Greening of the Earth Mitigates Surface Warming (2020)

Before life got in the way, I wanted a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Resource Management as a foundation for a Master&#x27;s in Urban Planning. I currently run r&#x2F;UrbanForestry for the same reason:<p>I don&#x27;t think it makes sense to see human settlements as separate from nature. I think of nature as the fabric within which such configurations occur.<p>It isn&#x27;t inevitable that human development must be a concrete jungle. You can include plants, permeable surfaces, etc in your plans so people can live more lightly and less intrusively on the land.<p>I also think America has a lot of room for adding back walkable mixed-use neighborhoods where at least some people can live, work and shop in the same neighborhood. Or at least live and shop if they are retirees, teens, or similar groups who aren&#x27;t seeking a job or who already work at home or from home in some capacity.<p>Studies suggest this leads to greater wealth in such neighborhoods (such as more sales) and we know vehicle traffic is a significant burden wrt human-caused climate change. Making it possible to skip the long commute makes for a better quality of life and less pollution adding to this issue.<p>We currently frame this issue as a painful choice between short-term gratification and current high quality of life with a long-term cost of global disaster versus short-term sacrifice for slim hope of assuaging our guilt with no guarantee of real improvement in the future. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s necessary.<p>I&#x27;ve lived without a car in the US for more than a decade. I think you can live that way and live well. I think we can design and build a world that provides a high quality of life for people and doesn&#x27;t destroy the environment in the process.

This is not the answer the Australian government is looking for.<p>The solution needed by politicians is highly technological, expensive, allows us to keep selling coal, and isn&#x27;t understood by people so can be easily spun into ridiculous tales by politicians.<p>&quot;Just plant trees&quot; would be ridiculously expensive and is totally impractical, the politicians would say.

77% of agricultural land is devoted to livestock. We could return a lot of that land to wilderness if we adopted a whole food plant based diet.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.onegreenplanet.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;chart-shows-worlds-land-used&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.onegreenplanet.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;chart-shows-worlds-land-...</a>

The surface area of a lawn is several times that of a concrete surface.<p>Walking into a forest, I notice the air is several degrees cooler than outside.<p>Even a house made of clay will be a few degrees cooler in certain weather than one made of concrete due to the increased surface area and evaporation causing cooling.<p>It isn’t rocket science. Greenery makes the earth a much better place.

There was a similar report two years ago from NASA that the world had gone greener over 20 years primarily due to India and China. But I couldn’t find the breakdown of it by country.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;feature&#x2F;ames&#x2F;human-activity-in-china-and-india-dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;feature&#x2F;ames&#x2F;human-activity-in-china-an...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earthobservatory.nasa.gov&#x2F;images&#x2F;144540&#x2F;china-and-india-lead-the-way-in-greening" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earthobservatory.nasa.gov&#x2F;images&#x2F;144540&#x2F;china-and-in...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.org&#x2F;activity&#x2F;save-the-plankton-breathe-freely&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.org&#x2F;activity&#x2F;save-the-plankto...</a> 70% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by marine plants, rainforests are responsible for roughly one-third (28%)

Tree cover also decreases albedo, which increases the total solar energy absorbed. [0]<p>I wonder if tree cover decreases local surface temperature (as described in this article) while actually increasing global warming because less light is reflected back to space.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.climate-policy-watcher.org&#x2F;vegetation&#x2F;deforestation-and-the-little-ice-age.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.climate-policy-watcher.org&#x2F;vegetation&#x2F;deforestat...</a>

If you are into this sort of thing, I have a youtube channel where I grow food on 1&#x2F;3 acre. I&#x27;ve a 6 year old food forest, my first year flock of 6 leghorn chickens, and very close access to a lot of water. Connecticut Zone 6b. Links in profile.

Mitigation as in hitting a wall at 180 mph instead of 200? Or hitting the wall in 32 years instead of 30?<p>Everything helps, but in the end the solution to the problem is elsewhere. Not tackling the problem and only going to partial mitigations is almost as bad as doing nothing, because it is just a delay to avoid solving the problem until is too late or doesn&#x27;t matter anymore for you in particular.

Well yeah. The best carbon capture technology we have is planting trees.<p>Thankfully it happens all by itself.

&gt; NASA satellites have been observing increased green cover on land, which is thought to be due to intensive agriculture to feed growing populations and ambitious tree-planting programs – for example, the so-called “Green Great Wall” in China.<p>&gt; The cooling effect from greening is less significant in tropical forests with high leaf areas.<p>Does this mean that cutting down the Amazon rainforest to use the land for farming is net-beneficial for slowing down climate change?

I have this pet theory of mine that planting trees could also mitigate rising sea levels since trees contain water. Is that dumb ?<p>I have no idea of the order of magnitude we are talking about so I might be entirely delusional.

If you establish a few trees and vegetation in an area it creates an oasis that is cooler than the surroundings as well as retaining water. This is definitely the way to cool the earth as well as absorb CO2

I mean, I get that this needs to be studied in order to understand Earth&#x27;s climate better, but I feel like the title would be more accurate and responsibly written if they said &quot;partially mitigates&quot;.

If you search youtube for &quot;desertification&quot; you will find many videos on the horrors of this problem being shared by school teachers as if it where a fact.<p>E.g. &quot;Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,&quot; begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it&#x27;s happening to about two-thirds of the world&#x27;s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI</a><p>Back on planet Earth, a review of the current scientific literature firmly disproves this thesis. Nasa satellite images clearly show the deserts are retreating, and on average there is a strong trend to global greening...<p>Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature 2016 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nclimate3004" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nclimate3004</a> &quot;Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning). Ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilisation effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (4%).&quot;<p>Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature 2016 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;srep20716" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;srep20716</a> &quot;Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening” in dryland areas of the Mediterranean, the Sahel, the Middle East and Northern China, as well as greening trends in Mongolia and South America. More recently, a global synthesis from 1982-2007 showed an overall “greening-up” trend over the Sahel belt, Mediterranean basin, China-Mongolia region and the drylands of South America.&quot;<p>Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard 2014 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;adsabs.harvard.edu&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2015AGUFM.B31A0515K" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;adsabs.harvard.edu&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2015AGUFM.B31A0515K</a> &quot;Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere. Global greening refers to global net increases in the area of green canopy, stocks of carbon, and the duration of the growing season. The growing seasons in general have prolonged while the stock of biomass carbon has increased and the rate of deforestation has decelerated. Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data obtained through atmospheric CO2 observations, remote sensing, forest inventories and land use statistics.&quot;<p>Rise in CO2 has &#x27;greened Planet Earth&#x27; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;science-environment-36130346" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;science-environment-36130346</a> Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: &quot;It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).

Wasn&#x27;t Trump derided for wanting to plant a billion trees or something (I&#x27;m going by memory)?<p>edit <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;trump-touts-tree-planting-but-ignores-climate-in-state-of-the-union-speech&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;trump-touts-tree-...</a>

Planting Trees and shrubs is not a substitute for phasing out fossil fuel emissions in case you were confused by this and many other similar headlines.

Nov 23, 2020

Duh.

Is that really what we need though, atmospheric temperature I thought was the main issue<p>How long heat stays in one area<p>I get that more plants = good, for other reasons but surface temperature wasnt something we have been aiming to optimize for?