Killer Trees
Editorial By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Ronald Reagan once declared that air pollution comes from trees. He was right then and he's right now. Psssst: Trees can also contribute to global warming.
Reagan's famous statement contributed to the conventional wisdom that Republicans are ignorant or uncaring or both on environmental issues. It also earned the Gipper considerable derision. His former press secretary, James Brady, once grabbed the president as they flew over a forest and said in mock alarm, "Look, Mr. President — killer trees!" Turns out, Reagan was right.
Planting trees are said to be food for the environment and a tool to fight climate change. Al Gore and others guzzle energy like there's no day after tomorrow, figuring that if they pay someone in a Third World country to plant trees, they're somehow magically "carbon neutral."
Sort of like drinking like a fish, paying someone to stay sober, then claiming you're not an alcoholic.
As Steven Milloy, guru of junkscience.com explains, forests affect the climate in three ways. They are dark and therefore absorb sunlight, which warms the planet. They also absorb carbon dioxide, which the scientists on the Supreme Court have determined is a pollutant rather than the source of all plant and, therefore, animal life on earth. But they emit water vapor, which outranks carbon dioxide as the biggest greenhouse gas of all.
According to researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where you plant the trees makes all the difference. Based on their computer modeling, results of which appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (April 17), tropical forests exert a net cooling effect. But forests above 20 degrees north latitude — a line extending roughly from southern Mexico through Saharan Africa and central India, and the Chinese island of Hainan — have a net and not insignificant warming effect.
Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institute's department of global ecology in Stanford, Calif., and a co-author of the report, explains that a forest has a "strong warming influence" if it covers sun-reflecting snow while absorbing solar energy. Poor cloud formation coupled with the intense absorption of light by the trees "far overwhelms the cooling effect of the carbon storage."
How strong a warming influence do northern forests exert? Well, the Canadian researchers say that by the year 2100 they will warm surface temperatures in their area by an estimated 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
Interestingly, the computer model showed that if all forests were cut down, the global mean temperature would actually decrease by more than half a degree Fahrenheit. But then there'd be nothing left to hug.
The Jan. 12, 2006, issue of the journal Nature reported a study by the Max Planck Institute showing that plants, including trees, emit methane into the atmosphere, the third most important greenhouse gas behind water vapor and carbon dioxide. In fact, they found that plants — two-thirds of which are in tropical rain forest regions — produce up to 30% of annual global methane production.
According to New Zealand climate researcher David Lowe, "We now have the specter that new forests might increase global warming through methane emissions rather than decrease it by being sinks for carbon dioxide."
Suffice it to say that Earth's climate and what affects it are complicated and that man's contribution to the mix might be more tiny than we know. If you plant that carbon-offsetting tree in, say, Guatemala, it might help. But if that tree grows in Brooklyn, we might be toast.
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