Hapless climate botherers barking up the wrong tree again? Carbon dioxide capture should be left to nature.
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In a new paper published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change the scientists look at the climate effects of deforestation at different latitudes, says Net Zero Watch.
The researchers find that at latitudes 50°N to 60°N – in other words essentially all of the UK – and above, deforestation contributes to global cooling, so afforestation (which has opposing effects to deforestation) will contribute to global warming.
Another example of unintended consequences caused by the irrational pursuit of climate obsessions by governments.
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A fifth of Welsh farms are running at a loss and there is a risk that farmers will be priced out of agriculture by big corporations buying up farmland for carbon offsetting schemes, according to a new report on family farms in Wales.
The findings of an inquiry by the Welsh Affairs Select Committee published today (7 April) paint a concerning picture for Welsh agriculture, an industry where the average farm size is just 48ha, compared to 87ha in England, says TW News.
From pressure on incomes and land availability to a lack of opportunity for new entrants, the report highlights some of the key concerns and sets out a series of recommendations to governments to address the issues.
You just know that sooner rather than later the BBC will play its climate change (meaning humans in their book) card in an article about any kind of adverse or unusual weather conditions, even if only lasting a day or two, and sure enough…so predictable and tedious. They also conveniently forgot that in the ‘Great Storm’ of 1987 which felled an estimated 15 million trees in England alone, much of the damage was in southern England, northern France and the Channel Islands.
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It is the untold story of the winter storms, says BBC News.
More than eight million trees have been brought down and many are now threatened by another two named storms bearing down on Britain.
Forest managers warn that already “catastrophic” damage will be made worse by Storms Dudley and Eunice.
There are warnings that the heating climate is making our weather more severe and unpredictable, and that management and planting strategies must adapt more quickly.
The whole ‘net zero’ thing is a scandal in many ways, but at least some MPs are noticing one of the issues, even if partly for the wrong reason. Burning trees isn’t a solution to anything apart from papering over a few of the cracks in electricity supply caused by intermittent renewables.
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Burning wood to create power is a ‘scandal’, 50 MPs warn the energy minister in a letter today.
The letter – which has cross-party support – marks a major shift in political opinion over the burning of biomass, which is currently classed by the Government as a green form of energy, says the Daily Mail.
The letter says the extra emissions produced by biomass ‘are the equivalent of three million Ford Fiestas on our roads’.
Organised by Peter Bottomley, Father of the House of Commons, the letter calls for a meeting with Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng to discuss ending subsidies to the Drax power plant in Yorkshire.
A portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [image credit: R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution @ Wikipedia]
This article starts off confident that the researchers are right – ‘we now know’ etc. – but later retreats and says ‘the cooling appears to have’ etc. But as the Little Ice Age is an interesting topic it’s worth a look.
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New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age?
The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming, says Phys.org.
The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.
This cold spell, whose precise timeline scholars debate, but which seems to have set in around 600 years ago, was responsible for crop failures, famines and pandemics throughout Europe, resulting in misery and death for millions.
Amazon Rainforest, near Manaus [image credit: Neil Palmer/CIAT @ Wikipedia]
For climate obsessives and modellers convinced of the claimed effects of ‘important greenhouse gases’ (to quote the reporter), this must be a bit of a setback.
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Most of the methane gas emitted from Amazon wetlands regions is vented into the atmosphere via tree root systems—with significant emissions occurring even when the ground is not flooded, say researchers at the University of Birmingham.
In a study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the researchers have found evidence that far more methane is emitted by trees growing on floodplains in the Amazon basin than by soil or surface water and this occurs in both wet and dry conditions, reports Phys.org.
The bottom line (of this article) is that ‘To actually reach net-zero will require reducing emissions close to zero.’ Does anyone seriously expect that will happen? ‘Research indicates that net-zero strategies that rely on temporary removals to balance permanent emissions will fail.’ Extrapolating from some existing pledges to plant millions of trees, it’s possible this could require ‘one-third of the world’s farmland’. Worse still for the carbon offsetters, some of their prized forest assets have been known to go up in wildfire smoke. And so on. All the so-called climate ambition looks ever more absurdly unrealistic on examination, without even looking at the plausibility of the supposed need for it.
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Net-zero emissions pledges to protect the climate are coming fast and furious from companies, cities and countries says TechXplore.
But declaring a net-zero target doesn’t mean they plan to stop their greenhouse gas emissions entirely—far from it.
Most of these pledges rely heavily on planting trees or protecting forests or farmland to absorb some of their emissions.
That raises two questions: Can nature handle the expectations? And, more importantly, should it even be expected to?
Whatever the motivations of forest fire arsonists, they’re out there in numbers. Climate propagandists may not want to look too closely at such inconvenient details. Dry conditions in summer are not necessarily evidence of ‘climate change’ due to humans.
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More than 70 percent of fires that have swept Italy this summer are caused by human action, aided by climate change, a government minister said Thursday.
Firefighting planes were deployed again overnight to tackle forest fires in the southern region of Calabria and on the island of Sicily, where flames threatened a nature reserve in the north, reports Euractiv.
They are the latest in hundreds of blazes that have broken out across the peninsula in recent weeks, with one, in the west of the island of Sardinia, ravaging almost 20,000 hectares.
Smoke from forest fires in Southern California [image credit: NASA]
Will this be the end of climate alarmists feeding their confirmation biases over these events, resulting in the usual hysteria against atmospheric gases generated by humans? Almost certainly not, as they can still cling to the notion that the summer fires aren’t mostly due to lightning, arson or faulty power lines. Another report says: ‘Further analyses suggested that large fires were not associated with higher temperatures’.
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A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. and one in Canada has found that the increasing number of large fires in Southern California during the autumn and winter months is mostly due to the Santa Ana winds and power line failures, rather than rising temperatures, reports Phys.org.
In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their study of fires in Southern California going back to 1948.
Large wildfires in California regularly make the news because of their magnitude and ferocity.
Solar flare erupting from a sunspot [image credit: space.com]
Using trees as solar cycle and cosmic ray detectors here. The researchers say: ‘Notably, other evidence suggests that the sun was also undergoing a decades-long period of increasing activity.’ We may ask, with a view to the current era: how often does that happen, and why?
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The sun constantly emits a stream of energetic particles, some of which reach Earth, says Phys.org.
The density and energy of this stream form the basis of space weather, which can interfere with the operation of satellites and other spacecraft.
A key unresolved question in the field is the frequency with which the sun emits bursts of energetic particles strong enough to disable or destroy space-based electronics.
One promising avenue for determining the rate of such events is the dendrochronological record. This approach relies on the process by which a solar energetic particle (SEP) strikes the atmosphere, causing a chain reaction that results in the production of an atom of carbon-14.
The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the last decade than it absorbed, according to a stunning report that shows humanity can no longer depend on the world’s largest tropical forest to help absorb man-made carbon pollution. [Talkshop comment – ‘carbon pollution’ is a man-made fiction].
From 2010 through 2019, Brazil’s Amazon basin gave off 16.6 billion tonnes of CO2, while drawing down only 13.9 billion tonnes, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
As climate obsessives in the UK demand the cancellation of plans for a coal mine in Cumbria, the spotlight falls once more on the far more relevant issue of industrial-scale biomass burning, which produces more ’emissions’ of carbon dioxide than coal but rakes in fortunes in subsidies. The world must wait decades for new trees to grow enough to fully replace the ones burnt. The illogicality of it all won’t go away.
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A former vice chairman of the United Nations’ climate advisory body has called on the British government to review its policies surrounding the burning of wood for energy, reports Sky News.
Jean Pascal van Ypersele, Professor of Environmental Sciences at Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, has told Sky News he believes subsidies given to the industry by the UK government are “contradictory” to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement – signed by countries in 2015 to try to limit global warming.
The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial strategy says subsidies are only given to biomass which complies with strict sustainability criteria and biomass is a “valuable” part of the National Grid.
Trees are a natural way to tackle climate change [Talkshop comment – or so the theory goes] and soak up carbon.
But Mr van Ypersele, who was vice chairman of the IPCC – the body which assesses science on climate change – says burning wood pellets creates a ‘carbon debt’ and accounting rules don’t properly take into consideration the time it takes for replacement trees to grow back.
He said: “We release the CO2 now hoping that future woods will absorb the CO2 in the future. But that’s a very strong assumption. Burning wood doesn’t make much sense if you want to reduce CO2 emissions.”
The UK is the world’s biggest importer of wood pellets. In the move away from coal over recent years there has been a switch towards burning biomass to generate power.
Contrary to most current thinking, the net effect of planting – or cutting down – trees could in theory be zero, or somewhere near that, depending on local factors.
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New research by Christopher A. Williams, an environmental scientist and professor in Clark University’s Graduate School of Geography, reveals that deforestation in the U.S. does not always cause planetary warming, as is commonly assumed; instead, in some places, it actually cools the planet, says Phys.org.
A peer-reviewed study by Williams and his team, “Climate Impacts of U.S. Forest Loss Span Net Warming to Net Cooling,” is published today (Feb. 12) in Science Advances.
The team’s discovery has important implications for policy and management efforts that are turning to forests to mitigate climate change.
Looks like another setback for those looking for solutions to imaginary problems.
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Planting huge numbers of trees to mitigate climate change is “not always the best strategy”—with some experimental sites in Scotland failing to increase carbon stocks, a new study has found.
Experts at the University of Stirling and the James Hutton Institute analysed four locations in Scotland where birch trees were planted onto heather moorland—and found that, over decades, there was no net increase in ecosystem carbon storage, reports Phys.org.
The team—led by Dr. Nina Friggens, of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Stirling—found that any increase to carbon storage in tree biomass was offset by a loss of carbon stored in the soil.
They may be chasing their own tails here. The carbon cycle is a natural process, but now climate-obsessed humans assume they can achieve something by attempting to tinker with it. But they also promote so-called ‘carbon capture and storage’, which in the unlikely event it was successful would reduce growth rates of CO2-dependent trees and other vegetation.
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Given the tremendous ability of forests to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, some governments are counting on planted forests as offsets for greenhouse gas emissions—a sort of climate investment, says Phys.org.
But as with any investment, it’s important to understand the risks.
If a forest goes bust, researchers say, much of that stored carbon could go up in smoke.
Austria’s Pyramidenkogel: ‘at a height of 100 metres it is the tallest wooden observation tower in the world’ says Wikipedia [image credit: Rollroboter @ Wikipedia]
Another case of jumping on the climate bandwagon to promote a product? The term used is ‘mass timber’, or engineered wood. Sweden has already built the first wooden wind turbine tower, made of modular laminated wood.
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Architects and engineers are working on ways to swap steel and glass for strong, sustainable wood-based materials, says Discover Magazine.
When the empire state building was completed in 1931, the 102-story skyscraper ranked as the tallest in the world, a beacon of American progress as well as a lightning rod for Midtown Manhattan.
And the material that made it possible was steel — or so people believed until 2015, when Canadian architect Michael Green showed that an identical structure could be fabricated out of timber.
Green was not proposing replacing the 20th-century icon. His plans are far more radical. Green wants the global construction industry to replace steel and concrete with high-tech plywood.
Some more inconvenient data and discussion from an experienced and well-known meteorologist. Planting more trees may as he proposes be useful, but so might chopping down fewer of them for biomass burning and wind turbine land clearances.
I believe that as the COVID-19 situation diminishes, a major pivot to man made climate change as the major driver of impending doom will come front and center, says Joe Bastardi.
Perhaps I will be wrong, but the naming of AOC by Joe Biden as an advisor on how to fight climate change, to me, was the first signal this is going to happen.
This is an insensitive tactic, since the misery of Covid-19 is real, immediate, and loaded with great uncertainty. Future generations can opine on the result of the measures taken to combat it. Yet, as I wrote back in March:
If trees could be grown as fast as they’re used up, maybe – but they obviously can’t be. Obsession with carbon dioxide continues to distort rational thinking. Any idea that wood can replace all petroleum products, for example, is nonsense. Wooden road surfaces instead of asphalt?
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Wood is the resource the world is relying on for its low carbon future, says DW.com.
It’s touted as a replacement for concrete and steel, fossil fuels, power and plastics. But is there enough of it to go around?
The harvesting machine takes just one second to fell the towering spruce, and another to strip the branches and scan its trunk for defects.
Most things the UK CCC suggests are likely to be a bad idea, but that’s another story. If this is all they can think of, they’re scraping the barrel. How long does the list of experts trashing tree burning policies have to get before the government takes any notice?
A suggestion by the UK Committee on Climate Change to burn more wood and plant replacement trees as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels has drawn criticism from think tank Chatham House (reports OilPrice.com), which says this is hardly the best approach to reducing emissions.
“Expanding forest cover is undoubtedly a good thing, if you’re leaving them standing,” energy expert Duncan Brack told the Daily Telegraph.
You couldn’t make it up. Having for years rejected claims that industrial-scale burning of wood was not sustainable, climate obsessives now discover…exactly that. At least the media waited until the COP conference in Madrid ended, to avoid upsetting the delegates.
Experts horrified at large-scale forest removal to meet wood pellet demand, says The Guardian.
A few snippets from the article:
Climate thinktank Sandbag said the heavily subsidised plans to cut carbon emissions will result in a “staggering” amount of tree cutting, potentially destroying forests faster than they can regrow.
Whatever the motivations of forest fire arsonists, they’re out there in numbers. Climate propagandists may not want to look too closely at such inconvenient details. Dry conditions in summer are not necessarily evidence of ‘climate change’ due to humans.
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