A new study found that deforestation of a single plot causes significant temperature increases in undisturbed forest land up to fifty kilometers away (IOPscience). This particular study was conducted in Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado regions. The researchers took great care to separate the specific influence of gains due to non-local deforestation from changes of a local nature normally expected in other places. The principal conclusion is that climate models can easily underestimate the total impact of any amount of deforestation on regional temperatures.
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Bill McKibben explains why burning wood as a source of renewable energy is a bad mistake (The New Yorker). What most people don’t realize: “Across much of Europe, countries and utilities are meeting their carbon-reduction targets by importing wood pellets from the southeastern United States and burning them in place of coal: giant ships keep up a steady flow of wood across the Atlantic….. Biomass makes up fifty per cent of the renewables mix in the E.U.” Bill has plenty to say about that.
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Natural gas leakage is shown to be the main reason for the recent spike in atmospheric methane (The Conversation). “The Cornell University study indicates that natural gas production is responsible for two-thirds of the sizeable rise in global methane emissions between 2008 and 2014 – with shale gas produced by fracking accounting for more than half of this increase.” Methane accounts for around one-quarter of greenhouse gas warming due to human activity.
Note: The methane level has grown at about the same rate as CO2 since 2008, following a period when it seemed to be under control. Each year around a tenth of the gas in the air is naturally removed, then fully replaced by new emissions, over half of which are not natural.
This scientist is very concerned about how people react when they receive bad news about the effects of climate change (Scientific American). Read it and see if you agree. (I think she’s on the wrong track.)
My comment: I think scientists should stay away from expressing opinions about how humans are going to respond. They should just describe the future exactly as they think it will be, according to the best currently available information, if such and such physical landmarks are actually generated. Some landmarks are inevitable and irreversible over explicit time periods. Beyond that, the landmarks that are breached depend on the future behavior of the human race as a whole. Almost anyone can predict what that will be, and do so as well as any scientist. Some will be right and most will be wrong, but they all have a right to be heard. Scientists should simply make it clear, over and over, that they are not in the business of predicting human behavior, but, just like weather forecasters, or medical doctors for a different example, they are responsible for expressing the best professional information about their diagnosis taken from the evidence in hand and the implications derived from various other points of reference. These, in turn, are to have been well-studied, yet will never be completely free of some remaining uncertainty.
Carl