Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study claims that the shift from broadleaf to conifer trees in managed European forests has caused 0.12c (0.21F) of warming in Europe, by reducing the albedo of large areas of land, causing more sunlight to be absorbed.
Abstract
Afforestation and forest management are considered to be key instruments in mitigating climate change. Here we show that since 1750, in spite of considerable afforestation, wood extraction has led to Europe’s forests accumulating a carbon debt of 3.1 petagrams of carbon. We found that afforestation is responsible for an increase of 0.12 watts per square meter in the radiative imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, whereas an increase of 0.12 kelvin in summertime atmospheric boundary layer temperature was mainly caused by species conversion. Thus, two and a half centuries of forest management in Europe have not cooled the climate. The political imperative to mitigate climate change through afforestation and forest management therefore risks failure, unless it is recognized that not all forestry contributes to climate change mitigation.
Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6273/597
Study author Dr Kim Naudts speaking to the BBC;
Removing trees in an organised fashion tends to release carbon that would otherwise remain stored in forest litter, dead wood and soil.
Choosing conifers over broadleaved varieties also had significant impacts on the albedo – the amount of solar radiation reflected back into space.
“Even well managed forests today store less carbon than their natural counterparts in 1750,” said Dr Kim Naudts who carried out the study while at the Laboratory of Climate Science and Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Speaking to Science in Action on the BBC World Service, she said: “Due to the shift to conifer species, there was a warming over Europe of almost 0.12 degrees and that is caused because the conifers are darker and absorb more solar radiation.”
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35496350
To me this study drives home how ridiculously overblown the whole global warming issue is.
If this study is right, if opening the wrong packet of tree seeds can cause a 0.12 degree shift in temperature, over a large region of the Earth, what else have climate scientists missed?
The assertion that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for most of the warming since pre-industrial times, now looks even more preposterous than it did before.
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Have a good look at this Senator, it might influence your way of thinking about Co2
*emu*
On 6 February 2016 at 12:27, Watts Up With That? wrote:
> Eric Worrall posted: ” Guest essay by Eric Worrall A study claims that the > shift from broadleaf to conifer trees in managed European forests has > caused 0.12c (0.21F) of warming in Europe, by reducing the albedo of large > areas of land, causing more sunlight to be absorbed” >
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/13/surprise-leaves-maintain-temperature-new-findings-may-put-dendroclimatology-as-metric-of-past-temperature-into-question/
Oh FFS. This is like British Rail blaming delays on the wrong kind of leaves on the rails!
No, not at all. Albedo changes caused by land use are actually pretty important, and, as the study suggests, may actually be a significant factor in the warming we’ve see. A bit like water abstraction has been to sea level rise.
Also, consider, the crops grown next to an otherwise rural weather station. What impact are they going to have on the readings taken there? Possibly a rural version of UHI?
http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/dont-blame-us-ndash-it-was-the-wrong-kind-of-snow-1847208.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1237102/Fears-Eurostar-chaos-weeks-thousands-face-stranded-Christmas.html
And a few years ago when snow shutdown the 750v/dc ground level 3rd rail power system for the rail network. A newly built A4 Pacific class 4-6-2 COAL burning STEAM locomotive kept the network open.
Causing sunlight to be absorbed….well that explains why those species of trees grow so quickly!
So they tripped upon a big secret I have been suppressing for years: trees gather energy more efficiently per $ than solar PV panels and store solar energy better and more cheaply than lithium batteries from Tesla!! On top of that it can be released on demand at any scale from a match to a power station. What will they think of next.
And it is as green a solution as anyone can imagine. We owe it all to Dr St Barbe Baker.
In all fairness, I think that they mean absorbed by the ground, thus heating it, not by the trees.
Nope, I heard it on the radio and it was mentioned that the darker leaves of coniferous trees is the cause of the warming.
Paul of Alexandria – Evergreen forests shade the ground all year round, unlike deciduous trees. It is the trees that would absorb the sunlight, not the ground, in any forest.
Difference is that coniferous are green all year around, darkening winter landscape. Just look on winter satellite pictures of Siberia. It is hardly white. There is never 10+ meters of snow to cover all pine trees.
.21F … Really?? I can see those Polar Bears sweating already.
“‘Even well managed forests today store less carbon than their natural counterparts in 1750,’ said Dr Kim Naudts who carried out the study while at the Laboratory of Climate Science and Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.”
Yeah, that’s partly why we have fewer enormous forest fires these days, spewing all that carbon right back into the air.
Yep, that’s why the carbon sink is 150% bigger today than in 1965. And about 3000% bigger in 1965 than the entire period from 1860 to 1875. And that’s in spite of deforestation; and a warming ocean as they claim. And the forests storing less carbon. That logic must be related to global warming causes it to snow more.
If the trees are so bad then they should all be cut down and burned.
Just the non-carbon bits though.
Nature has designed trees so that healthy ones are more fire resistant and dying ones/diseased ones less so. Nature will rid the world of unhealthy trees very efficiently……
In the modern interpretation of things, all change is bad.
Don’t these kinds of trees release aerosols that cool the local area?
I think the aerosols act as a nucleus which causes water droplets to form around them and then localised precipitation – they help the forest gather water.
When will this end?
2036
I wonder what is the effect of Yogi Bear stealing pikkanik baskets?
Surely if he were to return to his natural diet, this would decrease global warming?
Maybe one of those soon to be unemployed “scientists” from the CSIRO can look into this?
I wonder what is the effect of Yogi Bear stealing pikkanik baskets?
Pissing off Ranger Smith.
The article is on the right track. Of course their model is incorrect, any mature forest will eventually be a net carbon emitter through some combination of events (fire, disease, old age, insects). We reforested a huge chunk of Northern Hemisphere as fossil fuels replaced wood and as agriculture became more efficient. More biomass will eventually lead to higher carbon dioxide emissions. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if dissolved carbon dioxide was liberated out of ground water from tree roots.
“Has not led to cooling since 1750” – anybody remember what it was like in 1750? Little Ice Age maybe? Who wanted more cooling? Maybe these guys knew what they were doing…
FFS, trees/plants convert carbon dioxide into starch, cellulose etc. They don’t magically store it all as carbonic acid. The steady state (which rarely lasts for that long) occurs when the levels of carbon dioxide drop to a level that just maintains the forests without there being an excess to expand growth……
This is a wonderful example of green tree fraud!!
The do anything for a global warming buck study grant researchers are inherently dishonest. The grant givers and the grant takers know what the end result will be before the ink on the cheque drys. A first class Ponzi scheme rip off the taxpayers, who as usual foot the bill.
I disagree with you here: I don’t know if the study’s conclusions are accurate, but it’s certainly an important area of study to consider……
Conifers take in CH4 methane.
If governments get as good at managing nature as they are at managing economies then we’re doomed no matter what the climate does.
Wouldn’t conifers replacing deciduous trees indicate cooling?
Bingo!
If it occurs naturally, yes. But this is about planted forests.
This is old news, so not news at all. Works in summer and winter.
About 10 years ago there were articles about this and the big push for planting millions of trees in the mid-latitudes went bye bye. I’ve looked for the article recently but haven’t found it.
This is easy to see when a dark fence post brings about snow melt near its base.
So it works with just about any tree except Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera).
Example:
April 10, 2007 (in SciAm)
More Trees, Less Global Warming, Right? — Not Exactly
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tropical-forests-cool-earth/
Yeah, I recall an article in the Economist about it (from back in the days before the Economist lost their marbles over global warming).
Canadians were very disappointed to learn that they could not plant tons of trees in order to fight global warming. That’s OK I said, we can cut the forests we have down instead. Make money from selling the lumber AND get carbon credits for NOT growing new trees. It was fun watching the environmentalist spinning in circles trying to figure out what position they should take.
0.12°K : 2 decimal places : since 1750 ?
Climatology, the gift to satire that keeps on giving.
“To me this study drives home how ridiculously overblown the whole global warming issue is. ”
I agree and call it a lot of mental masturbation!
G
Masturbation is not bad [necessarily; chap I knew – reportedly – masturbated (many years ago, like in the 70s or 80s) in the bar of the Harlequins club house: if true, wrong!!)
Auto
AGW is making a total mockery of itself.!!!!
The instigators of the scam have to step in soon and bring this farce to an end.
Out of somewhere around 288K . that’s really 5th decimal place . But they are really not certain even about the 3rd .
Going from historical times there has been an increase in agricultural land at the expense of the forest. Most of Spain was forested when the Romans went there with open decidous forest, oak, beech, willow, holly etc. with some pine and fir as well. Not much left now, except in the wetter regions, but people still harvest cork and collect pine nuts in the south. So I guess more absorption of the sun’s energy and less reflection.
Owing to positive feedbacks a single El Hiatus event can trigger mass starvation in an entire cult. If there are not enough scraps of global warming news to feed on the members can be triggered into frantic rampages through forests, restaurants and journals looking for straws to grasp at in their desperate hunt for funds. The French government has just passed a law compelling scientific journals to re-distribute unsold, mis-shapen or out-of-date theories to starving newspaper journalists in their neighborhoods. /s
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/04/sea-lion-rescued-san-diego-restaurant#comment-68079376
Why does Europe want it colder ?
Because extreme cold is evidence for global warming.
This is now a convincing argument in the minds of the populace.
Warming causes cold stormy weather and only right-wing skeptics fail to grasp the subtlety of such a viewpoint. This obviously explains why the little ice age was a pleasantly balmy period, and why each year the most unpleasant weather arrives during the summer when the ocean has warmed.
Oh wait, that seems to be completely the reverse of reality.
Maybe computer modellers should go outside once in a while!! 🙂
Bob, that questions is easy to answer. If Europe gets colder again, the glaciers will stop melting back and as a result, the evidence of Medieval villages at high elevations, now being uncovered, will disappear into the ice.
One of the greatest proofs that Europe was significantly warmer 1000 years ago is the evidence of human settlements in places that are now frozen and inhabitable, the same as Greenland. If the gentle warming of the Alps continues, it will continue to uncover these most inconvenient facts.
Because they want to emigrate to Syria where it will be warmer and less snow to stop the trains.
How much difference does it make after those broad-leaf trees drop their leaves in the Autumn?
That probably depends on how much snow collects and how long it remains.
Having explored all the sensible avenue in search of support for CO2 climate Alarmism, CAGW Climatologists are now exploring some of the silliest areas imaginable in their final desperate search.
Odd thoughts ….
Questions about broadleaf trees – they are able to control their leaf temperature within a fairly narrow band to achieve optimum photosynthesis rates. Largely, I think, by leaf orientation. There may have been similar studies on leaf temperatures in conifers but I haven’t read any.
I haven’t seen the study in the article and I wonder if they looked at variations in broadleaf albedo through leaf orientation in response to temperature? Would be interesting to know what effect that has.
Changing agricultural processes from the mid 20th century in the UK (and elsewhere) led to autumn sowing of cereals – meaning that fields were covered in growing crops through the winter rather than bare soil followed by a spring planting. That will have caused a significant change in albedo to earlier decades. I don’t think that the EU directive which ended stubble burning in the 1980s will have made much difference to albedo although it did reduce CO2 emissions from burning and the incorporation of the stubble into the topsoil led to improved soil structure.
I think that Dr. Christie made very valid points in saying that it is not the temperature at localised surface locations that is important but the air temperature up to 50,000 feet recorded by satellites and weather balloons. That, unlike some surface records, has shown no increase and on occasion slight decline in temperature.
Albedo changes clearly can have a strong but very localised effect at ground level; however the satellite evidence seems to suggest, very much as Willis has hypothesised, that there are very efficient mechanisms for transporting that heat back out to space.
All tends to point to ground based temperature records being good at creating an illusion of global warming – and particularly when past decades records are routinely adjusted downwards – but in reality these are fairly irrelevant.
‘Questions about broadleaf trees – they are able to control their leaf temperature within a fairly narrow band to achieve optimum photosynthesis rates.’
I never heard of such. Leaf temperature is not controlled. Trees don’t move their leaves on any short time scale. Size and location of leaves is controlled to optimize available sunlight. This occurs during WEEKS of growth in the spring.
Trees control their local temperature through transpiration. There was a fad in the Southwest that had streamside trees being removed because it was assumed they were “using up” the water. Studies showed that the cooling effect of trees reduce water loss from direct evaporation. Kind of a wash, though hotter water and lack of shade can also kill the resident fish.
But some folks just can’t leave well enough alone. Their jobs depend on intervention.
Subtropical to boreal convergence of tree-leaf temperatures
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7203/abs/nature07031.html
“We show a remarkably constant leaf temperature of 21.4 plus/minus 2.2 °C across 50° of latitude, from subtropical to boreal biomes.”
Pielke Sr. would agree that land use affects the local climate in an important way.
Folks with PhDs are generally poor at context; ie. they can’t see the forest for the trees. They focus intensely on their own research area and ignore the big issues that point to the error of what they think they are proving. Judith Curry calls these Pink Flamingos. She raises the following questions:
Of course the real alarmists have a solution to such questions; simply adjust the inconvenient facts out of existence.
Wow…there was a whole lot of nonsense in that study abstract. “Europe’s forests accumulating a carbon debt” and so on. It is a distressing sign of the times that such absurd notions are taken even semi-seriously in some circles.
However, a study of the change of distribution between conifer forests and broadleaf forests in terms of albedo should potentially be able to bring interesting fruits? As Steve Crook noted above Feb 5 at 11:20: “Albedo changes caused by land use are actually pretty important, and, as the study suggests, may actually be a significant factor in the warming we’ve see”.
While I understand the author’s point: “what else have climate scientists missed?” I rather thought that changing the albedo of the land is one of the very few ways mankind can (in any noticeable degree) alter the climate of the earth?
Bearing in mind that 70% of Earth’s surface is water and a large portion of land is not under cultivation (e.g., Antarctica, desert regions such as Sahara, Gobi, Arabian Peninsular, Atacama, Kalahari, Mojave, Central Australia, etc.; mountainous regions such as the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Cascades, Atlas, European Alps, Urals, etc.; and most of the Canadian and Siberian tundra), the land under cultivation is not that large in the grand order of things. But what the heck, many have this towering image of themselves as Masters of the Universe who make the very stars and constellations quake and tremble in their awesome presence.