What Carbon Removal Taught Me About Cooling

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Garrity, Dennis

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Aug 29, 2025, 7:38:25 PMAug 29
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A very insightful take on role of climate cooling. Read the piece below and then read "Cooling Isn't Plan B. It's How Plan A Succeeds."

 

‘One thing I think most people miss about cooling interventions is that it’s not just about buying us more time. Stabilizing the global temperature also means preserving the conditions where our climate solutions can actually work.’

 

From: Paul Gambill from Inevitable & Obvious <paulg...@substack.com>
Date: Thursday, August 28, 2025 at 11:57 PM
To: dennis....@evergreening.org <dennis....@evergreening.org>
Subject: What Carbon Removal Taught Me About Cooling

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Ten years building carbon removal taught me an uncomfortable truth: we need cooling interventions to buy time for everything else to work.

͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­

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After I wrote about the Global Tipping Points conference giving geoengineering the cold shoulder, Pete Irvine from SRM360 reached out. They'd had plenty of climate scientists and policy folks weigh in on cooling interventions, but nobody from deep in the carbon removal trenches. We went back and forth over email, and the piece that came out of it just went live on SRM360: "Cooling Isn't Plan B. It's How Plan A Succeeds."

 

Pete had this great observation about how our climate toolkit keeps expanding. First it was just emissions cuts. Then we grudgingly accepted we'd need adaptation. Then carbon removal fought its way into respectability. Now here we are, talking about cooling.

Each expansion happens the same way, and each time it happens because the math stops working without it.

I've been thinking about this progression all year. I've been trying to figure out and describe why carbon removal isn't scaling faster—meeting with founders, talking to investors, dissecting the bottlenecks. The uncomfortable truth kept surfacing: even if we solve every problem, we're still not going to scale fast enough. Since February, when Hansen's acceleration paper made that timeline collapse undeniable for me, I've been diving into cooling interventions. Reading everything, attending webinars, trying to understand this space the way I understand carbon removal. (This is the kindling phase of starting something new, if you've read my past articles.)

The numbers are brutal. We're removing maybe 1-3 million tonnes of CO2 annually. We need 285 million by 2030 just to stay on track. That's not a gap you close with incremental progress.

And rising temperatures don't just make life harder—they actively sabotage the solutions we're trying to scale. Think about it: how much harder will it be to build massive industrial infrastructure for carbon removal while supply chains are breaking from extreme weather? How likely is unprecedented international cooperation while climate migration increases and populism rises in kind? What do we do when increasing temperatures reduce nature’s ability to drawdown CO2? The hotter it gets, the harder everything becomes.

That's the insight that made cooling click for me. It's not some separate thing from our climate response. It's what keeps the window open for everything else to work. There are very real downside risks to cooling, but if we can manage them, it’s plausibly the best option for giving decarbonization and carbon removal a fighting chance.

SRM360 does something nobody else is doing well—they translate between worlds. Their webinars break down the legal landscape without requiring a law degree. They publish perspective pieces from glaciologists, ethicists, Global South researchers. They're not pushing an agenda; they're building shared understanding. When you're dealing with something this complex and contentious, that's invaluable.

Anyway, go read the piece. Then poke around their other work. We're going to need these resources for what's coming.

Humanity is eventually going to use cooling interventions, one way or another. The only question is whether we'll be ready when we do.

 

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Garrity, Dennis

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Sep 3, 2025, 9:22:21 AMSep 3
to Worms, Patrick, healthy-planet-action-coalition
Amen. It really struck me as well. We need to build awareness
about this in the regeneration and restoration community. Let’s have
a call about this next week. Say Monday at 4 pm CET?

I also want to discuss a connected topic. I’m organizing a global 
online conference October 15-16 on the global heating emergency. 

Cheers, Dennis

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 3, 2025, at 6:16 PM, Worms, Patrick <P.W...@cifor-icraf.org> wrote:



“Stabilizing the global temperature also means preserving the conditions where our climate solutions can actually work.”

That’s probably the most important sentence I’ve read all week!

 

Patrick Worms

Senior Science Policy Advisor, CIFOR-ICRAF

 

President, IUAF - the International Union of Agroforestry

Senior Fellow, EURAF – the European Agroforestry Federation

Trustee, Savanna Institute

Senior Fellow, EGA – the Evergreening Global Alliance

Steering Committee Member, ILLP - Initiatives for Land, Lives and Peace
Advisor, EJP Soils - European Joint Programme Soils

Advisor, ERC - Ecosystem Restoration Camps

Executive Committee, IPC - International Poplar Commission, FAO

 

Email: p.worms@cifor-icraf.org  

Tel +32 2 351 6829| Cell/WhatsApp + 32 495 24 46 11

cifor-icraf.org |  globallandscapesforum.org |  resilient-landscapes.org    

  

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John Dixon

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Sep 3, 2025, 9:30:49 AMSep 3
to Worms, Patrick, healthy-planet-action-coalition, Garrity, Dennis

Right you are, Patrick.

 

And that “climate solutions can work” in a way that maintains or restores “liveable environments for people”

 

Cheers

John

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rob de laet

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Sep 3, 2025, 11:10:10 AMSep 3
to Worms, Patrick, Garrity, Dennis, healthy-planet-action-coalition
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David Price

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Sep 3, 2025, 3:58:32 PMSep 3
to healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com, rob de laet

Dear Rob de Laet

The reason why the "IPCC models" are missing "cooling through the atmospheric watercycle is 2 magnitudes higher" is because this is sheer unsubstantiated hyperbole. If you are able to provide the world with a genuine peer-reviewed paper (published in a relevant and reputable journal) where your calculations can be verified by other experts, then the IPCC process would pick it up. And if the science was found to be worthy, it would be incorporated and you would be a hero. 

I for one am pretty sure your calculations are wrong: you are propagating pseudo-scientific myths.  Your recent reference to the Sir David King interview is but one example. Nowhere in that interview (your “Climate restoration” link), was there ANY mention of using terrestrial forests to “cool the planet”.  The focus of that discussion was on ocean greening, e.g., using OIF, to enhance the oceanic C sink. 

Also worth noting that interview took place 6 years ago (when CO2 concentration was reported to be 415 ppm)!!  Sir David expressed a lot of doubt about SAI at that time: I wonder if, 6 years later and things continuing to get worse, he may have revised his opinions a bit?

I believe your intentions are good but you have never provided any convincing proof (or reliable evidence) for why restoring global tropical forests (or establishing any forests) will contribute to significant planetary cooling!  (And that does not take into account the feasibility of establishing significant areas of forest in regions that are sufficiently supplied with water and NOT already covered with lush vegetation such as croplands or pasture for grazing animals.) Nor, as far as I am aware, have you produced any genuine peer-reviewed articles that allow anyone to assess your claims. I am not saying that tropical reforestation is a bad idea: if properly managed, it would bring multiple benefits including socioeconomic improvements for tropical regions, wood products (along with modest CO2 removal), and some surface-level cooling to enhance the comfort of both humans and wildlife. You have made the point that the CO2 sequestration benefits of afforestation are limited (and I agree, with caveats). I would add that increased evapotranspiration (ET), from increased forest cover, could lead to more tropospheric cloud cover in tropical regions, and hence produce a slight increase in planetary albedo -- which would be beneficial to the global energy balance. 

But your claims that increased ET, (resulting from vast increases in tropical forest cover, if that is even possible) will cool the planet by as much as 1 degree C have no plausible basis in atmospheric physics. As I have tried to explain to you before: increased evapotranspiration at the planetary surface can only occur at the expense of reduced sensible heat flux. It is adjusting the values of the terms of the Surface Energy Balance Equation (e.g., see this lecture from the late Francis Bretherton: https://atmos.washington.edu/~breth/classes/AS547/lect/lect10.pdf ). It is impossible to evaporate more water than there is heat available for allocation to sensible and latent heat--because that would be a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics! Latent heat cannot be transported to the stratosphere any more effectively than sensible heat (the Monin-Obukhov Similarity principle for turbulent exchange processes applies (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monin%E2%80%93Obukhov_similarity_theory ). In fact, vertical transport would likely be reduced on average as convection is driven to some extent by surface heating (i.e., a surface cooled by ET will convect less rapidly). 

In any case water vapour is itself a GHG, so any significant additions to average atmospheric moisture content (which is happening as the atmosphere warms) will only increase the greenhouse warming effect. Most atmospheric moisture will condense or freeze before it reaches the tropopause at 10-20 km altitude—where the temperature is around -60 C or colder - and the sensible heat that was "removed" at the surface will be released to add to the atmospheric temperature (the First Law applies). It is basically a zero-sum game. There is some moisture in the stratosphere, which evidently is also increasing, but this will also add to greenhouse warming. E.g.. See this article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1310344110  -- just read the first sentence under "Significance". All energy released from the earth's atmosphere to space is in the form of longwave radiation -- emitted as a quartic function of its Kelvin temperature, according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law. 

Paradoxically, the cooling caused by more forest ET would presumably lower the average planetary surface temperature in the afforested region, perhaps by a few degrees C (as that is what you are aiming for!). This could have the overall effect of reducing annual longwave reradiation emitted from the planetary surface in these regions (again according to the S-B equation), and hence contribute to a (small) increase in the global energy imbalance--I.e., it will actually tend to increase global warming rather than reduce it!

Regards 

David

================

I acknowledge that I reside on unceded Traditional
Territory of the Secwépemc People

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."

The wrath of God will destroy those who destroy the Earth. Rev. 11:18

rob de laet

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Sep 3, 2025, 4:01:12 PMSep 3
to healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com, David Price
David, 

Can you do a step by step analysis where we made the errors? 

Thank you, 

David Price

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Sep 4, 2025, 1:22:42 PMSep 4
to rob de laet, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com
Rob,

It is good of you to ask, but it seems to me that I have analysed the steps where you have made errors. Your overall assumptions are incorrect. Perhaps the biggest error is a widely held misapprehension that cooling the planetary surface by increasing plant evapotranspiration in hot climates also cools the planet globally. It does not and it cannot. The reason for this is that energy released by the planet to space is entirely governed by the outgoing global flux of thermal (“long-wave”) radiation—which is a function of atmospheric temperature. You appear to think that increasing the upward latent heat flux will result in more longwave emitted by the atmosphere, but you are forgetting that an increased upward flux of latent heat must be exactly matched by an equivalent decrease in the upward flux of sensible heat.

Incidentally the biotic pump concept, which I think I understand, may be important for cooling at the local to regional scale, but it still operates within the closed system which we call the atmosphere. The biotic pump cannot change the laws of thermodynamics! 

All evaporated moisture must inevitably condense (and some will freeze) as the atmospheric temperature decreases with altitude. Liquid water or ice eventually returns to the earth’s surface. Condensation and freezing release the latent heat to the atmosphere. Other heat arrives in the atmosphere from the surface as sensible heat: any overall effect of increased surface evaporation on high altitude atmospheric temperature will be balanced by the effect of reduced surface sensible heat flux: the net effect on average atmospheric temperature will be zero. 

You also seem to argue that increased surface evaporation will somehow accelerate transfer of surface heat to the outer atmosphere. But (as far as I understand the processes), if anything, the cooling effect will actually decrease the average rate of heat loss at the surface! This is because cooling reduces the temperature differential between the surface and the atmosphere, and that means less heat transfer through convection and radiation—while more heat remains stored in the ground and vegetation. This effect would be greatest in “hot” periods of the year, and might be offset by slightly warmer/drier conditions occurring in the “cool” periods (assuming no change in average annual precipitation/irrigation). I am unsure whether this would be significant at global scale over annual timescales, but I’d guess not. 

Regards

David  
From my cellphone

I acknowledge that I reside on unceded Traditional Territory of the Secwépemc People

On Sep 3, 2025, at 1:01 pm, rob de laet <robd...@yahoo.com> wrote:



David Price

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Sep 4, 2025, 1:42:24 PMSep 4
to rob de laet, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com
Hi Rob and Everyone

I see I made a minor error: I wrote

“less heat transfer through convection and radiation—while more heat remains stored in the ground and vegetation. “

That is not really correct, because the evaporative cooling will remove (most of) the heat that would otherwise be stored in ground and vegetation. However, heat storage is another “residual” term in the surface energy balance — which can “time-shift” the sensible and latent heat fluxes over the course of a year or longer.


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rob de laet

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Sep 4, 2025, 2:47:34 PMSep 4
to David Price, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com
Hi David,

again I urge you to go through the detailed calculations of our paper and show (and quantify) where the errors are, thank you.


Best,
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David Price

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Sep 4, 2025, 7:36:25 PMSep 4
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Rob, 

As you know, that paper is not a legitimate peer-reviewed article published in a relevant, reputable journal!  So it is simply not worth the effort for me (or anyone) to go through the calculations. I did look at it a couple of years ago and I remarked to you that if I had reviewed it, I would have requested major revision or rejection based on an egregiously incorrect statement I found in the introduction. 

In any case, you have never responded to my complaints about the underlying assumptions you appear to be making. One could agree with the arithmetic but what’s the point if it is based on completely erroneous assumptions!? If you can get a decent paper published in a quality journal (which will only accept it if it is relevant to the journal’s area of research), then I will be interested to read it carefully. 

As I have mentioned before: “International Journal of Biosensors and Bioelectronics”, aside from being completely off-topic, is published by MedCrave Online. MedCrave is a notorious purveyor of predatory journals, e.g., see https://www.danreichart.com/medcrave 

Your paper was supposedly turned around by several reviewers and accepted by the journal without significant changes, all within 2 weeks! Sorry, but that sets off all kinds of warning bells!

Regards


David 
From my cellphone

I acknowledge that I reside on unceded Traditional Territory of the Secwépemc People

On Sep 4, 2025, at 11:47 am, 'rob de laet' via Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



rob de laet

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Sep 4, 2025, 7:56:32 PMSep 4
to David Price, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com
ok

rob...@rtulip.net

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Sep 4, 2025, 8:37:19 PMSep 4
to healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com, Paul Gambill

David and Rob & all

Thank you for this interesting dialogue.  On Rob’s claim that "cooling through the atmospheric watercycle is 2 magnitudes higher", I wonder how this relates to cloud albedo?  While water has a warming effect in its invisible vapour state, it has a cooling effect in liquid state as clouds.  But I still think David’s key point holds that evapotranspiration can only make a relatively small contribution to the overall task of cooling the planet, and that other much larger methods are needed.

Paul Gambill makes an essential point in the first comment in the thread shared by Dennis - “The numbers are brutal. We're removing maybe 1-3 million tonnes of CO2 annually. We need 285 million by 2030 just to stay on track. That's not a gap you close with incremental progress.”  While the point here is correct about the impossibility of incremental carbon response, I think he wildly understates the gap, given that we add over 50 billion tonnes of GHGs every year – about 200 times larger than what Paul says we need.

And very good to see Patrick from ICRAF picking up the comment of the week from Dennis - “Stabilizing the global temperature also means preserving the conditions where our climate solutions can actually work.”  The key condition, as I alluded in my post just now on albedo collapse, is that the recent 2% darkening of the planet is swamping all other climate effects in terms of radiative forcing, and must be slowed and reversed as the essential first step in the critical engineering path back to a stable climate.  The program logic of an effective theory of change for climate restoration requires restoring albedo as the prerequisite for all effective carbon action.

Regards

Robert Tulip



Ten years building carbon removal taught me an uncomfortable truth: we need cooling interventions to buy time for everything else to work.

͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­

After I wrote about the Global Tipping Points conference giving geoengineering the cold shoulder, Pete Irvine from SRM360 reached out. They'd had plenty of climate scientists and policy folks weigh in on cooling interventions, but nobody from deep in the carbon removal trenches. We went back and forth over email, and the piece that came out of it just went live on SRM360: "Cooling Isn't Plan B. It's How Plan A Succeeds."

Pete had this great observation about how our climate toolkit keeps expanding. First it was just emissions cuts. Then we grudgingly accepted we'd need adaptation. Then carbon removal fought its way into respectability. Now here we are, talking about cooling.

Each expansion happens the same way, and each time it happens because the math stops working without it.

I've been thinking about this progression all year. I've been trying to figure out and describe why carbon removal isn't scaling faster—meeting with founders, talking to investors, dissecting the bottlenecks. The uncomfortable truth kept surfacing: even if we solve every problem, we're still not going to scale fast enough. Since February, when Hansen's acceleration paper made that timeline collapse undeniable for me, I've been diving into cooling interventions. Reading everything, attending webinars, trying to understand this space the way I ­­understand carbon removal. (This is the kindling phase of starting something new, if you've read my past articles.)

The numbers are brutal. We're removing maybe 1-3 million tonnes of CO2 annually. We need 285 million by 2030 just to stay on track. That's not a gap you close with incremental progress.

And rising temperatures don't just make life harder—they actively sabotage the solutions we're trying to scale. Think about it: how much harder will it be to build massive industrial infrastructure for carbon removal while supply chains are breaking from extreme weather? How likely is unprecedented international cooperation while climate migration increases and populism rises in kind? What do we do when increasing temperatures reduce nature’s ability to drawdown CO2? The hotter it gets, the harder everything becomes.

That's the insight that made cooling click for me. It's not some separate thing from our climate response. It's what keeps the window open for everything else to work. There are very real downside risks to cooling, but if we can manage them, it’s plausibly the best option for giving decarbonization and carbon removal a fighting chance.

SRM360 does something nobody else is doing well—they translate between worlds. Their webinars break down the legal landscape without requiring a law degree. They publish perspective pieces from glaciologists, ethicists, Global South researchers. They're not pushing an agenda; they're building shared understanding. When you're dealing with something this complex and contentious, that's invaluable.

Anyway, go read the piece. Then poke around their other work. We're going to need these resources for what's coming.

Humanity is eventually going to use cooling interventions, one way or another. The only question is whether we'll be ready when we do.

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rob de laet

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Sep 4, 2025, 9:21:05 PMSep 4
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Hi Robert, 

thank you. I had this discussion with David before and we all have limited time, so I have decided to not invest time in repeating it. Again, I invite everybody to look at the calculations we worked on, which have been developed over a number of years, starting with Antonio Nobre about 10 years back, improved by Peter Bunyard and then again we did a major quantification in this article: https://medcraveonline.com/IJBSBE/IJBSBE-09-00237.pdf Dismissal the way David does, is simply misguided. Maybe I am a relative newcomer, but Peter Bunyard was one of the co-founders of the ecologist, a co-author of a Blueprint for Survival in 1972. At his kitchen table many developments of the Gaia Theory with James Lovelock happened. 

David does not take our work seriously, fine. But we have come to this conclusion, not just in this article, but also in our book Cooling the Climate (could not include the PDF because of the limitations in Google groups, happy to provide to anyone how is interested) and further work on the tipping point of the Amazon. Mavericks in science often open new doors by daring to challenge orthodoxy, seeing possibilities others overlook, and turning bold questions into breakthroughs that redefine our understanding of the world. We operate from the Gaia theory and understand the atmosphere, the weather and climate as properties evolved over time by a biosphere that has been able to more and more create the metabolisms of our planet for life to thrive. I think we have done enough research for our work to be taken seriously. The calculations are complex and not for everyone but we would be grateful for the number crunchers in this group to take a look at them. 

Two more points, while our assertion is far outside the scope of possibility of mainstream climate science, if it would be even half true, we have carved a very important path out of the mess we are in, so even if our statements look outrageous, in view of the situation we are in, it might be a good idea to look at them.  The other point is that our solution comes with a huge number of co-benefits that even if half true, the co-benefits alone would be enough to take this seriously: food and water security, biodiversity protection, soil and landscape regeneration and finance going to the rural poor to award them as an army to regenerate the damaged planet. Even if global cooling would not be achieved, local cooling as well as mitigation of weather extremes by reforestation and ecosystem restoration have been widely documented, so we should make the strategic regeneration of the biosphere a key strategy on par with decarbonization. It certainly beats the complete failure to bring emissions down over the last few decades.

Let me add as a last point, that where Peter and I operate from the concept of the EEI, the fact that climate sensitivity of CO2 has played such a central role in climate science shows how tentative and immature it has been for a long time. The climate sensitivity of CO2 cannot be established, simply because it does not solely depend on the amount of CO2 in the air but also, and more importantly so, on the land the solar rays hit. Lovelock’s Daisyworld story has shown how simple life forms like black and white daisies, by altering their environment through heat absorption and reflection, can self-regulate a planet’s temperature to remain habitable. On a totally white planet the climate sensitivity of CO2 would be zero and on a very wet planet, it is very low as well. That is why we propose to rehydrate the planet as a way to cool. Our estimate is that at least half of the warming up attributed to CO2 has been caused by the destruction of living biomass (on land and in the oceans) and the drying out of the land masses. 

Hope this shows where Peter and I come from, hope not too many typos, 

Kind regards, 

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lee mcnair

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Sep 5, 2025, 1:02:17 PMSep 5
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Thanks Rob, I'm not a scientist, just a Unitarian Universalist environmental justice legislative advocate at the county and state (Maryland) level. As such I can't say anything scientific about cooling the planet. I can say, however, that we have woefully and completely failed in both support for removing carbon from the atmosphere and slowing fossil fuel emissions. My own state is now encouraging continued and additional so-called natural gas plants to power AI and datacenters.

I've become cyntical enough to wonder if the whole CO2 bruha isn't just a distraction to keep us from acknowledging the horrific multi-crisis of social breakdown, political totalitarian upswing, wars, destruction of nature and our biosystem resources, etc.

All this to say that even if only the co-benefits of what you are doing work, then you are doing good and honorable work. Please keep doing it.

Lee

"The primary purpose of Economists is to make Astrologists respectable."
Sir Kenneth Galbraith

"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain"
Isaac Asimov

   

Robin Collins

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Sep 5, 2025, 1:28:02 PMSep 5
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Lee

No, the CO2 thing is certainly not a “distraction” from the other real ills that plague us. It is an important aspect of it, and arguably the most important crisis humanity currently faces. 

Robin


David Price

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Sep 5, 2025, 3:21:52 PMSep 5
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Hi Rob 

I can hardly contain myself! You refer to my "dismissal" [of your proposals] as being "simply misguided". It is a matter of opinion as to who is "misguided"!! For example, you have just written:



We operate from the Gaia theory and understand the atmosphere, the weather and climate as properties evolved over time by a biosphere that has been able to more and more create the metabolisms of our planet for life to thrive. I think we have done enough research for our work to be taken seriously.

That's an awful lot of hubris!!

SPOILER ALERT: Gaia is a philosophical metaphor that has little place in real ecology. And Daisyworld has about as much in common with global climate models as a potted cactus plant has in common with the Amazon rainforest. 

You also wrote "our solution comes with a huge number of co-benefits that even if half true, the co-benefits alone would be enough to take this seriously: food and water security, biodiversity protection, soil and landscape regeneration and finance going to the rural poor to award them as an army to regenerate the damaged planet."

Aside from whether tropical ecosystem restoration is a "global cooling solution", I am in complete agreement with everything you said there -- and I have said so several times. They are essentially all completely true in principle, but turning all those perceived co-benefits into real action will be a huge challenge (to put it mildly). And I have also said (RobertT please note) that I can imagine that increased forest cover and increased ET would lead to more tropospheric cloud formation which could increase planetary albedo to a small extent. But this latter point is something you consider to be a very minor benefit, along with C sequestration.

But, when it comes to your central argument, you have dismissed (or ignored) my concerns and questions repeatedly. Here is a list:

1. That what you claim to be true violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (please prove me wrong!).

2. That you apparently have discovered a previously undocumented mechanism by which water vapour is transported from earth's surface to the stratosphere that is somehow different from known processes of convection and entrainment (see (1.))

3. That you don't seem to be aware of the importance of the surface energy balance as the means by which incoming radiation is allocated between sensible heat flux and evaporation (latent heat). (See (1.))

4. That you appear not to recognize that our atmosphere and the planet within, whether Gaia controlled or not, is fundamentally a "closed system". The only means by which the earth can cool (which is its natural fate in the universe!) is by radiation according to the Stephan-Boltzmann equation (see (1.)). (BTW, reflection of incoming solar radiation, dependent upon planetary albedo, is not strictly a cooling mechanism: rather it is a process which reduces planetary heat absorption.) 

5. In your so-called "peer-reviewed" paper (I urge people to check out this website: https://www.danreichart.com/medcrave -- it is good for a belly laugh), the opening sentences read as follows:

Greenhouse gases heat up the planet, but they are not the only 
driver of climate change. While carbon gets all the attention, another 
factor is largely overlooked. It is water in its movements and changes 
of state (ice, liquid water and vapour) as it interacts with plant life and 
the atmosphere. 

Basically this is nonsense! It is what led me to say that, had I been asked to review that paper, I would have called for major revision or rejection of the manuscript. 

This text completely ignores all of past contributions on the role of vegetation in the hydrological cycle (e.g., Penman and Monteith (1964), Priestley and Taylor (1972), Jarvis and McNaughton (1983)  and many others, not to mention all the work carried out by climate modellers in the 1990s onwards. I might as well point out that until relatively recently, GCMs (which you refer to disparagingly as "the IPCC's models") were only about simulating heat and water vapour. The effect of CO2 was entirely prescribed by adding in a doubled or tripled CO2 concentration to see how a simple change in atmospheric GHG content would affect the "equilibrium climate" results compared to a "standard 1X CO2 concentration". The next generations of simulations were carried out by using "transient forcing" -- adding historical and projected time series of annual human-caused CO2 emissions (i..e., nothing from natural sources such as wildfires -- these were assumed to be net zero). A major concern was the parameterization of terrestrial surface conditions: I.e., how to capture the differing effects of snow and ice, desert, grassland, croplands and may be three types of forest, on the surface energy balance? Only since around 2005 or later (I'm guessing because even though I was involved in some of that work, it's been a while ago now) only since circa 2005 were the first attempts carried out to create "Earth System Simulators" which included dynamic vegetation and carbon cycling. Only in these simulations is there an attempt to simulate the feed-backs as climate change melts ice and disrupts the natural vegetation, etc. These are horrendously complicated processes to simulate effectively (and quasi-realistically) at global scale. The fact that you don't recognize any of this in your paper demonstrates you really haven't done your homework!

I would really love to believe that what you are claiming as fact is true: As I said, you will be a hero. But honestly, it's pseudo-science: a house of cards built on a table with a leg missing. 

I have good reason to be dismissive: Give me a good reason to think otherwise!!!

LAST NIGHT, I had an idea. You seem to accuse me of being closed-minded: Here is a thought experiment for you to ponder:

Imagine, if you dare, that we humans decided to completely remove all tropical forests from the planetary surface. All of the Amazon, the forests of the Congo and the forested regions of southern Asia. Let's assume that after cutting or bulldozing every tree, we go in with a fleet of 747s to spray Round-Up on all of the cleared areas. What do you think would happen to the Earth Energy Imbalance as a result?

I then had to google this and almost immediately I found this paper just out in Nature which will probably interest you! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63156-0 

But to answer the question I took the lead from RobertT: I went to ChatGPT. You will see that I had to prod it a bit to get away from "first-order thinking". I asked the following questions:

What would be the overall impact of removing all tropical forests from earth's surface on the global earth energy imbalance (EEI)?

OK. So I have two concerns: (1) Let's assume that all the carbon contained in global tropical forests remains fixed and is not oxidized, so does not add to the atmospheric GHG burden  [NOTE: So this is a pretty unrealistic assumption! ChatGPT quite reasonably assumed all the carbon would be released and therefore boost the GHG warming, and hence make the EEI larger. But that was not my point! ]

OK. The second constraint is that the the first law of thermodynamics must be applied to the surface energy balance -- any reduction in evaporation will increase surface temperature and therefore also increase both the upward sensible heat flux and the upward thermal radiation flux. How will this constraint affect EEI?

Would anyone like to do this themselves or see the several pages ChatGPT5 generated for me? (I would share it now but it needs some fixing up in Word.)

Regards

David

================

I acknowledge that I reside on unceded Traditional
Territory of the Secwépemc People

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."

The wrath of God will destroy those who destroy the Earth. Rev. 11:18

rob de laet

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Sep 5, 2025, 5:04:17 PMSep 5
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Dear Lee,

Thank you for your kind message and encouragement. Yes, we are living through an existential mega- and meta-crisis of planetary scale as the current paradigm is no longer working and the chaos seems to close in on us. Obviously the problem goes way beyond CO₂ alone. Overpopulation, overconsumption, resource depletion, ecological destruction are degrading the quality of life for all of us and for all non-human beings we share our living planet with. We treat all this more and more as disposables, pulverized the in the juggernaut of materialism, in stead of as part of the sacred world we inherited and we should be stewarding in stead of destroying. The grotesque and terrible decline in civility and political decay all feed into the same story of disconnection from life and the loss of a vision and plan to create a livable future on this amazing planet we call home and we are honor bound to pass on in a much better state to our offspring. 

For me, the beauty of large-scale strategic ecosystem restoration, both on land and in the oceans, is that it directly addresses these multiple crises at once at all levels, including at the level of spirituality and meaning making. 

By restoring forests, soils, the water cycles, ocean biology and so on, we don’t only cool the planet and mitigate weather extremes, we also regenerate food security, strengthen communities, and create the conditions for resilience, wellbeing and finally peace, not in a world where everyone can go after endless greed, but where we all guaranteed basic needs for all life to express itself to the fullest. These co-benefits are not side-effects; they are in fact the heart of why this work is so urgent and hopeful and my push for it unrelenting.

Your role pushing for environmental justice is a vital part of this enormous transformation, we need to go through to carve out a path through the mess we are in, to a sustainable and equitable future, in sink with a thriving biosphere that gave us all the elements to live a rich, meaningful and fulfilling life as part of the never ending story of life itself unfolding and discovering on its path through the eons.

Very happy we are on the same team, We do not know each other yet, but it would be great to have a short introductory call. 

Looking forward to hearing from you, 

Onward!

David Price

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Sep 7, 2025, 12:29:28 AMSep 7
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Hi Everybody

Rob's sharing of this link about cloud loss 

was very timely. But "The loss of latent heat export into space caused by diminished cloud cover is not mentioned" because it simply does not happen. 

My session with ChatGPT was quite illuminating. Until last Friday, I had only used AI LLMs once before and that was for a completely different purpose when I was just following someone else’s lead. This time, with a lot of skepticism and trepidation, I decided to really try it out on a complex problem. I was really impressed by how ChatGPT appeared to understand my concerns, and allowed me to follow my own curiosity, while it offered to lead me down a whole bunch of rabbit holes.

Rob de Laet has persistently refused to answer my questions about the validity of the underlying assumptions used in his proposal. Instead he has been asking me to “check the detailed calculations” in the recent “peer-reviewed” paper on which he is a coauthor (Bunyard et al. 2023, https://medcraveonline.com/IJBSBE/IJBSBE-09-00237.pdf , hereafter referred to as “Bunyard23”).  I decided to ask the same questions of ChatGPT. As it turned out, ChatGPT generated strong confirmation of my suspicions, and in the process, provided an independent verification of many of the calculations Rob wanted me and others to check! My entire session with ChatGPT ran to over 30 pages: I have cleaned these up and they are now in a 3 MB PDF which I am happy to share with anyone who wants to see it. I could post it somewhere if someone can provide a place to upload it.

Below I will provide a “brief” summary of the “bottom line” responses on each of the questions I posed. It is not a complete review and undoubtedly subject to some personal bias. But I have tried to be honest about what ChatGPT said, while keeping my summary as short as possible.

If that is still too much, here is the summary of the summary of ChatGPT’s deliberations:

A tight, first-order biophysical-only estimate for restoring 1,000,000 km² (100 Mha) in the Amazon—i.e., holding atmospheric GHGs fixed and only counting fast land–atmosphere effects (evapotranspiration, clouds, surface fluxes).….

Global mean temperature change (at equilibrium): Δ𝑇glob ≈ −0.042 °C

Change in Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI): ΔEEI ≈ −0.04 to −0.055 W m−2

Regards

David

===================================================================

THE SUMMARY STARTS HERE 

Question 1: What would be the overall impact of removing all tropical forests from earth's surface on the global earth energy imbalance (EEI)?

ChatGPT: “Removing all tropical forests would push Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) more positive (warmer)—by roughly +1 W/m² or more on multi-decadal timescales—because both fast biophysical changes and slower greenhouse-gas effects increase the net energy gained by the planet.”

ChatGPT further explained that the immediate effect would be to reduce cloud albedo, and that the longer term (multi-decadal) consequences would be injection of “CO₂ (and some CH₄/N₂O) into the atmosphere”. This is fair enough but it wasn’t what I had in mind, so I asked:

Question 2: OK. So I have two concerns: (1) Let's assume that all the carbon contained in global tropical forests remains fixed and is not oxidized, so does not add to the atmospheric GHG burden.   I know this is an unrealistic assumption but I wanted to get a handle on the role of tropical forests on the water balance and EEI, without considering GHGs as a confounding forcing agent.  (Note also that Rob de Laet evidently does not accept that CO2 increase is the major cause of radiative forcing: I wanted to find out if he is even partially correct.)

ChatGPT: “Great constraint to isolate the biophysical piece. If we (hypothetically) delete all tropical forests but magically keep all their carbon from oxidizing, the net effect on Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI) would almost certainly be a positive push (more energy in than out) — i.e., warming, “ Bottom line: “Keeping carbon fixed doesn’t save you from the warming that comes from removing tropical forests. You’d expect a positive global EEI on the order of +0.2 to +0.6 W m⁻², driven by reduced evapotranspiration and cloud cover overwhelming the small surface-albedo brightening in the tropics.”

So does this mean that ChatGPT thinks Rob is correct? Well not really. Certainly reduced evapotranspiration has a role, but note also ChatGPT’s mention of reduced cloud cover, which reduces planetary albedo. (The surface brightening effect is something I had considered and I was a bit surprised that it was not expected to have a larger impact in the absence of clouds.)

Question 3: OK. The second constraint is that the the first law of thermodynamics must be applied to the surface energy balance -- any reduction in evaporation will increase surface temperature and therefore also increase both the upward sensible heat flux and the upward thermal radiation flux. How will this constraint affect EEI?

ChatGPT: “Great constraint—and you’re absolutely right to enforce it.  Short version: enforcing the surface first law doesn’t flip the sign of the EEI change. It just tells you how the system closes the budget: less evaporation (LE) forces surface warming, which boosts sensible heat (H) and upwelling longwave from the surface (LW↑). That extra longwave ultimately increases TOA OLR, which partly cancels the positive EEI driven mainly by reduced clouds / lower planetary albedo. So EEI still goes more positive, but less than if you ignored the longwave response.” 

Note: TOA OLR means “Top-of-Atmosphere Outgoing Longwave Radiation”. And ASR coming up next means “Absorbed Shortwave Radiation” (or at least I think so).

So ChatGPT concedes that the loss of surface cooling raises the surface temperature which increases both sensible heat and OLR. ChatGPT also generated some numbers: “Using a typical net feedback parameter ∣𝜆∣ ∼ 1 W m−2 K−1 (Planck plus other fast feedbacks), the system would warm by ~0.3–0.5 K until ΔOLR cancels the extra ASR and EEI → 0 at the new, warmer steady state.

So ChatGPT estimated the overall sensitivity of global mean temperature to the removal of tropical forests: I am assuming the “net feedback parameter” includes aerosols and water vapour. Removing ALL tropical forests (around 18.4 million km2 https://rainforests.mongabay.com  ) would have the effect of warming the planet by around 0.3 to 0.5 K. To my own knowledge, Rob de Laet has claimed several times that simply restoring all the degraded forest in the Amazon (estimated at around 1 million km2) will cool the earth by 1 K!! Hence my next question:

Question 4: That's all great stuff, So here's a follow-up question: What would be the overall effect on EEI of restoring all the world's deforested tropical forest regions?

ChatGPT: “Short version: restoring (re-growing) tropical forests would make EEI more negative (cooling) on the way to a new equilibrium—roughly the mirror image of removal. The size depends on how much area you actually restore and whether you include carbon drawdown.”

This of course is an entirely reasonable response. ChatGPT offered estimates for different levels of forest restoration, as simple proportions of the amount restored. But it also wanted to account for CO2 removal. Its bottom line statement was:

“Biophysical-only: Restoring tropical forests reduces EEI (cooling) by ~0.25–0.50 W m⁻² if you restored the full tropical-forest belt; scale linearly for smaller restored areas (e.g., 5 million km² → ~0.07–0.14 W m⁻²).

With carbon: Add a further negative forcing that accumulates over decades, potentially making the total EEI reduction substantially larger—provided the carbon stays sequestered and the forests persist.”

So a projected reduction of the order of  0.1 W m⁻² for restoring 5 million km²!  I decided that I could ask ChatGPT to provide an estimate of global cooling obtained by restoring the Amazon rainforest – to compare directly with estimates in Bunyard23.

Question 5: Let's focus on reforesting deforested and degraded forest lands in the Amazon region only. What would be the effect on EEI and on global mean temperature?

ChatGPT:  The Amazon rainforest spans ~6.0–6.7 million km². Best recent syntheses put forest loss at ~15% of the original area → ≈1.0 million km² already cleared (mostly in Brazil)…. “

(It makes some assumptions based on GCM experiments to simulate Amazon forest removal … as I soon realized, I was not the first person to be asking such questions!)

“Bottom line (biophysical-only): EEI: ~−0.04 to −0.05 W m⁻² (cooling) from restoring ~1.0 million km² of Amazon forest. Global mean temperature (equilibrium, long-run): ~−0.04 °C.

So there we have an answer! About 0.04 °C of global cooling.

ChatGPT went on to pose the important question: “What about regional temperature over the Amazon?” Its response was as follows (my italics added for emphasis!):

“Locally, the signal is much larger than the global mean because the surface energy balance shifts strongly toward latent heat (LE) with forest cover: Observations show deforestation warms nearby areas by ~1–3 °C and dries them; re-establishing tall, rough, transpiring forest tends to cool the near-surface air by ~1–2 °C (seasonally more) and increase afternoon cloud cover and rain recycling. Recent satellite/empirical work in the basin finds strong warming downwind of clearings; reforestation would reverse a good chunk of that.”

This is what I have been saying all along: At the local/regional scale, at the planetary surface, the increase in ET provides significant cooling. BUT its contribution to lowering global temperature is much smaller. That contribution might seem to be non-zero, but actually it’s not! The reason for the lowering of global temperature is mainly the expected increase in afternoon cloud cover – which causes increased albedo and reflectance of incoming solar radiation. It is not due to upward magical transport of heat due to the increased evapotranspiration. [Note that Rob has insisted that albedo increase is a relatively minor benefit of increased forest cover.]

ChatGPT also estimated the cooling achieved through forest carbon uptake:

“…over decades, carbon uptake from largescale Amazon restoration would add substantial extra cooling (on the order of tenths of a W m⁻² globally if sustained), far exceeding the biophysical −0.04 to −0.05 W m⁻² above. But that depends on permanence, fire, and climate-dieback risks.

This I found rather surprising, but I think it plausible given the caveats about permanence.

Question 6: please perform calculations for 1 million km2 (100 million hectares)

I went on to explore the potential of managing the restored forest for harvesting and generating wood products (which can be a form of C sequestration if managed appropriately. I won’t get into that here.)  But here’s ChatGPT’s final response on the forest restoration question:

ChatGPT: Here’s a tight, first-order biophysical-only estimate for restoring 1,000,000 km² (100 Mha) in the Amazon—i.e., holding atmospheric GHGs fixed and only counting fast land–atmosphere effects (evapotranspiration, clouds, surface fluxes).” ….

“Results (biophysical only

Global mean temperature (equilibrium):

Δ𝑇glob ≈ (−0.25 °C) × 0.167 ≈ −0.042 °C

Change in Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) / effective TOA forcing:

ΔEEI ≈ λΔT ≈ (1.0 – 1.3)×(−0.042) ≈ −0.04 to −0.055 W m−2

Sign is negative (cooling). For context, that’s about 5–7% of today’s ~0.8–1.0 W m⁻² observed EEI.

Transient vs. equilibrium timing:

Expect roughly half the equilibrium cooling to appear over the first few decades (ocean lag), i.e. ~−0.02 °C initially, with EEI reduced by a comparable fraction (becoming more negative) until the system cools toward the new equilibrium. *ChatGPT said “becoming more negative” but I think it should have said “becoming less positive”.

How this squares with your first-law constraint

More forest → higher latent heat (LE) → surface cools, so H and surface LW↑ drop. At TOA, cloud/shortwave changes dominate initially (lower ASR), making EEI more negative. As the planet cools, OLR decreases, slowly nudging EEI back toward ~0 at the new, slightly cooler equilibrium.”

===================================================================

I acknowledge that I reside on unceded Traditional
Territory of the Secwépemc People

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."

The wrath of God will destroy those who destroy the Earth. Rev. 11:18

rob de laet

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Sep 7, 2025, 7:08:42 AMSep 7
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David, 

thank you very much for doing this exercise, will go through it soon and respond. 

rob de laet

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Sep 10, 2025, 7:23:48 AM (13 days ago) Sep 10
to healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com, David Price

Hi David, 

Thank you for challenging our insights. It is busy and I am perplexed at the amount of time people are able to apply to the discussions in the HPAC group. I hope we can get more emphasis on a total plan of action, which no doubt will have many chapters. 

Before I go into your AI driven critique, let me again reiterate that in order to reverse large parts of the fast accelerating climate mess we are in, we need an integral plan for biosphere regeneration at all levels and that certainly includes ocean biology regeneration and a series of measures to counter Arctic amplification. But let us focus now on our proposal to cool the planet by substantially increasing the rainforest areas in the tropical zone (which includes the transition to agroforestry food production from vast areas of open field monocropping). 

Two points before I start off: I would be grateful if you could not put words in my mouth that I have never uttered: 
‘’Note also that Rob de Laet evidently does not accept that CO₂ increase is the major cause of radiative forcing’’, which is patently both untrue and unfair. I clearly acknowledge the role of GHGs in warming up of the planet, I have only said that the quantification of it is simply not possible, because it is dependent on more than just the quantity of GHGs in the atmosphere, it also depends on the Bowen ratio and surface temperatures (Stefan–Boltzmann law) as well as albedo. A simple metric is therefore not possible as the effects are composite. A formula could work but I think EEI is doing a better job anyway, so why bother. I propose we put climate sensitivity as a value to bed and stick with EEI. 

With regards to this sentence in your mail: ‘’It is not due to upward magical transport of heat due to the increased evapotranspiration.’’ Let me describe this process more clearly: The cooling effect of the rainforest is due to the upward biophysical transport of solar energy absorbed by the forest and stored as latent heat in water vapor. This energy is then released and exported to space as thermal infrared radiation (IR) from high-altitude cloud tops after condensation. Satellite records confirm this process, showing that a warmer system appropriately radiates more IR outwards, even as a decrease in reflective cloud cover contributes to the overall rise in Earth's Energy Imbalance, as observed in the years of record drought in the Amazon (2023 and 2024). Your statement: ‘’"The loss of latent heat export into space caused by diminished cloud cover is not mentioned" because it simply does not happen.’’’’ is not true as explained above. The key is that the forest acts as a natural heat pump, moving energy from the hot surface to a colder altitude where it can be efficiently radiated away.

Your argument against our thesis that biosphere regeneration can cool the climate is mainly rooted in a fundamental misapplication of a global climate metric. While your use of the IPCC's (conservative) global average is understandable, it fails to capture the concentrated, powerful, and localized biophysical processes that are at the very heart of the Earth's natural thermostat. I would not trust AI to be ahead of us too much yet.

Globally, the benchmark is the Earth’s Energy Imbalance, which you put at about +1.0 W/m² (we actually use a higher 2023 value provided by NASA but for the magnitude change it does not really matter). But this is a homogenized planetary average, which does not allow for the understanding of regionally different effects. We all know that the total sunlight coming in at the equator is roughly a factor 4 so it would be absurd to treat all heat dynamics everywhere with one average. Regionally, the localized Net Radiative Forcing shows that rain forests operate as extraordinarily powerful cooling engines, regulating heat and water cycles far beyond their boundaries. 

Your global figure arises only after averaging, which obscures the way global EEI is built up from the aggregation of much stronger local differences. It is precisely these localized signals of evapotranspiration and cloud albedo that, once integrated, reveal the true contribution of tropical forests to the Earth’s energy balance. From a Gaia Theory perspective this is easily understood: the tropical rainforests have evolved as the most powerful cooling and rehydrating organs of the living planet precisely because most sunlight needs to be processed in that region. It is a process of evolutionary adaptation, evolutionary geo-engineering if you want, we are looking at.  

Only by taking into account this powerful, concentrated local effect, are we able to understand why the tropical rainforests are so crucial to the global EEI. The biophysical cooling of tropical forests, working through the atmospheric water cycle, is a concentrated phenomenon, not a diffuse global one, though the teleconnections of the biotic pump and the phenomenon of flying rivers have climate impacts many thousand kilometers from their emergence. 

In short: Rainforests are not just considerable carbon stores, they're giant climate cooling engines. They pump water, make clouds, and cool the planet far more than simple averages can show.

NB: Can we start to describe the EEI as a balance sheet with cooling effects on one side and warming effects on the other side. GHGs are obviously on the warming side, a lot of biological processes are on the cooling side. This would also help the financial world to understand what needs to be done and not all corrections of the situation have to be focused on dealing with CO₂, but put the cooling capacity of healthy ecosystems on the other side of the balance sheet and make them investable to maintain a livable future on our beautiful but damaged planet. 
The calculation of the total cooling capacity of the rainforests we have carefully approached in our paper and we stand by them. Here is the link once more: https://medcraveonline.com/IJBSBE/IJBSBE-09-00237.pdf
For those interested in a more specific definition of the tipping point of dieback of the Amazon rainforest, which can add 2-2,5 C to global temperatures on top of IPCC projections within decades, please look at the the attached article: In Defense of the Biotic Pump, with additional knowledge and modelling from our esteemed colleague Ali Bin Shahid. It is in a scientific publication of repute.
I hope we can put this discussion to bed as well as we need to focus on action. 
Grateful for any help with our project https://www.coolingtheclimate.earth/ based on the simple idea that avert the tipping point of the Amazon rainforest, we need to pay everyone in the forest to protect and restore the forest. 
Best, 

JASR-9887-vol8iss1-（41-64）.pdf

David Price

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Sep 15, 2025, 8:09:01 AM (7 days ago) Sep 15
to rob de laet, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com

Hi Rob

I have numerous comments I could make about your last email below. I have decided I will have to find the time to have one final go at "understanding" and then explaining, where Bunyard et al, and you, are somehow completely wrong. As an aside, James Lovelock was assuredly an eminent scientist -- and for sure he understood that Gaia was still subject to the constraints imposed by the laws of physics. He must surely be rolling in his grave (to use a metaphysical metaphor!) now that his ideas have led to a fringe cult that evidently thinks Gaia is metaphysical reality. 

I agree with you that action is needed urgently. However, the not-so-perplexing reason why we are willing to invest time and effort in discussion is because it is far from clear which options are going to work and which of them are feasible and cost-effective -- and which of them are based on erroneous and misleading science.  Weeding out the latter can only help the world focus on approaches that will work, and thereby avoid huge wastes of time and money. 

Meanwhile:

Your comment: "'’Note also that Rob de Laet evidently does not accept that CO₂ increase is the major cause of radiative forcing'’, which is patently both untrue and unfair. I clearly acknowledge the role of GHGs in warming up of the planet, I have only said that the quantification of it is simply not possible, because it is dependent on more than just the quantity of GHGs in the atmosphere..."

The first part of your response is fair, and I admit that in going back through some of the things you have said over the last year, I had forgotten some of the details. What got me was this opening sentence of Bunyard et al 2024:

"Greenhouse gases heat up the planet, but they are not the only driver of climate change. While carbon gets all the attention, another factor is largely overlooked. It is water in its movements and changes of state (ice, liquid water and vapour) as it interacts with plant life and the atmosphere."

Incidentally I should also apologize for referring to this "peer-reviewed" paper as "Bunyard et al 2023" in my previous rant! Elsewhere in that paper. the authors (I want to say "you") put CO2 removal as the least important mechanism by which forests could contribute to climate change mitigation (aka "global cooling"). Even increased cloud formation boosting tropospheric cloud albedo is only ranked number 5 in a list of 7 mitigation benefits. Bunyard et al write: (my italics added for emphasis):

“A healthy rainforest acts as a heat pump, cooling the Earth’s surface and releasing heat into space. Because of the heat pump, the cooling engendered by evapotranspiration and subsequent cloud-forming is two orders of magnitude greater than the cooling brought about by carbon sequestration in forming biomass.”

(Such statements would have received major complaints from any competent reviewer of that paper, had it been submitted to a respectable climatology or meteorology journal!)

But I agree that I misinterpreted this, and if you accept that CO2 increase (since circa 1850) is the primary cause of recent warming trends, then I apologise. However, the second part of your statement -- that "quantification of it is simply not possible" shows you are really not following the science. I will have to address that later. Meanwhile, here is an interesting conundrum for you to ponder: 

The logical corollary of that italicized second sentence is that if global forest evapotranspiration provides around 100 times as much "planetary cooling" as CO2 removal, and if forests contribute so much to this cooling, then why was the planet not several degrees C colder than it is today as recently as 200 years ago, when most of the world's forests were still largely intact? The warming since 1850 of ~1.5 C, which most experts accept is due mainly to an approximate 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 plus feedbacks, should, according to you, have been much greater, as most deforestation has occurred since 1850.

According to Our World In Data, forests covered approximately 35% of global land area in 1850, compared to about 40.5% around 10,000 yr BP and about 27% today (see infographic at https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area which notes "Half of forest loss has happened since 1900"). So if restoring 280 Mha will cool the planet by 1 C in 20 years, as you claim, then reducing global forest cover from about 5 billion ha 125 years ago, to about 4 billion ha today, should have warmed the planet by 1000/280 = ~3.5 C, on top of the ~1.5 C warming caused by GHGs!! (This is quite separate from the potential future warming due to the Amazon forest dieback tipping point that you mentioned.) Clearly that 3.5 C warming has not happened, so clearly you are grossly exaggerating the importance of global forests as "coolers of the planet". Your "cool the planet 1 C in 20 years"  is pure fantasy!

As a further indication of how what you are saying makes little sense: We have agreed in the past, more-or-less, that about 85 to 90% of global evapotranspiration is known to be derived from ocean evaporation, with the other approximate 15% coming from various land surfaces. Of that ~15%, the Amazon alone is (or was?) estimated to be the source of 6-7% of terrestrial ET -- or about 1% of global total. While I find that factoid quite astonishing (but I am not disputing it), Amazonian deforestation has removed about 1 million km2, or 100 million hectares or about 15% of its original forest extent (implying a decrease of ~0.15% in global ET, assuming all other factors are unchanged). So your plan to re-establish around 280 Mha of tropical forest would have the net effect of increasing the time-averaged global total ET by about 0.4% --- and that does not account for the fact that most of the restored land will already have some plant cover and exposed soils which are already contributing to global ET. Let's be reasonable and assume that tropical forest cover will eventually double average ET relative to the previously deforested/degraded land at the same location. The net increase of around 0.2% globally will be well within the range of inter-annual variation -- i.e., barely significant as a factor controlling EEI, compared to the general trends in GHG forcing and albedo loss.

Furthermore, as global oceans warm (not least because of the general trend of decreasing ocean albedo), the increase in evaporation from ocean surfaces will completely swamp the relatively minor increase in ET from tropical reforestation efforts. The net effect of this will, in any case, be to increase the water vapour GHG feedback and hence increase EEI. 

I have a whole bunch more comments drafted (including quite a bit on your evident misunderstanding of EEI), but I need to study that darn paper again to be sure of what I say. 

Regards

David

================

I acknowledge that I reside on unceded Traditional
Territory of the Secwépemc People

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."

The wrath of God will destroy those who destroy the Earth. Rev. 11:18

rob de laet

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Sep 15, 2025, 8:43:24 AM (7 days ago) Sep 15
to healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com, David Price
Good morning from Brazil, 

quick reply in CAPS in your reply below and then on with a busy week 
On Monday 15 September 2025 at 14:09:04 CEST, David Price <da...@pricenet.ca> wrote:


Hi Rob

I have numerous comments I could make about your last email below. I have decided I will have to find the time to have one final go at "understanding" and then explaining, where Bunyard et al, and you, are somehow completely wrong. As an aside, James Lovelock was assuredly an eminent scientist -- and for sure he understood that Gaia was still subject to the constraints imposed by the laws of physics. He must surely be rolling in his grave (to use a metaphysical metaphor!) now that his ideas have led to a fringe cult that evidently thinks Gaia is metaphysical reality. 

I THINK PETER BUNYARD, WHO HAS HAD MANY LONG SESSIONS WITH LOVELOCK, WOULD DISAGREE THERE. BUT HE WITHDREW FROM THIS LONG DISCUSSION. 
I agree with you that action is needed urgently. However, the not-so-perplexing reason why we are willing to invest time and effort in discussion is because it is far from clear which options are going to work and which of them are feasible and cost-effective -- and which of them are based on erroneous and misleading science.  Weeding out the latter can only help the world focus on approaches that will work, and thereby avoid huge wastes of time and money. 

ACTUALLY, RESTORING THE BIOSPHERE WILL HAVE USE CO-BENEFITS FOR CLIMATE RESILIENCE, FOOD AND WATER SECURITY AND WITH THAT DAMPENING OF SOCIO-POLITICAL STRESS, IN FACT IT IS AN INSURANCE AGAINST HUMAN CONFLICT, SO EVEN IF IT DIDN'T COOL WE SHOULD DO IT. THIS GOES FOR THE LARGEST COOLING ORGANS OF THE PLANET AS ARE THE RAINFORESTS AS IS THE RESTORATION OF OCEAN BIOLOGY. 

Meanwhile:

Your comment: "'’Note also that Rob de Laet evidently does not accept that CO₂ increase is the major cause of radiative forcing'’, which is patently both untrue and unfair. I clearly acknowledge the role of GHGs in warming up of the planet, I have only said that the quantification of it is simply not possible, because it is dependent on more than just the quantity of GHGs in the atmosphere..."

The first part of your response is fair, and I admit that in going back through some of the things you have said over the last year, I had forgotten some of the details. What got me was this opening sentence of Bunyard et al 2024:

"Greenhouse gases heat up the planet, but they are not the only driver of climate change. While carbon gets all the attention, another factor is largely overlooked. It is water in its movements and changes of state (ice, liquid water and vapour) as it interacts with plant life and the atmosphere."

Incidentally I should also apologize for referring to this "peer-reviewed" paper as "Bunyard et al 2023" in my previous rant! Elsewhere in that paper. the authors (I want to say "you") put CO2 removal as the least important mechanism by which forests could contribute to climate change mitigation (aka "global cooling"). Even increased cloud formation boosting tropospheric cloud albedo is only ranked number 5 in a list of 7 mitigation benefits. Bunyard et al write: (my italics added for emphasis):

“A healthy rainforest acts as a heat pump, cooling the Earth’s surface and releasing heat into space. Because of the heat pump, the cooling engendered by evapotranspiration and subsequent cloud-forming is two orders of magnitude greater than the cooling brought about by carbon sequestration in forming biomass.”

THANK YOU, 

THAT IS CORRECT, WHILE CARBON SEQUESTRATION AND DIMINISHING OUTPUT, IN THE CASE OF THE RAINFORESTS (SO NOT EVERYWHERE) THE CARBON EFFECT IS FAIRLY UNIMPORTANT THOUGH THE BURNING DOWN OF THE AMAZON AS A WHOLE (WHICH COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN QUITE SUDDENLY IF THE FOREST DRIES OUT ANY FURTHER) WOULD ADD OUT OF THE TOP OF MY HEAD UPWARDS OF 50 PPM TO THE ATMOSPHERE, SO THAT IS NOT A SMALL THING. BUT THE LARGEST EFFECT WOULD BE THE REMOVED COOLING EFFECT VIA THE ATMOSPHERIC WATER CYCLE. IN MY CALCULATIONS WE ATTRIBUTED IN THE WORST CASE SCENARION A GLOBAL RISE IN TEMPERATURES OF 2,5 C OUT OF WHICH ABOUT 0,25 C TRANSIENT RESPONSE AND MAYBE DOUBLE THAT AS FINAL EQUILIBRIUM RESPONSE. THE REMOVED WATER COOLING EFFECT WOULD KICK IN PRACTICALLY IMMEDIATELY. 

(Such statements would have received major complaints from any competent reviewer of that paper, had it been submitted to a respectable climatology or meteorology journal!)

But I agree that I misinterpreted this, and if you accept that CO2 increase (since circa 1850) is the primary cause of recent warming trends, then I apologise. However, the second part of your statement -- that "quantification of it is simply not possible" shows you are really not following the science. I will have to address that later. Meanwhile, here is an interesting conundrum for you to ponder: 

The logical corollary of that italicized second sentence is that if global forest evapotranspiration provides around 100 times as much "planetary cooling" as CO2 removal, and if forests contribute so much to this cooling, then why was the planet not several degrees C colder than it is today as recently as 200 years ago, when most of the world's forests were still largely intact? The warming since 1850 of ~1.5 C, which most experts accept is due mainly to an approximate 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 plus feedbacks, should, according to you, have been much greater, as most deforestation has occurred since 1850.

According to Our World In Data, forests covered approximately 35% of global land area in 1850, compared to about 40.5% around 10,000 yr BP and about 27% today (see infographic at https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area which notes "Half of forest loss has happened since 1900"). So if restoring 280 Mha will cool the planet by 1 C in 20 years, as you claim, then reducing global forest cover from about 5 billion ha 125 years ago, to about 4 billion ha today, should have warmed the planet by 1000/280 = ~3.5 C, on top of the ~1.5 C warming caused by GHGs!! (This is quite separate from the potential future warming due to the Amazon forest dieback tipping point that you mentioned.) Clearly that 3.5 C warming has not happened, so clearly you are grossly exaggerating the importance of global forests as "coolers of the planet". Your "cool the planet 1 C in 20 years"  is pure fantasy!

AGAIN, NOT ALL FORESTS ARE THE SAME. THE TROPICAL RAINFORESTS HAVE DEVELOPED TO COOL, PRINCIPALLY THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERIC WATER CYCLE. THAT MAKES THEM DIFFERENT IN EFFECT TO THE OTHER FORESTS. 

As a further indication of how what you are saying makes little sense: We have agreed in the past, more-or-less, that about 85 to 90% of global evapotranspiration is known to be derived from ocean evaporation, with the other approximate 15% coming from various land surfaces. Of that ~15%, the Amazon alone is (or was?) estimated to be the source of 6-7% of terrestrial ET -- or about 1% of global total. While I find that factoid quite astonishing (but I am not disputing it), Amazonian deforestation has removed about 1 million km2, or 100 million hectares or about 15% of its original forest extent (implying a decrease of ~0.15% in global ET, assuming all other factors are unchanged). So your plan to re-establish around 280 Mha of tropical forest would have the net effect of increasing the time-averaged global total ET by about 0.4% --- and that does not account for the fact that most of the restored land will already have some plant cover and exposed soils which are already contributing to global ET. Let's be reasonable and assume that tropical forest cover will eventually double average ET relative to the previously deforested/degraded land at the same location. The net increase of around 0.2% globally will be well within the range of inter-annual variation -- i.e., barely significant as a factor controlling EEI, compared to the general trends in GHG forcing and albedo loss.

AGAIN WHAT MATTERS IS FUNCTION, LOCATION AND SYSTEMIC ROLE IN THE METABOLISM OF GAIA. YOU ARE COMPARING ''KIDNEYS TO LUNGS'' IN THE PLANETARY SUPER ORGANISM. LINEAR FUNCTIONS ARE NOT APPLICABLE. 

Furthermore, as global oceans warm (not least because of the general trend of decreasing ocean albedo), the increase in evaporation from ocean surfaces will completely swamp the relatively minor increase in ET from tropical reforestation efforts. The net effect of this will, in any case, be to increase the water vapour GHG feedback and hence increase EEI. 

LIVING SYSTEMS ARE PERFECTLY ABLE TO BRING WATER VAPOR DOWN BOTH OVER THE OCEANS AND ON LAND IF THEY ARE IN A HEALTHY STATE. THAT IS WHAT THEY DO ALL THE TIME. 

I have a whole bunch more comments drafted (including quite a bit on your evident misunderstanding of EEI), but I need to study that darn paper again to be sure of what I say. 

I HOPE THAT WE CAN AGREE THAT RESTORING THE DAMAGED BIOSPHERE NEEDS TO HAVE A CENTRAL ROLE IN FIXING THE PLANET. 

BELOW THE LIST OF WHERE ALL THE CARBON IS ON OUR PLANET, JUST A REMINDER, EVERYONE HAS SEEN THIS AT SOME TIME. I HOPE THAT FROM THIS LIST IT IS CLEAR THAT THE PLANET IS PERFECTLY ABLE TO REPROCESS A QUARTER OF CURRENT ATMOSPHERIC CARBON, THE PROBLEM IS THE DECADES AHEAD OF US, HOW TO WE AVERT CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE THAT WILL KILL BILLIONS OF PEOPLE AND DEGRADE THE BIOSPHERE (ALSO CALLED THE 6TH MASS EXTINCTION). WE WILL NEED ALL HANDS ON DECK BOTH ON THE CARBON AND THE WATER COOLING SIDE, WITH THE LATTER ONE A FUNCTION OF THE BIOSPHERE. LET'S RESTORE IT. 

  • First = share of the global total (including deep ocean).

  • Second = share of the active pools only (excluding deep ocean, set as 100%).

  • Deep ocean: ~37,000 GtC (78%, —)

  • Soils: ~2,500 GtC (5%, 24%)

  • Fossil fuels: ~4,000 GtC (8%, 39%)

  • Surface ocean (upper layers): ~900 GtC (2%, 9%)

  • Atmosphere (CO₂): ~870 GtC (2%, 8%)

  • Vegetation (forests, plants): ~575 GtC (1%, 6%)

  • Permafrost: ~1,500 GtC (3%, 14%)

  • Marine biota (plankton etc.): ~3 GtC (0.01%, 0.03%)


David Price

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Sep 15, 2025, 1:40:25 PM (7 days ago) Sep 15
to rob de laet, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com

Rob,

You have just written (not for the first time!): "RESTORING THE BIOSPHERE WILL HAVE USE CO-BENEFITS FOR CLIMATE RESILIENCE, FOOD AND WATER SECURITY AND WITH THAT DAMPENING OF SOCIO-POLITICAL STRESS, IN FACT IT IS AN INSURANCE AGAINST HUMAN CONFLICT, SO EVEN IF IT DIDN'T COOL WE SHOULD DO IT."

That is the nub of the issue: IT WON'T (CANNOT) ACHIEVE THE COOLING, SO DON'T MISLEAD PUBLIC EXPECTATION THAT IT WILL. However, I fully endorse campaigning on all the other benefits of forest (and "biosphere") restoration that you and I generally agree are highly important. 

I will make a personal public pledge: I will donate US$100 to EcoRestoration Alliance -- as soon as, but IF and ONLY IF, you drop the global cooling fantasy from all the PR!  

See additional comments in blue below. 

I hope you have fun in Brazil.

David

================

I acknowledge that I reside on unceded Traditional
Territory of the Secwépemc People

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."

The wrath of God will destroy those who destroy the Earth. Rev. 11:18

Tropical rainforests have evolved (which is to say their component species have co-adapted to maximize their own survival) to exist in hot humid climates and they transpire a lot... no argument about that. But evapotranspiration is governed by physics, as captured in the Penman-Monteith equation. All terrestrial vegetation, including all forests, evaporates water according to the terms of the P-M. To get perfect agreement between theory and observations it is necessary to parameterize the stomatal and boundary layer conductance terms -- which is always challenging but it does not change the physics. In any case, most ET occurs, and most deforestation has occurred, in the tropics -- my back-of-envelope calculation is probably wrong by a few percent but at least it is based on real data and a logical response to your entirely unsubstantiated claims!

I am sure Lovelock (1919-2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock ) and Monteith (1929-2012, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Monteith ) would have had mutual respect for each other's work, as both were elected FRS (Monteith in 1971, Lovelock in 1974). I expect they crossed paths more than once. Reading Lovelock's wikipedia page, however, it is evident (at least to me) that he was losing his grip on reality by the time he was in his 80s -- around 2000. Perhaps Lovelock is ultimately responsible for a lot of present-day misinformation about global climate change and how to deal with it?  

Speaking as a 71-year old, I really wish people would stop venerating the elderly just because they made a name for themselves when they were younger! For example, if the US population capped the age of eligibility to be elected President at 70, the world would likely be a much better place.


As a further indication of how what you are saying makes little sense: We have agreed in the past, more-or-less, that about 85 to 90% of global evapotranspiration is known to be derived from ocean evaporation, with the other approximate 15% coming from various land surfaces. Of that ~15%, the Amazon alone is (or was?) estimated to be the source of 6-7% of terrestrial ET -- or about 1% of global total. While I find that factoid quite astonishing (but I am not disputing it), Amazonian deforestation has removed about 1 million km2, or 100 million hectares or about 15% of its original forest extent (implying a decrease of ~0.15% in global ET, assuming all other factors are unchanged). So your plan to re-establish around 280 Mha of tropical forest would have the net effect of increasing the time-averaged global total ET by about 0.4% --- and that does not account for the fact that most of the restored land will already have some plant cover and exposed soils which are already contributing to global ET. Let's be reasonable and assume that tropical forest cover will eventually double average ET relative to the previously deforested/degraded land at the same location. The net increase of around 0.2% globally will be well within the range of inter-annual variation -- i.e., barely significant as a factor controlling EEI, compared to the general trends in GHG forcing and albedo loss.

AGAIN WHAT MATTERS IS FUNCTION, LOCATION AND SYSTEMIC ROLE IN THE METABOLISM OF GAIA. YOU ARE COMPARING ''KIDNEYS TO LUNGS'' IN THE PLANETARY SUPER ORGANISM. LINEAR FUNCTIONS ARE NOT APPLICABLE. 
LUNGS OR KIDNEYS, TREES OR OCEANS, WATER MOLECULES ARE IDENTICAL. LINEAR FUNCTIONS ARE A FIRST ORDER APPROXIMATION. SO PROVE ME WRONG!

Furthermore, as global oceans warm (not least because of the general trend of decreasing ocean albedo), the increase in evaporation from ocean surfaces will completely swamp the relatively minor increase in ET from tropical reforestation efforts. The net effect of this will, in any case, be to increase the water vapour GHG feedback and hence increase EEI. 

LIVING SYSTEMS ARE PERFECTLY ABLE TO BRING WATER VAPOR DOWN BOTH OVER THE OCEANS AND ON LAND IF THEY ARE IN A HEALTHY STATE. THAT IS WHAT THEY DO ALL THE TIME. 
I THINK IT IS CALLED PRECIPITATION (AS RAIN OR SNOW OR HAIL). "Living systems" have had to adapt to Earth's weather, rain or shine! And yes, there are vegetation feedbacks which are now quite well understood (thanks to Penman and Monteith and the many boundary layer meteorologists who have followed in their footsteps).

rob...@rtulip.net

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Sep 20, 2025, 9:52:09 PM (2 days ago) Sep 20
to rob de laet, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com, Paul Gambill

Hi Rob

 

An excellent conversation on the role of forests in climate is at https://youtu.be/GWdXCqVOFkY

 

Forests - Their Vital Role in Climate Dynamics, Rain, and The Biotic Pump with Anastassia Makarieva | TGS 193

Nate Hagens

96.2K subscribers

7,682 views Sep 10, 2025 The Great Simplification - with Nate Hagens

(Conversation recorded on July 9th, 2025) To best understand this episode, please watch this ~2 minute video on the biotic pump:    • Biotic Pump and Flying Rivers   It’s widely known that Earth’s forests provide home to countless numbers of species, act as a vast sink for carbon, and provide much of the food, materials, and clean water on which our societies rely. But emerging science shows us that forests may play another critical role: making rain. This theory, called the biotic pump theory, hypothesizes that instead of being passive recipients of rain, forests may actively create the conditions for precipitation over land – a premise that turns modern meteorology on its head. In this episode, Nate is joined by physicist Anastassia Makarieva about the critical yet often overlooked role forests play in maintaining ecological balance and climate stability. Through the lens of the biotic pump theory, she highlights the importance of moisture and rainfall cycles, the dangers of ecosystem tipping points, and the escalating risks of deforestation. Anastassia argues that a paradigm shift is needed – one that redefines how humanity understands and manages forests in the fight against global heating. What would climate models reveal if they fully integrated the Biotic Pump Theory? How might policies protecting against deforestation evolve if societies recognized the irreplaceable role forests play in how water moves on land? And beyond policy, how might reconnecting with our deep interdependence on forests help us rediscover a richer connection to ourselves as individuals?

 

Dr. Anastassia Makarieva is a Russian atmospheric physicist and senior researcher at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute. She obtained her Ph.D. in atmospheric physics from St. Petersburg State University in 2000. Makarieva is best known for co-developing the "biotic pump" theory alongside the late Professor Victor Gorshkov. The theory posits that forests play a crucial role in driving atmospheric moisture transport, effectively influencing rainfall patterns over land. Her work emphasizes the importance of intact forests in maintaining climate stability and has challenged conventional climate models to incorporate the dynamic role of vegetation in atmospheric processes.

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