Be Very, Very Careful Where You Plant That Tree

This may require some thinking, but I have always encouraged that.

Now look. Horticulturalists know a lot of this already, and they know you can't plant that Avocado, in the ground, out of doors, in eastern Colorado, even if you do water it, and expect it to survive a year.

John Simspon, reporting in ScienceNOW Daily News, for 10 April 2007 "Be Careful Where Your Plant That Tree," describes that it would be useful and wise to heed what scientist's are finding -- that all trees are not created, or engineered, as equals. To plant the wrong tree in an area or circumstance where the tree does not maximize its potential in the war against CO2 overload in our atmosphere, may be a bad move. (Kasting says, in 1998, 4.8Gt C/year)

Simpson reports that "When it comes to climate change, not all trees are created equal. A tree growing in the tropics cools the planet, according to a new study, but the same tree contributes to global warming in the high latitudes."
These kinds of findings could help eco-warriors and the rest of us to better target our conservation efforts.

"Trees affect local weather in two divergent ways." Simpson writes. On one hand, his article points out, trees are great carbon dioxide sinks, inhaling the heat-trapping gas from the air. Practically every one of the tree's carbon atoms came right out of the air. Photosynthesis supports the extraction of the Carbon, the return of most of the Oxygen to the air, and trees also exhale water.

Trees also, through a process known as evapotranspiration, create clouds that bounce back warming rays (ScienceNOW, 12 March(1). But trees also absorb heat from the sun and prevent or interfere with snow from reflecting ultraviolet rays, warming the regional climate. A team led by atmospheric scientist Govindasamy Bala of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California wondered whether a tree's location would cause some of these effects to overpower others.

So, Simpson explains, the team clear-cut forests--using a computer "simulation", of course. (A model!) When the researchers compared their simulation to a "standard" model with no deforestation, they found that the impact of deforestation depended on location. In the northern latitudes, a tree's ability to trap heat and block snow reflection appears to overpower the cooling effects of its carbon dioxide consumption; without trees, these areas became 0.8° Celsius cooler by 2100 in their model compared to the standard model.

[Well, that depends on really how good your model is. -LP]

The opposite is true in the tropics, Bala says, which warmed by 0.7° when treeless over the century. And in temperate regions, the effects seem to balance out; the difference in temperature between the two models in these areas was just 0.04°, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study CONFIRMS that reforestation efforts in the tropics could slow global warming, and it serves as an important warning against planting trees in boreal regions, says climate scientist Victor Brovkin of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

[Again, their model. . .-LP]

Planting trees in temperate regions probably has no net effect on global warming, he says. As for the idea that we might be better off in a world without trees, Bala warns against underestimating the value of forests, which provide habitat for wildlife and help preserve Earth's biodiversity.

(Les Porter's snide comment: Makes you wonder about paved-over Postdam, and their effectless reforestation? Thanks, Victor! It is an area needing more study, for sure. Imagine this headline: "Scientist's say trees at mid-latitudes are climate neutral; cut them all down with no effect!"

Hey John Simpson, square this up! Is Vic in the majority? Come on.)

Related sites

http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0907.htm
(Note: some details of enissions and reservoirs. Kasting 1998)

http://www.weather.nps.navy.mil/~psguest/polarmet/clichange/index.html

(Excellent Naval site.)
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http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/312/2

1-Simpson, John, ScienceNOW Daily News,12 March 2007; --"A new study of the South American rainforest's leaf cover reveals growing evidence of seasonality among the evergreens. What's more, the leaves themselves may be driving the change, sparking the transition from the dry to wet seasons. For the first half of the year, NASA images revealed an average of 3.5 layers of leaf cover--or leaf area per unit ground area; that figure increased to six layers during the second half of the year. During the first half of the year, clouds and sheets of rain cover the lush rainforest, sheltering the plants from sunlight and causing trees drop more leaves than they produce. Following this wet season, things dry up, and the jungle begins to blossom. "[It's] as if plants know there are good times to come with lots of light." Says Ranga Myneni of Boston University in Massachusetts. (Their report was published online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. in March, 2007)

Related sites

http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/amazon.htm
http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/rainforest_ecology.html
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleevapotranspiration.html

[Les Porter's Note: But it depends; Gaia seems to do most of this by putting the right plant in the right place, at the right latitude, in the right soil, with the right amount of water, take advantage of ambient insolation. It isn't perfect.

Periodic orbital vagaries, episodic coincidences caused by wandering continents, the growing luminosity of the Sun, convectional windblown thermohaline circulations . . .Gaia does what she can.

Of course, when some species overwhelms her biosystems; overwhelms the fine tuning her systems have developed with the geosystems; with the astrosystems; with the planetary impact/possible extinction systems -- over hundreds of millions of years . . .what's a live world gonna do?

There is always the biodiversity speciation card, the appropriate plague or virus selected to do Mom's work -- austere, heartless, but if these kids get all the training you can give them and still miss the point, maybe NEW kids would do better, while there is still time, a billion years to try them newer kids out. . . If one could just get rid of only the "bad" children. . . Why won't they work with Mom?]