
Global growth is slowing, trade conflicts are worsening, ***problems related to climate change and environmental protection remain unresolved while big changes are ahead of us as digitalization gains traction.
“Independently, each [issue] would be a daunting challenge — all these challenges at the same time are a really big challenge that can only be resolved through cooperation,” says the president of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Borge Brende.
But the willingness to cooperate has been declining globally.
US President Donald Trump is an staunch opponent of multilateral treaties. Brazil’s new president also prefers to strike a nationalist chord. In Europe, everything seems to center on Brexit. Italy is governed by populists, while yellow vests are rocking the boat in France…
All in all, some 70 heads of state and government will be there as well as the heads of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Health Organization. The list of participants counts some 3,000 people, also representing the realms of business and ***science, as well as various environmental and development agencies.
So what are they all doing in the Swiss Alps? Nothing less than ***trying to improve the world…
Trump’s absence is bad for the forum’s PR machinery. Last year, the US president dominated the headlines in Davos ***even though he had nothing to contribute toward resolving any global conflicts. Instead, Trump called on businesspeople to invest more in his country…
According to WEF founder Klaus Schwab, the world lacks a vision, ***and the Davos forum could help out there. He’s aware, though, that proposals made by elites tend to be viewed skeptically by ordinary people around the globe.
“Elites are not considered trustworthy, if the time horizon is the next election or the next quarterly report,” says Schwab. “But in Davos, we deliberately want to take a longer-term view; we want to be opportunity-oriented, and we want to shape.”…
But he and the forum don’t believe that everything should be subjected to the forces of the market. He said he warned as early as 1996 that globalization in its current form would not be sustainable.
“If we speak about Globalization 4.0, ***it has to be more inclusive, more sustainable and it has to be based more on moral principles.”
(OUCH!) Meanwhile, Schwab’s self-imposed plan to considerably raise the number of female WEF participants has seen little progress so far. The female participation quota reaches 22 percent this year, only slightly up from the 21 percent recorded in 2018…
https://www.dw.com/en/elites-on-snowcapped-peaks-davos-2019/a-47134091
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In my observations of this whole climate business, it appears that geologists [Geologist – “The sun, not CO2, drives Earth’s climate”] and many astrophysicists are most of the skeptics than other disciplines. Or the more you know about some unrelated science (to atmospheric science) the more alarmist you are.
90
There is also a lot of farmers who make nice extra income (courtesy of taxpayers) from “Carbon farming” –
keeping parts of their property tree covered.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2016-10-04/carbon-farming-queensland-gives-diversified-income/7894254
If they do decide trees warm, then there will be a whole lot of very upset people who make their living from carbon sequestration in trees.
100
I knew a guy out near Parkes. He had a couple of hundred hectares of rocky ground and shrubby trees.
No way he was ever going to clear it, too expensive, no water, soil not great…
But he put in a clearing certificate anyway, and within a couple of days the offer of being paid to leave it uncleared was made. Taken with glee.
He then brought the farm down the road for a pittance, and did it again.
Nice way to augment a farming income. 🙂
211
It’s a pity we don’t have that scam here in SA.
I let parts of my properties go back to native vegetation ( even planted trees ) and got not a penny
70
You gotta learn how to play the game.
Now that its back in its “native” state, advertise wide and loud that you intend to clear it again.
Make sure the Greenies hear. (gotta be loud and yelly to be heard over their ranting) 😉
You may still be on a gold mine 😉
32
Andy
In Qld old growth doesn’t qualify. What they’re after is cleared country with a potential fastgrowth rate.
If you buy into that you’re surrendering your PMAV country (mapped as previously cleared and the best for grazing)
20
George:
I knew a retired farmer from WA who wasn’t that keen (I’m being polite) on those farmers who ‘planted’ gum saplings during a drought. A picture or two of the bare land, followed by a picture of the saplings in the ground attracted funds from Europe where they were used as evidence of “carbon capture”. The farmer got money, the European companies sold Carbon Certificates and the buyers got a smug warm glow for their money.
2 years later the process was repeated.
10
An excellent example of how such arrangements can be rorted.
But the next step has to be anti-rorting measures, eg by drone surveillance. And so, the drama keeps progressing.
00
About 15 years ago the tree thing was big.
However, if one studies trees (or watches railroad tie fence posts) in winter, it is easy to see and feel the warmth of dark wood even with Sun low in the sky.
The Sun facing side of dark trees (and such) absorb energy and warm markedly.
We visited a forest once with much snow on the ground. Old stumps stuck up, and around them the snow as gone. We weren’t the only ones that noticed. A swarm of Ladybird Beetles covered the sunny side of the old tree. I have 35 mm color slides. I should dig them out and digitize them.
Anyway, as the “tree thing” started to gain traction, it died almost as rapidly.
Several studies were published that showed the heat gain possible with evergreens at mid-latitudes.
I did not save links. I think this was just about the time the internet was coming on. Memory fades.
60
So it was discovered that the UHIE (Urban Heat Island Effect) wasn’t restricted to the Urbs?
Wot a shame.
20
… and then there is the one tree to rule them all, the yamal tree …
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/21/mikes-nature-trick-revisited-scottadamssays-edition/
70
It’s fun reading the motherhood-statements in Nature’s oh-so-sciency article…
“Nobody denies that trees are good for the environment”
“forests provide a host of benefits”
“As trees live, grow and die, scientists have learnt, they are in constant conversation with the air”
What the Green Berets movie did for war, Nature does for the climatariat. Keep the punters in line by spouting a lot of sentimentality and piety.
And now that the Left has been persuaded to love war since 2008, we even get:
“When it comes to fighting global warming, trees have emerged as one of the most popular weapons.”
90
https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/david-attenboroughs-plea-to-davos-the-mechanisms-that-we-have-for-destruction-are-so-wholesale-and-so-frightening/news-story/ed1c2e712066546986444fa430291872
Attenborough is over rated in my opinion, a good TV narrator presenting the hard work and research of others, but not a demi god.
141
Everyone tries to drive the news cycle. The word from Davos is that the world is going to hell. World economic crisis. China collapsing. Of course Mr Hairdo, John Kerry says Trump should resign.
In Australia we are told a climate and water expert is going to investigate the mysterious lack of water in the Darling river. The Murray however is full, as it was right through the long drought. That’s what 22 locks and spillways will do, but only a Climate Expert can find a problem.
In the US, it has become clear that the utterly contrived attack on a Catholic Boys school student was supported by an elaborate system using a fake Twitter account to ensure the video went viral but could not be traced. The boys were criticised by their own school and their church and threatened with expulsion until a rival video showed they were the real victims of abuse and intimidation. This shows how the left are becoming expert at exploiting a very compliant media to create a false narrative. The most extreme are the violent Anti-Fascists who are violent fascists pretending to be victims. We saw all this in the 1930s and it is copybook perfect.
As for mankind wrecking the planet, we are now conspiring with trees and grasses and bushes and wild animals to change the climate. Eliminate the people, the greenery, the animals, the insects and the planet will be saved? Really? For whom?
151
Attenborough is joined by Australian medical scientist Professor Peter Doherty who is also a climate crusader.
He has no qualification or knowledge in the area as far as I could make out. We traded emails, which went on much longer than I anticipated.
At his suggestion I read his book; “The knowledge Wars” which is partly about his promotion of AGW climate science. He flits about from one topic too another. He uses standard debating tactics to try to slam dunk the opinions he does not like and frequentlty appeals to the the precautionary pronciple when his arguments are weak. After a while it was almost comical. I started to wonder how some one with some much predjudice and apparently shallow thinking could have won a Nobel Prize! Maybe it is not so hard if you stay on the conventional academinc side and have a bit of luck.
Unfortunately Doherty has been on a few committees advising government, so like Attenborough has has been able to do a lot of harm with respect to climate policy.
111
more on NZ. they definitely need to read jo’s thread!
27 Jul: New Zealand Herald: Ten years, 1 billion trees – making the numbers add up
VIDEO: 1min07sec: Ngati Hine launch the Government plan to plant a billion trees.
Those who have absorbed the Government’s grand plan for 1 billion trees by 2028 tend to make their case with a blitzkrieg of big numbers and lots of division and multiplication.
Forest Owners’ Association president Peter Weir is among the maths gymnasts, but mercifully not before he cuts to the chase: “We’ve done it before”.
“We did more than that [in the 1990s],” says Weir…
“We had this strategy [1 billion trees] in the 1990s but land prices were different then,” says Weir. “They’re now out of reach of commercial forestry owners – no large companies have got unplanted land in the land bank.”
That leaves farmers, Māori landowners, Crown Forestry, local councils and Joe Public to plant the rest…
Here we go with the maths again.
“You have to ask what are the things that will make a farmer or owner of unplanted land suitable for afforestation plant it,” says Weir.
“One is telling those farmers they are coming into the ETS (emissions trading scheme) and by planting they can grow their own [carbon] offsets so the farm is carbon neutral…
The ETS, now under review because it is seen as not up to the job of reducing New Zealand’s net carbon emissions to zero within 32 years, is currently the main tool to help cut emissions. Trees play a critical part in achieving those targets, and changes to the ETS can be expected to provide incentives to plant more…
For big commercial forestry companies, says Weir, today’s carbon prices are too low to compensate for land prices, and allow them to be active participants in the new programme.
“Yes, we’re supportive of it in principle but some other parameters would need to change. The carbon price lifts the internal rate of return in forest investment nicely and … $200 a tonne [of carbon] would absolutely get a lot of planting going, but the current $20 a tonne – and the price in the ETS is capped at $25 a tonne at the moment – is not sufficient top-up to pay the current asking prices for land…
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12093900
20
Pakistan/Imran Khan should read this thread too…just in case:
2 Sept 2018: ExpressTribunePakistan: PM Imran waters first plant of 10 billion trees project
By Sohail Khattak
Talking to media at the occasion, the prime minister said that their target is to plant 10 billion trees in five years of their tenure to make the country green.
He said the aim is to beat the threat of global warming and climate change. “Pakistan is seventh on the list of those countries which will be affected by global warming… this is a war for the survival of our future generations,” he said while talking about the aim of the trees plantation drive…
“This is the beginning. Our target is to plant 10 billion trees in the whole country and this campaign will continue for 5 years.
***We had planted 1.18 billion trees in K-P and now we are starting plantation in the rest of the country,” he said…
“To increase the importance of plantation and cleanliness among children from the beginning we are including this subject in schools,” PM Imran said…
He said that PTI government in K-P had planted 1.18 billion trees in last five years of their tenure and now they have the target of 10 billion across the country…
Imran urged that it is not only the responsibility of government or of an individual but it is the responsibility of every citizen to take part in the campaign and contribute to make this country green otherwise the land would convert into desert owing to melting glaciers…
https://tribune.com.pk/story/1793657/1-pm-imran-says-making-pakistan-greener-future-generations/
if the earlier 1 billion tree tsunami created all the jobs below, imagine what the 10 billion tree tsunami will achieve. eucalypts included:
***March 2017: Reuters: FEATURE-‘Billion tree tsunami’ surges across northern Pakistan
by Rina Saeed Khan
The “Billion Tree Tsunami”, which involves adding trees both by planting and natural regeneration, is backed by cricketing legend Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party, which governs in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in Pakistan’s northwest…
About 13,000 government and private nurseries, in almost every district of the province, are now producing hundreds of thousands of saplings of local and imported tree varieties, including pines, walnuts and eucalyptus, Aslam told the Thomson Reuters Foundation…
An estimated 500,000 “green jobs” have been created through the effort, some of which have gone to rural women and unemployed youth, he said…
Aslam said the regeneration effort is being monitored by both the provincial forest department and WWF-Pakistan, working as an auditor.
Nawaz, of WWF, said he had just returned from three days looking at 2.5 million new trees in the province. He called the restoration “an amazing achievement” by the government’s forest department and by local communities who are paid to plant trees…
The project has been recognised by the Bonn Challenge, a global partnership aiming to restore 150 million hectares of the world’s deforested and degraded lands by 2020…
The Bonn challenge website estimates an economic benefit of the reforestation effort at $121 million for the province, in terms of carbon sequestration, better watershed improvement and future sustainable wood supplies.
feature-billion-tree-tsunami-surges-across-northern-pakistan-idUSL5N1GS5XO
30
BoM is forecasting above average maximum temperatures for Feb-April, but when you examine their past accuracy it’s only just above 50% for key cities, and only 65% for most of Australia – more computer models required?
80
Robber
What data is their forecast based on ? Data from weather station in big cities and towns, where there is a significant Urban Heat Island effect ? Very probably..
Nothing to see there then….
We all know the scam so Let’s move along
41
the full interview. Prince William interviews Attenborough at Davos:
from 14min33sec William brings up Paris – CAGW to the end:
Youtube: 25min09sec: EuroNews: Sir David Attenborough discusses his life’s work at Davos 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKToAJQ_gGI
10
I decline to watch this nonsense Pat..
Attenborough is long past retirement…
his TV shows were & are wonderful for presenting the natural world.
But he well short of any great understanding of the Earth’s climate..
And as for Prince William..well he has a job to do.Keep the Royal family in good odour with the hoi poloi…
Poor bugger does not have the opportunity to do his own research and come to his own conclusions…
62
This is his best work to date.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOMiyjitjA
40
Hilarious! Loved the part where the bloke smashed his computer!
40
how is he way short of understanding the earth’s climate. He would know way more than the average joe
36
Ahh … no, he doesn’t have a clue.
Its come to my notice that you respect disciplines, they are the experts after all, but since the break down of the climate change peer review system, we can all be experts if we put our minds to it.
Like the retired US school teacher who discovered the real cause of coral bleaching.
62
Attenborough “knows” what is fed to him by the biased BBC script writers and producers. In any case if The Bro knows about monkeys and butterflies, that does not make him an authority on climate. We have another example of that closer to home in Flannery the tree kangaroo man / instant climate guru. More cash in climate than tree kangaroos, eh Timmy? Like El Gordo says, Attenborough is no more a climate expert than the rest of us.
David Bellamy was a genuine naturalist who knew far more than The Bro, but he was sidelined years ago because he wouldn’t go along with the global warming crap.
I’m sorry that William had to be involved in this garbage. It would have been better had Prince Charles interviewed the old boy — 2 gullible talking heads — but Chilla was probably too busy talking to his cabbages as usual.
91
Actually it is quite fun viewing DVDs of his latter work as the PC crap is uttered.
I love the bit in the NHM where he claims that Gideon Mantell discovered the dinosaurs. Leaving aside that he didn’t present any evidence until 6 months after Buckland (who Darwin like hesitated for at least 6 years), but he twice denied in writing that he had found the Iguanadon tooth, the basis of Attenborough’s claim.
Of course Buckland was a son of a clergyman, therefore privileged (although not particularly wealthy) whereas Mantell was the fourth son of a bootmaker therefore GENUINELY WORKING CLASS and a suitable hero for the political correct.
That his father owned his own house and shop, 6 other houses in Lewes and shares in 2 tanneries, employed over 23 workers, and had to hand £500 in cash to start his son’s career is regarded as immaterial to the myth. Still facts don’t count, Mantell is the working class hero of science.
20
Poiter you must be on some of that stuff you’re crowd want testing , Attenborough lost me with ocean acidification and Coral bleaching , then he went into evangelist mode and it all went downhill from there .
63
22 Jan: TheLocalSwitzerland: $10,000 hotel rooms: the surprising numbers that tell the story of Davos
55: This is how many kilometres of fencing has been erected for security reasons during the WEF meeting…
500: That is the number of journalists covering Davos in 2019…
22 Jan: France24: Bolsonaro tries to sell ‘new Brazil’ to business elite in Davos speech
by News Wires/AFP
Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro touted a “new Brazil” in a speech Tuesday to the world’s business elite at this year’s World Economic Forum, in Davos, vowing an investment-friendly agenda and attacking left wing politics in Latin America.
Like Trump, the “Mr Clean” Bolsonaro surfed a populist wave to ride to power, vowing an end to rampant corruption and a restoration of law and order in Brazil…
And he insisted the natural environment was also safe, despite fears that the new government will open up the Amazon rainforest further to agribusiness and loggers…
While Bolsonaro’s promises on investment and deregulation have wowed the Brazilian stock market, he has also taken a page from the Trump playbook in bashing China.
If such trade tensions worry many of the Davos crowd, so does the threat of planetary economic dislocation caused by climate change, according to a WEF survey last week.
Greenpeace executive director Jennifer Morgan said Bolsonaro should not have been afforded the “prestigious platform” of the WEF in Davos, “because I think it just buttresses that type of approach that he is taking”.
It was up to the company bosses present in Davos to push back and “actually prioritise the Amazon and reducing deforestation over their short-term business interest”, she told AFP, “because the Amazon is a fundamental part of how the whole planet works”.
https://www.france24.com/en/20190122-davos-bolsonaro-sell-new-brazil-business-elite-speech-world-economic-forum
22 Jan: CNBC: President Bolsonaro touts ‘new Brazil’ in Davos, says country will become more business-friendly
•On his first international trip since becoming president, Bolsonaro delivered the keynote speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF).
•The absence of President Donald Trump at this-year’s five-day event has thrust Brazil’s premier into the spotlight, less than three weeks after his inauguration.
by Sam Meredith
“Brazil’s economy is still relatively closed to foreign trade and to change that situation is one of my administration’s major commitments,” Bolsonaro said, according to a WEF translation.
“You can be sure that by the end of my term in office, our economic team, led by Minister of Finance Paulo Guedes, will position in the ranking of the 50 best countries in the world to do business,” he added.
His comments are likely to be well received by market participants, after more than a decade of interventionist policies by previous administrations…
The 63-year-old nationalist secured a sweeping election victory late last year, promising to drain the political swamp and fight deep-seated corruption.
The country’s benchmark stock index reached an all-time high at the end of last week, amid improving investor sentiment about the new government’s pension reform plans.
The Bovespa, one of 2018’s top performing indexes across the globe, hit a record high, crossing the 96,000 mark on Friday. It followed heightened expectations that Bolsonaro’s government could reveal pension reform plans earlier-than-expected.
On Tuesday, the index pared some its recent gains, standing at 95.611 at around 3:30 p.m. London time…
“We think Jair Bolsonaro has a big chance to reform the country,” Francesco Starace, chief executive at Enel, told CNBC at WEF on Tuesday.
“His agenda is a reform agenda. If it is populist or not populist, we don’t care – it is a reform agenda that we think is good for the country and the country needs it,” he added…
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/22/wef-president-jair-bolsonaro-touts-new-brazil-in-davos.html
22 Jan: CNBC: John Kerry told an audience at Davos that President Donald Trump should resign
•John Kerry said President Donald Trump should resign while speaking on a CNBC panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
•The former secretary of State lamented that Trump “doesn’t take any of this seriously” before calling for his resignation…
by Carmin Chappell
TRUMP TWEET: “Last time I went to Davos, the Fake News said I should not go there” he tweeted. “This year, because of the Shutdown, I decided not to go, and the Fake News said I should be there.”…
50
Off topic but only slightly, Sir David Attenborough is at it again; in a BBC TV interview (Davos 2019) with HR Prince William no less, (carefully prompting the questions) he makes his usual ‘doomsdayers’ pedictions for the end of the world as we know it, overpopulation, habitat & species destruction along with a good dose of human induced (and of course irreversible) man-made climate change. I believe (from ABC news today) that he also stated that we have 10 years in which to rectify the problem before it is too late. Note that it is 10 years and not 7,9,12, or 11. Just how does he know that? Sir Richard please tell us. My message to him is short and simple; Sir Richard get used to it, humans have arrived on the planet and they are here to stay. It cannot be undone. Managed of course, but not undone. And humanity will survive all else.
GeoffW
91
22 Jan: AFP: What Climate Change? World Leaders Hire Private Jets to Reach Davos For World Economic Forum
WEF organisers insist that they are making the annual forum environmentally sustainable, offsetting the carbon emissions generated by private aviation as much as possible through their own initiatives on the ground…
The convenience and comfort of flying privately rather than commercially appears to outweigh any concerns about the outsized carbon footprint it involves, judging by a number-crunching exercise by the company Air Charter Service (ACS).
It forecast nearly 1,500 private jet flights over the week of the World Economic Forum (WEF) to airports near Davos in the Swiss Alps.
That would be up from the more than 1,300 aircraft movements seen at last year’s forum, despite climate change registering as the top risk factor identified for the global economy in a survey of WEF movers and shakers last week.
In a blog post, the website privatefly.com forecast an even higher number of private flight movements related to Davos this week, of around 2,000 in and out of local airports.
And while most people reach Davos by car or train after alighting from airports such as Zurich, two to three hours’ away, a select few CEOs and government leaders hire helicopters to save time…
And the trend is towards even more expensive, larger private jets such as the Gulfstream GV and Bombardier’s Global Express. “This is at least in part due to some of the long distances travelled, but also possibly due to business rivals not wanting to be seen to be outdone by one another,” (Andy Christie, private jets director at ACS) said…
WEF organisers insist they are making the annual forum environmentally sustainable, offsetting the carbon emissions generated by private aviation as much as possible through their own initiatives on the ground.
“We encourage our partners from business and others to take that (offsetting measures) on,” Dominique Waughray, head of Global Public Goods at the WEF, said last week.
“Most private aircrafts that come in are actually for government officials, because under the Vienna convention the most efficient and secure way of getting people to an event like that is via an aircraft,” he said. “So that is a sort of security brief, but we still offset them.”
https://www.news18.com/news/world/what-climate-change-world-leaders-hire-private-jets-to-reach-davos-for-world-economic-forum-2010537.html
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read all:
22 Jan: Breitbart: Pompeo Celebrates Death of Globalism at Davos Speech: ‘Nations Matter’
by Frances Martel
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday that the defeat of entrenched political interests in top offices around the world – from America to Italy to Brazil – was a “positive development” for the world and a return to the worldview that “nations matter.”
Pompeo enthusiastically defended President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan – “Make America Great Again” – as a philosophy that accelerated economic growth in the country and improved the lives of average Americans. He encouraged the gathering, including both world leaders and influential global businesspeople, to embrace “economic security” and reject the influences of international bodies far removed from the interests of the people.
“Over the past few years, all around the world, voters have tuned out politicians and political alliances that they thought weren’t representing their interests,” Pompeo told the crowd via satellite from Washington, DC…READ ON
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2019/01/22/pompeo-davos-nations-matter/
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Better tell World Champion glider pilot Ingo Renner about that!
Ingo has spent most of his life flying gliders and that means looking for the best local hot spots where thermal up currents are to be found. Ingo’s advice is to avoid green crops and forested areas if flying over flat areas in Australia. They tend to be cooler. Rocky outcrops and bare dark soil is much better.
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Peter C.,
There is not a contradiction here. I think the problem is what I call lazy writing, or poor wordsmithing.
Bare dark soils and dark rocks absorb and warm. Air near the surface warms by conduction and become less dense, and more buoyant – thus rises – a thermal. Bare ground under clear sky will cool rapidly, the air becomes denser, and the thermal stops and reverses.
With a full cover of growing green things, much of the energy is internalized during the sunlight hours. At night, the plants and water therein, with the load of H2O vapor above, will cool less rapidly. Convection, both directions, is lessened.
There is lots more going on – as Jo and others have explained.
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Bare ground under clear sky (darn!) at night
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Of course, because they transpire strongly which causes cooling. It’s why coastal areas have moderate temperatures whereas deserts have massive temperature extremes. Its not just mammals that practice thermal regulation and when it comes to cooling plants and mammals use EXACTLY the same mechanism.
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What a wonderful illustration of the term cherry picking, I see why it’s hidden here.
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22 Jan: Guardian: Weatherwatch: climate change cooks up ideal conditions for snow
Record-breaking dumps of snow across Europe most likely have a worrying cause
by Kate Ravilious
Look at all that snow in the Alps; has global warming taken a break? Alas, no, it turns out that the recent record-breaking dumps of snow across much of southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria are more likely a consequence of global warming. Why? Balmy temperatures in the North Sea and Baltic Sea are cooking up the ideal conditions to create snow…READ ON
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/21/weatherwatch-climate-change-cooks-up-ideal-conditions-snow
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“Balmy temperatures …”
Should she decide on a excursion into this balmy region, we should prepare a Darwin Award with her name on it.
Somewhat like this lady: Bikini Hiker
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another CAGW frontline, according to senior propagandist Lyce Doucet of the BBC:
22 Jan: BBC: The battle on the frontline of climate change in Mali
by Lyse Doucet, Chief international correspondent
“First, armed groups attacked nearby,” she explains in a tired voice as we sit on plastic matting, five young children nestled close to their mother in Mali’s fabled city in the sand Timbuktu.
“Then the rains came, and did the rest.”
The worst rains in 50 years in northern Mali washed away their entire crop.
Those rains poured through the cracks in her mud home caused by an explosion an armed group set off.
The cracks are showing everywhere in a fragile land now doubly cursed by the extremes of conflict and climate change…
The increase in temperatures in the ***Sahel are projected to be 1.5 times higher than the global average, says the UN.
“It hasn’t been on our radar screens,” says Peter Maurer, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
“We often look at arms and armed actors, and maybe at underdevelopment, but now we see that climate change is leading to conflicts among communities and this is a different kind of violence.”…
Mali is now lurching between droughts and floods…
https://www.bbc.com/news/the-reporters-46921487
11 Jun 2018: InterPressService: Great Green Wall Brings Hope, Greener Pastures to Africa’s Sahel
By Issa Sikiti da Silva
The unexpected relief has come from the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and Sahel Initiative (GGWSSI), an eight-billion-dollar project launched by the African Union (AU) with the blessing of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the backing of organizations such as the World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)…
The GGW aims to restore Africa’s degraded landscapes and transform millions of lives in one of the world’s poorest regions. This will be done by, among others, planting a wall of trees in more than 20 countries – westward from Gambia to eastward in Djibouti – over 7,600 km long and 15 km wide across the continent.
The countries include Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Senegal. There is also Algeria, Egypt, Gambia, Eritrea, Somalia, Cameroon, Ghana, Togo and Benin…
International partners including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), Sahara and Sahel Observatory (SSO), among others, are also playing a critical role to ensure that the project is being successfully implemented, and upon its completion by 2030 will become the world’s largest living structure and a new Wonder of the World…
The project founders said that by 2030 the ambition is to restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land and sequester 250 million tons of carbon…
http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/06/great-green-wall-brings-hope-greener-pastures-africas-sahel/
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Lyce Doucet could have done a little research!
7 Sept 2018: BBC: Large-scale wind and solar power ‘could green the Sahara’
By Matt McGrath
Installing huge numbers of solar panels and wind turbines in the Sahara desert would have a major impact on rainfall, vegetation and temperatures, researchers say.
They found that the actions of wind turbines would double the amount of rain that would fall in the region.
Solar panels have a similar impact although they act in a different way.
The authors say their work reinforces the view that large-scale renewables could transform the Sahara region.
The scientists modelled what would happen if 9 million sq km of the Sahara desert was covered in renewable energy sources…
According to authors’ calculations, a massive installation in the desert would generate more than four times the amount of energy that the world currently uses every year…
“Our model results show that large-scale solar and wind farms in the Sahara would more than double the precipitation, especially in the Sahel, where the magnitude of rainfall increase is between 20mm and 500mm per year,” said Dr Yan Li, the lead author of the paper from the University of Illinois, US.
“As a result, vegetation cover fraction increases by about 20%.”
In the Sahel, the semi-arid region that lies to the south of the Sahara, average rainfall increased 1.12mm per day where wind farms were present, according to the study.
With wind turbines, it’s all about the mixing of air caused by the rotation of the blades…
Solar panels actually reduce the reflection of sunlight from the surface known as the albedo effect. This triggers a positive albedo-precipitation-vegetation feedback that leads to precipitation increases of about 50%, the authors report…
The authors say that the heating impact of all those turbines and panels would not make an important difference.
“The local warming by wind and solar farms is much smaller compared with the reduced future warming from greenhouse gases that renewable power at this scale would imply,” said Dr Li…
The study has been published (LINK) in the journal, Science.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45435593
21 Jul 2016: Phys.org: Warmer Mediterranean turns the Sahel green
Source: Max Planck Society
As researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg report in the current edition of the journal Nature Climate Change, due to higher sea temperatures in the Mediterranean more moisture from the eastern Mediterranean is reaching the southern edge of the Sahara at the start of the West African monsoon in June. Moreover, according to the current study, the future development of precipitation in the Sahel region is crucially dependent on the warming of the Mediterranean…
Practically no other region in the world has a climate as variable as the Sahel. The climate in the region, which is several hundred kilometres wide, located south of the Sahara, and extends from the Atlantic coast of Senegal to Eritrea on the Red Sea, is dominated by the West African monsoon. This brings rain to the entire region from June to September while drought prevails in winter…
The intensity of the monsoon has varied repeatedly over time. Following a relatively wet period in the 1950s and 1960s, the Sahel experienced several periods of severe drought up to the mid-1980s, which claimed over 100,000 lives. Surprisingly, the rainfall increased again after that…
And different temperatures in different marine regions also explain why there has been more rain again in the Sahel since the 1990s…
https://phys.org/news/2016-07-warmer-mediterranean-sahel-green.html
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should have added a “sarc tag” when I posted BBC’s Matt McGrath piece on RE and the Sahel.
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The Sahara is a desert because it lies more or less under the edge of the Hadley cell where the air that rose at the equator (better the intertropical convergence zone ITCZ) descends back to Earth again. The already dry air from the tropopause is heated by compression as it descends, further reducing the humidity. This circulation causes a permanent high over the Sahara. How will installing 9 million km^2 (!!!!!!) of solar cells change that?
Have a look at an atlas, most of the worlds deserts are under the edges of the Hadley cell.
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read all…full text:
22 Jan: CarbonPulse: ECOSYSTEM MARKETPLACE: Davos and the salad sauce of sustainable supply chains
In his 1974 book Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the late American philosopher Robert Persig described periods of “lateral drift,” which most of us enter at some point, after realizing that the beliefs and premises we’ve been taught don’t always match our experiences. Lateral drift brought Persig into a “far orbit of the mind” that seemed unproductive at the time, but which set the stage for periods of fervent activity.
Something is happening in the “Zero-Deforestation Supply Chain Movement,” which is a key component of the global effort to end climate change, and this week’s Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) could provide the impetus for moving beyond lateral drift into fervent activity…READ ON
http://carbon-pulse.com/67494/
23 Jan: CarbonPulse: BP sold WCI offsets from record Alaska forestry projects, data suggests
Oil major BP purchased offset credits from two of the largest projects in the WCI cap-and-trade programme, a company official confirmed last week, but data suggests the fuel supplier is reselling many of those Alaska-sourced units on the secondary market.
22 Jan: CarbonPulse: EU plans Brussels conference to further work on Paris Agreement’s Article 6
The European Commission is planning to host a conference on international carbon trade this spring to help clinch a deal on rules for Article 6 of the Paris Agreement after recent talks fell apart.
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Regional cooling signal in Perth,
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/unusually-wild-wintry-weather-hits-was-south-west-as-cyclone-possible-in-the-north/529105
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“Most scientists agree, however, that tropical forests are clear climate coolers: trees there grow relatively fast and transpire massive amounts of water that forms clouds, two effects that help to cool the climate.”
How interesting, the claim is that warming from CO2 increases water vapour in the atmosphere (constant relative humidity with rising temperature) and since water vapour is the most significant green house gas this causes further warming in a positive feedback loop. Indeed the long standing claim is that this triples the direct effect of rising CO2. However the above states that more water evaporation causes cooling through extra cloud formation. So, more water vapour causes warming or cooling, whichever better suits the current thesis. What an obliging molecule water is.
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Off topic again, but there’s a rant coming up from myself;
CanI suggest that Ross Greenood -2GB Moneynews- get himself a job with ABC Radio instead !!
Just listened to him on his show at 6.20 pm ‘sucking up’ to none other than Audrie Zuckerman from our illustrious AEMO. Gave me the sh*ts I can tell you;
Story goes as many of you may know that one of the units at Loi Yang Power Station is down. So small crisis that can easily be overcome if everyone mucks in and raises their AC from say 18degC to say 24degC. Oh and don’t use the washers or the pool pump either!! This is all after Audrie has informed us that they have been planning for contingencies to get power from other sources and at the cheapest prices !! Also she went on about how our old coal fired power stations in NSW may not be adequate as they are more likely to ‘break down’ in this hot weather – like any/all machines do !!
Well by this time I was ready to throw my portable radio out the window !!
I have known previously that good old Ross, being a ‘money man’ with all his contacts in bussiness is an out and out green lefty on climate change. I for one will not be tuning in to further broadcasts of his show !!
I intend to get on their web site and let them know how I feel. Also perhaps a phone call.
Regards GeoffW
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2nd rant, I hope that their SA and Victoria power grid collapses around their necks !!
As it may well do so in coming days. No harm meant to anyone.
GeoffW
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Geoff your rant is warranted and good call , the AEMO know exactly what constraints they are under but blame renewables never .
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Yeah?? Ok …plant lots of cannabis is the answer then. 🙂
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We could pull out the cotton at Cubby and replace it with terpenes, the Greens would be overjoyed.
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O/T – for the EV file
“We Don’t Need No Frozen Sparky Cars”
“More: The cold weather and snow couldn’t have come at a worse time for $TSLA. Facebook groups are getting flooded with frozen door handle and charge port complaints.”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/01/23/we-dont-need-no-frozen-sparky-cars/
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Just love the look of bewilderment on their faces when their ‘electric’ cars don’t work . . .
GeoffW
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Fascinating, informed and open-minded discussion to date; from start to finish.
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http://joannenova.com.au/2018/12/new-report-renewables-indirectly-make-electricity-more-expensive-so-abc-tells-australia-the-opposite/#comment-2086797
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This is by far the most Monty Python story. Trees are good. Trees are bad. We humans control the albedo of the planet which is 75% water surface anyway. That water weighs 340x as much as the thin air above it and does most of the buffering, creates all the weather, all the storms and of course, all the rain, snow, ice. The planetary rotation creates the wind and circulation. That’s it. It is a water planet, not a tree planet.
Still we are supposed to believe we insignificant humans control the temperature of the planet. No, the only power source is the sun and by far the biggest, most significant green house gas is water. All life on earth is made from it. Dried you weigh nothing. You are mostly water. All the weather is caused by water and the sun. Water covers the planet, but somehow we humans are supposed to be in control? Call it a global megalomanical obsession. America landed men on the moon and suddenly humans are the Masters of the Universe. In fact Hollywood will not admit only America has done so. They are so woke. Woke non gender specific humans(huwomen?) landed men on the moon. Apparently.
We do not control the planet. As best we can influence the rainfall on some land. That’s it. It’s not about the trees.
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