New paper on forests

[Ugo Bardi]

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/7/eaax8859

It leaves me rather perplexed. What kind of measurement are they doing
exactly? In any case, it is being presented in the mainstream press as
proof that deforestation is good and cools the planet!



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Prof. Ugo Bardi
Dipartimento di Chimica, Università di Firenze, Italy
Full member of The Club of Rome
Registered Expert of the United Nations "Harmony With Nature" Programme
Chief Editor of "Biophysical Economics and Sustainabilty," a Springer Journal
Delegato del Rettore per la gestione della Rete Università Sostenibili (RUS)
ugo....@unifi.it
www.cassandralegacy.blogspot.com
www.theproudholobionts.blogspot.com

[Anastassia Makarieva]

Dear Ugo,

What you have spotted and faced is the problem I have been talking about for many years, e.g. in my interview to the EcoShock radio.

https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/10/natural-solutions-to-our-crisis.html

Deforestation increases albedo. A higher albedo cools the Earth. Current models assume that this cooling, at least in high and mid latitudes, dominates over the warming associated with carbon emissions and water vapor control.

This is what we are terribly concerned about as these attitudes are progressively gaining momentum. Soon Russia will be advised to cut and sell out all of its forests to cool the planet.

All this is based on bogus modelling where independent physical factors of opposite signs accurately sum up to a small magnitude of the needed sign (plus or minus).

It is a very, very big scientific problem of which the green-minded general public remains totally unaware.

Best wishes

Anastassia

сб, 13 февр. 2021 г. в 18:51, Ugo Bardi <ugo....@unifi.it>:

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[Anastassia Makarieva]

This is what we wrote in 2019 in our position paper on climate-regulating forests

https://www.bioticregulation.ru/life/paradigm.php

The danger of one-sided approaches. Underestimating the stabilizing impact of forests threatens climate stability both of the planet as a whole as well as, in the first place, of the world's largest forest regions including Russia. Latest publications of model-derived scenarios "predict" global cooling for a completely deserted Earth and already begin to warn against considering forest recovery as a way out of the climatic crisis [15]. World mainstream media started spreading the idea that, even though the least disturbed natural forests are efficient carbon dioxide absorbers as well as huge carbon pools [16,17], carbon absorption could be possibly organized by different means, especially taking into account that the world is increasingly short of agricultural land [18]. Opinions have been circulating that time has possibly come for the international programs aimed at forest conservation in poor countries to close [19]. Soon, it appears, one can expect even more specific model-based recommendations as to where forests should be done away with to ease the consequences of global warming elsewhere.
[15] Winckler J., Lejeune Q., Reick C.H., Pongratz J. (2019) Nonlocal effects dominate the global mean surface temperature response to the biogeophysical effects of deforestation. Geophysical Research Letters 46: 745-755.
[16] Griscom B.W. et al. (2017) Natural climate solutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114: 11645-11650.
[17] Lewis S.L., Wheeler C.E., Mitchard E.T.A., Koch A. (2019) Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon. Nature 568: 25-28.
[18] The new plan to remove a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: Bury it. Washington Post 12.06.2019
[19] Is REDD ready for its closeup? Reports vary. Mongabay.com 12.06.2019

Regional cataclysms. Those regions where the approval or indifference of the international community will allow for an extensive extermination of forests are to be hit first and hardest by climatic cataclysms. When it becomes clear that, contrary to model predictions, the loss of the regulatory function of natural ecosystems has also increased the vulnerability of the global climate as a whole, it can be too late to remedy the situation. It is necessary to make use of the existing priority in the understanding of the global situation and to use the precautionary principle. To provide for state security in the current situation of environmental and climate change it is necessary to take the following urgent measures on identifying, preserving and studying the intact (mildly-perturbed) forest landscapes in Russia.

сб, 13 февр. 2021 г. в 19:02, Anastassia Makarieva <ammak...@gmail.com>:

[Anastassia Makarieva]

See also here http://jfsi.ru/en/3-3-2020-makarieva-et-al/

One-fifth of the world’s forest ecosystems are located in Russia. Until recently, the main influence of the forest on climate was considered to be emission (during cutting and fires) or absorption (during forest restoration) of carbon dioxide. The absorption of excess atmospheric carbon by Russian forests largely compensates for the carbon emissions associated with the extraction of oil, gas, and coal by Russian companies (Romanovskaya, Federichi, 2015). However, today, according to the latest IPCC report (IPCC, 2019), for forests of high latitudes, including Russian ones, their influence on the reflectivity of the planet is increasingly emphasized (Andrews et al., 2017; Winckler et al., 2019a, b). The argument is put forward that the heating of the planet’s surface due to the absorption of solar radiation by the forest cover in winter can exceed the cooling due to the absorption of excess carbon dioxide by the forest. If this type of calculations is, despite their high uncertainties up to the sign change, included into official schemes for assessing the climatic impacts of different countries,– and such attempts are already under way (see, e.g., Duveiller et al., 2020), – then Russian carbon footprint and the corresponding economic sanctions will rise substantially. Russia will officially lose its climate buffer.

The possibility of such a negative scenario derives from the fact that, for the first, natural intact forests of Russia have been studied significantly less intensely than the tropical forests of Brazil or Indonesia. For the second, Russian undisturbed forests are unique. Forests that have an age of the last disturbance exceeding several hundred years do not have analogues in the world; they are preserved in the oldest nature reserves or in hard-to-reach locations. The climatic impact of Russian forests is therefore estimated on the basis of global and regional models/parameterizations, which, as IPCC experts themselves recognize, are characterized by large uncertainties.

сб, 13 февр. 2021 г. в 19:10, Anastassia Makarieva <ammak...@gmail.com>:

[Pokorný Jan]

Dear Ugo, this is one of the papers based on dogma that plants/forest affect climate via albedo (reflection of solar radiation) and as a source/sink of CO2.
It is based on: G. B. Bonan, Forests and climate change: Forcings, feedbacks, and the climate benefits of forests. Science 320, 1444–1449 (2008).Abstract/FREE Full TextGoogle Scholar
They just play with energy balance of Earth and radiative forcing as explained in IPCC. They ignore role of land cover changes in distribution of solar energy.


From IPCC:
As the largest contributor to the natural greenhouse effect, water vapour plays an essential role in the Earth’s climate. However, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is controlled mostly by air temperature, rather than by emissions. For that reason, scientists consider it a feedback agent, rather than a forcing to climate change. Anthropogenic emissions of water vapour through irrigation or power plant cooling have a negligible impact on the global climate“. Myhre et al. 2013 str 666

It is very, very dangerous ideology using scientific terms
I think we have to explain role of forest/vegetation both on scientific level and in schools using affordable devices
Best regards
Jan

[Anastassia Makarieva]

In general, I fully agree with Jan, but the situation looks to me much more complex. Indeed the influence of plant cover on climate is most often discussed in terms of albedo and carbon storage. However, this does not mean that the water vapor impact of plants is not taken into account. It is.

But, in GCMs, it is taken into account in such a delicate way as to be just slightly lower by absolute magnitude, and of opposite sign, than the albedo effect. Because the warming due to deforestation-induced drying critically depends on moisture transport, which GCMs do not capture correctly. So they in principle do not have any reasonable constraints on this term. So, in this situation, it is just silently modeled in such a way that albedo almost fully cancels it, and, historically, one can attribute all warming to carbon-related processes.

I bet that if somebody paid a small amount of money to a group of young ambitious and freely thinking modelers, there would be absolutely easy for them to come up with GCMs where, conversely, the deforestation-induced water-related warming would dominate, while the albedo would instead compensate carbon emissions. It is entirely arbitrary. But as it now becomes policy, it is no longer academic science. It is just dangerous.

сб, 13 февр. 2021 г. в 19:57, Pokorný Jan <pok...@enki.cz>:

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[JUAN FERNANDO SALAZAR VILLEGAS]

Dear Anastassia, Ugo, and Jan,

This is worrisome. Although Williams, Gu, and Jiano (2021; WGJ21) acknowledge that their study has some limitations and state that forest loss may be problematic for some reasons (e.g. its impacts on air and water quality), the paper may be easily read, e.g. by decision makers, as an argument to not be worried about forest loss. Just like Anastassia, I can imagine someone using this paper to recommend deforestation in Russia as a contribution to global warming mitigation.

Some thoughts:

Reducing the climatic role of forests to the effects of surface albedo and carbon on the radiative balance is far from being a parsimonious representation of reality. Two major missing elements in the equation are clouds and continental water.

Clouds are a major source of uncertainty in climate models (see e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3190). One famous example is the double ITCZ that is present even in the most recent climate models of CMIP6 (https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL087232). There are many physical connections between forests and clouds (e.g. atmospheric moisture, evapotranspiration, VOCs, and convection) that are neglected by WGJ21, poorly represented by climate models, and can strongly influence the future impacts of forest loss on climate.

Continental water dynamics can be strongly influenced by forest loss, and at the same time have effects on the energy balance that are not accounted for through albedo or carbon. The same change in net radiation at the surface can produce contrasting cooling/warming effects depending on surface water. Alterations of the boundary layer (including the below-canopy layer in forests) as well as long-term effects on soil composition and structure are very important here. As Anastassia and Viktor discussed, keeping moistened the continents is anything but trivial, and forests play a critical role on this.

I do not see how WGJ21 can suggest that forest loss has a negligible/beneficial effect on climate while neglecting these and other factors at play.

Kind regards,

Juan

 

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Juan F. Salazar
Profesor Asociado, Escuela Ambiental, Facultad de Ingeniería
[Associate Professor, School of Environment, Faculty of Engineering]
Universidad de Antioquia

Medellín, Colombia

Google Scholar

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[Anastassia Makarieva]

Dear Juan, dear colleagues,

From my perspective, this worrisome case has unfortunately much wider implications than that of the particular study of Williams, Gu, and Jiano (2021). Below is Figure  2.17 from the most recent IPCC report on land use and land cover change. This figure separates the biogeochemical (mostly carbon emissions) versus biophysical (all the rest, including albedo) influences of forests on climate.

See full citation for this figure at the end of this message.

The carbon impact is in red, in all regions it is agreed that deforestation leads to warming. Regarding the biophysical impact, in boreal forests it is believed by many that deforestation leads to cooling. Even if in this particular report this graph has not  yet made it to the Summary for Policy Makers and the huge uncertainties (which basically make the whole message bogus) are recognized, I am afraid it is just a matter of time when this will be "official".

From the more scientific viewpoint, I would like to draw your attention to this Figure 2 from Winckler et al. 2018 https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL080211

Panel (c) shows nearly 1 degree global cooling from the albedo changes due to a massive deforestation. In panel (b), besides the albedo, the effects of warming due to transpiration reduction ("local") effects are included. In the result, the "total" effect, while still cooling, is almost an order of magnitude smaller than both the albedo and transpiration. But albedo and transpiration are independent physical magnitudes. How has it come that these independent effects in current GCMs compensate each other so precisely -- such that the net effect is an order of magnitude lower than both of the two?

This is a very important question, because it affects our understanding of the historical changes of land cover on climate. Within the current view, we did well that we destroyed the forests, it (a little bit) prevented the Earth from warming even faster. Given that these processes are largely unknown and thus heavily parameterized, my guess is that the main constraint governing their parameterizations (when the models were tuned to historical changes) was precisely to largely offset their mutual influence such that the climate signal can be attributed to CO2.

Note also that cooling the Earth by transpiration is a complex process. It is due to the fact that a certain part of solar radiation energy is trapped as latent heat during evaporation and released at about 5 km altitude thus escaping interacting with the greenhouse substances below. This is a non-trivial effect and it depends crucially on the dynamics of the condensation/evaporation processes, which are recognized to be poorly represented in GCMs. In this situation, the above figure from IPCC is extremely dangerous.

Best wishes,

Anastassia

Source for the IPCC figure: IPCC, 2019: Jia G., Shevliakova E., Artaxo P., De Noblet-Ducoudré N., Houghton R., House J., Kitajima K., Lennard C., Popp A., Sirin A., Sukumar R., Verchot L., Chapter 2. Land–climate interactions, In: Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems [Shukla P.R., Skea J., Calvo Buendia E., Masson-Delmotte V., Pörtner H.-O., Roberts D.C., Zhai P., Slade R., Connors S., van Diemen R., Ferrat M., Haughey E., Luz S., Neogi S., Pathak M., Petzold J., Portugal Pereira J., Vyas P., Huntley E., Kissick K., Belkacemi M., Malley J. (eds.)]. 2019. In press. URL: https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/cite-report/

вт, 23 февр. 2021 г. в 15:41, JUAN FERNANDO SALAZAR VILLEGAS <juan.s...@udea.edu.co>:

[Germán Poveda]

Dear Anastassia and all:

In addition to evapotranspiration, another important cooling mechanism of forests (seemingly greater than ET) is their high aerodynamic conductance, even more so during dry days, which enhances the transport of heat from the surface to the atmosphere, resulting in a higher rate of surface cooling.  Please take a look at the attached paper:

Panwar, A., Renner, M., and Kleidon, A.: Imprints of evaporative conditions and vegetation type in diurnal temperature variations, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 24, 4923–4942, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-4923-2020, 2020.

Best wishes,

Germán

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