From a Georgia Tech Press Release:
Reducing Greenhouse Gases May Not Be Enough to Slow Climate Change
Georgia Tech City and Regional Planning Professor Brian Stone publishes a paper in the December edition of Environmental Science and Technology that suggests policymakers need to address the influence of global deforestation and urbanization on climate change, in addition to greenhouse gas emissions.
According to Stone’s paper, as the international community meets in Copenhagen in December to develop a new framework for responding to climate change, policymakers need to give serious consideration to broadening the range of management strategies beyond greenhouse gas reductions alone.
“Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases,” said Stone. “Most large U.S. cities, including Atlanta, are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole – a rate that is mostly attributable to land use change. As a result, emissions reduction programs – like the cap and trade program under consideration by the U.S. Congress – may not sufficiently slow climate change in large cities where most people live and where land use change is the dominant driver of warming.”
According to Stone’s research, slowing the rate of forest loss around the world, and regenerating forests where lost, could significantly slow the pace of global warming.
“Treaty negotiators should formally recognize land use change as a key driver of warming,” said Stone. “The role of land use in global warming is the most important climate-related story that has not been widely covered in the media.”
Stone recommends slowing what he terms the “green loss effect” through the planting of millions of trees in urbanized areas and through the protection and regeneration of global forests outside of urbanized regions. Forested areas provide the combined benefits of directly cooling the atmosphere and of absorbing greenhouse gases, leading to additional cooling. Green architecture in cities, including green roofs and more highly reflective construction materials, would further contribute to a slowing of warming rates. Stone envisions local and state governments taking the lead in addressing the land use drivers of climate change, while the federal government takes the lead in implementing carbon reduction initiatives, like cap and trade programs.
“As we look to address the climate change issue from a land use perspective, there is a huge opportunity for local and state governments,” said Stone. “Presently, local government capacity is largely unharnessed in climate management structures under consideration by the U.S. Congress. Yet local governments possess extensive powers to manage the land use activities in both the urban and rural areas.”
The Environmental Science and Technology article is available at http://pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag.
For more on land use change in the USA, see this NASA resource
woodNfish (11:02:52) :
rbateman (10:04:46) :
http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:UorSi_S5PxkJ:www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/media-archive/Lawsuit%2520Filed%2520to%2520Prevent%2520Timber%2520Harvest%2520at%2520Power%2520Fire%2520Site.pdf+harvest+fire+trees&hl=en&gl=us&sig=AFQjCNHlVX2NMd-kml7uG_Dy8cbabHmImg
Maybe that url won’t work but the title is: Lawsuit filed to prevent timber harvest at Power Fire site
from Wed. Aug. 17, 2005 of the Ledger Dispatch
found on Google with phrase — harvest fire trees
I could only get the quick view.
This guy’s plans would amount to more government control over land use and would take us further down the path to socialism, or maybe I should say communism. He and Al Gore can both go fly a kite. What ever happened to the land of the free?
jmrSudbury (12:07:47)
Actually, I believe that the warmists say that UHI is insignificant, rather than non-existent. Since AGW induced temperature change is half the UHI induced temperature change in Hotlanta, then AGW induced temperature change is twice as insignificant as UHI induced temperature change in Hotlanta. For once I’m in agreement with the warmists. AGW is insignificant 🙂
And it was just established that the Usa isn’t warming, a few posts back.
50% of nothing is well very close to zero
The author is at least as qualified as Al Gore, James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt…
None of them have college degrees in Earth or Atmospheric Science.
George E. Smith (08:40:25) :
“So how many trees does Professor Stone plan on planting in the spot where his house used to stand; or hasn’t he got around to knocking it down yet?”
Rod Smith (09:04:59) :
“I notice a new, at least to me, phrase in the next-to-last paragraph.
‘Climate Management.'”
And this is how the government begins to control the use of private property. All new development will have to meet certain standards that prevent any contribution to climate change. In the end we’ll all be living cheek-by-jowl with our neighbors in horrible high-rises, eating algae, and wondering what it was like to be free to go for a drive in the country.
“Climate Management.”
****************
I’d call it something more like climate scientist hubris.
You suggest some people cannot admit the natural world is bigger than they are. What may make sense is for conservation to adopt a new area of study called “Land Use.”
Search using just about any city with the words “tree” and “removal” and see what pops up. Try Atlanta for starters. So the tree-police are already among us.
Seattle is also a place to be very careful about trimming, topping, or removing trees.
That’s old news….
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020926landcover.html
Yes, published by NASA.
If land use changes account for 50% of USAs warming and USAs temperature is now back to “Normal” then shouldn’t the real USA temperature by 50 % below normal?
Check with your local ski hill operator or grain farmer.
Here in Canada Whistler Ski Area has had its second earliest opening and much of the prairie grain crop was still in the field according to the last crop report.
DaveE (09:40:28) :
So that’s it then.
The only way to save the planet is to get rid of the people!
Yes, and I’m afraid you’ve been selected to go first, Dave.
Dave
Tech needs to be careful, or they will forfeit their government grants, with articles that go against policy.
J. Peden (10:18:29) :
Such people allege they are trying to “save” us, or something equally grandiose, when, if they actually had any ethics, they should have just stuck to repetitively washing their own hands and left the rest of us alone.
I’ve had 40-odd years now of people trying to save me and liberate me. The trouble is, they always want to save or liberate me so that I can be less than I was before. Strikes me like a poor bargain. Maybe they just want the rest of us to stop trying.
re: John F. Hultquist (12:34:18)
Hi John,
I wasn’t asking about harvesting trees, I was asking about lawsuits to stop replanting after the harvest and I am assuming the phrase “forest salvage”, means to save a forest.
The UHI is a local effect and does not extend much past city limits. I don’t think that is the same as “climate”. Where I live Boston has a UHI which effects its local temperatures, but it still experiences the same seasons we do, gets rain and snow and sunshine too. So, I’d call the UHI pretty insignificant even on a local level. However, it is real.
I live 17 miles outside the closest large city and the temperature drops almost 10 degrees going home after work. In the morning it is always at least 5 degrees cooler.
woodNfish (11:02:52) :
http://www.wildcalifornia.org/pages/page-198
http://www.redding.com/news/2009/may/10/salvage-logging-costs-pushed-up-by-sour-economy/
The Greens sit in thier pristine Redwood Forest next to the Pacific Coast, where it is always moist and upwind of the fires. Meanwhile, inland, the place burns down with great regularity and increasing frequency.
All our communities and the USFS wants to address the issue and remediate it, but nobody can get around the lawsuits.
Dog chases tail.
woodNfish (13:27:41) :
A Salvage Sale is to take the standind dead trees out as fast as possible after a fire. Bugs & rot mean the clock is ticking. The receipts pay for the restoration (erosion control) and replanting subsequent to the salvage.
Congress isn’t about to give the USFS extra money for operations.
Injunctions are a frivolous means to prevent salvage until the timber is worthless.
You can forget about reforestation.
The lawsuits are the renewable resouce, not the timber.
In the past half-century I’ve been alive, every architect and developer has made every effort to strip every tree and blade of grass from every property project and replace it with blacktop. And everyone wonders why the cities feel hotter????
I just love this stuff, you can’t make it up. The press release says (emphasis mine):
The US Forest Service says:
Year, Thousands of Acres of Forest, % Change Since 1953
1953, 508,855, 0%
1977, 492,355, -3%
1987, 486,318, -4%
1997, 503,664, -1%
2007, 514,213, 1%
SOURCE: (2 MB Excel Spreadsheet)
Yeah, that explains a lot …
Ed wins for “And another 50% from the ocean…”
I wrote a post back in March 2009 that eventually compared the SST anomalies of U.S. Coastal Waters (HADSST) to Contiguous U.S. Land Surface Temperatures (GISS). Here’s the graph:
http://s5.tinypic.com/209r3t2.jpg
And here’s the post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/03/sst-anomalies-of-us-coastal-waters.html
So I went back and snipped off the data before 1950, then hit the trend line button. It appears Ed was right. The coastal waters linear trend is about half the linear of the US Contiguous Land Surface Temps:
http://i33.tinypic.com/21blmkp.jpg
Why are they ignoring the fact that the globe had cooled to the 1950 temperature from the 1938 era warm period?
It is ingenuous to start from an arbitrary (low) point and ignore the previous temperature history. To then explain warming with non-natural factors, ignoring natural cycles and factors is an exercise in misdirection, again blaming man for any change.
Land use changes. Now we have an agenda for curtailing all development and industrial expansion. Forget future permission to add a garage to your house.
The problem with putting high tree densities into suburbia is illustrated every year with the fires that encroach into the communities in California.
They also make it that much more difficult for Emergency Services to navigate the community after storms.
Paul Hildebrandt (09:44:04) :
“Yeah, Atlanta is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world.”
That graph has been compensated for UHI:
…the urban and peri-urban (i.e., other than rural) stations are adjusted so that their long-term trend matches that of the mean of neighboring rural stations. Urban stations without nearby rural stations are dropped.
Willis Eschenbach, you beat me to it. This guy is in Atlanta, right?
You would think that a land use guy in Atlanta would know that arable peaked in the South in 1860 and has been declining ever since. Millions of southern acres once under the plow returned to forest.
This new forest, notably around Atlanta, was then cut down for urban expansion.
Net effect: I haven’t got a clue, but whatever the question is, deforestation is not the answer.
I’d say 50 percent from land use, maybe 10 percent from cleaner air, 5 percent from location error, 25-35 percent from ENSO/SST’s, and the rest split with the other factors.
How big an impression does UHI and land-use changes make on the temp. record for the northern hemisphere as tens of thousands of square miles in many countries have been paved over, after all quite a bit of the warming is in the NH?